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Tim O'Reilly

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2017-11-08

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2017-11-08

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1. “And I've been the three things that happened the day of that decision or the day after that decision. One, it was not really meaningful other than just a psychological boost. I had a friend who was dating the Philippine ambassador to the UN. And he was trying to remember a quote from Lao Tzu, and she knew that I was really deeply into Lao Tzu. And so she called me up to say, hey, my friend needs this quote for his speech. She's going to give it to the UN. Do you know what it was? And it was just kind of cool. Here I am as this kid being asked as a source for this speech. That gave me a boost. The other thing was I got approached by another friend to write a book about Frank Herbert, which is the thing that ended up convincing me that I was a writer.”

   2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “It was, you know, my wife and I had been talking about having kids. She was saying, you know, about six, she was seven years older than I was, and she was ready before I was. I was 24. I basically, you know, one day I said, I'm ready. She'd been saying, let's have kids. And I said, okay, I'm ready. And the very next day, I still remember it. These three things happen on the same day. And it was almost like a sign. One of them, well, I guess the main thing I would just say is once I decided it was sort of like, oh, I have to start really being the breadwinner. I have to be a provider. And it was sort of like a light gun. Switch got flicked. It was like, wow, daddy juice kicked in.”

   2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Now, kind of rehearse ideas of justice. They were incredibly new and powerful. And yes, they felt like these mystical kind of things that they were wrestling with. But anyway, but I digress. So the point of, the reason I was interested in classics was deeply connected with George's theory because I was into like, okay, we're now entering into, he had this idea that we were entering into this new phase of global consciousness. And there's a real irony because my long detour into tech. Was turned out not to be a detour at all because who would have thought that I'm trying to think how much longer, 30 years later I would be kind of the prophet of global consciousness in the form of Web 2.0 and mediated by technology. But to answer your question very specifically,”

   2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Actually, books like Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind, where you can kind of see this, you know, that when they talk about in homer, Odysseus doesn't decide to do something, Athena puts this idea into his Thumas, his liver, and he acts. And then by the time 400 years later, when you're reading about Socrates, you're seeing them wrestling with these ideas that really are at the heart of what is truth, what is justice, what is happiness. And by the way, that was sort of the subject of my thesis in classics was really about mysticism and logic in Plato, because they would kind of talk about, well, these mystical passages, he must have been influenced by the Orphics. I'm like, no, you know, these things that we...”

   2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Well, it was pretty simple. First of all, let me give a little context for the classics. I had worked in the early 70s when I was actually just even a teenager with a guy named George Simon, who had developed this theory about the evolution of consciousness and also about an experiential approach to kind of inner spiritual growth. I could kind of go into it in more detail. But one of his ideas was that there had been this profound evolution of consciousness over time. And there was a sort of a historical arc to it, and that we were in a period of sort of individuation that had really begun in classical Greece.”

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6. “And there are some things that you have to do that you don't want to do. And one of the secrets of success in life is to first will those things and then come to love them. And you think about that with exercise, the great example. It's like it's hard to get started, but once you get into it, it becomes a joy. And there are a lot of things that are like that. Doing the dishes, cleaning the house, looking after other people. And so understanding having an understanding of what your responsibilities are and then working at them, if necessary with will until they become something that you love is just an incredibly useful piece of life advice.”

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7. “I don't have kids, so I don't have any answers to it. Well, the one thing that I, this is not a question, but there's one piece of life advice that I give in the form of a quote from a psychiatrist named Irvin Yalam, who was also a novelist, and he wrote a novel called When Nietzsche Wept, which is an imagined story of early analysis, actually predominated, was a guy who was a predecessor to Freud. It's basically him analyzing Nietzsche. And there's this one line in it that really stuck in my head as lines do sometimes from books. And it was, first will, what is necessary, and then love what you will. And it does have to do with the one thing that I think we do have to teach our children. Well, there's a lot of things we have to teach our children. But one of them is that everything doesn't come easily.”

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8. “Treat them as people. I mean, a lot of people treat their kids as objects. I've been in a room with people where they talk about their kids when they're there as if they don't listen. They're not there. Or they just, you know, so kids are on show or they're told what to do. And it's like treat them like you would want to be treated. I guess I felt like I did my best. As a parent, parenting is a hard job to just be there with your kids and talk with them and listen to them.”

   2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “The thing I guess I would just say is look at your kid. There's a wonderful book, I forget the name of the author. It's called Loving Every Child. And it's about a guy in Nazi Germany. He basically had two schools. And one was for children of wealthy Germans. And then the other was a segregated school for Jews. And when they came to take his Jewish kids, he went with them and died in the concentration camp. Sorry. Funny how we can forget those things. But anyway, but the point of the book is love your children, look at them, understand them, and listen to them. And the thing that I think”

   2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “Frank didn't match the recipe of what you were supposed to do in school, but it was pretty clear he was following his own path. Same thing's true of, you know, I have two daughters and one of them school was easy. She always did well. The other one, you know, not so well. But she was totally following her own path. And she's become this amazing sound artist. She's an artist in residence of the exploratorium, you know, created an iPhone app for something called Rhythm Necklaces, this different way of visualizing rhythm. She's sort of exploring medieval hockets and she's scored stuff for Bjork's biophiliator and created these sort of all these odd musical instruments just totally built her own curiosity driven path into the world. And so”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “It's sort of a tough one because sometimes you do have to push kids. I think the main thing, and this is true whether you're a parent with your kids or whether you're a business person or just somebody trying to solve problems in your own life, is having an attitude of receptivity and openness and looking, really looking and understanding what's going on. I mean, at the end of the day, there are no recipes. And so many problems come from people following recipes or following maps that don't match the reality.”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Even though he started with this sort of rental thing in college, he was basically building and selling homes. And then after the 2008 financial crisis, nobody would finance homes unless you had cash. So you could borrow for a business property. So he ended up building, he had these lots and he started building places and renting them. And he actually got pretty good at it. So he has a variety of businesses.”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Well, because I was always the top student in school and he was, you know, he got D's and F's. And my brothers and I were always saying, no, no, he just isn't interested, you know, because we would see him at home, you know, when he was 10 years old. He got totally obsessed with the Civil War and he'd read, he was reading Bruce Catton and all the lots and lots of history and setting up these enormous recreations of battles of the Civil War. And we went, he's just not interested in school. And so just sort of interesting watching, he's seven years younger than I am, but watching him kind of have the same path of building his own business, you know, creating a lot of value for the people around him and pivoting as necessary. He got into the”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “Be basically built a house to live in and never look back. It was like, I think it was a junior, he had a friend built the house that they went and lived in. And then they went, this was great. So they rented it to some other students and they built another one over the summer and lived in that. Anyway, so he started, and it's kind of funny because he's really built, he still lives near the college. He lived in. He's built the church, the school, the library, the homes that many of the people live in. And he now has kind of a business that's a rental business. There's some actually fabulous places he's built on the Shenandoah River that he rents. It's kind of interesting because he's actually been a lot like me and that he built his business just intuitively from the ground up by following his nose. And what was so interesting though, when we were growing up,”

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15. “My next brother has run a small publishing company that I started with him called Travelers Tales, which wrote basically was a story-based approach to travel, rather than guidebooks which tell you what to do. It was like more like people sharing their experiences so you could go, oh yeah, that sounds like exactly what I want, as opposed to kind of the catalog approach. So he's been a travel writer for many years. And then all of my sisters have basically have raised families, although it's interesting, a very heavy percentage of homeschooling in my family. And so they've been teachers as well as parents, my younger brother, Frank, is a builder in college.”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “Well, let me kind of go through my oldest brother has had a pastiche of careers. He owns a small fleet of taxi cabs where he's been competing with Uber and Lifton and kind of fulminating against the taxi system. He would like to be able to operate like Uber and Lyft and can't. He also runs a business reselling used books, including mine on Amazon. So he's kind of, fortunately, he's dealing with two very declining industries. And he”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Work. And in some ways, that's been my life. It's funny because Code for America sort of the latest incarnation or one of the latest incarnations of that. But when I was early in my career, it was just like, oh, doing documentation, writing down the steps. I still remember working with one author on one of our early books, and he said, I can't write this chapter yet. And I said, that's what I said, why? And he said, because the software doesn't work. And I said, that's what you have to write. Because, you know, while you're sitting here not getting this book done and this piece of the software that doesn't work, people are beating their heads against the wall and they think it's them.”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Enough that it was happening, but they didn't know it. And the same thing true, we work a lot at the federal level under Obama generous deputy CTO and help set up something called the United States Digital Service. A lot of the problems at the VA were very similar. People would be applying from library computers, you know, homeless vets, and they couldn't get through the process. And basically the people in Washington, the VA headquarters were saying, well, they're obviously not eligible because they're not succeeding. And they had tested and the procurement process meant, oh yeah, we have to test this app, but they tested it with a particular combination of internet explorer and Adobe software. And that wasn't what was out there in the real world. And it didn't work. And so they went out and just filmed users. And then they were able to go see, look, it really does.”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “So we're sort of they're exploratory. Jan, my wife, Jen Palka, calls it apps to ops. We're basically building apps that actually do let us follow the users so we can say, oh, here, you're losing some number of people because your application takes 45 minutes to fill out and there are people who are trying to do this in libraries where there's a 30 minute timeout and you have no mechanism for them to save their work. Stuff like that. you know, hey, you're telling people their documents are uploaded successfully, but they're not, or you're sending out, you know, in some counties, they were sending out letters about people's appointments that they were supposed to make. And they would come in 25% of them or some significant fraction would come out after the date of the appointment. And they didn't know it. That was the worst part.”

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20. “They could have thought through how we are going to make this easier for people. And a lot of the work, the other work we do, things like we work on improving access to food aid. And we got brought in because they didn't really understand why people were signing up and then falling off the program and then signing up again immediately. And it was just administrative stuff that people didn't know how to comply with. And they didn't have any measurement. You know, in the tech world, people have gotten very used to A-B testing and measuring things and understanding, oh, this is where people are falling out of our pipeline. This is where things don't work. And a lot of what we've ended up building at Code for America are alternate pathways that are designed to teach us about what's wrong.”

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21. “What's broken in our society is this sort of layering of ideas that change, but they change incompletely. People have this effectively bad map of the world. It doesn't work anymore. And same kind of thing. And again, a lot of the work that we do at Code for America, my wife's nonprofit, is around fixing some of these things. We do a lot of work in expunging low-level offenses. That's why we were talking with Fred from People's Record. They passed something called Prop 47 here in California. And there was something like 30, 40 million dollars spent to pass this proposition. But the implementation, nobody thought about it. And so a tiny fraction of the people who are eligible have actually done it. And the same thing we saw with the healthcare.gov”

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22. “Sorry, Shannon, the head of the San Francisco Foundation was over at dinner. And we're talking about various issues. And he says, he says, Fred Blackwell, he says, what about the weed problem? I said, what do you mean the weed problem? He says, well, you know, there's all these people coming in now and they're making all this money selling weed. And the only people who can't participate in this new economy are all the black and brown people who have convictions on the record for selling weed. And, you know, it's just that kind of interesting thing that we don't think about, you know, when we change the rules, what do we do about the people who played by the old rules, the new rules? And that just kind of leads me down the path of a lot of what”

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23. “It was legal, and his son actually had the betting business in a little betting shop. But it's a lot of fun. And it actually brings up something that's completely irrelevant, but kind of a bit of pattern recognition, the fact that here was a guy who had a living doing something that was illegal. And then when it became legalized, he was able to do it. made me think of what's happening right now with weed in places like California where it's been legalized.”

    2017-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “And just my mom later came to travel with me. She would just come with me on my business trips. And she was just such a willing, interested traveler. She was a girl from the back of the mill in Yorkshire, you know, kind of grew up from actually her parents and her grandparents before that were factory workers. But her dad was also a bookie, you know, taking bets on horses back when it was illegal. And so she always would tell us stories, which for her were full of shame, but for us we're full of romance of how she used to have to go collect bets from strangers in the park when she was a girl and the police come. He'd have to light out over the back fences. We took great delight in the thought that we were descended from petty criminals. I mean, again, of course, by the time I was a teenager and went to visit, you know.”

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25. “She says, James, I don't know. And he goes, okay, and runs back out. And then later she said, what did you think I was doing lying on the floor? And he said, I don't know. Maybe dusting under the piano. So she was basically, she was the old school, you know, I mean, she made every, I mean, you know, I kind of look back and I go, she should have made us do more of the work. You know, we had some chores, but basically she made all the beds. It's a lot with seven kids. And again, of course, I was in the older cohort, so there were still, you know, young babies. The thing that's actually been such a great delight to me in my life, my dad died very young, died at 60, you know, so, and that's now, you know, 40 years back.”

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26. “You know, I think taking care of seven kids is huge. I still remember one of my memories of my mom is her on her hands and knees in the bathroom scrubbing the toilet. And she looks up and says, life is not a bowl of cherries. But of course, the idea of my mom like that brings up another great story about the time that she likes to tell. She was apparently up on a piano stool trying to dust a light and she fell flat on, she fell off and was lying flat on the floor. My brother James, who must have been eight or nine at the time, came running in from the schoolyard. We lived about a block from the school. Caesar on the floor and says, mommy, what time is it?”

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27. “Counter. And they kind of traced where the copper went. It accumulates in the liver and then in the brain of people with Wilson's disease. And it's normally excreted after about some relatively small amount of time. So it was copper64. It's got a half-life of a few weeks. And so I presumably it was all gone. But if I ever come down with liver cancer, I may have my father to blame. But we actually did it twice, and again, he obviously took some thought about whether it was safe because once we became lab rats for him, there were other researchers who wanted us to do other experiments. And he said, no, I don't want you to do that one. That doesn't seem right to me. So he, of course, used himself as a guinea pig for his experiments”

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28. “Actually, it wasn't my dad who injected them. It was a guy named Leroy Shipley. He was the lab tech. And oh my God, he was amazing. He was very funny. But my best friend and I and my best friend sisters when I was 14, the girls were a little older agreed to participate in a study of Wilson's disease, which is a disease of the abnormal retention of copper in the body, so genetic disease. My dad was sort of a pioneer in early genetic medicine, also radio medicine. And Wilson's disease was one of his specialties. And so they needed to have control subjects to understand how copper is excreted normally. And so they would inject us with radioactive copper. And then every day we went in and lay in this room with massive thing. It wasn't like today's MRIs, but it was just this whole room that was called a whole body.”

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29. “And he has to pick his prize. And behind door number one is a million dollars. And they tell him that. Behind door number two is a chateau in France. And behind door number three is a cookie. And of course, everybody knows what he picks. And what I like to say about myself is that I always go for the cookie. Because in some sense, what I really care about, what's my cookie is finding people who are doing something new and interesting that I think other people want to know about and that they can learn from. And my whole business has been built around finding people who have cookies and then sharing it with the world.”

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30. “Yes, well, I often joke about myself as a VC and a business person. That I'm a little bit like the Some episode I remember from when my kids were little on cookie monster. I may not have this completely right, but he's on a game show.”

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