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M. Sanjayan

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81
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2017-12-07
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2017-12-07
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  1. “Ways, but just don't like you ask people, so what do you think you're good at? And they'll sort of tell you their resume or they'll recite you that sort of, and that's not particularly useful. I'll tell them about the things that I wish I had done. I think every student that going through should take a class in ethics. I think every student going through should take a class on communications and storytelling. I think every student who goes through should think about how during their four year or three, whatever their college term is, spending a little time working on something that is completely unrelated to their primary area of interest. That was probably the best thing I ever did when I was going through the American education system is that during the summer, I was restricted on what jobs I could do because I was a foreign student. I would go and work at the World Bank. And for a biologist to be walking around,”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “A few seconds or for a few minutes. And I think that ability to intensely focus on something and not be distracted from anything else is a very useful habit to have. And so I'm very good at one, like when you're one-on-one, you can be one-on-one, you can be very focused. I think that's true for storytelling. I think that's true for really getting information out of people. And I think helping people focusing on one thing and then switching to another is a serial focus is a very, very useful practice. I think that we waste enormous amounts of time pretending to work. And we can just sort of get rid of that whole thing. I think we're not honest with ourselves about what we're really good at and what we're not good at. In the very early success to life is being absolutely brutally honest at what you're not good at. And you can compensate for it to some”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Yeah, so the... Look, some of the principles that you'd probably want to try to get into Dealing with focus, right? So this is a major challenge, especially for younger people, and it's not getting any better. And I have the ability, right, and it's not because I have some magical abilities because you just practice it, of intensely focusing on one thing.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “It's so much stuff that we learned in college is wasted. You just think about the vast amounts of stuff that they taught us that we never, ever actually use. So I would love to, look, I would probably teach a class, like being really honest because I do teach at university. So it'd probably be something about biology and something about the environment, right? So chances are it'll be in that vein. It might be a class in communication because I've done enough television work and stuff like that to be able to do that legitimately. Or storytelling. But I would probably teach a class in biology. But if I really could get away with it, I would do something like, you know, like all the things you wish you'd known getting into this or how to organize your life to get stuff done. You know, be kind of in that vein. I think it should just basically take some of your books, crib it.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “You know, I probably teach that freshman seminar class. Freshman College, because I think I have relatable experiences that I can translate to that group and it's still early enough for their trajectory to make a big difference. So that's probably why I picked that group. And what would I teach?”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So, you just have to think, well, this could be Mombasa to Kampala truck ride right now in the back of a local bus. And you'd like, oh my God, this would be so much better than that. I can order food and I can get drinks. And I mean, you're just infinitely, infinitely better, infinitely better. So that's the trick. Like I once had to spend an entire month in a very small cabin on a boat. No windows. It's a research vessel. I'm stuck in there with another roommate. Tiny for a month. And we had food literally cans of food under our bed. That's how small the whole. But I kept thinking, this is like a sleeper suite on Singapore Airlines like $20,000 ticket right now because I can sleep. There's a shower, like I can walk around, and it just makes you feel so much better. So that's the trick with distance. Anytime the space...”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “But large Samoan gentlemen, either side of me, who, the plane hadn't even really taken off, they both fell asleep, and their hands kept falling into my lap. Boom, like this. And I had to lift and put it. And that kind of flight, you just, okay, you just have to comply.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “I try to be as comfortable as I possibly can during the flight. I mean, it's just the usual stuff. I try to get myself on the new time zone fast. I'm very strategic about when I drink coffee or anything like coffee or tea very strategic about the timing on that. I tend to fast a little bit on flights. I don't eat a lot just because I can catch up later and it always makes me feel a little better. I guess that's sort of it. Sometimes you get it depends. It really, like I did this flight, and I'll be absolutely honest with you. I fly so much that sometimes I'm flying in business class, especially very, very long flights when I have to land there and get into meetings. Sometimes I fly an economy. I did this very long flight from Sydney to Johannesburg. And I'm in the back of an old 747 middle seat with these two very nice”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So I used to love this Victorian aux bag, but they don't make it anymore. See, the problem with... Really kills you. You just figure out that there's something that works really well. And then they go and change it. Like shoes, like athletic shoes. Oh my God, do they change it? And there's a whole race to change it fast. So this is really a hard question because I now use a Tumi bag and I like it because I like the four wheels. I also like the sturdiness of that bag. It's heavy. That's the downside on it. I'm getting older, so I can't really”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “New Zealand based company. I think you and I both know the founder and Jeremy Moon. And I like his personal ethos and his stuff works. I don't get paid by this company or anything like that. But that's probably the last under $100 purchase I made that”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “That's a really hard question for me because I don't buy a lot of stuff. I'm a total snob when it comes to the stuff I own. And the reason for that is because I travel incessantly. And when I travel, I just have one bag and I have to take it. So everything I own has to do like double duty. And so I'm very, very, very picky about either simplifying or just taking exactly what I like. So can't think of something really easy that comes to mind under 100 bucks. They could just name icebreaker underwear. So icebreaker is a great company. They produce amazing stuff all out of Marina Wall.