YouSaid · the spoken record

Safi Bahcall

lines on the record: 155
first: 2019-03-15
most recent: 2019-03-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This first portion, this was just a ton of fun to see you again and just catch up. So yeah, looking forward to part two and forward to having drinks together one of these days. For sure. Catching up some more.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's like separating the artists and soldiers, but not by role, but by time. And then now that we've done that, let's take off that hat and now Focus on operational excellence, on time, on budget, on spec. This is not a moment for innovative, dreamy, this is like deliver on time on budget on spec. And there you separate by time rather than by roll if you're a small company.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How might somebody here's all these reasons to dismiss it and why it could never be true, all the reasons people use to dismiss a loanshot. That's why it's a loonshot. Like they made fun of Goddard. Rockets could 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 rocketry. All these things you sure are true. What if they weren't? Or how might a really creative person Get away around that How might that kill us? 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. How might they kill us? And then if we identify those things, How can we flip that around and use that to knock out our competitors?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our competitors, our 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. What's the opposite? And now let's suspend disbelief like a movie. Let's suspend disbelief.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't want to tell your artists, all right, I need you to have a 98% success rate on your ideas. I need you to have two ideas on Monday, two ideas on Tuesday, three ideas on Wednesday. You can't schedule The converse is when you're dealing with your soldiers, you want to create those metrics. So in a small group, if you can't separate that by role, you want to separate that. We're all going to. Put off our execution hat, our operational excellence hat, and we're going to put on our crazy artists 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 But if they were right, they would kill us. What are those things? What are our embedded assumptions or beliefs about our customers? Right.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to be very mindful. This sort of comes back to wearing different hats. You want to be very mindful. We're going to go into a zone where all we're going to do is the art is created and we want to maximize failure. And then we're going to step out of that zone when we've listed the hundred different ideas and pick the five. And we're going to minimize failure. We want to get 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, because you don't have different people. You don't have an artist and a soul. Sometimes you do. But you want...”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's go to aviation. The guys who are coming up with crazy ideas for new technology, you want them to try lots of stuff and crazy things that nobody said could work. But the guys who are assembling planes, you don't want them to launch 10 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 ask about what if you're a smaller company or a solo? So, you want to separate your artists and soldiers. If you're a larger company, you can separate that by role. If you're a smaller company, you want to think about separating that by time.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can think of one as sort of the artist and one is 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 90 yards. And so you need both. And so that's... Kind of one of the things that I get into is why companies often fail is that they don't understand the separation that you need for both, that they're motivated by two completely different things. And you need to tailor the 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.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 your own ten line. There's a lot of ideas in the world. You want to be able 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, how to understand timelines and getting things done on time, on budget, on spec. And that's the other 90 yards. So you need both.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Walton disrupted the retail industry, transistor disrupted everything, but that's in hindsight. When you're really there at the time, you nurture loonshots to challenge beliefs, to challenge accepted wisdom. Some things that you think are absolutely true maybe you're right. Suppose you're wrong. 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 Lynch. So what can small teams or groups do?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has not been a real entrepreneur. Most of the great, like the transistor. We're working on building better switches for telecom. And when they came up with Bell Labs, and when they invented the solid state device, It turned out 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 aids. Were the scientists working on 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. So the reason you want to nurture loonshots is to challenge beliefs.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ideas that end up becoming incredibly important that actually in 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 Villard. He had no clue. He wasn't thinking, let me disrupt the retail industry by locating stores in the rural America and then building them somewhat. No. He was just like his wife said he didn't want to live in a big city. And as he pointed out later, we had no idea what the demand would be. So real innovations are about, are less about market projections and some guru waving a PowerPoint about you're going to disrupt this market? That's crap. A real innovation that ends up doing something is like a leaf in a tornado. You just never know where it's going to end up. Anybody tells you it's going to end up there.