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0:03:58 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:04:00 This is Tim Ferriss.
0:04:03 Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with
0:04:09 world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,
0:04:13 and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.
0:04:18 This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10th
0:04:23 year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads.
0:04:28 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:04:31 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.
0:04:36 I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes, and internally we’ve
0:04:41 been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes,
0:04:46 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people
0:04:48 I consider stars.
0:04:54 These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
0:04:58 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
0:05:03 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:05:10 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:05:15 And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:05:23 First up, Michael Lewis, the number one New York Times best-selling author of more than 15 books,
0:05:31 including Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short, which were made into major motion pictures,
0:05:39 and his latest, Going Infinite, which delves into the rise and fall of FTX and its founder,
0:05:40 Sam Bankman Freed.
0:05:47 A topic Michael also explores in depth in his critically acclaimed podcast, Against the Rules.
0:05:52 You can learn more about Michael at MichaelLewisWrites.com.
0:06:03 I’m looking at a paragraph from brainpickings.org, which is run by Maria Popova, who I’m very fond of.
0:06:06 And there’s a piece on your writing process.
0:06:10 She may have been quoting a different source, but I just want to read something quickly.
0:06:12 And then we can discuss, these are your words.
0:06:15 Before I wrote my first book in 1989, the sum total of my earnings as a writer
0:06:18 over four years of freelancing was about 3,000 bucks.
0:06:22 So it did appear to be financial suicide when I quit my job at Solomon Brothers,
0:06:26 where I’d been working for a couple of years and where I’d just gotten a bonus of $225,000,
0:06:32 which they’d promised they’d double the following year to take a $40,000 book advance
0:06:34 for a book that took a year and a half to write.
0:06:40 Was that a hard decision or was it something you’d just been biding your time for?
0:06:42 You put it very well.
0:06:44 It was something I’d been biding my time for.
0:06:48 When I went into Solomon Brothers, I knew that this was a temp gig.
0:06:54 I’d be there for a few years and I was there more out of curiosity about how this world worked
0:06:58 than I was to advance a career.
0:07:04 In fact, aside from the money, which I liked, I didn’t think really much about the career at
0:07:05 Solomon Brothers because I knew I could only hang out.
0:07:07 My interest would only last for so long.
0:07:10 And I was intensely interested in it as I was learning about it.
0:07:14 But when I kind of figured it all out and got a sense of how it all worked and
0:07:17 there weren’t any more questions I had that needed to be answered,
0:07:19 I really started to get bored.
0:07:22 But the whole time I was there, I was writing.
0:07:28 I got myself in trouble because I’d actually tend to write about what’s around me.
0:07:33 And so I started to write things about this great boom that was happening on Wall Street
0:07:39 was really the beginning of what we still live with, this notion of 22 or 23-year-olds
0:07:41 rolling on and making a fortune.
0:07:44 The sums of money being made on Wall Street and the share of the economy it occupied
0:07:46 was expanding rapidly.
0:07:48 And no one quite understood why.
0:07:52 So there was a natural market for me to sort of try to explain it.
0:07:56 And I mentioned the Wall Street Journal asked me to write op-eds for them.
0:08:00 I wrote an op-ed arguing that investment bankers were overpaid.
0:08:05 And in the bottom of the op-ed, it said Michael Lewis is an associate with Solomon Brothers in London.
0:08:10 But I tell you, I must have like a blind streak, right?
0:08:13 Because my reaction was, “Wow, great piece.”
0:08:17 When they sent me the galleys or whatever it was, I said, “This is fabulous.”
0:08:20 And I didn’t even think, “What are the people at Solomon Brothers going to think?”
0:08:25 Except maybe they’re going to be thinking, “So cool that I wrote an article on the Wall Street Journal.”
0:08:27 I got to work the next day.
0:08:31 And there’s a fellow who ran all of Solomon Brothers International.
0:08:32 Delightful guy.
0:08:34 He was the guy who had hired me in the first place.
0:08:39 And he was ash and face sitting at my desk with this little newspaper on his lap.
0:08:43 And he said, “Michael, I mean, it was really not an anger.
0:08:44 It was more in sadness.”
0:08:47 He said, “Michael, you have no idea of the damage you’ve done.”
0:08:48 And I was kind of like, “What do you mean?”
0:08:52 He said, “This thing is being picked up all over the United States.
0:08:57 And we’ve had a crisis meeting overnight of the Solomon Brothers board.
0:08:59 What to do about it?”
0:09:04 They couldn’t have wouldn’t have fired me because I had just flukelly started to generate
0:09:06 a whole lot of money for them, like a whole lot of money.
0:09:08 I was essentially a salesperson.
0:09:16 And I had at that point the second biggest money generating account in the entire firm.
0:09:21 And the person would speak only to me, even though I’d only been there a year and a half.
0:09:25 It was basically the most sophisticated hedge fund sort of manager in Europe.
0:09:27 And so they didn’t want to fire me because they didn’t want to lose him.
0:09:32 He said to me, my boss said, “What are we going to do about this?”
0:09:34 And I said, “I don’t really want to do anything about this.”
0:09:37 And he said, “Well, we need you to stop writing.”
0:09:39 And I said, “I’m not going to stop writing.
0:09:40 It’s what I love to do.”
0:09:42 And he had the bright idea.
0:09:44 He said, “Could you write under a different name?”
0:09:46 And I said, “No problem.
0:09:46 I can do that.”
0:09:48 And he said, “What name are you going to use?”
0:09:49 Actually just popped into my head.
0:09:51 I’ll use my mother’s maiden name.
0:09:55 So I wrote under the name Diana Bleeker for maybe the next nine months or a year.
0:10:00 And maybe not quite that long, but I wrote half a dozen pieces.
0:10:01 They got better and better.
0:10:04 I was getting better and better because I had better and better editing.
0:10:08 So Michael Kinsley, who was then editing the New Republic, had walked into my life.
0:10:13 And he was teaching me writing lessons basically in the way he edited the pieces.
0:10:18 But the pieces Diana Bleeker was writing, I mean, I really felt off the leash
0:10:20 because nobody could trace it back to me.
0:10:24 I was almost describing the trading floor around me in pieces.
0:10:26 And people were circulating.
0:10:27 It was really great.
0:10:30 I was sitting in London at my desk doing my business.
0:10:34 And I would watch people Xeroxing articles I’d written in the New Republic under Diana
0:10:36 Bleeker and pass them out on the trading floor.
0:10:40 And so I had a sense that like, God, people are hungry for this.
0:10:41 People are laughing.
0:10:42 People were, it was just working.
0:10:48 Now the money part of it, what happened was I came home one night to my house in London,
0:10:55 picked up a phone call, and it was a man named Ned Chase, who happens to be Chevy Chase’s dad,
0:10:58 who was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster.
0:11:02 And he said, I figured out who Diana Bleeker was and I got your number.
0:11:04 I never found out how he did that.
0:11:05 We think you should write a book.
0:11:09 And at that point, I thought, I’m out.
0:11:13 If someone will publish a book by me, I’m not hanging around the Wall Street firm any longer.
0:11:17 I did hang around an extra three months to get my bonus.
0:11:20 But the minute I saw the money hit the bank account and I knew they couldn’t take it back,
0:11:21 I left.
0:11:23 And not because I, you know, disliked them.
0:11:26 It was just, I loved a lot of the guys there.
0:11:27 Mostly it was almost all guys.
0:11:30 I really liked my bosses generally.
0:11:33 I just was bored with the work and I had this other thing I love to do.
0:11:39 You know, I had two conversations in which people tried to say, oh, don’t do that.
0:11:44 Don’t walk away from a sure fortune to go take a flyer on writing a book.
0:11:48 One was my bosses who took me into a room.
0:11:51 And this tells you just how innocent an age it was.
0:11:53 I mean, these days you’d be in a room with lawyers, right?
0:11:57 And, and you’d be told you signed this nine disclosure agreement and you’re writing anything
0:11:58 about anything.
0:11:59 They didn’t care about it.
0:12:01 They were worried about my sanity.
0:12:02 They were actually worried about my career.
0:12:08 They couldn’t believe that I was going to walk away from this really cushy situation
0:12:10 and go and do that other thing.
0:12:12 So they were trying to help me.
0:12:15 And I just said, you know, I got this feeling I got to do this.
0:12:19 My father said, you know, you really could just wait.
0:12:24 You really could just collect some millions of dollars and then write your books.
0:12:29 But the problem was I was what, 27 at the time?
0:12:35 I looked ahead of me and I looked at people who were 35 or 37 and they seemed ancient
0:12:37 and they seemed completely stuck.
0:12:42 Like they made so much money and their lives had adapted to the making of money.
0:12:44 Depended on the making of money.
0:12:48 I just thought there’s no way I’d spend a lot of time here and still even want to do this.
0:12:51 I’d be trapped and I don’t want to do that.
0:12:54 So I ignored all that advice and just went and did it.
0:12:57 And it worked out, you know, that was Liars Poker.
0:13:03 Liars Poker, at least I’ve read, was intended to be a cautionary tale of sorts.
0:13:05 It’s not how everybody took it.
0:13:07 I mean, it’s a very exciting book.
0:13:08 The thing is, it’s like a funny book.
0:13:09 It was a funny story.
0:13:11 It’s a very, very funny book.
0:13:17 And it’s also an incredible story because you’re seeing this transformation of this industry
0:13:20 and the effect on all these young people.
0:13:26 But I had only one kind of moralistic thought in mind when I wrote it because I really just thought
0:13:34 my models that I had in my head when I wrote it were Education of Henry Adams and Rousseau’s Confessions.
0:13:40 The model was just tell the world what happened exactly as you remember it and that’s enough.
0:13:44 You don’t need to layer on an interpretation of what happened.
0:13:45 What happens good enough.
0:13:52 And the extent I wanted kind of to push the reader in any direction, it was just really young readers,
0:13:59 like people in college, that I hoped would read it and would say, yeah, I now know what this is.
0:14:01 Yeah, there’s money there.
0:14:03 But a lot of it’s kind of silly.
0:14:07 And I have these other things I want to do with my life and I’m going to go do them.
0:14:12 So I’m not going to be seduced by Goldman Sachs or have Goldman Sachs pray on my anxiety
0:14:15 about my future when I’m walking out of my college.
0:14:16 I’m going to go do what I’m meant to do.
0:14:20 And I felt that way because I had watched classmates at Princeton,
0:14:25 just naturally drift into the arms of the investment banks because they really couldn’t,
0:14:28 they felt they couldn’t resist the money and they were anxious about not being successes.
0:14:36 Then what happens is the book comes out and the book makes it seem because it was as business goes,
0:14:40 incredibly colorful and entertaining and lucrative.
0:14:47 And I had dozens of letters a day from young readers saying, dear Mr. Lewis,
0:14:52 I really loved your how to book about Wall Street, about how to make money on Wall Street.
0:14:55 And I’m hoping that there’s some tips in there that you didn’t put in there
0:14:56 that you could let me know so I have an edge.
0:15:03 It just fueled the desire of young people to want to do it more.
0:15:04 And I didn’t see that coming.
0:15:05 And that’s something I don’t know.
0:15:08 Anybody who writes books, I think, learns that you write a book,
0:15:09 but the reader reads a book.
0:15:14 And the reader may read a book that’s entirely different from what you thought you wrote.
0:15:16 And you can’t really do that much about it.
0:15:19 How do you think about, if you do, ambition?
0:15:23 And this may not be a good question, but it seems like from what I’ve read,
0:15:28 the overt ambition that kind of people wear on their shirt sleeves
0:15:36 in certainly many parts of Wall Street, you find off-putting or maybe in bad taste.
0:15:39 But you certainly don’t shy away from ambitious projects, right?
0:15:43 How do you personally think about ambitious, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth either?
0:15:46 No, no, it’s an interesting way to frame the question.
0:15:47 How do I think about ambition?
0:15:53 Well, I could tell you, I thought it was so comical that I was going to be
0:15:58 in this ambitious money-making world that the week before I went to Solomon Brothers,
0:16:03 I went into Paul Stewart, this men’s store, because I saw it through their window.
0:16:07 I saw they had red suspenders with little gold dollar signs on them.
0:16:10 And I thought, this is like a way to make fun of the whole thing.
0:16:11 And nobody thought it was funny.
0:16:13 Nobody thought it was like, you can’t wear that shit around here.
0:16:18 You can’t wear that shit until you are a big enough deal to wear that shit.
0:16:21 I’ve always been enormously ambitious in a way.
0:16:25 I’ve always wanted my life to be great, like really great.
0:16:28 I’m competitive, like very competitive.
0:16:30 And I love competitive sports.
0:16:31 I love winning.
0:16:33 I don’t particularly like losing.
0:16:40 I guess number one, I don’t accept money as an accurate measure
0:16:44 or any kind of real measure of whether you’re winning or losing.
0:16:47 So money doesn’t hold that, doesn’t have that hold on me.
0:16:50 Fame a bit more.
0:16:56 I mean, I would say a lust for attention and fame is probably closer to a vice of mind
0:16:58 than a lust for money and fortune.
0:17:04 But even that, I find I get tired of and it just doesn’t interest me that much.
0:17:09 I don’t think I’m a maximizer in that I try to get a lot of a thing.
0:17:13 It’s more, if I’m trying to maximize anything, it’s a feeling.
0:17:16 And it’s a feeling that that was a kickass book.
0:17:19 I could look at something and just say, that is a great piece of work.
0:17:23 That feeling is what I’m kind of always gunning for.
0:17:24 And it’s a pretty private feeling.
0:17:28 And I think over time, I mean, you must have found this too,
0:17:37 that the response that I have to external validation has become muted and numbed.
0:17:41 And when I got a glowing review for Liar’s Poker,
0:17:43 and it went to the top of the New York Times bestsell list,
0:17:46 it was like dancing all over my kitchen.
0:17:47 I mean, I was just happy as a clam.
0:17:51 I couldn’t believe that it was like I just won the Super Bowl.
0:17:54 And now I don’t read the reviews.
0:17:59 I sometimes forget whether a book is on the New York Times bestsell list or not.
0:18:01 I’m not paying as much attention to it.
0:18:03 It doesn’t gratify me in the same way.
0:18:09 But the gratification I get from looking at something that I think I’ve done that’s really good
0:18:12 is at least as great as it was back then.
0:18:13 I think I’m tapping into that.
0:18:17 I think I’m tapping into like the pleasure I got when I was just all by myself in a room
0:18:19 laughing at my own jokes.
0:18:25 It’s sort of like maximizing self-satisfaction, which is maybe not the most attractive trait
0:18:29 that my ambition is to maximize my self-satisfaction.
0:18:30 Maybe that’s my ambition.
0:18:37 Let’s jump into the process associated with the maximizing the self-satisfaction.
0:18:40 You mentioned laughing at your own jokes.
0:18:44 I have read that you sometimes write late at night, say midnight,
0:18:50 you put on a headset and play the same soundtrack of, say, 20 songs over and over again.
0:18:52 Is that something that you still do?
0:18:55 Yes. In fact, I did it yesterday.
0:18:59 Kids screwed up my natural writing rhythm.
0:19:02 My natural rhythm would be to kind of start about four in the afternoon
0:19:06 and write till three in the morning and sleep until noon.
0:19:07 But you can’t do that with kids.
0:19:14 So I’m not as likely to be found late at night at my desk, though it happens sometimes.
0:19:20 But whenever I’m writing, I have headphones on and I have a soundtrack I write to.
0:19:22 And the soundtrack changes.
0:19:23 It changes book to book.
0:19:30 And it’s got to the point where both my wife and my kids will recommend songs for the soundtrack
0:19:31 for whatever the next project is.
0:19:33 And I’ll build a soundtrack intentionally.
0:19:36 And the music is, you know, it’s all over the map.
0:19:41 It tends to be very up, but it tends to be music that I just stop hearing.
0:19:45 And I noticed something really funny, just the last couple of weeks,
0:19:50 because I’m working on something now, the second season of my podcast,
0:19:53 where I have a different relation to music.
0:19:56 The podcast is about coaching.
0:19:58 And the last episode, which I have still not written,
0:20:00 it’s the only episode I haven’t written,
0:20:04 is me getting coached in something I’m incredibly uncomfortable doing.
0:20:05 And it’s singing.
0:20:09 I’ve been doing voice lessons an hour every day for the last three months.
0:20:13 And there’s a song I sing, and I’m going to tell you which one it is,
0:20:16 that I’m going to have to sing, that I’ve been practicing,
0:20:18 that happens to be on my soundtrack.
0:20:23 And now I realize I have to remove it because it kicks my brain into a different space.
0:20:25 All of a sudden, I hear it, and it’s like Pavlavi.
0:20:27 And I’ve got to belt out the tune.
0:20:29 I’ve got to worry about hitting a high note.
0:20:30 And it screws up my writing.
0:20:34 And so I’ve just been hitting skip because I’ve been reluctant to change it.
0:20:36 But I have to just going to have to remove it.
0:20:40 So it puts me, the music puts me, the purpose of it is
0:20:42 to shut out the possibility of interruption.
0:20:44 I can’t hear knocks on the door phones,
0:20:47 people dropping packages on the front porch, anything.
0:20:49 I’m just in my own space.
0:20:51 And I kind of cease to hear the sound.
0:20:54 You mentioned Michael, was it Kinsley?
0:20:55 Is that right?
0:20:56 The editor?
0:20:57 The editor of the New Republic.
0:21:00 What made him a good editor, or what did you learn from him?
0:21:04 Can you remember anything that he helped tighten or improve?
0:21:09 So Michael Kinsley had a gift for creating writers.
0:21:13 There are dozens of people who were young writers then,
0:21:18 who he had profound influence on and careers that he just launched.
0:21:20 And it’s an odd assortment.
0:21:22 And I was one of those people.
0:21:27 I think what happens with writers who come up in a conventional way,
0:21:31 like through creative writing programs or by writing for their circle of friends,
0:21:33 is they get treated too politely.
0:21:35 Their work gets treated too politely.
0:21:40 So they don’t hear a really withering critique of their work.
0:21:44 And Michael Kinsley could not help himself.
0:21:47 He delivered the most withering critiques of your work.
0:21:50 The kind of throat clearing phony first paragraph,
0:21:52 which was totally unnecessary.
0:21:53 It would come back.
0:21:54 It’d be just a big X throat.
0:21:55 Why’d you even write that?
0:21:56 Start here.
0:21:58 It would be, I can’t remember.
0:22:03 I had learned a word that was just a completely obscure word.
0:22:06 And I even remember the word, but I don’t know how to pronounce it.
0:22:07 It’s Cthonian.
0:22:10 It starts C-H. I think it means of the underworld.
0:22:13 And I remember working it into the piece.
0:22:17 And like a big circle around it saying, you fucking phony.
0:22:21 Would you go into the thesaurus?
0:22:24 It was just like making merciless fun of me.
0:22:28 My byline at the very beginning, I thought it sounded good.
0:22:30 It was for it to be Michael M. Lewis.
0:22:32 My middle name is Monroe.
0:22:34 I thought a middle initial kind of fancied it up.
0:22:37 He put a big circle around it and said, don’t do that.
0:22:39 Don’t be one of those people.
0:22:40 You’re not Michael M. Lewis.
0:22:41 You’re Michael Lewis.
0:22:45 He was all the preposterous things that you naturally tend to do
0:22:48 when you’re putting words on paper.
0:22:52 He identified all of them as vices and stopped you from them.
0:22:56 And so in addition, he was unbelievably gifted at seeing
0:22:58 what a good story it was.
0:23:00 You started to learn what was interesting
0:23:02 and what wasn’t just talking to him,
0:23:05 just by how he responded to what you said.
0:23:09 It was a kind of feedback that everybody should get,
0:23:13 but that most people are too tender and sensitive to deliver.
0:23:14 It’s a funny thing.
0:23:15 I think that this happens in speech too.
0:23:20 I think that there’s lots of inefficiency in human conversation,
0:23:23 that people do all kinds of things they really shouldn’t do,
0:23:26 and that other people make fun of them for doing.
0:23:28 People are endlessly telling stories
0:23:30 about what some other person said, making fun of them.
0:23:32 And it shouldn’t be that way.
0:23:33 We should be very efficient conversationalists
0:23:34 because we do it all the time,
0:23:36 but we aren’t because we don’t get feedback
0:23:38 because people are too polite.
0:23:41 And I think people are too polite with other people’s writing.
0:23:43 And what Michael Kinsley, his great gift
0:23:44 in addition to being a kind of genius,
0:23:46 was he just couldn’t be polite.
0:23:47 He was just so blunt.
0:23:50 I’m Michael Lewis on my books instead of Michael M. Lewis
0:23:52 because of Michael Kinsley.
0:23:54 I have a question for you about,
0:23:55 maybe this isn’t the right word,
0:23:57 but productive laziness.
0:24:01 I was looking at an article that talked about
0:24:04 a speaking gig from 2017, Qualtrics.
0:24:05 You might know where this is going,
0:24:07 but the quote that stuck out to me was,
0:24:10 “Attributed to you, people waste years of their lives
0:24:13 not being willing to waste hours of their lives.”
0:24:15 And I don’t know if that prompts any memories,
0:24:17 but is that something you can elaborate on?
0:24:19 Sure, that wasn’t a quote for me.
0:24:22 It was a quote from one of my characters, Amos Tversky.
0:24:26 He’s one of the main characters in the Undoing project.
0:24:28 And it resonated with me.
0:24:32 What he meant was that people don’t back away from their work.
0:24:35 And especially the need to always seem busy or be busy
0:24:39 stops people from finding things that are really worth doing
0:24:41 and sifting the ones that are worth doing
0:24:43 from the ones that aren’t worth doing.
0:24:46 So it resonates with me because I am not a person
0:24:48 who always has to be doing something.
0:24:55 And in fact, my natural state is probably inert
0:24:58 that I can really just lay around and screw off
0:25:00 and procrastinate with the best of them.
0:25:03 And it’s partly because of how I grew up.
0:25:04 I mean, I grew up in New Orleans
0:25:07 and there was not a whole lot of value
0:25:10 attached to either ambition or career achievement.
0:25:14 You were who you were because of how you were
0:25:15 and who your family was
0:25:16 and what neighborhood you grew up in
0:25:18 and where you went to school.
0:25:20 You were always so well defined by your environment
0:25:24 that trying to change it by doing stuff
0:25:25 didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
0:25:30 And my father used to tell me, and I believe this
0:25:31 until I was about 20,
0:25:34 “On our family coat of arms, there was a motto in Latin
0:25:37 and the motto was do as little as possible
0:25:39 and that unwillingly.
0:25:42 For it is better to receive a slight reprimand
0:25:44 than to perform an arduous task.”
0:25:46 And he would just say that like,
0:25:48 “Just keep that in mind, we live by these words.”
0:25:53 So that’s kind of where I was coming from just generally.
0:25:58 And I found this thing that didn’t feel like work.
0:26:01 So it didn’t feel like an attempt at achievement,
0:26:02 not that achievement was bad,
0:26:04 it just, that’s not why I was doing it.
0:26:06 But having said that,
0:26:09 I do find that being able to back away
0:26:12 and get yourself, myself in a state of mind
0:26:14 in which I can say,
0:26:16 “It’s okay if I never write anything else.
0:26:18 It’s okay if I never write another book.
0:26:20 It’s okay if I don’t do anything for six months.”
0:26:22 And I can afford that now,
0:26:23 and that’s nice to be able,
0:26:25 it’s a luxury to be able to afford it.
0:26:26 But I think a lot of people who can afford it
0:26:28 don’t actually take advantage of the luxury
0:26:30 because I think that doing that,
0:26:33 putting yourself in a state of mind where I’m,
0:26:36 I’ve got to make an argument about why I need to write
0:26:38 another book because I don’t have to,
0:26:42 changes your relationship to potential stories
0:26:43 and potential material.
0:26:47 It requires the material to rise to the level of interest
0:26:50 where you feel obliged to engage with it.
0:26:52 So you’re not doing it just because
0:26:53 you got to write another book.
0:26:56 You’re doing it because how can I not write this?
0:27:00 And it serves my own sloth and indolence,
0:27:02 serves as a kind of filter.
0:27:06 And the filter is, no, I don’t have to do that.
0:27:07 So I’m not going to do that.
0:27:09 I don’t particularly want to do that.
0:27:10 So I’m just not going to do that.
0:27:12 And even if you tell me that,
0:27:14 oh, it’s got big bestseller written all over it,
0:27:17 I’m not interested because it keeps me off that path.
0:27:19 I think it’s been very useful
0:27:21 because it does two things at once.
0:27:24 One is it raises the level of the bar
0:27:28 that the material has to jump over to get to me.
0:27:29 So the material is going to have to be really good
0:27:31 if I’m going to engage with it.
0:27:35 And two, it stops me from doing the same thing
0:27:37 over and over again just to be successful.
0:27:40 It enables me to almost encourages me
0:27:43 to move around and do surprising things.
0:27:49 And I think readers and audiences really appreciate
0:27:53 and will engage with the writer who’s willing to take risks.
0:27:55 That, yeah, they like their writer,
0:27:57 some of their writers to just keep doing
0:27:58 the same things over and over again,
0:28:02 but they’ll follow you if you take a brave risk.
0:28:03 Since I’m not doing it,
0:28:06 I’m not trying to create the next sure-fired bestseller.
0:28:10 I’m led to other and sometimes unlikely material.
0:28:13 So the books end up being about a lot of different things.
0:28:18 What are some of the questions or thresholds
0:28:23 that indicate the material has risen above the necessary hurdles?
0:28:25 I found one question.
0:28:28 I don’t know if this is your or not,
0:28:30 so feel free to confirm or deny.
0:28:33 But would I be sad if this story didn’t get told?
0:28:35 Yeah, that’s funny. That is one.
0:28:36 It’s a really good question
0:28:41 because there’s not a clear-cut rule that I follow except feeling.
0:28:44 There are a couple of feelings that I associate
0:28:47 with the desire to write a book.
0:28:51 One is a feeling that if I don’t do it,
0:28:53 it won’t properly get done
0:28:57 because I have some privileged access to the story.
0:28:58 And there are lots of different ways
0:29:00 you can have privileged access to the story.
0:29:04 But the sense that, yeah, this book really should be written
0:29:07 and someone needs to do it and that someone is clearly me.
0:29:12 The second and related feeling is I have an obligation to the material.
0:29:15 It isn’t the material has an obligation to me as a writer.
0:29:17 It’s I have an obligation to this material.
0:29:20 And once I have that feeling, I have a motive.
0:29:23 I have a motive and whether I’m fooling myself or not,
0:29:26 it’s a motive that’s a deeper and more inspiring motive than,
0:29:29 “Oh, I got to make a living.”
0:29:31 Or, “Oh, I got to get a book on the bestseller list.”
0:29:34 Or, “Oh, I got to have something to tell my friends
0:29:35 when they ask me, ‘What are you doing?'”
0:29:36 It’s the highest motive.
0:29:38 It’s I have an obligation.
0:29:39 I have a duty.
0:29:43 And I’ve had that feeling with every book I’ve written,
0:29:44 how it gets to that point.
0:29:47 I mean, they take their different paths to that point.
0:29:49 But it obviously is some feeling in myself
0:29:51 that this is an important story.
0:29:56 If you could put a message, a quote, a question,
0:30:00 anything at all on a billboard, metaphorically speaking,
0:30:02 that would reach billions of people,
0:30:06 does anything come to mind non-commercial
0:30:10 that you might put on a billboard saying a mantra,
0:30:12 something you remind yourself of, anything at all?
0:30:14 It’s going to sound trite, whatever I say.
0:30:19 And let me just say that I live in the world’s capital of bumper stickers.
0:30:23 At Berkeley, California, there are more bumper stickers per automobile
0:30:25 than anywhere else in the world.
0:30:27 It’s been scientifically proven.
0:30:30 You can walk down the street and it’s mostly political stuff,
0:30:33 but it’s just like people getting their point across in bumper stickers.
0:30:35 And I have never had a bumper sticker on my car
0:30:39 because it’s not one thing I’ve ever wanted to say over and over forever.
0:30:42 I’m not a bumper sticker or quote guy.
0:30:45 However, if you say I got to put it up on a billboard,
0:30:50 I would take the mantra of my high school baseball coach,
0:30:52 one of the greatest men I’ve ever known,
0:30:56 who is actually the subject of one of the podcast episodes.
0:31:00 And he would just say it routinely and he just kind of became part of you.
0:31:02 He would say, don’t be good, be great.
0:31:05 And he’d say it to you as he handed you the ball to go out to pitch a game.
0:31:07 He’d say it to you when you were working out.
0:31:10 And you just, having that mind,
0:31:14 it’s the kind of thing I try to keep in mind when I’m working on something.
0:31:16 Good is not okay.
0:31:18 If you’re going to do it, be great.
0:31:19 Push yourself.
0:31:25 And it’s hard and don’t just stop when it’s good enough.
0:31:28 That’s what I would stick on a billboard.
0:31:31 It’s one of those things that’s in the billboard of my mind.
0:31:33 Don’t be good, be great.
0:31:34 I love it.
0:31:36 That’s Billy Fitzgerald.
0:31:37 Billy Fitzgerald.
0:31:43 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:32:52 And now, Dr. Martin Rothblatt, an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur,
0:32:57 and the chairperson and CEO of United Therapeutics,
0:33:01 a biotechnology company she founded in 1996
0:33:03 to save the life of one of her daughters.
0:33:06 You can learn more about Dr. Rothblatt
0:33:13 and the work of United Therapeutics at UNITHER.com.
0:33:18 Martin or Dr. Rothblatt, both welcome to the show.
0:33:19 Thank you for making the time.
0:33:22 Thanks so much, Tim. Just Martin’s fine.
0:33:26 All right, and this interview, as my listeners might imagine,
0:33:29 was challenging in the best way to prepare for
0:33:32 because there are a million and one directions that we can go
0:33:37 with just this bio alone, which is, of course, a snapshot,
0:33:40 a distillation of much more that you have done.
0:33:43 And I thought we could start in perhaps an unlikely place,
0:33:45 and that is Alan Watts.
0:33:49 I have read that you are a fan of Alan Watts,
0:33:52 and specifically the book subtitle on the taboo
0:33:55 against knowing who you really are.
0:34:00 Could you please explain, if that is true, why that is the case?
0:34:05 Yes, thanks, Tim. Alan Watts has a really unique ability
0:34:10 to see the dialectic aspect of everything in nature.
0:34:13 By that I mean that there’s a kind of a ying-ying
0:34:16 aspect to everything in nature.
0:34:18 And he points out that, for example,
0:34:24 you can’t have a crest of a wave without the bottom of a wave.
0:34:29 And it has helped me whenever I see things in life that seem negative,
0:34:34 to be able to look at it in another way and see the positive in it.
0:34:39 When were you first introduced to his work? How did that come about?
0:34:44 I was first introduced to it through the literature of this philosophy
0:34:49 called transhumanism, sort of the idea that people can transcend
0:34:52 some biological human limitations.
0:34:55 A friend of mine, Frank Sasanowski,
0:34:59 who is the head of the National Organization on Rare Diseases,
0:35:03 pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits.
0:35:07 He himself is both a Jesuit and an FDA lawyer,
0:35:10 but he pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits,
0:35:16 such as Teardre du Chardon from France and other individuals here in the U.S.
0:35:20 And then from those Jesuits, they referred to Alan Watts.
0:35:22 I’m not sure if he was actually a Jesuit,
0:35:27 but he undertook some religious training, both in China, I think, and in the U.S.
0:35:32 He was a radio announcer for many years in San Francisco,
0:35:34 I think during the ’70s or ’80s.
0:35:38 I don’t know if you remembered him, the film of a few years ago,
0:35:40 her in which like a computer — I do.
0:35:45 Yep. So I was watching that movie, which kind of is interesting to me
0:35:51 because it epitomized or it visualized the concept of computers becoming sentient.
0:35:53 And in the middle of that movie,
0:35:56 there’s a scene in which Alan Watts appears.
0:36:00 And I stood up in the movie theater and I said, “Oh my God, Alan Watts!”
0:36:09 Did you ultimately find the presentation in that movie to be compelling
0:36:12 as it relates to sort of sentient intelligence?
0:36:16 I did. I thought it was an accurate depiction of a likely way
0:36:20 that sentients would begin to arise in our society,
0:36:23 basically by being very, very useful to people,
0:36:26 cleaning up their inboxes, stuff like that.
0:36:31 This may be a good place and we’re going to be all over the place in nonlinear fashion.
0:36:36 Bina48, who or what is Bina48 if I’m pronouncing that correctly?
0:36:38 Yep. You’ve got it perfectly.
0:36:44 So Bina is the name of my partner and we’ve been married for about 40 years.
0:36:48 And when she was 48, we undertook a joint project
0:36:53 to try to create a digital symocra or a digital copy
0:36:58 of her basic personality with a lot of her memories and thoughts.
0:37:03 And we thought this would be a very nice project as a combination of science and art
0:37:08 and to encourage young people, get them more excited about computer science
0:37:10 and women in particular, girls in particular.
0:37:14 So we contracted with a couple of companies
0:37:18 who were experts in both the software engineering side
0:37:24 and in the physical modeling of a face that moves exactly like a human face does.
0:37:28 You might imagine there’s this exhibit at Disney World,
0:37:32 Disneyland of Lincoln and whatnot, something like that, but more realistic.
0:37:40 We built this project and since that time, Bina48 has thrilled audiences all around the world.
0:37:45 I’m sure she has inspired hundreds if not thousands of girls to go into computer science.
0:37:50 And she continues to get better and better, more and more advanced software.
0:37:55 I don’t know if you have watched the series Black Mirror before,
0:37:59 but I find some of their episodes to be very strong and in one of them,
0:38:07 a significant other is effectively resurrected by pulling data and patterns
0:38:12 and therefore mannerisms and so on from effectively social media accounts.
0:38:18 So pulling from the cloud and feeding into this simulacrum
0:38:22 or model of someone who used to be or in this case still is.
0:38:30 How far away do you think we are from being able to do something along those lines convincingly?
0:38:33 Yes, Tim. So I am a fan of the Black Mirror series
0:38:39 and there are a few other somewhat similar series that are streaming now, upload and whatnot.
0:38:41 So it’s an idea that’s catching on.
0:38:48 And even at a very basic level, social media firms like Twitter, for example,
0:38:55 and probably Facebook as well, offer an opportunity that after a person passes away,
0:38:57 their account can remain active.
0:39:04 And I believe in the case of Twitter can even continue tweeting in the way that you once tweeted.
0:39:08 So I think this general idea is it’s a trend.
0:39:14 It’s only going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job
0:39:16 of copying the human personality.
0:39:22 Sometime in this century, for sure, and maybe in just like two or three decades,
0:39:26 I think that there will be a digital copy of a person.
0:39:30 And another word is like a digital doppelganger of a person
0:39:34 who will claim to be the original person.
0:39:38 And they may make that claim before or after the person died.
0:39:44 And then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to grapple with,
0:39:49 is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album?
0:39:52 Or is this actually some form of digital sentience?
0:40:00 When you were growing up, who were your role models or inspirations?
0:40:05 Was there anyone in particular who stood out to you when you were in high school?
0:40:11 Or at the very beginning, let’s just call it freshman year of your undergrad as
0:40:16 icons worth emulating or lesser known role models worth emulating?
0:40:18 Did anyone really stick out for you?
0:40:24 I think that in terms of authors, I was very influenced by Robert Heinlein,
0:40:25 the science fiction author.
0:40:28 Sure, stranger in a strange land and so on.
0:40:30 Absolutely, it was so brilliant.
0:40:35 And then a few years ago, when his widow released the uncensored,
0:40:41 unedited version of stranger in a strange land, it’s like three times larger and no holds barred.
0:40:44 I just savored every page of that.
0:40:48 My favorite book of all of his is Time Enough for Love,
0:40:52 in which he covers almost every topic under the sun.
0:40:58 So Heinlein’s characters were somewhat of role models for me.
0:41:03 Like Lazarus Long is a common character in some Heinlein books.
0:41:08 In the public sphere, I was very much enamored with Robert Kennedy.
0:41:15 His positive, progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him.
0:41:18 So I looked up to him.
0:41:20 Those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time.
0:41:26 You seem to be good at many things, of course, just based on the bio alone.
0:41:35 But what strikes me is how quickly you were able to develop expertise in new fields.
0:41:42 I’d like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio.
0:41:45 And that is United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company.
0:41:48 She started to save the life of one of her daughters.
0:41:55 I’d love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story,
0:41:58 just because people will want to hear it.
0:42:04 And then the follow-up, just to plant the seed for it, is how you learned biology.
0:42:11 Because my understanding is you didn’t have much in terms of background in biology.
0:42:13 That’s a huge mouthful of a question.
0:42:18 But if you could give us a bit of the background, that would be extremely helpful.
0:42:20 And we can use that as a jumping off point.
0:42:26 Sure. So it’s kind of funny that you can go all the way through undergraduate,
0:42:31 at a great place like UCLA, and never be required to take a life science course.
0:42:32 But that was the case.
0:42:37 So the last biology class I had was in high school.
0:42:45 And here, suddenly, I was faced with a situation as an adult while running Sirius XM
0:42:50 that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness.
0:42:54 She can’t even walk up a couple of stairs to the front door.
0:42:58 And there are no medicines approved for it.
0:43:04 I finally got her to the best doctor one could find, the head of pediatric cardiology
0:43:09 at Children’s National Medical Center in the middle of Washington, D.C.
0:43:13 And the doctor said, this is an extremely rare disease.
0:43:15 No one knows why it arises.
0:43:18 All the patients die within two to three years.
0:43:22 He had only seen two or three other kids with it, and they both died.
0:43:25 And all you can do is hope for a lung transplant.
0:43:28 So Tim, I was completely crushed.
0:43:30 I just saw black.
0:43:31 I didn’t know what to do.
0:43:38 And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward,
0:43:43 night after night, and myself and Beena would tag team staying there with her,
0:43:46 was once she fell asleep to go down into the library
0:43:52 and to just begin learning about what was this illness she had,
0:43:56 which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension.
0:44:00 And why were there no treatments available for it?
0:44:03 So I just began reading and reading and reading.
0:44:06 Most of the time I read things.
0:44:08 I didn’t understand what they were talking about
0:44:13 because there were these long medical words and chemical words
0:44:15 that I never learned in law school
0:44:18 or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering.
0:44:20 But of course there were dictionaries.
0:44:23 And I looked up the words in a dictionary.
0:44:27 And they had college level anatomy textbooks.
0:44:32 So what I didn’t know, I just kept going backwards in academia.
0:44:35 I guess you would say backwards in learning or pedagogy.
0:44:38 Until I would even get to like a high school level textbook
0:44:40 that would explain something.
0:44:42 And I said, okay, I get that.
0:44:47 And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night
0:44:49 until I learned everything I needed to know.
0:44:54 How did you, and I know this is a story you’ve told before,
0:44:59 but ultimately in searching for possible solutions,
0:45:01 and as we were chatting about before recording,
0:45:04 there’s a lot of luck involved.
0:45:07 And it doesn’t mean that your path is replicable
0:45:12 by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation
0:45:13 similar to what you experienced.
0:45:18 But nonetheless, you were able to ultimately track down,
0:45:22 I suppose it’s fair to say, a molecule, a drug of some type.
0:45:28 Would you mind describing for listeners the process then
0:45:33 of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion
0:45:35 this drug or to license it?
0:45:36 If you could describe that,
0:45:38 I have a number of questions that will stem off of it.
0:45:43 There are a gazillion articles published
0:45:48 on every type of medical research you could imagine.
0:45:50 I mean, it’s just a bottomless well.
0:45:54 There are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals.
0:45:59 Each of those journals have every year thousands of articles
0:46:01 published across them.
0:46:05 So it’s difficult to find the information that you need.
0:46:09 But in law school, we learn a very useful skill.
0:46:12 This skill goes by the name of shepherdizing
0:46:17 after this type of index that they have in law school called shepherds.
0:46:21 So what shepherdizing involves is when a judge
0:46:24 writes a decision, like the Supreme Court issues a decision,
0:46:26 they drop a lot of footnotes.
0:46:31 And of course, one thing lawyers love to do is make footnotes and references.
0:46:34 And then what you’re supposed to do as a good lawyer
0:46:38 is to look up all of the footnotes and the references
0:46:42 that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to.
0:46:47 And then the shepherdizing process is after you get all of those references
0:46:52 to then look up all of the references in those other articles.
0:46:56 And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns
0:46:59 where three, four, five levels down,
0:47:03 the references are all circling back around on themselves.
0:47:08 So I applied that shepherdizing process to these medical articles.
0:47:12 And somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article,
0:47:19 they make footnotes and citations to other people’s research who they relied upon.
0:47:22 So I would get all of those articles and read those.
0:47:24 And then I would follow up on all of the references in those.
0:47:32 Finally, I read about a molecule that a researcher at Glaxo Welcome had written
0:47:38 in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure.
0:47:41 And it failed in its test of congestive heart failure.
0:47:42 It did not work.
0:47:46 But in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did.
0:47:50 And the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention
0:47:56 was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart,
0:47:58 which is called the pulmonary artery.
0:48:02 It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure
0:48:06 while leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine.
0:48:11 Well, that’s exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension,
0:48:13 the people who have this disease.
0:48:19 I’ll make a quick footnote that when my daughter was diagnosed,
0:48:26 2,000 people in the US had the disease because medicines have become so much better
0:48:29 and because we’ve been able to, like you mentioned in the introduction,
0:48:34 get all of these approvals, there are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it.
0:48:38 So it’s likely that people listening to your podcast
0:48:42 will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension.
0:48:49 And I read this article and I said, wow, just when I need this tiny stretch of artery,
0:48:54 just between the heart and the lungs, this molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch
0:48:57 of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone.
0:49:01 That was the holy grail that I was looking for.
0:49:04 So I looked at where the author of the article was from.
0:49:09 He was from Glaxo Welcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
0:49:12 And I made a beeline down to him and asked him
0:49:17 if he could develop this molecule that he’d found for my daughter’s disease.
0:49:21 Was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom?
0:49:24 A big all caps yes?
0:49:26 No, it was actually a big all caps no.
0:49:32 Unfortunately, the individual who had written the article
0:49:35 had actually retired a few months earlier.
0:49:39 And the person that I ended up meeting with who is in charge of research and development
0:49:43 said that this was just one article.
0:49:46 It was an incidental finding.
0:49:53 In any event, this disease afflicted so few people it was completely unrealistic
0:49:57 to expect Glaxo Welcome to develop this molecule
0:50:00 for my daughter and other people with that disease.
0:50:03 And I asked him, his name’s Bob Bell.
0:50:06 He’s now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman.
0:50:12 I asked Dr. Bell, I said, what would it take for you to develop this medicine?
0:50:14 He said, well, it probably would take you couldn’t do it.
0:50:19 We only develop medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year
0:50:20 and revenue potential.
0:50:24 He said, but it’s possible you could buy it from us.
0:50:30 If you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise,
0:50:35 I could then introduce you to the business development people at Glaxo Welcome.
0:50:37 So over the course of the next several months,
0:50:41 I created a brand new biotechnology company.
0:50:47 I was able to have a Nobel laureate who was formerly associated with Glaxo Welcome
0:50:50 become head of a scientific advisory board.
0:50:52 And I re-approach Glaxo Welcome.
0:50:56 And I said, I have all the things that you asked for.
0:51:00 Can you sell me this drug and we’ll develop it ourselves?
0:51:04 Well, Tim, it turns out that everybody asked said,
0:51:06 well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree.
0:51:08 And that’s how it is in a big bureaucracy.
0:51:15 It turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper
0:51:18 to agree to license this drug to me.
0:51:21 Finally, it happened.
0:51:28 And all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10% of any money
0:51:30 that I would ever get from this molecule.
0:51:33 I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them.
0:51:34 I was in their face all the time.
0:51:43 Also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell’s sister had contracted
0:51:47 a form of pulmonary hypertension from the time I first met him
0:51:49 toward the end of this process.
0:51:53 And he became a product champion for me within Glaxo Welcome.
0:51:57 I mean, that was just pure luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say.
0:52:01 And then they really didn’t think this molecule had any chance at all.
0:52:05 And they were really just doing it to get rid of me, I think.
0:52:08 But still, all 15 people had to sign it.
0:52:11 After we successfully developed this molecule,
0:52:18 we have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to Glaxo Welcome
0:52:22 because that molecule has saved thousands of people’s lives.
0:52:28 It has produced a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us.
0:52:32 And Bob Bell, when I invited him to our 15th anniversary,
0:52:36 and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine,
0:52:42 and he said this was the absolute best transaction that Glaxo Welcome had ever done.
0:52:48 So in hindsight, what did they miss?
0:52:51 What accidentally got deleted from the spreadsheet?
0:52:57 Or what assumption or assumptions were incorrect that they missed this opportunity so completely?
0:53:02 I think there were probably like maybe three main ones.
0:53:06 The first one, and I can say this kind of from first hand knowledge,
0:53:09 since I am now the head of a pharmaceutical company,
0:53:15 the odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than one in 100.
0:53:19 I mean, the human body is so complicated.
0:53:23 It’s like a massive set of very precisely keyed locks.
0:53:27 And every molecule is like a random key.
0:53:31 And the chance that you would have a molecule that opened a lock,
0:53:36 that fixed some dysfunction in the body, rather than causing some harm to the body,
0:53:38 is it’s less than one in 100.
0:53:44 So first of all, they figured the chance of this thing working just in general was less than one in 100.
0:53:49 Secondly, they thought to themselves, even if it worked a little bit,
0:53:54 there’s only 2000 people in the whole country with this disease.
0:53:56 They didn’t really think that if it worked really well,
0:53:59 the number of people would keep accumulating.
0:54:02 I see you’re saying if you have these people who would have died,
0:54:08 otherwise not dying, then that treatment cohort is just going to grow and grow and grow.
0:54:08 Is that what you mean?
0:54:09 Exactly.
0:54:14 I thought about it like I was getting subscribers at SiriusXM.
0:54:18 People said to me, “Oh, Martin, you’ll be lucky to have 100,000 subscribers.”
0:54:21 I said, “Well, if I keep them, and I get another 100,000 the next year,
0:54:26 then I’ll be up to 200,000, and then maybe 400,000, 800,000.
0:54:27 Now we have 30 million.”
0:54:31 They didn’t think in that subscriber mindset.
0:54:32 That was the second problem.
0:54:40 The third problem is that they didn’t really imagine that the healthcare system would pay
0:54:44 something like $100,000 per year for this medicine.
0:54:50 And at the time, this was about 20 years ago, early 2000s,
0:54:56 I think like the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps $10,000 a year
0:55:00 for a patient or $10,000 for a course of treatment.
0:55:05 Because of advances in things like precision medicine and gene therapy,
0:55:12 there are many, many medicines now that cost over $100,000 a year, mostly for rare diseases.
0:55:18 And the healthcare system pays for them because so few people have these diseases
0:55:23 that even though the medicines are expensive, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to diseases
0:55:31 like hypertension or common illnesses, asthma, that afflict tens of millions of people.
0:55:37 So the healthcare system doesn’t really mind paying a lot of money if it’s a rare disease.
0:55:41 And the people at Glaxo Welcome were clueless about this.
0:55:46 They were actually looking for the big billion-dollar blockbusters, not for the rare diseases.
0:55:48 So those were their three omissions.
0:55:51 They failed to be Alan Wattsian.
0:55:54 They failed to see that because something is big,
0:55:57 underneath that means that there’s something else that’s small.
0:55:59 And that was what Alan Watts would always say.
0:56:02 He says something is good only because something else is bad.
0:56:07 At the very least, I mean, it’s a valuable thought exercise
0:56:10 when you’re looking at the assumptions that you’re making.
0:56:12 And what an incredible story.
0:56:16 You mentioned Sirius. We haven’t spent any time on Sirius just yet.
0:56:27 When did you first fall in love or become intoxicated or enchanted by satellite systems
0:56:28 or electrical engineering, I suppose?
0:56:31 But you can take whichever one is more interesting to tackle.
0:56:37 You’re absolutely right that I fell in love and I was intoxicated by satellite communications.
0:56:45 It seemed to me kind of magical that we can put a machine way out in space
0:56:50 and that machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet.
0:56:53 My first real moment of first love, if you will,
0:56:58 was at a remote NASA tracking station in the Indian Ocean.
0:57:04 And I had left UCLA to travel around the world, really hitchhike around the world.
0:57:10 And I found myself in the Indian Ocean on a set of islands called the Seychelles.
0:57:15 And on these islands at the top of the mountain in the middle of the main island,
0:57:16 there was a NASA tracking station.
0:57:25 And I went up into it and I was probably a pretty grungy 19-year-old at that point in time.
0:57:29 But the engineers inside there were kind and patient with me
0:57:36 and they explained to me how their satellite antennas were communicating with satellites
0:57:40 in all different orbits around the Earth and even all the way out to Jupiter.
0:57:45 And I asked them, I said, “Would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there
0:57:51 and have it broadcast information back to the entire Earth?”
0:57:54 And they said, “If you made a powerful enough satellite,
0:57:59 then the receiving equipment on Earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand.”
0:58:02 And I could have kissed the guy.
0:58:07 I just said, “Wow, that’s the purpose of my life.”
0:58:10 And I made a beeline back to UCLA.
0:58:13 I changed my major to communication studies.
0:58:17 I did an undergraduate thesis on direct broadcast satellites.
0:58:24 I did a joint JD/MBA degree where I published multiple articles on satellite communications.
0:58:29 I worked at Hughes Aircraft Company, which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then
0:58:33 and helped design a satellite to cover South America.
0:58:37 And then ultimately went out on my own with my dream goal, which was Sirius XM.
0:58:47 What did it feel like, if you can remember, to have that answer given to you or that direction,
0:58:50 rather, given to you, the purpose given to you?
0:58:56 Did it feel a certain way, that type of conviction or that type of belief?
0:58:57 What do you recall?
0:58:59 Yeah, Tim, it’s the best feeling.
0:59:00 It’s the best feeling.
0:59:03 And actually, I don’t think it really has anything to do with age.
0:59:09 I felt like the same kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Teslas
0:59:14 and I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output.
0:59:20 And there’s a very simple correlation between horsepower and electrical power,
0:59:23 between kilowatts and horsepower.
0:59:25 It’s almost one-to-one, not exactly.
0:59:30 And I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in
0:59:33 terms of their horsepower.
0:59:40 So, right away, I said, wow, this car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter.
0:59:44 I had that same kind of, this is the purpose of my life,
0:59:46 is to make an electric helicopter.
0:59:50 So, you can get this kind of excitement at any point in life.
0:59:53 I think probably the best way to describe it, Tim,
0:59:56 would be like a lightning bolt to your soul.
0:59:58 You know, I was asking about biology earlier,
1:00:02 but I would be very curious, since you mentioned also that there were no,
1:00:05 well, the requirements as such in undergrad,
1:00:08 did require you to take any additional biology classes.
1:00:13 If you were trying to teach, let’s just say, a class,
1:00:17 and you could pick the age, or it could be a set of classes, scientific literacy.
1:00:26 Being able to have enough basic fluency to provide more surface area for those
1:00:28 lightning bolts, if that makes any sense, right,
1:00:31 when you’re looking at a manual or having a conversation with an engineer
1:00:32 or reading a scientific study.
1:00:39 Do you have any thoughts on how we could cultivate more scientific literacy,
1:00:41 if that’s the right phrase to use?
1:00:44 Yeah, I think that’s a great phrase to use.
1:00:50 I think what’s necessary is that you have to relate science to people’s everyday lives.
1:00:54 And one of the greatest people are doing this,
1:00:57 and to go back to the beginning of the interview,
1:00:59 when you asked me who was the role model for me,
1:01:06 I should have said Carl Sagan was like an amazing, amazing role model to me.
1:01:09 I watched the Cosmos series over and over again.
1:01:17 And Carl Sagan was a genius at being able to take scientific concepts
1:01:19 and relate them to people’s everyday life.
1:01:23 And if you remember for watching those series,
1:01:29 the iconic image of him taking a dandelion and blowing it,
1:01:36 and describing that this is how a star spreads out its gas throughout the galaxy,
1:01:41 those type of step-by-step instructions, ladders to get from one place to another,
1:01:45 is the way I think to build scientific literacy.
1:01:50 And I would ask my students to think about anything that’s important in their life,
1:01:52 whatever it might be.
1:01:55 And from whatever they said was important to their life,
1:02:02 I would then begin wrapping that in layers and layers of basic scientific concepts
1:02:04 that pertain to what was important to them.
1:02:07 Are there any science fiction authors per se,
1:02:11 but science authors or elucidators of science
1:02:16 who have written anything that would be appropriate for a lay audience?
1:02:19 If someone is listening and they see their blind spots,
1:02:21 which I know by definition is kind of impossible,
1:02:26 but if they recognize they don’t have enough scientific fluency
1:02:29 or as much as they would like, but they want to try to cultivate that,
1:02:32 do you have any recommendations for them?
1:02:34 There’s a lot of books like that.
1:02:42 One of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named Thomas Kuhn.
1:02:46 He was one of the most famous historians of science,
1:02:50 and his book is perennially in print.
1:02:53 It’s called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
1:03:00 In this book, he goes through about 10 different revolutions in science,
1:03:03 where everybody thought the world was one way,
1:03:07 and then kind of like a crazy person would say,
1:03:08 “No, I think it’s like a different way.”
1:03:13 And gradually set about proving it’s a different way,
1:03:17 and created a revolution in science.
1:03:20 And he explains this in very lay terms.
1:03:24 He takes you through the science of gravity, for example,
1:03:31 with Isaac Newton, science of relativity, with Einstein, electricity, with Maxwell,
1:03:38 and so on, in a very step-by-step fashion to make the science accessible.
1:03:41 And in the way his main point in writing this book
1:03:46 is to teach people critical thinking, to teach people to question authority.
1:03:50 Ultimately, all science is about is just saying, “Why?
1:03:54 Why?” Like every two, three, four-year-old kid knows how to do that, right?
1:03:56 Why? Why? Why?
1:04:00 And I think Thomas Kuhn does a great job of that in his book.
1:04:06 I should also point out, and please feel free to correct me if I’m oversimplifying,
1:04:09 but the why, why, why is not just for four-year-olds.
1:04:13 It’s not just for scientists in lab coats,
1:04:16 or whatever people envision scientists to be.
1:04:23 It’s also extremely helpful in situations like those you found yourself in
1:04:26 with Glaxo Welcome and attempting to license.
1:04:32 I mean, constantly pushing for explanation and clicking on those footnotes
1:04:34 to go to the footnotes to go to the footnotes
1:04:40 to ultimately get to some point of leverage where you can move things around.
1:04:44 It seems like it’s also not just an intensely interesting
1:04:48 and academically rewarding approach to thought,
1:04:50 but an immensely practical approach to life.
1:04:54 At least that’s how it seems from reading so many of your stories.
1:04:57 You know, when you discover something,
1:05:02 what’s happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain,
1:05:06 and it’s lighting up the pleasure centers, too.
1:05:12 So I really believe that there’s nothing more exciting than having a realization
1:05:16 about something, coming to an inspiration about something,
1:05:20 which is why books and reading are so magical.
1:05:24 Another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job
1:05:29 of explaining concepts that can inspire people is Octavia Butler.
1:05:30 She wrote a lot of books.
1:05:35 One of them, very well known, is Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents.
1:05:41 And in these books, she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority.
1:05:45 So I’m not sure what it was that my parents did.
1:05:50 I don’t really remember them specifically encouraging my questioning of them.
1:05:53 In fact, I do remember my father discouraging it.
1:06:01 But nevertheless, what happened to me was I absorbed the American culture.
1:06:06 And the American culture is a culture of questioning authority.
1:06:10 I recently heard one of the latest interviews with Tony Fauci
1:06:13 when he was, people were asking him,
1:06:21 “Why is it that Americans won’t do these basic public health steps to stop the pandemic?”
1:06:26 And he said, “You know, American culture does not like to be told what to do.
1:06:32 American culture is died-in-the-wool question authority.
1:06:38 You’d be hard-pressed to find another country where it would be more difficult
1:06:44 to get people to follow a single rule for everybody than the United States.”
1:06:48 So it’s that American cultural ethic of questioning authority
1:06:52 that I know is like deep in my mental DNA.
1:06:54 So we were chatting just a few minutes ago about
1:06:57 realizations, inspiration.
1:07:01 I’d like to ask if we flash back to,
1:07:04 well, we could flash back to any point in time that you choose, really.
1:07:10 How did you relate to or think about gender in your youth?
1:07:12 And you can choose what youth means.
1:07:16 And I guess I’m wondering if there were any flashes of realization,
1:07:21 or if you came sort of pre-installed with a certain orientation
1:07:23 or way of thinking about it or feeling about it.
1:07:28 Whatever you could say to speak to your experience of gender when you were younger,
1:07:29 I would love to hear it.
1:07:34 Sure. So it is related to this questioning of authority, Tim.
1:07:41 Around teenage years, I had a constant vision of myself,
1:07:44 not as a male, but as a female.
1:07:49 And of course, I said to myself, WTF, why am I thinking like this?
1:07:53 I can’t imagine anybody else is thinking like this.
1:07:57 But nevertheless, the thoughts were real, and the feelings were real,
1:07:59 and the feelings were visceral.
1:08:01 Could you describe the feelings?
1:08:06 Because I think I’m certainly very interested in what form that takes.
1:08:09 Is it a discomfort of some type?
1:08:11 Is it a longing?
1:08:13 How did it feel for you?
1:08:18 So first, I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different
1:08:21 for every single transgender person.
1:08:24 And talking about my feelings, I don’t want to give the impression
1:08:28 that these are going to be the feelings of other transgendered people
1:08:32 because, as a community, we’re as heterogeneous as anybody else.
1:08:40 So for me, it was really a matter of just visualizing myself in a female form.
1:08:45 And there was not any dislike of my male form.
1:08:51 Again, it was kind of very Alan Watson in that I saw myself as male
1:08:55 only because the opposite of male was female.
1:08:58 So I could also see myself as female.
1:09:01 And this was the way my mind was working.
1:09:07 And when I say I saw myself, it was just kind of like a physiologic embodiment.
1:09:12 Obviously, I knew boys and girls and men and women’s bodies were different.
1:09:16 So I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman
1:09:20 wherein I was very much trapped in a male body.
1:09:26 It was the prevailing view that this was a completely unacceptable way to be.
1:09:30 So the authority was, no, this is not possible.
1:09:33 People are only male or female.
1:09:36 And never the twain shall meet.
1:09:44 So again, this American Paul Ravirish question authority mindset got me reading.
1:09:50 And I found once again that there was a vast literature on transgenderism,
1:09:54 transsexualism, Native American people who were too spirited,
1:10:01 communities in India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female.
1:10:05 So even though this was never something I learned in junior high
1:10:09 or high school or elementary school or really anywhere in American culture,
1:10:17 in say the 1990s, I learned through books that humanity was not either strictly male
1:10:18 or strictly female.
1:10:23 And as I began to question authority, I began to say to myself,
1:10:28 why can’t I also come out as not strictly male and not strictly female?
1:10:31 When I think a lot of listeners hear the words male and female,
1:10:37 they think of the physiological differences that you might put side by side,
1:10:39 looking at physical characteristics.
1:10:48 When you say not totally male or female or not cleanly bifurcated into solely those two categories,
1:10:54 do you mean to say masculine and feminine traits or what we would often find labeled as such?
1:10:56 Or do you mean something else?
1:11:00 I mean, predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you refer to.
1:11:06 Now oftentimes, those masculine and feminine traits are just a short hop,
1:11:10 skipping a jump from masculine and feminine apparel.
1:11:11 Right.
1:11:13 Depending on how people dress.
1:11:19 They’re a short hop, skipping a jump from masculine and feminine hairstyles in an age,
1:11:24 that was the time of Prince and Boy George and whatnot.
1:11:29 And then you get to masculine and feminine manicures.
1:11:31 Like why can’t a guy paint his nails?
1:11:38 And then you get to next questions of secondary and primary sex organs.
1:11:44 And some people wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology
1:11:49 and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology.
1:11:54 And I found that there was actually like a vast literature following again,
1:11:57 footnotes to footnotes, references to references.
1:12:06 I was like, oh my God, it is possible to in fact alter your physiology to match your psychology.
1:12:10 What appeared to be the most intelligent researchers in this area
1:12:19 are opining that this is a safe and healthy thing to do for people who feel that they are
1:12:22 kind of quote unquote trapped in the wrong body.
1:12:29 From say zero to a hundred percent, how well do you feel you have your physiology
1:12:31 matching your own psychology at the moment?
1:12:33 Hundred percent.
1:12:33 Hundred percent.
1:12:34 Hundred percent.
1:12:40 What were the biggest or the most important decisions, actions that you took?
1:12:46 Did any surprise you to have a disproportionate effect on increasing that percentage?
1:12:47 Nope.
1:12:52 I think that every part of the transition process kind of fell in place.
1:12:55 It was not something that happens on a day.
1:12:58 It’s kind of you get to a point of diminishing returns.
1:13:02 So over a period of years, I gradually transitioned.
1:13:07 And I think even to this point, I’m still in a transition process.
1:13:14 I kind of went from a pure male to a more, I would say not pure, but I would say,
1:13:21 knocking on the female door to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as
1:13:28 trans binary, meaning that I embrace both masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely.
1:13:34 Looking at the introduction, which I read at the top of the show, so to speak,
1:13:40 there is a line about leading efforts of the transgender community to establish their own
1:13:44 health law standards and of the International Bar Association to Protect.
1:13:47 And this is the part I want to ask you to elaborate on.
1:13:51 Autonomy, rights, and genetic information via an international treaty.
1:13:53 What are autonomy, rights, and genetic information?
1:13:54 Sure.
1:14:00 So autonomy, it’s just a fancy word for saying that people should be able to make up their own
1:14:07 mind, that people should have the power, the authority, the freedom to decide what to do
1:14:08 with their own body.
1:14:14 And genetic rights, of course, refers to the human genome, the DNA that we all have.
1:14:20 Now, there is a tremendous diversity of human genomes out there.
1:14:27 There are people who, because of their DNA, they are pretty much immune to some kind of cancers,
1:14:34 whereas other people, because of their DNA, it’s very likely that they’ll get those type of cancers.
1:14:39 There are some people, because of their DNA, they almost cannot feel pain.
1:14:42 They have an extremely high tolerance for pain.
1:14:48 There are other people, because of their DNA, that the slightest pinprick will send them screaming.
1:14:54 So once Craig Vanter and Francis Collins led the effort to decode the human genome,
1:15:02 and about the year 2000, all types of pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers
1:15:09 began scouring the world to engage in what’s called genetic mining or genome mining,
1:15:13 meaning going to different populations of people around the world,
1:15:20 often that have been intermarried for quite a while, so their genomes are kind of concentrated,
1:15:26 and trying to learn something from those communities’ DNA that can then be translated
1:15:33 into useful pharmaceuticals to help everybody else have some of the strengths
1:15:37 or less of the weaknesses of those isolated populations.
1:15:44 What I was concerned with is that if people extract the DNA from these remote communities,
1:15:49 that they in fact do so only with the consent of those communities,
1:15:54 or with the consent of the elected representatives of those communities,
1:16:00 so that they can have some fair financial return for their natural endowment.
1:16:05 I see. So it’s similar, in a sense, to preventing, say, biopiracy from the Amazon,
1:16:12 where you have these tribes who are not providing their own human genetic information,
1:16:18 but are, say, acting as a wellspring of ethnobotany and providing source materials
1:16:24 for creating pharmaceuticals, and you would want out there to be some recompense to those groups,
1:16:32 translating that into your own sort of endogenous genetics would be what you’re referring to.
1:16:34 That’s fascinating. Never even thought about that. Absolutely.
1:16:40 Are there any examples you could give of these sort of tightly knit clusters,
1:16:44 maybe the clusters is too small a word, of people who are being studied for this reason,
1:16:48 for medicinal purposes? There are actually many, many dozens,
1:16:52 and there are quite a few companies who specialize in this type of area.
1:16:56 The population that comes top of mind to me, Tim, right now,
1:17:02 because it’s such a fascinating story, and it relates to my own activities in organ manufacturing,
1:17:09 is a community of people living in Ecuador and Peru, very close-knit, intramaried,
1:17:16 that are all a kind of dwarfism, and these individuals, they rarely grow taller than
1:17:24 four feet tall, and it was discovered just over the past 15, 20 years that they are descendants
1:17:32 of Jews from 2,000 years ago who were forced into a diaspora across the Mediterranean
1:17:39 after the Roman occupation of Palestine, and in that ancient time, these people were a very
1:17:45 small stature, but it was just part of the human diversity. They ended up as a group,
1:17:51 mostly ending up in Spain, and then when the Inquisition took hold, their descendants,
1:17:55 who were still very small, they left Spain, they went to the New World,
1:18:02 and because the Inquisition still had some type of a hand in the larger population centers of
1:18:07 what’s now Peru and Ecuador, they went out into the rural areas, and there they lived for several
1:18:15 hundred years, and it turns out that this population, they have one gene that makes their body not
1:18:22 receptive to growth hormone. All of us naturally, we produce growth hormone, and the cells of our
1:18:28 bodies have a receptor for that growth hormone, and when the growth hormone locks into the receptor,
1:18:36 we begin growing. This population of people in Peru and Ecuador, they lack the growth hormone.
1:18:41 That gene fell off like 2,000 years ago, and they kept passing it on and on,
1:18:47 not much growth hormone receptor. They’re perfectly intelligent, they live normal lives,
1:18:53 they just don’t grow very large. I found this population fascinating because in my company,
1:18:59 United Therapeutics, we’re trying to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs.
1:19:05 One of the ways we do this is by modifying the genome of the pig, and it’s kind of like a
1:19:10 fluke of nature, Tim, that the pig’s organs, their heart, their kidneys, their lungs,
1:19:16 are very much the same size and functionality as human kidneys, hearts, and lungs.
1:19:21 The only problem is that if you leave a pig on the zone, they’ll actually grow extremely large,
1:19:29 and when these first transplants were done, they had to euthanize the animal recipients of the
1:19:37 transplants because the organs from the pig had grown too large. What we did is we took a page from
1:19:44 this population of people in Peru and Ecuador, the Western medicine gives them a disease name.
1:19:51 It’s called Laren’s disease, L-A-R-O-N, after this Israeli scientist who discovered what was
1:19:58 going on here. We said, “Well, why don’t we modify a growth hormone receptor knockout
1:20:05 just like the Laren’s population has into these pigs?” When we transplant the kidneys of these
1:20:11 pigs into people, the kidneys won’t keep growing and growing as a normal pig can be many hundreds
1:20:17 of pounds. Instead, the kidney will just stop growing at the same size as when we transplanted
1:20:21 it, and that’s working out really well. Let’s talk more about organ manufacturing.
1:20:31 What are some of the other precursors or requirements for having a sufficient supply
1:20:37 of organs to meet whatever demands there are in the U.S. or in the world today?
1:20:44 The demands, whether it’s in the U.S. or outside the U.S., are huge and are way, way in excess of
1:20:52 the supply. I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs today is an adequate supply
1:20:58 of transplantable organs. It’s a beautiful thing that before people like Tom Starzell
1:21:05 questioned authority and said it was possible to do an organ transplant in our parents’ teenage
1:21:10 years and adult years, that would have just been crazy stuff. You take an organ from a dead person,
1:21:15 you put it in a live person who has a bad organ and the person comes back to health,
1:21:21 that’s about as crazy as it gets, but they did it. They did it. Now, standing on their shoulders,
1:21:28 we have hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for these organs, yet each year there are only
1:21:36 about 30,000 kidneys available for transplant, only around 3,000 hearts, only around 2,000 lungs.
1:21:42 The gap between the need for these organs and the supply is humongous.
1:21:48 Are you still, or I should say United Therapeutics, currently trying to manipulate the vagus nerve?
1:21:57 Is that in process? Yes, that is in process. It’s a fascinating area, Tim. We are very fortunate
1:22:06 to work with the father of bioelectronic medicine, Dr. Kevin Tracy. He’s the chief medical officer
1:22:12 at the Northwell Medical Complex up in the New York area. By the way, that reminds me,
1:22:18 speaking of how can laypeople get access to scientific knowledge easily, subscribe to
1:22:24 Scientific American. I’m sorry to put an advertisement in here, but I find Scientific
1:22:30 American and National Geographic two of the greatest ways for laypeople, which I do consider
1:22:36 myself a layperson, to learn about all different types of science that they might not know anything
1:22:43 about. One day, I got my Scientific American in the mail, and on the cover, it was using
1:22:49 electronics to cure diseases. Well, here I am. My whole career has just been like electronic
1:22:55 engineering, building satellites. Now, because of my daughter, I’m in this medical field,
1:23:00 so I’m so excited. It was one of those lightning bolts to the soul. Now, I have a chance to bring
1:23:06 my male and female side together, to bring my satellite and my biology side together and merge
1:23:13 them. I got very excited, and I had a chance to meet and now work with and support the work of
1:23:20 Dr. Tracy. He taught me a very simple sentence, Tim, which I’ve subsequently found to be absolutely
1:23:26 true in all the research I’ve read. It is that the nervous system touches every single cell on your
1:23:35 body. The nervous system touches every single cell in our body. The largest nerve in the body,
1:23:41 there’s one nerve that is way, way larger than all the rest of them. It’s the vagus nerve.
1:23:49 It starts in our mind. It wraps around our heart, our lungs, our gut. It’s an immense nerve. And by
1:23:56 stimulating this vagus nerve, it’s possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body
1:24:02 by a fluke of nature, a positive fluke. The vagus nerve comes out to the skin
1:24:09 in two and only two places around the left and right ears. There are like a couple of
1:24:15 different ridges in your earlobe, or your ear, I guess you would say it. And one of them called the
1:24:22 simba conchie is the place where the vagus nerve comes out. And if you electrically stimulate
1:24:28 the simba conchie on either the left or the right ear, it’s been proven now, again, in lots of
1:24:34 published literature, to have positive therapeutic effects on the body. What are some of those
1:24:41 positive therapeutic effects? One which has been documented quite extensively is the ability to
1:24:48 control Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel syndrome, which are two gastrointestinal problems,
1:24:56 as well as very high priced and I would say tinged with some potential side effect
1:25:02 biologic medicines that are approved by the FDA to treat Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel
1:25:09 syndrome. Another illness that has been shown to mediate against is rheumatoid arthritis.
1:25:17 And the common factor here is that we have two types of nervous systems. We have a
1:25:23 fight or flight nervous system, which is the sympathetic nervous system. And we have a rest
1:25:29 and digest nervous system, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system. When diseases
1:25:35 occur, it’s because one of those two nervous systems, the sympathetic one, the fight or flight,
1:25:42 takes more of a dominant position in the body and causes a state of inflammation or over activation.
1:25:51 And by stimulating the vagus nerve, you can ramp up the power of the parasympathetic nervous system
1:25:57 and calm down this kind of overstressed state that leads to an irritable bowel syndrome or to
1:26:03 the inflammation of arthritis. This is in the course of doing all the reading for this conversation.
1:26:09 One of those things that really woke me up and maybe pay attention for a bunch of reasons.
1:26:16 One is relevance to my current life because I’ve been working with a doctor for about 10 weeks
1:26:22 doing heart rate variability training. And there are some researchers with claims, I want to say
1:26:28 out of Rutgers and elsewhere, that certain types of HRV training affect vagal tone. And
1:26:36 via affecting that vagal tone have a host of cascading therapeutic benefits. Whether or not
1:26:41 that holds up to scrutiny or not, I don’t know. But the second, and I’m embarrassed to even
1:26:48 give voice to this. So hopefully this won’t just destroy any tiny shred of credibility that I might
1:26:55 have as I mentioned it. But I lived in China for a period of time in college, went to universities
1:27:00 there in Beijing as effectively an exchange student. But it was a one way exchange. I don’t
1:27:08 think we had any students in return from China. And the ears are very much utilized in the world
1:27:16 of acupuncture. And I’m curious to know if you think that whether by trial and error or otherwise,
1:27:26 it’s possible that acupuncture stumbled upon the effects without knowing the mechanism
1:27:34 of stimulating or affecting the ears to then in turn affect the vagus nerve. I know it’s
1:27:41 quite a stretch. But when I first read about this access via the ears, that is one thing that jumped
1:27:46 to mind. Because I always kind of poo pooed. And if I’m being honest, ridiculed the idea
1:27:53 of using the ears to access these deep inner points. But here we are. So I don’t know if
1:28:00 you have any thoughts. Tim, first your credibility is immense. So you would have to actually say
1:28:05 something crazy to Denton or what you said is the opposite of crazy. What you said is extremely
1:28:14 insightful and prescient. So as convinced as I was that putting a satellite in geostationary orbit
1:28:21 would enable people across the planet to receive radio signals, as convinced as I was that we could
1:28:25 have a molecule that would halt the progression of my daughter and other people’s disease.
1:28:32 That’s exactly how convinced I am that the acupuncturists of traditional Chinese medicine
1:28:39 did in fact come upon the nerve patterns that are accessible from the earlobe.
1:28:48 And one of the first things that Dr. Tracy showed to me was a very medically accurate from Chinese
1:28:55 traditional medicine practitioner map of the earlobe in terms of exactly where you put. I’m
1:29:01 sorry, I don’t know what the official name is of the pins or needles that they put in your earlobe
1:29:07 and how they map to different parts of the body. And then he showed me on an anatomy map
1:29:15 how that traces the lines of the vagus nerve. That’s wild. Yeah, it is totally true. And why
1:29:22 really would it not be true? I mean, you know, thousands of years of Chinese civilization,
1:29:28 they have had a chance to do so much trial and error. And they were a literate civilization
1:29:33 for so long. So the results that trial and error could be passed on and passed on.
1:29:39 So I do think it’s entirely rational that they would have figured this out. And what I’m hoping
1:29:47 for now and what I’m trying to support is there is an opportunity to what I call in my own words,
1:29:56 crack the human neurome. So what that means is that there are unique patterns of amplitudes
1:30:04 and signal lengths and signal voltages that will activate some different part of the
1:30:11 vagus nerve than others. And each of these different voltages and wavelengths will correlate to a
1:30:17 different part of the human body. We don’t know what those are. Right now, we are just kind of,
1:30:24 in the way I would say we’re dumber than the acupuncturist, because almost all of the work
1:30:29 that the FDA has allowed to go forward on vagal nerve stimulation, they all use the same pulse
1:30:35 with the same pulse power. And it works. So that’s great. But I think it could work even
1:30:42 better if we decoded the human neurome. And I believe in the future, people will be able to
1:30:49 put on a pair of like beat headsets. And those beat headsets will have gel less, meaning like you
1:30:56 don’t need like the EKG kind of gel, gel less electrodes will rest across your simbaconchi
1:31:01 and your traga and the different parts of your earlobe, and will provide you a stimulation that
1:31:06 matches the particular ailment that you have. Eliminate the ailment without taking any pills,
1:31:11 without paying any money to anybody. This is an area I want to keep digging in because
1:31:17 it’s rare. Well, it’s pretty much non-existent that I have the opportunity to speak with someone
1:31:24 with so much electrical engineering background about the possible applications or implications
1:31:32 of technology like this. I’d love to just throw out another group of devices to see if you have
1:31:41 any opinions on them one way or the other, but potential applications of let’s just say TDCS
1:31:49 or TMS, so transcranial direct current stimulation or other means of stimulating
1:31:55 the brain, typically using some type of conducive gel, but not always in the case of a TMS paddle.
1:31:59 Have you looked at these technologies or done any reading in the literature related to them?
1:32:06 A little bit. I’m aware of a friend of mine has a company that obtained an FDA approval for
1:32:12 treating a particular form of brain cancer with this type of technology. So there’s this very
1:32:17 solid scientific benefit that’s been documented. After many years of working through the FDA,
1:32:23 I have a world of respect for the rigor that they put into any decision to approve something. So
1:32:27 when they approved it, it meant that it was scientifically proven to work. Something that
1:32:36 is quite different from that, but at the same time related to it, Tim, is on the last day of 2019,
1:32:44 which was like the last day of the decade, it turned out to be a weekday. I forget if it was
1:32:50 a Tuesday or whatever, but the U.S. Patent Office only issues patents on one day of a week,
1:32:54 and it was like the one day of a week that they issue them on, whether it’s Tuesday or whatever.
1:33:02 And it was a patent that I received for a device that I call an Alzheimer’s Cognitive Enabler,
1:33:11 and this device is worn over the cranium, as you mentioned, and it senses nerve impulses
1:33:19 inside the brain. It is connected to a computer with a visual recognition and a speech comprehension
1:33:27 system so that if a patient with Alzheimer’s is not able to adequately communicate and appear to
1:33:33 recognize the people who are coming into their room, the computer vision recognition system
1:33:40 and sound recognition system will talk on behalf of the Alzheimer’s patients, say, you know,
1:33:46 hello, son, thank you for coming to see me. And it is actually being triggered by
1:33:52 recognitions that are deep in the Alzheimer’s patient’s mind so that more people will come
1:33:58 to visit the patient, the patient’s stress levels may be lower. So I believe this kind of bridging
1:34:06 of electronics in the mind is really right around the corner. What inspired putting the work into
1:34:14 that research and filing that patent? I think part of it was seeing my mother-in-law suffer
1:34:20 pretty badly from somewhere around the spectrum between dementia and Alzheimer’s was never really
1:34:27 completely clear where she was at that. And she would recognize us coming in, but she couldn’t
1:34:34 communicate. And it would have meant a lot to everybody if she would be able to communicate.
1:34:39 My own mother is more or less at that point right now as well. Secondly, the work on the
1:34:46 BINA-48 computer showed me that it was really possible for people to strike up meaningful
1:34:54 relationships with the digital version of BINA, the BINA-48 robot. And so it was just like,
1:35:01 you know, a very short step from instead of putting all of BINA’s or even a good portion
1:35:07 of her memories and her personality into this computer, why not actually have the computer’s
1:35:14 interaction capability, input/output capability triggered by something like a Neurosky type of
1:35:21 EEG brain interface. And the last piece of it was I was given a Christmas present by a friend of
1:35:27 mine, which was one of these Neurosky headsets that lets you kind of like play a game just with
1:35:33 your thoughts by controlling your EEG signals. So that’s a consumer product anybody can buy,
1:35:37 and it really works. This conversation brings back a lot of memories for me because I have
1:35:43 Alzheimer’s disease. It’s very prevalent on both sides of my family and observed both sets of my
1:35:49 grandparents deteriorate to the point where at least some of them couldn’t recognize immediate
1:35:58 family members and was recently rewatching segments of a documentary I saw called Alive Inside,
1:36:06 and the subtitle is A Story of Music and Memory. And what struck me most about this documentary is
1:36:13 that not that they could play music from someone’s youth to them through headsets and watch them come
1:36:20 alive in some really spectacular ways, both physically, in terms of kinesiology moving around,
1:36:25 but also psychologically, the most impressive part to me is that they would play music for,
1:36:32 say, a handful of minutes, five to ten minutes from someone’s youth, and then turn off the music,
1:36:38 and that person could have a perfectly coherent, reasonably fast-speed conversation, whereas
1:36:45 prior to the administration of the music, they were from the outside catatonic, basically,
1:36:51 and it makes me wonder what music is doing. I’m sure there are people who study this and probably
1:36:59 have a better mechanistic explanation and how it could be incorporated into therapies intended to
1:37:04 counter dementia or advanced Alzheimer’s disease, things of this type. Tim, you see like just in
1:37:10 this conversation, we are uncovering like so many, you know, vast new oceans of opportunity for people
1:37:19 to learn and study about. To me, music is the foundational human technology, because the first
1:37:24 thing that we ever could become aware of would be the beat of our mother’s hearts while we were
1:37:32 still in utero. And that beat, that’s a rhythm, okay? And after we’re born, you know, people may
1:37:39 have better or worse rhythm, but there’s nobody that cannot detect the sound of a beat and move
1:37:45 to it. And then all the different types of melodies and chords that build upon rhythm,
1:37:50 it’s just fancier and fancier forms of music. So I believe that there’s tremendous therapeutic
1:37:56 properties to music. It’s just been scratched. They even scratch. It’s been kind of like blown on,
1:38:06 like. And it’s there for like all the thousands of young people today who have come up, grown up
1:38:12 with more music than ever before, to begin to apply this great human cultural technology of
1:38:18 music to the biggest mystery in the entire universe, which is the human mind. I want to come back
1:38:25 to the mind or more accurately consciousness in a moment. But first, this will seem like a left
1:38:31 turn. And it is, I was reading a piece in the Washington Post that covered quite a lot of your
1:38:38 life. And there was a segment on love night. I don’t know if that’s enough of a prompt,
1:38:45 but can you tell us what love night is? So when Dina, my partner and I got married, we each had
1:38:51 one child from a previous marriage that each of us had custody of. And then we had two children
1:39:00 together. And we were kind of trying to build a blended family that would feel like nobody was
1:39:07 a stepmom or a stepdad, that everybody was just like in one family. And in fact, we cross-adopted
1:39:15 each other’s kids from our previous marriages. So I was taking the kids to music classes. All of the
1:39:22 kids were in the Yamaha Music Program where they learned piano and violin instruments like that.
1:39:29 And we would practice songs. And I was brought up Jewish where every Friday night was something
1:39:37 that was special. It was the Sabbath and the family sat down together and had dinner and set a couple
1:39:43 of prayers. So Bina and I tried to think, how can we like merge all these things together? The Jewish
1:39:50 tradition, the need to create a blended family, the music that we were all enjoying from watching
1:39:58 the kids learn to play piano and violin. And we decided to, every Friday night, have a special
1:40:05 family ceremony, which we would call love night. And we sang a song, which the melody was actually
1:40:12 based on one of the kids’ songs that they had learned in the Yamaha Music Program. The words were,
1:40:21 you know, very simple and affirming. And at love night, the core of love night was that each person
1:40:29 around the table would have an opportunity to say what love meant to them during the past week,
1:40:36 during the week from the previous Friday to this Friday. What does love mean to you? And, you know,
1:40:43 Bina and I, as the adults, we would say something either sophisticated or simple. Like, I love Bina,
1:40:49 I love Martine, I love the kids. The kids started off just saying, like, what love means to me is,
1:40:57 like, our dogs or our car. You know, very basic things. But as they grew older, they came into
1:41:03 more and more sophisticated definitions and expressions of love until after a couple of
1:41:10 decades of this. All of us have heard thousands of different things that love can mean to a person.
1:41:14 Now, I’d like to fast forward, and I’m sorry to be on a little riff here, but I want to fast
1:41:20 forward to the current COVID pandemic. Our kids are all adults now. They’ve flown the coop,
1:41:27 they have their own kids. And suddenly we are in a situation where we can’t all gather together in
1:41:33 anyone else for love night. You don’t want to travel, you don’t want to like endanger people,
1:41:42 so on and so forth. So we decided to continue the love night tradition, but on Zoom or to be
1:41:50 fair Google Meet. So every Friday night from my son, who’s a captain in the army in Iraq,
1:41:57 to his wife, who’s on a base in El Paso, to my other son with four grandchildren in Florida,
1:42:03 to my daughter in Brooklyn, and her kid and her husband and me and I, we all get together on Zoom
1:42:08 plus friends of all of ours. The kids were not embarrassed by love night. In fact, they wanted
1:42:12 to share it with their friends and their friends were saying like, whoa, this is crazy, this is
1:42:18 beautiful. And so we get together every Friday night, we sing our love night song. And now there’s
1:42:24 about 20 of us, you know, we go around virtually what love meant to us during that previous week.
1:42:28 And I would say love night is one of the most beautiful parts of my life.
1:42:36 I’m so glad that I asked that question. And love night, could you give a few more examples
1:42:46 of possible answers just to give people a flavor for how people might answer this question? Because
1:42:52 I, for instance, would love to try this with my girlfriend, with some of our friends, family,
1:42:57 etc. But I would be nervous as the orchestrator that I might get that question and not have
1:43:05 the ability to kick things off effectively. So every morning, being in my partner goes out for,
1:43:11 takes our two dogs out for a walk with one of her best friends who lives a few houses away.
1:43:18 And that best friend now joins our love night. And last Friday, she said, what love means to me
1:43:25 is every morning, going out for a walk with being in the dogs. Last week, our youngest grandson,
1:43:32 Saturn, he’s, you know, was born in 2010. So he’s 10 years old. He said, what love means to me
1:43:41 is this. And he pulled a piece of paper, he said, I got a 95 on my math test. And he was just so proud
1:43:48 of himself and shared it with us. So those are typical examples of, I think I last time said,
1:43:54 what love means to me is sitting down at the piano and playing different songs from memory.
1:44:01 So to use this as a skipping, I was going to say a skipping stone, but I think I’m getting my
1:44:09 metaphors mixed up. I say a launch pad, a lily pad, pick your, pick your choice to consciousness.
1:44:15 Do you think that we will be able to, as I’ve heard you put it once, recapitulate or recreate
1:44:24 consciousness synthetically? And does that mean we’ll have machines that can love, for instance,
1:44:29 in the not too distant future? What would it mean to have created consciousness?
1:44:36 Sure. I do believe it’s possible. And a great book that I would recommend that goes into this
1:44:44 subject in beautiful detail is called The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. And Marvin Minsky is
1:44:50 often thought of as the father of artificial intelligence. He was a professor at MIT for
1:44:58 great many years. So in the Emotion Machine book, he really describes exactly how you would go about
1:45:06 creating a computer and the type of software that it would take in order for the machine to
1:45:14 feel what we feel when we say that we love somebody. And I think it’s likely to occur, Tim,
1:45:23 because it’s hard for me to think of any aspect of life that cannot be replicated if one had
1:45:30 sufficiently advanced technology. One of my favorite sayings from another role model, Arthur C.
1:45:36 Clark, is that magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.
1:45:44 So I think just like we have been able to create an artificial hip, artificial knees,
1:45:53 artificial hearts. In my own company, we are building lungs and kidneys. People are creating
1:45:59 artificial nerves. People like Elon Musk has formed a whole company, Neuralink,
1:46:05 where he’s working on downloading a whole human brain. I have little doubt that humans will end
1:46:13 up being able to replicate a human mind. Now, whether or not the rest of society accepts it
1:46:20 as a human mind or not, I think is going to be a long pitch battle. And that’s what is the subject
1:46:27 of my book, “Virtually Human.” That whole book talks about how and when will society accept digital
1:46:34 consciousness as being as conscious as a human. But even if that digital consciousness is not yet
1:46:43 at human level, what happens when it’s at, say, primate level or at canine level or even at rodent
1:46:48 level? If you can get to any of these levels, you could kind of see how it’s the same old human
1:46:55 effort of keep making incremental improvements that would eventually get you to the human level,
1:47:01 where I think that the individual alive today that has the best understanding of this topic
1:47:06 is a guy at Google named Ray Kurzweil. He’s a director of engineering at Google.
1:47:15 And what I love about Ray is he never tires of pointing out that this digital human consciousness,
1:47:24 it’s human. Human consciousness is a human phenomena. So when we create a digital analog or
1:47:32 doppelganger or simulcra, whatever you want to call it, when we create a her, that her is human.
1:47:40 It’s not us versus them. It’s one. It’s we will have been able to move our mind into a digital
1:47:46 substrate, just like if our knees give out, you move it to a mechanical substrate or if an organ
1:47:52 gives out, you transplant it with another organ. Where would you, if you had to,
1:47:59 kind of price is right style, put a timeline on this? When do you think we’ll have rodent or canine
1:48:05 level consciousness plus intelligence? Yeah, it’s pretty hard to say, Tim, because one thing I am
1:48:12 not is I’m not a sucerer, I’m not a prophet, I’m not a visionary, any of those things. I’m just a
1:48:18 humble technologist and all the projects I work on, they have five year time horizons because I
1:48:24 have difficulty really seeing beyond five years. So every technology I’m working on, it’s like I
1:48:32 want to get this thing done and out to the public within five years. Also, I am totally a believer
1:48:41 in this adage that futurists usually overpromise in the near term and underpromise in the long
1:48:47 term. So what that would mean in this context is you will hear a lot of futurists saying, oh,
1:48:55 we’ll have digital rats or digital dogs or digital people in 10, 20 or 30 years. They have probably
1:49:03 overpromised in the near term. What they have underpromised in the long term is in
1:49:10 not 10, 20, 30 years, but in say 80, 90 or 100 years, there won’t be just digital rats,
1:49:15 digital dogs and digital people, but most people will be digital.
1:49:21 Exciting and I suppose for some people very terrifying at the same time. What are some of the
1:49:32 most important ethical questions or considerations related to technology as we move into future
1:49:39 decades in your mind? In my mind, the biggest problem with technology is that people only think
1:49:46 about the rights to implement the technology and they don’t think about the obligations they have
1:49:53 as somebody creating a technology. And by what I mean by that is, you know, there was this great
1:50:00 philosopher of the 20th century, Isaac Berlin, I believe he was German, and he had a real simple
1:50:07 message. His message was that for every right, there is an obligation. It’s again, it’s a very
1:50:14 Alan Watson, sorry to keep coming back to Alan Watts, but it’s a very Alan Watson point of view
1:50:22 that a right only means something in the context of its obligation. So for example, if I have a right
1:50:28 to be a parent, which we think everybody has a right to be a parent, you only have that right
1:50:35 to be a parent so long as you comply with your obligation to be at least not a horrible parent.
1:50:39 If you’re a horrible parent, you will have your children taken away from you and you’ll no longer
1:50:46 in that sense be a parent. So with regard to technology, I think there is a point of view that
1:50:52 anybody who can create a technology has a right to make that technology. But I dispute the ethics
1:51:00 of that perspective. I think that every right to make a technology is coupled to an obligation
1:51:07 to have the consent of anybody who would be adversely affected by that technology. So for
1:51:14 example, my right to build an atomic power plant or a nuclear power plant someplace, I don’t just
1:51:20 have that right. That right is coupled to an obligation that I have to have the consent
1:51:27 of all the surrounding communities of people who could be adversely affected by the implementation
1:51:35 of that technology. And it comes into this domain of in my own field, say the transplantation of
1:51:41 genetically modified pig organs into people. For me to have a right to do that technology,
1:51:47 I have to have the consent of the larger community that that’s a safe thing to do.
1:51:56 In a democratic country, that consent is issued on behalf of the country by the government
1:52:03 and in the field of health, it’s issued by the FDA. So before the FDA permits us to transplant
1:52:09 these genetically modified pig organs into people, they want us to demonstrate to them that there is
1:52:16 no risk, not a small risk, but no risk of any kind of animal virus seeping into the human
1:52:23 population as a result of these animal transplants. So in summary, I believe like an amazing field
1:52:30 for the future, a field that will probably in the future have almost as many people with this
1:52:37 career as our web designers today is the field of techno ethics. Everybody who wants to create a
1:52:45 technology will need to wrap that technology in an ethical envelope of consent. If we look at
1:52:50 in a science over while we could look at it over the last few thousand years, but let’s just say
1:52:56 last few hundred years, you mentioned earlier that I think you were discussing the structure
1:53:03 of scientific revolutions, how these breakthroughs, these massive scientific leaps forward seem like
1:53:10 complete madness at the time to the vast majority. And we don’t have to go that far back to find,
1:53:16 say, surgery without or with minimal use of anesthetics on newborns and infants. I mean,
1:53:23 this is not the Dark Ages. This is less than a hundred years ago. You see some really appalling
1:53:30 things that were taken as best practices or common practice. And one of my friends who’s an
1:53:36 outstanding doctor likes to repeat this, I suppose, adage that you hear among good doctors,
1:53:43 which is 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don’t know which 50%. And that seems to always
1:53:48 be true. So if we flash forward 10 or 20 years, and I know you’re not a prophet or a soothsayer,
1:53:55 but I’m curious, or it could be five years as a technologist, what do you think are any of the
1:54:03 things we’re doing now or believe now that will be shown to be patently absurd or viewed as barbaric
1:54:11 or crazy or naive in the near future? Probably a lot of things. Yeah. Since a lot of, you know,
1:54:16 what we look back in the past, that seems to be barbaric. Building on top of your example
1:54:26 of the torturous procedures put on to neonates, people forget that the founder of the American
1:54:33 Medical Association, the first doctor who created the American Medical Association, his name was
1:54:42 Dr. Gross. He lived in Philadelphia, and he did not believe in asepsis at all. And so he would do
1:54:51 all of his procedures right in his street clothes, infecting everybody, and countless women lost
1:54:57 their lives because of having those type of quote unquote doctors, helping with the delivery of the
1:55:04 children and ending up creating a septic condition in the mothers. And one of the most famous painters
1:55:11 in American history, Thomas Akins, painted this picture of the Gross Clinic, where Dr. Gross was
1:55:17 teaching all the young doctors how to do a procedure, and you see dirt in his shoes and scuffy hands.
1:55:24 Then he was followed. The second president of the American Medical Association was a Dr. Agnew,
1:55:31 who was the student of Gross. And he had read about the research of Lister in England and became a
1:55:37 believer that even though we can’t see these things germs, they’re real. And we need to practice, you
1:55:43 know, strict septic procedures before we do an operation. A few years later, Thomas Akins painted
1:55:50 the Agnew Clinic, and you see that the doctors in white smocks and everybody is, you know, looking
1:55:57 super sterile and clean. So these type of revolutions can occur just like one generation
1:56:02 to the next. It’s not something that takes a long time. I think that, you know, looking at what’s
1:56:10 going on today in our world, I think the fact that we burn our own house will look to be
1:56:15 absolutely bonkers. People would say, well, let me get this right. You’ve got like, you know,
1:56:21 a super thin atmosphere. I mean, you guys saw that from space since the 60s at least.
1:56:28 This atmosphere around your planet is super thin. You have an undeniable record of measurements of
1:56:35 carbon dioxide into the atmosphere going up year after year after year. And you continue to just
1:56:42 spew without limit greenhouse gases into this atmosphere, despite the fact that, you know,
1:56:47 people are dying on the shorelines, dying of diseases, et cetera, et cetera. I think they
1:56:53 will think we are as stupid as somebody who would light a fire in the middle of their house to try
1:57:00 to keep warm and not bother with the smoke that they were choking on. And then if I could add an
1:57:07 addendum to that, did you guys know that the Earth receives 10,000 times the amount of solar energy
1:57:13 falls right on the Earth each day? Then it uses 10,000 times the amount of energy it flows.
1:57:18 And that’s not to talk about the wind. And that’s not to talk about the waves. And that’s not to
1:57:23 talk about the nuclear energy. I think the people in the future may think we were pretty stupid
1:57:31 to be so scared of nuclear energy, which has killed a few dozens of people, that we went ahead
1:57:37 and just, you know, stopped all the nuclear plants and began pouring ungodly amounts of greenhouse
1:57:42 gases into the atmosphere that will kill millions of people. That will seem ludicrous to them.
1:57:46 I think this is, and I won’t keep you too much longer, but I think this, I would be remiss if I
1:57:56 didn’t ask you to comment on or describe your own engineering projects with carbon neutrality or
1:58:02 zero emissions as an objective, because this is not just idle hand waving for you. This is
1:58:09 something that you’ve taken a keen engineering mind to. And I think that was not mentioned in
1:58:17 your bio, even though it’s yet another one of these examples of extreme curiosity and capability.
1:58:20 Could you just describe what you’ve done in that arena, please?
1:58:26 So this is another area that gives me immense enjoyment. Again, another kind of like lightning
1:58:33 bolt to my soul is to try to create infrastructure, buildings and cars and planes and things
1:58:40 that have a zero carbon footprint. And I look at it as an intellectual challenge
1:58:48 when I’ve read that people said, well, we cannot have a zero carbon footprint society until 2050.
1:58:54 That’s what the authorities say. You know already, Tim, I’m going to say, why? Why not? Why not? Why
1:59:01 not? I’m going to question that authority. So about three years ago, we undertook to build a new
1:59:06 headquarters for a company in Silver Spring, Maryland that would have a zero carbon footprint,
1:59:12 not in the best climate, Maryland. It’s got its good seasons and its bad seasons.
1:59:17 Right in the middle of a city, Silver Spring, Maryland is a built up suburb of Washington,
1:59:24 D.C. And for the manufacture of medicines and stuff, which is a somewhat of an energy-intensive
1:59:32 activity. So we built 150,000 square foot zero carbon footprint building, which turned out to
1:59:38 be the largest zero carbon footprint building in the entire world. And we inaugurated it a couple
1:59:44 years ago. It turns out we produce more energy than we use each year now, two years running.
1:59:51 We did this by just thinking carefully about energy and how to manage it. So for example,
2:00:00 we have underneath the building 50 wells, each of which go down 500 feet. And they exchange
2:00:06 heat from the building with the coolness of the earth in the summer, bring the coolness back up.
2:00:12 And in the winter, they exchange coolness of the building with the steady temperature of the earth
2:00:18 in the winter to keep the building warm. The sides of the building are cladded with solar panels.
2:00:26 The entire building has a brain that automatically opens the windows and closes the windows to allow
2:00:32 natural ventilation. It’s a role model for many other buildings and lots of designers and engineers
2:00:38 have come over there. Another example is in the delivery of our organs. When we right now we refurbish
2:00:46 organs, lungs in particular, that a decedent has donated or the decedent’s family has agreed to
2:00:52 the donation. But when the transplant surgeons look at that lung, they say it’s too full of fluid
2:00:57 and mucus, we can’t use it, throw it away. So what United Therapeutics says is give us your
2:01:03 lonely, unwanted, unloved lungs, fly them to Silver Spring, Maryland, we will refurbish them,
2:01:09 we’ll show through a high-speed digital network to the transplant surgeons all across the country
2:01:14 that the organ is good as new through this digital network and bronchoscope and X-ray and all that
2:01:20 stuff. And then we fly the lungs back out to them and we’ve saved over 150 lives this way Tim.
2:01:26 How do you refurbish a lung? First you have to remove it from the dying body. A dying body is
2:01:33 a terrible place to be. So we remove it from the decedent, we cool it down, so we kind of give it
2:01:38 a, I won’t say we freeze it, but we cool it down very low temperature. We fly it to Maryland and
2:01:45 we put it in a glass dome. And in this glass dome we have tubes, we have a kind of artificial blood
2:01:52 and air pumping. So we’ve made a kind of isolated artificial body just for that lung. And we have
2:01:57 expert technicians who work these, sorry I don’t know the exact name of the equipment, but it sucks
2:02:04 out mucus and they operate on the lungs like it was a person, but it’s just an isolated pair of
2:02:11 lungs. And the transplant doctors who could be in Texas or Florida, wherever, they tell us through
2:02:16 the digital screen in the voice, put the bronchoscope down the left side or down the right side or go
2:02:22 further, give me, they see this and they know what they want. So our technicians know how to do this
2:02:30 and within four hours in almost two-thirds of the time we were able to take what was a non-compliant
2:02:36 dead piece of tissue and turn it into a nicely breathing lung. It’s so beautiful to watch Tim,
2:02:41 the lungs go in and out like a butterfly’s wings going up and down. In fact, you could see a video
2:02:46 of it on that Washington Post article you were mentioning. And then we cool the lungs back down
2:02:53 and we fly it to the transplant surgeon and 100% of the time that they have accepted these lungs,
2:02:58 they have had successful lung transplants with, like I mentioned, over 150 people walking out
2:03:04 of the hospital. But I mentioned this because this is a lot of flying around, flying here,
2:03:09 flying there, you know, helicopters going back and forth, planes. And if I’m going to make an
2:03:14 unlimited supply of organs, and you remember all those numbers we talked about at the beginning
2:03:19 of the call, the hundreds of thousands of people who needs these organs, that is going to be a
2:03:25 humongous carbon footprint. We could have said to ourselves, well, we’re doing such a good thing,
2:03:31 we’re saving all these lives, we could be permitted to foul our atmosphere because it’s
2:03:36 balanced by the good things we’re doing. But instead, we like to ask ourselves like the
2:03:42 challenging question, how can we do like the good thing and the right thing at the same time?
2:03:47 How can we manufacture all these lungs and deliver them with a zero carbon footprint?
2:03:54 And the solution came from the technology of electric helicopters, which are powered by renewable
2:04:00 energy that can fly these organs from one place to the other without adding any carbon footprint
2:04:06 at all. And I will be a little bit of a sous-sayer here. I am absolutely convinced that in this decade,
2:04:12 the 2020s, we will be delivering manufactured organs by electric helicopter.
2:04:18 I love it. I have, I will say one, I made sheet and sneak in one or two more, but
2:04:25 I love talking with you. Likewise, this is just endlessly, endlessly interesting.
2:04:30 So many, so many different pathways into the labyrinth. But I need to make sure, I suppose,
2:04:36 since my job is supposedly interviewer that I can find my way back out. I have read that…
2:04:37 Alan Watts will show you the way.
2:04:42 Alan Watts will show me the way. He does have a most seductive and hypnotic voice
2:04:47 for those who haven’t heard. I recommend. I have read that a favorite saying of yours is,
2:04:52 quote, “identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them.” End quote.
2:04:57 Can you please speak to that or explain what that means for you?
2:05:01 Yes. So, identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them.
2:05:12 Means to try to find a, I’ll put it in business terms, a market area that is ignored, a unmet
2:05:17 need. But it doesn’t really have to just apply to medicine. It can apply to any area of life.
2:05:24 And the way I would phrase it, Tim, in just like, you know, a very natural, almost folklorish way,
2:05:30 is that it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.
2:05:38 In a business school, back at UCLA, one person we studied a lot was the experience of General
2:05:45 Electric under Jack Welch. And he had an adage, which from a business sense was, I think, very,
2:05:51 very smart. He said, “If you can’t be number one or number two in a market, don’t even try,
2:05:57 because you will have to spend an amount of money equal to the revenues of the number one or a
2:06:02 number two in that market to become the number one or number two in the market. If you’re not
2:06:08 the number one or number two, you will always struggle to be profitable. But if you are the
2:06:14 number one or number two, your profitability is assured.” So, what that means translated to all
2:06:22 of our activities is if there’s an area, like, for example, a number of people have said, you know,
2:06:27 we should get involved. We, when I say we, my company, Knight Therapeutics, should get involved
2:06:34 in creating a vaccine for COVID. And to me, well, you know, it’s not a corridor of indifference.
2:06:41 There are dozens of companies working on a vaccine for COVID. So, that’s not what we would
2:06:46 want to do. It’s very unlikely we’d ever be successful on that. Somebody else said, “Well,
2:06:52 how about these people, the COVID long haulers, the people who have survived from a very difficult
2:06:58 course of COVID, and they’ve got chronic lung problems that are bothering them months and
2:07:04 likely years after the effect?” I said, “Yes, that’s a corridor of indifference. Nobody is thinking
2:07:10 about the long haulers, the people who now have, you know, chronic lung problems because of the
2:07:16 havoc that COVID racked in their lungs. Let’s develop some medicines for these chronic long
2:07:25 haulers.” Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. On a related, maybe a related note in some
2:07:30 respects, this is a question that doesn’t always work. So, I’ll take the blame if it doesn’t. But
2:07:37 if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message, a quote, a word, an image,
2:07:43 a question, anything out to billions of people, let’s just assume they all speak English for the
2:07:48 sake of argument. What might you put on that billboard? I think Apple, Computer, and Steve Jobs
2:07:54 got there before me. Think different. Think different. Why is that important? Because the
2:08:01 solutions, Albert Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created.
2:08:07 You have to solve it on a different level.” If we all think the exact same way,
2:08:13 we will never get out of the ruts that we’re in. The only way to get out of the problems that we
2:08:20 face is to think differently, to go down the corridor of indifference, to question authority,
2:08:27 to be diverse. Thinking different is the pathway to solving problems that exist today.
2:08:36 Looking back at everything we’ve talked about, and looking at all of the copious pages of notes
2:08:44 for prep in front of me, it strikes me that you’ve forged many paths for yourself and helped others
2:08:50 to do the same by thinking different, but also thinking brightly, coming back to Alan Watts
2:08:56 yet again, the yin and the yang, and seeing the positive, looking for the positive in different
2:09:02 circumstances, different situations. Do you have any advice or recommendations for people
2:09:09 who struggle to do that, who are maybe mired in a sense of hopelessness might be too strong a word,
2:09:15 but those who tend to see the glass as half full and perhaps as a result of that tend to see
2:09:21 half the spectrum of options or solutions? It’s a really difficult question to answer, Tim,
2:09:30 because everybody’s situation is so unique and so different. And I do not doubt that for many,
2:09:37 many people, it is just a bad life, whether it started that way or ended up the way. And it’s
2:09:45 almost impossible to see a way out. The perspective that I take is that I try to stay in touch with
2:09:54 my ancestors. I think about the great-grandmothers who had to bear children in the worst of possible
2:10:03 circumstances. I think about all of my partner Bena’s great-grandmothers who were picking cotton
2:10:11 as slaves and had to work all day being bitten up by bugs, burning in the sun, feet deep in mud,
2:10:17 and then bear a child at the last moment. So whether it’s like my great-grandparents from
2:10:24 Eastern Europe or hers from the African diaspora, they had nothing to look forward to other than
2:10:30 just the hope that they were going to have some children and that maybe those children might
2:10:36 have a little bit of a better life than they did. And if not their children, their children’s children.
2:10:42 So their only purpose in life, their only hope in life, their only joy in life was to make a
2:10:48 generation and that maybe that generation would be better. Now, here we are in America or really
2:10:53 most any other country in the world. We’re at a point now where like eight out of 10 people have a
2:11:00 smartphone with access to all the world’s knowledge and information, with access to countless
2:11:06 amounts of music and training through YouTube. There are many people in the world still in dire
2:11:11 circumstances, but the vast majority of people are doing better than people have ever done before
2:11:18 in history. So I say to myself and I would ask, you know, somebody else looking through the world
2:11:25 darkly right now, looking at the glass half full, I would say how much worse it must have been in
2:11:32 the past. What do I owe to my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents
2:11:38 who suffered and toiled, who barely managed to survive to produce another generation?
2:11:44 What do I owe to them? I owe to them to make the absolute most possible out of my life and that’s
2:11:49 what I’m going to do. Hot damn, Martin. I’m ready to get out there and get amongst it. I have so
2:11:56 enjoyed this conversation. There are 79 more hours we could do just in round one. I won’t
2:12:05 subject you to that and I’m so grateful that you were willing to make the time to have this
2:12:11 conversation. Thank you so much. My pleasure being with you, Tim. And is there anything else you would
2:12:20 like to say to suggest or ask of those listening before we bring this to a close? Two of my best
2:12:26 friends and people who I think are the smartest, most creative, most happy-loving people I know,
2:12:33 Paul Mann and D.A. Wallach both said to me that your podcast is the best and Martin,
2:12:39 if Tim Ferriss invites you on his podcast, you have to go on it. So thank you, D.A. and thank you,
2:12:47 Paul. Well, thanks to them also for me. I have for many months, my whole team knows this,
2:12:54 been hoping to have you on. I had high hopes coming into it. You exceeded all of those high hopes,
2:13:02 which seems to be a pattern for you. And I’m just very grateful and happy that we had a chance
2:13:10 to connect. So thank you again. And for everyone listening, you can find Martin on Instagram at
2:13:18 TransBinary, Twitter @SkyBiome. We will link to everything in the show notes that have mentioned
2:13:24 in this conversation, the books and everything you can imagine that we discussed will be available
2:13:32 in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be kind, practice love night, think
2:13:38 different, think brightly and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing
2:13:44 before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me
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2:13:54 people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
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2:14:29 And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short,
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2:14:38 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser,
2:14:44 tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
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0:03:58 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:04:00 This is Tim Ferriss.
0:04:03 Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with
0:04:09 world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,
0:04:13 and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.
0:04:18 This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10th
0:04:23 year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads.
0:04:28 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:04:31 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.
0:04:36 I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes, and internally we’ve
0:04:41 been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes,
0:04:46 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people
0:04:48 I consider stars.
0:04:54 These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
0:04:58 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
0:05:03 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:05:10 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:05:15 And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:05:23 First up, Michael Lewis, the number one New York Times best-selling author of more than 15 books,
0:05:31 including Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short, which were made into major motion pictures,
0:05:39 and his latest, Going Infinite, which delves into the rise and fall of FTX and its founder,
0:05:40 Sam Bankman Freed.
0:05:47 A topic Michael also explores in depth in his critically acclaimed podcast, Against the Rules.
0:05:52 You can learn more about Michael at MichaelLewisWrites.com.
0:06:03 I’m looking at a paragraph from brainpickings.org, which is run by Maria Popova, who I’m very fond of.
0:06:06 And there’s a piece on your writing process.
0:06:10 She may have been quoting a different source, but I just want to read something quickly.
0:06:12 And then we can discuss, these are your words.
0:06:15 Before I wrote my first book in 1989, the sum total of my earnings as a writer
0:06:18 over four years of freelancing was about 3,000 bucks.
0:06:22 So it did appear to be financial suicide when I quit my job at Solomon Brothers,
0:06:26 where I’d been working for a couple of years and where I’d just gotten a bonus of $225,000,
0:06:32 which they’d promised they’d double the following year to take a $40,000 book advance
0:06:34 for a book that took a year and a half to write.
0:06:40 Was that a hard decision or was it something you’d just been biding your time for?
0:06:42 You put it very well.
0:06:44 It was something I’d been biding my time for.
0:06:48 When I went into Solomon Brothers, I knew that this was a temp gig.
0:06:54 I’d be there for a few years and I was there more out of curiosity about how this world worked
0:06:58 than I was to advance a career.
0:07:04 In fact, aside from the money, which I liked, I didn’t think really much about the career at
0:07:05 Solomon Brothers because I knew I could only hang out.
0:07:07 My interest would only last for so long.
0:07:10 And I was intensely interested in it as I was learning about it.
0:07:14 But when I kind of figured it all out and got a sense of how it all worked and
0:07:17 there weren’t any more questions I had that needed to be answered,
0:07:19 I really started to get bored.
0:07:22 But the whole time I was there, I was writing.
0:07:28 I got myself in trouble because I’d actually tend to write about what’s around me.
0:07:33 And so I started to write things about this great boom that was happening on Wall Street
0:07:39 was really the beginning of what we still live with, this notion of 22 or 23-year-olds
0:07:41 rolling on and making a fortune.
0:07:44 The sums of money being made on Wall Street and the share of the economy it occupied
0:07:46 was expanding rapidly.
0:07:48 And no one quite understood why.
0:07:52 So there was a natural market for me to sort of try to explain it.
0:07:56 And I mentioned the Wall Street Journal asked me to write op-eds for them.
0:08:00 I wrote an op-ed arguing that investment bankers were overpaid.
0:08:05 And in the bottom of the op-ed, it said Michael Lewis is an associate with Solomon Brothers in London.
0:08:10 But I tell you, I must have like a blind streak, right?
0:08:13 Because my reaction was, “Wow, great piece.”
0:08:17 When they sent me the galleys or whatever it was, I said, “This is fabulous.”
0:08:20 And I didn’t even think, “What are the people at Solomon Brothers going to think?”
0:08:25 Except maybe they’re going to be thinking, “So cool that I wrote an article on the Wall Street Journal.”
0:08:27 I got to work the next day.
0:08:31 And there’s a fellow who ran all of Solomon Brothers International.
0:08:32 Delightful guy.
0:08:34 He was the guy who had hired me in the first place.
0:08:39 And he was ash and face sitting at my desk with this little newspaper on his lap.
0:08:43 And he said, “Michael, I mean, it was really not an anger.
0:08:44 It was more in sadness.”
0:08:47 He said, “Michael, you have no idea of the damage you’ve done.”
0:08:48 And I was kind of like, “What do you mean?”
0:08:52 He said, “This thing is being picked up all over the United States.
0:08:57 And we’ve had a crisis meeting overnight of the Solomon Brothers board.
0:08:59 What to do about it?”
0:09:04 They couldn’t have wouldn’t have fired me because I had just flukelly started to generate
0:09:06 a whole lot of money for them, like a whole lot of money.
0:09:08 I was essentially a salesperson.
0:09:16 And I had at that point the second biggest money generating account in the entire firm.
0:09:21 And the person would speak only to me, even though I’d only been there a year and a half.
0:09:25 It was basically the most sophisticated hedge fund sort of manager in Europe.
0:09:27 And so they didn’t want to fire me because they didn’t want to lose him.
0:09:32 He said to me, my boss said, “What are we going to do about this?”
0:09:34 And I said, “I don’t really want to do anything about this.”
0:09:37 And he said, “Well, we need you to stop writing.”
0:09:39 And I said, “I’m not going to stop writing.
0:09:40 It’s what I love to do.”
0:09:42 And he had the bright idea.
0:09:44 He said, “Could you write under a different name?”
0:09:46 And I said, “No problem.
0:09:46 I can do that.”
0:09:48 And he said, “What name are you going to use?”
0:09:49 Actually just popped into my head.
0:09:51 I’ll use my mother’s maiden name.
0:09:55 So I wrote under the name Diana Bleeker for maybe the next nine months or a year.
0:10:00 And maybe not quite that long, but I wrote half a dozen pieces.
0:10:01 They got better and better.
0:10:04 I was getting better and better because I had better and better editing.
0:10:08 So Michael Kinsley, who was then editing the New Republic, had walked into my life.
0:10:13 And he was teaching me writing lessons basically in the way he edited the pieces.
0:10:18 But the pieces Diana Bleeker was writing, I mean, I really felt off the leash
0:10:20 because nobody could trace it back to me.
0:10:24 I was almost describing the trading floor around me in pieces.
0:10:26 And people were circulating.
0:10:27 It was really great.
0:10:30 I was sitting in London at my desk doing my business.
0:10:34 And I would watch people Xeroxing articles I’d written in the New Republic under Diana
0:10:36 Bleeker and pass them out on the trading floor.
0:10:40 And so I had a sense that like, God, people are hungry for this.
0:10:41 People are laughing.
0:10:42 People were, it was just working.
0:10:48 Now the money part of it, what happened was I came home one night to my house in London,
0:10:55 picked up a phone call, and it was a man named Ned Chase, who happens to be Chevy Chase’s dad,
0:10:58 who was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster.
0:11:02 And he said, I figured out who Diana Bleeker was and I got your number.
0:11:04 I never found out how he did that.
0:11:05 We think you should write a book.
0:11:09 And at that point, I thought, I’m out.
0:11:13 If someone will publish a book by me, I’m not hanging around the Wall Street firm any longer.
0:11:17 I did hang around an extra three months to get my bonus.
0:11:20 But the minute I saw the money hit the bank account and I knew they couldn’t take it back,
0:11:21 I left.
0:11:23 And not because I, you know, disliked them.
0:11:26 It was just, I loved a lot of the guys there.
0:11:27 Mostly it was almost all guys.
0:11:30 I really liked my bosses generally.
0:11:33 I just was bored with the work and I had this other thing I love to do.
0:11:39 You know, I had two conversations in which people tried to say, oh, don’t do that.
0:11:44 Don’t walk away from a sure fortune to go take a flyer on writing a book.
0:11:48 One was my bosses who took me into a room.
0:11:51 And this tells you just how innocent an age it was.
0:11:53 I mean, these days you’d be in a room with lawyers, right?
0:11:57 And, and you’d be told you signed this nine disclosure agreement and you’re writing anything
0:11:58 about anything.
0:11:59 They didn’t care about it.
0:12:01 They were worried about my sanity.
0:12:02 They were actually worried about my career.
0:12:08 They couldn’t believe that I was going to walk away from this really cushy situation
0:12:10 and go and do that other thing.
0:12:12 So they were trying to help me.
0:12:15 And I just said, you know, I got this feeling I got to do this.
0:12:19 My father said, you know, you really could just wait.
0:12:24 You really could just collect some millions of dollars and then write your books.
0:12:29 But the problem was I was what, 27 at the time?
0:12:35 I looked ahead of me and I looked at people who were 35 or 37 and they seemed ancient
0:12:37 and they seemed completely stuck.
0:12:42 Like they made so much money and their lives had adapted to the making of money.
0:12:44 Depended on the making of money.
0:12:48 I just thought there’s no way I’d spend a lot of time here and still even want to do this.
0:12:51 I’d be trapped and I don’t want to do that.
0:12:54 So I ignored all that advice and just went and did it.
0:12:57 And it worked out, you know, that was Liars Poker.
0:13:03 Liars Poker, at least I’ve read, was intended to be a cautionary tale of sorts.
0:13:05 It’s not how everybody took it.
0:13:07 I mean, it’s a very exciting book.
0:13:08 The thing is, it’s like a funny book.
0:13:09 It was a funny story.
0:13:11 It’s a very, very funny book.
0:13:17 And it’s also an incredible story because you’re seeing this transformation of this industry
0:13:20 and the effect on all these young people.
0:13:26 But I had only one kind of moralistic thought in mind when I wrote it because I really just thought
0:13:34 my models that I had in my head when I wrote it were Education of Henry Adams and Rousseau’s Confessions.
0:13:40 The model was just tell the world what happened exactly as you remember it and that’s enough.
0:13:44 You don’t need to layer on an interpretation of what happened.
0:13:45 What happens good enough.
0:13:52 And the extent I wanted kind of to push the reader in any direction, it was just really young readers,
0:13:59 like people in college, that I hoped would read it and would say, yeah, I now know what this is.
0:14:01 Yeah, there’s money there.
0:14:03 But a lot of it’s kind of silly.
0:14:07 And I have these other things I want to do with my life and I’m going to go do them.
0:14:12 So I’m not going to be seduced by Goldman Sachs or have Goldman Sachs pray on my anxiety
0:14:15 about my future when I’m walking out of my college.
0:14:16 I’m going to go do what I’m meant to do.
0:14:20 And I felt that way because I had watched classmates at Princeton,
0:14:25 just naturally drift into the arms of the investment banks because they really couldn’t,
0:14:28 they felt they couldn’t resist the money and they were anxious about not being successes.
0:14:36 Then what happens is the book comes out and the book makes it seem because it was as business goes,
0:14:40 incredibly colorful and entertaining and lucrative.
0:14:47 And I had dozens of letters a day from young readers saying, dear Mr. Lewis,
0:14:52 I really loved your how to book about Wall Street, about how to make money on Wall Street.
0:14:55 And I’m hoping that there’s some tips in there that you didn’t put in there
0:14:56 that you could let me know so I have an edge.
0:15:03 It just fueled the desire of young people to want to do it more.
0:15:04 And I didn’t see that coming.
0:15:05 And that’s something I don’t know.
0:15:08 Anybody who writes books, I think, learns that you write a book,
0:15:09 but the reader reads a book.
0:15:14 And the reader may read a book that’s entirely different from what you thought you wrote.
0:15:16 And you can’t really do that much about it.
0:15:19 How do you think about, if you do, ambition?
0:15:23 And this may not be a good question, but it seems like from what I’ve read,
0:15:28 the overt ambition that kind of people wear on their shirt sleeves
0:15:36 in certainly many parts of Wall Street, you find off-putting or maybe in bad taste.
0:15:39 But you certainly don’t shy away from ambitious projects, right?
0:15:43 How do you personally think about ambitious, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth either?
0:15:46 No, no, it’s an interesting way to frame the question.
0:15:47 How do I think about ambition?
0:15:53 Well, I could tell you, I thought it was so comical that I was going to be
0:15:58 in this ambitious money-making world that the week before I went to Solomon Brothers,
0:16:03 I went into Paul Stewart, this men’s store, because I saw it through their window.
0:16:07 I saw they had red suspenders with little gold dollar signs on them.
0:16:10 And I thought, this is like a way to make fun of the whole thing.
0:16:11 And nobody thought it was funny.
0:16:13 Nobody thought it was like, you can’t wear that shit around here.
0:16:18 You can’t wear that shit until you are a big enough deal to wear that shit.
0:16:21 I’ve always been enormously ambitious in a way.
0:16:25 I’ve always wanted my life to be great, like really great.
0:16:28 I’m competitive, like very competitive.
0:16:30 And I love competitive sports.
0:16:31 I love winning.
0:16:33 I don’t particularly like losing.
0:16:40 I guess number one, I don’t accept money as an accurate measure
0:16:44 or any kind of real measure of whether you’re winning or losing.
0:16:47 So money doesn’t hold that, doesn’t have that hold on me.
0:16:50 Fame a bit more.
0:16:56 I mean, I would say a lust for attention and fame is probably closer to a vice of mind
0:16:58 than a lust for money and fortune.
0:17:04 But even that, I find I get tired of and it just doesn’t interest me that much.
0:17:09 I don’t think I’m a maximizer in that I try to get a lot of a thing.
0:17:13 It’s more, if I’m trying to maximize anything, it’s a feeling.
0:17:16 And it’s a feeling that that was a kickass book.
0:17:19 I could look at something and just say, that is a great piece of work.
0:17:23 That feeling is what I’m kind of always gunning for.
0:17:24 And it’s a pretty private feeling.
0:17:28 And I think over time, I mean, you must have found this too,
0:17:37 that the response that I have to external validation has become muted and numbed.
0:17:41 And when I got a glowing review for Liar’s Poker,
0:17:43 and it went to the top of the New York Times bestsell list,
0:17:46 it was like dancing all over my kitchen.
0:17:47 I mean, I was just happy as a clam.
0:17:51 I couldn’t believe that it was like I just won the Super Bowl.
0:17:54 And now I don’t read the reviews.
0:17:59 I sometimes forget whether a book is on the New York Times bestsell list or not.
0:18:01 I’m not paying as much attention to it.
0:18:03 It doesn’t gratify me in the same way.
0:18:09 But the gratification I get from looking at something that I think I’ve done that’s really good
0:18:12 is at least as great as it was back then.
0:18:13 I think I’m tapping into that.
0:18:17 I think I’m tapping into like the pleasure I got when I was just all by myself in a room
0:18:19 laughing at my own jokes.
0:18:25 It’s sort of like maximizing self-satisfaction, which is maybe not the most attractive trait
0:18:29 that my ambition is to maximize my self-satisfaction.
0:18:30 Maybe that’s my ambition.
0:18:37 Let’s jump into the process associated with the maximizing the self-satisfaction.
0:18:40 You mentioned laughing at your own jokes.
0:18:44 I have read that you sometimes write late at night, say midnight,
0:18:50 you put on a headset and play the same soundtrack of, say, 20 songs over and over again.
0:18:52 Is that something that you still do?
0:18:55 Yes. In fact, I did it yesterday.
0:18:59 Kids screwed up my natural writing rhythm.
0:19:02 My natural rhythm would be to kind of start about four in the afternoon
0:19:06 and write till three in the morning and sleep until noon.
0:19:07 But you can’t do that with kids.
0:19:14 So I’m not as likely to be found late at night at my desk, though it happens sometimes.
0:19:20 But whenever I’m writing, I have headphones on and I have a soundtrack I write to.
0:19:22 And the soundtrack changes.
0:19:23 It changes book to book.
0:19:30 And it’s got to the point where both my wife and my kids will recommend songs for the soundtrack
0:19:31 for whatever the next project is.
0:19:33 And I’ll build a soundtrack intentionally.
0:19:36 And the music is, you know, it’s all over the map.
0:19:41 It tends to be very up, but it tends to be music that I just stop hearing.
0:19:45 And I noticed something really funny, just the last couple of weeks,
0:19:50 because I’m working on something now, the second season of my podcast,
0:19:53 where I have a different relation to music.
0:19:56 The podcast is about coaching.
0:19:58 And the last episode, which I have still not written,
0:20:00 it’s the only episode I haven’t written,
0:20:04 is me getting coached in something I’m incredibly uncomfortable doing.
0:20:05 And it’s singing.
0:20:09 I’ve been doing voice lessons an hour every day for the last three months.
0:20:13 And there’s a song I sing, and I’m going to tell you which one it is,
0:20:16 that I’m going to have to sing, that I’ve been practicing,
0:20:18 that happens to be on my soundtrack.
0:20:23 And now I realize I have to remove it because it kicks my brain into a different space.
0:20:25 All of a sudden, I hear it, and it’s like Pavlavi.
0:20:27 And I’ve got to belt out the tune.
0:20:29 I’ve got to worry about hitting a high note.
0:20:30 And it screws up my writing.
0:20:34 And so I’ve just been hitting skip because I’ve been reluctant to change it.
0:20:36 But I have to just going to have to remove it.
0:20:40 So it puts me, the music puts me, the purpose of it is
0:20:42 to shut out the possibility of interruption.
0:20:44 I can’t hear knocks on the door phones,
0:20:47 people dropping packages on the front porch, anything.
0:20:49 I’m just in my own space.
0:20:51 And I kind of cease to hear the sound.
0:20:54 You mentioned Michael, was it Kinsley?
0:20:55 Is that right?
0:20:56 The editor?
0:20:57 The editor of the New Republic.
0:21:00 What made him a good editor, or what did you learn from him?
0:21:04 Can you remember anything that he helped tighten or improve?
0:21:09 So Michael Kinsley had a gift for creating writers.
0:21:13 There are dozens of people who were young writers then,
0:21:18 who he had profound influence on and careers that he just launched.
0:21:20 And it’s an odd assortment.
0:21:22 And I was one of those people.
0:21:27 I think what happens with writers who come up in a conventional way,
0:21:31 like through creative writing programs or by writing for their circle of friends,
0:21:33 is they get treated too politely.
0:21:35 Their work gets treated too politely.
0:21:40 So they don’t hear a really withering critique of their work.
0:21:44 And Michael Kinsley could not help himself.
0:21:47 He delivered the most withering critiques of your work.
0:21:50 The kind of throat clearing phony first paragraph,
0:21:52 which was totally unnecessary.
0:21:53 It would come back.
0:21:54 It’d be just a big X throat.
0:21:55 Why’d you even write that?
0:21:56 Start here.
0:21:58 It would be, I can’t remember.
0:22:03 I had learned a word that was just a completely obscure word.
0:22:06 And I even remember the word, but I don’t know how to pronounce it.
0:22:07 It’s Cthonian.
0:22:10 It starts C-H. I think it means of the underworld.
0:22:13 And I remember working it into the piece.
0:22:17 And like a big circle around it saying, you fucking phony.
0:22:21 Would you go into the thesaurus?
0:22:24 It was just like making merciless fun of me.
0:22:28 My byline at the very beginning, I thought it sounded good.
0:22:30 It was for it to be Michael M. Lewis.
0:22:32 My middle name is Monroe.
0:22:34 I thought a middle initial kind of fancied it up.
0:22:37 He put a big circle around it and said, don’t do that.
0:22:39 Don’t be one of those people.
0:22:40 You’re not Michael M. Lewis.
0:22:41 You’re Michael Lewis.
0:22:45 He was all the preposterous things that you naturally tend to do
0:22:48 when you’re putting words on paper.
0:22:52 He identified all of them as vices and stopped you from them.
0:22:56 And so in addition, he was unbelievably gifted at seeing
0:22:58 what a good story it was.
0:23:00 You started to learn what was interesting
0:23:02 and what wasn’t just talking to him,
0:23:05 just by how he responded to what you said.
0:23:09 It was a kind of feedback that everybody should get,
0:23:13 but that most people are too tender and sensitive to deliver.
0:23:14 It’s a funny thing.
0:23:15 I think that this happens in speech too.
0:23:20 I think that there’s lots of inefficiency in human conversation,
0:23:23 that people do all kinds of things they really shouldn’t do,
0:23:26 and that other people make fun of them for doing.
0:23:28 People are endlessly telling stories
0:23:30 about what some other person said, making fun of them.
0:23:32 And it shouldn’t be that way.
0:23:33 We should be very efficient conversationalists
0:23:34 because we do it all the time,
0:23:36 but we aren’t because we don’t get feedback
0:23:38 because people are too polite.
0:23:41 And I think people are too polite with other people’s writing.
0:23:43 And what Michael Kinsley, his great gift
0:23:44 in addition to being a kind of genius,
0:23:46 was he just couldn’t be polite.
0:23:47 He was just so blunt.
0:23:50 I’m Michael Lewis on my books instead of Michael M. Lewis
0:23:52 because of Michael Kinsley.
0:23:54 I have a question for you about,
0:23:55 maybe this isn’t the right word,
0:23:57 but productive laziness.
0:24:01 I was looking at an article that talked about
0:24:04 a speaking gig from 2017, Qualtrics.
0:24:05 You might know where this is going,
0:24:07 but the quote that stuck out to me was,
0:24:10 “Attributed to you, people waste years of their lives
0:24:13 not being willing to waste hours of their lives.”
0:24:15 And I don’t know if that prompts any memories,
0:24:17 but is that something you can elaborate on?
0:24:19 Sure, that wasn’t a quote for me.
0:24:22 It was a quote from one of my characters, Amos Tversky.
0:24:26 He’s one of the main characters in the Undoing project.
0:24:28 And it resonated with me.
0:24:32 What he meant was that people don’t back away from their work.
0:24:35 And especially the need to always seem busy or be busy
0:24:39 stops people from finding things that are really worth doing
0:24:41 and sifting the ones that are worth doing
0:24:43 from the ones that aren’t worth doing.
0:24:46 So it resonates with me because I am not a person
0:24:48 who always has to be doing something.
0:24:55 And in fact, my natural state is probably inert
0:24:58 that I can really just lay around and screw off
0:25:00 and procrastinate with the best of them.
0:25:03 And it’s partly because of how I grew up.
0:25:04 I mean, I grew up in New Orleans
0:25:07 and there was not a whole lot of value
0:25:10 attached to either ambition or career achievement.
0:25:14 You were who you were because of how you were
0:25:15 and who your family was
0:25:16 and what neighborhood you grew up in
0:25:18 and where you went to school.
0:25:20 You were always so well defined by your environment
0:25:24 that trying to change it by doing stuff
0:25:25 didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
0:25:30 And my father used to tell me, and I believe this
0:25:31 until I was about 20,
0:25:34 “On our family coat of arms, there was a motto in Latin
0:25:37 and the motto was do as little as possible
0:25:39 and that unwillingly.
0:25:42 For it is better to receive a slight reprimand
0:25:44 than to perform an arduous task.”
0:25:46 And he would just say that like,
0:25:48 “Just keep that in mind, we live by these words.”
0:25:53 So that’s kind of where I was coming from just generally.
0:25:58 And I found this thing that didn’t feel like work.
0:26:01 So it didn’t feel like an attempt at achievement,
0:26:02 not that achievement was bad,
0:26:04 it just, that’s not why I was doing it.
0:26:06 But having said that,
0:26:09 I do find that being able to back away
0:26:12 and get yourself, myself in a state of mind
0:26:14 in which I can say,
0:26:16 “It’s okay if I never write anything else.
0:26:18 It’s okay if I never write another book.
0:26:20 It’s okay if I don’t do anything for six months.”
0:26:22 And I can afford that now,
0:26:23 and that’s nice to be able,
0:26:25 it’s a luxury to be able to afford it.
0:26:26 But I think a lot of people who can afford it
0:26:28 don’t actually take advantage of the luxury
0:26:30 because I think that doing that,
0:26:33 putting yourself in a state of mind where I’m,
0:26:36 I’ve got to make an argument about why I need to write
0:26:38 another book because I don’t have to,
0:26:42 changes your relationship to potential stories
0:26:43 and potential material.
0:26:47 It requires the material to rise to the level of interest
0:26:50 where you feel obliged to engage with it.
0:26:52 So you’re not doing it just because
0:26:53 you got to write another book.
0:26:56 You’re doing it because how can I not write this?
0:27:00 And it serves my own sloth and indolence,
0:27:02 serves as a kind of filter.
0:27:06 And the filter is, no, I don’t have to do that.
0:27:07 So I’m not going to do that.
0:27:09 I don’t particularly want to do that.
0:27:10 So I’m just not going to do that.
0:27:12 And even if you tell me that,
0:27:14 oh, it’s got big bestseller written all over it,
0:27:17 I’m not interested because it keeps me off that path.
0:27:19 I think it’s been very useful
0:27:21 because it does two things at once.
0:27:24 One is it raises the level of the bar
0:27:28 that the material has to jump over to get to me.
0:27:29 So the material is going to have to be really good
0:27:31 if I’m going to engage with it.
0:27:35 And two, it stops me from doing the same thing
0:27:37 over and over again just to be successful.
0:27:40 It enables me to almost encourages me
0:27:43 to move around and do surprising things.
0:27:49 And I think readers and audiences really appreciate
0:27:53 and will engage with the writer who’s willing to take risks.
0:27:55 That, yeah, they like their writer,
0:27:57 some of their writers to just keep doing
0:27:58 the same things over and over again,
0:28:02 but they’ll follow you if you take a brave risk.
0:28:03 Since I’m not doing it,
0:28:06 I’m not trying to create the next sure-fired bestseller.
0:28:10 I’m led to other and sometimes unlikely material.
0:28:13 So the books end up being about a lot of different things.
0:28:18 What are some of the questions or thresholds
0:28:23 that indicate the material has risen above the necessary hurdles?
0:28:25 I found one question.
0:28:28 I don’t know if this is your or not,
0:28:30 so feel free to confirm or deny.
0:28:33 But would I be sad if this story didn’t get told?
0:28:35 Yeah, that’s funny. That is one.
0:28:36 It’s a really good question
0:28:41 because there’s not a clear-cut rule that I follow except feeling.
0:28:44 There are a couple of feelings that I associate
0:28:47 with the desire to write a book.
0:28:51 One is a feeling that if I don’t do it,
0:28:53 it won’t properly get done
0:28:57 because I have some privileged access to the story.
0:28:58 And there are lots of different ways
0:29:00 you can have privileged access to the story.
0:29:04 But the sense that, yeah, this book really should be written
0:29:07 and someone needs to do it and that someone is clearly me.
0:29:12 The second and related feeling is I have an obligation to the material.
0:29:15 It isn’t the material has an obligation to me as a writer.
0:29:17 It’s I have an obligation to this material.
0:29:20 And once I have that feeling, I have a motive.
0:29:23 I have a motive and whether I’m fooling myself or not,
0:29:26 it’s a motive that’s a deeper and more inspiring motive than,
0:29:29 “Oh, I got to make a living.”
0:29:31 Or, “Oh, I got to get a book on the bestseller list.”
0:29:34 Or, “Oh, I got to have something to tell my friends
0:29:35 when they ask me, ‘What are you doing?'”
0:29:36 It’s the highest motive.
0:29:38 It’s I have an obligation.
0:29:39 I have a duty.
0:29:43 And I’ve had that feeling with every book I’ve written,
0:29:44 how it gets to that point.
0:29:47 I mean, they take their different paths to that point.
0:29:49 But it obviously is some feeling in myself
0:29:51 that this is an important story.
0:29:56 If you could put a message, a quote, a question,
0:30:00 anything at all on a billboard, metaphorically speaking,
0:30:02 that would reach billions of people,
0:30:06 does anything come to mind non-commercial
0:30:10 that you might put on a billboard saying a mantra,
0:30:12 something you remind yourself of, anything at all?
0:30:14 It’s going to sound trite, whatever I say.
0:30:19 And let me just say that I live in the world’s capital of bumper stickers.
0:30:23 At Berkeley, California, there are more bumper stickers per automobile
0:30:25 than anywhere else in the world.
0:30:27 It’s been scientifically proven.
0:30:30 You can walk down the street and it’s mostly political stuff,
0:30:33 but it’s just like people getting their point across in bumper stickers.
0:30:35 And I have never had a bumper sticker on my car
0:30:39 because it’s not one thing I’ve ever wanted to say over and over forever.
0:30:42 I’m not a bumper sticker or quote guy.
0:30:45 However, if you say I got to put it up on a billboard,
0:30:50 I would take the mantra of my high school baseball coach,
0:30:52 one of the greatest men I’ve ever known,
0:30:56 who is actually the subject of one of the podcast episodes.
0:31:00 And he would just say it routinely and he just kind of became part of you.
0:31:02 He would say, don’t be good, be great.
0:31:05 And he’d say it to you as he handed you the ball to go out to pitch a game.
0:31:07 He’d say it to you when you were working out.
0:31:10 And you just, having that mind,
0:31:14 it’s the kind of thing I try to keep in mind when I’m working on something.
0:31:16 Good is not okay.
0:31:18 If you’re going to do it, be great.
0:31:19 Push yourself.
0:31:25 And it’s hard and don’t just stop when it’s good enough.
0:31:28 That’s what I would stick on a billboard.
0:31:31 It’s one of those things that’s in the billboard of my mind.
0:31:33 Don’t be good, be great.
0:31:34 I love it.
0:31:36 That’s Billy Fitzgerald.
0:31:37 Billy Fitzgerald.
0:31:43 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:32:52 And now, Dr. Martin Rothblatt, an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur,
0:32:57 and the chairperson and CEO of United Therapeutics,
0:33:01 a biotechnology company she founded in 1996
0:33:03 to save the life of one of her daughters.
0:33:06 You can learn more about Dr. Rothblatt
0:33:13 and the work of United Therapeutics at UNITHER.com.
0:33:18 Martin or Dr. Rothblatt, both welcome to the show.
0:33:19 Thank you for making the time.
0:33:22 Thanks so much, Tim. Just Martin’s fine.
0:33:26 All right, and this interview, as my listeners might imagine,
0:33:29 was challenging in the best way to prepare for
0:33:32 because there are a million and one directions that we can go
0:33:37 with just this bio alone, which is, of course, a snapshot,
0:33:40 a distillation of much more that you have done.
0:33:43 And I thought we could start in perhaps an unlikely place,
0:33:45 and that is Alan Watts.
0:33:49 I have read that you are a fan of Alan Watts,
0:33:52 and specifically the book subtitle on the taboo
0:33:55 against knowing who you really are.
0:34:00 Could you please explain, if that is true, why that is the case?
0:34:05 Yes, thanks, Tim. Alan Watts has a really unique ability
0:34:10 to see the dialectic aspect of everything in nature.
0:34:13 By that I mean that there’s a kind of a ying-ying
0:34:16 aspect to everything in nature.
0:34:18 And he points out that, for example,
0:34:24 you can’t have a crest of a wave without the bottom of a wave.
0:34:29 And it has helped me whenever I see things in life that seem negative,
0:34:34 to be able to look at it in another way and see the positive in it.
0:34:39 When were you first introduced to his work? How did that come about?
0:34:44 I was first introduced to it through the literature of this philosophy
0:34:49 called transhumanism, sort of the idea that people can transcend
0:34:52 some biological human limitations.
0:34:55 A friend of mine, Frank Sasanowski,
0:34:59 who is the head of the National Organization on Rare Diseases,
0:35:03 pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits.
0:35:07 He himself is both a Jesuit and an FDA lawyer,
0:35:10 but he pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits,
0:35:16 such as Teardre du Chardon from France and other individuals here in the U.S.
0:35:20 And then from those Jesuits, they referred to Alan Watts.
0:35:22 I’m not sure if he was actually a Jesuit,
0:35:27 but he undertook some religious training, both in China, I think, and in the U.S.
0:35:32 He was a radio announcer for many years in San Francisco,
0:35:34 I think during the ’70s or ’80s.
0:35:38 I don’t know if you remembered him, the film of a few years ago,
0:35:40 her in which like a computer — I do.
0:35:45 Yep. So I was watching that movie, which kind of is interesting to me
0:35:51 because it epitomized or it visualized the concept of computers becoming sentient.
0:35:53 And in the middle of that movie,
0:35:56 there’s a scene in which Alan Watts appears.
0:36:00 And I stood up in the movie theater and I said, “Oh my God, Alan Watts!”
0:36:09 Did you ultimately find the presentation in that movie to be compelling
0:36:12 as it relates to sort of sentient intelligence?
0:36:16 I did. I thought it was an accurate depiction of a likely way
0:36:20 that sentients would begin to arise in our society,
0:36:23 basically by being very, very useful to people,
0:36:26 cleaning up their inboxes, stuff like that.
0:36:31 This may be a good place and we’re going to be all over the place in nonlinear fashion.
0:36:36 Bina48, who or what is Bina48 if I’m pronouncing that correctly?
0:36:38 Yep. You’ve got it perfectly.
0:36:44 So Bina is the name of my partner and we’ve been married for about 40 years.
0:36:48 And when she was 48, we undertook a joint project
0:36:53 to try to create a digital symocra or a digital copy
0:36:58 of her basic personality with a lot of her memories and thoughts.
0:37:03 And we thought this would be a very nice project as a combination of science and art
0:37:08 and to encourage young people, get them more excited about computer science
0:37:10 and women in particular, girls in particular.
0:37:14 So we contracted with a couple of companies
0:37:18 who were experts in both the software engineering side
0:37:24 and in the physical modeling of a face that moves exactly like a human face does.
0:37:28 You might imagine there’s this exhibit at Disney World,
0:37:32 Disneyland of Lincoln and whatnot, something like that, but more realistic.
0:37:40 We built this project and since that time, Bina48 has thrilled audiences all around the world.
0:37:45 I’m sure she has inspired hundreds if not thousands of girls to go into computer science.
0:37:50 And she continues to get better and better, more and more advanced software.
0:37:55 I don’t know if you have watched the series Black Mirror before,
0:37:59 but I find some of their episodes to be very strong and in one of them,
0:38:07 a significant other is effectively resurrected by pulling data and patterns
0:38:12 and therefore mannerisms and so on from effectively social media accounts.
0:38:18 So pulling from the cloud and feeding into this simulacrum
0:38:22 or model of someone who used to be or in this case still is.
0:38:30 How far away do you think we are from being able to do something along those lines convincingly?
0:38:33 Yes, Tim. So I am a fan of the Black Mirror series
0:38:39 and there are a few other somewhat similar series that are streaming now, upload and whatnot.
0:38:41 So it’s an idea that’s catching on.
0:38:48 And even at a very basic level, social media firms like Twitter, for example,
0:38:55 and probably Facebook as well, offer an opportunity that after a person passes away,
0:38:57 their account can remain active.
0:39:04 And I believe in the case of Twitter can even continue tweeting in the way that you once tweeted.
0:39:08 So I think this general idea is it’s a trend.
0:39:14 It’s only going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job
0:39:16 of copying the human personality.
0:39:22 Sometime in this century, for sure, and maybe in just like two or three decades,
0:39:26 I think that there will be a digital copy of a person.
0:39:30 And another word is like a digital doppelganger of a person
0:39:34 who will claim to be the original person.
0:39:38 And they may make that claim before or after the person died.
0:39:44 And then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to grapple with,
0:39:49 is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album?
0:39:52 Or is this actually some form of digital sentience?
0:40:00 When you were growing up, who were your role models or inspirations?
0:40:05 Was there anyone in particular who stood out to you when you were in high school?
0:40:11 Or at the very beginning, let’s just call it freshman year of your undergrad as
0:40:16 icons worth emulating or lesser known role models worth emulating?
0:40:18 Did anyone really stick out for you?
0:40:24 I think that in terms of authors, I was very influenced by Robert Heinlein,
0:40:25 the science fiction author.
0:40:28 Sure, stranger in a strange land and so on.
0:40:30 Absolutely, it was so brilliant.
0:40:35 And then a few years ago, when his widow released the uncensored,
0:40:41 unedited version of stranger in a strange land, it’s like three times larger and no holds barred.
0:40:44 I just savored every page of that.
0:40:48 My favorite book of all of his is Time Enough for Love,
0:40:52 in which he covers almost every topic under the sun.
0:40:58 So Heinlein’s characters were somewhat of role models for me.
0:41:03 Like Lazarus Long is a common character in some Heinlein books.
0:41:08 In the public sphere, I was very much enamored with Robert Kennedy.
0:41:15 His positive, progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him.
0:41:18 So I looked up to him.
0:41:20 Those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time.
0:41:26 You seem to be good at many things, of course, just based on the bio alone.
0:41:35 But what strikes me is how quickly you were able to develop expertise in new fields.
0:41:42 I’d like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio.
0:41:45 And that is United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company.
0:41:48 She started to save the life of one of her daughters.
0:41:55 I’d love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story,
0:41:58 just because people will want to hear it.
0:42:04 And then the follow-up, just to plant the seed for it, is how you learned biology.
0:42:11 Because my understanding is you didn’t have much in terms of background in biology.
0:42:13 That’s a huge mouthful of a question.
0:42:18 But if you could give us a bit of the background, that would be extremely helpful.
0:42:20 And we can use that as a jumping off point.
0:42:26 Sure. So it’s kind of funny that you can go all the way through undergraduate,
0:42:31 at a great place like UCLA, and never be required to take a life science course.
0:42:32 But that was the case.
0:42:37 So the last biology class I had was in high school.
0:42:45 And here, suddenly, I was faced with a situation as an adult while running Sirius XM
0:42:50 that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness.
0:42:54 She can’t even walk up a couple of stairs to the front door.
0:42:58 And there are no medicines approved for it.
0:43:04 I finally got her to the best doctor one could find, the head of pediatric cardiology
0:43:09 at Children’s National Medical Center in the middle of Washington, D.C.
0:43:13 And the doctor said, this is an extremely rare disease.
0:43:15 No one knows why it arises.
0:43:18 All the patients die within two to three years.
0:43:22 He had only seen two or three other kids with it, and they both died.
0:43:25 And all you can do is hope for a lung transplant.
0:43:28 So Tim, I was completely crushed.
0:43:30 I just saw black.
0:43:31 I didn’t know what to do.
0:43:38 And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward,
0:43:43 night after night, and myself and Beena would tag team staying there with her,
0:43:46 was once she fell asleep to go down into the library
0:43:52 and to just begin learning about what was this illness she had,
0:43:56 which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension.
0:44:00 And why were there no treatments available for it?
0:44:03 So I just began reading and reading and reading.
0:44:06 Most of the time I read things.
0:44:08 I didn’t understand what they were talking about
0:44:13 because there were these long medical words and chemical words
0:44:15 that I never learned in law school
0:44:18 or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering.
0:44:20 But of course there were dictionaries.
0:44:23 And I looked up the words in a dictionary.
0:44:27 And they had college level anatomy textbooks.
0:44:32 So what I didn’t know, I just kept going backwards in academia.
0:44:35 I guess you would say backwards in learning or pedagogy.
0:44:38 Until I would even get to like a high school level textbook
0:44:40 that would explain something.
0:44:42 And I said, okay, I get that.
0:44:47 And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night
0:44:49 until I learned everything I needed to know.
0:44:54 How did you, and I know this is a story you’ve told before,
0:44:59 but ultimately in searching for possible solutions,
0:45:01 and as we were chatting about before recording,
0:45:04 there’s a lot of luck involved.
0:45:07 And it doesn’t mean that your path is replicable
0:45:12 by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation
0:45:13 similar to what you experienced.
0:45:18 But nonetheless, you were able to ultimately track down,
0:45:22 I suppose it’s fair to say, a molecule, a drug of some type.
0:45:28 Would you mind describing for listeners the process then
0:45:33 of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion
0:45:35 this drug or to license it?
0:45:36 If you could describe that,
0:45:38 I have a number of questions that will stem off of it.
0:45:43 There are a gazillion articles published
0:45:48 on every type of medical research you could imagine.
0:45:50 I mean, it’s just a bottomless well.
0:45:54 There are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals.
0:45:59 Each of those journals have every year thousands of articles
0:46:01 published across them.
0:46:05 So it’s difficult to find the information that you need.
0:46:09 But in law school, we learn a very useful skill.
0:46:12 This skill goes by the name of shepherdizing
0:46:17 after this type of index that they have in law school called shepherds.
0:46:21 So what shepherdizing involves is when a judge
0:46:24 writes a decision, like the Supreme Court issues a decision,
0:46:26 they drop a lot of footnotes.
0:46:31 And of course, one thing lawyers love to do is make footnotes and references.
0:46:34 And then what you’re supposed to do as a good lawyer
0:46:38 is to look up all of the footnotes and the references
0:46:42 that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to.
0:46:47 And then the shepherdizing process is after you get all of those references
0:46:52 to then look up all of the references in those other articles.
0:46:56 And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns
0:46:59 where three, four, five levels down,
0:47:03 the references are all circling back around on themselves.
0:47:08 So I applied that shepherdizing process to these medical articles.
0:47:12 And somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article,
0:47:19 they make footnotes and citations to other people’s research who they relied upon.
0:47:22 So I would get all of those articles and read those.
0:47:24 And then I would follow up on all of the references in those.
0:47:32 Finally, I read about a molecule that a researcher at Glaxo Welcome had written
0:47:38 in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure.
0:47:41 And it failed in its test of congestive heart failure.
0:47:42 It did not work.
0:47:46 But in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did.
0:47:50 And the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention
0:47:56 was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart,
0:47:58 which is called the pulmonary artery.
0:48:02 It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure
0:48:06 while leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine.
0:48:11 Well, that’s exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension,
0:48:13 the people who have this disease.
0:48:19 I’ll make a quick footnote that when my daughter was diagnosed,
0:48:26 2,000 people in the US had the disease because medicines have become so much better
0:48:29 and because we’ve been able to, like you mentioned in the introduction,
0:48:34 get all of these approvals, there are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it.
0:48:38 So it’s likely that people listening to your podcast
0:48:42 will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension.
0:48:49 And I read this article and I said, wow, just when I need this tiny stretch of artery,
0:48:54 just between the heart and the lungs, this molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch
0:48:57 of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone.
0:49:01 That was the holy grail that I was looking for.
0:49:04 So I looked at where the author of the article was from.
0:49:09 He was from Glaxo Welcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
0:49:12 And I made a beeline down to him and asked him
0:49:17 if he could develop this molecule that he’d found for my daughter’s disease.
0:49:21 Was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom?
0:49:24 A big all caps yes?
0:49:26 No, it was actually a big all caps no.
0:49:32 Unfortunately, the individual who had written the article
0:49:35 had actually retired a few months earlier.
0:49:39 And the person that I ended up meeting with who is in charge of research and development
0:49:43 said that this was just one article.
0:49:46 It was an incidental finding.
0:49:53 In any event, this disease afflicted so few people it was completely unrealistic
0:49:57 to expect Glaxo Welcome to develop this molecule
0:50:00 for my daughter and other people with that disease.
0:50:03 And I asked him, his name’s Bob Bell.
0:50:06 He’s now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman.
0:50:12 I asked Dr. Bell, I said, what would it take for you to develop this medicine?
0:50:14 He said, well, it probably would take you couldn’t do it.
0:50:19 We only develop medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year
0:50:20 and revenue potential.
0:50:24 He said, but it’s possible you could buy it from us.
0:50:30 If you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise,
0:50:35 I could then introduce you to the business development people at Glaxo Welcome.
0:50:37 So over the course of the next several months,
0:50:41 I created a brand new biotechnology company.
0:50:47 I was able to have a Nobel laureate who was formerly associated with Glaxo Welcome
0:50:50 become head of a scientific advisory board.
0:50:52 And I re-approach Glaxo Welcome.
0:50:56 And I said, I have all the things that you asked for.
0:51:00 Can you sell me this drug and we’ll develop it ourselves?
0:51:04 Well, Tim, it turns out that everybody asked said,
0:51:06 well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree.
0:51:08 And that’s how it is in a big bureaucracy.
0:51:15 It turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper
0:51:18 to agree to license this drug to me.
0:51:21 Finally, it happened.
0:51:28 And all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10% of any money
0:51:30 that I would ever get from this molecule.
0:51:33 I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them.
0:51:34 I was in their face all the time.
0:51:43 Also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell’s sister had contracted
0:51:47 a form of pulmonary hypertension from the time I first met him
0:51:49 toward the end of this process.
0:51:53 And he became a product champion for me within Glaxo Welcome.
0:51:57 I mean, that was just pure luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say.
0:52:01 And then they really didn’t think this molecule had any chance at all.
0:52:05 And they were really just doing it to get rid of me, I think.
0:52:08 But still, all 15 people had to sign it.
0:52:11 After we successfully developed this molecule,
0:52:18 we have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to Glaxo Welcome
0:52:22 because that molecule has saved thousands of people’s lives.
0:52:28 It has produced a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us.
0:52:32 And Bob Bell, when I invited him to our 15th anniversary,
0:52:36 and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine,
0:52:42 and he said this was the absolute best transaction that Glaxo Welcome had ever done.
0:52:48 So in hindsight, what did they miss?
0:52:51 What accidentally got deleted from the spreadsheet?
0:52:57 Or what assumption or assumptions were incorrect that they missed this opportunity so completely?
0:53:02 I think there were probably like maybe three main ones.
0:53:06 The first one, and I can say this kind of from first hand knowledge,
0:53:09 since I am now the head of a pharmaceutical company,
0:53:15 the odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than one in 100.
0:53:19 I mean, the human body is so complicated.
0:53:23 It’s like a massive set of very precisely keyed locks.
0:53:27 And every molecule is like a random key.
0:53:31 And the chance that you would have a molecule that opened a lock,
0:53:36 that fixed some dysfunction in the body, rather than causing some harm to the body,
0:53:38 is it’s less than one in 100.
0:53:44 So first of all, they figured the chance of this thing working just in general was less than one in 100.
0:53:49 Secondly, they thought to themselves, even if it worked a little bit,
0:53:54 there’s only 2000 people in the whole country with this disease.
0:53:56 They didn’t really think that if it worked really well,
0:53:59 the number of people would keep accumulating.
0:54:02 I see you’re saying if you have these people who would have died,
0:54:08 otherwise not dying, then that treatment cohort is just going to grow and grow and grow.
0:54:08 Is that what you mean?
0:54:09 Exactly.
0:54:14 I thought about it like I was getting subscribers at SiriusXM.
0:54:18 People said to me, “Oh, Martin, you’ll be lucky to have 100,000 subscribers.”
0:54:21 I said, “Well, if I keep them, and I get another 100,000 the next year,
0:54:26 then I’ll be up to 200,000, and then maybe 400,000, 800,000.
0:54:27 Now we have 30 million.”
0:54:31 They didn’t think in that subscriber mindset.
0:54:32 That was the second problem.
0:54:40 The third problem is that they didn’t really imagine that the healthcare system would pay
0:54:44 something like $100,000 per year for this medicine.
0:54:50 And at the time, this was about 20 years ago, early 2000s,
0:54:56 I think like the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps $10,000 a year
0:55:00 for a patient or $10,000 for a course of treatment.
0:55:05 Because of advances in things like precision medicine and gene therapy,
0:55:12 there are many, many medicines now that cost over $100,000 a year, mostly for rare diseases.
0:55:18 And the healthcare system pays for them because so few people have these diseases
0:55:23 that even though the medicines are expensive, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to diseases
0:55:31 like hypertension or common illnesses, asthma, that afflict tens of millions of people.
0:55:37 So the healthcare system doesn’t really mind paying a lot of money if it’s a rare disease.
0:55:41 And the people at Glaxo Welcome were clueless about this.
0:55:46 They were actually looking for the big billion-dollar blockbusters, not for the rare diseases.
0:55:48 So those were their three omissions.
0:55:51 They failed to be Alan Wattsian.
0:55:54 They failed to see that because something is big,
0:55:57 underneath that means that there’s something else that’s small.
0:55:59 And that was what Alan Watts would always say.
0:56:02 He says something is good only because something else is bad.
0:56:07 At the very least, I mean, it’s a valuable thought exercise
0:56:10 when you’re looking at the assumptions that you’re making.
0:56:12 And what an incredible story.
0:56:16 You mentioned Sirius. We haven’t spent any time on Sirius just yet.
0:56:27 When did you first fall in love or become intoxicated or enchanted by satellite systems
0:56:28 or electrical engineering, I suppose?
0:56:31 But you can take whichever one is more interesting to tackle.
0:56:37 You’re absolutely right that I fell in love and I was intoxicated by satellite communications.
0:56:45 It seemed to me kind of magical that we can put a machine way out in space
0:56:50 and that machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet.
0:56:53 My first real moment of first love, if you will,
0:56:58 was at a remote NASA tracking station in the Indian Ocean.
0:57:04 And I had left UCLA to travel around the world, really hitchhike around the world.
0:57:10 And I found myself in the Indian Ocean on a set of islands called the Seychelles.
0:57:15 And on these islands at the top of the mountain in the middle of the main island,
0:57:16 there was a NASA tracking station.
0:57:25 And I went up into it and I was probably a pretty grungy 19-year-old at that point in time.
0:57:29 But the engineers inside there were kind and patient with me
0:57:36 and they explained to me how their satellite antennas were communicating with satellites
0:57:40 in all different orbits around the Earth and even all the way out to Jupiter.
0:57:45 And I asked them, I said, “Would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there
0:57:51 and have it broadcast information back to the entire Earth?”
0:57:54 And they said, “If you made a powerful enough satellite,
0:57:59 then the receiving equipment on Earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand.”
0:58:02 And I could have kissed the guy.
0:58:07 I just said, “Wow, that’s the purpose of my life.”
0:58:10 And I made a beeline back to UCLA.
0:58:13 I changed my major to communication studies.
0:58:17 I did an undergraduate thesis on direct broadcast satellites.
0:58:24 I did a joint JD/MBA degree where I published multiple articles on satellite communications.
0:58:29 I worked at Hughes Aircraft Company, which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then
0:58:33 and helped design a satellite to cover South America.
0:58:37 And then ultimately went out on my own with my dream goal, which was Sirius XM.
0:58:47 What did it feel like, if you can remember, to have that answer given to you or that direction,
0:58:50 rather, given to you, the purpose given to you?
0:58:56 Did it feel a certain way, that type of conviction or that type of belief?
0:58:57 What do you recall?
0:58:59 Yeah, Tim, it’s the best feeling.
0:59:00 It’s the best feeling.
0:59:03 And actually, I don’t think it really has anything to do with age.
0:59:09 I felt like the same kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Teslas
0:59:14 and I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output.
0:59:20 And there’s a very simple correlation between horsepower and electrical power,
0:59:23 between kilowatts and horsepower.
0:59:25 It’s almost one-to-one, not exactly.
0:59:30 And I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in
0:59:33 terms of their horsepower.
0:59:40 So, right away, I said, wow, this car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter.
0:59:44 I had that same kind of, this is the purpose of my life,
0:59:46 is to make an electric helicopter.
0:59:50 So, you can get this kind of excitement at any point in life.
0:59:53 I think probably the best way to describe it, Tim,
0:59:56 would be like a lightning bolt to your soul.
0:59:58 You know, I was asking about biology earlier,
1:00:02 but I would be very curious, since you mentioned also that there were no,
1:00:05 well, the requirements as such in undergrad,
1:00:08 did require you to take any additional biology classes.
1:00:13 If you were trying to teach, let’s just say, a class,
1:00:17 and you could pick the age, or it could be a set of classes, scientific literacy.
1:00:26 Being able to have enough basic fluency to provide more surface area for those
1:00:28 lightning bolts, if that makes any sense, right,
1:00:31 when you’re looking at a manual or having a conversation with an engineer
1:00:32 or reading a scientific study.
1:00:39 Do you have any thoughts on how we could cultivate more scientific literacy,
1:00:41 if that’s the right phrase to use?
1:00:44 Yeah, I think that’s a great phrase to use.
1:00:50 I think what’s necessary is that you have to relate science to people’s everyday lives.
1:00:54 And one of the greatest people are doing this,
1:00:57 and to go back to the beginning of the interview,
1:00:59 when you asked me who was the role model for me,
1:01:06 I should have said Carl Sagan was like an amazing, amazing role model to me.
1:01:09 I watched the Cosmos series over and over again.
1:01:17 And Carl Sagan was a genius at being able to take scientific concepts
1:01:19 and relate them to people’s everyday life.
1:01:23 And if you remember for watching those series,
1:01:29 the iconic image of him taking a dandelion and blowing it,
1:01:36 and describing that this is how a star spreads out its gas throughout the galaxy,
1:01:41 those type of step-by-step instructions, ladders to get from one place to another,
1:01:45 is the way I think to build scientific literacy.
1:01:50 And I would ask my students to think about anything that’s important in their life,
1:01:52 whatever it might be.
1:01:55 And from whatever they said was important to their life,
1:02:02 I would then begin wrapping that in layers and layers of basic scientific concepts
1:02:04 that pertain to what was important to them.
1:02:07 Are there any science fiction authors per se,
1:02:11 but science authors or elucidators of science
1:02:16 who have written anything that would be appropriate for a lay audience?
1:02:19 If someone is listening and they see their blind spots,
1:02:21 which I know by definition is kind of impossible,
1:02:26 but if they recognize they don’t have enough scientific fluency
1:02:29 or as much as they would like, but they want to try to cultivate that,
1:02:32 do you have any recommendations for them?
1:02:34 There’s a lot of books like that.
1:02:42 One of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named Thomas Kuhn.
1:02:46 He was one of the most famous historians of science,
1:02:50 and his book is perennially in print.
1:02:53 It’s called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
1:03:00 In this book, he goes through about 10 different revolutions in science,
1:03:03 where everybody thought the world was one way,
1:03:07 and then kind of like a crazy person would say,
1:03:08 “No, I think it’s like a different way.”
1:03:13 And gradually set about proving it’s a different way,
1:03:17 and created a revolution in science.
1:03:20 And he explains this in very lay terms.
1:03:24 He takes you through the science of gravity, for example,
1:03:31 with Isaac Newton, science of relativity, with Einstein, electricity, with Maxwell,
1:03:38 and so on, in a very step-by-step fashion to make the science accessible.
1:03:41 And in the way his main point in writing this book
1:03:46 is to teach people critical thinking, to teach people to question authority.
1:03:50 Ultimately, all science is about is just saying, “Why?
1:03:54 Why?” Like every two, three, four-year-old kid knows how to do that, right?
1:03:56 Why? Why? Why?
1:04:00 And I think Thomas Kuhn does a great job of that in his book.
1:04:06 I should also point out, and please feel free to correct me if I’m oversimplifying,
1:04:09 but the why, why, why is not just for four-year-olds.
1:04:13 It’s not just for scientists in lab coats,
1:04:16 or whatever people envision scientists to be.
1:04:23 It’s also extremely helpful in situations like those you found yourself in
1:04:26 with Glaxo Welcome and attempting to license.
1:04:32 I mean, constantly pushing for explanation and clicking on those footnotes
1:04:34 to go to the footnotes to go to the footnotes
1:04:40 to ultimately get to some point of leverage where you can move things around.
1:04:44 It seems like it’s also not just an intensely interesting
1:04:48 and academically rewarding approach to thought,
1:04:50 but an immensely practical approach to life.
1:04:54 At least that’s how it seems from reading so many of your stories.
1:04:57 You know, when you discover something,
1:05:02 what’s happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain,
1:05:06 and it’s lighting up the pleasure centers, too.
1:05:12 So I really believe that there’s nothing more exciting than having a realization
1:05:16 about something, coming to an inspiration about something,
1:05:20 which is why books and reading are so magical.
1:05:24 Another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job
1:05:29 of explaining concepts that can inspire people is Octavia Butler.
1:05:30 She wrote a lot of books.
1:05:35 One of them, very well known, is Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents.
1:05:41 And in these books, she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority.
1:05:45 So I’m not sure what it was that my parents did.
1:05:50 I don’t really remember them specifically encouraging my questioning of them.
1:05:53 In fact, I do remember my father discouraging it.
1:06:01 But nevertheless, what happened to me was I absorbed the American culture.
1:06:06 And the American culture is a culture of questioning authority.
1:06:10 I recently heard one of the latest interviews with Tony Fauci
1:06:13 when he was, people were asking him,
1:06:21 “Why is it that Americans won’t do these basic public health steps to stop the pandemic?”
1:06:26 And he said, “You know, American culture does not like to be told what to do.
1:06:32 American culture is died-in-the-wool question authority.
1:06:38 You’d be hard-pressed to find another country where it would be more difficult
1:06:44 to get people to follow a single rule for everybody than the United States.”
1:06:48 So it’s that American cultural ethic of questioning authority
1:06:52 that I know is like deep in my mental DNA.
1:06:54 So we were chatting just a few minutes ago about
1:06:57 realizations, inspiration.
1:07:01 I’d like to ask if we flash back to,
1:07:04 well, we could flash back to any point in time that you choose, really.
1:07:10 How did you relate to or think about gender in your youth?
1:07:12 And you can choose what youth means.
1:07:16 And I guess I’m wondering if there were any flashes of realization,
1:07:21 or if you came sort of pre-installed with a certain orientation
1:07:23 or way of thinking about it or feeling about it.
1:07:28 Whatever you could say to speak to your experience of gender when you were younger,
1:07:29 I would love to hear it.
1:07:34 Sure. So it is related to this questioning of authority, Tim.
1:07:41 Around teenage years, I had a constant vision of myself,
1:07:44 not as a male, but as a female.
1:07:49 And of course, I said to myself, WTF, why am I thinking like this?
1:07:53 I can’t imagine anybody else is thinking like this.
1:07:57 But nevertheless, the thoughts were real, and the feelings were real,
1:07:59 and the feelings were visceral.
1:08:01 Could you describe the feelings?
1:08:06 Because I think I’m certainly very interested in what form that takes.
1:08:09 Is it a discomfort of some type?
1:08:11 Is it a longing?
1:08:13 How did it feel for you?
1:08:18 So first, I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different
1:08:21 for every single transgender person.
1:08:24 And talking about my feelings, I don’t want to give the impression
1:08:28 that these are going to be the feelings of other transgendered people
1:08:32 because, as a community, we’re as heterogeneous as anybody else.
1:08:40 So for me, it was really a matter of just visualizing myself in a female form.
1:08:45 And there was not any dislike of my male form.
1:08:51 Again, it was kind of very Alan Watson in that I saw myself as male
1:08:55 only because the opposite of male was female.
1:08:58 So I could also see myself as female.
1:09:01 And this was the way my mind was working.
1:09:07 And when I say I saw myself, it was just kind of like a physiologic embodiment.
1:09:12 Obviously, I knew boys and girls and men and women’s bodies were different.
1:09:16 So I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman
1:09:20 wherein I was very much trapped in a male body.
1:09:26 It was the prevailing view that this was a completely unacceptable way to be.
1:09:30 So the authority was, no, this is not possible.
1:09:33 People are only male or female.
1:09:36 And never the twain shall meet.
1:09:44 So again, this American Paul Ravirish question authority mindset got me reading.
1:09:50 And I found once again that there was a vast literature on transgenderism,
1:09:54 transsexualism, Native American people who were too spirited,
1:10:01 communities in India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female.
1:10:05 So even though this was never something I learned in junior high
1:10:09 or high school or elementary school or really anywhere in American culture,
1:10:17 in say the 1990s, I learned through books that humanity was not either strictly male
1:10:18 or strictly female.
1:10:23 And as I began to question authority, I began to say to myself,
1:10:28 why can’t I also come out as not strictly male and not strictly female?
1:10:31 When I think a lot of listeners hear the words male and female,
1:10:37 they think of the physiological differences that you might put side by side,
1:10:39 looking at physical characteristics.
1:10:48 When you say not totally male or female or not cleanly bifurcated into solely those two categories,
1:10:54 do you mean to say masculine and feminine traits or what we would often find labeled as such?
1:10:56 Or do you mean something else?
1:11:00 I mean, predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you refer to.
1:11:06 Now oftentimes, those masculine and feminine traits are just a short hop,
1:11:10 skipping a jump from masculine and feminine apparel.
1:11:11 Right.
1:11:13 Depending on how people dress.
1:11:19 They’re a short hop, skipping a jump from masculine and feminine hairstyles in an age,
1:11:24 that was the time of Prince and Boy George and whatnot.
1:11:29 And then you get to masculine and feminine manicures.
1:11:31 Like why can’t a guy paint his nails?
1:11:38 And then you get to next questions of secondary and primary sex organs.
1:11:44 And some people wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology
1:11:49 and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology.
1:11:54 And I found that there was actually like a vast literature following again,
1:11:57 footnotes to footnotes, references to references.
1:12:06 I was like, oh my God, it is possible to in fact alter your physiology to match your psychology.
1:12:10 What appeared to be the most intelligent researchers in this area
1:12:19 are opining that this is a safe and healthy thing to do for people who feel that they are
1:12:22 kind of quote unquote trapped in the wrong body.
1:12:29 From say zero to a hundred percent, how well do you feel you have your physiology
1:12:31 matching your own psychology at the moment?
1:12:33 Hundred percent.
1:12:33 Hundred percent.
1:12:34 Hundred percent.
1:12:40 What were the biggest or the most important decisions, actions that you took?
1:12:46 Did any surprise you to have a disproportionate effect on increasing that percentage?
1:12:47 Nope.
1:12:52 I think that every part of the transition process kind of fell in place.
1:12:55 It was not something that happens on a day.
1:12:58 It’s kind of you get to a point of diminishing returns.
1:13:02 So over a period of years, I gradually transitioned.
1:13:07 And I think even to this point, I’m still in a transition process.
1:13:14 I kind of went from a pure male to a more, I would say not pure, but I would say,
1:13:21 knocking on the female door to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as
1:13:28 trans binary, meaning that I embrace both masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely.
1:13:34 Looking at the introduction, which I read at the top of the show, so to speak,
1:13:40 there is a line about leading efforts of the transgender community to establish their own
1:13:44 health law standards and of the International Bar Association to Protect.
1:13:47 And this is the part I want to ask you to elaborate on.
1:13:51 Autonomy, rights, and genetic information via an international treaty.
1:13:53 What are autonomy, rights, and genetic information?
1:13:54 Sure.
1:14:00 So autonomy, it’s just a fancy word for saying that people should be able to make up their own
1:14:07 mind, that people should have the power, the authority, the freedom to decide what to do
1:14:08 with their own body.
1:14:14 And genetic rights, of course, refers to the human genome, the DNA that we all have.
1:14:20 Now, there is a tremendous diversity of human genomes out there.
1:14:27 There are people who, because of their DNA, they are pretty much immune to some kind of cancers,
1:14:34 whereas other people, because of their DNA, it’s very likely that they’ll get those type of cancers.
1:14:39 There are some people, because of their DNA, they almost cannot feel pain.
1:14:42 They have an extremely high tolerance for pain.
1:14:48 There are other people, because of their DNA, that the slightest pinprick will send them screaming.
1:14:54 So once Craig Vanter and Francis Collins led the effort to decode the human genome,
1:15:02 and about the year 2000, all types of pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers
1:15:09 began scouring the world to engage in what’s called genetic mining or genome mining,
1:15:13 meaning going to different populations of people around the world,
1:15:20 often that have been intermarried for quite a while, so their genomes are kind of concentrated,
1:15:26 and trying to learn something from those communities’ DNA that can then be translated
1:15:33 into useful pharmaceuticals to help everybody else have some of the strengths
1:15:37 or less of the weaknesses of those isolated populations.
1:15:44 What I was concerned with is that if people extract the DNA from these remote communities,
1:15:49 that they in fact do so only with the consent of those communities,
1:15:54 or with the consent of the elected representatives of those communities,
1:16:00 so that they can have some fair financial return for their natural endowment.
1:16:05 I see. So it’s similar, in a sense, to preventing, say, biopiracy from the Amazon,
1:16:12 where you have these tribes who are not providing their own human genetic information,
1:16:18 but are, say, acting as a wellspring of ethnobotany and providing source materials
1:16:24 for creating pharmaceuticals, and you would want out there to be some recompense to those groups,
1:16:32 translating that into your own sort of endogenous genetics would be what you’re referring to.
1:16:34 That’s fascinating. Never even thought about that. Absolutely.
1:16:40 Are there any examples you could give of these sort of tightly knit clusters,
1:16:44 maybe the clusters is too small a word, of people who are being studied for this reason,
1:16:48 for medicinal purposes? There are actually many, many dozens,
1:16:52 and there are quite a few companies who specialize in this type of area.
1:16:56 The population that comes top of mind to me, Tim, right now,
1:17:02 because it’s such a fascinating story, and it relates to my own activities in organ manufacturing,
1:17:09 is a community of people living in Ecuador and Peru, very close-knit, intramaried,
1:17:16 that are all a kind of dwarfism, and these individuals, they rarely grow taller than
1:17:24 four feet tall, and it was discovered just over the past 15, 20 years that they are descendants
1:17:32 of Jews from 2,000 years ago who were forced into a diaspora across the Mediterranean
1:17:39 after the Roman occupation of Palestine, and in that ancient time, these people were a very
1:17:45 small stature, but it was just part of the human diversity. They ended up as a group,
1:17:51 mostly ending up in Spain, and then when the Inquisition took hold, their descendants,
1:17:55 who were still very small, they left Spain, they went to the New World,
1:18:02 and because the Inquisition still had some type of a hand in the larger population centers of
1:18:07 what’s now Peru and Ecuador, they went out into the rural areas, and there they lived for several
1:18:15 hundred years, and it turns out that this population, they have one gene that makes their body not
1:18:22 receptive to growth hormone. All of us naturally, we produce growth hormone, and the cells of our
1:18:28 bodies have a receptor for that growth hormone, and when the growth hormone locks into the receptor,
1:18:36 we begin growing. This population of people in Peru and Ecuador, they lack the growth hormone.
1:18:41 That gene fell off like 2,000 years ago, and they kept passing it on and on,
1:18:47 not much growth hormone receptor. They’re perfectly intelligent, they live normal lives,
1:18:53 they just don’t grow very large. I found this population fascinating because in my company,
1:18:59 United Therapeutics, we’re trying to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs.
1:19:05 One of the ways we do this is by modifying the genome of the pig, and it’s kind of like a
1:19:10 fluke of nature, Tim, that the pig’s organs, their heart, their kidneys, their lungs,
1:19:16 are very much the same size and functionality as human kidneys, hearts, and lungs.
1:19:21 The only problem is that if you leave a pig on the zone, they’ll actually grow extremely large,
1:19:29 and when these first transplants were done, they had to euthanize the animal recipients of the
1:19:37 transplants because the organs from the pig had grown too large. What we did is we took a page from
1:19:44 this population of people in Peru and Ecuador, the Western medicine gives them a disease name.
1:19:51 It’s called Laren’s disease, L-A-R-O-N, after this Israeli scientist who discovered what was
1:19:58 going on here. We said, “Well, why don’t we modify a growth hormone receptor knockout
1:20:05 just like the Laren’s population has into these pigs?” When we transplant the kidneys of these
1:20:11 pigs into people, the kidneys won’t keep growing and growing as a normal pig can be many hundreds
1:20:17 of pounds. Instead, the kidney will just stop growing at the same size as when we transplanted
1:20:21 it, and that’s working out really well. Let’s talk more about organ manufacturing.
1:20:31 What are some of the other precursors or requirements for having a sufficient supply
1:20:37 of organs to meet whatever demands there are in the U.S. or in the world today?
1:20:44 The demands, whether it’s in the U.S. or outside the U.S., are huge and are way, way in excess of
1:20:52 the supply. I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs today is an adequate supply
1:20:58 of transplantable organs. It’s a beautiful thing that before people like Tom Starzell
1:21:05 questioned authority and said it was possible to do an organ transplant in our parents’ teenage
1:21:10 years and adult years, that would have just been crazy stuff. You take an organ from a dead person,
1:21:15 you put it in a live person who has a bad organ and the person comes back to health,
1:21:21 that’s about as crazy as it gets, but they did it. They did it. Now, standing on their shoulders,
1:21:28 we have hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for these organs, yet each year there are only
1:21:36 about 30,000 kidneys available for transplant, only around 3,000 hearts, only around 2,000 lungs.
1:21:42 The gap between the need for these organs and the supply is humongous.
1:21:48 Are you still, or I should say United Therapeutics, currently trying to manipulate the vagus nerve?
1:21:57 Is that in process? Yes, that is in process. It’s a fascinating area, Tim. We are very fortunate
1:22:06 to work with the father of bioelectronic medicine, Dr. Kevin Tracy. He’s the chief medical officer
1:22:12 at the Northwell Medical Complex up in the New York area. By the way, that reminds me,
1:22:18 speaking of how can laypeople get access to scientific knowledge easily, subscribe to
1:22:24 Scientific American. I’m sorry to put an advertisement in here, but I find Scientific
1:22:30 American and National Geographic two of the greatest ways for laypeople, which I do consider
1:22:36 myself a layperson, to learn about all different types of science that they might not know anything
1:22:43 about. One day, I got my Scientific American in the mail, and on the cover, it was using
1:22:49 electronics to cure diseases. Well, here I am. My whole career has just been like electronic
1:22:55 engineering, building satellites. Now, because of my daughter, I’m in this medical field,
1:23:00 so I’m so excited. It was one of those lightning bolts to the soul. Now, I have a chance to bring
1:23:06 my male and female side together, to bring my satellite and my biology side together and merge
1:23:13 them. I got very excited, and I had a chance to meet and now work with and support the work of
1:23:20 Dr. Tracy. He taught me a very simple sentence, Tim, which I’ve subsequently found to be absolutely
1:23:26 true in all the research I’ve read. It is that the nervous system touches every single cell on your
1:23:35 body. The nervous system touches every single cell in our body. The largest nerve in the body,
1:23:41 there’s one nerve that is way, way larger than all the rest of them. It’s the vagus nerve.
1:23:49 It starts in our mind. It wraps around our heart, our lungs, our gut. It’s an immense nerve. And by
1:23:56 stimulating this vagus nerve, it’s possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body
1:24:02 by a fluke of nature, a positive fluke. The vagus nerve comes out to the skin
1:24:09 in two and only two places around the left and right ears. There are like a couple of
1:24:15 different ridges in your earlobe, or your ear, I guess you would say it. And one of them called the
1:24:22 simba conchie is the place where the vagus nerve comes out. And if you electrically stimulate
1:24:28 the simba conchie on either the left or the right ear, it’s been proven now, again, in lots of
1:24:34 published literature, to have positive therapeutic effects on the body. What are some of those
1:24:41 positive therapeutic effects? One which has been documented quite extensively is the ability to
1:24:48 control Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel syndrome, which are two gastrointestinal problems,
1:24:56 as well as very high priced and I would say tinged with some potential side effect
1:25:02 biologic medicines that are approved by the FDA to treat Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel
1:25:09 syndrome. Another illness that has been shown to mediate against is rheumatoid arthritis.
1:25:17 And the common factor here is that we have two types of nervous systems. We have a
1:25:23 fight or flight nervous system, which is the sympathetic nervous system. And we have a rest
1:25:29 and digest nervous system, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system. When diseases
1:25:35 occur, it’s because one of those two nervous systems, the sympathetic one, the fight or flight,
1:25:42 takes more of a dominant position in the body and causes a state of inflammation or over activation.
1:25:51 And by stimulating the vagus nerve, you can ramp up the power of the parasympathetic nervous system
1:25:57 and calm down this kind of overstressed state that leads to an irritable bowel syndrome or to
1:26:03 the inflammation of arthritis. This is in the course of doing all the reading for this conversation.
1:26:09 One of those things that really woke me up and maybe pay attention for a bunch of reasons.
1:26:16 One is relevance to my current life because I’ve been working with a doctor for about 10 weeks
1:26:22 doing heart rate variability training. And there are some researchers with claims, I want to say
1:26:28 out of Rutgers and elsewhere, that certain types of HRV training affect vagal tone. And
1:26:36 via affecting that vagal tone have a host of cascading therapeutic benefits. Whether or not
1:26:41 that holds up to scrutiny or not, I don’t know. But the second, and I’m embarrassed to even
1:26:48 give voice to this. So hopefully this won’t just destroy any tiny shred of credibility that I might
1:26:55 have as I mentioned it. But I lived in China for a period of time in college, went to universities
1:27:00 there in Beijing as effectively an exchange student. But it was a one way exchange. I don’t
1:27:08 think we had any students in return from China. And the ears are very much utilized in the world
1:27:16 of acupuncture. And I’m curious to know if you think that whether by trial and error or otherwise,
1:27:26 it’s possible that acupuncture stumbled upon the effects without knowing the mechanism
1:27:34 of stimulating or affecting the ears to then in turn affect the vagus nerve. I know it’s
1:27:41 quite a stretch. But when I first read about this access via the ears, that is one thing that jumped
1:27:46 to mind. Because I always kind of poo pooed. And if I’m being honest, ridiculed the idea
1:27:53 of using the ears to access these deep inner points. But here we are. So I don’t know if
1:28:00 you have any thoughts. Tim, first your credibility is immense. So you would have to actually say
1:28:05 something crazy to Denton or what you said is the opposite of crazy. What you said is extremely
1:28:14 insightful and prescient. So as convinced as I was that putting a satellite in geostationary orbit
1:28:21 would enable people across the planet to receive radio signals, as convinced as I was that we could
1:28:25 have a molecule that would halt the progression of my daughter and other people’s disease.
1:28:32 That’s exactly how convinced I am that the acupuncturists of traditional Chinese medicine
1:28:39 did in fact come upon the nerve patterns that are accessible from the earlobe.
1:28:48 And one of the first things that Dr. Tracy showed to me was a very medically accurate from Chinese
1:28:55 traditional medicine practitioner map of the earlobe in terms of exactly where you put. I’m
1:29:01 sorry, I don’t know what the official name is of the pins or needles that they put in your earlobe
1:29:07 and how they map to different parts of the body. And then he showed me on an anatomy map
1:29:15 how that traces the lines of the vagus nerve. That’s wild. Yeah, it is totally true. And why
1:29:22 really would it not be true? I mean, you know, thousands of years of Chinese civilization,
1:29:28 they have had a chance to do so much trial and error. And they were a literate civilization
1:29:33 for so long. So the results that trial and error could be passed on and passed on.
1:29:39 So I do think it’s entirely rational that they would have figured this out. And what I’m hoping
1:29:47 for now and what I’m trying to support is there is an opportunity to what I call in my own words,
1:29:56 crack the human neurome. So what that means is that there are unique patterns of amplitudes
1:30:04 and signal lengths and signal voltages that will activate some different part of the
1:30:11 vagus nerve than others. And each of these different voltages and wavelengths will correlate to a
1:30:17 different part of the human body. We don’t know what those are. Right now, we are just kind of,
1:30:24 in the way I would say we’re dumber than the acupuncturist, because almost all of the work
1:30:29 that the FDA has allowed to go forward on vagal nerve stimulation, they all use the same pulse
1:30:35 with the same pulse power. And it works. So that’s great. But I think it could work even
1:30:42 better if we decoded the human neurome. And I believe in the future, people will be able to
1:30:49 put on a pair of like beat headsets. And those beat headsets will have gel less, meaning like you
1:30:56 don’t need like the EKG kind of gel, gel less electrodes will rest across your simbaconchi
1:31:01 and your traga and the different parts of your earlobe, and will provide you a stimulation that
1:31:06 matches the particular ailment that you have. Eliminate the ailment without taking any pills,
1:31:11 without paying any money to anybody. This is an area I want to keep digging in because
1:31:17 it’s rare. Well, it’s pretty much non-existent that I have the opportunity to speak with someone
1:31:24 with so much electrical engineering background about the possible applications or implications
1:31:32 of technology like this. I’d love to just throw out another group of devices to see if you have
1:31:41 any opinions on them one way or the other, but potential applications of let’s just say TDCS
1:31:49 or TMS, so transcranial direct current stimulation or other means of stimulating
1:31:55 the brain, typically using some type of conducive gel, but not always in the case of a TMS paddle.
1:31:59 Have you looked at these technologies or done any reading in the literature related to them?
1:32:06 A little bit. I’m aware of a friend of mine has a company that obtained an FDA approval for
1:32:12 treating a particular form of brain cancer with this type of technology. So there’s this very
1:32:17 solid scientific benefit that’s been documented. After many years of working through the FDA,
1:32:23 I have a world of respect for the rigor that they put into any decision to approve something. So
1:32:27 when they approved it, it meant that it was scientifically proven to work. Something that
1:32:36 is quite different from that, but at the same time related to it, Tim, is on the last day of 2019,
1:32:44 which was like the last day of the decade, it turned out to be a weekday. I forget if it was
1:32:50 a Tuesday or whatever, but the U.S. Patent Office only issues patents on one day of a week,
1:32:54 and it was like the one day of a week that they issue them on, whether it’s Tuesday or whatever.
1:33:02 And it was a patent that I received for a device that I call an Alzheimer’s Cognitive Enabler,
1:33:11 and this device is worn over the cranium, as you mentioned, and it senses nerve impulses
1:33:19 inside the brain. It is connected to a computer with a visual recognition and a speech comprehension
1:33:27 system so that if a patient with Alzheimer’s is not able to adequately communicate and appear to
1:33:33 recognize the people who are coming into their room, the computer vision recognition system
1:33:40 and sound recognition system will talk on behalf of the Alzheimer’s patients, say, you know,
1:33:46 hello, son, thank you for coming to see me. And it is actually being triggered by
1:33:52 recognitions that are deep in the Alzheimer’s patient’s mind so that more people will come
1:33:58 to visit the patient, the patient’s stress levels may be lower. So I believe this kind of bridging
1:34:06 of electronics in the mind is really right around the corner. What inspired putting the work into
1:34:14 that research and filing that patent? I think part of it was seeing my mother-in-law suffer
1:34:20 pretty badly from somewhere around the spectrum between dementia and Alzheimer’s was never really
1:34:27 completely clear where she was at that. And she would recognize us coming in, but she couldn’t
1:34:34 communicate. And it would have meant a lot to everybody if she would be able to communicate.
1:34:39 My own mother is more or less at that point right now as well. Secondly, the work on the
1:34:46 BINA-48 computer showed me that it was really possible for people to strike up meaningful
1:34:54 relationships with the digital version of BINA, the BINA-48 robot. And so it was just like,
1:35:01 you know, a very short step from instead of putting all of BINA’s or even a good portion
1:35:07 of her memories and her personality into this computer, why not actually have the computer’s
1:35:14 interaction capability, input/output capability triggered by something like a Neurosky type of
1:35:21 EEG brain interface. And the last piece of it was I was given a Christmas present by a friend of
1:35:27 mine, which was one of these Neurosky headsets that lets you kind of like play a game just with
1:35:33 your thoughts by controlling your EEG signals. So that’s a consumer product anybody can buy,
1:35:37 and it really works. This conversation brings back a lot of memories for me because I have
1:35:43 Alzheimer’s disease. It’s very prevalent on both sides of my family and observed both sets of my
1:35:49 grandparents deteriorate to the point where at least some of them couldn’t recognize immediate
1:35:58 family members and was recently rewatching segments of a documentary I saw called Alive Inside,
1:36:06 and the subtitle is A Story of Music and Memory. And what struck me most about this documentary is
1:36:13 that not that they could play music from someone’s youth to them through headsets and watch them come
1:36:20 alive in some really spectacular ways, both physically, in terms of kinesiology moving around,
1:36:25 but also psychologically, the most impressive part to me is that they would play music for,
1:36:32 say, a handful of minutes, five to ten minutes from someone’s youth, and then turn off the music,
1:36:38 and that person could have a perfectly coherent, reasonably fast-speed conversation, whereas
1:36:45 prior to the administration of the music, they were from the outside catatonic, basically,
1:36:51 and it makes me wonder what music is doing. I’m sure there are people who study this and probably
1:36:59 have a better mechanistic explanation and how it could be incorporated into therapies intended to
1:37:04 counter dementia or advanced Alzheimer’s disease, things of this type. Tim, you see like just in
1:37:10 this conversation, we are uncovering like so many, you know, vast new oceans of opportunity for people
1:37:19 to learn and study about. To me, music is the foundational human technology, because the first
1:37:24 thing that we ever could become aware of would be the beat of our mother’s hearts while we were
1:37:32 still in utero. And that beat, that’s a rhythm, okay? And after we’re born, you know, people may
1:37:39 have better or worse rhythm, but there’s nobody that cannot detect the sound of a beat and move
1:37:45 to it. And then all the different types of melodies and chords that build upon rhythm,
1:37:50 it’s just fancier and fancier forms of music. So I believe that there’s tremendous therapeutic
1:37:56 properties to music. It’s just been scratched. They even scratch. It’s been kind of like blown on,
1:38:06 like. And it’s there for like all the thousands of young people today who have come up, grown up
1:38:12 with more music than ever before, to begin to apply this great human cultural technology of
1:38:18 music to the biggest mystery in the entire universe, which is the human mind. I want to come back
1:38:25 to the mind or more accurately consciousness in a moment. But first, this will seem like a left
1:38:31 turn. And it is, I was reading a piece in the Washington Post that covered quite a lot of your
1:38:38 life. And there was a segment on love night. I don’t know if that’s enough of a prompt,
1:38:45 but can you tell us what love night is? So when Dina, my partner and I got married, we each had
1:38:51 one child from a previous marriage that each of us had custody of. And then we had two children
1:39:00 together. And we were kind of trying to build a blended family that would feel like nobody was
1:39:07 a stepmom or a stepdad, that everybody was just like in one family. And in fact, we cross-adopted
1:39:15 each other’s kids from our previous marriages. So I was taking the kids to music classes. All of the
1:39:22 kids were in the Yamaha Music Program where they learned piano and violin instruments like that.
1:39:29 And we would practice songs. And I was brought up Jewish where every Friday night was something
1:39:37 that was special. It was the Sabbath and the family sat down together and had dinner and set a couple
1:39:43 of prayers. So Bina and I tried to think, how can we like merge all these things together? The Jewish
1:39:50 tradition, the need to create a blended family, the music that we were all enjoying from watching
1:39:58 the kids learn to play piano and violin. And we decided to, every Friday night, have a special
1:40:05 family ceremony, which we would call love night. And we sang a song, which the melody was actually
1:40:12 based on one of the kids’ songs that they had learned in the Yamaha Music Program. The words were,
1:40:21 you know, very simple and affirming. And at love night, the core of love night was that each person
1:40:29 around the table would have an opportunity to say what love meant to them during the past week,
1:40:36 during the week from the previous Friday to this Friday. What does love mean to you? And, you know,
1:40:43 Bina and I, as the adults, we would say something either sophisticated or simple. Like, I love Bina,
1:40:49 I love Martine, I love the kids. The kids started off just saying, like, what love means to me is,
1:40:57 like, our dogs or our car. You know, very basic things. But as they grew older, they came into
1:41:03 more and more sophisticated definitions and expressions of love until after a couple of
1:41:10 decades of this. All of us have heard thousands of different things that love can mean to a person.
1:41:14 Now, I’d like to fast forward, and I’m sorry to be on a little riff here, but I want to fast
1:41:20 forward to the current COVID pandemic. Our kids are all adults now. They’ve flown the coop,
1:41:27 they have their own kids. And suddenly we are in a situation where we can’t all gather together in
1:41:33 anyone else for love night. You don’t want to travel, you don’t want to like endanger people,
1:41:42 so on and so forth. So we decided to continue the love night tradition, but on Zoom or to be
1:41:50 fair Google Meet. So every Friday night from my son, who’s a captain in the army in Iraq,
1:41:57 to his wife, who’s on a base in El Paso, to my other son with four grandchildren in Florida,
1:42:03 to my daughter in Brooklyn, and her kid and her husband and me and I, we all get together on Zoom
1:42:08 plus friends of all of ours. The kids were not embarrassed by love night. In fact, they wanted
1:42:12 to share it with their friends and their friends were saying like, whoa, this is crazy, this is
1:42:18 beautiful. And so we get together every Friday night, we sing our love night song. And now there’s
1:42:24 about 20 of us, you know, we go around virtually what love meant to us during that previous week.
1:42:28 And I would say love night is one of the most beautiful parts of my life.
1:42:36 I’m so glad that I asked that question. And love night, could you give a few more examples
1:42:46 of possible answers just to give people a flavor for how people might answer this question? Because
1:42:52 I, for instance, would love to try this with my girlfriend, with some of our friends, family,
1:42:57 etc. But I would be nervous as the orchestrator that I might get that question and not have
1:43:05 the ability to kick things off effectively. So every morning, being in my partner goes out for,
1:43:11 takes our two dogs out for a walk with one of her best friends who lives a few houses away.
1:43:18 And that best friend now joins our love night. And last Friday, she said, what love means to me
1:43:25 is every morning, going out for a walk with being in the dogs. Last week, our youngest grandson,
1:43:32 Saturn, he’s, you know, was born in 2010. So he’s 10 years old. He said, what love means to me
1:43:41 is this. And he pulled a piece of paper, he said, I got a 95 on my math test. And he was just so proud
1:43:48 of himself and shared it with us. So those are typical examples of, I think I last time said,
1:43:54 what love means to me is sitting down at the piano and playing different songs from memory.
1:44:01 So to use this as a skipping, I was going to say a skipping stone, but I think I’m getting my
1:44:09 metaphors mixed up. I say a launch pad, a lily pad, pick your, pick your choice to consciousness.
1:44:15 Do you think that we will be able to, as I’ve heard you put it once, recapitulate or recreate
1:44:24 consciousness synthetically? And does that mean we’ll have machines that can love, for instance,
1:44:29 in the not too distant future? What would it mean to have created consciousness?
1:44:36 Sure. I do believe it’s possible. And a great book that I would recommend that goes into this
1:44:44 subject in beautiful detail is called The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. And Marvin Minsky is
1:44:50 often thought of as the father of artificial intelligence. He was a professor at MIT for
1:44:58 great many years. So in the Emotion Machine book, he really describes exactly how you would go about
1:45:06 creating a computer and the type of software that it would take in order for the machine to
1:45:14 feel what we feel when we say that we love somebody. And I think it’s likely to occur, Tim,
1:45:23 because it’s hard for me to think of any aspect of life that cannot be replicated if one had
1:45:30 sufficiently advanced technology. One of my favorite sayings from another role model, Arthur C.
1:45:36 Clark, is that magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.
1:45:44 So I think just like we have been able to create an artificial hip, artificial knees,
1:45:53 artificial hearts. In my own company, we are building lungs and kidneys. People are creating
1:45:59 artificial nerves. People like Elon Musk has formed a whole company, Neuralink,
1:46:05 where he’s working on downloading a whole human brain. I have little doubt that humans will end
1:46:13 up being able to replicate a human mind. Now, whether or not the rest of society accepts it
1:46:20 as a human mind or not, I think is going to be a long pitch battle. And that’s what is the subject
1:46:27 of my book, “Virtually Human.” That whole book talks about how and when will society accept digital
1:46:34 consciousness as being as conscious as a human. But even if that digital consciousness is not yet
1:46:43 at human level, what happens when it’s at, say, primate level or at canine level or even at rodent
1:46:48 level? If you can get to any of these levels, you could kind of see how it’s the same old human
1:46:55 effort of keep making incremental improvements that would eventually get you to the human level,
1:47:01 where I think that the individual alive today that has the best understanding of this topic
1:47:06 is a guy at Google named Ray Kurzweil. He’s a director of engineering at Google.
1:47:15 And what I love about Ray is he never tires of pointing out that this digital human consciousness,
1:47:24 it’s human. Human consciousness is a human phenomena. So when we create a digital analog or
1:47:32 doppelganger or simulcra, whatever you want to call it, when we create a her, that her is human.
1:47:40 It’s not us versus them. It’s one. It’s we will have been able to move our mind into a digital
1:47:46 substrate, just like if our knees give out, you move it to a mechanical substrate or if an organ
1:47:52 gives out, you transplant it with another organ. Where would you, if you had to,
1:47:59 kind of price is right style, put a timeline on this? When do you think we’ll have rodent or canine
1:48:05 level consciousness plus intelligence? Yeah, it’s pretty hard to say, Tim, because one thing I am
1:48:12 not is I’m not a sucerer, I’m not a prophet, I’m not a visionary, any of those things. I’m just a
1:48:18 humble technologist and all the projects I work on, they have five year time horizons because I
1:48:24 have difficulty really seeing beyond five years. So every technology I’m working on, it’s like I
1:48:32 want to get this thing done and out to the public within five years. Also, I am totally a believer
1:48:41 in this adage that futurists usually overpromise in the near term and underpromise in the long
1:48:47 term. So what that would mean in this context is you will hear a lot of futurists saying, oh,
1:48:55 we’ll have digital rats or digital dogs or digital people in 10, 20 or 30 years. They have probably
1:49:03 overpromised in the near term. What they have underpromised in the long term is in
1:49:10 not 10, 20, 30 years, but in say 80, 90 or 100 years, there won’t be just digital rats,
1:49:15 digital dogs and digital people, but most people will be digital.
1:49:21 Exciting and I suppose for some people very terrifying at the same time. What are some of the
1:49:32 most important ethical questions or considerations related to technology as we move into future
1:49:39 decades in your mind? In my mind, the biggest problem with technology is that people only think
1:49:46 about the rights to implement the technology and they don’t think about the obligations they have
1:49:53 as somebody creating a technology. And by what I mean by that is, you know, there was this great
1:50:00 philosopher of the 20th century, Isaac Berlin, I believe he was German, and he had a real simple
1:50:07 message. His message was that for every right, there is an obligation. It’s again, it’s a very
1:50:14 Alan Watson, sorry to keep coming back to Alan Watts, but it’s a very Alan Watson point of view
1:50:22 that a right only means something in the context of its obligation. So for example, if I have a right
1:50:28 to be a parent, which we think everybody has a right to be a parent, you only have that right
1:50:35 to be a parent so long as you comply with your obligation to be at least not a horrible parent.
1:50:39 If you’re a horrible parent, you will have your children taken away from you and you’ll no longer
1:50:46 in that sense be a parent. So with regard to technology, I think there is a point of view that
1:50:52 anybody who can create a technology has a right to make that technology. But I dispute the ethics
1:51:00 of that perspective. I think that every right to make a technology is coupled to an obligation
1:51:07 to have the consent of anybody who would be adversely affected by that technology. So for
1:51:14 example, my right to build an atomic power plant or a nuclear power plant someplace, I don’t just
1:51:20 have that right. That right is coupled to an obligation that I have to have the consent
1:51:27 of all the surrounding communities of people who could be adversely affected by the implementation
1:51:35 of that technology. And it comes into this domain of in my own field, say the transplantation of
1:51:41 genetically modified pig organs into people. For me to have a right to do that technology,
1:51:47 I have to have the consent of the larger community that that’s a safe thing to do.
1:51:56 In a democratic country, that consent is issued on behalf of the country by the government
1:52:03 and in the field of health, it’s issued by the FDA. So before the FDA permits us to transplant
1:52:09 these genetically modified pig organs into people, they want us to demonstrate to them that there is
1:52:16 no risk, not a small risk, but no risk of any kind of animal virus seeping into the human
1:52:23 population as a result of these animal transplants. So in summary, I believe like an amazing field
1:52:30 for the future, a field that will probably in the future have almost as many people with this
1:52:37 career as our web designers today is the field of techno ethics. Everybody who wants to create a
1:52:45 technology will need to wrap that technology in an ethical envelope of consent. If we look at
1:52:50 in a science over while we could look at it over the last few thousand years, but let’s just say
1:52:56 last few hundred years, you mentioned earlier that I think you were discussing the structure
1:53:03 of scientific revolutions, how these breakthroughs, these massive scientific leaps forward seem like
1:53:10 complete madness at the time to the vast majority. And we don’t have to go that far back to find,
1:53:16 say, surgery without or with minimal use of anesthetics on newborns and infants. I mean,
1:53:23 this is not the Dark Ages. This is less than a hundred years ago. You see some really appalling
1:53:30 things that were taken as best practices or common practice. And one of my friends who’s an
1:53:36 outstanding doctor likes to repeat this, I suppose, adage that you hear among good doctors,
1:53:43 which is 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don’t know which 50%. And that seems to always
1:53:48 be true. So if we flash forward 10 or 20 years, and I know you’re not a prophet or a soothsayer,
1:53:55 but I’m curious, or it could be five years as a technologist, what do you think are any of the
1:54:03 things we’re doing now or believe now that will be shown to be patently absurd or viewed as barbaric
1:54:11 or crazy or naive in the near future? Probably a lot of things. Yeah. Since a lot of, you know,
1:54:16 what we look back in the past, that seems to be barbaric. Building on top of your example
1:54:26 of the torturous procedures put on to neonates, people forget that the founder of the American
1:54:33 Medical Association, the first doctor who created the American Medical Association, his name was
1:54:42 Dr. Gross. He lived in Philadelphia, and he did not believe in asepsis at all. And so he would do
1:54:51 all of his procedures right in his street clothes, infecting everybody, and countless women lost
1:54:57 their lives because of having those type of quote unquote doctors, helping with the delivery of the
1:55:04 children and ending up creating a septic condition in the mothers. And one of the most famous painters
1:55:11 in American history, Thomas Akins, painted this picture of the Gross Clinic, where Dr. Gross was
1:55:17 teaching all the young doctors how to do a procedure, and you see dirt in his shoes and scuffy hands.
1:55:24 Then he was followed. The second president of the American Medical Association was a Dr. Agnew,
1:55:31 who was the student of Gross. And he had read about the research of Lister in England and became a
1:55:37 believer that even though we can’t see these things germs, they’re real. And we need to practice, you
1:55:43 know, strict septic procedures before we do an operation. A few years later, Thomas Akins painted
1:55:50 the Agnew Clinic, and you see that the doctors in white smocks and everybody is, you know, looking
1:55:57 super sterile and clean. So these type of revolutions can occur just like one generation
1:56:02 to the next. It’s not something that takes a long time. I think that, you know, looking at what’s
1:56:10 going on today in our world, I think the fact that we burn our own house will look to be
1:56:15 absolutely bonkers. People would say, well, let me get this right. You’ve got like, you know,
1:56:21 a super thin atmosphere. I mean, you guys saw that from space since the 60s at least.
1:56:28 This atmosphere around your planet is super thin. You have an undeniable record of measurements of
1:56:35 carbon dioxide into the atmosphere going up year after year after year. And you continue to just
1:56:42 spew without limit greenhouse gases into this atmosphere, despite the fact that, you know,
1:56:47 people are dying on the shorelines, dying of diseases, et cetera, et cetera. I think they
1:56:53 will think we are as stupid as somebody who would light a fire in the middle of their house to try
1:57:00 to keep warm and not bother with the smoke that they were choking on. And then if I could add an
1:57:07 addendum to that, did you guys know that the Earth receives 10,000 times the amount of solar energy
1:57:13 falls right on the Earth each day? Then it uses 10,000 times the amount of energy it flows.
1:57:18 And that’s not to talk about the wind. And that’s not to talk about the waves. And that’s not to
1:57:23 talk about the nuclear energy. I think the people in the future may think we were pretty stupid
1:57:31 to be so scared of nuclear energy, which has killed a few dozens of people, that we went ahead
1:57:37 and just, you know, stopped all the nuclear plants and began pouring ungodly amounts of greenhouse
1:57:42 gases into the atmosphere that will kill millions of people. That will seem ludicrous to them.
1:57:46 I think this is, and I won’t keep you too much longer, but I think this, I would be remiss if I
1:57:56 didn’t ask you to comment on or describe your own engineering projects with carbon neutrality or
1:58:02 zero emissions as an objective, because this is not just idle hand waving for you. This is
1:58:09 something that you’ve taken a keen engineering mind to. And I think that was not mentioned in
1:58:17 your bio, even though it’s yet another one of these examples of extreme curiosity and capability.
1:58:20 Could you just describe what you’ve done in that arena, please?
1:58:26 So this is another area that gives me immense enjoyment. Again, another kind of like lightning
1:58:33 bolt to my soul is to try to create infrastructure, buildings and cars and planes and things
1:58:40 that have a zero carbon footprint. And I look at it as an intellectual challenge
1:58:48 when I’ve read that people said, well, we cannot have a zero carbon footprint society until 2050.
1:58:54 That’s what the authorities say. You know already, Tim, I’m going to say, why? Why not? Why not? Why
1:59:01 not? I’m going to question that authority. So about three years ago, we undertook to build a new
1:59:06 headquarters for a company in Silver Spring, Maryland that would have a zero carbon footprint,
1:59:12 not in the best climate, Maryland. It’s got its good seasons and its bad seasons.
1:59:17 Right in the middle of a city, Silver Spring, Maryland is a built up suburb of Washington,
1:59:24 D.C. And for the manufacture of medicines and stuff, which is a somewhat of an energy-intensive
1:59:32 activity. So we built 150,000 square foot zero carbon footprint building, which turned out to
1:59:38 be the largest zero carbon footprint building in the entire world. And we inaugurated it a couple
1:59:44 years ago. It turns out we produce more energy than we use each year now, two years running.
1:59:51 We did this by just thinking carefully about energy and how to manage it. So for example,
2:00:00 we have underneath the building 50 wells, each of which go down 500 feet. And they exchange
2:00:06 heat from the building with the coolness of the earth in the summer, bring the coolness back up.
2:00:12 And in the winter, they exchange coolness of the building with the steady temperature of the earth
2:00:18 in the winter to keep the building warm. The sides of the building are cladded with solar panels.
2:00:26 The entire building has a brain that automatically opens the windows and closes the windows to allow
2:00:32 natural ventilation. It’s a role model for many other buildings and lots of designers and engineers
2:00:38 have come over there. Another example is in the delivery of our organs. When we right now we refurbish
2:00:46 organs, lungs in particular, that a decedent has donated or the decedent’s family has agreed to
2:00:52 the donation. But when the transplant surgeons look at that lung, they say it’s too full of fluid
2:00:57 and mucus, we can’t use it, throw it away. So what United Therapeutics says is give us your
2:01:03 lonely, unwanted, unloved lungs, fly them to Silver Spring, Maryland, we will refurbish them,
2:01:09 we’ll show through a high-speed digital network to the transplant surgeons all across the country
2:01:14 that the organ is good as new through this digital network and bronchoscope and X-ray and all that
2:01:20 stuff. And then we fly the lungs back out to them and we’ve saved over 150 lives this way Tim.
2:01:26 How do you refurbish a lung? First you have to remove it from the dying body. A dying body is
2:01:33 a terrible place to be. So we remove it from the decedent, we cool it down, so we kind of give it
2:01:38 a, I won’t say we freeze it, but we cool it down very low temperature. We fly it to Maryland and
2:01:45 we put it in a glass dome. And in this glass dome we have tubes, we have a kind of artificial blood
2:01:52 and air pumping. So we’ve made a kind of isolated artificial body just for that lung. And we have
2:01:57 expert technicians who work these, sorry I don’t know the exact name of the equipment, but it sucks
2:02:04 out mucus and they operate on the lungs like it was a person, but it’s just an isolated pair of
2:02:11 lungs. And the transplant doctors who could be in Texas or Florida, wherever, they tell us through
2:02:16 the digital screen in the voice, put the bronchoscope down the left side or down the right side or go
2:02:22 further, give me, they see this and they know what they want. So our technicians know how to do this
2:02:30 and within four hours in almost two-thirds of the time we were able to take what was a non-compliant
2:02:36 dead piece of tissue and turn it into a nicely breathing lung. It’s so beautiful to watch Tim,
2:02:41 the lungs go in and out like a butterfly’s wings going up and down. In fact, you could see a video
2:02:46 of it on that Washington Post article you were mentioning. And then we cool the lungs back down
2:02:53 and we fly it to the transplant surgeon and 100% of the time that they have accepted these lungs,
2:02:58 they have had successful lung transplants with, like I mentioned, over 150 people walking out
2:03:04 of the hospital. But I mentioned this because this is a lot of flying around, flying here,
2:03:09 flying there, you know, helicopters going back and forth, planes. And if I’m going to make an
2:03:14 unlimited supply of organs, and you remember all those numbers we talked about at the beginning
2:03:19 of the call, the hundreds of thousands of people who needs these organs, that is going to be a
2:03:25 humongous carbon footprint. We could have said to ourselves, well, we’re doing such a good thing,
2:03:31 we’re saving all these lives, we could be permitted to foul our atmosphere because it’s
2:03:36 balanced by the good things we’re doing. But instead, we like to ask ourselves like the
2:03:42 challenging question, how can we do like the good thing and the right thing at the same time?
2:03:47 How can we manufacture all these lungs and deliver them with a zero carbon footprint?
2:03:54 And the solution came from the technology of electric helicopters, which are powered by renewable
2:04:00 energy that can fly these organs from one place to the other without adding any carbon footprint
2:04:06 at all. And I will be a little bit of a sous-sayer here. I am absolutely convinced that in this decade,
2:04:12 the 2020s, we will be delivering manufactured organs by electric helicopter.
2:04:18 I love it. I have, I will say one, I made sheet and sneak in one or two more, but
2:04:25 I love talking with you. Likewise, this is just endlessly, endlessly interesting.
2:04:30 So many, so many different pathways into the labyrinth. But I need to make sure, I suppose,
2:04:36 since my job is supposedly interviewer that I can find my way back out. I have read that…
2:04:37 Alan Watts will show you the way.
2:04:42 Alan Watts will show me the way. He does have a most seductive and hypnotic voice
2:04:47 for those who haven’t heard. I recommend. I have read that a favorite saying of yours is,
2:04:52 quote, “identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them.” End quote.
2:04:57 Can you please speak to that or explain what that means for you?
2:05:01 Yes. So, identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them.
2:05:12 Means to try to find a, I’ll put it in business terms, a market area that is ignored, a unmet
2:05:17 need. But it doesn’t really have to just apply to medicine. It can apply to any area of life.
2:05:24 And the way I would phrase it, Tim, in just like, you know, a very natural, almost folklorish way,
2:05:30 is that it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.
2:05:38 In a business school, back at UCLA, one person we studied a lot was the experience of General
2:05:45 Electric under Jack Welch. And he had an adage, which from a business sense was, I think, very,
2:05:51 very smart. He said, “If you can’t be number one or number two in a market, don’t even try,
2:05:57 because you will have to spend an amount of money equal to the revenues of the number one or a
2:06:02 number two in that market to become the number one or number two in the market. If you’re not
2:06:08 the number one or number two, you will always struggle to be profitable. But if you are the
2:06:14 number one or number two, your profitability is assured.” So, what that means translated to all
2:06:22 of our activities is if there’s an area, like, for example, a number of people have said, you know,
2:06:27 we should get involved. We, when I say we, my company, Knight Therapeutics, should get involved
2:06:34 in creating a vaccine for COVID. And to me, well, you know, it’s not a corridor of indifference.
2:06:41 There are dozens of companies working on a vaccine for COVID. So, that’s not what we would
2:06:46 want to do. It’s very unlikely we’d ever be successful on that. Somebody else said, “Well,
2:06:52 how about these people, the COVID long haulers, the people who have survived from a very difficult
2:06:58 course of COVID, and they’ve got chronic lung problems that are bothering them months and
2:07:04 likely years after the effect?” I said, “Yes, that’s a corridor of indifference. Nobody is thinking
2:07:10 about the long haulers, the people who now have, you know, chronic lung problems because of the
2:07:16 havoc that COVID racked in their lungs. Let’s develop some medicines for these chronic long
2:07:25 haulers.” Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. On a related, maybe a related note in some
2:07:30 respects, this is a question that doesn’t always work. So, I’ll take the blame if it doesn’t. But
2:07:37 if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message, a quote, a word, an image,
2:07:43 a question, anything out to billions of people, let’s just assume they all speak English for the
2:07:48 sake of argument. What might you put on that billboard? I think Apple, Computer, and Steve Jobs
2:07:54 got there before me. Think different. Think different. Why is that important? Because the
2:08:01 solutions, Albert Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created.
2:08:07 You have to solve it on a different level.” If we all think the exact same way,
2:08:13 we will never get out of the ruts that we’re in. The only way to get out of the problems that we
2:08:20 face is to think differently, to go down the corridor of indifference, to question authority,
2:08:27 to be diverse. Thinking different is the pathway to solving problems that exist today.
2:08:36 Looking back at everything we’ve talked about, and looking at all of the copious pages of notes
2:08:44 for prep in front of me, it strikes me that you’ve forged many paths for yourself and helped others
2:08:50 to do the same by thinking different, but also thinking brightly, coming back to Alan Watts
2:08:56 yet again, the yin and the yang, and seeing the positive, looking for the positive in different
2:09:02 circumstances, different situations. Do you have any advice or recommendations for people
2:09:09 who struggle to do that, who are maybe mired in a sense of hopelessness might be too strong a word,
2:09:15 but those who tend to see the glass as half full and perhaps as a result of that tend to see
2:09:21 half the spectrum of options or solutions? It’s a really difficult question to answer, Tim,
2:09:30 because everybody’s situation is so unique and so different. And I do not doubt that for many,
2:09:37 many people, it is just a bad life, whether it started that way or ended up the way. And it’s
2:09:45 almost impossible to see a way out. The perspective that I take is that I try to stay in touch with
2:09:54 my ancestors. I think about the great-grandmothers who had to bear children in the worst of possible
2:10:03 circumstances. I think about all of my partner Bena’s great-grandmothers who were picking cotton
2:10:11 as slaves and had to work all day being bitten up by bugs, burning in the sun, feet deep in mud,
2:10:17 and then bear a child at the last moment. So whether it’s like my great-grandparents from
2:10:24 Eastern Europe or hers from the African diaspora, they had nothing to look forward to other than
2:10:30 just the hope that they were going to have some children and that maybe those children might
2:10:36 have a little bit of a better life than they did. And if not their children, their children’s children.
2:10:42 So their only purpose in life, their only hope in life, their only joy in life was to make a
2:10:48 generation and that maybe that generation would be better. Now, here we are in America or really
2:10:53 most any other country in the world. We’re at a point now where like eight out of 10 people have a
2:11:00 smartphone with access to all the world’s knowledge and information, with access to countless
2:11:06 amounts of music and training through YouTube. There are many people in the world still in dire
2:11:11 circumstances, but the vast majority of people are doing better than people have ever done before
2:11:18 in history. So I say to myself and I would ask, you know, somebody else looking through the world
2:11:25 darkly right now, looking at the glass half full, I would say how much worse it must have been in
2:11:32 the past. What do I owe to my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents
2:11:38 who suffered and toiled, who barely managed to survive to produce another generation?
2:11:44 What do I owe to them? I owe to them to make the absolute most possible out of my life and that’s
2:11:49 what I’m going to do. Hot damn, Martin. I’m ready to get out there and get amongst it. I have so
2:11:56 enjoyed this conversation. There are 79 more hours we could do just in round one. I won’t
2:12:05 subject you to that and I’m so grateful that you were willing to make the time to have this
2:12:11 conversation. Thank you so much. My pleasure being with you, Tim. And is there anything else you would
2:12:20 like to say to suggest or ask of those listening before we bring this to a close? Two of my best
2:12:26 friends and people who I think are the smartest, most creative, most happy-loving people I know,
2:12:33 Paul Mann and D.A. Wallach both said to me that your podcast is the best and Martin,
2:12:39 if Tim Ferriss invites you on his podcast, you have to go on it. So thank you, D.A. and thank you,
2:12:47 Paul. Well, thanks to them also for me. I have for many months, my whole team knows this,
2:12:54 been hoping to have you on. I had high hopes coming into it. You exceeded all of those high hopes,
2:13:02 which seems to be a pattern for you. And I’m just very grateful and happy that we had a chance
2:13:10 to connect. So thank you again. And for everyone listening, you can find Martin on Instagram at
2:13:18 TransBinary, Twitter @SkyBiome. We will link to everything in the show notes that have mentioned
2:13:24 in this conversation, the books and everything you can imagine that we discussed will be available
2:13:32 in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be kind, practice love night, think
2:13:38 different, think brightly and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing
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This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #427 “Michael Lewis — Inside the Mind of the Iconic Writer” and episode #487 “Dr. Martine Rothblatt — A Masterclass on Asking Better Questions and Peering Into the Future.”
Please enjoy!
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Start
[04:13] Notes about this supercombo format.
[05:16] Enter Michael Lewis.
[05:54] Why Michael quit his well-paid job to become a full-time author.
[12:58] Liar’s Poker is a cautionary tale, not a how-to book.
[15:16] On ambition and the metrics of success.
[18:31] Maximizing self-satisfaction, optimizing the writing process, and learning to sing.
[20:51] The value of having an impolite editor on your side.
[23:52] On the merits of productive laziness.
[28:13] How Michael determines if a project should proceed.
[29:51] Michael’s billboard.
[32:45] Enter Martine Rothblatt.
[33:14] Martine’s appreciation for Alan Watts’ book on human identity.
[35:34] Martine’s thoughts on AI-human coexistence in the movie Her.
[36:31] BINA48 and realistic human simulations in media.
[39:53] Martine’s role models and inspirations.
[41:20] When Martine started a biotech company to save her daughter’s life.
[52:44] Glaxo Wellcome’s misconceptions about Martine’s successful drug.
[56:17] Martine’s interest in satellite communication systems.
[1:00:33] Promoting scientific literacy and curiosity.
[1:05:20] Questioning authority and Martine’s transgender journey.
[1:10:28] Martine’s non-binary gender identity.
[1:12:34] Key decisions in Martine’s transition.
[1:13:28] The need for genetic information protection laws.
[1:16:00] South American population and organ transplant research.
[1:21:42] Vagus nerve manipulation for various therapies.
[1:31:25] Martine’s Alzheimer’s cognitive enabler patent.
[1:38:17] The Rothblatt family’s “love nights” tradition.
[1:43:54] The possibility of machines experiencing love.
[1:49:20] Ethical considerations for future technology.
[1:52:44] Current practices future generations might view as barbaric.
[1:57:42] United Therapeutics’ zero-carbon-footprint headquarters.
[2:00:32] Refurbishing unusable lungs to save lives.
[2:04:45] United Therapeutics’ focus on long-term COVID-19 effects.
[2:07:26] Martine’s billboard.
[2:08:27] Advice for finding positivity in life.
[2:11:48] Parting thoughts.
*
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