Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt - The Tim Ferriss Show

This is a 10-year anniversary 'super combo' episode of The Tim Ferriss Show pairing two past guests. Michael Lewis recounts walking away from a lucrative Solomon Brothers career to write Liar's Poker, how editor Michael Kinsley shaped him as a writer, and his philosophy of ambition, productive laziness, and only writing books he feels obligated to write. Martine Rothblatt covers her path from SiriusXM satellite radio to teaching herself biology to found United Therapeutics and save her daughter from pulmonary arterial hypertension, plus her work on transgender identity, transplantable pig organs, vagus nerve stimulation, digital consciousness, and zero-carbon engineering. Both interviews emphasize questioning authority, finding overlooked opportunities, and Alan Watts-style dialectical thinking.

• Solomon Brothers wouldn't fire Michael Lewis for his critical Wall Street Journal op-ed because he managed the firm's second-biggest money-generating account, so they asked him to write under a different name instead.
  00:09:18
• Lewis secretly wrote half a dozen pieces for the New Republic under his mother's maiden name 'Diana Bleecker' while working at Solomon Brothers, watching colleagues xerox his own articles on the trading floor.
  00:09:48
• When Rothblatt's daughter was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary arterial hypertension with no approved treatments, she taught herself biology night after night in the hospital library, working backwards from medical journals to high-school textbooks.
  00:43:48
• Rothblatt licensed the drug that built United Therapeutics from Glaxo Wellcome for just $25,000 plus 10% royalties; they have since paid Glaxo over a billion dollars in royalties.
  00:50:38
• United Therapeutics engineers pig organs for human transplant using a growth-hormone-receptor knockout (Laron's disease) discovered in a small-statured community in Peru and Ecuador, so transplanted organs stop growing.
  01:17:26
• Stimulating the vagus nerve where it surfaces at the ear (the cymba conchae) has documented therapeutic effects on Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and rheumatoid arthritis.
  01:23:12
• Rothblatt received a patent on the last day of 2019 for an 'Alzheimer's cognitive enabler' headset that detects nerve impulses and speaks on behalf of patients who can no longer communicate.
  01:33:07
• Rothblatt predicts that within the 2020s, United Therapeutics will deliver manufactured transplant organs by electric helicopter to maintain a zero carbon footprint.
  02:04:26

• Lewis earned about $3,000 total from four years of freelance writing before quitting a Solomon Brothers job where he'd just received a $225,000 bonus to take a $40,000 book advance.
  00:06:13
• Lewis writes with headphones playing the same soundtrack of songs on repeat, building a different soundtrack for each book; his wife and kids suggest songs.
  00:18:43
• The quote 'people waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives' is from Amos Tversky, a character in Lewis's book The Undoing Project, not Lewis himself.
  00:24:22
• Lewis's billboard message would be his high school baseball coach Billy Fitzgerald's mantra: 'Don't be good, be great.'
  00:30:39
• BINA48 is a digital robot copy of Rothblatt's wife Bina's personality and memories, created when Bina was 48 to inspire girls toward computer science.
  00:36:28
• When Rothblatt's daughter was diagnosed, only about 2,000 Americans had pulmonary arterial hypertension; thanks to better medicines there are now around 50,000.
  00:48:31
• Rothblatt identifies as 'trans binary,' embracing both masculine and feminine aspects, and self-reports a 100% match between her physiology and psychology.
  01:11:40
• United Therapeutics built a 150,000-square-foot net-positive-energy headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, with 50 geothermal wells 500 feet deep, the largest zero-carbon-footprint building in the world.
  01:59:45
• Each year only about 30,000 kidneys, 3,000 hearts, and 2,000 lungs are available for transplant in the US, far below demand.
  02:01:19
• Rothblatt recommends Marvin Minsky's 'The Emotion Machine' as a blueprint for how software could make a machine feel love, and cites Ray Kurzweil as the person who best understands digital consciousness.
  01:44:34

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