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So the moral of the story is you want to nurture these loonshots. So forget about moonshots or big goals or even the word disruptive innovation is a terrible word. It should be crossed out of every dictionary and taken off of every website because it's misleading because anybody who's been an entrepreneur knows that”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mace Windy, which sounds like a superhero that farts. 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 a horrific shit in the beginning, then you're probably okay. All right, 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.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was 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 can see why studios rejected it at first. And one of the titles of one of the drafts, actually this was the shooting version of the script. first title was the adventures of Luke Star Killer. It was such a stupid name that the hero was called Mace Windy.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Let's just put in a couple drive-in studios and then write it off as a loss. And then the crowd reaction was like, wait, what? And then, of course, it became the greatest film franchises of all times. And 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 find them. And I've read the drafts. They were freaking horrific.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were trying to sell the movie. They just sold it to some studio and they'd cast this guy who was 32 years old, who had been in a movie like Tarzan and the Little People or whatever it was. I forgot what the name was, in like two movies. And he'd been a milk truck driver. And they made it for a million bucks. And the American studioist, you know what, this is like, this is absurd. No one's going to want to see. Literally the quote was, no one's going to watch a limey truck driver Fighting spies. Of course, that guy was Sean Conner.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right. So there's a delete button on those videos, I'm sure. Anyways Tell a fair number of film stories. They tell a kind of James Bond story, which was a loonshot. Ian Fleming had written. These bond novels, and he really didn't have as much money as some of the 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, they just weren't buying. And there were a bunch of false fails. They made some TV show, which was a disaster. So that was a false fail. And the American studios were like, there's just no way Americans want to see a British dude with an accent or they're going to believe that it's like some heroic spy saving the world like the stories are junk and he's kind of a metriseal like who wants to watch that he's kind of prissy about his stuff like who wants to see that and actually even the first when he finally got he gave up after eight or nine years trying to do it and got these like random producers who you know want to just bankrupt at his business and uh”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And 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 developing a film was so similar to developing a drug. I just found that connection fascinating. So I tell a fair amount of film stories, I realize my answers are kind of 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 tang”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I did a lot of, one of the stories I tell a bunch of film stories. One of my really close friends in film, and we've been friends for many, many years. And so he and I have traded stories. And part of the inspiration 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.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's you screw up, you do something stupid, even in business life, you had a bad board, you said stupid things or you had a bad investor meeting, or you did something dumb with an employee that you regret doing, you need to slap your thigh or think of the Michelle Wee example. I screwed that up and that's one step along the way of me getting better and whatever I'm going to do now. Slap the thigh and let's focus on set that behind you and then move forward. And so that's the kind of golf record or the Andrea Agassi slap your thigh trick.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was like a mental little hook to forget about the point. And 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 Michelle. Michelle We, yeah, Michelle Wee.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Olivia was a good friend asked me for that question. And I thought about that at the time The inspiration a little bit is also tennis. So I played in the juniors as a kid and grew playing tennis and at the time it was probably, you know, shows how old I am. Pete Sambris versus Andre Agassi was. And so both were, I admired both. Agassi 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.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, that's good research. So that's from my very good friend, Olivia Fox, who was also at the wedding. You made a met her there, but she sent me an early draft and I gave her that quote. And it's a mental reminder of... Whenever you screw up, and anyone who's gotten anywhere, it's because you've been through those three deaths, you've been called a failure, an idiot, including in drafting this book when like every, 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. I'm thinking what book that makes physics? I haven't read any books”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 fast forward, I think it was July 11th, 1969, if I remember, it was the day after the Apollo, the successful launch of the Apollo 11 rocket to the moon, the Times issues of retraction. And it says, apparently, rocket flight does not violate the laws of physics, and quote, the Times regrets the error.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he says this guy, you know, this professor doesn't understand the basic laws of physics that we teach our children every day in school”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty hilarious in 1920, I think it was, after Goddard had suggested his idea that we could get to space with these liquid-fueled rockets, in 1920, the Times came out with an editorial and said, oh, this guy, Professor Goddard with his quote chair. They literally put quotes around the word chair in physics. Like, that's a bad thing. Air quotes. His quote, chair in physics at some university, like Clark, like making fun that he wasn't an Ivy League guy and he was a quote chair.