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I think he is so distraught about what has happened in the last 20 or 30 years to our planet. And so am I. And I think we all are really impatient. And I keep waiting for other people to see something that I have seen and very, very few people around me somehow seem to have that gene turned on. And I think that impatience is what sort of makes us sometimes be irrational, but other times just feel desperate.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “What was true was like, so I was eager to say things. Like you thought that that's what you did. I wanted to go save wildlife. And he said, no, right now your job is to just do a really good piece of science. It's actually good advice. Like do a really hard piece of work so that you'd own it and you'd know that once in your life you could do that. And there's time enough later to save things. He tells me now that he might not have said that advice today. But at that time, it made an impression on me and that's sort of what I did.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “By whatever, I was always a stranger in a strange land, no matter where we moved, because we moved around a lot throughout Africa and sometimes into Asia. And I just felt that that was a big leap, like taking this sort of bet to come to America. And then the second one I think had more to do with, I had an amazing advisor, a guy named Michael Soule, who was like the father of conservation biology. He coined that word and he put it on the map. And 20 years ago, he was the guy. And I was lucky enough to work with him. I just cold called him and sort of pestered him until he took me on as student. And I think that made me realize there was a path there.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “No, honestly, I wish there was something more epic on that. I mean, I think there were two moments in my life where I made these big leaps. The first was coming to America, deciding that I wanted to be here for graduate school or for my higher education. And that was because of Bruce Springsteen. Kid you not. Kid you not. That's how we picked colleges back then, right? Because you didn't have, like, I didn't have, well, I didn't have the internet. I definitely didn't have any way of knowing why America would make sense for me. very little concept of America. But someone gave me that Nebraska album. And I remember looking at the cover of that album and something about that cover and something about the songs in that and the last song on that album. And it just made you want to think of sort of endless possibilities and sort of wide open spaces. And I always felt confined in my life, confined by society or”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And my grandma, she had to add that, right? And I started thinking about it, and I'm like, really, isn't that what we're actually trying to do? Because ultimately it's all connected. People need nature to thrive. And that is one virtuous cycle. But it was a fooling game, and I bet many, many people who follow their quote-unquote passion, you know, sort of try to find their way, do a lot of sort of fooling around. Fooling of other people, fooling of social circles. I was just lucky, lucky, lucky enough that there was enough there and I finally realized that I could actually do this.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “You know, once I got my PhD, I tell a story. I went back to Sri Lanka, and my grandmother, I overheard her telling her friend who's like across the wall, like kind of leans over and they have this conversation. My grandson is back. He's a doctor now, but not the kind who saves people.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Yeah, sure. Look, I always love nature. I loved animals. I think all kids love nature and love things that move. And as you get old, it kind of gets beaten out of you, right? You just get stopped encouraging to do that. But my parents just let me do that because it's the only thing that was sort of around me. And I fool them for a long time thinking I was sort of in pre-med and kind of went further and further into that sort of realm until eventually very late in my sort of I had my masters and just getting into my PhD I sort of realized that there's actually a career that was actually open to Asians in thinking about the environment and thinking about conservation and think about actually saving the planet you could actually do that respectably so for most of your life and be okay with it it took a lot of convincing for that bigger family to sort of get that”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “And I don't get that. I still ask them, then they're like, yeah, it's just sort of typical. We didn't have a choice. It's like the two lotteries you win, the parents you have, that's one lottery. You don't get picked that. I won that one. And the country of your birth is your second lottery. I sort of snuck into that one. But those are the two things. And Steve's completely right. All of the other things in your life tend not to matter as much as those two lotteries that you get.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “My dad had a job offer, was in Sierra Leone as an accountant for a forestry company. Later on, his career just took off and he did great, but it just was this unbelievable thing. And not just the capital, not Freetown. Like this is like where Ebola was like recently, right? I mean, this is where there's a 30-year civil war in Sierra Leone. We didn't just go to the capital. We went 200 miles in the interior and lived in like a treehouse with quite literally monkeys, obviously, around us.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “My dad got a tax in the middle of the night. You know, my parents are the mildest sort of meekest mannered Asians you can possibly meet. My dad's an accountant. And he never, like, even now when I travel, in Botswana or Namibia or Indonesia or Colorado, Aspen, the same advice. Don't talk to strangers, be careful what you eat. It's the same kind of meek, careful advice. But they had this one gigantic moment of courage, which I still don't understand because even today it would be a massive deal to do. But these Asians who never have left the country decided to pick up their five-year-old and one-year-old. And over a weekend, decide that the country was getting politically really bad. And with two suitcases and only the jewelry my mother had, just left. And the only people...”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “So since then, birthdays have been really, really difficult. It starts on December 26th, which is not great for lots of reasons. And so it creates this gigantic sense of anxiety. It's never good enough. It carried right into adulthood. It was very, very destructive to everyone around me. And even today, by the way, when we get together with my family, even today, there is discussion about whether I threw the cake out the window or not. And the power of storytelling, and this is what's happened to my mind, I start thinking, did I really see that monkey or did I actually throw the cake? I don't even know after a while, which is sort of interesting. So anyway, that's a very long story, but that's it. Sorry.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “And she turns to me and she says, you wicked, wicked child. Your birthday is canceled forever. We will never do birthday again. Just wait till your father comes home. And that was it. And now I'm on the floor. I'm like, because for a child, injustice is like the worst thing ever.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “And the monkey looked at me, and I look at the monkey, we're both like, ah, the monkey's like. And then it jumps. It jumps on the windowsill and flees. It like goes, gone. And I go screaming in. The cake, my cake, my bamima cake. That kind of thing. My mom comes out, she's like, worried, petrified. She's only been the country for a few days at that point, like 22 days, shaking me. She's like, are you okay? Are you okay? I'm like, the cake, the KK. She goes the window. Goes to the no cake there. She goes to the window and our house is on stilts to avoid flooding in the rainforest. And she looks down and the cake is down there.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “About it. My mother eventually got tired. She said, you know, like that's it, here's the cake, put it on the table. She goes in to take a bath and I kind of stop crying as you do when you're five and no one's watching and I walk into the living room and out of the corner of my eye catch a glimpse of something. I turn and look and there's a monkey and the monkey is holding my cake.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Five years old. We just moved from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone, West Africa, and not just in town. We were like in the bush, in the country, like way out there. My mother, amazingly, so in Sri Lanka I was like a little prince. I had these amazing cakes, like battleship cake, entire zoo cake. I mean, it was like that kind of cake. Then we went to Sierra Leone and my mother, and we had to sort of flee Sri Lanka in the middle of the night because of trouble in the country. And my mom actually packed, which is amazing, I think, back on it, like a pound of flour and like icing sugar because we came to Sierra Leone on December 4th and my birthday was on December 26th. And she knew this. And so out there in the middle of the jungle, she baked me a cake. It was a simple little round cake with chocolate frosting, which is like the simplest frosting you can get, right? Basically, you can make it almost anywhere. And I didn't like it. So I was crying, I was weeping. I was unhappy.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Last name ever, I know. Or adopted last name. There we go. So I think the most logical segue here is to ask you. About bullying during your childhood. We've suffered, many of us, through bullying, and I want to talk about Monkey. A monkey who stole your birthday cake. How do you know that Can you explain what? What the hell is going on here? Yeah, could you please explain monkey birthday cake story? Well, I'll do that very quickly because that actually comes to one of your questions that you ask people, which is about a strange habit. So one of my strange habits, unusual habit, is that I like to do something new, something I've never done before. I like to try it on my birthday. And that's a tradition. It's been everything from writing poetry to learning how to snowboard when I was 45 to fly fishing to...”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “I would shout from the rooftops. So you know what lingam is, right? Look it up. Like lingam. That's like a phallic representation. So it's like penis. It's the same thing. And mutu means pearl. It's actually mother of pearl. So yeah. That's exactly what it's like.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “And the problem is this name Mutalingam quite literally means giant pearl penis Until I was like a junior, I was deeply conscious of that. And I would never say it. And then one day in a bar, somehow it kind of blurted out. And the reaction I got was, really? And so then it became not a problem anymore, sort of thing. That sounds like a last name.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “But my dad's name, which I use as a last name, like from my American passport. Is Mutal I don't use it much for two reasons. I've actually never, one reason is the obvious one, because if someone said Dr. Mukalingam had been my dad who would look, not me. So I don't associate it distinctly with myself. That's the reason I've told everyone. The reason I don't tend to use it and never ever told this to anyone, at least not in a public audience, is that when I came to America, people have this obsession about what your name means. They always ask you, like, oh, wow, cool name. What does that name mean? Like, I don't go around going, like, Michael, what is your name mean? And I just like, I'm an angel. It doesn't come up. But they do tend to ask that of foreigners for some reason.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Okay. Can you guys hear me? First of all, Tim called me up yesterday. When I was in Botswana, Getting on a flight 22 hours to get here and said, hey, you in DC, because I'm going to be there. And I'm like, yeah, but I'm not just arriving, but that. And he's like, well, I'm there for 24 hours. But hey, I'd love to see you. Do you want to come to this thing? Oh, by the way, do you want to be on stage? And I'm not good at saying no, which we'll get to, having listened to this last podcast about saying no to things. But I feel so much better today because I realize it isn't the last minute invitation because he did the same thing to Steve Case. To get about it. Okay, so I'm a Tamil, I'm from Sri Lanka, and some of us are just given one name. So on my bid certificate, it just says Sanjayan.”

    2017-12-07 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #285: Preserving Human Life, Battling the Busy Trap, and How to Stay Focused -- M. Sanjayan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT