#364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries

Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run fly out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So now I also do personal questions. Now it's seen. A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal emperoscellar. S

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Anytime you want. Check it out, go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM. To get started. Safi, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. Glad to be here.

And I'm gonna read your bio here This is this is one of the One of these several I would say. interviews that I've done where it's not gonna be a challenge, as I said to one of my employees earlier. to find things to talk about. It's gonna be a matter of

uh trying to ask you all the things I would like to ask you, but I'll give people some context first. So By way of bio. Sophie Bacall. You can find him on Twitter at Safi Bakal, that's S A F I B A H C A L L. received his PhD in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi Kovan and a biotechnology company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. Sophie was named Ernston Young's New England biotechnology entrepreneur of the year. In twenty eleven, he worked with President Obama's Council of Science Advisors on the future of national research.

Safi, you are most recently author of Loon Shots. That is the title, subtitle, How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Wind Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, which has some of the best cover blurbs I've ever seen on any book. We might talk about that. Daniel Conman does not give a lot of blurbs for books. Loon Schuss describes what an idea from physic tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better. It has been selected for Washington Post's Ten leadership books to watch for two thousand nineteen. Inc's ten business books you need to read in two thousand nineteen. And business insiders fourteen books everyone will be reading in two thousand nineteen. That would be good for you if that's if that's ends up being the case. And uh We we go back a ways, so I've been really excited to catch up.

Because our lives have changed quite a lot since uh we last were spending And I thought we could just start at the very beginning. So could you describe for people how we first met? And uh a little bit of the context.

All right, sure. So we were at um This was maybe ten years or so ago. And we were at um A uh at the Sundance in where is Sundance? Sundance is in Utah. It's Sundance in Utah and Uh there's a conference organized every year by Peter Thiel and Orrin Hoffman, and Orin's a good friend of mine for many years.

And I was sitting at a lunch table and I just taken up as sort of a hobby. Triathlon, long distance triathlon. And I had just learned for the first time

Kind of real swimming, not just sort of slap splashing around in a how to you know, how can you'cause splashing on a pool, you you can swim a you know, a couple of laps and you get tired. But that's not gonna help you if you wanna swim one point two miles in the ocean. So I had

found this course called Total Immersion and I was just having such a blast, like Because it takes you from You know, a a a two out of ten to like a five to seven to really really quickly. You can like knock out one point two miles.

No problem. So I was sitting at lunch and somehow there was This guy kinda Quiet but happy guy uh next to me. And he had also just taken up total immersion swimming. And then we just totally connected on how amazing it was and like how it can transform your swimming.

And how it's a metaphor for life. And I started using that as a metaphor. For learning. Yeah, in breaking down everything you know about life about like a swim stroke and all the bad habits that you learn. And replacing them and how Interesting it is that just small little tweaks.

can take you so rapidly from a two out of ten to a six out of ten or a seven or an eight. And what kind of a joy that is and how that can apply in so many areas of life. And this other guy sitting next to me was like, Yes, yes, absolutely. And I just did total immersion too. And I feel exactly the same way. And then Since then we've been friends. And uh total immersion in in a way is uh such a perfect introduction and metaphor for a lot of what you do in life and what impresses me about you

And uh as you mentioned, uh a a great example of learning something in a A typical way. Right, because it's not just looking at the small things that have a disproportionate output or testing them, but also

It is fundamentally about testing assumptions, right? And if for those people who don't know, we won't spend the entire interview on total immersion, but it's it's a great lead-in. Because Speaking of someone who's uh born and raised on Long Island, surrounded by water, had a few near drowning experiences when I was very young, I did not learn how to swim, meaning I could not do to and fro in a decent sized pool until my thirties.

and had a a really acute fear of water and after about a week of total immersion by myself with a book, keep in mind, not even video at that point was doing twenty, thirty laps at a time. Which is just bonkers to think about. And I'd failed up to that point, even though

Another friend, Chris Saka, had uh Actually no, it wasn't Chris Sok at that point before that. Another friend, Chris Ashington, had assigned me a New Year's resolution. We realized We're more likely to actually fulfill our nearest. resolutions if we assign each other resolutions with sort of rewards and punishments. And mine was to do a one kilometer open water swim. And his was to drink nothing stronger than green tea for a year because he liked double espresso.

But I had failed up to that point, in part because every lesson started the same way, which was here's a kickboard. And go do ten laps in the pool. And after A lap and a half, I'm like I can't even feel my legs, I'm so tired. Right. And the lesson was as good as done. And then you take total immersion and one of the first things Terry Laughlin Encourages.

uh you to think about is minimizing The legs. And minimizing drag. And it's just a rethinking of the entire of the entire approach to swimming. So

You more than almost anyone I've met. I feel like ten years ago. We're like having the same conversation ten years ago. And it you know, the really cool thing about it, the way it applies to so many areas of life that I found is A counterintuitive take On something that everybody does or believes is true. And that is

Well, if you're swimming forward you want to see where you're going, so you raise your head. And so that's exactly what's wrong with swimming. With most like casual swimming, because then you're like kicking your feet. to maintain horizontal balance. And by kicking your feet, you're using, you know, eighty or ninety percent of your energy is just going to correct bad position. That's why you're tired.

And so in so many areas of life When you learn this kind of bad habit that's this very natural that every human does. Once you become self aware of that. It's really not hard to ch just put your head down.

Yeah. And don't kick. That's it. That's basically the magic. Put your head down and don't kick. And that's it. So many different areas of life, it turns out. There are these bad habits, these things that you

think you should be doing or you're programmed to do or everybody tells you to do And they create drag. And then Some day somebody maybe it's Tim Ferris.

You know, here's this really counterintuitive weird trick. Don't do that. Do this. And all of a sudden the drag goes away and you can swim.

A mile. And y you know, I actually think it reminds me you w you mentioned we we were talking a little bit about Donny Kahneman and how he transformed economics. It's very similar. Right, because what he said. Yeah, for

economist for two hundred years had said Oh there's one way to think about you know, incentives and how they influence behavior. Everybody calculates you know, net present expected value of my financial return doing X and

doing Y and if X is greater than Y I do X. The rational actors. Just a rubber. You know I'm a psychologist and that's like

Bullshit. That's just not what happens. That's not what people do. people operate on these little rules of thumb and sometimes X may rationally be greater than Y, but they do Y anyway. For these reasons.

And it was it's not Rocket it was a very simple adjustment, like hold your head flat and don't kick. Yeah. It was basically saying, Hey, humans are humans. They're not calculators.

That's it. Yeah. And that Transformed economics. So

There you see just like The same Total immersion swimming trick. Which changes swimming. is what Kahneman did for economics. It changed economics with this one

Idea. Actually humans are humans. They operate on some heuristics, not N P V calculations. And economics were like, That's not possible. They operate on NPV. Like, I don't think so. I kinda know humans and they don't do that. Which is in retrospect sounds sort of obvious.

But it was a big Big change. Yeah, it's um And you know more well, you've forgotten more probably in the last week than I'll ever know about physics, but it it uh As a layman who's

interested in science but by no means. a a real scientist. Uh ru it makes Me think of uh Richard Feynman and I'm gonna I'm going to butcher this, I'm sure, but something along the lines of it doesn't matter how pretty your theory is, if it doesn't fit with experiment, it's wrong. That's right. And there's a lot of

Disregarding Yeah. uh perhaps the obvious in favor of this these legacy theories. Uh That just do not fit. the sort of the the reality that is that is right in front of you. Funny uh

Well maybe not funny, but Little known fact, I was actually a subject and son of some of uh Kahneman's studies when I was an undergrad. I didn't for my four dollars an hour or whatever, hitting a space bar with various psychological studies in Green Hall. That's right, people that he was uh at Princeton and you were at Princeton and Actually that's sort of the connection. Like I think he was a n neighbor of my mom and dad who 'Cause I grew up in Princeton. Oh I Right. Well, we'll talk about we'll talk about growing up in towns like Princeton another time. I didn't grow up in Princeton, but I grew up in uh the end of Long Island, which has some similar dynamics.

Let's let's zoom out a bit and we're gonna do this quite a bit in this conversation, I think, because I want to Talk about Safi. the individual and your personal practices and your thinking because I think there's a lot I don't think there is a lot to explore there. You you are one of the most systematic People I know.

But I also want to give people Uh the context on your career and some of what you've done and your past, because I think it's helpful. And we were just talking about Terry Laughlin who uh

passed away not all too long ago. And He uh was hospitaliz short. shortly after Uh just before and then shortly after my my interview with him, which was the last long four interview he ever did.

And he had cancer and then a stroke that was a complication and a number of things following and then he passed away. Which was very sad. What is your History with cancer. in the sense that uh why did you get involved? With

Anything related to cancer. I was uh Uh I started in academic science and theoretical physics and um After a few years and it this may be a a personality flaw, but I um

Uh and it's taken me many years to appreciate this, but I Really good. Excited. All right, I'll I'll explain this in physics geek language and then I'll try to tra

The way I think about it is I couple to the derivative. I'll ex Break that down. So the derivative is a slope. So you know, zero derivative means no slope and big derivative means a very high slope.

And then physics. When you say you couple to something, it You know, an electron is traveling along and has some coupling constant to the photon and that's how it interacts with light and that's always the case. And so when I say I couple to derivative, it means that I derive energy From the slope, from the slope of learning.

And so when I started in theoretical physics. I was learning an enormous amount. And then after I I was in one area of theoretical physics called particle physics, it's the science of the very small what happens inside a proton or a neutron, that quirks.

And After a few years I sort of felt like I had you know, gotten very deep in that tunnel and I wasn't learning as much and it the I mean there were uh.

You know, I'm not gonna exaggerate, there's a ton still out there to learn. But it wasn't like drinking from a fire hose, like starting off feeling like an imposter. We're starting off. being barely able to swim one lap. And then going to swimming a kilometer, no problem.

And uh You know, physics is Got particle physics has gotten a little stuck in the last twenty or thirty years in some sense, which we can Talk about some other time.

So I switched to a totally different area. After about five years. And then I got into the business world. I realize I'm kind of far from your cancer question. That's okay. But it's Um

I switched out of academic science because after about five years you know, in each of these areas I felt like I'd sort of learning. I wanted to learn something new. So I went into the business world. Went into McKinsey.

Didn't it. Anything about I don't I didn't even own a suit. Actually I remember can I take a digression for a weird little story? I love digressions for weird stories. I'll remember I'll if if need be, and I don't think that's getting far from your game. That's a question. But like sort of a funny story. So

Uh It's kinda how I got ended up in cancer and I started off in this weird physics place. So I I'd only I basically Mm. hadn't set foot off a university.

Until I was thirty. because I you know, my parents are academic scientists. We just mentioned Princeton. And so I spent a lot of time Around there and then. uh college, grad school, postdoc.

And then I was sort of getting a little like Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Just you know, write papers and grants and referee and this thing conferences. So I started Exploring as some friend had been to this

company called McKinsey which I'd never heard of and they said look sort of interesting problem solving. It's sort of like I'm like all right I'll Do that, sign you know, sent an application interview comes and Uh my friend told me y you need to wear a suit. I'm like Wow, I I haven't had a suit since my bar mitzvah, you know, like

eighteen years ago or whatever. So I asked like where do you buy a suit? And I went in and it was just like Incredible place with these super expensive clothes and like it was the most

amazing s thing I'd ever seen. It was called the men's warehouse. And so I bought a suit and I felt like a million I paid like a hundred and twenty dollars or something. I was like, this is like ten X more than I've ever paid for any clothing item. And I uh and I And I felt like a million bucks and I I fly to New York for this interview with this firm. And uh

Yeah, I I I remember coming into the city and like getting off and going walking up Park Avenue. And I'm wearing like this old beat up ski jacket'cause that you know, I used I would go skiing and I didn't realise that people also have some fancy jacket. It's like everybody around me is wearing this like Like the overcoat. Exactly. So I got this like

I feel like a million bucks'cause I have this hundred and twenty dollar men's warehouse suit and like You know. I probably spent eighteen dollars on the men's warehouse tie and I'm feeling really extravagant. And then I'm like walking down the street and I have this beat up old ski jacket with like still the ski tags hanging off of it. On top of your men's warehouse. My men's warehouse and I'm like Why am I the only one wearing this on this whole street? I'm like, uh huh.

That's weird. And so then I get to my interview and I like I hide the jacket in the coat closet before I get in there. But anyway I uh Did that and that was drinking from a fire hose'cause I'd like never set up. foot off of university and all of a sudden

I'm wearing a suit and I'm worn a suit in well Like since my bar mitzvah and then They throw you I mean they educate they take time to sort of educate you a little bit online. That was super fun, all these Yeah. professors fly in to just educate you. And I'm like, This is the best thing ever.

They're paying me And all these professors have been flying into like This four week course to this on this resort with you know, thirty people from all over the world who are really interesting people my age.

And people are flying in just to teach us like all day long. I'm like This is like This is awesome. And I'm learning all this new stuff. And I was drinking from a fire hose and it was sort of going from

Well, in this case it was a zero out of ten. I I never even balanced it. Checkbook. Like if I had Six dollars to buy a burrito in San Francisco.

I was happy. Like that's awesome. And um But after a couple years you're like oh Okay, now I got Like

what people do for a living and how it works and the business stuff and then I was Like how do I combine Yeah, I d I don't think I just want to be a guy who sort of Whispers to people, here's what you might want to do if you want to Build your business.

I wanted to sort of do something, but I wanted to do something. back in the science world. And also something that was more about I there uh, you know, let's make more money, which is you know what big companies are trying to do and what you're as a consultant, you're trying to help them.

And in academia it's about the search for truth. So I wanted to do something different that would feel like It may be a little corny or cliche, but You're helping people who are suffering, and there's something you could be very selfish about it.

There's something just very satisfying. Even if you just think at the local level, like There's a kid in a hospital bed. And family's gonna lose that kid and if something you can do could help save that kid and so that family and that kid have a

decades of life together. Even if that's just one kid. That s feels so much more satisfying than you know, having X or Y or Z in the bank or even publishing another original research paper, so that's on your If you can

see a family experiencing life together for decades and they might not have That's incredibly satisfying. And so I sort of stumbled into cancer tape. Get back to your question. Because that was a a really hot research era. This was eighteen, nineteen years ago.

That was a really exciting area and there was really Very little progress. made in that area. Spent about six months or a year kind of talking to scientists. at different universities who had might have some promising ideas and didn't want to work with venture capitalists.

Uh and thought that physics was Sort of like this exotic weird bird. Um They were just like this.

guy who's coming to talk to us about biology and chemistry and medicine and oncology and he's a physicist. So it was a mutual interest there. And eventually started a company. And just got more and more into it. into it and interested in Seeing these individual lives and how little progress had been made and how many good ideas were floating.

And if I could make A difference. Bridging some of those ideas. into into the real world into the commercial world, into the business world, into the industry where they could

become drugs that could save lives, even if you just save one kid. uh help one family. That would feel incredibly satisfying. More satisfying than writing a paper or making money. So that's kind of how I got into Cancer and oncology.

And I wanted to thank you for that. Uh I had never heard uh the men's warehouse story either. This is this is I think s uh something I wanted to establish early on because Uh it it gives an indication of

where you were pointed. Right. And then when we get into The Uh the habits and the routines and the frameworks and so on that you use personally or

within organizations it it it shows some of the how, but I wanted to at least get to some of the why. First. Uh Let's let's take a bit of a a ninety degree turn. And this is gonna seem strange.

But I I thought this would be a a good illustration of And not not just Safi the sort of s scientific Innovator, but You you the person because they go together.

Yeah. So I'm gonna Uh, I want you to I'm gonna read something and then you can give us context for what this what this is and why. Uh why you have this habit or had it.

I would get so excited when I stumbled across a perfect passage and its beautiful music. I would preserve it in an Evernote file, whip out my phone dinner, and read that passage to whoever my poor dinner companion happened to be pounding the table to the rhythm, pointing out the beauty and the choices. See how he did X here and not Y. That's why it works. Silence. No one cared, but I enjoyed it. What is this about? Oh man. I don't know how you find this stuff, but Uh So that's to do with another detail.

was uh with this company that I started for thirteen or so years. And then through oh weird series of coincidences and stumbles and different things. ended up um

Writing. in writing. And so first I wrote a kind of a long form essay and then You know, it was sort of fifteen thousand words. I edit it a lot and people seemed to like it and then Some Much more experienced author.

friends and journalist friends would like Nobody publishes. So that turned into a book. And as I started

Uh with writing. Uh I kinda broke it down a little like swimming. Like what are the you think you know. People tell you a bunch of stuff.

And the more you get into it, the more you realise a lot of stuff that people tell you is really not very helpful or often wrong. And could you give any examples? Oh just like don't use passive voice. There are actually some great reasons you do want to use passive voice, but if you I I get this picture of like this old school mommet, like hitting you with a ruler.

from the nineteen. Don't use passive voice. Never use passive voice. Always use active voice. Then you read some of these like phenomenally beautiful passages and you look in them and they're using passive voice left and right and like Really?'Cause These guys are pr like some of these guys have won the you know, Nobel Prize, for example. Or Pelzer Prize and they're using p so why?

And um just for people who are could you give an example of of active and passive voice for people who may not be familiar with the The um you know active voice is Johnny

flu the helicopter to go put out uh And then um Uh

It's so funny, I don't like do these things. Uh A helicopter was brought in to go Mm-hmm. You know.

view the fire from high above and film it for video. And so when the helicopter was brought in as kind of passive. Johnny flew the helicopter. Now in this case, for example Why would you want to use the passive voice? If you're telling a story You're telling the story of the fire. Do you really need to know that Johnny flew that helicopter to put out that I think this is an example and something I seem like that specific helicopter.

Do you really it's actually kind of distracting. Because Johnny is kind of irrelevant to the story. So what you're doing is you're inserting something in the reader's mind. That's an irrelevant distraction that you'll never come back to. That's just Is a glitch in the storytelling.

So That's one example. Mm-hmm. um of why you want to use but there are many examples of why you wanna use but anyways As part of I found that I um people that sort of said, Oh, you're a pretty good writer, I think that's

meaning for like a physicist. So that's a really low bar. And uh or even a you know, a CEO or a public company like that's a really low bar. You're pretty good for a public company executive. I'm like Thanks. It's like I'm a one point five out of a rather than a one. Um But I just started to find it fun.

to try to break down writing, like you break down swimming or break down other things and then how do you Trained to get better. And so I read a lot and Um Uh

Eventually I came up with a kind of The training. And uh I would write Yeah. Drop my daughter off it.

school in the morning, I come back, kinda lock myself in this little eight by eight Cave, shut down everything and just sort of modes of writing, whether you're you're reading, you're Writing or

Editing. And uh you know, five, six o'clock, pick my daughter up from school. Daycare, bring her back, dinner. And then my wife would check out it like

Seven thirty eight, she gets up really early and she was just done. So from eight o'clock on Every day for almost two years. I would bring out one of actually just a couple books. And uh often I would just go to we were living on Massav in Cambridge and so there are a lot of great

bars at a little restaurant. I'm gonna go to the bar counter. And it's a little bit more. Yeah and I would spend the next two hours usually just on two paragraphs.

Were these the same books or different books each time? Are they consistently the same? Almost always the same. Actually I would Focus on probably two books. And I would just dissect a paragraph or two from those two books for almost a year. And

Um and that was One of the other things like With swimming, you know. everybody says keep your head up or it's natural to keep your head up. There's this natural inclination to try to Read a ton.

Read widely, read all these authors, and you get all these lists of here's my favorite twenty authors, like Oh, I should read those twenty. There's somebody else's favorite twenty, oh I should read those twenty. And so I kinda threw all that out. And said I'm gonna actually focus on I don't know much about literature. I never you know, I did sports and I did like math and science.

And that's it. I really didn't read it. So I didn't So I have like a big gap. And then I'm not going to be able to Uh two books that really resonated for me. What did you pick? Uh Nabokov.

Short stories. Uh, and I'll explain why. And Donald Hall. Uh essays after eighty. And uh this is for Just to develop an ear.

For writing. And I just read A paragraph or two or three from those books. Each night and then I would

Break it down. Like Why did this guy use I wasn't reading for content, I was just reading for Yeah. I had read a little bit of this and a little bit of that and reading here and then I picked some friend I think had sent me

point of meaning in bulk of short stories. And by the way, I should say, I don't think I've read anything else if it's just that one And when I opened it up to at random the book of the short stories. And I started reading his sentences like my jaw dropped. I didn't know the English language could

Do that. How is this guy doing that? It's probably sort of like your sports thing, like analy you know, with athletes like how to How the fricking hell is this guy doing it? And it's just so different at such a higher level than anyway. So that's why I would take

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

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

And Nabuc Nabokov I pick because his sentences and and rhythm and musicality of his writing, which is like Jaw dropping in every one. Like everyone is a ten out of ten. It's not like oh there's a great sentence or a great pass. Not a one hit wonder. It's y yeah, it's just like how the

Freaking hell does this guy do this? Um and again I have to say I'm not a literature guy or an English guy and there's Ninety nine. percent of like famous authors I've not read. I just Couldn't believe.

And so I was How does this guy do this? But it was once I After doing this sort of over and over and then read th there were a few other beautiful passages I've done and I would capture them in my Evernote.

And then I would highlight the word. Like why this word in yellow? And then sometimes I would bold l like he did a lot of Use a lot of alliterations and I would highlight the first letters just to see his alliterations. And then I would highlight the transitions, and then I would break down the transitions between paragraphs. into like well there's seven different types of transitions. Here's an example of one. Here's Oh this is the pivot transition and other.

And so I started to get a sense of Of that. And I started having this weird experience after doing this for a year or so. Which was

I would read passages and I would hear music. I would hear them. Uh Um I would hear them in my head, but o but as music and as harm. So when I was

read for example in the book if I would hear This is a little weird to say all this stuff,'cause it's like private internal mind. This is the podcast for that. Nobody listens to it, right? No, it's just you and me and a handful of our best friends. It's just you and me, right? So it's all private stuff. I would just hear this thing like music and it was in perfect harmony. And then I'd pick up the newspaper or I'd pick up some other stuff or some random book. And I couldn't read more than two sentences.

'Cause it just sounded like clashing. Well, the transitioning and the and the use of passive and it didn't e this word could have been that word. And I'm like, I can't even read more than three sentences'cause it just It's grading. And then I go back to You know, this other thing where there was perfect harmony.

And uh it was just musical. It was just I wouldn't even at some point I just I wouldn't even know why. But uh one thing would just grate and I get like these It's like somebody rubbing fingers on chalkboard. And the other one it's just like uh So can we can we talk about

Decisions a bit more. Sure. Okay. Uh because you are examining in that case decisions of a writer. So you're you're you're doing a s forensic analysis. of why certain things happen, why certain choices were made.

And this this may be a natural place, maybe not, you can you can tell me. to talk a little bit about a totally different field, although similar sounding last name, uh Gary Kasparov. Oh car could you Describe.

To me why you find Kasparov. Interesting. Uh I and who and who he is, for people who don't know. Okay, another book that I really enjoyed was his uh book, Life Imitates Chess. I love that book.

And uh But for a lot of reasons. I I have a a real admiration of like excellent chess players'cause it's a it's something that takes incredible focus. Incredible commitment. Uh and people who do it really well do something I could never do and Um it's just it's so impressive. Um

So I've always Um Found it fascinating to follow. Uh learn about great chess players. And I actually I I listened to some podcasts you did with a guy named Josh.

Wait skin. Which was Fascinating. I actually loved his book too. I w and then because of that I went and got I didn't know he was before got his book which was awesome about um Yeah the art of learning um love of learning. The the art of learning you guys would love each other. At some point you should meet. Yeah and I I it can'cause he he did chess and then did martial arts, and I did martial arts for a long time and and then physics. Um So um

Kasparov. uh, as you mean it was the is the longest reigning chess champion in history. And he wrote this book about how life imitates chess where he kind of breaks down what he Dead.

And uh It's it's so fascinating, but one particular lesson really resonated For me. Um

As a mindset shift. for how to think about making decisions Or analyzing decisions. both in business life and in personal life. So Casper I've said kinda.

One of if not the key. to his success. Uh in chess. Was After a game, whether he won or lost.

Rather than say analyze the game by saying, Oh, I moved Pon to Bishop. Uh, you know, Pontake's Bishop here and that was a bad move and that lost the game, so next time I shouldn't Dupont takes bishop. Rather than analyze the move and the outcome, which is what most

Chess players too. And you can call that kind of an outcome mindset. He analyzed How did I arrive at the decision to make that move? Not just so much the move itself, but

What was I think what was my decision making process? Which series of moves Did I go through, how long did I go through them, what did I consider, in what order? How did I prepare for the match and how did that affect my All these sort of metal level. Not the outcome itself.

But one step above which is What was my process that I used to arrive at that decision? And given that it was a bad decision Where did that process break down in my decision And therefore how should I tweak my decision making process for the

And he said, That one Ingredient one lesson. Keep asking why. keep asking why did you make that decision and call that sort of a system mindset. Let's analyze the system.

Rather than the outcome. That's one higher level. And then has enormous power and leverage. Because once you tweak your process, if you can identify a weakness in your process. and adjust that process.

Now Not only next time won't you do Pon takes Bishop, which is a bet you might do Pon But you've now improved your process, which can help you in five hundred other situation rather than helping one situation that can help you in

Five hundred. And so I took that and I call that sort of system versus outcome mindset. And that can help you enormously in personal life or in business life. The Caspref story.

This has uh extremely as you're saying, wide ranging Implications and applications. Outcome versus process. distinction is also something that comes up if you talk to any really, really high level poker player.

Right, because you can have a great outcome. That is just dumb luck. You made it you had a terrible decision making process. Or you threw caution to the wind and really just you know, flipped the coin and hoped that you would get heads and you did. And so you're like, Oh wow Let me reward that decision making process, which might have not been a process at all, or

You can You can make the th the right decision, you can have a good process and the deck is just stacked against you. It does doesn't mean that you should stop making decisions that way. Exactly. Right. So you really have to zoom out. Uh and uh

You know, this is makes me also think of many, many other things, right? It's w and on some level All of life is investing, right? You have finite time. Finite energy. uh finite capital and Um

Mm-hmm. Even if the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, which is part of the reason why really good poke poker players who are thinking systematically also understand the importance of having a bankroll. Right. Right. Because if they have a string of bad luck, even with really, really good strategy and decision making, they need to be able to weather uh series of

Um Bad hands, for instance. Uh Th this is this is uh Just such a critical distinction. Um and and I don't want to belabor it, but I think it's

Uh Something that That's I'd love to hear a little more about uh if you could personalize it. So how do you How do you implement this?

yourself or how have you in terms of doing postgame analysis on decisions. Right. I think you know at the at the business level, it it's ex the the poker analogy is perfect because people don't realize how much is luck in real life, whether it's an invention or an innovation or launching a new product. So In the business level, and I'll tell you kind of a totally different angle, personal level. But at the business level You know, there are some pretty good teams or companies that will try to do a post mortem after some product launches and they'll analyze But they're still at that level one of outcome mindset of

We did Pont takes Bishop and it didn't work, so let's not do Pon so they say we launched the product and it didn't have this feature and customers like this feature and that's why it didn't go as well. So let's make sure we have this feature. So you're still on kind of level one. The really, really great Teams and the and companies and not that many of them.

Say How did we arrive at that decision to launch that product? At that time. How do we make that decision? Who is involved in the decision?

What information did they have? Is that the right? people to ha be making the are we making the decisions in the right way? Are we presenting the people who are making the decisions? with the right uh information at the right time analyzed in the right way. And you see the difference. In one case you just learned let's not put feature X on product Y.

In the other case. you learn something that can apply to five hundred different products. Let's think about how we tweak our decision making process in the future. So that's sort of system versus outcome mindset on the

And this might apply elsewhere. Are there other questions you could ask? when trying to decipher what your decision making process was. It Why did we think it was a good idea? uh what were we missing, right? What what information didn't we have until too later? I don't know what the the right selection

of questions would be Oh yeah, so y y y there's so many. Like what are people's individual incentives? The people who are involved in the decision So few people ask that question. Are they really incentivized by the project launch, or do they have some other thing, like are they really focused on promotion? So how does being focused on promotion How did that affect the decision? And if we altered their incentives,

Might they have arrived at a different decision. So people rarely ask. Let's Just think about the X number of people who are involved in the decision. Let's walk through one by one what are their incentives. Let's just think about let's just have even a

twenty minute conversation. Do we really think the incentives Are the right incentives. That are giving us the decision. That are aligning people with the outcome.

Or not. How are people communicating. How are people exchanging idea you know, are they meeting The day of the Who's

set of analyses are they looking at. Somebody who really knows what they're doing or not? And did they get presented the right data at the right time to make the most informed Yeah. The real key is, as you sort of said with luck and cards.

You wanna do this for Not just for failures. That's the wrong and you wanna do it As much, if not more, for successes. You might have just gotten lucky. Those are the most dangerous traps. Let's say like you you kick

You know, and sp you kick A soccer ball. Into the goal. And you made it you you were five feet in front of the goalkeeper and you kicked right at the goalkeeper. It just happens that the goalkeeper slipped.

on the mud or whatever, it was raining. But you kicked right at the goal paper and you gotta go. Does that mean you should keep kicking right at the goalkeeper? That's the right strategy? No, you just got lucky. Yeah, you won the game and maybe the world championship, but you got lucky. Do you want to do that again next time? No. You bet on some dumb internet stock and it quadrupled or something.

And you had no idea what you were doing and you were drunk when you made the investment, but you made quadruple your money. So does that tell you want to be drunk before every investment and not look at any No, you got lucky. So it's more important to actually look at the successes and think about how do I make that decision. then it is the failure.

S think hard about a failure. people rarely think about did I get lucky. They like to Say, Oh, I was my genius. So it's more important as a team to say

All right, this worked. Where did we get lucky? Where would we actually had flaws in our process? That we need to adjust next time and how we made the we m We were uninformed.

And we simply got lucky, our competitors stumbled. We just got lucky. So we really shouldn't The reason that's more important is'cause it cements bad habits. This is what we did last time. You know, we got drunk before we made an investment and it was a great investment. Let's get drunk again and make another invest.

It cements bad habits because you confuse good outcome with good decision making. So that's on the On the business side. So It can have a pretty evic big effect on the personal

Side as well. I Yeah, one example is I give one example for married people, one example for single people. So

W a single one I I actually did use. Again, it's just you and me, right? Again, the mayor may be you know, you let's say you get into an argument with your significant other and you you find yourself getting into an art you say something About I don't know, whatever, the dishes, or you say something about the driving, or you say something. And you know, it leads into an argument. And then the outcome mindset is like

Well I said something about the dishes. Don't Tell you something about the dishes. in the future. So guess what's gonna happen? You're gonna have

The same kinda argument about fifty seven other subject'cause you're not getting at the Right. What were you thinking when you said that thing about the dishes? Why were you thinking it?

What state of mind were you in? Maybe you're frustrated about something at work. As an example. And you're mentioning some nagging comment. Right. Was the problem really about the problem? Right. And then Uh

You say now I have a flaw in my system where I'm frustrated at work. And then it It comes out as a comment about something that just Is a bad

Idea Zabato. So maybe rather than just say don't ask about the dishes next time and it comes up Say If I'm frustrated at work, what else can I do? other than make comments about the dishes. Like

Can I Set up a punching bag. You know, and just start hitting the punching bag and take a shower and then I'm in a better mood and I don't give a shit about dishes or whatever. So you find What were you thinking at the time when you made that comment?

Is there a tweak to your decision making process so that you don't make not just that comment, not Pontake's bishop Um Married life, for example, personal example. single life. Actually when you and I knew each other both were single, I take you're still

We haven't caught up in a couple of years. We haven't. I actually have a wonderful girlfriend I've been with. For a while now and Things are going extremely well. So we we can talk more about that. But um So I was in um Living in Manhattan.

Uh as a single guy Uh, and my the the company that I was running was in Boston. So I was just commuting back and forth and I didn't have almost any social life because there's so much time in the plane and then run dealing with running a business. So I would set up these um

Gathering. You came to remember in my own. Apartment and um Uh I call them sway scientists, writers, artists, and entrepreneurs.

And then eventually I added mostly'cause I was trying to exclude them and eventually I just became explicit. No BLC. No bankers, lawyers, or consultants. Which which one should note you used to be at McKinsey, which is great. No bankers, lawyers, or consultants. Self hating consultant.

So I I call them Swain O BLC also'cause I just don't remember stuff unless I have it like an a CILI acronym or something. Yeah. Yes, I call the sway no BLC and as soon as I said especially when I added the no BLC, like interest skyrocketing. Especially from the BLC crow. Like my bank or lawyer or consultant friends were like, Can I come? I'm like

Wait, what part of like no BLC? I just said no BLC. And like Yeah yeah, but can I come? Can you make things like that's weird. And then single women in Manhattan, like really interesting, intelligent, attractive women friends that we would be like I am so there I am s I so wanna come. And then I realized You know, I was sort of at it, but I realized like There is such frustration among really intelligent

women, professional women. They were so tired of like The same old. 'Cause New York is full of these you know, really ambitious bankers who are just focused on banking and They were so curious to meet s scientists, right? So for me I see scientists all day long and

Writers I was sort of. Uh Jimmy. But uh anyway, it ended up becoming this really fun thing. And uh

I went out on a series of dates, but I for probably ten years. I never really had we're coming to the like system outcome versus in dating. I'm not in any rush. Okay. I'm just No no I'm loving this. So take your time. So Yeah. You, Tim, I remember coming to these sort of sway, you know, B L C events. Or in Hoffman, my friend used to come to these things and Um

Uh You were awesome. And so I and you know, I ended up having some decent dating life. do these things mostly just'cause I was not around very often. I would just pick a day and then everybody would be there. And

five years, sort of ten years of a sort of single guy in Manhattan and Um A friend like to describe it as You know, you have junk eating with you just move from car it was sort of like junk dating. Like

There's a high on the first date. And then that high is still On the second day and then it fades. on the third day and so then you go to the next one'cause there's a high and so Manhattan life is full of this sort of junk dating, like you have the junk eating thing, you go from one to another and then you never

It's really a bad, bad place for dating, I think, because you never There's so many carbs around. So Yeah, everyone's looking for the next shiny penny and you don't actually take the time to really relish and Savor. And get past a couple of little speed bumps to

Find the What's really valuable underneath. Anyway, I've been dating five or Five years, six years, seven years, and and at that point my my father had gotten ill and Uh

And then passed away from cancer, from a a a a rare type of leukemia. And that I think gave me a mind shift. Like what am I doing here? And I had been doing this sort of mindless kind of like the Gary P Kasparov, Pon takes Bishop. Well that

Didn't work out with that dating thing, so let me not date. You know, some woman who looks like this or is in the profession Why or to has this characteristic. So okay, so that solves, you know. That's one

Pon takes bishop, don't do this move, don't do that move. But I'd never step back and said, Like what am I just systematically? Like what's wrong here? Like why have I, you know, not dated anyone for more than two months or three months in like in a bunch of years. And I took a weekend and I just said, All right, let me be

Really try to be really honest with myself, like You know, I I do want something more serious. I want a life partner. Let me just think through uh you know, the last ten or twenty you know, dates that I've gone or or or women that I've gone on some kind of date with. I co.

Why did it not develop? Is there any pattern here? What was I thinking when I Again, what was your decision making process that you wanna And then when I was I

You know, there was a pattern that came out and I was like I'm doing this. Same pattern over and over. And I need to be thinking in a completely different way, and I need to be making my decisions about who I date and why I date them in a totally different way. I know we're

We're getting into like a therapy session here or or or person a lot of personal details, but ca are you open to sharing what the pattern was? Uh it was getting a little this is just between you and me, right? It's just between you and me. Got it. All right. You know, I um Yeah, I think one of the lessons there is that

No matter how self aware you think you are, you're really influenced by your surroundings. A lot more Or at least I was, really influenced by who I was surrounded with more than I appreciated. I thought oh I'm my own person, it doesn't matter.

But at the time I had a number of friends who were in the film and fashion world. And uh So I I didn't have a lot of time to arrange social life stuff'cause I was flying all the way. And so I would go to social events with them and they were really interested in other film and fas so a lot of my dates were like film and fashion, or occasionally I would

Uh Um You know, meat. some other variants. And they were really especially interested in kind of some of the more Superficial qualities.

And sort of fast dating based on like superficial stuff and how people look or how people th And As much as I thought I was a good guy it I sort of fell into that trap. And

of dating based on much more superficial and I Because I was able to like make conversation reasonably well and have a good time. I could have a fun first or second or th and then Kind of fool myself. into thinking, Oh, I really connect with this person.

Because look at these really interesting conversations. You mentioned Richard Feynman, one of the great Feynman quotes is The most important thing is not to fool yourself. And you need to remember that you're the easiest person to fool. And I was fooling myself. I was saying.

Oh, I'm really into that person'cause they're a great people person and we have all these great people insights. You know, meanwhile the person wants to go to clubs it You know. midnight or one AM and like that's the last thing. I have any interest in doing. And um

So when I said I I'm really being influenced, I need to just step out of this. I need to actually break up with some of my Guy friends. Which is a weird thing to think, but Uh, you know, you get kind of reliant.

And then you just sort of follow. I need to break up. Because This is influencing me. And I need to make different decisions about who I want to go out on dates with because that stuff is not really me. It's not

deeply who I it's not who I am at my core. And I'm making the first few conversations fun, but then I'm getting bored. Uh. I had an old friend who Told me there was sort of two criteria for

Um Finding the right life partner. He was a New York guy and he was a very is older guy and you know, he was a mentor for and he Very successful, also very good looking, very sort of classic Midwest gentleman and been very successful. in dating. And I'd learned a lot'cause he was on his third wife.

But very happily married. I and I think you learn more by from failure obviously than success. So he he learned a lot and he said just two criteria. One Mental health. Because and especially in Manhattan that's a really That's a pretty high bar.

And two. Find somebody you like having dinner with. 'Cause you can be having a lot of dinners together. And if that's not Appealing to you.

It's gonna be a tough marriage. And the the physical stuff takes care of itself. 'Cause you know, you won't you won't be there if But the That was just a great physical stuff meaning y it's either there or it isn't. Yeah, and you know that within the first few and you're you're just not gonna go there and it's so overrated. It's so overemphasized anyway.

That's not something you need to think about. What's underemphasized Is stuff you're more likely to miss. And it's just a really great simple straightforward litmus test. How much do you like having dinner together? And

What I realized is like a when I went back and looked at the I wouldn't rank high, you know, how much I like to have dinner with, you know. the people I'd been dating. And so that's what I started looking for. People who were More

just an intellectual mind fit for me and less worried about any of the other stuff, less worried what any friend would think or anybody would think or anyone around me. I've I've said you're smiling. I'm smiling because I I I want to ask. Uh just a few follow up questions and I know that I'm jumping in a lot, but this is what I do anyway. Like we're if we were having drinks, I'd be doing exactly I'd be doing exactly the same thing. Uh you mentioned

peer group and there's sort of two at least two components of I would imagine making a ship. One is breaking up with some of your friends and then the other is gathering the people you hope to be positively influenced by. Right. And I think for a lot of people listening, the latter part is the easier part. And like adding more people. Right.

Did you break up with your friends by doing the the slow drift where it's like By the time you were gone, they don't didn't really notice because it was very gradual, or did you Do it more directly? How did you break up with people? Well, firstly we're guys, so we don't talk about st you know. I I think women have a much more communicative thing and guys are just like

Oh, whatever. Like we didn't answer a couple of texts, so you know, whatever. It's also Manhattan. Yep. So you know, the social life is like let's Text, you know, ten friends at five PM and see what's going on at seven PM and you know, whichever two you And so after a while you don't answer some of those texts. It's like breaking a with some guy friends. Turns out. You know. Not to be a heavy lift.

Um The g you know. But yeah, it is breaking out and then finding people who you think are More Resonant.

And Um you really enjoy and are more the way you want to be aspirationally, you how you want to live your life. Um

And uh You know, through that process. I mean, not long after I did that. system mindset as opposed to outcome mindset on dating. Uh You know, I went out on a couple of day and they were just totally different level. I enjoyed them at a much different level because I was really

How much am I? Genuinely enjoying dinner. As opposed to how much am I you know, telling stories trying to be funny and it was funny and she laughed and that's great. Let's Go to bed or whatever. This thing's not on, right? That's great. So um,

That never happened, by the way, honey. You're the first, really. Um I'm gonna be in trouble I think. We have we have magic in post production if needed. No, it just started and and v very shortly thereafter I um

I uh Was sort of set up on a Introduction I call it A date. My wife calls it a business meeting. So there's a slightly different perspective here. I um

I don't know if you know this story. 'Cause you were at the wedding. I was at the wedding, but I don't know this part. Okay, so Uh I was at a cocktail event at uh uh uh there was a a theater group

Actually Catherine was at the wedding too, who who was responsible for all this. Um There is a theater production group. uh in New York. And uh they had their annual gala and I you know, went to to raise the flag and support and

But it's full of kinda artists and, you know, fil theater people that I I didn't You know, know the first thing about So I would just like went to line to went online to for a drink just to like hide out and

Yeah. And um There was a guy uh standing next to me. Who uh said Oh hey, you know, you know, my name is So what is your and what do you do? And I said

Oh, I I do medical research. Because in B in New York nobody knows what Or at the time nobody was. And he said, Oh, that's interesting. My ex girlfriend does cancer research in Boston. And I'm all of a sudden like

My ears perk up, my antenna goes up like ding ding ding ding ding. Really? 'Cause this was this was a pretty good looking dude. He was kinda this tall and you know, nice looking guy and he was clearly well adjusted and kind of a likable guy and I thought

A Cancer research in Boston. That's what I do. That's what I B If this guy's pretty good looking, his ex girlfriend is probably pretty hot. C, she's probably pretty well adjusted because if you know, most scient women in science are There's so few that they just the the guys are like sharks.

But if she can interest A guy who doesn't know any science who's pure arts She must be kind of a well rounded personality, so A B C. I'm like ding ding ding ding ding.

And uh 'Cause I was already on the lookout'cause of this system mindset like whom I'm whom I'm dating. And so within about the first Thirty milliseconds I'm like How can I

Stock this guy electronically. Tomorrow. Figure out who his ex girlfriend is. And then somehow accidentally arranged to bump into her. And this was all like within the first, you know, and then he's just talking and I'm just talking. I'm just like mentally, you know, like Planning the next day. Planning like tomorrow I'm gonna figure out like does he know the woman who's hosting? And then can I find out like f what his last name is? And can I

Anyway I'm doing all these calculations in my head. You know, that's so when he he asked you know, like how do you know, what's your connection, I explain oh I ran it. uh a biotech I I said you know, I run a biotech company in Boston and cancer research who's her advisor. Oh, I know that guy, da And he says um

Oh, do you mind if I introduce you?'Cause she might be interested in a job in industry. And I'm thinking like Ding ding ding ding ding, you know I'm sort of kind of like. Sure. Well I'll see if I can make the time for that meeting. And um So then I go home and the next morning I'm thinking

All right, what are the odds? It's Saturday night in New York, some guy in line for a drink. tells you something about his ex car that he's actually gonna follow through. This is less than ten percent chance, right? So I'm already thinking like how do I figure out who this guy was or And then I get this email.

And it you know, it's like oh Sophie and Mag, I wanna introduce you. Uh, you know, Magda's interested in so and so. And um Uh Safi does You know, such and such. And later I found out he Googled me and there's

you know, there was this kinda profile written about me online and there was a little video and so we forwarded all that stuff to I didn't know that at the time. But anyways. So I get this email and then so ten milliseconds later I Google her and out comes this like model pose. Like this like and I'm like

What? Yeah. Fricking hell, that's a cancer biology PhD. He was a postdoc at Harvard. Oh my God, I am so taking this meeting. And so then I arranged to meet her and then

We meet up one week later and it was supposed to be like just a coffee after it's the least romantic Oh, it was down at the Dana Farber. Cancer center for some meetings and she was working right nearby. So we met at the like Longwood Medical Galleria. Right, you know, yeah, doctors and scrubs everywhere and it's just like fast food court.

And like there's some cheesy little hotel there with a cheesy little restaurant. I forgot the name. And uh You know, sit down five o'clock is supposed to be a thirty minute coffee and it turns into five hours.

And like neither but I I don't even notice the time. And for the first time I feel like I'm not trying. Yeah. I'm not like trying to be entertaining or tell a story or blah blah blah. It's just like

This is the actual me. And she's like a female version of me. No. Not really, but like female version minus fourteen years and you know, very attractive and all sorts of other from the Czech Republic, not from Israel and the New Jersey. But other than that, just very s No, but she just w she really cared about science.

And the search for truth in family. I really didn't care for anything else. Like All the stuff of the glitz or you know, financial or material stuff and You know that's that is really Sadly pretty common in Manhattan.

She just had no interest. She just liked The science she was doing and figuring out Good science. Deeply about family. And that was it. And she knew what she cared about and and

She clearly just had Fantastic. Values and it was like Yes. Woman is.

Awesome. How'd it how'd it work out? And uh I would say eight months later you got The wedding invitation. Amazing. Yeah.

Beautiful wedding. Thank you. Also. Thank you. And Uh So this this is uh I I like the

the weaving that we're doing from sort of personal to business because It's same same, same but different. Right, like the a lot of the thought processes behind them. And Yeah one thing. uh hoping to do today also, which you're doing a great job of

uh doing yourself, but is is humanizing you in the sense that if if I read a very simple bio of you. But if if we got into a lot of the details, uh i you you can be very intellectually intimidating, I think. You could be. Uh you're a very smart guy.

And There's there's no doubt some hardware that helps with that, but you also use systems. and you you enable yourself with tools. And so you mentioned uh no BLC.

Right. And you said very quickly in passing, Well I can't remember anything unless I use acronyms. So Let's talk about acronyms just for a second. Uh because this this type of shorthand.

Can be Really helpful. have you used and uh there are there are a whole bunch that that pop up. I mean the literally all many, many, many acronyms that that you use. Uh So you know I'm looking at one here, but you can start with anyone you like, one FBR, right FBR.

What the hell does that mean? Uh what are what are some other Uh, whether it's sort of heuristics or Acronyms that you use. To help.

Perform better, make better decisions, anything. Right, FBR. Okay, so that's one of the uh writing rules of thumb that I learned that was One of the most important things. Um

Writing I I Bro after a year or two or three I kinda broke out writing. For myself and to style, story, and process. Yeah.

So I had kind of five rolls on style that I worked on and iterated kind of five rules on story that I worked on and it had five rules on Just Process which is sort of writing routine.

But probably one of the most important ones on the routine process was Right F B R. So that stands for right, fast, bad and wrong. And the reason that that's so important is that Especially if you have any kind of

uh perfectionistic Tendencies. What resonated for me and how I remember it. It just means When you're starting to write, let's say you found the idea and the narrative thread and the thing that you're

the wheels are turning and you think you can see, you know, the fog it's like driving, you know, and you're in a you can only see a few feet ahead with because you're in a fog and it's sort of the mist clear and like, Oh, I see. I see where I'm going with this thing. Let's just go. The inclination is when you write a sentence or a paragraph or the first couple of paragraphs is To stop and backtrack. Either for style.

Or for facts. Like I I'm I'm doing nonfiction, right? So I'm not doing fiction. So You know, and such and such date this guy did this thing and then he did that thing like Was it really that date? Then let's go check the internet.

So you wanna write F so that is a disaster. You'll never get anything done if you do that. So the trick is to go exactly one eighty, especially if you have an Right f F BR. Right F right fast, bad and wrong.

Put the wrong date. You don't get the stara, the sentence doesn't sound good. Great. Right fast. Right bad and right wrong.

Terrible grammar. Terrible word choice, wrong facts. And that Liberates you. That liberates you to like follow the narrative thread.

Just keep going and going with it. And not stop and back track. Cause every time you stop. But maybe it's like a car going down the highway. It's easy to stop. But then you have to spend all this fuel to get back up to speed and you might not get there.

So once you're finally going. What you often discover you write a lot too is like Once you start writing. And start pulling on that narrative thread like It's just really surprising where it goes.

But only if you go fast. Yeah. Not if you go slow. Not if you say Oh, was it nineteen forty one he did this or was it nineteen thirty nine? Was he with this person or was he with that person? Am I spelling his name correctly? Let's go check on the internet.

Then you've lost the thread. And what It hurts on many levels. Not only do you get less done But You lose the creativity.

Cause it's only when you're at high speed. Like And the wheels are turning, and you're like, Oh wait, wait a minute, oh th oh I could go here and oh I could go there and oh I could go here. Like when you're driving fast, you can make a left turn, it has a big impact. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just thinking, you know, creativity And there are many different types of creativity, but it's it's in some ways

a lot like riding a bike, right? It's easier at Slightly higher speeds. Exactly. You try to ride a bicycle really, really slowly and you're twisting and turning and trying to keep your balance and it's herky jerky and the stopping and starting that task switching is really expensive. Uh it's funny you're saying that'cause it in the the physics of that is the angular momentum of the wheels. And once you have high angular momentum, you're much more stable than at low angular momentum. Yeah. Yeah. Uh

I was gonna I was gonna digress into motorcycles for a second, but with of course being a part of the the fun of having our conversations is that the uh it's just a a a beautiful medley of digressions. But trying to maintain some semblance of professional podcasting. protocol. We could go on a motorcycle digression too. I got motorcycles start, but that's another you're in charge. You go wherever you're going back to motorcycles. Uh We we'll we're gonna segue to other subject areas, but what other we're not gonna go through all of the rules for style story and process, but I'm curious, particularly

About process or the uh but it could be any. Are there any other rules that you uh have found to be particularly valuable. For writing. Um the jump to mine. It's the

It's the hats. It's for me I realized and and again, a lot of this stuff took a long time. There are two hats you wear on reading and there are two hat there are three hats you wear on writing.

And you just Wanna be very clear about what hat you're wearing when So you don't confuse them. And then you're much more efficient.

Uh so and I have some really silly I don't think I've ever said these out loud. It's more like inner But since you're an old friend, and this like this thing is definitely not on Um so in reading there are two modes.

And the first one I call Rickles. And the second one I call Reese. Yeah. Okay. You're laughing. I ca I could tell it's like silly and stupid, but I that's how I think about it. Rickles is reading for information, content, lessons.

Rick R. I C Whatever it is. Whatever it is. Rickles. Reading for information, content, lessons and stories. Rickles.

The raw me if you're writing narrat nonfiction narrative. That's for like the raw meat of the the facts or the ideas of the story. And you're really reading for information. For content. And for lessons. And when you say reading, are you meaning are you referring to research that you're doing? Got it.

So that's be the research you're let's say you're writing about World War Two, then you're That's in Rickles. You're reading Very fast. you know, as fast as you can and as deeply as you can and chasing different threads and different footnotes and different archival And that is the Rickles hat. You're reading

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

for kind of the musical rhythm. And the pacing and the the tricks that he uses on transitions and Um Or others. He w he wasn't the only one I did that.

Uh Donald Halloween. whose book essays after a he was a But again, I'm kinda ignorant when it comes to literature. A lot of people knew this. I did he was a poet, Laura. I remember talking to like some English friends and they laughed at me that I didn't know who he was. Anyway, some friend had sent me this essay and I picked that up.

And as a poet, he also has incredible word choice. And rhythm and pacing. And um it's very different than Naboka. Naboka is fun. But it completely eccentric and it completely unique style that only applies if you're a Russian emigre who So it's not relevant for

Copying it. It's just interesting to develop. Yeah. And But Nabokov is cold. He's clearly as he's writing for entertaining himself with language.

He doesn't have any m he was the first to say I don't have any messages. I don't have any morals and you can sort of tell he doesn't really care about his characters. He's just playing. He's playing with language. Hall is warm. He wrote.

R just passed away, sadly. Um He wrote so movingly. And sparingly about incredibly deep emotional personal things.

How he fell in love with his And how he thought he would uh she would outlive him and how they made all these plans and then she came down at an early age with leukemia and he just couldn't believe that he was out burying her and she was just

But he writes it in not a modeling way. at all and he writes it so beautifully and so powerfully and so tightly. So I read Hall for how do you write about emotion. Which I had zero experience especially as a scientist that emotion was not like a top skill of mine. And communicating emotion was not something I Any So I I read him not only for the

beautiful but very different writing style, but also for how do you write about emotion, how do you write about people, how do you write about characters. Yeah. Kind of a poetic way. Not overtelling. Yeah.

using as few words as possible. Anyway, that's Reese. So I I wanna pause for one second because I've been able to see the output of that. In uh loon shots, for instance, in the very beginning in some of the stories that you tell of patients. It's a great example.

of like the output of training that ability that you did not consider yourself as that faculty that you didn't Consider yourself as having. had developed.

Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Uh And and I I wanna I'm not gonna Well I am going to interrupt, but not for very long because I I do want to get to the the writing side. But i I wanna underscore for folks who are like, why are we talking about writing With a physicist.

Biotech. entrepreneur and the the reason we're talking about it is because it's it's it's same same but different. What what I'm really fascinated by is how you structure your thinking. And question and stress test your thinking. So just for people who are like, Why are we talking about writing? That's why. So please continue. Okay. So um You ask about anchor name or or

The uh the other writing lesson was these multi these multiple hats. So in In um Reading. It was Rickles.

Now I'm gonna put on my hat. It has nothing to do with style, so just shut up shut off that part of the brain. you're reading really fast for a story or a content. And then Reese. I'm reading for ear art and skill.

So it's just pure writing skill. And so The way I train for it is to think strategically about where am I weak. So I can explain a technical pretty well. That's what I've been doing my whole life, whether in

academic science, running a biotech company trying to explain. technical stuff about how a drug works or the biology or chemistry to people who are not as technical. So explaining an idea I can do.

in even in plain English. But books that just explain ideas are boring. I don't even like reading them. People. don't really connect to ideas. People connect to people.

If you can Tell a story. Story about people. through which an idea is revealed. That's the best of all worlds. So just talking about ideas is eh so so. Just talking about people's then you're sort of a fairy tale.

But if you can combine the two. Tell stories of people through which in underlying ideas revealed and through which and which is connected by an underlying idea, which is what I tried to do in this book. That's for me the grander challenge, that was really kind of a big challenge.

How do you not do A and not do B, but do the combination of A and B. And so I was not good at Telling stories of people. You don't really do that in academic science. You write a paper, you're not gonna write a paper saying, Well, let me tell you about the day I first had this idea and then I was wrong about this, and then Joe That's not how you write an academic paper.

And When you run a biotech company, you know, you're at a You know, you do your earnings call if you're public or you're at a you know an investment meeting and you do your twenty five minute road show. You're not you know, let me tell you a story about how, you know, the failures and the characters and the dr no. They're like What's your you know, what's your what with your R and D spaghetti. Just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts. All right, Safe, so we've talked about the two hats of reading.

What are the three hats of writing? The three hats of writing there's Hunting or the way I think about it is There's hunting, there's drafting. And there's editing.

So in hunting. You're looking for the narrative thread that's gonna hold your story together or if you do nonfiction you're your the the the series of stories and the series of anecdotes and the lesson you're gonna draw. So that's the hunting. The drafting is where you're writing FBR, fast, bad and wrong, just as fast as you can.

Then the editing is where it all comes together and you try to make it, you know, you get rid of all the glitches and make it shine. And you know, as we're talking, I was thinking about this uh movie you took me to see, this premiere you took me to see, uh yesterday by Robert Rodriguez, where he made this Amazing movie for seven thousand dollars. And before that he was talking about a master class, uh he was doing his master class in

And which was just Really a master class in creativity. And he was talking about how in film He thinks of making a film as Also in three stages.

Like cooking, where you write your recipe, then you go grocery shopping and then you do the editing at the end, is like your cooking. I think it's it's very similar in writing. the hunting, the finding the the narrative thread is like your recipe. The drafting fast, bad and wrong, the FBR, running as fast as you can.

It's like Go in a supermarket and just film your car as fast as you can with all the stuff. And then it all comes together in the editing. So it's it's actually very interesting, um hearing that from Robert Rodriguez because it just reminded me of the Um

Kind of the three hats that I wear when I'm writing. Almost perfectly. To it. He used Index cards.

Like a a pack of index cars you can get for probably a dollar or two dollars, and he's like, This could change your life. Like one pack of index cars and lay it on the floor and then rearrange the order and so on. Uh so like you said, that's the hunting for the structure, right? Or the arc. And then same as you. You're f fast, bad, and wrong in quick drafting. and then assembling it in in some respects with film. I know that's slightly different, but

improvising on the fly when things go wrong or other opportunities present themselves in on the actual say set or day of shooting. When you are doing the hunting Did you have For instance A A within chapter structure that you tried to stick to where there were their common ingredients.

With a chapter. Where you would try to say start with a story, then add fact, then close with a story, or would did you look at it as more of a an arc? And a build over the course of the book. Or perhaps both. H how did you how did you how did you approach the the hunting portion?

Yeah, I'd love to say it as system or method, but I Yeah. Absolutely. I actually had to learn added one one of my rules is Patience over panic because you start with a blank page. And I just had absolutely no idea what was gonna happen.

where it was gonna go, what story You know, I end up with all these kind of Crazy stories. In fact Actually probably the nicest thing somebody said to me about the book it was this guy, um Name Bob Sutton, who wrote this book called The No Asshole Rule. Bob's a good guy. Very funny guy. We were having uh beers at the Dutch Goose in Menlo Park, which I I used to go to twenty years ago, and he's been like a lifelong customer since he was like twelve.

And um we're in like the second or third beer and there's there's another author friend of our ours there. And uh At some point he turns to me and he goes, Your book. And I go, Yeah, I said Man, that was some wacky shit.

And I take I feel like that's some'cause you know, I did Pan Am and and Einstein and Kepler and Steve Jobs and U Boats And uh I feel like in some ways that was like the nicest thing anybody said to me. Oh yeah. I think I think wacky shit is is a strong endorsement.

Yeah, and I I you know, it's i when you ask like what did I do to get these like wacky stories in each chapter. They're e all of them are so different. Like, you know, comparing one trip at Pan Am with B in American or Or uh Steve Jobs and Jeff Raskin versus Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, you know, comparing across two centuries. I have absolutely no clue where they I would just

Lock myself in my little cave, shut the blinds. And I would just I would disappear into some zone and then I would reemerge at five thirty to pick up my daughter from daycare and I'd look at one Where the hell did that come from? I have no idea. So to answer your question, I have no I would just look at a blank page and then I'd I'd look up at five thirty and there's this weird c weird what did you call wacky shit.

And That's the grocery shopping. You know we w we were talking about the Robert Rodriguez film and It's Once you start that's the advantage of writing FBR, writing fast bed wrong, is that once you start going at high speed, just like all the stuff Yeah, just the speed is really important.

Yeah. I've always thought since I sort of have three rules for everything. Creativity for me is about speed, attention, and courage. You want to go as fast as you can. Like for me, getting the stories is about speed reading. So I read through

You know, I had so many sources and some I think I have like about five thousand files. I I mean I scanned Almost all the books, so I have everything electronic. I could search. In the database electronically. I was just reading as fast as I could because

Eventually something that's number two. First is speed. Second is attention. Because you wanna be reading as fast as you can and all of a sudden there's a tiny little thing like Whoa wait what? And that's where you go. I

The visual I have,'cause I've sort of a visual for everything, is that you're there's this dense forest of stuff. Which is all the facts and data and stories. And there's this beautiful clearing on the inside, which is like a central core idea. and you're looking for the path in and so you're running around the circle of the As fast as you can and you're looking

Maybe you're looking for like a little red Sparrow. That's like hiding, that's gonna peek out behind a little leaf or a tree. And you're running and you're looking, looking, and running, and you're as fast as you can. And then all of a sudden you see that. So you need speed. You need attention to keep your eye out for that tiny little

You know, Red Sparrow to say I'm over here. This is the path. And then You need courage'cause it may look like a really wacky sparrow. You need to have some balls to really follow

that idea because your first thought is there's just no way There's no way I could compare Steve Jobs and Isaac Isaac Newton. That's absurd. Well let me pull on that a little bit more. Oh it turns out Steve Jobs Didn't really Develop the Mackinth he had

This Assistant named. No, you didn't have an assistant. There was a guy working at Apple um who had been working on the this project that he called the Macintosh project for you know a year or two before jobs and he tried to interest jobs in it and Jobs dismissed it. And eventually just'cause of

by default, after jobs had kind of messed up the the Lisa and Apple three, it was the only project they could You know, fine. And history got rewritten. Like, Oh, he invented it. That's not really what happened.

But that's kind of what happened with Isaac Newton. Oh, he just came up with the idea of gravity. Well, actually there was a guy who was much less charismatic, much less good communicator, named Robert Hooke, who came up with a couple of the central ideas of gravity. Fed them to Isaac Newton.

And then Isaac Newton ran with it. Just like Jeff Raskin kind of fed the ideas of a graphical user interface and a small computer called the Macintosh. It already had the name. To Steve Jobs. Now Steve Jobs was a much more charismatic, much better communicator, in some ways much more ambitious, and shoved him

Aside. Just like Isaac Newton was. had a lot of skills that the other guy didn't have. I mean Steve Jobs was a great synthesizer. He could bring in marketing and motivate people the way that Jeff Raskin couldn't.

Realize we're going on a really long tangent here. Okay. But Isaac Newton Also, you know, had some better skills, but he was really fed this the early ideas by a guy named Robert Hook. So

creativity what I found is like speed, attention, and courage, because you have to say The idea of comparing Steve Jobs And Jeff Raskin with Isaac Newton and Robert Hook sounds nuts. Who would ever do that? But you have to have some balls to go after it. It strikes me also that it's uh one could look at it not just as a Potential sequence.

Yeah. but also uh as a hierarchy in the sense that if if you don't have speed you're not gonna be able to s develop the Three hundred and sixty degree view.

to Had the attention yield. Any fruit. So you need to have that. It's almost a precursor. to the attention, then the attention is a precursor to the to the courage, which is sort of the execution on what you find. That little red sparrow.

That's exactly right. It's in order. Speed, detention, courage. And that's kinda What I found for me was The secret of creating wacky shit.

And uh If we If we if we come out again. to look at uh the world of

of business. And not fooling yourself or not confusing Process and outcome. And and trying to really have

Alright. to read something correctly and I I should note also that that these different hats and these different heuristics is for being clear on your purpose before, say, reading a book or selecting a book in the first place. is is really, really, really important and uh

I give it give an example that illustrates this Uh in a in a very different context. So Tony Robbins doesn't exercise at some of his events. Where he'll ask people to scan the room and he'll say, Before you scan the room, I want you to note anything red, a reddish hue. Remotely close.

And they do that for sixty seconds and then he says, All right, run through the list of all the things that you saw that were red. And then he asks people, now note without looking around the room what you saw that was blue. Right. And people can't do it.

Right. And it's it's to have that search function. sort of set in place. Before Reading a book.

Before Editing. Right. Is really, really, really, really critical. Uh Let's talk about uh and I think the term that you use is False failures.

Or False failure. Right. Let's talk about that for a second because it it also might tie into someone you we mentioned at the very beginning of the conversation who is who is Peter Thiel. But can you talk about what what a What a what a false Fail or false failure is.

So Falfell is the idea uh let's say you're nurturing some crazy idea that everybody thinks is nuts, which I I call for lack of a better word, I call that a loon shot. rather than a moonshot. You know, moonshot everybody knows it's a big goal and a exciting destination, but you know, the the big ideas that really make a div transform whether it's an industry or science or even world history. Um

Almost never arrived, dazzling. Everybody with their brilliance. tend to be the ones that are floating around for years or sometimes decades and the

people championing them are written off as Nuts. Mm. In uh revisionist history, looking back, it's like oh it's obvious that it was right. It's sort of a natural

And that guy was obviously a genius. But most people don't talk about the fact that Everyone said he was an idiot for twenty years, including some of the most famous people and famous discoveries we know of.

But What you shi with loon shots with these crazy ideas. Is very often people give up on them because of what you might call a false fail. Because

And a f by a false fail I mean it was a flaw in the experiment. Rather than the idea. The Outcome is the same. you know, the experiment gave a negative result and everybody walks away. In science that's the case. Experiment gave a negative result.

Everybody walks away. But the problem is not with the idea, it's with the Experiment. So the example I you mentioned, Peter Till. So the example I use is uh I think I

Uh I might have first heard about this from Ken Howry, probably another mutual friend. Yeah. So Um I think Ken was telling me this one time over drinks. This was like many years ago. Yeah, Ken who's at who was at PayPal with with Peter, part of the PayPal maf mafia. That's right. They knew each each other from uh Stanford days or something. Yeah. And then later Founders Fund and and So uh can

had started working with Peter on his private investments. This was just a few months or a year before it turned into founders' fund. And so he was kind of helping him out. And he mentioned The disguise Zuckerberg had come by Mark Zuckerberg with this idea for um A social network.

And uh Everybody had been social networks had been around for, you know, a decade at that point. And they'd all gone nowhere. There was a dozen of them, like and you and I can remember All these

crazy names of all these things, you know, small world, tri whatever, all these things that went and flamed out. And at the time There was another one that was rising, was sort of the popular one at the time called Frenster, which some people may remember. And that was just starting to flame out and people were leaving.

Friendster for the new thing at the time, which was called My space. So when Zachary was going around. Ken was telling me the story. Um

Everybody had kinda passed. passed on investing because everybody said, Well Look at look at all the social network. Everybody Bishop takes pawn. They said all these guys fail. Yeah.

And you know why they fail? We know why they fail because you can see that they're uh all these users are hopping from network to network. And that's the outcome. Right. That's the Bishop Day Mont that lost the game. All these social networks are going nowhere, there's no money in them. So no, we're not giving our money to this Zuckerberg kid or whatever his name is. And uh

Uh Can and and Peter. Uh Is that really why they're failing? Let's

Take a look. And so they had friends behind the scenes at uh friends to I don't remember if they were investors or not or whatever, but you know, it's a small community. And uh they said let's Ask for the data, for the user retention data.

Like people are f clearly fleeing and we know that they they were using Friends turn like Kind of glitchy and it was sort of crashing. So they got the data on the r user retention and friends, and they found Holy crap. Like

People are staying on this site for hours. Now this is a site that's crappy. No offense to whoever's listening who is part of that team, but like this site is crashing all the time. And they happened to know that they'd been given advice on like, listen, you need to build you know, you've scaled from a few users to like a few million you need to improve your systems'cause your site is glitchy. And what they realized is that people were staying on for hours.

Even though it was a crappy Glitchy website. And that the the MySpace just had a better website. So they realized it wasn't that it was a bad business model, like clothing fads and they everybody that's what people thought it was like, you know, you just switch everybody will switch on mass every Every season.

They were actually great but people were staying forever on these sites. These guys just had a bad website. They had a software glitch. So it was a false fail. It was a false fail of Frimster. They

It was a flaw in the experiment, in the in the in the process by which people were making their judgment. not a flaw in the underlying idea. The Loon shot the crazy idea that social networks had some Yeah. So the Tiel I wrote.

uh Zuckerberger check for Five hundred thousand. Yeah. First I think it was the first outside money into Facebook. Yeah, eight years non family and friends into Facebook. That's right. I think eight years later he sold it for a billion dollars. And that's how Paying attention to a false fail.

Can be Very lucrative. So Uh

Let's see here. There's another name I wanted to bring up. to I am blanking here. It begins with Sir James Blake. Uh Black, excuse me. James Black. So uh

Who is Sir James Black and what did he say to you at one point that uh that sticks in memory because this this this may relate in some way. Oh um So he was uh Uh and he passed away a f you know, a few years ago as well. So

He was a uh Nobel Prize winning Pharmacologists, chemist, biochemist. Well not biochemist, chemist. Uh from Scotland. And

He in some ways revolutionized legendary what people call now drug hunters. He just had a nose for identifying great new drugs. And so when I met him, I think he was already in his eighties. Um

But we got him interested in Uh what we were doing. There were things that he liked about And we had a sort of uh Um A little bit

You know, we went against the grain of what people said you should be doing and he that kind of appealed to him. So he would fly over periodically from uh Scotland and advise our Team. And uh I remember when

one night he he'd flown over Remember, this is like an eighty year old guy. And he had flown over Um You know, some transatlantic flight.

Landed in the morning. And we probably had like a twelve or fourteen, he just went through the whole day. of like research, research, you know, stories and he been talking the whole day and standing his feet. And we're at uh you know some. the end of like some dinner and I am like dropping dead of exhaustion.

And I'm probably in my mid thirties or whatever, early forties at the time. And Um, I'm just like I just want to go home to bed. Right,'cause this was a long day. And he's like and so I'm getting up to like going and goes No, Sophie stay staying like past me on this sit down, sit down, come have a whiskey with me I can't do a Scottish app, but that's what you know. And he's like, Come have a whiskey with me like everybody else leaves and I'm like, Oh my God

I can how is this eighty year old guy just like full of it? So we get some whiskeys. And then he's like, I you know, I tells us like why he loves what we're doing and this and that and then You know, he starts with well, let me tell you when I was and then he like starts with like the Korean War. Oh my God. Like I'm gonna need a shot of adrenaline or something just to stay alive. But I mean they're fascinating stories of like this guy really

developed two phenomenal drug categories that saved millions of lives. So I'm And uh so we start talking, he tells me this stuff and at some point I tell him about how there's this project in the lab that I'm feeling kinda depressed about'cause I was really excited about and it's not You know, it hit this negative result. And he he pats me on the knee again and goes, Oh, my boy It's not a good drug unless it's been killed three times.

Yeah. And I I took away from that as I really it kind of Gave me pause and made me Rethink. And then as I ended up I started going through more histories and stories

The revisionist histories that you read about like great discoveries. Oh, I had this idea on a Monday and then I showed it to people on Tuesday and we were all excited on Wednesday and it worked on Thursday and the drug was approved on Friday. That is not What happens these people with these great ideas They get killed. Like really, the project gets terminated. Everybody hates it. It's pull the put people say, Oh, it's tough to kill a project. Let me be a big man and kill a project. It's really easy to kill a project. You just say no if you're in charge, you just say no funding, you're done. And it never comes back.

No one's gonna work on a dead project. So no one can prove you wrong. You seem like a big man, it's really easy to it's actually hard to keep a project going. Why? 'Cause any good Crazy idea stumbles and fails. Like Jim said.

It gets killed three times. It has these terrible fails, it seems like a really bad idea. It doesn't work it looks like it's not gonna work out. And then If you have a really great champion or you get really lucky You survive that failure in all of his projects.

But he won the Nobel Prize for it. There are two drug categories, a beta blockers and a Just to mean antagonist. failed like that multiple times. And so that's what he meant. And then when you look back and history like the statin drugs, I tell a little bit of that story.

Probably the You know I've saved millions of lives, preventing millions of Heart attacks. They were killed multiple times and they almost died and disappeared and never happened. And

That's I I've come to think of that as the three deaths of the loonshot. The truly important breakthroughs are killed several times. And it It does go against the grain of this stuff that you hear in Silicon Valley all the time of like fast, fail you know, fail fast and pivot. Fail fast and pivot. Well,

Okay. But like if you fail fast and pivot, that's probably what everybody else did when they hit the exact same stumble. And sometimes It's the opposite, like Everybody will fail fast and pivot when they hit that same stumble.

But If it's there's something really important. Underlying there. U I mean often that is the the reason why there's something really important is because Everybody is turned away from the first stumble.

And you need to make it past that first stumble, past the second stumble, past the third stumble. And then you have the gold. And that's why it's gold. 'Cause everybody gives up on the first or second'cause everybody's following v fail fast and pivot. So everybody's given up. If you've persisted through those failures.

That's where the really, really big breakthroughs are. So let's let's do uh That's sort of a a little retrospective on Uh

Looking at Some historical examples. And i maybe by way of example. Uh describing what loon shots are.

Right. And Uh I believe There are two types. We could talk about Uh Juan and Bob.

Which is not a uh A country music duo. Uh Give us give us give us some examples of loon shots and the maybe the different species. Of of loon shots. Uh the two types. So

There is uh the one type I think of as a technol a product or a technology. But Everybody says won't work.

So you go way back the telephone people said this is a pointless, you know, toy or um the transistor there's no way you could make a switch out of some solid state device or personal computer that's not gonna be important or or digital cameras or Um

Even jet engines, that's the Juan and Bob story. Jet engines, you know, there's no way you could ever make a commercial plane with a jet engine. So those are products or technologies. That everybody's says won't work. Let's call those P type. The other thing is a s is much less gr those are kinda glamorous,'cause every you can put a pro picture of a product on a on a on a on a P for product product. P for product P type. You can put that on the cover of a magazine and people get really excited and y there's this

There is We're we're at a south by south west. So there is this obsession with product, product, product, product. But what people often miss and is sometimes much more important and is a dangerous trap if you miss it. is the other kind, is a small change in strategy. That involves no new technology.

It's a small change in strategy. Let's call it S type. That everyone says is crazy or won't work. So what's an example of that? Well Let's take a story of a young kid. Who

uh wanted to go into retail and wants to open a shop and You know, where All the customers are. Big cities. And then his wife happens to say

Uh well, honey, you know, I'm happy to support you in this Dream of yours. But I just hate big cities. Uh, I'm only willing to live Where Right.

town is smaller than ten thousand people. So he says, Okay and he decides he likes being married, he also likes quail hunting. So he knows there's this region in the middle of America where the four states come together in a corner and they're four different quail hunting seasons. So he

Putches store there and he moves to a little town called Bentonville, Arkansas. And He opens a store. And he makes it a little bit bigger and he sells stuff a little bit cheaper.

And he gives the store a name. It's called Walmart. Okay now that Ends up absolutely dominating the retail industry and wiping out everybody else. Now is he thinking about let me go disrupt the retail industry? No, he had a wife that didn't want to live in a big town and he liked quail hunting.

And he made stuff a little cheaper. So he had small changes in strategy. Where he put his store. How big he made a store. And I'm not sure.

Made prices a little bit lower. Were there any new technologies? No. He just sold stuff a little bit. Did he invent retail? No.

Did he invent selling stuff a little cheaper? No. These were small shifts in strategy. that ended up being incredibly important. So those things are much harder.

And they're much less glamorous because they're harder to write about and harder to prove. uh than the P type things which are easier to prove. So those are the two Types. Mm. Yeah.

And uh just so people aren't left hanging with with Juan and Bob, uh Juan Trip Pan Am and Bob Crandall American Airlines. But the the the the example that really uh I I had actually not I had any familiarity with uh Which which

Which I think. I'd love you to to describe briefly is uh Robert Goddard. Uh and Uh the

Um rocket flight in space, right? Because people credit Right. Uh other people. Uh namely Guess it would have been uh J F F K but uh in in t could could you describe

A little bit of the the backdrop. For that story. Sure, so in i in fact that gets right to the moonshot, loonshot. So in nineteen sixty one Kennedy. announced in a speech to Congress.

his ambition of putting a man on the moon. And of course that was widely applauded and Uh That's actually where the term moonshot comes from. But as we mentioned those

Breakthroughs. That Get us there are rarely. recognized and widely applauded at the time. So in fact How did we actually get to the moon? Well, we got to the moon on a rocket.

How ro rockets work through liquid you know, a liquid fueled Jet propulsion. So the Principles that got us to the moon.

were invented by a guy named Robert Goddard. Four decades earlier. And he had written it up, he had demonstrated, he'd been working on experiments, he had proved it. To Pretty good certainty.

But he was ridiculed. And uh I I remember I found this in the New York Times, this w in in the archives, this was Pretty hilarious. Ninete, I think it was. Um after Goddard had suggested his idea that we could get to space with these liquid fueled rockets

Uh in nineteen twenty the Times came out with an editorial and said Oh, this guy uh you know Professor Goddard with his quote chair. They literally put quotes around the word chair in physics. Like that's a bad thing. You know, air quotes his quote chair in physics at some university like Clark and like making fun that he wasn't an Ivy League guy and he was a quote chair. And he says,

This guy you know, this uh professor doesn't understand the basic laws of physics that we teach our children every day. Exactly. Namely that Newton's laws of action and reaction make rocket flight in space. Impossible. End of story. So the funny part of that is that like

Uh fast forward I think it was July eleventh, nineteen sixty nine, if I remember. It was the day of the The day after the Apollo. The successful launch of the Apollo eleven rocket.

Uh to the moon. The times. Issues of attraction. And it says, uh apparently Rocket flight does not violate the laws of physics, and quote.

The Times regrets the error. Uh and when you when you really, really put uh these Seemingly miraculous successes.

or iconic structures, for instance, Eiffel Tower, uh under a fine sort of forensic lens. uh you realize that uh I'm not gonna say all of them, but it's certainly a very high percentage. not only encountered resistance, but I mean Exceptionally violent. And heavy handed.

sort of ad hominem attacks. I mean the the the Eiffel Tower, which everyone knows at this point, and it's in every brochure and every sales pitch for Paris and France. was opposed by just about everyone. I mean it was it was all uphill. And I I wanna talk um

at some point about how in a smaller teams or uh entrepreneurs who are maybe solo, maybe with a handful of folks can can think about embrac or Um

structured thinking around. Loon shots, but I wanted to jump back to your personal experience for a second and again feel free to fact check this because you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Uh or Uh in in certainly not in every book. Uh but

I have here A quote from Uh Michelle We. The golfers. Coach.

who instructed her and this is from a book, The Nett and the Butterfly. Uh To herself whenever she missed a putt, quote, I've gotten that out of the way. Now I'm one step closer to becoming the best putter in the history of golf. Um

The the segue is that Uh It's You were then mentioned afterwards and Yeah.

Um A is that true? B are there Uh how do you use such a quote or other quotes? Uh As a as a as a practice or a reminder. That's a lot a lot of question at once. No, sure. So that that's from my uh a very good friend, Olivia Fox.

who was also at the wedding, you may not met her there. But she uh sent me an early draft and I I gave her that quote and uh It's a mental reminder of And whenever you screw up and it anyone who's gotten anywhere it's because you've been through those three deaths, you've been called a failure and idiot, including in drafting this book when like every p uh you had the same experience. Every publisher is like oh yeah, there's like no way books on who try to mix physics and business never work. And I'm thinking like

Re really like what book that makes physics? I haven't read any books. There's so many never's just to like Uh books on physical fitness, cookbooks don't travel internationally. I mean there's so many never and you're like really? Like where's the data on that? Yeah. Um Uh you know, Olivia was a good friend asked me for that question. Thought about that at the time and the um

The Inspiration a little bit is also Tennis. played in the juniors as a kid and um We're playing tennis and I uh at the time it was

It's probably. And so both were Yeah, I admired both. Um I I see developed this

Tick or trick. Which is At the end of a bad point, if I remember correctly, at the end of a bad point he would slap his thigh. And that was like a mental Little hook.

to forget about the point and it's he just associated with slapping his thigh with forgetting the bad point that he just fucked up and focusing on the current. And that was a little trick for his brain just to stop wallowing in the bed. And Focus on now and just The bad just went away.

And It's the same thing with uh Michelle and Michelle We. Yeah. Yeah, Michelle We And It's you screw up, you do something stupid. Even in business life, you had a bad board meet you said stupid things or you had a bad investment meeting or you did something dumb with an employee that you you regret doing.

You need to slap your thigh or think of the Michelle Wee example, like I screwed that up and that's one step along the way of me getting better and whatever I'm gonna do now. Slap the thigh and let's focus on You know? Set that behind you. And then move forward. Uh

That's the kind of golf record or the Andre Agassi Slap Your Thigh trick. Okay, related. Because you you use and and Not to not to belabor this, but you have You use systems and reminders a lot.

Yeah. Uh Why do you have a post it note? You may You may no longer have it, but Uh post it note that says The Adventures of Luke Star Killer.

Oh yeah, it's still up on my wall. I think it's a What on earth is that? So I did a lot of uh one of the stories I tell I I tell a bunch of film stories. I have some uh one of my really close friends is a uh in film and we've been friends for many, many years and so I've He and I have traded stories.

Um and and part of the inspiration was like It was so fascinating to me how many of my stories from biotech were so similar to the stories from film. And how what a biotech CEO does is so similar to what a film producer does, and how the markets are structured, the hundreds of biotech companies and the hundreds of film. And the few film majors are so similar to the hundreds of small production shops.

And the the few Uh Sorry the few film majors at the top, the few pharma majors at the top. and the hundreds of production shops and the hundreds of biotech companies. The film industry structure, the financing of it, the dynamics of it, the focus of it was so similar to

Developing a film was so similar to developing a drug. I just found that Connection. Fascinating. Um so I tell a fair amount of film stories. In the I realize my answers are kinda long winded to you. Like I tell a lot of stories to get there. My wife hates that, by the way. See, I'm doing that again.

Like going off on a tangent story of a tangent. This is a tangent of a tangent of a tangent. That's why I do long form. Um That's why there's a delete button on those videos, I'm sure. Anyways, uh The um

Tell a f a fair number of film stories. I tell the kinda James Bond story, which was a loonshot, like Uh Ian Fleming had written these Bond novels and he really you know, he he didn't have as much Money is some of the It's a lifestyle he aspired to, which you can see in these Bond movies.

And so he was really trying to sell the film. And everybody had just written this off. Like all the studios that just weren't buying and there were a bunch of false fails. They made some T V show which was a disaster, so that was a false fail and like, yeah, there's just And American studios were like There's just no way Americans wanna see

A British dude with an accent. Or they're gonna believe that, you know, it's like some heroic spy. Saving the world, like this the stories are junk and He's kind of a metrosexual, like who wants to watch that? He's kinda prissy about his stuff. Like who wants to see that?

And actually even the first When he finally got it, he gave up after eight or nine years trying to do it and got these like random producers who, you know, wanted just bankrupt at his business and Uh They were trying to sell the movie. They just

sold it to some studio and they'd cast this guy who was thirty two years old who had been in a movie like Tarzan and the Little People or whatever it was, I forgot what the name was, and like two movies and He'd been a milk truck driver. And uh the Americans they made it for a million bucks. And uh this the American studio said, Do you know what this is like

This is absurd. No one's gonna want to see Literally the quote was no one's gonna watch a limey truck driver. You know, fighting spies. But they really were so sure it wouldn't work. They opened it in Drive In Studios, I think it was like in Kentucky and Texas.

Like, let's just put in a couple of drive in studios and then write it off as a lot. And then the reaction the crow reaction was like, Wait, what? And then of course it became a The greatest. film franchises of all times.

And the other the second the two top film franchises of all time are James Bond and Star Wars. So I ended up going way back. tracing like minute by minute what happened with Star Wars. And if you search, you can actually find the early drafts. There are four early drafts of the script and you can actually get

Find them. And um I've read the draft. They were Freaking horrific. Like

It was ter the writing was terrible, the storytelling was terrible, the characters were Nothing like the characters that you have at the end. The plot was incomprehensible. It sounded absurd. Which is you know, you could see why peop studios rejected it at first. And one of the titles of one of the drafts. Actually this was the shooting version of the script.

Yeah. first title was The Adventures of Luke Star Killer. And it was such a stupid name the the hero was called Mace Wendy. Mace Windy. Mace Windy. Which sounds like, you know, a superhero that farts. Yeah and it just like it was so bad.

Yet it became one of the greatest movies of all time. And so I keep that. to help me write FBR, right? Fast, bad and wrong. You just realize that All first drafts are shit. Everything when it starts off is shit. And if Star Wars one of the greatest movies of all time

was just such horrific shit in the beginning. Then you're probably okay. It's alright. To have your stuff sound terrible. And that's okay, just keep going. You fix it up in the editing, which is what they did.

Uh I knew every line to that film as a kid when it came out and I would drive audience is nuts because uh it's it's I think the only film. Maybe that and E T. Where I insisted my mom take me to the movies repeatedly. And it was it was for my family it was it was quite an indulgence to go to the movies to begin with, right? But I knew the entire movie by heart.

And A split second before any character would say a line, I would say the line in the theater, which understandably drove the people around me batshit crazy. But um stuck with me, had a huge impact. So now I know that uh Mace Wendy is to thank for it.

Uh how can smaller teams and we have so much uh to chat about. I mean hopefully we can do a part two, um, a round two with this and because I I would love to. And it's so fun to spend time together, but Uh Maybe just with with some of the time that we have left you could talk about How

Individual entrepreneurs Or Small small teams. Can think about Loon shots. What is the significance for

A a single person or a small group. Right. So You know, kinda the moral of the story is you want to nurture these loon shots. So forget about you know, moonshots or big goals or d even the word disruptive innovation is a terrible word. It should be crossed out of every

Anybody who's been an entrepreneur knows that Um The great idea the ideas that end up becoming incredibly important that actually you know retrospect disrupt the market. Nobody knows.

At the time. Like Sam Walton. Had no clue. He just liked quail hunting. That's why he went to Benton Villa. Had no clue he wasn't thinking, let me disrupt the retail industry by locating stores and uh in a rural America and then building them somewhat no. He was just like his wife said he didn't want to live in a in a in a big city and as he

We had no idea what the demand would be. So real innovations are about Or less about market projections and some guru waving a PowerPoint about you're gonna disrupt this market. That's crap. A a real innovation that ends up doing something is like a leaf in a tornado.

You just never know. where it's gonna end up. Not been a real entrepreneur. Most of the great like the transistor. They were working on building better switches for telecom.

And when they came up with the Bill Labs and when they invented the solid state It turned out it was it wasn't. good enough to use in telecom. So they really had no idea what to do with it. It was five years before the first application, which ended up being

In hearing it. So we're the scientists working on The transistor going to their bosses and saying let's disrupt the hearing aid market. I have an idea for you. No. They were just trying to build better switches and j So the reason you want to nurture loon shots

is to challenge beliefs. It's not a you want to use disruptive innovation if you're a history professor and you're writing about what happened in hindsight. Otherwise don't use it.

Yeah, Walton disrupted the retail industry, transistor disrupted Everything. But that's In hindsight, when you're really there at the time You nurture loon shots to challenge beliefs.

To challenge accepted wisdoms. Some things that you think are absolutely true. Maybe you're right. But suppose you're wrong. Do you want to read about it in a press release?

From your competitor? Or would you rather be nurturing it? in your own lab or trying it in yourself and seeing how it plays out. That's why you nurture loon shot. So what can small teams Or groups do.

Well To succeed with anything, just the idea. Is a small fraction of it. If you think about a football field, the idea is getting you from your own goal Maybe to your own

five yard line or you are in ten line. Just there's a lot of ideas in the world. You wanna be able to to take an idea into a real product you need people who understand the markets, who understand how to segment the market, who understand audiences, who understand how to build, who understand how to manufacture, understand how to release. I don't understand. timelines and getting thing done on time, on budget, on spec.

And that's the other ninety yards. So you need both. And you can think of one as sort of the artist and one as sort of the soldier. You have artists that work on the crazy ideas and you have the soldiers that get the ball down The other ninety yards.

And so you need Both. some kinda one of the things that I get into is why companies often fail is that they don't where those two they don't understand the separation that you need for both that you need

They're motivated by two completely different things. And you need to tailor Yeah. way you interact, the systems you design, the incentives, the metrics. Totally different, almost exactly opposite for artists and soldiers.

For artists, you want a high failure rate. If you're not trying stuff and failing stuff. For soldiers. You want a low failure rate. Like let's let's go to uh you know, military for aviation.

The guys who are coming up with crazy ideas for new technology, if you wanted to try lots of stuff and crazy things that nobody said could work and then But the guys who are assembling planes You don't want them to launch ten planes in the sky and say, Well, let's see which eight fall and crash. No. So it's the exact opposite things you want to reward.

So you need to separate your artists and your soldiers and design different tools and manage the balance between the two. So that's if you're a larger company. Now you asked about what if you're a smaller company or a solo? So You wanna separate your artists and soldiers. You can

If you're a larger company you can separate that by role. If you're a smaller company you wanna s think about separating that by Time. You want it. be very mindful. This is sort of comes back to the ha wearing different hats.

You wanna be very mindful we're gonna go into a zone. Where all we're gonna do is the artist create and we wanna maximize failure. And then we're gonna step out of that zone when we've You know listed the hundred different ideas or and picked the five that

minimize failure. We wanna get This these five ideas done on time, on budget, on spec, to customers. So you need to be very self aware of what zone are you in. And the confusing thing is when you're running a small team'cause you don't have different people. You don't have an artist and a soul. Sometimes you do.

But you want You don't want to tell your artists All right, I need you to have a ninety eight percent success rate on your ideas. That's I need you to have two ideas on Monday, two ideas on Tuesday, three ideas and when you know, you can't schedule

Create it. The converse is when you're dealing with your soldiers You don't you want to create those metrics. So in a small team or s small group

If you can't separate that by roll, you want to separate that. put off our execution hat, our operational excellence hat. We're gonna put on our crazy artist. Wacky. What ideas could kill our business? What are the things that are floating out there That we're sure are not right.

The loon shots. But if they were right, they would kill us. What are those things? What are our embedd assumptions or beliefs about our customers, right? Our competitors.

Or substitutes. The nature of our market or regulatory, whatever. We know that these are right. We know that our beliefs are true. But what's the opposite? Suppose they're wrong.

What could somebody be doing to kill us? Let's just take a week or whatever it is. And Think of all the things that we know we're sure is true. With the opposite.

And now let's suspend disbelief like a movie. Let's suspend disbelief. How might somebody Here's the th all these reasons to dismiss it and why it could never be true. All the reasons people use to dismiss a loon shot, that's why it's a loon shot.

Like they made fun of Goddard. physi you know, rockets can never fly in space. It's against the laws of physics. All these things that you're sure are true. Like the New York Times was sure Newton's laws of physics applied and ruled out, you know, rocketry. All these things you sure are true.

What if they weren't? Alright. How might a really creative person Get away around that. And

How might that kill us? Let's just take a week. And walk through all the loon shots that are out there on our customers or our markets or our products or whatever it is. Whatever doing. And then if we identify those things

How can we flip that around? And use that. to knock out our competitors. So that's like take Separating

the artists and soldiers, but not by role, but by time. Yeah. Now that we've done that, let's take off that hat And now Let's focus on

operational excellence on time on budget on spec. Okay, this is not a moment for like innovative, dreamy. This is like on time deliver on time, on budget, on spec. And there you separate by time rather than by role. If you're a small company.

Uh This is uh And we're we're gonna wrap up in just a few minutes. Um but uh I I want to highlight for

how tied together everything is. that we've talked about. Throughout. This. Session one.

of hopefully at at least at least two because I love hanging out with you and catching up. Uh In the sense that Whether it's fast, bad, and wrong. Right. Right.

Spitting out. Uh in other words, on an individual level being clear on the hat that you're wearing and segmenting by time or within an extremely large organization, segmenting by role between

uh there are ways to Systematize. Your Generation of ideas, vetting of ideas, execution of ideas.

And um You know, one of the reasons I enjoy whether it's having drinks, hanging out at your wedding, or or simply batting around ideas with you is that You're very good at Asking questions.

That help with clear thinking, which helps with clear action or more effective action. Uh Would you be willing Not right now, but some other time to do a round two where we talk about how to bring a gun to a knife fight, which we kind of alluded to, right? Right. uh incentives.

how to apply incentives to other people, to yourself, to teams, et cetera. Because this is really, really, really underappreciated and a whole bunch of other things that I'd love to talk to you about. Would you be willing to do that? Let's do it. Okay. Awesome. Now for those people who are only going to uh perhaps get this episode. Uh I highly, highly recommend and for those of you who listen to the show a lot, I don't Say that lightly. that you uh grab a copy of of Loon Shots. It is it is Incredibly pragmatic.

Uh it is very well written. Uh I was I was really impressed because b with all the time we've spent together, it's like I haven't the identity that I have sort of painted on top of this avatar in my head called Safi is like scientist, entrepreneur, et cetera. And Uh I get sent a lot of books and I get sent a lot of books by by my friends too. And every time I get one, I'm like, Oh God, I hope this isn't garbage because it's just gonna be so uncomfortable to try to like t dance around this somehow.

And It's a it's a damn good book. Uh it it really is. So I I encourage people, LoonShots.com Take a look at the book. Um and if you're like, I still need to be sold, okay, go read, go read up on Safi and you'll be like, okay, there are probably th additional things that I could learn from Safe and from the historical examples that you weave together, right? It's it's really

The way that I like to learn. personally and I think it's the way a lot of humans learn, as you pointed out, is through stories that illustrate points. And It's it's tempting, I think, and this is another thing that impresses me uh about you. is to uh

from the influence of in s in some cases academics to to speak in abstractions and conceptual frameworks. Without the uh real life sort of human glue that makes it memorable and the m the memorable component is really important because if if you don't have

Yeah. the stickiness of these concepts. How the hell are you going to apply them? when the time's when the time comes that they're actually important to implement. So Check out Loon Shots at Safi Bakal on Twitter. S A F I B A H C A L L. We will be continuing the conversation somehow, some way.

Uh is there anything else you would like to say before we wrap up this round one. Any questions, comments? Suggestions to the audience, anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up this this first portion. This was just uh it was kinda fun to see you again and just catch up. So um Um

Yeah, looking forward to part two and Forward to having drinks together one of these days and Catching up some more. Alright, awesome. There's there's so much more to explore. So folks keep an eye out for Round two. I'm gonna I'm gonna twist some arms if necessary, bribe with alcohol if if it's called for, and uh for links to everything that we've discussed in this episode, all the names mentioned, books, et cetera.

authors uh and so on. Uh you can go to the show notes, so Tim.blog forward slash podcasts and just search. Safi S A F I or Loon shot, lune shots, and he will come right up and you'll have all of it.

And until next time, thank you for Listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up,

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