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

“I'm loving this. So take your time. So, you know, you, Tim, I remember coming to these sort of sway no BLC events, Aaron Hoffman, my friend, used to come to these things. were awesome and so I and you know I ended up having some decent dating life because I would do these things mostly just because I was not around very often I would just pick a day and then everybody would”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weird, and then single women in Manhattan, like really interesting, intelligent, attractive women friends that would be like, I am so there. I am, I so want to come. And then I realized, you know, I was sort of out of it, but I realized like there was such frustration among really intelligent women, professional women. They were so tired of like the same old, because New York is full of these, you know, really ambitious bankers who are just focused on banking. They were so curious to meet scientists. So for me, I see scientists all day long and writers I was sort of curious about and entrepreneur. But anyway, it ended up becoming this really fun thing. And I went out on a series of dates. But for probably 10 years, I never really had, we're coming to the system outcome versus dating.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially from the BLC crowd. Like my bank or lawyer or consulting friends were like, Can I come? I'm like, wait a minute, what part of no BLC? I just said no BLC. And like, yeah, yeah, but can I come? Can you make any sense?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self hating consultant. And call him Swayne OBLC, also because I just don't remember stuff unless I have it like an silly acronym or something. Yeah. I called the Sway No BLC. And as soon as I said, especially when I edited the no BLC, like interest skyrocketed.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking about that later So I was living in Manhattan. As a single guy, and the company that I was running was in Boston. So I was just commuting back and forth and I didn't have almost any social life because there's so much time in the plane and then dealing with running a business. So I would set up these gatherings, some of which you came to, I remember in my. Apartment and um. Called them sway, scientists, writers, artists, and entrepreneurs. And then eventually I added mostly because I was trying to exclude them, and eventually I just became explicit no BLC. No bankers, lawyers, or consultants.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Single life, actually, when you and I knew each other, both were single. I take you're still, we haven't caught up in a couple of years.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And then, uh, You say, now I have a flaw in my System where I'm frustrated at work and then it comes out as a comment about something that just is a bad idea. It's a bad out. So maybe rather than just say don't ask about the dishes next time and it comes out, say if I'm frustrated at work, what else can I do other than make comments about the dishes? Like can I set up a punching bag and just start hitting a punching bag and take a shower and then I'm in a better mood and I don't give a shit about dishes or whatever. So you find what were you thinking at the time when you made that comment? Is there a tweak to your decision making process so that you don't make not just that comment, not Pont takes bishop, but many other similar things? So that's... Married life, for example, personal example.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, good. Let's say you get into an argument with your significant other and you find yourself getting into an argument, you say something about, I don't know, whatever, the dishes or you say something about the driving or you say something. And it leads into an argument. And then the outcome mindset is like, well, I said something about the dishes. Don't say something about the dishes in the future. So, guess what's going to happen? You're going to have the same kind of argument about 57 other subjects because you're not getting at the root. What were you thinking when you said that thing about the dishes? Why were you thinking it? State of mind were you in? Maybe you're frustrated about something at work as an example and you're mentioning some nagging comment.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business So it can have a pretty big effect on the personal side as well. One example Give one example for married people, one example for single people. So single one I actually did use a little personal, but whatever. Again, it's just you and me, right?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we really shouldn't, the reason that's more important is because it cements bad habits. This is what we did last time. We got drunk before we made an investment, and it was a great investment. Let's get drunk again and make another. It cements bad habits because you confuse good outcome with good decision-making. So that's on the...”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you kicked right at the goal paper and you got to go. Does that mean you should keep kicking right at the goalkeeper? That's the right strategy. No, you just got lucky. You won the game in maybe the World Championship, but you got lucky. Do you want to do that again next time? No, you bet on some dumb internet stock and it quadrupled or something and you had no idea what you were doing and you were drunk when you made the investment, but you made quadruple your money. So does that tell you you want to be drunk before every investment and not look at any due diligence? No, you got lucky. So it's more important to actually look at the successes and think about how do I make that decision than it is the failure because everybody's thinks hard about a failure. People rarely think about did I get lucky? They like to say, oh, I was my genius, blah, blah, blah. So it's more important as a team to say, all right, this worked. Where did we get lucky? Where do we actually have flaws in our process that we need to adjust next time and how we made that? We were uninformed and we simply got luckier. Our competitor stumbled. We just got lucky.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How are people communicating? How are people exchanging? Are they meeting the day of? Whose set of analyses are they looking at? Somebody who really knows what they're doing or not? And did they get presented the right data at the right time to make the most informed? Now, the real key is, as you sort of said with luck and cards, Want to do this for not just for failures, that's the wrong. You want to do it as much, if not more, for successes. You might have just gotten lucky. Those are the most dangerous traps. Let's say you kick a soccer ball into the goal and you were five feet in front of the goalkeeper and you kicked right at the goalkeeper. It just happens that the goalkeeper slipped in the mud or whatever. It was raining.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. So there's so many. Like, what are people's individual incentives? The people who are involved in the decision, so few people ask that question. Are they really incentivized by the project launch or do they have some other thing? Like are they really focused on promotion? So how does being focused on promotion, how did that affect the decision? And if we altered their incentives, might they have arrived at a different decision? So people rarely ask let's just think about the X number of people who are involved in the decision. Let's walk through one by one what are their incentives. Let's just think about, let's just have even a 20-minute conversation. Do we really think the incentives are the right incentives that are giving us that are aligning people with the outcome or not?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The really, really great teams and companies, and not that many of them, say, how did we arrive at that decision to launch that product at that time? How did we make that decision? Who is involved in the decision? What information did they have? Is that the right people to be making the decision? Are we making the decisions in the right way? You see the difference. In one case, you just learn let's not put feature X on product Y. In the other case, you learn something that can apply to 500 different products. Let's think about how we tweak our decision-making process in the future. So that's sort of system versus outcome mindset on the business side.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think at the business level, the poker analogy is perfect because people don't realize how much is luck in real life, whether it's an invention or an innovation or launching a new product. In the business level, and I'll tell you kind of a totally different angle, personal level, but at the business level, you know, there are some pretty good teams or companies that will try to do a post-mortem after some product launches, and they'll analyze, but they're still at that level one of outcome mindset of we did Pontak's bishop and it didn't work, so let's not do. So I said we launched the product and it didn't have this feature and customers liked this feature, and that's why it didn't go as well. So let's make sure we have this feature. So you're still on kind of level one.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one higher level, and that has enormous power and leverage. Because once you tweak your process, if you can identify a weakness in your process and adjust that process, now not only next time won't you do Pontakes Bishop, which you might do Pon does something else, but you've now improved your process, which can help you in 500 other than helping you in one situation that can help you in 500. And so I took that and I call that sort of system versus outcome mindset, and that can help you enormously in personal life or in business life. And so that's”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not the outcome itself, but one step above, which is what was my process that I used to arrive at that decision, and given that it was a bad decision, where did that process break down in my decision? And therefore, how should I tweak my decision-making process? And he said, that one lesson, keep asking why did you make that decision and call that sort of a system mindset. Let's analyze the system rather than the outcome.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rather than analyze the move and the outcome, which is what most chess players do, and you can call that kind of an outcome mindset. He analyzed how I did arrive at the decision to make that move. Not just so much the move itself, but what was I think, what was my decision-making process? Which series of moves did I go through? How long did I go through them? What did I consider? In what order? How did I prepare for the match? And how did that affect my all these sort of meta levels?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and because he did chess and then did martial arts, and I did martial arts for a long time and then physics. So Kasparov, as you mean it was the longest reigning chess champion in history. And he wrote this book about how life imitates chess, where he kind of breaks down what he did. It's so fascinating, but one particular lesson. Really resonated for me. As a mindset shift for how to think about making decisions or analyzing decisions. Both in business life and in personal life. Casper, I've said one of, if not the key to his success in chess, was After a game, whether he won or lost, or Rather than say, analyze the game by saying, oh, I moved Pawn to bishop. Pondakes bishop here, and that was a bad move, and that lost the game, so next time I shouldn't do Pontak's bishop.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, another book that I really enjoyed was his book Life Imitates Chess. I love that book. And a little bit for a lot of reasons. I have a real admiration of excellent chess players because it's something that takes incredible focus, incredible commitment, and people who do it really well do something I could never do. It's so impressive. So I've always... Found it fascinating to follow About great chess players. And I actually listened to some podcasts you did with a guy named Josh. Weight skin, which was fascinating. I actually loved his book too. And then because of that, I went and got, I didn't know who he was before, got his book, which was awesome about...”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's just you me and the panel. Just you and me, right? It's just all private stuff. I always just hear this thing like music, and it was in perfect harmony. And then I'd pick up the newspaper or I pick up some other stuff or some random book and I couldn't read more than two sentences because it just sounded like clashing. Well, the transitioning and the use of passive and it didn't, this word could have been that where I'm like, I can't even read more than three sentences because it just, it's grading. And then I go back to this other thing where there was perfect harmony. And it was just musical. I wouldn't even, at some point, I wouldn't even know why. But one thing was just great and I get like these, it's like somebody rubbing fingers on chalkboard. You're like, and the other one, it's just like,”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would hear them in my head, but as music and as harm. So when I was read, for example, in the book, if I would hear This is a little weird to say all this stuff because it's like private internal mind thing. Talk about it out loud.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And once I'd, after doing this sort of over and over, and then there were a few other beautiful passages, and I would capture them in my Evernote, and then I would highlight the word, like why this word in yellow. And then sometimes I would bold, like he did a lot of uses a lot of alliterations, and I would highlight the first letters just to see his alliterations. And then I would highlight the transitions, and then I would break down the transitions between paragraphs into like, well, there's seven different types of transitions. Here's an example of one. Oh, this is the pivot transition. And so I started to get a sense of that. And I started having this weird experience after doing this for a year or so, which was I would read passages and I would hear music. And I would hear them.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's just like, how the fricking hell does this guy do this? And again, I have to say, I'm not a literature guy or an English guy, and there's 99% of famous authors I've not read. I just couldn't believe this. And so I was, how does this guy do this?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nabokov I picked because his. Sentences and rhythm and musicality of his writing, which is like jaw dropping in everyone, like everyone is a 10 out of 10. It's not like, oh, there's a great sentence or a great pass.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's probably sort of like your sports thing with athletes. How the freaking hell is this guy doing it? And it's just so different at such a higher level than any. So that's why I would take two paragraphs at a time or three paragraphs. And I'd say, why did he put this word here in this sentence and not there? Because the natural thing would be, let's say, to make an active voice or the natural thing would be, why did he use this transition from this sentence, the end of this one, to the beginning or end of this paragraph? Suppose I do it differently. It just sounds worse. Why? Why does it sound worse when I move this word? And he could have picked any word. There are like six words you could imagine that mean this thing. Why did he pick this one? Let me try a different one. And then, oh, it just sounds worse. And I would just do that repeatedly.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nabokov short stories And I'll explain why. And Donald Hall essays after 80. And this is for just to develop an ear for writing. I just read a paragraph or two or three from those books. Each night, and then I would. Break it down like why did this guy use? I wasn't reading for content. I was just reading for ear. So Nabokov, I had read a little bit of this and a little bit of that and reading here. And then I picked some friend, I think, and sent me pointed me to Nibbokov short stories. And by the way, I should say, I don't think I've read anything else because I'm just that one. When I opened it up at random, Nabooka's short stories, and I started reading his sentences, like my jaw dropped. I didn't know the English language could do that How is this guy doing that?”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost always the same. Actually, I would Focus on probably two books, and I would just dissect a paragraph or two from those two books for almost a year. And that was one of the other things with swimming, you know, everybody says keep your head up or it's natural to keep your head up. There's this natural inclination to try to read a ton, read widely, read all these authors, and you get all these lists of, here's my favorite 20 authors, oh, I should read those 20. There's somebody else's favorite 20. Oh, I should read those 20. And so I kind of threw all that out and said, I'm going to actually focus. I don't know much about literature. I did sports and I did math and science and that's it. I really didn't read it. So I didn't, so I have like a big gap. But I picked two books that really resonated for me.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know five, six o'clock, pick my daughter up from school, from daycare, bring her back, dinner, and then my wife would check out at like 7.30H, gets up really early, and she was just done. So from 8 o'clock on, every day for almost two years, I would bring out one of actually just a couple books. And often I would just go, we were living on Mass Ave in Cambridge, and so there are a lot of great bars, a little restaurant, and I would go to the bar counter, get a burger, pizza or something, and a beer Would spend the next two hours usually just on two paragraphs.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As part of, I found that people had sort of said, oh, you're a pretty good writer. I think that's meaningful. So that's a really low bar. Or even a CEO or a public company, that's a really low bar. You're pretty good for a public company executive. I'm like, thanks. That's like, I'm 1.5 rather than a one. But I just started to find it fun to try to break down writing like you break down swimming or break down other things. And then how do you train to get better? And so I read a lot. Eventually, I came up with a training. And I would write I drop my daughter off at school in the morning and come back, kind of lock myself in this little 8x8 cave, shut down everything, and just do one of the three sort of modes of writing, whether you're reading, you're writing, or editing.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Johnny flew the helicopter. Now, in this case, for example, why would you want to use the passive voice? Well, if you're telling a story, you're telling the story of the fire, do you really need to know that Johnny flew that helicopter to put out that fire? I think this is an example and something I seem to that specific helicopter. It's actually kind of distracting because Johnny is kind of irrelevant to the story. So what you're doing is you're inserting something in the reader's mind that's an irrelevant distraction that you'll never come back to. is a glitch in the storytelling so that's one example of why you want to use there are many examples of why you want to use but anyways”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The active voice is Johnny flew the helicopter to go put out to go videotape the fire. And then it's so funny. I don't do these things. Helicopter was brought in to go. You know, view the fire from high above and film it for video. And so in the helicopter was brought in as kind of passive.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, just like don't use passive voice. There are actually some great reasons you do want to use passive voice, but if you, I get this picture of like this old school moment hitting you with a ruler from the 190, don't you passive voice, never use passive voice, always use active voice. And then you read some of these phenomenally beautiful passages and you look in them and they're using passive voice left and right. Really? Because these guys are pretty, like some of these guys have won the, you know, Nobel Prize, for example, or Pulter Prize, and they're using. So, why”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broke it down a little like swimming. Like, what are the you think you know? People tell you a bunch of stuff. And the more you get into it, the more you realize a lot of stuff that people tell you is really not very helpful or often wrong.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man. I don't know how you find this stuff. That had to do with another detail. So I was with this company that I started for 13 or so years and then through a weird series of coincidences and stumbles and different things, ended up Writing and writing. And so first I wrote a kind of a long form essay and then it was 15,000 words. I edited a lot and people seemed to like it. And then some much more experienced author friends and journalist friends were like, nobody publishes 15,000 word essays anymore. That's a book. Also, you have a lot of ideas in here and that needs to be fleshed out. So that turned into a book. And as I started with writing,”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just got more and more into it and interested. These individual lives and how little progress had been made and how many good ideas were floating around. And if I could make a difference, bridging some of those ideas. Into the real world, into the commercial world, into the business world, into the industry where they could become drugs that could save lives. Even if you just save one kid. Help one family, that would feel incredibly satisfying, more satisfying than writing a paper, making money. So that's kind of how I got into cancer and oncology.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See a family experiencing life together for decades and they might not have, that's incredibly satisfying. And so I sort of stumbled into cancer to get back to your question because that was a really hot research year. This was 18, 19 years ago. That was a really exciting area and there was really very little progress made in that area. And I spent about six months or a year kind of talking to scientists at different universities who had might have some promising ideas and didn't want to work with venture capitalists and thought that physics was sort of like this exotic weird bird. And so I was sort of Were just like, who is this guy who's coming to talk to us about biology and chemistry and medicine and oncology? And he's a physicist. So it was a mutual interest there. And eventually started a company.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're helping people who are suffering. And there's something, you could be very selfish about it, there's something just very satisfying. Even if you just think at the local level, like there's a kid in a hospital bed and family is going to lose that kid. And if something you can do could help save that kid, and so that family and that kid have a decades of life together, even if that's just one kid. That feels so much more satisfying than having X or Y or Z in the bank or even publishing another original research paper. So that's on your. If you can.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Checkbook. Like if I had $6 to buy a burrito in San Francisco, I was happy. That's awesome. But after a couple years, you're like, oh, okay, now I got what people do for a living and how it works and the business stuff. And then I was like, how do I combine? I don't think I just want to be a guy who sort of whispers to people, here's what you might want to do if you want to build your business. I wanted to sort of do something, but I wanted to do something back in the science world and also something that was more about Either let's make more money, which is what big companies are trying to do and what you're as a consultant you're trying to help them. And in academia, it's about the search for truth. So I wanted to do something different that would feel like Maybe a little cornier or clich”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But anyway, I did that, and that was drinking from a fire hose because I'd like never set up foot off a university. And all of a sudden, I'm wearing a suit and I hadn't worn a suit, well, like since my Bar Mitzvah. And then they throw you, I mean, they take time to sort of educate you a little bit online. That was super fun, all these professors fly in to just educate you. And I'm like, this is the best thing ever. They're paying me. And all these professors have been flying into like this four-week course on this resort with 30 people from all over the world who are really interesting people my age and people are flying in just to teach us like all day long i'm like this is like this is awesome and i'm learning all this new stuff and i was drinking from a fire hose and it was sort of going from you know well in this case it was a zero out of ten”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like a million bucks because I have this 120 men's warehouse suit and I probably spent $18 on the men's warehouse tie and I'm feeling really extravagant. And then I'm like walking down the street, and I have this beat up old ski jacket with like still the ski tags hanging off of it on top of your men's warehouse. My men's warehouse, and I'm like.