YouSaid · the spoken record

Martine Rothblatt

lines on the record: 106
first: 2024-06-25
most recent: 2024-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“On either the left or the right here, it's been proven now, again, lots of published literature, to have positive therapeutic effects on the body.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nervous system touches every single cell in our body. The largest nerve in the body, there's one nerve that is way, way larger than all the rest of them. It's the vagus nerve. It starts in our mind. It wraps around our heart, our lungs, our gut. It's an immense nerve. And by stimulating this vagus nerve, it's possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body. By a fluke of nature, a positive fluke, the vagus nerve comes out to the skin in two and only two places around the left and right ears. They're like a couple of different ridges in your earlobe or your ear, I guess you would say it. And one of them called the Simba conchi is the place where the vagus nerve comes out. And if you electrically stimulate the symbol,”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of those lightning bolts to the soul. Now I have a chance. So I got very excited and I had a chance to meet and now work with and support the work of Dr. Tracy. And he taught me a very simple sentence, Tim, which I've subsequently found to be absolutely true in all the research I've read. It is that the nervous system touches every single cell in your body.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, here I am. Like, my whole career has just been like electronic engineering, building satellites. And now because of my daughter, I'm like in this medical field. So I'm like so excited.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that isn't in process and it's a fascinating area, Tim. We are very fortunate to work with the father of bioelectronic medicine, Dr. Kevin Tracy. He's the chief medical officer at the Northwell Medical Complex up in the New York area. And by the way, that reminds me speaking of how can lay people get access to scientific knowledge easily. Subscribe to Scientific American. I'm sorry to put an advertisement in here. Scientific American. But I find Scientific American and National Geographic, two of like, you know, the greatest ways for lay people, which I do consider myself a lay person, to learn about all different types of science that they might not know anything about. So one day I got my scientific American in the mail. And on the cover, it was using electronics to cure diseases.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The demands whether it's in the US or outside the US are huge and are way, way in excess of the supply. I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs today is an adequate supply of transplantable organs. It's a beautiful thing that, you know, before people like Tom Starzel questioned authority and said it was possible to do an organ transplant in our parents, teenage years and adult years that would have just been like crazy stuff like you take an organ from a dead person, you put it in a live person who has a bad organ and the person comes back to health, that's about as crazy as it gets. But they did it. You know, they did it. And now standing on their shoulders, we have hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for these organs. Yet each year there are only about 30,000 kidneys available for transplant, only around”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Organs from the pig had grown too large. So, what we did is we took a page from this population of people in Peru and Ecuador. The Western medicine gives them a disease name. It's called Leron's disease, L-A-R-O-N, after this Israeli scientist who discovered what was going on here. We said, well, why don't we modify a growth hormone receptor knockout just like the Larren's population has into these pigs. So when we transplant the kidneys of these pigs into people, the kidneys won't keep growing and growing on normal pig can be many hundreds of pounds. Instead, the kidney will just stop growing at the same size as when we transplanted it. And that's working out really well.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jean fell off like 2,000 years ago, and they kept passing it on and on. Not much growth hormone receptor. So they're perfectly intelligent. They live normal lives. They just don't grow very large. So I found this population fascinating because in my company, United Therapeutics, we're trying to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. And one of the ways we do this is by modifying the genome of the pig. And it's kind of like a fluke of nature, Tim, that the pig's organs, their heart, their kidneys, their lungs are very much the same size and functionality as human kidneys, hearts, and lungs. The only problem is that if you leave a pig on its own, they'll actually grow extremely large. And when these first transplants were done, they had to euthanize the animal recipients of the transplants because the”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just part of the human diversity. They ended up as a group, mostly ending up in Spain. And then when the Inquisition took hold, their descendants, who were still very small, they left Spain and they went to the New World. And because the Inquisition still had some type of a hand in the larger population centers of what's now Peru and Ecuador, they went out into the rural areas and there they lived for several hundred years. And it turns out that this population, they have one gene that makes their body not receptive to growth hormone. All of us naturally, we produce growth hormone, and the cells of our bodies have a receptor for that growth hormone. And when the growth hormone locks into the receptor, we begin growing. This population of people in Peru and Ecuador, they lack the growth hormone.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are actually many, many dozens, and there are quite a few companies who specialize in this type of area. The population that comes top of mind to me, Tim right now, it's such a fascinating story and it relates to my own activities in organ manufacturing, is a community of people living in Ecuador and Peru, very close-knit, intermarried, that are all a kind of dwarfism. And these individuals, they rarely grow taller than four feet tall. And it was discovered over just over the past 15, 20 years that they are descendants of Jews from 2000 years ago who were forced into a diaspora across the Mediterranean after the Roman occupation of Palestine. And in that ancient time, these people were a very small stature.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they, in fact, do so only with the consent of those communities or with the consent of the elected representatives of those communities so that they can have some fair financial return for their natural endowment.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Craig Venter and Francis Collins led the effort to decode the human genome. And about the year 2000, all types of pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers began scouring the world to engage in what's called genetic mining or genome mining, meaning going to different populations of people around the world, often that have been intermarried for quite a while. So their genomes are kind of concentrated and trying to learn something from those communities' DNA that can then be translated into useful pharmaceuticals to help everybody else have some of the strengths or less of the weaknesses of those isolated populations. What I was concerned with is that if people extract the DNA from these remote communities,”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So autonomy is just a fancy word for saying that people should be able to make up their own mind, that people should have the power, the authority, the freedom to decide what to do with their own body. And genetic rights, of course, refers to the human genome, the DNA that we all have. Now, there is a tremendous diversity of human genomes out there. There are people who, because of their DNA, they are pretty much immune to some kind of cancers, whereas other people, because of their DNA, it's very likely that they'll get those type of cancers. There are some people because of their DNA. They almost cannot feel pain. They have an extremely high tolerance for pain. There are other people because of their DNA that the slightest pinprick, you know, will send them screaming.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nope, I think that every part of the transition process kind of fell in place. It was not something that happens on a day. It's kind of, you get to a point of diminishing returns. So over a period of years, I gradually transitioned. And I think even to this point, I'm still in a transition process. I kind of went from a pure male to a more, I would say, not pure, but I would say, you know, knocking on the female door to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as transbinary, meaning that I embrace both the masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What appeared to be the most intelligent researchers in this area are opining that this is a safe and healthy thing to do for people who feel that they are kind of quote unquote trapped in the wrong body.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you refer to. Now oftentimes those masculine and feminine traits are just a short hop skip and a jump from masculine and feminine apparel. Depending on how people dress, they're a short hop skip and a jump from masculine and feminine hairstyles in an age. That was the time of prince and boy George and whatnot. And then you get to masculine and feminine manicures. Like, why can't a guy paint his nails? And then you get to next questions of, you know, secondary and primary sex organs. And some people wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology. And I found that there was actually like a vast literature following, again, footnotes to footnotes, references to references. I was like, oh my God, it is possible to, in fact, alter your physiology to match your psychology.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Though this was never something I learned in junior high or high school or elementary school or really anywhere in American culture in say the 1990s, I learned through books that humanity was not either strictly male or strictly female. And as I began to question authority, I began to say to myself, why can't I also come out as not strictly male and not strictly female?”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like boys and girls, and men and women's bodies were different. So I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman when I was very much trapped in a male body. It was the prevailing view that this was a completely unacceptable way to be. So the authority was, no, this is not possible. People are only male or female. And, you know, nevertheless shall meet. So again, this American Paul Revere-ish question authority mindset got me reading. And I found once again that there was a vast literature on transgenderism, transsexualism, Native American people who were too spirited, communities in India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different for every single transgender person. And talking about my feelings, I don't want to give the impression that these are going to be the feelings of other transgender people because as a community, we're as heterogeneous as anybody else. So for me, it was really a matter of just visualizing myself in a female form. And there was not any dislike of my male form. Again, it was kind of very Alan Watsian in that I saw myself as male only because the opposite of male was female. So I could also see myself as female. And this was the way my mind was working. And when I say I saw myself, it was just kind of like a physiologic embodiment. Obviously, I knew.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So it is related to this question of authority, Tim, around teenage years. I had a constant vision of myself, not as a male, but as a female. And of course, I said to myself, WTF, I think. I can't imagine anybody else is thinking like this, but nevertheless, the thoughts were real and the feelings were real and the feelings were visceral.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But nevertheless, what happened to me was I absorbed the American culture. And the American culture is a culture of questioning authority. I recently heard one of the latest interviews with Tony Fauci when he was, people were asking him, why is it that Americans won't do these basic public health steps to stop the pandemic? And he said, you know, American culture does not like to be told what to do. American culture is died in the wool question authority. You'd be hard-pressed to find another country where it would be more difficult to get people to follow a single rule for everybody than the United States. So it's that American cultural ethic of questioning authority that I know is like deep in my Mental DNA.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you discover something, what's happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain and it's lighting up the pleasure centers too. So I really believe that there's nothing more exciting than having a realization about something coming to an inspiration about something, which is why books and reading are so magical. Another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job of explaining concepts that can inspire people is Octavia Butler. She wrote a lot of books. One of them, very well known is Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents. And in these books, she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority. So I'm not sure what it was that my parents did. I don't really remember them specifically encouraging my questioning of them in fact. I do remember my father discouraging it.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this book, he goes through about 10 different revolutions in science, where everybody thought the world was one way and then kind of like a crazy person would say, no, I think it's like a different way. And gradually set about proving it's a different way and created a revolution in science. And he explains this in very lay terms. He takes you through the science of gravity, for example, with Isaac Newton, science of relativity, with Einstein, electricity, with Maxwell, and so on, in a very step-by-step fashion to make the science accessible. And in the way his main point in writing this book is to teach people critical thinking, to teach people to question authority. Ultimately, all science is about is just Saying why, why, like every two, three, four year old kid knows how to do that, right?”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of books like that. One of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named Thomas Kewen. He was one of the most famous historians of science, and his book is perennially in print. It's called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Carl Sagan was a genius at being able to take scientific concepts and relate them to people's everyday life. And if you remember for watching those series, the iconic image of him taking a dandelion and blowing it and describing that this is how a star spreads out its gas throughout the galaxy. Those type of step-by-step instructions ladders to get from one place to another is the way I think to build scientific literacy. And I would ask my students to think about anything that's important in their life, whatever it might be. And from whatever they said was important to their life, I would then begin wrapping that in kind of layers and layers of basic scientific concepts that pertain to what was important to them.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's a great phrase to use. I think what's necessary is that you have to relate science to people's everyday lives. And one of the greatest people at doing this, and to go back to the beginning of the interview when you asked me who was a role model for me? Should have said Carl Sagan was like an amazing, amazing role model to me. I watched the Cosmos series over and over again.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had that same kind of this is the purpose of my life, it's to make an electric helicopter. So you can get this kind of excitement at any point in life. I think probably the best way to describe it, Tim, would be like a lightning bolt to your soul.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Timmy, it's the best feeling. It's the best feeling. And actually, I don't think it really has anything to do with age. I felt like the same kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Teslas and I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output. And there's a very simple correlation between horsepower and electrical power between kilowatts and horsepower. It's almost one-to-one, not exactly. I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in terms of their horsepower. So right away, I said, wow, this car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just said, wow, that's the purpose of my life. And I made a beeline back to UCLA. I changed my major to communication studies. I did an undergraduate thesis on direct broadcast satellites. I did a joint JDMBA degree where I published multiple articles on satellite communications. I worked at Hughes Aircraft Company, which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then and helped design a satellite to cover South America. And then ultimately went out on my own with my dream goal, which was SiriusXM.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inside there were kind and patient with me, and they explained to me how their satellite antennas were communicating with satellites in all different orbits around the Earth and even all the way out to Jupiter. And I asked them, I said, would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there and have it broadcast information back to the entire Earth? And they said, if you made a powerful enough satellite, then the receiving equipment on Earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand. And I could have kissed the guy.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're absolutely right that I fell in love and I was intoxicated by satellite communications. It seemed to me kind of magical that we can put a machine way out in space and that the machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet. My first real moment of first love, if you will, was at a remote NASA tracking station in the Indian Ocean. And I had left UCLA to travel around the world really hitchhike around the world. And I found myself in the Indian Ocean on a set of islands called the Seychelles. And on these islands, at the top of the mountain, in the middle of the main island, there was a NASA tracking station. And I went up into it, and I was probably a pretty grungy 19-year-old at that point in time. But the engineers...”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That afflict tens of millions of people. So the healthcare system doesn't really mind paying a lot of money if it's a rare disease. And the people at Glaxo Welcome were clueless about this. They were actually looking for the big billion dollar blockbusters, not for the rare diseases. So those were their three omissions. They failed to be Alan Watsian. They failed to see that because something is big underneath, that means that there's something else that's small.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The third problem is that they didn't really imagine that the healthcare system would pay something like $100,000 per year for this medicine. And at the time, this was in the early about 20 years ago, early 2000s, I think like the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps $10,000 a year for a patient or $10,000 for a course of treatment. Because of advances in things like precision medicine and gene therapy, there are many, many medicines now that cost over $100,000 a year, mostly for rare diseases. And the healthcare system pays for them because so few people have these diseases that even though the medicines are expensive, it's a drop in the bucket compared to diseases like hypertension or common illnesses, asthma.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I thought about it like I was getting subscribers at Sirius XM. People said to me, oh, Martin, you'll be lucky to have 100,000 subscribers. I said, well, if I keep them, again, another hundred thousand the next year, then I'll be up to 200,000. And then maybe 400 and 800,000. Now we have 30 million. They didn't think in that subscriber mindset. That was the second problem.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think they were probably. Head of a pharmaceutical company, the odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than one in a hundred. I mean, the human body is so complicated. It's like a massive set of very precisely keyed locks. And every molecule is like a random key. And the chance that you would have a molecule that opened a lock that fixed some dysfunction in the body rather than causing some harm to the body is less than one in a hundred. So first of all, they figured the chance of this thing working just in general was less than one in a hundred. Secondly, they thought to themselves, even if it worked a little bit, there's only 2,000 people in the whole country with this disease. They didn't really think that if it worked really well, the number of people would keep accumulating.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has produced a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us. And Bob Bell, when I invited them to our 15th anniversary, and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine, and he said this was the absolute best transaction that GlaxoWelcome had ever done.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time I first met him toward the end of this process, and he became a product champion for me within GlaxoWelcome. I mean, that was just purest luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say. And then they really didn't think this molecule had any chance at all. And they were really just doing it to get rid of me, I think. But still, all 15 people had to sign it. After we successfully developed this molecule, we have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to GlaxaWelcome because that molecule has saved thousands of people's lives.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Finally it happened and all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10% of any money that I would ever get from this molecule. I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them. I was in their face all the time. Also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell's sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could buy it from us if you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise. I could then introduce you to the business development people at GlaxoWelcome. So over the course of the next several months, I created a brand new biotechnology company. I was able to have a Nobel laureate who was formerly associated with GlaxoWelcome become head of a scientific advisory board and I reapproached GlaxoWelcome and I said, I have all the things that you ask for. Can you sell me this drug? And we'll develop it ourselves. Well, Tim, it turns out that everybody I ask said, well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree. And that's how it is in a big bureaucracy. It turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper. To license this drug to me.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was actually a big all caps note. Unfortunately, the individual who had written the article had actually retired a few months earlier. And the person that I ended up meeting with who was in charge of research and development said that this was just one article. It was incidental finding. In any event, this disease afflicted so few people. It was completely unrealistic to expect Glaxo Welcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease. And I asked him, his name's Bob Bell. He's now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman. I asked Dr. Bell. I said, what would it take for you to develop this medicine? He said, well, it probably would take, you couldn't do it. We only developed medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year in revenue potential. He said, but it's possible.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sins have become so much better because we've been able to, like you mentioned in the introduction, get all these approvals. There are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it. So it's likely that people listening to your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension. And I read this article and I said, wow, just when I need this tiny stretch of artery just between the heart and the lungs, these molecules somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone. That was the holy grail that I was looking for. So I looked at where the author of the article was from. He was from GlaxoWelcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. And I made a beeline down to him and ask him if he could develop this molecule that he'd found for my daughter's disease.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At Claxville Welcome, had written in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure. And it failed in its test of congestive heart failure. It did not work. But in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did. And the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart, which is called the pulmonary artery. It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure while leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine. Well, that's exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension, the people who have this disease. I'll make a quick footnote that when my daughter was diagnosed, 2,000 people in the US had the disease because of medicine.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to. And then the shepherdizing process is after you get all of those references to then look up all of the references in those other articles. And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down, the references are all circling back around on themselves. So I applied that shepherdizing process to these medical articles and somewhat like doctors whenever a researcher publishes an article. They make footnotes and citations to other people's research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles and read those and then I would follow up on all of the references in those. Finally, I read about a molecule that a researcher”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a gazillion articles published on every type of medical research you could imagine. I mean, it's just a bottomless well. There are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals. Each of those journals have every year thousands of articles published across them. So it's difficult to find the information that you need. But in law school, we learn a very useful skill. This skill goes by the name of shepherdizing after this type of index that they have in law school called shepherds. So what shepherdizing involves is when a judge writes a decision like the Supreme Court issues a decision, they drop a lot of footnotes. And of course, one thing lawyers love to do is, you know, make footnotes and references. And then what you're supposed to do as a good lawyer is”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I looked up the words in a dictionary, and they had college level anatomy textbooks. So what I didn't know, I just kept going backwards in academia, I guess you would say, backwards in learning or pedagogia until I would even get to like a high school level textbook that would explain something. And I said, okay, I get that. And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Die within two to three years, he had only seen two or three other kids with it and they both died. And all you can do is hope for a lung transplant. So, Tim, I was completely crushed. I just saw black. I didn't know what to do. And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward night after night and myself and Bina would tag team staying there with her was once she fell asleep to go down into the library and to just begin learning about what was this illness she had which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension and why were there no treatments available for it so i just began reading and reading and reading most of the time i read things i didn't understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words that i never learned in law school or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering but of course there were dictionaries and”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, so it's kind of funny that you can go all the way through undergraduate at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a life science course. But that was the case. So the last biology class I had was in high school. And here, suddenly I was faced with a situation as an adult while running Sirius XM that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness. She can't even walk up a couple of stairs to the front door. And there are no medicines approved for it. I finally got her to the best doctor one could find, the head of pediatric cardiology at Children's National Medical Center in the middle of Washington, D.C. And the doctor said, you know, this is an extremely rare disease. No one knows why it arises.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, it was so brilliant. And then a few years ago, when his widow released the uncensored, unedited version of Stranger in a Strangeland, it's like three times larger and like no holds barred. I just savored, you know, every page of that. My favorite book of all of his is Time Enough for Love, in which he covers almost every topic under the Sun. So Heinlein's characters were somewhat of role models for me, like Lazarus Long is a common character in some Heinlein books. In the public sphere, I was very much enamored with Robert Kennedy. His positive, progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him. So I looked up to him. Those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time.”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Copy of a person. Another word is like a digital doppelganger of a person who will claim to be the original person. And they may make that claim before after the person died. And then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to grapple with, is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album? Or is this actually some form of digital sentience?”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I am a fan of the Black Mirror series, and there are a few other somewhat similar series that are streaming now, upload and whatnot. So it's an idea that's catching on. And even at a very basic level, social media firms like Twitter, for example, and probably Facebook as well, offer an opportunity that after a person passes away, their account can remain active. And I believe in the case of Twitter can even continue tweeting in the way that you once tweeted. So I think this general idea is it's a trend. It's only going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job of copying the human personality. Sometime in this century, for sure, and maybe in just like two or three decades, I think that there will be a digital...”
2024-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT