417. How to Manage Your Job, Your Company, Your Life | Derick Cooper

[0] Hello everyone.

[1] Today I have the opportunity to speak with Mr. Derek Cooper.

[2] Derek's the chief executive officer of QOL Medical, which is a private pharmaceutical company that specializes in the production of treatments and the origination of treatments for rare diseases.

[3] So you can understand how that properly done, could be a very worthwhile enterprise.

[4] I've got to know, Derek, over the last few years.

[5] He volunteered to be of aid to my enterprise in whatever way might be useful a while back.

[6] And after investigating his background a bit, both Michaela, my daughter and I reached out to him, and we've established a very productive relationship.

[7] We worked together on Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia.

[8] And he's a benefactor of that institution.

[9] and we've gone a number of adventures together in Greece with the people from Ralston College, the students, and some of the other principles and benefactors.

[10] And that's been extremely interesting.

[11] I've had a lot of conversations with Derek about deep biological matters.

[12] He's an expert in immunological function.

[13] And as he's instructed me about the adaptations that the immunological system is capable of, we've been able to work out a mapping of the manner in which the immunological system works to stave off pathogens, and the manner in which human thought and general behavioral adaptation progresses.

[14] And that's one of the things that I wanted to share with everyone today.

[15] And I think we did that quite effectively, bringing the communication patterns of bees along for the ride.

[16] It's very interesting, you know, to talk to someone whose knowledge is quite disparate from yours in some ways.

[17] where, and still, where the communication still remains in the boundaries of mutual comprehensibility.

[18] And so I also walked Derek through his experiences as a businessman, first working for a large baked foods enterprise and then as an investment banker.

[19] We tied that into our biological discussion as well, talking about how experience can be mine to lead to what would you say, the facilitation of broader and broader patterns of adaptation practically and conceptually.

[20] And so that's all on the table in this discussion.

[21] So welcome aboard.

[22] Derek, do you remember where we met and how?

[23] I do.

[24] It was originally on Zoom.

[25] Actually, I was sitting right here.

[26] And Michaela introduced us.

[27] I reached out to Michaela back when you were having some health issues because I run a pharmaceutical company and just have some access to resources and offered to help however I possibly could because I've over time developed a lot of respect for what it is that you're doing in the world.

[28] Yeah, well, you have been a tremendous amount of help.

[29] And so for everybody watching and listening, I've worked with Derek since we've meant, to a large degree, I suppose our most intensive collaboration has been with regards to Ralston College in Savannah.

[30] And we'll talk about Ralston as we walk through this interview.

[31] But Derek's also been very helpful in relation to the tour as well and has provided me with transportation and so forth when that's been, and that's been extraordinarily helpful.

[32] And we've also had a variety of extremely productive conversations, not least in Greece.

[33] So I've traveled with Derek to Greece as part of her collaboration with Dr. Stephen Blackwood.

[34] Some of you watching and listening will be familiar with him as a consequence of the Exodus seminar.

[35] And Dr. Blackwood is president of Ralston College and Derek is one of its supporters and developers.

[36] And so we've traveled to Greece a number of times and gone to some remarkable places and had some amazing adventures and also had the opportunity to get to know each other at a conversational and personal level.

[37] And the conversations have been extremely enlightening to me, partly because Derek knows a lot of, knows a lot in the biological realm, especially with regard to immunological function.

[38] That's something I really hope to touch on today.

[39] And we've found all sorts of interesting parallels between how the immune system works and how cognitive systems work.

[40] And part of the reason I wanted to interview Derek today, apart from the fact that he's an interesting character on the entrepreneurial side, as well as the cognitive side, is because of what he knows on the biological front.

[41] I thought that would be really interesting to bring to people's attention.

[42] So let's start, if you don't mind, let's start with your company.

[43] Do you want to describe it and describe its scale and exactly what you do?

[44] Sure, yeah.

[45] So it's a mid -sized, maybe large private.

[46] specialty biopharmaceutical company.

[47] We make drugs for rare diseases.

[48] So we focus primarily on genetic diseases and therapies for those diseases, which involve understanding the sort of genetic background for why those diseases may occur.

[49] And then once you sort of capture that biological dynamism, You investigate how you can possibly counter whatever may be going wrong.

[50] So the scale of our company, we have a couple hundred employees, primarily in the U .S., although we do have some European operations, and we sort of run the gamut from the manufacturing side we have in -house to sales and commercial operations as well as clinical development, etc so we do fully integrated biopharmaceutical company so you told me at one time paradoxically that there's nothing rare about rare diseases when you take them in their in their cumulative sense so maybe you could explain to everybody what that means yeah so i think that a rare disease in the U .S. at least is defined as a disease that less than 200 ,000 people have.

[51] And typically rare diseases are rare.

[52] Each silo, each disease is rare because they tend to be fairly impactful to human health and can cause real problems.

[53] And so when they are more significant in terms of human health, it's they're less likely to have survived through evolutionary history.

[54] So each rare disease in and of itself is unique, and relatively small in terms of the prevalence or the number of people that would have the disease.

[55] But overall, the total people with rare diseases, if you add up all of the categories of each individual disease, is pretty pretty substantial.

[56] And another thing is happening just as we as we evolve in the industry and learn more about the genetic background of different diseases, what we're learning is that they have implications for other diseases.

[57] So a rare disease that impacts cognitive function, for example, we find that maybe minor mutations with something like that could have a broader impact on a disease like dementia, for example.

[58] the two could be related.

[59] And so then you learn about the disease in a broader context by focusing on the sort of hyper -severe portion of the...

[60] Right.

[61] Well, that's, I suppose, in some ways, that's almost a scientific truism, because it turns out that because everything is ultimately connected, if you investigate anything deeply enough, even something rare, you start to find commonalities between what you're, and associations between what you're studying and all sorts of things that are relevant in the broader world.

[62] One of the things you see in the careers of scientists often is that, you know, they start out to some degree, maybe when they're undergraduates, as generalists.

[63] Then they specialize intensely on a phenomenon that might seem trivial because of its particular specificity.

[64] Genetic mutations in fruit flies, I suppose, comes to mind.

[65] But As the scientist develops his or her career and starts to approach the limits of their cognitive ability, the connections between what they're studying and everything else start to become more and more apparent to them.

[66] And as their careers progress, they become broader and broader in their range of knowledge.

[67] And I think that's a, this is partly why I think it's possible for people to follow what they're interested in and to do that effectively.

[68] because if you follow what you're interested in, even if it's a pinpoint, it'll lead you to, if you do it properly and in a disciplined manner and striving uphill, it'll lead you to wherever you want to go.

[69] And I guess this is partly also what happened to you, and I'm kind of interested in that on the autobiographical front because you started out in investment banking.

[70] You were in investment banking for 16 years, right?

[71] So maybe walk us through that and tell everybody how it is that you're in, interests transformed across that period of time and how you ended up, first of all, in investment banking and then out of it and then into the company that you now run.

[72] So when I left undergraduate school at Washington and Lee, I started in what's called corporate finance and investment banking, which is sort of the capital raising side.

[73] We would help small and mid -sized companies go public or raise debt.

[74] execute on an acquisition, that kind of thing.

[75] And then I ended up moving to a family -owned business that my father had built after working for a good -sized Fortune 500 company for many years.

[76] He left in the late 80s and started his own company in the baked foods business of all things.

[77] So I moved into the operations of a baked food business.

[78] It was a good -sized company.

[79] We had 2 ,500 employees at one point, operations throughout the Southeast.

[80] We then sold that company about 10 years later.

[81] So in the late 90s, I worked for that company for a while.

[82] And after we sold it, I went to work for a company in Nashville, Tennessee, actually, which was called a mezzanine capital.

[83] It's basically helping invest in small companies so they can grow.

[84] At the time, it was a lot of fun.

[85] It was right in the sort of peak of the internet craze.

[86] So we were, chaos would be the defining characteristic of what was happening in the capital markets at the time.

[87] And so we're making a lot of investments in a lot of different small companies.

[88] And then that company was sold.

[89] And I sort of talked to my family and some friends, and we ended up putting together a private equity investment.

[90] company that ultimately made an investment in this pharmaceutical company in 2003.

[91] And then I just, I was on the board initially, got to know the company, and then joined the company full -time in 2010 as CEO and have been there ever since.

[92] So when you started out in the baked foods company, what did you, what did you, what did that teach you?

[93] What did that teach you about business?

[94] And so what did it teach you personally?

[95] What did it teach you about business?

[96] And what did it teach you that enabled you to make the move to the investment banking side of things and then into the pharmaceutical industry?

[97] So you, because the reason I'm asking, I suppose, is because you have an intellectual interest that will explore in relationship to biology.

[98] But you also have business knowledge and interest that enables you to not only investigate cognitively, let's say, and conceptually, but to run a business successfully and profitably.

[99] to manage people while doing that.

[100] And that's not an obviously overlapping skill set.

[101] So I'm curious to pull out the threads and to explain how both of those abilities developed.

[102] So let's go on the business side first.

[103] You started with this baked goods company.

[104] Yeah, so I think maybe it is more of an overlapping skill set because a baked foods company is defined by sort of a hyper -competitive environment.

[105] it.

[106] And it's very much what I would call a cost -driven business.

[107] And what I mean by that is you have to watch your cost very, very carefully because the margins are thin.

[108] There's a lot of competition.

[109] We basically were producing a very high volume of white bread and the basic stuff that you get on the shelf in a Walmart grocery store, white bread and wheat bread and hot dog and hamburger buns and distributing them to, I mean, we had a facility in Valdives, North Carolina that would make 50 ,000 pounds of an hour, just to put some perspective on this.

[110] So because of that fairly low margin cost -driven business, you have to manage the hierarchy of costs really, really precisely because anything that sort of grows or gets out of control can be disastrous in terms of the, the cost of the business.

[111] So it's, it's sort of the extreme side of pencil sharpening.

[112] I would say, I would say the pharmaceutical business by juxtaposition is almost the complete opposite.

[113] It is driven by a focus on the intellectual property development around a unique approach to treating a particular disease, which is highly complex and requires an extraordinary amount of thinking to juxtapose the two.

[114] And the consequence of that is that the margins in the industry are just completely different because the investment comes on developing the product and the patent portfolio around the product and that kind of thing, as opposed to managing the cost explicitly.

[115] But your question is a good one.

[116] It's not one I've thought about before because one of the things that we do somewhat uniquely with our company is we manage our costs pretty rigorously even though we don't necessarily have to because it is a more profitable business than baked foods, for example.

[117] But what I've found in doing that is that it limits chaos because if you, if you sort of are continuously hyper -focusing on what it is that is your goal and make sure that you are not allowing noise to enter the situation in pursuit of that goal, well, it's highly correlated with success.

[118] To be focused and not allow the organization to become too chaotic in pursuit of a goal is correlated.

[119] Yeah, so I'm trying to think of that from a psychological and a trait perspective.

[120] I mean, we know very well that success in complex endeavors is primarily dependent on intelligence, but that personality trait variance also plays a role.

[121] And so when you're talking about very tight cost control, I immediately think of two things, and one is conscientiousness.

[122] That's the ability to pay attention.

[123] That's orderliness and industriousness, the ability and willingness and desire for that matter, to pay attention to details.

[124] so details matter.

[125] And I would also suspect a certain degree of disagreeable, disagreeableness, too, because when you're talking about control of costs, let's say, to me, and this is partly practical experience speaking, that also means the ability to say no, right?

[126] And control implies, no, right, right.

[127] So, but then on the product development side, let's say, with regards to the pharmaceutical industry, that seems to be more something associated with high levels of openness and creativity and interest in intellectual matters.

[128] And so that's a relatively rare combination, extremely high openness.

[129] And I know that's characteristic of you because I've talked to you a lot and you're unbelievably interested in ideas, but you're also extremely detail -oriented.

[130] So that's a relatively rare overlap of traits.

[131] And so it sounds to me like you really did when you were working with the in the in the baked foods industry did you did you enjoy the the detail management that was associated with keeping the company functional despite it being lean no no that was that was not something that i found interesting it's it's necessary and i understood the value uh from a good management perspective But I do, I am a bit of a chaos seeker in, from an openness perspective.

[132] I do like to explore new ideas.

[133] And so an overly ordered organization is not, is not optimum for me. Right.

[134] So you weren't, you weren't fundamentally interested in, so for everyone listening and watching, if you're temperamentally suited to be a manager, let's say, what that means most basically is that you're intelligent and that you're conscientious and that you have a certain degree of emotional resilience, so you're low in neuroticism.

[135] Those are the best predictors on the managerial front.

[136] On the entrepreneurial front, the best predictors are intelligence once again because that's universal across any domain that's complex, but trait openness.

[137] And openness is basically aesthetic appreciation on the one hand and interest in ideas and intellectual exploration on the other.

[138] And my empirical investigations into predicting entrepreneurship showed quite clearly that the major trait predictor there was openness by a substantial margin.

[139] And so it sounds to me like when you were in your baked foods incarnation, let's say, that there was plenty of room there for conscientiousness, but not necessarily as much room as you have now for the investigation into deep problems, the intellectual investigation.

[140] Is that fair?

[141] that's fair that's a very good description okay okay but it trained you yeah i think that there's a um if you're a very open person it's good to work on the discipline you know if you if you're all like a CEO ultimately your responsibility is strategic you you need to be looking ahead and deciding where the organization is going and what it is that you're going to do and and how you get there and but But you have to learn to constrain your own openness in terms of seeking those things because if you don't, you will become the biggest source of chaos in the organization because very open people tend to be, well, open to lots of different ideas.

[142] And so if you can discipline yourself on that front first, then I think that it propagates throughout the organization, ultimately.

[143] And it's like anything.

[144] You have to draw the boundary between chaos and order.

[145] Yeah, yeah.

[146] Intelligently.

[147] Matter of fact, I think you could even define competence that way as the sort of optimum dynamic positioning of the boundary between order and chaos, depending on the circumstances.

[148] And it does change because...

[149] Do you have any idea how in your present business you...

[150] you make a decision about, so, okay, so if you're open, any given idea has a high probability of triggering a set of associated ideas.

[151] And the more open you are, the larger the gap is between the ideas that are triggered.

[152] So, in fact, when you're talking to highly open people, they'll jump from one topic to another.

[153] And if you're less open, you may not understand that there's any connection between those ideas at all.

[154] Now, the advantage to that is that you bring things together that are not normally conceptualized together.

[155] And also you're a seeker of multiple pathways.

[156] But the disadvantage, as you're inferring or even pointing out, is that, well, if you have 40, if you have 30 open people working on a project, there's going to be like 900 ideas a day.

[157] And some of those might even be great ideas, but the problem is that, well, most great ideas are still going to fail.

[158] Pursuit of any great ideas, unbelievable.

[159] time -consuming and costly.

[160] And you can't do everything at once.

[161] And so how have you learned, do you think, to distinguish between the ideas that attract your interest that are worth pursuing and the ideas that attract your interest that are, you know, that you have to let fall by the wayside?

[162] And, you know, how have you learned to deal with that conceptually, but also practically, right?

[163] Because you can have people around you that can help you with that too.

[164] So how have you solved that problem, given your openness?

[165] Yeah, yeah.

[166] You know, that's a good question.

[167] I hadn't really thought about it before.

[168] I think that what occurs is a process of sort of aligning the opportunity with the relevant sacrifice that you have to.

[169] In the investment world, we call it good capital allocation.

[170] So the way that you do this with investments is you sort of create a hierarchy of your opportunities.

[171] And whatever is at the top of the hierarchy, your very best opportunity where you can get the best return, you put as much resource into that opportunity to fill that bucket first before you allow, Warren Buffett actually says this in an extraordinarily pithy manner.

[172] He says, you know, when you're 25 years old, sit down and write down the top 25 goals that you have for your life, draw a line under number five.

[173] tear the page off, keep the top five, and don't ever change, and don't do anything else.

[174] I mean, you can make, you know, different changes, but it's a capturing of this concept of hyper -focus.

[175] Yeah.

[176] And so I think you have to, if you have an extraordinary opportunity, you're willing to direct more sacrifice to that opportunity as you should.

[177] And so it's a, it's a mathematical, it's a mathematical, math -esque balancing of the equation of how good is the opportunity and how much is it going to cost to pursue it?

[178] Right, right.

[179] Well, so there's a number of avenues of exploration that are germane to that observation.

[180] So one is, so if you talk to managers of small and large companies about what frustrates them, one of the things you find very rapidly is they're frustrated by the constant necessity of having to put out fires.

[181] So they're so busy dealing with like crisis minutia that they never get a chance to strategize over the long run or even to sit down and think about what a reasonable medium to long -term strategy is.

[182] And that is not productive.

[183] But part of the reason is this is that the typical manager.

[184] So the typical manager, first of all, fails.

[185] The empirical estimates are that 65 % of managers add negative net value to their companies.

[186] Right, so that's a pretty damning, and that's a pretty damning statistic.

[187] Yeah, I do think that's mostly chaos creation.

[188] Well, that's, that's, so what happens to managers very frequently is that they spend the majority of their time with their worst employees.

[189] And so the perverse management strategy, which is well documented empirically, is that you do the same thing with your employees that you do with your goals, according to your description, which is you figure out the people who are.

[190] stellar performers, and you spend all your time with them.

[191] And part of the reason is, is that the payoff, as a consequence of facilitating your stellar employees or partners, let's say, is exponential and not linear.

[192] And so also, the probability that if you're dealing with problem employees, that you're going to be able to do anything for them in the medium to long run is extremely low.

[193] You don't have the time or the energy, and then they may not have the inclination.

[194] I mean, managers aren't clinical psychologists, and their employees aren't people who are coming to them for psychological help.

[195] So there's an analogy there, you know, and the other thing I'm...

[196] Yeah, I think that that's directionally, partially correct.

[197] I might say it a little bit different.

[198] I think that at a high level, it's definitely a Pareto distribution, and you want to focus your time and energy on the sort of uber -competent people that can get a lot of things done.

[199] But you need to build a functional organization that has a lot of different people and a lot of different roles.

[200] And you can't do that by saying, well, we're just going to focus on these two or three superstars and hope everything else works out.

[201] You have to understand how the entire organization functions up and down the hierarchy.

[202] And I would say that chaos to me, if things are going wrong in some element of the organization, it's, you know, the sort of hyper -manager conscientiousness types that you're describing, they want to just get rid of the chaos.

[203] They don't want any change.

[204] They don't want anything to sort of disturb the organization.

[205] And I don't think that's actually exactly right.

[206] I think there's more subtlety to it.

[207] I think that when, you know, and sort of the sign of chaos to me is that the idea proliferation just kind of starts to go crazy.

[208] You get all these, well, maybe we should do this.

[209] Maybe they're competing ideas.

[210] Yeah, yeah.

[211] They, um, the, and that's a sign of, I think, in the business context, the sign of one of two different things.

[212] Either you have not communicated the goal clearly as a leader or, or you don't have the right goal and people aren't sure what to do.

[213] And so they're actually doing the right thing in the sense that if you don't know what to do and what you are doing isn't working, changing is a good idea.

[214] Now, that doesn't mean that you necessarily are changing in the right direction because you may or may not have access to or be privy to what is going on in other aspects of the organization.

[215] But to me, it's a sign, it's a smoke signal of something that you need to pay attention to.

[216] And the other thing that typically I see that causes chaotic behavior is people have a goal.

[217] The goal is relatively clear, and they realize they're not going to be able to make the goal.

[218] And so there's sort of a fear or threat aspect that's starting to occur.

[219] And they feel like whatever it is that they're doing isn't working.

[220] and they need to make a change in order to make sure that they're successful.

[221] So, in a sense, both of those reactions are correct, but you need to understand what it is that's motivating the person to sort of change direction so that you can either help them get to the goal or make sure that the goal is clear.

[222] And it's not necessarily just that there's a misalignment of competence, I think, would be.

[223] Which was your description?

[224] I mean, it could be.

[225] Well, I guess I'm also wondering, it may be the case as well, it's complicated when it comes to intelligence because intelligent people tend to perform better wherever they're put if it's complex.

[226] But you could imagine a situation where there's a lot of different sub -games in your corporate environment, and they're all necessary.

[227] So maybe there's a distinction let's say between sales and research.

[228] So that's a good distinction.

[229] The great people on the sales side aren't going to be the same people who are the great people on the research side.

[230] Absolutely.

[231] So, right, so there's going to be a distribution of competence by specialized bin.

[232] I mean, one of the things we know psychologically about specialized bins, let's say, for example, because you might ask yourself, well, how do you conceptualize the different, what does it mean for an occupation to be different from another occupation, right?

[233] Because obviously nurse and doctor are similar, but probably, you know, doctor and and graphic artists aren't that similar.

[234] And so it begs the question of what constitutes similarity and interest seems to be relevant in that regard, right?

[235] They are empirical.

[236] You know, I think that your goal is to run any organization, but well, I'll focus on a pharmaceutical company.

[237] If you want to run it well, you absolutely need to understand people.

[238] And I think that one of the things that you've been tremendously helpful to me with is things like the Big Five personality profile and I understand myself.

[239] And I think if you can understand what it is that you're good at and what it is that you are not good at, and there's a key component to that, which I would describe as epistemic humility.

[240] You have to know the boundary of what you know and what you don't know.

[241] And if you can fill in the gap, if you can understand that and fill in the gap properly, then the organization will function better because.

[242] Right, right.

[243] Because you're, you're sort of aligning different skill sets appropriately with what needs to be done.

[244] So I think, and, you know, another key component to this, I would say, I've learned from listening to you, is that because different people perceive the world differently, they, there's, you have to understand, at least somewhat, you have to have some concept of what they're referenced for me. because if you're a highly ordered, you know, conscientious person, then someone who's a creative marketing person, it's almost a different language in terms of how those people view the world.

[245] And so you need to sort of, you need to align the way that you communicate with the recipient of the communication.

[246] Because, I mean, it literally is almost like a different language.

[247] Right, right.

[248] Well, and you know, we hear a lot of squawking about diversity in the culture wars that are raging, but there is relevant appreciation for diversity.

[249] And real, true diversity is actually diversity of temperament, because we know there are five temperaments, dimensions of temperament.

[250] We know they're normally distributed, and we know that there are different skills associated with them and that those differences are real.

[251] So we know, for example, if you're extroverted rather than introverted, you're going to be motivated by social interaction, and it's going to energize you rather than innervating you.

[252] And it's highly probable, especially if you're involved in sales, this isn't invariably the case, but it's highly likely, that like sales, especially sales that involve a lot of presentations, a meeting a lot of people, a lot of group presentations, that's much more suitable for someone who's extroverted.

[253] Now, extroverts can also be impulsive, And in extreme, in the extreme, you know, there's pathologies associated with every skill.

[254] They can also, you know, that can degenerate into mania.

[255] You don't get anything without a cost.

[256] But it is extremely useful to know that people are actually different.

[257] You know, the people who are higher neuroticism, they're going to be much more sensitive to threat.

[258] And so you can imagine that that would be one of the things that would stop them from taking risks.

[259] And that might be a very bad thing on the strict.

[260] entrepreneurial side, but you might imagine, too, that having a few people around that who serve as canaries in the coal mine could also be extremely useful.

[261] And agreeableness is particularly interesting in that regard, because there are really pronounced advantages and disadvantages at the ends of the distribution.

[262] So disagreeable people, they're much more likely to bargain hard for themselves, so they're going to be formidable competitors.

[263] And they're going to be super blunt, and they can be blunt enough to be offensive.

[264] especially if you're agreeable and neurotic.

[265] But they'll tell you exactly what the hell's going on.

[266] And if you need a foil for yourself, and also someone who, if allied with you, can help you stop you from being taken advantage of.

[267] They're unbelievably useful.

[268] Whereas agreeable people, they can be taken advantage of, but they're very good at facilitating social bonds between people and making the environment have that feeling of what closeness and intimacy.

[269] Now, that's not always appropriate, but sometimes it's unbelievably useful, right?

[270] And so...

[271] Surreable people will tell you what they really think, and I find that incredibly helpful, because if I'm making a mistake in leading an organization, I need to understand that it's a mistake, and agreeable people won't tell you that you're making a mistake, because they don't like to upset the apple part.

[272] Yeah, yeah, they don't like interpersonal conflict at all.

[273] Yeah.

[274] Yeah, so, you know, we can see there that, And one of the upsides of viewing the world this way is that you can understand that people genuinely differ in their abilities.

[275] But there is a very large number of potential games that people can play.

[276] And if you're running something like a corporation, there's plenty of games within the corporation that you can, if you can identify the players properly, you can put them into a game that they'll be highly motivated to play.

[277] And so you can get the advantage of that diversity, right?

[278] can get the advantage of the diversity, you can maintain your standards of excellence.

[279] All that happens, though, is the excellence, what you're measuring in terms of excellence in performance is going to change.

[280] And so that would mean, for example, that you're not going to look for the same kind of performance, as you said, from a creative marketing director, that you might expect from someone who's assigned to manage and carefully control costs.

[281] Absolutely.

[282] Absolutely.

[283] I mean, that is a very, very, good description of good management, right?

[284] It's to align personality and competence with the job.

[285] Right, right.

[286] Well, yeah, that's a good definition of merit that's a good definition of merit that's also not particularly exclusionary.

[287] Now, Derek mentioned, for everybody who's watching and listening, Derek mentioned this Understand Myself's site.

[288] And so Understand Myself is a site I set up with Dr. Daniel Higgins and Dr. Robert Peel, who I've interviewed on this podcast, to help people understand their personalities.

[289] and it offers people a five -dimensional analysis of their personality.

[290] And five dimensions is a lot, by the way.

[291] The world has four dimensions, and so personality has five.

[292] It's a very complex structure.

[293] And it breaks each of the two dimensions further down into two aspects.

[294] So it gives you ten different aspects of your personality.

[295] And so you can take that and find out where you sit, what your relative strengths are in relationship to your temper.

[296] and what your relative weaknesses are.

[297] And if you take it with your partner, then you can find out theirs as well, assuming that they allow you access to it.

[298] And also, you'll get a report that details out your similarities and differences with that person.

[299] Because that's also really useful to know, right?

[300] I mean, if you're talking to someone who's disagreeable and you're agreeable, they are really looking at the world quite differently than you are.

[301] And so if you don't understand that, there's no shortage of opportunities for misunderstanding and friction.

[302] And if you do understand it, as you said, especially if you're talking to someone who has a personality trait that you lack, is that they're going to be able to shed light on elements of the world that are somewhat opaque to you.

[303] Exactly.

[304] I mean, I think that's one of the problems with things like Twitter.

[305] The algorithms are driven to aggregate you into echo chambers of people who see the world similarly.

[306] But that's not how the world works.

[307] We need good operations people and good sales and marketing people and good scientists, and those are all different skill sets.

[308] And they have to talk across an organization in order to be able to function optimally.

[309] So you can't just stay in your silo and just do what you want to do without understanding that if the distribution function is not functioning optimally, then it's going to cause disruptions for the sales team.

[310] Right.

[311] So these things have to align across perspectives, I guess.

[312] So what did you learn in addition to what you learned in the baked foods industry?

[313] What did you learn when you moved into investment banking?

[314] And how did you learn to, I presume, I mean, the first thing I guess I would like to know is exactly what is it that you did?

[315] And then what was the utility in that, like socially and also in terms of your development, later development, and work in the enterprise that you're pursuing now?

[316] Yeah.

[317] I think investment banking is a highly technical, highly conscientious, I mean, you work 100 hours a week.

[318] I mean, it's, it's, it's a pretty brutal environment, but you are exposed to a unbelievable stream of CEOs and CFOs.

[319] You're, you're only dealing with people who have been very successful running businesses, and they're looking to take their business to the next step.

[320] And it's, it's a pretty, it's an amazing educational environment because you're, you're working hard and you're being exposed to people who are highly competent and they are, they're looking to take the business to the next step.

[321] And so you're involved in that whole process in terms of writing a description of the company and what it is that they do.

[322] So when you go market it to institutional investors and whatnot, you can say, look at this amazing company that's created this new software or whatever it is.

[323] You have to, you become the, the, the, the, financial marketing arm of the organization and so you have to do all of the analysis on what the how competent the company is from an um an income perspective and and how sustainable they'll be what their growth opportunities are so you're you're hyper exposed to a lot of very high level of financial and operational concepts at very young age it's it's it because you and it's it's it's a very open environment.

[324] So you work on one deal for three months and then go right into the next one and then go right into the next one.

[325] So it's...

[326] Right.

[327] How many companies do you think, how many companies do you think you evaluated?

[328] Oh my gosh.

[329] I don't know.

[330] Hundreds.

[331] I couldn't.

[332] Hundreds.

[333] Hundreds.

[334] Hundreds.

[335] And how long, how many did you have to evaluate do you think?

[336] I mean, I know you came from a business background when you moved into investment banking, but how many companies did you have to evaluate before you felt that you knew what you were doing?

[337] And what is it that you were looking for?

[338] I mean, so we could imagine.

[339] Okay, so, and I'd like to start from basic principles.

[340] So as Derek pointed out, if you run a company and you want to make it grow at some point, it's possible that you're going to look for additional funding.

[341] And so if you go to an investment banker, you're going to find people who will invest in your company, and they're going to take a piece of your company as a consequence of working with you.

[342] And so there's a risk on both sides.

[343] The risk to the investment bank is that the company fails or is fraudulent, and the risk to the person who's running the company is that someone else will end up with more control or more ownership than might be optimal as far as they're concerned of the enterprise.

[344] And so that has to be negotiated.

[345] And so as an investment banker, you're in a situation where you have to evaluate a company's probability of success.

[346] Now, that's a very tricky thing, because there's many things other than the apparent creative, what would you say, the apparent creativity and utility of the product, right?

[347] There's the management team.

[348] There's the timing in the market.

[349] There's the marketing team.

[350] There's an endless number of things that go together to make a company work.

[351] And it's not at all obvious that you can take a look at a portfolio of stuff.

[352] and you can assess the companies and predict which stocks are going to perform well, because most money managers actually do worse than chance.

[353] What do you think that is different in investment banking?

[354] And there's something else I'd like to introduce into that.

[355] So investment bankers look for, they're hoping to, this is my understanding of it, they're hoping for at least something approximately a 10 to 1 return on their investment.

[356] And part of the reason they're looking for a return that high is that.

[357] a number of the companies that they evaluate that look good won't succeed and so there'll be substantive losses.

[358] Did you get to the point where you felt that you were credible in your analysis of the growth potential of companies?

[359] And if so, what did you learn that enabled you to make that determination?

[360] Yes, probably not then.

[361] I was too young to be able to do what it is that you're describing, I would say that I've gotten a lot better at it since then, and that one of the primary teachers is science itself.

[362] And what I mean by that is science teaches you the discipline.

[363] If you pay attention, the data will really help you to the right answer.

[364] And so I think a lot of investment banking and sort of investing in earlier stage companies is a bit of a we would call it Kentucky Windage in the South, but it's making guesses as to the competence of the management team and whether or not the idea is going to explode and take off.

[365] What science says is get hard data and then make a decision.

[366] It's much more cold and calculating analytical and much less intuitive.

[367] Now, I do think that intuition, is important to be, for being a good scientist.

[368] You can't just rely on what the spreadsheets tell you.

[369] But again, there's sort of an optimum balance.

[370] If the data tells you something different than what your intuition is telling you, listen to it.

[371] Well, it's tricky, too, it seems to me, too, because I suspect that one of the things you're also trying to figure out, and this would be harder to reduce to data, is that when you're entering into a partnership with someone that you're going to fund, one of the things that you're also attempting to specify is whether your team can work, your team can work productively with that team.

[372] And that's also a matter, not so much of initial analysis, but of continual negotiation as you're getting to know each other, I would presume.

[373] It is, it is.

[374] And I'm disagreeable enough to very strongly prefer, the business myself.

[375] So, yeah, yeah, I'm, there's a tangible interaction with the organization that I think is tremendously beneficial in terms of sort of really more clearly understanding what it is that you're doing and making sure that the various functions up and down the hierarchy of the organization also understand that.

[376] So it's hard to make sure that that communication game is played effectively and if you're more removed at the investment level.

[377] Your source of information is, well, you're much less likely to get the smoke signal of the chaos somewhere halfway down the organization that something's not functioning well if you're kind of removed from that.

[378] Well, I think that's why so many big enterprises inevitably fail.

[379] You know, they get layers and layers of operation.

[380] And at some point, the information can't propagate up the layers without disappearing or becoming biased in a way that's completely unproductive.

[381] Like, there might be built -in failure to gigantism in that manner for some of the reasons that you just described is you just don't know what the hell's going on anymore.

[382] Yeah, I think that's part of it.

[383] I think you don't know what the hell's going on.

[384] But I also think a big part of the reason you don't know what's going on is because the chaos does tend to become a self -fulfilling propagation function.

[385] And so as you add more layers, the mid -level layers add layers themselves.

[386] Because at some point in the organization, what starts to happen is the number of people that you have that report to you is finding characteristic.

[387] success.

[388] So it's sort of, it's not, are we achieving the goals as an organization that we want to achieve?

[389] It is, how many people do I have reporting to me?

[390] And so the tendency to sort of build fiefdoms is just inevitable in a large, many of us.

[391] Right, too.

[392] Well, and there's some evidence, you know, from the, from the comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology, evolutionary biology, end of psychology that human beings, human being group size tended to fractionate at about 200 individuals.

[393] And so there's, you could imagine that if 400 individuals are reporting to you, let's say, that you actually can't keep track of the permutations of their interactions.

[394] Right.

[395] And so that's a recipe for chaos as well.

[396] You know, I talked to Frank Magna, who's run a very successful organization in Canada.

[397] And he had a rule, and I can't remember precisely the rule, but his factories were capped at something like 400 employees.

[398] He'd just build another factory after he got bigger than that, because it was his experience.

[399] You know, and that might be somewhat unique to him, but I think the general principle is reasonable, is that once the enterprise got to, it could become unmanageable in terms of size and scope, and then it didn't know what it was doing anymore.

[400] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[401] Okay, so let's turn to your current company.

[402] And so the first question I would have for you is how in the world is it that you've been able to run a profitable enterprise concentrating on rare diseases when that's an interesting niche and the fact that they're rare should indicate that there aren't this is the standard excuse as far as I've been able to reason as far as I've been able to determine for the fact that not that much research effort is put into the into addressing rare diseases.

[403] But you have this niche where you seem to have managed that and also to be profitable.

[404] And people who are somewhat soured on capitalism listening to this might think, well, why does profit matter?

[405] And the answer to that is, well, it's an index that you're running an efficient organization.

[406] But without profit, there's no growth.

[407] So if you're not careful enough to run your enterprise profitably, it's not going to thrive.

[408] I think, yeah, I think on the ethical, sort of the implicit ethical question there, I think one of the, there's a distinct advantage in my mind of running an organization that is profitable because it is doing something that is actually good for people.

[409] So if you develop a drug that actually really helps people, there's a, there's an ethical exchange that occurs there.

[410] You know, yes, it is costly.

[411] for the patient or the insurance company to buy the product, especially doing something that can be transformative in that patient's life.

[412] So it's a pretty valuable trade, I think, to do something that really benefits people's lives and can make dramatic changes in their health.

[413] I mean, that's certainly a good thing to be able to look in the mirror in the morning, and tell you're, and realize that's what you're doing.

[414] So why do you think that matters?

[415] I'd like to take that apart.

[416] I was just talking to Jocco Willink yesterday, and one of the things Jocco said that he learned in the military, and this came as somewhat of a surprise to him, partly because he's a pretty rough guy.

[417] He said he was quite shocked at how much pleasure he took, implicit pleasure he took, in the mentoring and development of other people's skills.

[418] He didn't know, although learned quite rapidly, that that was an innate source of motivation and pleasure.

[419] Right now, the cynics with regards to capitalism or the cynics with regards to human beings, they basically make the claim that, well, fundamentally people are motivated by nothing other than power, right?

[420] Or maybe some combination of power and hedonism, because you need power for some reason, and it's usually to serve some hedonistic goal.

[421] So, and they would say, in response to, you know, a claim like the one you made is that, well, you've made a lot of money, and you've accrued a lot of power as a consequence of addressing these rare illnesses.

[422] And the real reason you did that was for the power and the money and the claim that you're making that you can be reasonably satisfied when you look yourself in the mirror or at least not too guilty.

[423] That's just a cover story for these other more fundamental motivations.

[424] But you claim that as a primary motivation.

[425] And so why do you believe that even of yourself, you know?

[426] I mean, there's reason to be cynical about ourselves just like there is about other people.

[427] Now, you did decide to go into the business of pursuing cures for rare diseases.

[428] But what is it that led you to believe that that motivation to help other people is actually a genuine motivation rather than a cover story for, you know, your own upward striving social mobility or something like that?

[429] Well, but the answer for me is because I know how I view the world.

[430] But, you know, I think that the thing that motivates most really competent, successful people that I know is a job well done, a functioning organization.

[431] There's an element of deep satisfaction that comes with, well, you know, closing the endropic gap, as you would say, and moving towards a goal that is, it's probably dopamine related and has something to do with, there's a satisfaction in doing something, doing something well.

[432] You know, I think we could look back to ancient Greece and Patmos and Samos and some of the islands that we've been on.

[433] And that's really where capitalism developed.

[434] And it, you know, if I make olive oil on my island and you make wine on your island and we trade, there's an implicit ethic in that.

[435] Because if I make rancid olive oil, and this is where the postmodernists are just completely wrong, they think that.

[436] that narcissistic, you know, self -interest is the sole motivation.

[437] But if I make rancid olive oil, you're going to stop trading your wine with me. I'm not going to get any more of your wine.

[438] You might get some vinegar.

[439] It might get some vinegar.

[440] Yeah.

[441] That's exactly what to happen.

[442] And so, you know, there's a – and, you know, it feeds on itself in terms of if you elevate your game and you make better wine, well, then there's an implicit call to me that, hey, buddy, you've got to step up your game because my wine, I now get 10 bottles of olive oil for one bottle of wine, because my wine's so much better.

[443] And so I've got to make better olive oil, right?

[444] And so there's a, there's an invitation to excellence, I think, that it's an implicit aspect of the ethical side of capitalism.

[445] So that's, see, the other thing that blinds people's vision to some degree is that we use terms that become abstracted and then that carry with them an unfortunate baggage and capitalism is likely one of those.

[446] You know, and it's more what you're pointing to, especially the implicit ethic, I think, is more simply conceptualized in relationship to voluntary exchange.

[447] You know, and I think if you ask the typical college student if they're opposed to capitalism, they might be inclined to say yes, but if you ask them whether their capacity to engage in voluntary exchange should be restricted, they'd say no, right?

[448] And so the case you're making was twofold with regards to implicit motivation.

[449] And one is, once you specify a goal, there's an intrinsic pleasure in moving efficiently towards that goal.

[450] And then we might say, well, you know, if the goal is destruction of other people, there could be implicit motivation in moving towards that.

[451] And sometimes that's true.

[452] But I would say, yeah, that's not a goal that's very easy to sustain in a social community.

[453] Right.

[454] And then that moves us into the second domain, which is if you're in a social community, you are in a community of exchange.

[455] And even if you're not exchanging goods, you're going to be exchanging glances.

[456] You're going to be exchanging ideas.

[457] You're going to be exchanging, well, to the degree that you're interacting with other people.

[458] you're exchanging, then if you see those other people repeatedly, the exchanges are going to be iterated.

[459] And we know, like this has been mathematically modeled, I've been reading Robert Axelrod's book on tit -for -tat computer competitions, we know perfectly well that there are emergent ethics, there are ethics that emerge out of iterated exchanges.

[460] And you're, okay, so you imagine that any goal that you have that's going to be sustaining is going to to have to serve the purposes of iterated exchange because otherwise it's not going to function in a social environment.

[461] People will just punish it out of existence.

[462] So that sets a set of constraints on what your goals are going to be.

[463] Okay, so now you have a set of constrained goals.

[464] If you posit one of those goals and start moving towards it, there's going to be pleasure in that.

[465] But then you've added an additional layer to that, which is, well, okay, imagine you have goal A and I have goal B and you produce something and I produce something, and we're going to exchange our products, there's an implicit ethic that's going to emerge out of the repeated exchange as well.

[466] One of them is going to be, I'm going to try to match your quality, because if I don't, you're going to find someone else to play with.

[467] Yeah.

[468] I think you actually touched on this in quite an elegant fashion, but I think it was with Sapolsky when you did a podcast with him.

[469] And you guys talked about, I hadn't heard you mentioned this before, but you talked about sort of the concept of a reciprocity bank that's built in human.

[470] That's what the reputation is.

[471] Yeah, yeah, that's a good description.

[472] Yeah, and I think that, so if I go hunting, you know, it's 10 ,000 years ago, and I go hunting and I'm successful and I share with you, well, now we have mutual banking system.

[473] We have a relationship that transcends across time, right?

[474] Because the next time you hunt, you're successful, and I'm not, you're going to share with men.

[475] And I think that that's a good description of the same thing in the wine and the olive oil.

[476] So, Derek, I've been writing about, I've been writing this book, We Who Wessel with God, as you know, and I've been closing it up.

[477] I've been writing the final chapter, which is a chapter on the Gospels.

[478] And one of Christ's injunctions, I believe it's in the sermon on the Mount, but it may occur in other places, is to store up treasure in heaven.

[479] And so I've been trying to understand, and not on earth where moths can eat it or rust can get at it or it can be stolen.

[480] And I'd be trying to understand what that means.

[481] Now, a lot of the ethic that's embedded in the Gospels and in the biblical corpus as a whole is an ethic of eternal view.

[482] So the idea is something like, so Abraham, for example, becomes the father of nations because he embodies a set of paternal attitudes and actions that propagate best across the longest conceivable span of time and in the largest number of situations.

[483] So you can imagine this is why the selfish idea with regards to propagation and genetic propagation doesn't make any sense to me, you know, because human beings have this long -term investment strategy with regards to.

[484] to their kids.

[485] You don't just have sex and reproduce.

[486] That doesn't work at all.

[487] In fact, if you just have sex and reproduce, your children are very much likely to die.

[488] They're going to be abused.

[489] They're going to be abandoned.

[490] So you have to have sex and then you have to invest for, okay, 18 years.

[491] That's a long -term strategy.

[492] But it's not 18 because there's grandparent investment.

[493] And there's even great -grandparent investment.

[494] Then you might say even there's, if you conducted yourself properly as a father, you would embody a set of sacrificial gestures that would maximize reproductive fitness across the broadest conceptual span of time, right?

[495] And so that's an implicit ethic.

[496] Now, a fair bit of that has to do with reciprocity.

[497] So when Christ says that you should store up treasure in heaven and that that's the most effective form of treasure, what he's essentially referring to, at least practically speaking, is something like reputational integrity.

[498] So the idea would be, you know, a currency can inflate and collapse, and you can lose everything.

[499] But if you've stored up a body of goodwill in a distributed community, well, even if everything around you falls apart, you're going to have people who are perfectly willing and eager to come to your aid just to fulfill their obligations of reciprocity.

[500] And that's the hospitality, by the way, that's made so much of in the Old Testament.

[501] Right.

[502] And so, and this is, I think, what human beings really figured out is that, our best investment is in the minds of others.

[503] And then you can imagine how that can be gamed, right?

[504] Because if the most important thing I have is my representation in the minds of others, then I can use narcissistic manipulation and Machiavellian manipulation to game that reputation.

[505] And here's another thing that happens in the Gospels that's so bloody interesting.

[506] So Christ's primary enemies in the Gospels are the people who game reputation.

[507] And so he goes after the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers, and he basically says, you people are claiming to act under the ages of divine inspiration, but all you're doing is falsely elevating your status in the marketplace, right?

[508] Which is essentially exactly what he tells them.

[509] And so they're gaming the system in order to falsely obtain reputational points.

[510] And that's, well, there's no difference between that and virtue signaling, is there?

[511] Those are the same thing.

[512] Yeah.

[513] So what do you do?

[514] Okay, let's go back to your company.

[515] What do you do you think that's effective in terms of motivating the people that you're overseeing and mentoring?

[516] What do you do in your company that's effective in terms of providing them with a clear vision?

[517] And what do you think the consequences of that are?

[518] Yeah.

[519] I think that, well, part of it we've touched on.

[520] You have to understand how communication propagates differently throughout different functions within the organization.

[521] Ultimately, there's a hierarchical aspect of good communication of a goal.

[522] You have to have a clear sort of superordinate goal for the organization.

[523] This is what we're going to do and then translate that goal to individual process steps and actions for different functions across the company.

[524] So if our goal is to sell a certain amount of product, well, we need salespeople to find a certain number of new patients in order to achieve that goal.

[525] And then we need to make sure the manufacturing team understands they have to produce this product at this level in order to achieve that goal.

[526] And so it gets translated into different, pertinent, you know, functional area pertinent goals, but all of those are subordinate to the overall objective to the company.

[527] So a lot of it's just a matter of translating that you do want to state the high level goal to make sure everybody understands it, but then try to clearly communicate how that is translated to what it is that you need for them to do.

[528] So, but people really appreciate clarity of goal setting.

[529] Right.

[530] It's comforting from the standpoint of, well, you want to know what it is that is going to be the defining characteristic of success.

[531] Right, right.

[532] And a failure for that matter, because then you can avoid failure.

[533] Yeah, yeah.

[534] People don't want to know what that is.

[535] You know, it is, you know, it is a no fun part of it.

[536] But you do have to set a goal because if you don't set a goal, you can't accomplish anything because you don't know what it is that you're supposed to be doing.

[537] I mean, it's sort of a statement of the obvious, but I think that, look, goal setting is implicit and it's wrapped up in who we are, right?

[538] Like you're, I think your, your identity is.

[539] Vision integrated.

[540] Yeah, it's integrated into goal setting, which is, which is responsibility, which is setting that boundary.

[541] If your, if your goal is to become a good lawyer, well, then you need to understand the law.

[542] You have to execute the law well in terms of your responsibility to your client.

[543] Like it, it sets the goal, your identity sets the goal for what it, is that you're doing every day.

[544] It's your responsibility in the world.

[545] If you want to be a good mother, you have to take care of your children.

[546] And so I think without a goal, it's you can't, I don't think you can have an identity.

[547] Well, you certainly can't have clarity of emotional fun.

[548] Well, I think, I think that identity properly understood is visionary and subsidiary.

[549] So you need the highest order vision, the thing at the pinnacle of the pyramid, and then you have to differentiate down into actionable steps, right?

[550] Yeah, yeah, and I think that is what identity is.

[551] And in the absence of visionary identity, we default to things like sexual identity or ethnic identity or, you know, those are all...

[552] We fractionate is what happened.

[553] Yeah, well, definitely, well, we certainly fractionate without a uniting vision, virtually by definition.

[554] Well, the other thing, too, that happens with clear goals is, and this is so important in terms of managing chaos, is that if the goal is clear and even the steps are clear, then there's no anxiety producing ambiguity.

[555] So you control a tremendous amount of both entropy and negative emotion.

[556] But you also make the criterion for movement forward clear.

[557] And that literally produces positive emotion.

[558] Like as soon as you establish a goal and you move towards it, you feel positive emotion.

[559] That's how the system works.

[560] Well, I think one of the most important aspects of narrowing focus is that, well, the goal, you could reconceptualize a goal as all of the things that you are not going to do.

[561] Because the things that you are going to distract you from the goal, like if you pick an example in biology, if you are a lion pride and you are approaching a herd of zebra, what the alpha lioness does is she actually communicates.

[562] to the entire pride, which zebra they're going to carve out and focus on.

[563] So she communicates the goal to the price so that they can set a boundary and separate that zebra from the rest of them.

[564] And then the whole pride can pounce on that zebra.

[565] And it makes the hunt much more effective when you target your efforts highly, highly specifically.

[566] I think that's what a hierarchy is.

[567] It's a procession from a general to a specific.

[568] And that's the same thing as a fractal, et cetera.

[569] Right, right.

[570] Well, so that means what the lion is communicating in large part is just how many zebras we're not going to chase today.

[571] Exactly.

[572] That's exactly.

[573] And what the zebra is doing is so the lion's trying to create order.

[574] What the lion's doing is rank ordering the zebras based on, you know, who's the slowest and the oldest, right?

[575] Or most easily identifiable.

[576] Most easy.

[577] Yeah, yeah.

[578] And so she's trying to create order in the sort of chaos of the herd of zebras.

[579] And what the zebras are actually doing is as prey animals.

[580] And I do fundamentally think that a predator is an order creating hierarchy -seeking action.

[581] And what prey often do, not always, but most of the time, they try to disrupt the lion's hierarchy.

[582] Yeah, yeah.

[583] So what they do that with their, go ahead, where they do that with their camouflage?

[584] They start running around, yeah, they just start running around, zinging and zagging, and actually what the, what the camouflage, what the black and white stripes do is disorient the sensory perception system of the lion.

[585] So they can't actually pick out one particular zebra.

[586] You know, birds do the same thing.

[587] If you come up on a covey of quail, a cocoon approaches a covey of quail, they just explode in 40 different directions at once, which disorients the predator.

[588] Right, right.

[589] And deer do that because they leap randomly into the air.

[590] Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[591] I think fundamentally a similar prey behavior across almost all aspects of the bees do the same thing.

[592] When the bear comes along and tries to steal their honey, the whole swarm of bees just starts, they create chaos for the bear.

[593] They start stinging them all over the place.

[594] So there's, so, so, but just, just the, the, the scientists that figured this out about zebras, I don't remember the name, but it's, it's fascinating.

[595] They, they darted a zebra and they just painted a red striped.

[596] I think that was Zipposki.

[597] I think that was Sopolsky.

[598] Yeah, I think so.

[599] So, so, and, you know, he's dead in the day.

[600] The lions could, and what, what they did was they, they basically disrupt zebras chaos mechanism.

[601] Right.

[602] Okay, so this is a good, one of the things I wanted to talk to you today about was immunological function.

[603] And this is actually a pretty good segue into that, because one of the more fascinating things you taught me, told me about was exactly how the immunological system targets its prey.

[604] What do we take a segue into that?

[605] And this is obviously one of the interests that you had on the biological front that overlapped with your pursuit of cure for rare diseases.

[606] But do you want to walk everybody through a brief description of how the immunological system adapts to a target?

[607] Yes.

[608] You actually, you covered this in, I think it was maybe with Hoffman, but you called it true enough, which I think is actually a very, very good description.

[609] So there's a sequence of activities that I would say seems to be.

[610] be a fairly common behavior pattern within biology generally.

[611] And the immune system follows this same sequence.

[612] So when you're confronted with the randomness of a pathogen, the first thing you do is react with randomness, because there's just no other way to deal with randomness other than wander around randomly.

[613] And so.

[614] Right.

[615] So you throw everything, including the kitchen sink out it.

[616] Yeah, not well, yeah, yes.

[617] And so what happens is that, and this is part of the reason you get tired when you first get sick.

[618] You've got a bacterial pathogen that gets into your bloodstream, and it's growing and proliferating.

[619] What your immune system does is it creates millions, billions of different plugs would be a good way to think about it.

[620] And each of those plugs has a slightly different structure.

[621] An analogy might be, you know, an American plug.

[622] versus a European plug for plugging in your computer.

[623] But imagine there are billions of them.

[624] And so the surface of a bacterium actually is highly specific.

[625] It's got curves and valleys.

[626] And you could imagine it like the island of Britain.

[627] There's a geography.

[628] There's a geography aspect of a bacteria.

[629] And so what the immune system is trying to do is, is identify specific aspects of that geography in order to be able to identify the bacterial cells themselves.

[630] Because once it can identify a particular shape in that geography, then if that shape is the same for all of the bacterial cells in your body, then it can identify every single one of them.

[631] And so what it's trying to do is map the bacteria, essentially.

[632] And it uses a really high sophisticated sequence from the general to the specific in order to do that.

[633] And it starts with sort of a general high -level shape recognition.

[634] You described this, I think, as a child grasping in a ball that doesn't know how to grasp yet.

[635] And so there's...

[636] Right, they use their whole arms.

[637] Yeah, they use their whole arms.

[638] Yeah.

[639] They can kind of grab.

[640] So the first thing that happens is the whole arm.

[641] grasp of the bacteria is not very good.

[642] But what the body does is it takes the few antibodies that sort of grasp generally, they get a little bit of a hold on the bacteria.

[643] And they concretize that first level of analysis.

[644] How does the immune system, like how did the cells that get like that initial, how do they communicate the fact that they've established that grip?

[645] there's there's um so what what the immune system does is it it it has a second function it's a little bit technical i won't go into it but basically there are other cells that come along and they they analyze antibodies that are plugged into things and so then they test and say well is this antibody plugged into something that i recognize which would be a human cell and they say no no no don't don't bother with that or they look at, is this something that I'm familiar with or I know?

[646] And they say no. When the the T -cell answer is no, then what ends up happening is that antibody that sort of vaguely grasps the bacteria, it gets copied.

[647] So the immune system stops making all the wild variation.

[648] And it starts making more and more of the first level of anybody that has.

[649] has a little bit of grasp.

[650] And then what happens is that sort of first level grasp, call it from the shoulder to the elbow, sort of the childlike vague grasping at the ball.

[651] The shoulder to the elbow becomes concretized.

[652] And then there's variations.

[653] This is all what's called the chimeric region, but there's variation from the elbow to the wrist.

[654] So this part, there are millions of copies made from here to here, here, and then this part is allowed to be flexed.

[655] To vary, yeah.

[656] That's very neat.

[657] And so as that part varies, what will happen is some copies of from here to here are better graspers.

[658] Some angle actually fits the fractal structure of the bacteria better.

[659] And then you get from here to here.

[660] So this whole section from your shoulder to your wrist is fitting better than just this section.

[661] Then what happens is that gets copied over and over and over again, and this part is allowed to flex.

[662] Right, right.

[663] So then you get grip like this, and so the grip just proceeds with a higher and higher level of what's called affinity.

[664] It's precision.

[665] It's proceeding from the general system.

[666] And it's getting better and better.

[667] Right, right.

[668] So you could imagine trying to map a coastline with blocks.

[669] And so you could imagine if your blocks were 10 miles by 10 miles, you could push them against the coast.

[670] And they obviously wouldn't fit very well because they're very low resolution.

[671] But some blocks would fit better in some areas of the coast than others.

[672] And so maybe it would be a block or a triangle or a circle or something like that.

[673] And then you could proliferate once you got the 10 square mile blocks in place, you could proliferate like one mile by one mile blocks and then 500 foot by 500 foot blocks and map the coast very, very precisely.

[674] Yeah, so what you're describing is a fractal dimension actually.

[675] Right, right.

[676] And so I'm going to use a slightly different analogy and then translate that to.

[677] So imagine you could get on a 200 -foot boat and just sail around the island of Britain.

[678] I think that's about 3 ,000 kilometers.

[679] Or you could go in and out of every...

[680] Cove.

[681] Yep.

[682] And that gets to 6 ,000 kilometers, call it.

[683] Or you could get on a 10 -foot rowboat and go in and out of every river and little nook and cranny.

[684] Right.

[685] Or you could use a one -foot measuring stick and measure around every single rock.

[686] And so when you, a fractal dimension is a way of measuring, it's a way of mathematics measuring the complexity in something.

[687] And so the way you can discern this is that.

[688] that as your measuring stick decreases in size, the total perimeter of the island of Britain is going to dramatically, logarithmically increase.

[689] And so you go, as you go from a 200 -foot yacht to a one -foot measuring stick, you go from 3 ,000 kilometers to 300 ,000 kilometers.

[690] Right, right, right.

[691] You get this astronomical increase.

[692] So what the immune system does is sort of true enough, I think your description is perfect.

[693] It's sort of obvious.

[694] optimum fractal dimensional goldilocks, this.

[695] It finds one or two or three different, what are called.

[696] And so it just maps one cove.

[697] It maps part of one cove.

[698] And then once it gets that, that cove is the same on every, imagine there are thousands of Britons all over the Atlantic Ocean.

[699] And you map one cove.

[700] Now your immune system goes, okay, I know this.

[701] and I know this one cove and all of these bacterial cells have this cove, so I know how to identify all of them.

[702] I don't need to keep mapping the whole entire thing.

[703] Right, and so good enough and good enough in that situation would be the immune system just has to map that organism well enough so that it can stop it.

[704] Yes, yes.

[705] And that's a kind of understanding, right?

[706] Well, this is part of the reason I got attracted to the New England pragmatists, because they have a philosophy of knowledge that's very much akin to this, is that how do you know when something is right?

[707] It's like, well, first of all, you have to set a target, and then it's right if you can use it to hit the target.

[708] And that's actually the definition of what constitutes right.

[709] I think it's the right boundary between order and chaos.

[710] And I mean, you used a definition of truth, I think it was with Sam Harris, of...

[711] evolutionarily advantageous, basically, something like that.

[712] Right.

[713] Well, it promotes survival and reproduction, something like that.

[714] Yeah, right.

[715] So here's the definition.

[716] If your immune system identifies a couple of epitopes or coves on a bacterial cell, and it wipes out all the bacterial cells, it can identify the bacterial cell.

[717] It's done.

[718] And then the really interesting thing happens is that in that library, It gets encoded and almost like a language in what's called a memory B cell, and those are kept in a library.

[719] And so the next time that bacterial cell comes into the body, the sequence of fractal dimensions of antibodies from the broad to the more and more specific, that's all maintained.

[720] So it can identify the bacterial cell at multiple levels of analysis, large coves and small coves.

[721] Right.

[722] So if there's a mutation, it doesn't have to start from square one.

[723] You can go back to sort of halfway between the general and the specific and start at the point where the fractal dimension no longer matters.

[724] Okay, so there's two things that are relevant there, practically speaking, I would say.

[725] And the first is, if you're negotiating with someone like your wife, it's useful to let her, let's say, wander around the problem space until she comes up with a first approximation of a solution.

[726] And you don't want to criticize that to death too badly because even though it's not a great fit, it's better than the initial state.

[727] And then what you're doing as you're negotiating is you're getting a tighter and tighter grip.

[728] Yeah, yeah, I think that the immune system is, perhaps a good analogy to hypothesize about in terms of the way that human thought.

[729] Yeah, yeah.

[730] It strikes me as highly probable.

[731] I think the human thought sort of proceeds from the general to the specifics so that maybe, you know, you would know this better than me, but with a child, they sort of learn the hierarchy of things as they mature at a young age.

[732] So a blueberry might be something like food, fruit, berry, blueberry.

[733] Oh, you know, that's proportionate to word length, by the way.

[734] The shorter words, the shorter words map on to more fundamental concepts, right?

[735] And those words have been conserved in linguistic history.

[736] That's fascinating because that's the same.

[737] They call those primary level or base level words, yep.

[738] Cat is one, by the way.

[739] Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[740] Or dog.

[741] That's the same thing as the antibody gaining sophistication as it proceeds sort of down the, I call it cone centricity, but it's really concentriced, but with another, imagine a upside -down traffic cone is really a hierarchy, but you're getting more and more specific as you get, and more technically sophisticated.

[742] Okay, so imagine this, imagine this then.

[743] So the, an archetype is like a shoulder.

[744] It's like this, it's like this, from the shoulder to the elbow.

[745] It's like, it's a general purpose problem -solving approach.

[746] And it isn't, you have to make it specific, right, to match it to the precise conditions that obtain in the environment.

[747] But the stories we conserve, the narratives we conserve, are those general purpose problem -solving tools that have the broadest possible application.

[748] Then you can imagine this too, Derek, you can imagine this, is that if you hear a story and it really strikes you and it's memorable, that's because your memory has evolved to have a place for that story because that story is so necessary that without it, your functional, your functional, your general functionality would be massively impaired.

[749] It's like the, yeah, it's like the antibody.

[750] It goes, you go back to the general, generality level, where it resonates with whatever it is that you're, I think that's maybe something like a heuristic in terms of problem solving.

[751] You're looking for a pattern similarity at the level of analysis that matches the new problem appropriately.

[752] You were sort of describing this scientist earlier.

[753] You know, when you describe one, when you learn how one genetic disease works, well, there's a lot of knowledge that you learn that translates to another genetic disease.

[754] It's not exactly the same protein, but in terms of DNA and RNA and all of the functional elements that go wrong with the genetic disease, many of them are the same.

[755] Okay, so well, so imagine that there's a behavioral space where evolutionary competition between strategies occurs.

[756] And we've already agreed on the fact that the strategies that are going to work consistently across time and a social organization are going to be functions of iterated reciprocal interactions.

[757] They have to be, because that's what defines a society.

[758] Okay, so now imagine those are all laid out through behavioral cooperation and competition.

[759] Okay, now imagine you have a mapping function and you can map those strategies.

[760] That's what a story is.

[761] Okay, now imagine those stories have levels of generality and specificity.

[762] right and so if you told your story it would be specific to your time and place and the conditions of your life but it would also be a variant of a broader story that people could rely on to orient themselves in conditions that were somewhat similar to yours there's a whole hierarchy of those so i would say the deepest the deepest and most general stories are the we define them as the religious stories and translating them into their spirit specific application is actually quite a complex act, right?

[763] It's like you can take a general heuristic, which would be coded as a narrative, and it might not be obvious to you how to apply that to the conditions of your life.

[764] That's a problem you have to solve, but that doesn't mean it's not without worth, because it's a good, it's a great starting place.

[765] I don't know if this analogy is appropriate, but I think what you're described, describing is the changing of the sort of dynamic moving of the boundary between order and chaos as you proceed down the level of specificity from the general to the specific.

[766] So actually what's happening there is the same thing as the antibody is the boundary is moving.

[767] The boundary is getting closer and closer to the target.

[768] And I think...

[769] Yeah, definitely, definitely.

[770] Well, and in some ways, too, the target might also be coming clearer and clearer, right?

[771] Because you imagine that's happening in two ways, right?

[772] Because it's happening, you're trying to minimize the distance between you and the target, but you're also trying to minimize the ambiguity in relationship to the target as you move towards it.

[773] You're trying to get rid of the noise.

[774] Yeah, yeah, the perceptual noise, exactly.

[775] And that is a matter of zeroing in, which is basically how we describe it.

[776] And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[777] That's how bees rank order.

[778] They rank order flower beds based on the frequency of bees coming back from flower bed and saying this is a flower bed of value, which they communicate in a pretty sophisticated manner.

[779] And so what they're actually doing is, you know, they start in the morning and they, they leave the hive and they fly around and it's random they don't know where the flower beds are and then throughout the day different bees identified different flower beds that have more nectar and less nectar and then they come back and they communicate that they found a flower bed and that there's nectar there and then the hive redirects the sacrifice to the most valuable flower bed based on the value the amount of value in each individual flower bet.

[780] So what ends up happening is you create a hierarchy from the general to the specific.

[781] It's sort of a parade of distribution is what it is, where you're targeting the sacrifice more and more and more algorithmically to the most, to the highest value.

[782] Right.

[783] And so, okay, so let's walk through that.

[784] So it's random to begin with because the bees go in every direction.

[785] Okay, now some bees come back and report.

[786] Now, you, I think you told me that the length of the dance of the individual B is proportionate to the store that they're trying to indicate.

[787] And so then the human equivalent to that would be like, if I watch you put a lot of time and effort into convincing me of something, it's going to be more convincing.

[788] Because you are, what you're doing is indicating by your sacrificial action, which is your dumping of time and effort into that attempt, that's your commitment to the goal.

[789] And so that's a pretty valid indication, at least of your estimation, of how valuable that goal is.

[790] Yeah, well, I mean, the dance, if you watch the sugar plum fairies, the dance increases in the level of excitement to indicate the procession towards value, right?

[791] So I think that's what you're just, is that, is that what you're just, is that what you're describing.

[792] Yeah, well, you want to think about how, well, how bees would indicate to each other the reliability of the message.

[793] And it's got to be something like that the bee, a bee that's willing to risk a lot of effort in the dance has obviously found a source of energy.

[794] Yeah, yeah.

[795] Well, I think it's actually more precise than that.

[796] So there's sort of three, so this guy, von Frisch, got the Nobel Prize for discovering this in like 1973.

[797] And what he discovered three different elements of how bees encode the location of value in a language.

[798] I mean, their dance is really a sort of a proto language.

[799] And what they do is they find a flower bed.

[800] They gorge themselves on nectar.

[801] So they're covered in pollen and nectar.

[802] So one telltale sign of a valuable flower bed is that bee actually comes up and he throws up in the middle of the hive.

[803] and so he's just covered in flower smell.

[804] And then he does a dance, and there are two aspects of the dance that actually create a vector.

[805] One is the length of the dance, and it's extraordinarily precise.

[806] So the length of the dance, every second, I think, represents about 1 ,000 meters.

[807] So if one second dance says the flower bed is 1 ,000 meters away.

[808] The curvature from the, so the bee sort of goes in a straight line, curves out to the start.

[809] The curvature of his dance indicates the direction of the flower bed as an angle off of the direction of the sun.

[810] I mean, it's unbelievably sophisticated.

[811] He looks up at the sun.

[812] He says, okay, this bee just told me the flower bed is 45 degrees off the angle of the sun.

[813] So go east, you know, a thousand meters.

[814] Yeah.

[815] Yeah, it's unbelievable.

[816] So then what I don't know that this part is true.

[817] I'm sort of guessing here, but then I think what probably happens is that because that flower bed is so valuable and because there's so much nectar there, more and more bees come back.

[818] Right, right.

[819] And they dance.

[820] And so that creates a hierarchy, right?

[821] There's more and more bees that are dancing and that track more attention.

[822] I wonder if they get more precise in their specification, too, as further exploration occurs.

[823] Probably.

[824] It's probably a weighted average of all the bees coming back and doing a very similar dance that tells you where the flower bed is.

[825] And so, yeah, they ultimately direct their sacrifice in a highly intelligent algorithmic way.

[826] And the sacrifices, their willingness to expand energy, right?

[827] When we talk about sacrifice, here's the bees burn up energy flying around.

[828] So that's the sacrifice.

[829] Yeah.

[830] Well, another thing this Von Frisch figured out, which this is even more fascinating, is that bees can lie.

[831] So you can have cane bees and able bees, and a cane bee will come back and do a dance, but not be covered in pollen and not have found that valuable of a flower bed.

[832] So it's a virtue signaling bee.

[833] He's a virtue signal to be.

[834] Yeah.

[835] And the other bees will pay less attention if you don't smell, if you don't have sort of highly potent flower smells.

[836] I wanted, did Von Frisch figure out why a bee would falsify his report?

[837] I mean, the obvious answer is for attention, you know, but it's not easy to translate that that into the bee world.

[838] Yeah, yeah, I don't know that we know that part, but.

[839] Narcissists, those are narcissists bees, by the way.

[840] Postmodernist bees.

[841] Yeah, they signal for treasure when that exists.

[842] Right, right.

[843] Well, I mean, this tells you a lot, right?

[844] Because the postmodernists think that there's no hierarchy.

[845] It's just all made up and we can sort of invent whatever hierarchy you want to.

[846] Well, bees can find value.

[847] Right.

[848] So it's so deep in nature that if bees can do it, well, human beings can damn well do it.

[849] Right.

[850] Well, and I would bet my bottom dollar that the systems that are active, when a bee watches another bee dance in a particularly motivated way are mediated by dopamine.

[851] It's highly probable, right?

[852] Because that's, well, that's conserved so far down.

[853] Yeah, yeah.

[854] I bet you're right.

[855] And so it's going, they definitely, they have all times of interesting behaviors.

[856] I mean, when a hornet comes in and starts trying to take bees, they scream.

[857] They literally scream predator threat.

[858] And so they have, they have behavior.

[859] patterns that are prey and predator.

[860] I mean, going and finding the flower is a predatory behavior.

[861] It's value -constructing.

[862] Right.

[863] When the bear - A value hierarchy.

[864] Yeah, when the bear comes, that's a predatory threat to the bee.

[865] They create chaos.

[866] Right, right, right.

[867] Around, to disrupt the goal -seeking behavior of the predator.

[868] And so the level of, actually, they sort of balance the chaos in order, depending on the situation.

[869] So when a hornet comes to the nest, what they'll actually do is a highly, highly almost hyper -ordered dance.

[870] They surround the hornet, and all the bees around the hornets start beating their wings in synchronous fashion.

[871] And they raise the temperature.

[872] So they can survive, I don't know, like 106 degrees, and hornets died 104 degrees.

[873] It's the same thing.

[874] Right.

[875] So like a fever.

[876] Yes, it's a fever.

[877] Wow, that's amazing.

[878] Isn't that amazing?

[879] Right, they cook the wasp, say?

[880] They cook the wasp.

[881] They literally cook a wasp without cooking themselves.

[882] Right?

[883] So that's right on the border of chaos.

[884] Right, right.

[885] It's perfect management, right?

[886] You know, it's like the peak of a Beethoven symphony or something.

[887] It's as far as you can possibly push it and still maintain order.

[888] Right, right.

[889] Okay, so let's close this up.

[890] by tying some things together.

[891] Okay, so when you move from investment banking into the pursuit of cures for rare diseases, you talked a little bit about, you know, how that had prepared you to do it.

[892] You talked a little bit about your motivation because you're actually inclined ethically, let's say, and therefore on a motivational basis, to pursue cures that are going to be of benefit to people.

[893] How did your intellectual interests align with your pursuit in the new company?

[894] Well, I'm fundamentally just a really curious person.

[895] So I love learning new things.

[896] And I realized I had an entropic gap in terms of my knowledge when I started with the biopharmaceutical company.

[897] That's an inadequate description of what I did not know, actually.

[898] And so I just went to work.

[899] I read.

[900] I just started reading.

[901] I went to classes.

[902] I just did all I could.

[903] to educate myself on every dynamic of biology I possibly could.

[904] So what do you think, okay, so now if I understand correctly, you came across this company when you were working in the investment banking realm.

[905] And then, okay, and then you got deep.

[906] Now, why do you think you got so deeply interested in this particular company?

[907] Like, what was the calling there?

[908] So one of the things, Derek, that I've been working on, you can tell me what you think about this, because I think it's an extra cool idea.

[909] I think that what's occurred to me as a consequence of walking through the biblical stories is that the Yahweh, the God that's presented in the Old Testament, is a dynamic process that's conscience on the one hand.

[910] So that calls you out on your misbehavior and that's calling on the other.

[911] So God is the spirit of conscience and calling.

[912] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[913] And so calling makes itself manifest in those things that grip your interest.

[914] And conscience makes itself manifest in, it's like the grip of, it's almost like the grip of, it's something like predation.

[915] Because when you do something wrong, that behavior, that element of yourself should be eradicated.

[916] And conscience tells you what part of you should die.

[917] And it tells you what part of you should die instead of you.

[918] Right?

[919] And so calling is like the bee dance in some ways.

[920] Calling is what indicates to you, for whatever reason, where the treasure lies, and conscience is what tells you when you're deviating from the path.

[921] And the united spirit that's presented in the Old Testament looks like the dynamic interaction of calling and conscience.

[922] And I really like that.

[923] I mean, it makes sense to me because we can follow our calling and we should attend to our conscience.

[924] And if you're doing something you're really interested in and your conscience is clear, things are going pretty.

[925] nicely for you.

[926] Like, that's a good place to be.

[927] So, okay, so you came across this company.

[928] And so what was it in that that called to you, do you think?

[929] Initially, it was the dynamic environment of the academic challenge that was highly intriguing.

[930] And so I think that was definitely part of it.

[931] But, you know, you, to summarize what you just said, you speak about adventure.

[932] I think that an adventure, you don't necessarily.

[933] You don't necessarily, necessarily have to have exactly the right calling to go on an adventure.

[934] Right.

[935] It can be a low -resolution adventure.

[936] It can be a low -resolution adventure.

[937] Yes, exactly.

[938] I think that what ends up happening, if you just, an adventure is that first step into chaos, like the bee getting up in the morning and flying around.

[939] He doesn't know what the flower mat is.

[940] The only way to find it is to start down the path.

[941] And I think that maybe conscience is the, as you proceed down the path, your accuracy of path direction evolves.

[942] You bet.

[943] You bet.

[944] More specifically.

[945] Yeah.

[946] And I don't know exactly how that happened.

[947] Well, I think it's this, what we've been discussing.

[948] It's sort of.

[949] Well, you'd learn more about pathways that lead nowhere.

[950] Yeah.

[951] It's gaining knowledge about where to set the boundary between order and chaos.

[952] I think it's something like that.

[953] because you need a little bit of chaos.

[954] If you don't have chaos, you can end up with the wrong goal.

[955] Well, it also, if there's no chaos, too, the other problem, too, is that, you know, you have to pursue a goal in a manner that allows you to pursue other goals when you're done with that goal.

[956] So as you're pursuing the goal, you want to be accreting information that allows you to pursue other goals, right?

[957] So there's a goal and a meta goal all the time, and the meta goal is going to be something like increased flexibility in positing and pursuing future goals.

[958] You don't ever want to sacrifice that to the specific goal.

[959] You know, this is why, like, a liberal arts education is such a good thing, because knowledge of multiple domains increases the meta -knowledge.

[960] Right, right.

[961] It's algorithmic or analogic pattern recognition.

[962] And I think this has actually been helpful to me in terms of my lack of highly specific background in the farm.

[963] pharmaceutical industry, I've done other things that actually, well, they don't constrain me to the, if you've always done something this way, this is why we do it, because we've all done it this way.

[964] And I come in and go, well, why?

[965] Because over here in this functional area, we did it this way.

[966] And so you ask the questions that can actually, I'm a source of chaos, I guess, would be, hopefully just the item of Phaia.

[967] Because you want to constantly be tilting towards the optimum, which requires knowledge.

[968] That's multi -dimensional.

[969] It's multidimensional.

[970] Yeah, well, one of the things I've noticed about successful people, and this is something that's very practical for those of you who are watching and listening, is that there's lots of people who are specialized, no, there's a minority of people who are specialized in any given area.

[971] And being specialized in a given area is very useful because there's a minority of people who are specialized.

[972] And so that marks you out.

[973] It gives you something to trade.

[974] But then there's a much smaller number of people who are specialists in two relatively unrelated domains simultaneously.

[975] Right.

[976] So maybe you're one in a thousand here and you're one in a thousand here.

[977] And assuming there's some overlap, you're one in 500 ,000 in that overlap.

[978] And then if you add a third domain of specialty.

[979] Well, there's like one of you.

[980] Yeah.

[981] I think that's actually a real problem the world.

[982] Is it what you're describing in some respects is sort of what Ian McGilchrist talks about in terms of a highly, highly left -brained specialization such that you're hyper -milinated and concretized in one area, which doesn't allow for this dynamite.

[983] Right.

[984] Right.

[985] understanding how multiple functions may interact, the patterns of behavior may interact across domains.

[986] Right.

[987] It's a kind of blindness of specialization.

[988] Yeah, and I think you cannot be right brain integrated in your thinking without being multidimensional in your education.

[989] I don't.

[990] Right, right.

[991] So that's a good, okay, well, the other thing that that sort of points out too, and this is more or less relevant to Ralston College, is that so you imagine that one of the things that you're doing, with a classical education is that you're increasing the dimensionality of the maybe what so imagine it's sort of akin to those shoulder to elbow elements of the of the immune system so if you have a good general education you have a lot of those yes right and so that yeah so right right right you can see almost every bacteria and viral protein yeah right at least you have a starting you have a starting place you have a starting place.

[992] And right, and these have been conserved, right?

[993] The best of the past is the conservation of these first -pass approximations.

[994] That's archetypal and biblical stories is what it is.

[995] Right, right.

[996] Yes, the first, it's the first part of the arm.

[997] It sort of gives you a doorway into the maze.

[998] Okay, so then imagine this too.

[999] So this is, this has something to do with certain degree of culture of homogeneity.

[1000] So imagine that there's a hundred of us and we were all raised on the same stories.

[1001] Okay, now these are stories that are like their first pass approximations to solutions.

[1002] But because we all know the stories, they're also first pass approximations, so partial solutions, that we would already regard as ethically viable.

[1003] Because we've got the same initial.

[1004] Yeah, we've got the same initial.

[1005] That's right, right, right.

[1006] Yeah, you can't, you can't have a functional society without a shared language, which doesn't work.

[1007] You and I can't communicate if we don't have the same language.

[1008] Right.

[1009] Well, and maybe what we're talking about here is like the prototypical elements of a shared language of value.

[1010] Yeah, I think it's sort of a language of morality, maybe.

[1011] Yeah.

[1012] Well, I don't know if there's a difference between a hierarchy of value and a morality.

[1013] I think those might be the same thing.

[1014] Yeah, I think so too.

[1015] I think I think this exists in biological systems broadly.

[1016] It's more of a micro level than the macro level that you're describing.

[1017] But I think, you know, you could define, you're going to have to get me a little bit of leeway here, but you could define a living system as the ability to dynamically manage the boundary between order and chaos to direct sacrifice.

[1018] I think all living things have the ability to do that.

[1019] They all share it.

[1020] And there's a good reason for that because the physical world itself, outside of nature and living things, is somewhat chaotic, right?

[1021] There's even at the quantum mechanical level or quantum physics level, we know that things can be waves or particles.

[1022] They can randomly become something completely different.

[1023] So there's a dynamism that's in the physical world.

[1024] So I think by definition, biology has to be able to navigate a highly complex environment that shares the tension between order and chaos.

[1025] Well, it seems like that.

[1026] It seems like that in the archetypal accounts, because the constituent elements of reality in the narratives of value are order and chaos.

[1027] And the third element is the ability to traverse that border.

[1028] I mean, so in the Taoist worldview, you just see that absolutely.

[1029] clearly, is what's the world made of?

[1030] What's made out of chaos?

[1031] So that's something like entropy, and it's made out of order.

[1032] And that's something like predictability.

[1033] And then the dynamic interaction between them, what would you say?

[1034] And then it's the ability to mediate between those two forces dynamically that constitutes, while you said it constitutes life.

[1035] It certainly constitutes consciousness, that's for sure.

[1036] Does it constitute life?

[1037] Yes, likely.

[1038] It's acted out.

[1039] I mean, it's happening at the cellular level.

[1040] is happening, bees do this, ants do this, they map, they create a boundary and randomness in order to direct sacrifice to sensory, perceptive, phenotypically relevant value.

[1041] That's too bargaining, but, you know, and every species is doing this differently, but they're basically doing the same thing.

[1042] Well, you look at, look at the dragon archetype, the dragon fight story.

[1043] I mean, that's a map of value.

[1044] And what it says, and Jung believed this was the core value in alchemy, in stirling this inventory, which was in that what you most want to find will be found where you least are inclined to look.

[1045] And Jung's take on that was, well, your weakest at your blindest point.

[1046] And so, of course.

[1047] You have to go into chaos.

[1048] You can't find value if you don't get that first step into chaos.

[1049] It's impossible because, by definition the value is not in it's not maintained perpetually inside of order it can't work you have to seek new new value right right because the order is exhaustible yeah otherwise the bear's going to come and steal all your honey well you see well you see the same thing with the bees it's like if they get locked onto a flower bed that's great until they take all the resources and then that whole pattern is now longer no longer not only no longer functional.

[1050] It's deadly.

[1051] Right, right, right.

[1052] Yeah, exactly.

[1053] And then they have to revert to a random search, at least to some degree.

[1054] Yeah.

[1055] So I think this boundary setting mechanism it enables different species to direct what it is they're doing.

[1056] It's sort of an intelligent direction of behavior that is phenotypically specific.

[1057] So, you know, a to a bat they're to to a bee god is the flower bed right so so they are wired to rank order flowerness is what they're actually doing yeah to a bat god is a big fat mosquito at dusk so so they are they they fly out of the cave at dusk and they rank order of mosquitoes and they target their their efforts and their sacrifice to the doppler effect the sound bouncing off of the fattest mosquito.

[1058] This is a completely different way of seeing the world.

[1059] Right.

[1060] Well, and for human beings, God is something like the pattern of the spirit, so we'll say the pattern of behavior that best instantiates the most positive possible reputation in the minds of other people.

[1061] Yeah.

[1062] Right.

[1063] I think that that by definition, I think that by definition, you touched on this very nicely earlier, it has to transcend different perspective and different worldviews.

[1064] So God has to take into account the variation of agreeableness and the variation of neuroticism.

[1065] Right, it's outside of all that.

[1066] Yeah, because you need neuroticism, right?

[1067] Because you want the zebra who's hypersensitive to the lion that's threatening.

[1068] Right, to alert the whole herd.

[1069] To alert the whole herd.

[1070] You need that.

[1071] But for some reason, you know, I think chaos is fundamentally a prey response.

[1072] So the zebras create chaos when they sense the predatory lion approaching them.

[1073] And that for some reason...

[1074] I have to think about that.

[1075] That's very interesting because that also means that the victims should sow chaos.

[1076] Victims should sow chaos.

[1077] Exactly.

[1078] I think, you know, maybe part of it is that in higher ed, we are teaching people that they are victims.

[1079] Yeah.

[1080] You know, your sole reference frame of the world is that, you know, it's sort of this weird dichotomy where you can be anything and do anything you want to be.

[1081] Totally uncranged, you will.

[1082] But, but there's this hyper oppressive patriarchal hierarchy that is going to keep you from being successful.

[1083] And you have no chance of being successful.

[1084] Well, it's going to eat you.

[1085] Basically, we're teaching young people that they cannot be successful.

[1086] And so, of course, they're going to have a prey response.

[1087] To being told you're being prayed upon.

[1088] Well, that's very interesting.

[1089] I hadn't thought about that, that's sowing of chaos as a prey animal response.

[1090] That's very interesting.

[1091] Yeah, off to stew on that.

[1092] It's a hypothesis, but yeah, yeah, yeah, stew on it.

[1093] Because I think, you know, we're sort of getting both aspects of it wrong, the predatory, value -seeking, goal -oriented side of the equation, which is what you say in 12 rules for law.

[1094] life.

[1095] Go make something of yourself and become a better person and all of the good things that happen downstream of that.

[1096] That is the predatory side of the equation, I think, in translating the analogy to nature.

[1097] And the prey side of the equation is a sort of hyper -victimization where, and we're teaching young people.

[1098] Yeah, well, that first pattern deteriorates into predator and the second pattern deteriorates into prey right yeah yeah exactly exactly right and i think that's probably true i think that's probably true and this is partly why the more radical left wing end of the interpretive spectrum is difficult to get rid of is because that first pattern of goal seeking can deteriorate into predator and often does right absolutely that's that's the sort of extremist, you know, narcissistic bully is the hyper predator.

[1099] Right, right.

[1100] Directionally, the far left has the vector correct.

[1101] I mean, those people definitely exist.

[1102] Yeah, and those tendencies, yeah.

[1103] But the categories, the ideological categorization of every predatory behavior as narcissistic psychopath is just, well, misses the nuance of the, right, right.

[1104] The olive oil for wine trade that actually does have an ethic built into it, that they just say, well, that doesn't exist.

[1105] Right.

[1106] All treasure hunting behavior is not predatory.

[1107] Exactly.

[1108] Well, how's the bee going to eat?

[1109] Right, right, right.

[1110] Okay, okay.

[1111] Well, that's a good place to end, Derek.

[1112] That's a good place to end.

[1113] You know, that's a nice summation of what we've been discussing.

[1114] So for everybody who's watching and listening, I'm going to continue to talk to Derek for another half an hour on the DailyWire Plus side, as I do with all my guests.

[1115] And so if you want to join us then, I'm going to have to take five minutes and figure out where I want to take this next.

[1116] But it'll probably be a continuation of the biological analogy because I think it's extremely useful.

[1117] So if you want to join us for that, do so.

[1118] To everybody who's watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

[1119] Derek, thanks very much for talking to me today.

[1120] Yeah, well, I'm glad we got to weave in like the practicalities of your career into, you know, the philosophical.

[1121] and biological discussions that we've had before.

[1122] That's exactly what I was hoping to accomplish, and I think we managed that.

[1123] So thank you very much for that, sir.

[1124] Let's take five, and for everybody watching and listening.

[1125] Again, thanks for your time and attention.