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My friend told me, You need to wear a suit. And I'm like, wow, I haven't had a suit since my bar mitzvah. 18 years ago or whatever. So I asked where do you buy a suit? And so I got the name of a place and I went in and was just like incredible place with these super expensive clothes. And it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. It was called the men's warehouse. And so I bought a suit and I felt like a million. I paid $120 or something. I was like, this is like 10x more than I've ever paid for any clothing item. And I felt like a million bucks and I fly to New York for this interview with his firm. And I remember coming into the city and getting off and walking up Park Avenue. And I'm wearing this old beat-up ski jacket because I would go skiing and I didn't realize that people also have some fancy jacket.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If need be, and I don't think that I'm getting kind of far from your cancer question, I realize now, but like sort of a funny story. So it's kind of how I got ended up in cancer when I start off in this weird physics play. So I basically hadn't set foot off a university until I was 30 because my parents are academic scientists. We just mentioned Princeton. And so I spent a lot of time around there and then college, grad school, postdoc. And then I was sort of getting a little like, is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Just write papers and grants and referee and this thing, conferences. So I started exploring as some friend had been to this company called McKinsey, which I'd never heard of. And they said, look, they sort of interesting problem solving. It's sort of like, all right, I'll do that, signed, you know, sent an application interview comes in.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Switched out of academic science because after about five years in each of these areas, I felt like I'd sort of learn and I wanted to learn something new. So I went into the business world, went into McKinsey, didn't know anything about, I didn't even own a suit. Actually, can I take a digression for a weird little story? I love digressions for weird stories. I'll remember I'll...”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gotten very deep in that tunnel and I wasn't learning as much. And I'm not going to exaggerate. There was a ton still out there to learn. But it wasn't like drinking from a fire hose, like starting off feeling like an imposter or starting off being barely able to swim one lap and then going to swimming a kilometer, no problem. And physics has got particle physics has gotten a little stuck in the last 20 or 30 years in some sense, which we can talk about some other time. So I switched to a totally different area after about five years. And then I got into the business world. I realized I'm kind of far from your cancer question. That's okay. But it's...”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way I think about it is I couple to the derivative and I'll break that down. So the derivative is a slope. So zero derivative means no slope and big derivative means a very high slope. And in physics, when you say you couple to something, an electron is traveling along and has some coupling constant to the photon, and that's how it interacts with light. And that's always the case. And so when I say I coupled to derivative, it means that I derive energy from the slope, from the slope of learning. And so when I started in theoretical physics, I was learning an enormous amount. And then after I was in one area of theoretical physics called particle physics, it's the science of the very small, what happens inside of a proton or a neutron, a quarks. And after a few years, I sort of felt like I had...”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started in academic science and theoretical physics. And after a few years, and this may be a personality flaw, but I... And it's taken me many years to appreciate this, but I really get excited. All right, I'll explain this in physics geek language, and then I'll try to, there's a saying.”
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. He was at Princeton and you were at Princeton. And actually, that's sort of the connection. Like, I think he was a neighbor of my mom and dad, because I grew up in Princeton. Oh,”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That transformed economics. So there you see just the same total immersion swimming trick which changes swimming is what Kahneman did for economics. It changed economics with this one idea. A, actually humans are humans. They operate on some heuristics, not NPV calculations. And economists were like, that's not possible. They operate on NPV. I don't think so. I kind of know humans and they don't do that.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And Connaman just said, you know, I'm a psychologist, and that's like bullshit. That's just not what happens. That's not what people do. People operate on these little rules of thumb, and sometimes X may rationally be greater than Y, but they do Y anyway for these reasons. And it's not, it was a very simple adjustment. Like hold your head flat and don't kick. Is basically saying, Hey, humans are humans, they're not calculators. That's it.”
2019-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT