Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Safi Bahcall: Shoot Your Loonshot | Career | E33

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

Shoot your loonshot and nurture your next crazy big idea! In #33, Hala yaps with Safi Bahcall, a trained physicist who has transformed his career every 5 years or so. He’s done everything from business consulting to co-founding a pharmaceutical company to now becoming a best-selling author. In this episode we’ll find out how Safi is able to reinvent himself so often and his tips for getting into a new field. In addition, we’ll cover his super fascinating concept and book, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform," which has been noted as one of the top business books for 2019. If you liked this episode, please write us a review! Fivver: Get services like logo creation, whiteboard videos, animation and web development on Fivver: https://track.fiverr.com/visit/?bta=51570&brand=fiverrcpa Fivver Learn: Gain new skills like graphic design and video editing with Fivver Learn: https://track.fiverr.com/visit/?bta=51570&brand=fiverrlearn Get a copy or download Safi’s ‘Shoot Your Loonshots’: https://amzn.to/2Pnl8mL Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

Hey guys, if you're an avid listener of Young and Profiting Podcast, I'd like to personally invite you to YAP Society on Slack. It's a community where listeners network and give us feedback on the show. Vote on episode titles, chat live with guests, and share your projects with the group. We'd love to have you. Go to Bitley slash YAP Society. That's BIT.L.Y slash YAP Society. You can find the link in our show notes. This episode of YAP is sponsored by Fiverr, a marketplace that over 5 million entrepreneurs used to their business. I've been using Fiverr for years. In fact, I got the Yap logo made on there, and if you've seen my cool audiograms with animated cartoons, I get those images from Fiverr too. They have affordable services like graphic design, web design, digital marketing, whiteboard

explainer videos, programming, video editing, audio editing, and much more. They have over 100,000 talented freelancers to choose from, and it's super affordable. Prices just start at $5. If you're interested to give Fiverr a shot, hit the link in our show notes. And if you'd rather learn how to do these types of services on your own, check out Fiverr Learn, a new platform that provides on-demand professional courses from leading experts. They start at just $20, but what you could learn is priceless. Check out the links in our show notes to learn more. You're listening to YAP, young and profiting podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. I'm your host, Halitaha, Today we're speaking with Safi Bacall.

Safi is a trained physicist who has transformed his career every five years or so. He's done everything from business consulting to co-founding a pharmaceutical company to now becoming a best-selling author. In this episode, we'll find out how he's able to reinvent himself so often and his tips for getting into a new field. In addition, we'll cover his super fascinating concept in book, Loon Shots, how to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform, which has been noted as well. one of the top business books for 2019. Hey, Safi, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Thanks, very glad to be here.

So before we get rolling, I just want to mention that I noticed you were from New Jersey. You grew up in Princeton? That's right. My parents were working at the university. Cool. Well, I'm a proud Jersey girl. I grew up in Central Jersey and Wachung, so happy to have a fellow Jersey in on the show. I think you make number two.

Glad to meet a fellow country person. So Safi, just to introduce you to my listeners, you are someone who is continually evolving. You have, in your own words, changed careers roughly every five years of your adult life. You started out as a serious academic scientist. You switched fields into particle physics, I believe. Then you did a total 360 and moved into business consulting. And then after that, you co-founded a pharmaceutical company. And finally, today, you were known as a best-selling author. So that's a super diverse career. Could you just walk us through your professional past at a high level, maybe mention some of the big and proudest moments that you have leading

up till today. Sure. Can you do that in five seconds? Sure, no problem. Let's go. No, no. Five minutes is okay. I grew up as the son of two scientists, so it was pretty natural to start a career in science.

And so I didn't set foot off a university until I was about 28 or 29. And I really enjoyed it. But I did find, as you say, that my curiosity started waning. Once I'd kind of learned a subject really well, I started looking for the next big challenge. And that's a theme that kind of stayed with me for a lot of these changes over the course of my life, which is people talk about follow your passion. For me, it's been a lot more about follow my curiosity. So I started off in one area of science called particle physics, where you study the science of the very small,

what happens inside an atom, inside a proton, inside a neutron, a very small. distances or very high energies. And after a while, after you start, you're at the bottom of this big hill and you have no idea what people are talking about and then you march up the hill and it's kind of a big challenge. And then you reach sort of like, oh, you're kind of one of the tribe and you know what you're talking about. After that, I looked for kind of the next big hill to climb. And so I switched fields into another area of science where, again, I started at the bottom of the hills called condensed matter physics. It's the study of the many. What happens to large systems of interacting particles, like the weird quantum effects that happen when you cool

metals down, for example, to very low temperatures, and all of a sudden friction just sort of completely disappears and currents start traveling forever, you get superconductors, things like that, these crazy quantum effects appear. So I did that again for about five years. I started kind of at the bottom of the hill and felt like a total imposter and was just really curious about all the ideas and science and techniques and tools. And then I sort of worked my way up and then kind of got curious again because I'd been so long in a university and academic world, I sort of realized that, well, you know, actually 99 plus percent of the people in the world aren't theoretical physicists. They do these things called jobs. They work in these things called offices, and I'd never seen

one. And I was sort of curious about like, well, how does that work? So I joined this consulting firm that likes to hire people who are outside the mainstream of MBAs or business schools. And that was an incredible learning experience. It's like drinking from a fire hose. And it was super, super fun for that. It's like learning a whole new world, people with jobs and offices and how they solve problems in the business world. That was kind of fascinating. And then once I understood that, I don't think for me a career of just sort of advising people was what I wanted to do.

I wanted to build something, and I wanted to see if I could bridge the world that I'd come from, the science world, with the business world, and do something kind of bigger than myself, something kind of more meaningful than, you know, making big companies more successful. And so that's when I started a biotech company developing drugs for cancer. Everybody knows someone with cancer or some other severe disease. And for me, it was just enormously motivating not only to get to learn something new again, start at the bottom of the hill and march my way up. But also to know that when I wake up every morning,

if I do really well and if I can bring people along and motivate them and we can build something great together, we might just give families more time on earth with their loved ones. And that's a super motivating kind of bigger purpose that transcends yourself. And that was super exciting. So the thread that goes through all of those things is, for me, it's like follow my curiosity. What am I really excited about learning?

Yeah, and then how did you get into becoming an author? Well, that was another kind of odd thing. Just for fun one time, I gave a talk. I was asked to give a talk on one of these sort of idea gatherings. Everybody was supposed to talk about something that is not their work. And I've always sort of had a passion for history, for looking back, and also for teasing out patterns. So if you're a scientist, especially a physicist, this, what you try to do is tease out patterns from nature. So I was interested in applying that to

history. So I gave a talk one time, 3,000 years of physics in 45 minutes, the eight biggest ideas. So I went back 3,000 years and I said, can we figure out what were the eight biggest jumps in human knowledge? And I found that to be just enormously fun. And I read a lot more than I usually read because normally when you're running a business or at least for me when I was running a business I had blinders on and I really actually didn't read books very much because I was so focused on you know the usual stuff when you're running a business which is putting out fires and raising money and hiring people and so on it was enormously fun to learn and then enormously fun to figure out how to communicate that to people in a way that was kind of fun and entertaining both of those

were really interesting, exciting, fun challenges, things that I hadn't done before. Both of those were sort of like starting at the bottom of the hill. I'd never really look back at history and tried to tease out patterns. I'd never really thought about how do you describe this stuff to people in a way that's sort of fun

and entertaining and excites them. Yeah. And I thought, you know, that was super fun. It was like I took two weeks off, you know, around Christmas time one year. And I thought, God, that was like the most fun I've had on a long time. And I was like, if I ever get the opportunity, maybe I should write that up because so many people came up to me and said, wow, that was awesome.

You know, you tell these stories in a way that we can actually get it and understand it. And it's funny. And people like, and they're like, you should write a book. And I was like, a book? Are you kidding? I'm like running a business. But that sort of stuck with me. And I thought, wow, that would be kind of fun.

I really enjoyed that couple weeks of thinking and I did it again. And sort of each year, I would sort of take two weeks off and try to write some new short essay or historical thinking. And eventually I got the opportunity after I left my company and I said, well, a lot of people in my field, especially after you've run a company for quite a while and we were public, there's just a lot of opportunities presented to you once you have all the scar tissue of having done it for quite a while. You know, we want to run this, want to run that. And I was like, you know what? I could always do that. Let me just try something totally new. Yeah.

And this might be something that I think you guys talk about a lot. I literally just talked about this with my wife this morning, which is when given two choices, sort of repeat something you've done before, whether it's eat at the same restaurant or stay in the same place or visit the same town for, let's say, a vacation, or try something a little different. I kind of tend to go for try something new. Yeah. Because at all other things are equal, trying something new broadens your experience. It gives you new data that you could then learn from.

So after I left my company, I said, well, I could go do this again. I've kind of done it. I sort of know a little bit what that's like. But this writing thing has been kind of in the back of my mind. And I've always admired really interesting writers and I had a bunch of writer friends. It said, why don't I just take six months and see what it's like? I've absolutely no idea. I don't even know what it means to sit down and write because normally I go into an office

and you have certain goals and you have a team and I know exactly what to do. there, I don't know what it means to write. You're looking at a blank piece of paper. How do you structure that? So I found myself at the bottom of a hill again, and that was awesome because that meant there was going to be a hard trek, and pretty soon you'd get to the top and have developed a new skill. And then I found, God, this is enormously fun.

So that's how I kind of transition. You know, that's amazing. And just to reiterate to my listeners, according to my research and listening to other podcasts and shows you were on. You were never a big writer. You weren't an English guy. It wasn't something that you really cared for before you made this transition. So it's astonishing how many times you've actually evolved and the fact that you've really overachieved for everybody tuning in. You were a best-selling author now. You released a book in 2019, your first book, and it's a bestseller with all these accolades, which is amazing, you know, and you had a pharmaceutical company

and you not only just co-founded a pharmaceutical company, you guys went public and it got like very successful. So it's amazing how you've done this and reinvented yourself over and over again. Some people think that they're too old to change or switch careers. And so you must have a certain mindset about having the strength to burn everything down and then rebuild every five or so years. So what do you think makes you different from other people who get scared and kind of, you know, they might slightly, evolved their career. Like for me, I went from B to B to C, which was like actually a big jump. But, you know, you totally do 360s. So what's really your secret sauce and mindset on that? Embracing the joy of learning. Embracing the personal delta. So here's what I mean by that.

And by the way, I want to ask you because you started a podcast. That's totally new. So I'll answer your question and you answer my question. So I think absolutely everybody can do this. Every single person can do this. They have it inside them. And it's absolutely comes down to kind of one simple thing. It's looking at the hill. Let's say you're thinking of, well, I'm doing this thing. I've been doing it for a while, especially if your curiosity is sort of waned. You know, you've kind of figured it out. There's another thing that maybe is like a little glimmer of a baby thought in your head. And that's cool. Grow that little thought. Follow that little thought and say, Well, what if? How might I explore that little thought? And then when you look at that, there's a plus and a minus. There is a hill. To learn to become good at some new thing, you will be starting at the bottom of that hill. Now, there's two ways to look at that hill. And this is the key. You could look at that hill as, man, that's going to be a long slog climb. That's tough. Or you can look at that hill. That is going to be.

awesome when I make it up the top of that hill. I will have grown so much. Let's go do it. So it's absolutely the two ways of looking at that hill. And what you want to do is follow those little thoughts, those little baby ideas and change them from I can't or it's impossible to how might I? And what if questions. Stop asking yourself, why shouldn't I do this? Because then you'll just create a lot of reasons. And start asking yourselves, how might I? or what if. And just keep asking how might I and what if and how might I and what if and how might I and what if? Don't worry about all the why not stuff.

Just identify those little baby thoughts of things that you might be doing differently. And just keep asking yourself those two questions, how might I blank? What if blank? And then whenever you see a hill, don't worry about the climb up. Embrace the climb up. That climb up, every single step is growing you. Every single step, like for me, when I started off at zero, never having written a page, every single step, it was awesome because you grow the most at the beginning.

Like at the beginning of the hill, you're using these muscles you've never used, and they grow really fast. Once you've gotten really good at something, you know, your learning curve plateaus. And this is why it's even better when you're older. And it's better the older you get. Why? Because when you're a young kid, you have these amazing growth, learning growth. So you go from every year in elementary school, in high school, in college, as a young adult, you grow from, you know, a one out of ten on something, a two out of ten on something, a three out of ten on something, to like a five out of ten or a seven out of ten. You go from knowing nothing about finance to sort of being in control, to getting it. But pretty quickly. And as you get older, you've mastered sort of a core set of skills and that experience happens less and less. And so going up a hill, marching up a hill is actually an incredible gift to find a new hill

that you want to climb and then experiencing that learning curve again. So when I was in my 40s and I took a blank piece of paper, I was like, wow, how do we do this? I have no idea. That's a gift. Like every week, I feel growth. Whereas if you've been doing something for five years or ten years, how often can you say, oh, every week I've really grown in this job?

Now, if you've done something five or ten years, you're probably already at eight out of ten. And maybe next week you'll be an eight point one out of ten. But if you start with a blank piece of paper, you start at something new. Well, week one, you might be a zero out of ten. Week two, you might be a two out of ten. that's the percentage growth from zero to two is infinity yeah right and then from two to four you know is a hundred percent growth so what you do is you embrace the delta you accept understand and relish the fact that that march up the hill is actually a gift it's an incredibly rapid growth

rate and the older you get the rarer that is yeah i was just going to mention let's say you're at a level two. You landed a new job. You're in this new experience. You're at a level two. Everybody else is out at 8, 9, 10. You have imposter syndrome, right? It's something that a lot of us face. How did you deal with that when you were at McKinsey is probably the best example of like those people were probably in that kind of a role for a long time or something similar and you're coming out of academia? Like how did you deal with that? You know, that's funny. It's exactly right. Every single transition, I felt like an imposter. I would say that feeling lasts about two years. So when I jumped from academia into the business world, I was like, even wearing a suit felt crazy to me because

I'd been in jeans and a t-shirt and sneakers for 10 years. I was like, this is just not me. But everyone around me is wearing this, so let me put that on. And I'm like, I'm an imposter here. But once you realize that it's just a dictionary, nothing anybody says is really all that complicated or hard to figure out, they're just using a shorthand because those guys who are seven or eight out of ten, they have a common language. When they say, you know, balance sheet, I had no idea what that was. Or when they say, you know, assets or when they say, you know, strategic uncertainty. acronyms. They're the worst. All these acronyms.

When you come in, you have no idea what they're talking. So you feel like an imposter, just like when you land in a foreign country and they're talking all this stuff that you don't understand. So you're like, well, I'm definitely traveling in a foreign land. And you realize that imposter feeling is just associated with a dictionary. And it's not a very complicated dictionary. Once you understand the words, the shorthand, none of the ideas are rocket science or as a friend of mine likes to say.

those ideas are rocket surgery. They're just a shorthand. And when you know what they mean, you got it. And then you're part of the club. Once you speak the language, they're like, oh, when you said this word or this phrase, that's what you meant. You said this. And then you're sort of like, okay, now I get it. Then I jumped into starting a company. And again, I was like, I had no idea. I didn't even know the words. I didn't know what venture capital was. I didn't know how you interacted with these people. I didn't know stock options. I didn't know what that was. employment agreement, all this stuff. But you know what?

You know, just six months or a year you got it. And none of those things are rocket science. Yeah. So you start to realize that imposter syndrome is kind of a dictionary problem. Yeah. And it's kind of a small dictionary problem. It's not like you need to memorize Merriam-Webster. It's like 50 or 100 ideas or concepts or phrases.

And once you've got those under your belt, okay, it's not really that mysterious. You know, that is so, so true. Like I'm thinking about all my situations in life where I felt like an imposter syndrome. And it's really just all about like the words that people use because when you're having conversations with people and you start to get lost because they said this acronym or word that you're not familiar with, then you just start feeling like, oh, I don't belong here. I don't even know what I'm doing. Like, you know, but what I found is helpful and I do this all the time is if I ever am in a

situation where I don't know a word, I always write it down and I always take time to like go look it up and learn right away, you know, and that really helps you get up to speed, like, super quickly. But you mentioned that you wanted to ask me something, so let me turn the tables back to you. Well, you talk about reinvention and you talk about how hard it is. So I'm curious, how did you decide to do a podcast? Yeah. Well, that's a long story, but I've been doing online radio shows, and I used to work at a radio station. And since I was like 22, the past eight or so years, I've been just doing radio on the side.

There was maybe like a four-year break when I went to go get my MBA and things like that. But I always did it on the side. And I'm still doing it on the side. I work at Disney streaming services right now. So it's always been like a side thing. Which brings me to another question for you is like, do you recommend having side hustles for projects that you're curious about? And I want to talk about curiosity in a bit.

But do you recommend having side hustles or kind of dropping whatever you're doing, cold turkey, and going like all in? Millennials are so interested in side hustle, so that's why I bring it up. Yeah, absolutely not dropping it and going all in. What you want to do, whenever you have kind of a situation that there's some fair amount of uncertainty and you don't really know, for example, should I do X or should I do Y or should I do Z with my life? absolutely in those situations what you want to do is plant a bunch of small seeds spread your bets make a bunch of little bets so do a little bit of x find ways where you can do a little of x a little of y a little of z you plant those seeds you don't plant one seed and then dump a ton of water on it and hope it grows you plan a bunch of little seeds water them all equally and it will become clear to you over time and probably quite quickly which one works for you. Like if I think I tried, let's say when I left my company, I planted a bunch of seeds while I was talking to a couple companies about this sort of advising thing, talking about some investors about this sort of investing thing, and then doing a little bit of writing. And I planted a bunch of seeds.

And then within months, it became clear to me, I just enjoyed this one particular seed. That flower was growing faster and bigger and more beautiful than all the other ones. And that's when you know, like, oh, I got it. So you absolutely want to get your feet wet. You want to get a little bit of experience in a few things because they won't all work out and nothing is exactly the same. You just don't have any data points. You don't know what it's going to be like until you try it. And what you want to do is gather those data points so that you can make a better decision in a few months or whenever it is. Yeah. Previously, you mentioned that curiosity is really key to all this.

And it reminds me of a quote. I had David Meltzer on a couple weeks ago. And he mentioned that you really need to be more interested than interesting if you want to succeed in something new. So when it comes to curiosity, how can we better develop that skill? And why is it really so important to hone when learning something new? Because it's a motivator. So when you are curious, you're open to new ideas. You are enjoying asking questions and you're enjoying learning.

And curiosity is really what drives learning. If someone is like lecturing at you, broadcasting at you, dumping information on you, you're not really learning very well. But when you're curious and try to figure stuff out on your own, that's when you learn the best. And so anyone who's thinking about making a transition, the number one thing you want to get good at is learning. Because you're going to have some new skills that you need to master. So curiosity matters because learning and learning well is what will make you succeed at whatever new thing you're trying. So how do you hone that? That's a really good question. How do you encourage that?

You have to notice the thoughts that are going on in your head and you have to notice a step back and recognize whenever a tiny little bubble pops up like, wait, what? or how did this happen? You've got to, rather than shut that down and say, let me just keep doing my regular thing, you've got to lean into that. So you've got to develop this skill of noticing. For example, artists have that incredibly well, I've found, and really great writers do this incredibly well.

They just go around life looking very carefully. You know, if there's a penis playing, what are his fingers doing? What do they look like? What is their texture? How would I describe it? What adjectives might I use? What is his hair like? Is it parted? Is it not parted? Why? What kind of impression does that take? What's an analogy with how he's striking the keys? How might I describe that? What does it remind me? And just notice these tiny little questions. And rather than redirecting, let me just be quiet and listen to the music, lean into the questions. So if you want to hone your curiosity, lean into asking questions. That's really good. And speaking of, you know, learning something new, let's talk about really quick how you learned how to write. I was listening to that interview you had that's very popular with Tim Ferriss. And you were talking about how you kind of used a scientific method to break down the way that authors wrote. And I thought that was really interesting. And I was hoping you could share that with our listeners. Yeah, I realized that I admired certain writers. I didn't really have much experience with literature. I came from my. a much more science background, a much more technical background, and people with science and

technical backgrounds are not usually known for their writing skills. A friend sent me a book, Nabokov's short stories, or recommended the book, and I got it, and I opened it up, and I remember reading a paragraph, and my jaw dropped. I was like, oh, my God, I didn't know the English language could do this. What is he doing? And I started to think, well, is there a pattern? Of course, he wasn't the only one. I read just a couple more, a handful of authors that had similar perfect pitch.

Just the words, the rhythm, the cadence just created this music that was unbelievable. And I started to try to understand, is there a pattern to it? What are they doing? And in the beginning, you're completely at the bottom of a hill, zero out of ten or one out of ten. And so what I would do is every night for about two hours, I would just study one or two paragraphs. That's it. and I would read that paragraph of a very small handful of writers. Typically, Nabokov, I mentioned on Tim's show, another one, Donald Hall, who is a poet laureate,

and just another beautiful writer in a very different way, almost the opposite way of Nabokov. And I would try to figure out what they're doing by changing the paragraph. Like, let me change a word. Wow, that sounds so much worse. Why? Why does that sound so much worse? And then I would look at what is he doing. You know, you can read some of the excellent guidebooks like, you know, Strunken White or Zistner's Writing Well or a couple of those types of things. And there's sort of guidelines. And occasionally they would just absolutely violate those guidelines. They would write in the passive voice instead of the active voice. They use very strange transitions. And I'd say, well, let me make it more like the guidelines. Let me rewrite that to be an active voice. whoa, that sounds so much worse. Why? And so slowly I started to like tease out my own little principles like, oh, here's a principle, here's a principle.

And then I would copy and paste like examples of other writing. And so I developed kind of a short list of principles. Here's what they do. Here's like a pacing beat. Here's a certain kind of transition. Here's another kind of transition. When I would read, I didn't read for plot or for story. I would just read to see these kind of writing.

principles that really great writers that I admired were using. And then it was very difficult in the beginning because I had no eye for it, no ear for it. I didn't really understand. But it's like going on a basketball court and shooting baskets, the first time you go there, you might even miss the rim completely. But if you just keep doing it and keep doing it, all of a sudden you'll get the hang of it. You watch what other people do. Then it starts to go in a few times and it started to sort of,

to sort of make sense. So it was kind of this tunneling into very small doses of writing and trying to vary them a little bit and trying to tease out what is it that they're doing and not giving up that made the difference. That's amazing. And I think like whether you want to get into writing or whatever you're trying to get into, just take cues from what he did for writing. Like study the experts. Like for me, I like to listen to podcast hosts and look at like how do they transition, how do they open up their show? Like, what are the little things that you can take from everyone? Because at the end of the day, everyone's basically just copying each other and learning from each other. And you can put together your own style by taking tidbits from everyone else. So I think

that's wonderful advice. We are about halfway through and I think that we should move on to your wildly fascinating concept, loon shots. This past year you wrote a book called Loon Shots, How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas, That Windmoor's, Turr Diseases, and Transform. This book 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 Insiders, 14 books everyone will be reading in 2019. So basically everyone's saying to read your book, and that's super impressive. And I want to ask, how does it feel to be a brand new author with a hit right out of the gate. And did you expect this much success right away? At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call

ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate, even though I'm so picky. Because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post noticed. Indeed, sponsor jobs help you stand out and hire fast by boosting your post to the top relevant candidates. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored ones according to Indeed

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To answer your question, I had absolutely no idea. I was writing this stuff. A lot of it was, you know, things that made me laugh, things that were funny for me, things that I was really curious about histories that I'd grown up being told and all. all we thought were true. And then as I dug in, and I just really enjoy digging in to find the real story beneath the surface or fake story, I discovered, holy cow, what really happened was almost exactly the opposite.

And I found that fascinating. And I found how do I structure all this stuff? How do I tell the story of how the Allies won World War II or the rise and fall of Pan Am or Edwin Land and Polaroid and his secret clandesthetic. on activities advising the federal government or Steve Jobs in Pixar or the rise and fall of the British Empire and how they're all connected by this one idea. How could I possibly connect these stories? That was such an interesting puzzle for me to solve that I just enjoyed doing. And I had absolutely no idea whether anybody else would share my sense of humor or share my curiosity about it.

So I just did the best I could to make it interesting. Somewhere in the middle there, actually, I got some great advice, which was, don't worry about what anybody else thinks. Just make something beautiful. That's good. And that was from Richard Preston. It was a best-selling author of a book called The Hot Zone. And it was a great writer, a very experienced writer.

He said, just make something beautiful. So anytime I kind of mind straight to, hey, you know, what might happen in the future, I just said, you know what? It doesn't matter. Just make something beautiful. And I would go back to the manuscript and back to the book and back to the stories and just try to make them better. Yeah, well, it's clear that you did a good job. So congratulations. Digging into Loon Chats, we actually interviewed billionaire and entrepreneur Naveen Jane a couple months back, and he wrote

the book Moonshots, creating a world of abundance. And it was a great conversation. If anyone's interested to go tune into that, it's episode 22. Moonshots has become somewhat of a buzzword. And most people know what that is. A Moonshot is an astronomically ambitious project. It's usually pretty expensive. It radically changes the world like going to the moon or curing cancer. And from my research, I learned that you actually made up the word loon shot. So why did you feel like you needed to create an entirely new word? And how is a loon shot different than a moonshot? Or are you saying it's the same thing, but we got moon shots wrong? A moonshot, as you said, is a big goal. It's a destination. Loon shots is how we get there. Nurturing loonshots is how we get there. And the reason I made up the term is because although a moon shot is a big goal, it's something that's generally widely recognized as being important. For example, when Kennedy declared in 1961, we should put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That was the original moonshot and he was widely applauded. But loonshots are ideas that are often widely dismissed or neglect.

and their champions are written off as crazy. And that's because the big ideas, the ones that change the course of science, business, or history rarely arrive with blaring trumpets and red carpets, dazzling everybody with their brilliance. They're much more likely to go through these long, dark tunnels of being rejected for years. For example, when Kennedy suggested his idea in 61, he was absolutely applauded for that. But not many people know that. The first one, 40 years earlier, Robert Goddard suggested the ideas that would get us to the moon, which is liquid fuel jet propulsion. In other words, rockets. And when Goddard suggested his ideas, he was widely ridiculed.

The New York Times wrote a piece saying, well, this man Goddard doesn't understand the basic principles of physics that we teach our children in high school every year, namely that Newton's laws of action and reaction make rocket flight in space. and a vacuum, impossible. There's nothing to push against. And 14 years after Goddard's death, in July, 1969, one day after the successful Apollo 11 rocket launch to the moon, the Times issued a retraction. Apparently, rocket flight does not violate 17th century physics, and, quote, the Times regrets the error.

So Goddard's idea was a classic loon shot. Loon shots are how we get to those great big goals. And they matter because if you are running a business or if you are directing a military and you ignore those loon shots, you are taking a big risk that your competitor or your enemy nurtures them first. For example, the U.S. had dismissed Goddard's ideas, this loon shots of rocket flight, but not Nazi Germany. Scientists in Germany read Goddard's papers, said, hey, this could work. and they built the first jet aircraft and the first long-range missiles, the first jet-powered missiles, which the allies had no answer to. That's why declaring moon shots is a good thing. It's fine. But nurturing loon shots is even more important. That's so interesting. And so why do you think it is that the most important breakthroughs in any field are usually the ones that get shot down at first?

Because if they're not, if everybody said, hey, yeah, let's go do it, then everybody would have done it. So the really big breakthroughs are the ones that get shot down that are very easy to dismiss. I'll give you an example. You're probably too young to take a statin drug, and you're probably very healthy, but tens of millions of Americans take statins. Those are cholesterol-lowering drugs. And when the guy who discovered the statins who created that statin category, as Japanese scientist named Akiro Endo, started that project, it seemed like lowering cholesterol would be a good thing. But then very rapidly a bunch of data came in that cholesterol-lower-lower-lower-dlets didn't really work,

and some other drugs that claimed to lower cholesterol didn't really work. And almost everybody gave up. But he kept going. And people told him he was kind of crazy to continue because not only did all these trials not work and this cholesterol-lower-lowering stuff, but people said, well, wait a minute, every cell in your body contains cholesterol. all. So what you're doing just sounds completely nuts, completely stupid. Don't even try. But he persisted, and then he tried again. And then he came up, we found this drug, which turned out to be the first statin. And then he tried it in mice, which is what you do in drug discovery.

And it didn't work. Nothing happened. And that point, almost everyone would give up. They said, look, if you can't make it work in the laboratory, then you don't have anything. But he kept going because he said, well, you know, maybe there's a species difference. And he had some reason to believe that the drug and the cholesterol work differently in different species, it turns out he was exactly right. Now we know that rats only have the one kind of cholesterol, the good cholesterol, whereas humans and apes and chickens and others have both. So he kept going and he discovered, oh, look, wow, it works really well in chickens, and they ran it in trials. And after they started in the early trials, again, there was some negative data and everybody abandoned the field. But he

He kept going. He kept going, and in the end, we got this drug that has now saved millions of lives. So that's a story of what I call the three deaths of the loon shot. The really good ideas are not the ones that are like, oh, let me try it for a week. I think it's working. Awesome. Let's go do it. Because if you tried it for a week, chances are lots of people tried it for a week.

I thought your principle of three deaths or three massive failures was so interesting. And you say that every loon shot really needs to go through this before they're worthy of deeper consideration. So what do you exactly mean by that? That was a lesson that a very famous drug discoverer, a guy named Sir James Black, who passed away a few years ago, but we were very lucky to be able to work with him in the last few years of his life. And he won the Nobel Prize for developing two of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the latter part of the 20th century. And I remember one day I was feeling kind of depressed. The press kind of dejected. Some experiment hadn't worked in the lab. And it was sort of late at night. We were having a couple of whiskeys together. And he leaned over and he said to me, oh, my boy, it's not a good drug unless it's been killed three times. And what he was telling me is like, don't worry about these project failures. He said, all of the really good projects have failed several times before they succeeded. And the more I looked, it wasn't just true in my field in medical research. It was true broadly. Like, Facebook was the 25th.

social network. There'd been a couple dozen before Facebook. Google was the maybe 18th search engine, I think. There'd been many before. None of them had made any money. None of them had succeeded in business. And there were all sorts of reasons that they previous ones had failed. And that comes down to another principle, which is the false fail, which is sometimes you will get a failure that's not because your idea is bad, but because there's a flaw in the experiment. So the example I told you of the statin drugs, which have now saved millions of lives and are taken by tens of millions of American, it is a good idea. It really does work. But when they gave it to the mice, when they started it in mouse studies, it failed, which is when so many people gave up. But that was a false fail because trying to treat mice with a drug that lowers bad cholesterol and mice don't have that, that's a flaw in the experiment.

So Facebook was another good story of a false fail because what happened was when Zuckerberg was taking this idea around in 2004, I think, it was right around the time of Friendster. Frenster had risen as a social network and then was starting to fail. Like people were abandoning Frenster for the next sexy social network, which at the time was MySpace. And so all of these investors passed and they said, well, social network. networks are just like genes. They're a fad. You know, someone wears this gene and this season and then switches to this other brand and this other season and so forth. And everybody just switches social network so there's no money, no money and all these investors passed. Well, that was a false fail. It was the false fail of Friendster. And Peter Thiel, as an example, went in and he had some friends who worked at Friendster and he got the data and he looked at the retention data and he said,

holy cow, people are staying on this site for hours. That's kind of amazing. And that's despite the fact when you used Friendster, he knew the site wasn't very stable, it kept crashing. And he realized people were leaving Friendster not because it was a bad business model. Any site that can get users to stay for hours is probably going to be a pretty good business model. They were leaving because of a software glitch. It was a false fail. That was a false fail of Friendster. And Thiel wrote a check for $500,000 and he sold it eight years later for a billion. That's incredible. It just goes to show how you really need to dig into the actual failure and not just like write it off as, oh, yeah, this failed next.

You call it, listen to the suck with curiosity. Right, exactly right. And I add the curiosity thing there because you get this advice or read this advice all the time of active listening. So I got those lectures and workshops all the time, active listening, repeat back what you've heard. But just repeating back what you've heard is not good enough. If you've poured your soul into a project, you're a young entrepreneur and someone, you know, an investor walks away or someone rejects your pitch or a partner walks away, a customer doesn't like your product, just saying, okay, yeah, I got it. And moving on is not very helpful. Your temptation when someone rejects your piss or a customer walks away is, oh, they just don't get it or, oh, they just don't get it.

they're idiots, it's just to dismiss them. Especially if someone tells you, oh, your baby's ugly. You're like, what? And you just want to hit them. But what you really want to do is take off that defensiveness hat and probe, like a detective, like a Sherlock Holmes. Set aside all that rejection stuff and give yourself time to get over it. And then probe, like Sherlock Holmes.

Oh, could you help me understand? What was it about my pitch? or what was it about the market? And only by getting really curious. And that's a gift. You have to be very polite. You have to ask people very nicely because there's no upside to them in walking you through why they said no. They're busy and those are difficult conversations and they could end friendships if they don't go well.

So you really have to probe and use the best hands and people skills you've got to tease out why they rejected whatever. you are offering because only when you pull on that thread. If you pull on that thread enough, there will be a little gold nugget at the end, which is something you overlooked. They may know something about competitors, about the market that you just don't know, but a lot of people who are looking do know. We're going to choose product X because it has this feature and that's why we like it. And you had no idea. You're a little blind to it because you've been working with blinders on on your thing. Only by listening to The Suck with Curiosity, LSC, you can pull on that thread and get that little gold nugget that can save you. Yeah. At what point would you suggest that people

give up on an idea? For me, actually, that LSC is a signal. It's sort of like a thermometer or reality check. If I'm getting rejection after rejection, and I find myself just getting really, really defensive and my curiosity has stopped, then it might be time. If, however, I'm still really curious, I'm like, oh, help me understand. Then it may be a sign that I am onto something, because if I'm really curious, I've understood that there's a core there and I will keep probing until I can keep pulling on that thread and find out why it's not working. Once I find out why it's not working and I have that data, I will probably have enough data on my own to make a decision. If I really set aside the defensiveness and the dismissing and the urge to, you know, call your

mother and get support that you're on the right track and all that stuff, and really listen with curiosity, genuine curiosity, not sort of lip surface curiosity. Help me understand why you're not interested. that would be a super valuable thing you could do if you could just take five minutes and walk me through. Once you've done that enough, you will probably know. If they're missing it because a competitor is offering X, and that's better than what you have for some reason, then you can go back and say, look, can I match that competitor? Can I do something better than them? In which case you'll go work on it.

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Very cool. Flipping back to Loon shots and kind of getting more detail into that. From my understanding, there's really two types. There's P type and S type. Could you describe the different story listeners and maybe give an example of each one? Sure. So this is important because most people have blinders to one or the other. They're very good at one and not the other. And by missing that, they are putting themselves at great risk. That somebody will very quickly figure out something better and take them over. And if you learn how to do that, you can. be a far, far stronger entrepreneur or manager or leader. So here's what I mean. P-type is a product LoonShod or a product innovation, something that makes your product better. For example, discovery of the telephone or the discovery of the transistor, the personal computer or jet engines, those are all new products. S-type is a small change in strategy. For example, when Sam Walton had this idea of he wanted to open a retail store and his wife said, okay, honey, I'm happy to

support you in your dream, but I just don't want to live in a big city. So he found a town. He liked being married, and he liked quail hunting. So he found a town in northwest Arkansas that was right on the border of four states. He could do quail hunting all year round, and he put his store there. He didn't create any new product. Selling stuff is not a new product. Selling it a little bit cheaper is not a new product. He just moved somewhere different. And there was a huge, demand as he later found out in rural America for larger stores that sold stuff a little bit more cheaply so that's an example of an S-type strategy so if you're let's say an artist you can create a new product or you're a scientist you

can create a new product you're an engineer you can create a new product that other people don't have but strategy might be a new way to market it a new person you can partner with a new channel you can use to get the word out none of those have to do with inventing a new product. Those are all small changes in strategy, a new way to price it, a new way to bundle it with something that no one has thought about bundling it before. So the reason it matters understanding these two different things is most people just say, let me make my product better and then sit back and see what happens. Well, usually nothing. The ones who really do great are the ones who can do both, who can make their product better

and come up with a new strategy, a new way of bundling it with somebody, a new person to work, with a new kind of partnership, a new kind of collaboration, new kind of pricing model, then they can reach kind of incredible heights. Another concept that I think is related to this that you talk about in your book, and it deals with specifically leadership, is the Moses Trap. Would you unpack this for our listeners? Yeah, the Moses Trap is this kind of myth of leadership that you will get if you read sort of glossy magazine articles and so on, that the great leader is the one who stands in the

top of a mountain and raises his or her staff and anoints the chosen project. This is what we will work on, the iPod, and parts the seas, and everybody gets out of the way and does that. So that's a myth, and that's actually a trap. That might work once or twice, but if that's how you lead, it's going to inevitably end in disaster, because you will raise your staff and anoint the wrong thing, as happened for Steve Jobs early in his career when he did lead like that. And that was a disaster many times and nearly bankrupted several of his companies. The first Apple stint it next and Pixar when he took it over. All three nearly failed and went bankrupt when he led in that way.

What the truly great leaders do who build these organizations that can are relentlessly can stay ahead of the competition. They lead much more like careful gardeners. They have the delicate hand of a gardener where they can balance the soldiers who are taking care of the core business, who are delivering and manufacturing products on time, on budget, on spec, and getting them to customers with quality consistently. And the radical idea is that those people or groups or projects that are easily dismissed and seem a little nutty, the loon shots. And those two sets of projects or two sets of people are very different, the artists and the soldiers. And I'll come back to what that means to small companies where you don't

have the resources to have two separate types of people. But in general, you have these two kind of mindsets, the artist mindset where you're really trying to maximize risk. You want to try a lot of things that seem a little bit crazy, most of which will fail, and that's good. And then the soldier mindset where you're trying to minimize risk. And those are opposite objectives. And a lot of companies fail because they mash them together. One is like solid. One is like liquid. And if you try to do both at the same time, all you get is mush. What you really need to do is separate those mindsets and say, look, for this part of the year or with this group of the people, this is our job. And it's awesome. It's a great thing to do. You've got to love your artists and soldiers equally. And that's the

You got to love both sides equally. You got to appreciate both sides equally. You can't favor one or the other. That's what a gardener does. It nurtures the tiny little baby stage ideas. Make sure it transfers them to the field where they can grow into big mature plants. And then he brings back those ideas. He creates the ecosystem for ideas and projects to travel between the artists and soldiers equally.

That needs the delicate hand of a gardener because those two mindsets are so different. The failure point in most innovation is the transfer between those two things, is getting that balance right. So leading like a Moses tends to be a disaster because you just point to one group and say you do this, and you miss that delicate balance and the transfer back and forth that you need to succeed. Semi-related, I know that you believe that structure is more important than culture. There's a common saying most of us have probably heard, culture eats strategy for breakfast. meaning that bad culture destroys companies, no matter how good their strategies may be. But you challenge that status quo with your own saying that structure eats culture for lunch.

So can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by this and why structure is so important for organizational success? Sure. So you can think of culture as the patterns of behavior that you see on the surface. You know, you have a political culture, you have an innovative culture. And the problem with this notion of you got to address culture and change culture is that fixing culture is very hard and often impossible. No amount of forcing employees to watch two-hour videos or sing kumbaya or hold hands is going to change culture very much. But if you look at structure, which is, for example, what do you reward? Those are the small changes that can actually transform behavior. So, for example, if you're at a group or company that rewards rank, that's what's celebrated.

You're going to get a very political culture because everyone's going to be sort of elbowing their neighbor to get promoted. On the other hand, if you're at a company that rewards ideas and intelligent risk taking, for example, promotions, you only get one percent bump in salary. I'm just going to take an extreme. Let's say in the first case, by rewarding rank, let's say promotions get to the extreme. like a hundred percent bump in salary, you get a very political culture. If you reward intelligent ideas and risk-taking and forget about what your rank is or what your hierarchy is, you're going to get a very innovative culture. That's what I mean by structure can drive culture, can drive patterns of behavior. The analogy I use is with a glass of water. So pattern of behavior is, for

example, are the molecules sloshing around that's a liquid? Or are the molecules rigidly in place that's a solid. It's the same exact molecule. Those are just two very different patterns of behavior. Now I'll tell you what, no amount of yelling at a block of ice, no amount of a CEO yelling at a block of ice, hey, molecules, why don't you guys loosen up a little bit is going to melt that block of ice. They're going to just be rigidly in place. But a small change in temperature can get the job done. A small change in temperature can melt steel. So underlying the patterns of behavior that you see are these small elements of structure. that can have dramatic effects on those patterns of behavior.

And that's what I mean by structure can eat culture for lunch. Awesome. So we're running up on time. Before we go, I thought a really fun way to close out this episode would be to ask you some fun questions that you have on your website that kind of sum up some of the key themes in your book. So I'll trigger you one by one with each of them. What do James Bond and Lipitor have in common? They were both initially loon shots that became wildly successful franchises. The first James Bond was rejected by every major film studio.

It went through the three deaths of a loon shot. Every studio killed it said, oh, there's no way anyone will take seriously a metrosexual, British spy who saves the world. And then it grew into the longest-running most successful film franchise in history. Lipitor, it was a cholesterol-lowering drug, went through the three deaths of the loinshot, no way it'll ever work, and it became the most successful drug franchise in history. Why do traffic jams appear out of nowhere on highways? Traffic jams appear out of nowhere. That's an example of a phase transition. We were just

talking about liquid to solid as a sudden change in pattern of behavior that's triggered by a small change in structure. Well, traffic jams suddenly appear on highways because it's also a phase transition between two states. One is called smooth flow. and one is called jammed flow, and you get the sudden transition between those two as you cross a critical density of cars on the highway. As soon as the separation gets closer than a certain amount, people's urge to slam on their brakes when something small happens overrides their desire to target cruise speed. And little things grow into massive jams. How does that relate to loon shots? Well, the idea in the book is a new way of thinking about the behavior of groups and the,

the patterns people have in teams and companies, why they suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, like a glass of water will suddenly change from liquid to solid, or traffic flow will suddenly change from smooth flow to jammed flow. And so it's actually no one has really thought about groups or behavior of groups in this way in 200 years. So it's a new way of thinking about that. And once you understand that, once you understand this idea of a transition in the behavior of group and there's small changes in structure and you can tease out what the small changes

and structure are, you can begin to manage it, you can begin to control it, you can design more innovative teams and companies, and it gives you a handful of rules you can use to innovate faster and better. Awesome. Well, this was an incredible interview. I really, really, really enjoyed this conversation. It was so nice to talk to you. You are such a smart, brilliant guy with so much experience, so much to shift.

with us. So I wish you the best. I hope you continue to write because you clearly have a talent for it. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? They can go to my website, loonshots.com, or follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. The tag is just my full name, Safi, Bacall. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Safi. It was such a pleasure. Thank you. It was enormously fun. And thank you for all the kind words. I should do this every morning. Really boost me up. Anytime. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to write us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting. And check us out at younginprofiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on YAP Society on Slack. Check out our show notes or young and profiting.com for the registration link. You can find me on Instagram at YAP with Hala or LinkedIn. from my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks to the YAP team for another successful episode. This week, I'd like to give a special thanks to Shiv.

Shiv has been supporting research on the podcast for about a year now, and he does an incredible job. He's also gearing up to launch a new series alongside Stephanie. It's called YAP Snacks. We can't wait to launch, and we're so lucky to have Shiv on our team. This is Hala, signing off.