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in fact, that gets right to the moonshot. So in 1961, Kennedy announced in a speech to Congress his ambition of putting a man on the moon. And of course that was widely applauded. 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 rockets work through 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 I remember I found this in”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he had small changes in strategy where he put his store, how big he made his store, and 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 than the P-type things, which are easier to prove. So those are the two types.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the town is smaller than 10,000 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 there are four different quail hunting seasons. So he puts his store there and he moves to a little town called Bentonville, Arkansas, and he opens his 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 we see 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.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For P type. You can put that on the cover of a magazine and people get really excited. There is, we're South by Southwest, so there is this obsession with product, product, product, product. But what people often miss, and this is sometimes much more important, and is a dangerous trap if you miss it, is the other kind. It's 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 wanted to go into retail and wants to open a shop where all the customers are, which is big cities. And then his wife happens to say, well, honey, you know, I'm happy to support you in this dream of yours, but I just hate big cities. I'm only willing to live.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The two types There is the one type I think of as. A product or a technology. That everybody says won't work. So you go way back to telephone people said this is a pointless toy or the transistor, there's no way you could make a switch out of some solid state device or personal computer. That's not going to be important or digital cameras or even jet engines. That's the Juan and Bob's 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 says won't work. Let's call those type. The other thing is much less, those are kind of glamorous because you can put a picture of a product on a piece.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, often that is the reason why there's something really important is because everybody has 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, because everybody gives up on the first or second, because everybody's following... 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.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's what he meant. And then when you look back in history, like the statin drugs, I tell a little bit of that story, probably saved millions of lives, prevented millions of heart attacks. They were killed multiple times and they almost died and disappeared and never happened. And I've come to think of that as the three deaths of the loonshot. Truly important breakthroughs are killed several times. And it does go against the grain of the stuff that you hear in Silicon Valley all the time of like fail fast and pivot. Fail fast and pivot. Well, okay, but 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. If there's something really important. Underlying there”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happens, these people with these great ideas get killed, like really the project gets terminated, everybody hates it, it's pulled up. 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 going to work on a dead project. So no one can prove you wrong. You seem like a big man. It's really easy. It's actually hard to keep a project going. Why? Because any good, crazy idea stumbles and fails like Jim said, it gets killed three times. It has these terrible failures. It seems like a really bad idea. It doesn't work. It looks like it's not going to work out. And then if you have a really great champion or you get really lucky, you survive that failure. And all of his projects that he won the Nobel Prize for two drug categories, a beta blockers and a histamine antagonists failed like that multiple times.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Develop two phenomenal drug categories that saved millions of lives. And 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 kind of depressed about because I was really excited about and it's not, you know, it hit this negative result. And 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. And I took away from that I really 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 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...”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's like, come have a whiskey with you. Like, everybody else leaves. And I'm like, oh my God, how is this 80 year old guy just full of it? So he gets some whiskeys. And then he's like, you know, he tells us 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 he like starts with like the Korean war. Oh my God. This is going to be a long night. I'm going to need a shadow of adrenaline or something just to stay alive. But I mean, they're fascinating stories of like this guy really.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some transatlantic flight landed in the morning, and it probably had like a 12 or 14. It just went through the whole day of like research, research, you know, stories, and he'd been talking the whole day in Stingon's feet. And we're at, you know, the end of like some dinner. And I am like dropping dead of exhaustion. And I'm probably in my mid 30s or whatever, early 40s at the time. And I'm just like, I just want to go home to bed because this was a long day. And he's like, and so I'm getting up to like go. And he goes, no, softly 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 I'm saying.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was, and he passed away a few years ago as well. He was a Nobel Prize winning pharmacologist, chemist, biochemist, well, not biochemist, chemist. From Scotland. And he, in some ways, revolutionized drug discovery. He's one of the first 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 80s. But we got him interested in what we were doing. There were things that he liked about our little team, our little band of biologists and chemists, and we had a sort of a little, you know, we went against the grain of what people said you should be doing that kind of appealed to him. So he would fly over periodically from Scotland and advise our team. And I remember when one night he'd flown over, remember this is like an 80-year-old guy. And he had flown over”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And I think, and eight years later, he sold it for a billion dollars. And that's how paying attention to a false fail can be very lucrative”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were actually great, but people were staying forever on these sites. These guys just had a bad website. They had a software glitch Was a false fail. It was a false fail of Frenster. It was a flaw in the experiment in the process by which people were making their judgment, not a flaw in the underlying idea, the Loonshot, the crazy idea that social networks had some value. So Tiel wrote Zuckerberg for 500,000.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they got the data on the user retention in Friendster and they found, holy crap, people are staying on this site for hours. Now this is a site that's crappy. No offense to whoever's listening is part of that team. But this site is crashing all the time and they happen 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 because your site is glitching. And what they realized is that people were staying on for hours Even though it was a crappy, glitchy website. And that the MySpace just had a better website. So they realized it wasn't that it was a bad business model like clothing fads and everybody, that's what people thought. It was like, you know, you just switch, everybody will switch on masks every season”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They said all these guys fail. And you know why they fail? We know why they fail because you can see that all these users are hopping from network to network. And that's the outcome, right? That's the bishop Taekwondo. It 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. Ken and Peter said, Is that really why they're failing? take a look. And so they had friends behind the scenes at Friends. I don't remember if they went best or as whatever, but it's a small community. And they said, let's ask for the data, for the user retention data. People are clearly fleeing. And we know that they were using Friendster and like the website was kind of glitchy and it was sort of crashing”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So can head started working with Peter on And he mentioned that this guy Zuckerberg had come by Mark Zuckerberg with this idea for Social network and everybody had been social networks had been around for a decade at that point and they'd all gone nowhere. There was a dozen of them. You and I can remember all these crazy names of all these things, you know, small world, 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 Friendster, 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 MySpace. So when Zuckerberg was going around, Ken was telling me the story, everybody had kind of passed.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By a false fail, I mean, it was a flaw in the experiment rather than the idea. The outcome is the same. The experiment gave a negative result and everybody walks away. In science, that's the case. The experiment gave a negative result. Everybody walks away. But the problem is not with the idea. It's with the experiment. So the example, you mentioned Peter Teal. So the example I use is I think... I might have first heard about this from Ken Howy. It was probably another mutual friend”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the revisionist history, looking back, it's like, oh, it's obvious that it was right. It's sort of a natural tendency to assume that, and that guy was obviously a genius, but most people don't talk about the fact that everyone said he was an idiot for 20 years, including some of the most famous people and famous discoveries we know of. But what you see with loon shots with these crazy ideas is very often people give up on them because of what you might call a false fail.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Felicity, let's say you're nurturing some crazy idea that everybody thinks is nuts, which I call for lack of a better word, I call that a loonshot rather than a moonshot. You know, moonshot, everybody knows what is a big goal and an exciting destination. But the big ideas that really make a difference that transform, whether it's an industry or science or even world history, almost never arrived dazzling everybody with their brilliance. tend to be the ones that are floating around for years or sometimes decades and that people championing them are written off as nuts.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly right. It's in order. Speed, detention, courage, and that's kind of what I found for me was the secret of creating wacky shit.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isaac Newton also had some better skills, but he was really fed the early ideas by a guy named Robert Hooke. So for creativity, what I found was like speed, attention, and courage, because you have to say the idea of comparing Steve Jobs and Jeff Raskin with Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke sounds nuts. Who would ever do that? But you have to have some balls to go after that.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And he sort of 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. I realized we're going on a really long tangent here.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT