Leadership, Identity, Survival, and Bees ｜ Derick Cooper ｜ EP 417 (uSa4IO7WVFs)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uSa4IO7WVFs

Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye. You talked about sort of the concept of a reciprocity bank that’s built in human… Right, right. That’s what a reputation is. Yeah, yeah that’s what reputation… That’s a good description. 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 a mutual banking system. We have a relationship that transcends across time. Hello everyone. Today I have the opportunity to speak with Mr. Derek Cooper. 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. So you can understand how that properly done could be a very worthwhile enterprise. I’ve got to know Derek over the last few years. He volunteered to be of aid to my enterprise in whatever way might be useful. A while back 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. We worked together on Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia and he’s a benefactor of that institution and we’ve gone a number of adventures together in Greece with the people from Ralston College, the students and some of the other principals and benefactors and that’s been extremely interesting. I’ve had a lot of conversations with Derek about deep biological matters. He’s an expert in immunological function 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 and that’s one of the things that I wanted to share with everyone today and I think we did that quite effectively, bringing the communication patterns of bees along for the ride. It’s very interesting to talk to someone whose knowledge is quite disparate from yours in some ways and still where the communication still remains in the boundaries of mutual comprehensibility 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. We tied that into our biological discussion as well talking about how experience can be mined to lead to, what would you say, the facilitation of broader and broader patterns of adaptation, practically and conceptually and so that’s all on the table in this discussion. So welcome aboard. Derek, do you remember where we met and how? I do. It was originally on zoom, actually I was sitting right here and Michaela introduced us. 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. Yeah, well you have been a tremendous amount of help and so for everybody watching and listening, I’ve worked with Derek since we’ve met to a large degree. I suppose our most intensive collaboration has been with regards to Ralston College in Savannah and we’ll talk about Ralston as we walk through this interview 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 extraordinarily helpful. We’ve also had a variety of extremely productive conversations, not least in Greece. So I’ve traveled with Derek to Greece as part of her collaboration with Dr. Stephen Blackwood, some of you watching and listening will be familiar with him as a consequence of the Exodus seminar and Dr. Blackwood is president of Ralston College and Derek is one of its supporters and developers 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 and the conversations have been extremely enlightening to me partly because Derek knows a lot in the biological realm, especially with regard to immunological function. That’s something I really hope to touch on today and we’ve found all sorts of interesting parallels between how the immune system works and how cognitive systems work 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. I thought that would be really interesting to bring to people’s attention so let’s start if you don’t mind let’s start with your company. Do you want to describe it and describe its scale and exactly what you do? Sure, yeah so it’s a mid-size maybe large private specialty biopharmaceutical company. We make drugs for rare diseases 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 and then once you sort of capture that biological dynamism you investigate how you can possibly counter whatever may be going wrong. 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 the manufacturing side we have in-house to sales and commercial operations as well as clinical development etc. So we do a 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 and typically rare diseases are rare each silo each disease is rare because they tend to be fairly impactful to human health and can cause real problems and so when they’re when they are more significant in terms of human health it’s they’re less likely to have survived through evolutionary history. So each rare disease in and of itself is unique but and and relatively small in terms of the prevalence or the number of people that that would have the disease but overall the total people with rare diseases if you add up all of the categories of each individual disease is pretty substantial and another thing that’s 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 so a rare disease that impacts cognitive function for example we find that that maybe minor mutations with something like that could have a broader impact on a disease like dementia for example there the two could be related and so then you learn about the disease in a broader context by focusing on the on the sort of hyper severe portion of the right well well that’s 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 and associations between what you’re studying and all sorts of things that are relevant to the broader world 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 then they specialize intensely on a phenomenon that that might seem trivial because of its of its particular specificity genetic mutations and fruit flies I suppose comes to mind 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 and as their careers progress they become broader and broader in their range of knowledge and 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 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 and I guess this is partly also what happened to you I and I’m kind of interested in that on the autobiographical front because you started out in investment banking you were in investment banking for 16 years right so maybe walk us through that and tell it tell everybody how it is that you your 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 that you now run so 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 the capital raising side we we would help small and mid-sized companies go public or raise debt and and execute on an acquisition that kind of thing and then I ended up moving to a I moved to a family-owned business that my father had built after working for a good-sized fortune 500 company for for many years he left in the late 80s and started his own company in the baked foods business of all things so I moved into the operations of a baked food business it was a good-sized company we had 2500 employees operations throughout the southeast we then sold that company about 10 years later so in the late 90s I worked for that company for a while and and after we sold it I went to work for a company in Nashville Tennessee actually which was a mezzanine it was called a mezzanine capital that’s basically helping invest in small companies so they can they can grow at the time it was a lot of fun it was right in the sort of peak of the internet craze so we were okay this would be the defining characteristic of what was happening in the capital markets at the time and so we’re making a lot of investments in a lot of different small companies and then that company was sold and I sort of talked to my family and some friends and we ended up putting together a private equity investment company that ultimately made an investment in this pharmaceutical company in 2003 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 so when you started out in the baked foods company what did you what what did you what did that teach you what did that teach you about business and what and so what did it teach you personally what did it teach you about business 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 so you because the the reason I’m asking I suppose is because you have an intellectual interest that we’ll explore in relationship to biology 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 and to manage people while doing that and that’s a you know that’s not an obviously overlapping skill set so I’m curious to pull out the threads and to explain you know how both of those abilities developed so let’s go on the business side first you started with this baked goods company baked foods company yes so I think I think maybe it is more of an overlapping skill set because a a baked foods company is defined by sort of a hyper competitive environment and it’s very much what I would call a cost driven business and what I mean by that is you have to watch your costs very very carefully because the margins are thin there’s a lot of competition we basically were producing a very high volume of like white bread and the the basic stuff that you get on the shelf and 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 Valdez North Carolina that would make 50,000 pounds an hour just to just to put some perspective on this 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 so it’s it’s it’s sort of the the extreme side of pencil sharpening I would say I would say the pharmaceutical business by juxtaposition is almost the complete opposite 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 of thinking to to juxtapose the two and the the consequence of that is that the margins in the industry are just just completely different because the investment comes on developing the product and the and the patent portfolio around the product and that kind of thing as opposed to managing the cost explicitly but but your question is a good one it’s not one I’ve thought about before because one of the things that we do somewhat uniquely with our company is we we manage our costs pretty rigorously even though we don’t necessarily have to because because it is a more profitable business than baked foods for example but what I’ve found in in doing that is that it 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 it it well it’s highly correlated with success to be to be focused and and not allow the organization to to become too chaotic in pursuit of a goal is right yeah so so I’m trying to think of that from a psychological and a trait perspective I mean we we know very well that success in complex endeavors is primarily dependent on intelligence but the personality trait variance also plays a role and so when you’re talking about very tight cost control I immediately think of two things and one is conscientiousness that’s the ability to pay attention that’s orderliness and industriousness the ability to and willingness and desire for that matter to pay attention to details so details matter 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 and control implies no right right 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 and so that that’s a relatively rare combination extremely high openness 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 so that’s a relatively rare overlap of traits 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 detailed 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 from a good management perspective but but I do I am a bit of a chaos seeker in from from an openness perspective I do like to explore new ideas and so an overly ordered organization is not is not optimum for me as we head toward a presidential election in november one thing you can be sure of 2024 will be a tumultuous year how will your hard-earned savings fare you already see the impacts of inflation at the pump in the grocery store the dollar continues to lose buying power quicker than wages can increase so how are you protecting your savings consider diversifying with gold from 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intelligent and that you’re conscientious and that you have a certain degree of emotional resilience so you’re low in neuroticism those are the best predictors on the managerial front on the entrepreneurial front the best predictors are intelligence once again because that’s universal across any domain that’s complex but trait openness and openness is basically aesthetic appreciation on the one hand and interest in ideas and intellectual exploration on the other and my empirical investigations into predicting entrepreneurship showed quite clearly that the major trait predictor there was openness by a substantial margin and so it sounds to me like you 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 well into deep problems the intellectual investigation is that fair that’s fair that’s a very good description okay okay but it trained you yeah i think that there’s a if you’re a very open person it’s good to work on the discipline you know if you’re if you’re like a ceo ultimately your responsibility is strategic you you need to be looking ahead and deciding where the order is going and what it is that you’re going to do and and how you get there and 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 and so you you if you can discipline yourself on that front first then i think that that it propagates throughout the organization ultimately and it’s it’s like anything you have to draw the boundary between chaos and order yeah yeah intentionally a 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 and it does change because do you do you have any idea how in your present business 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 and the more open you are the larger the gap is between the ideas that are triggered so in fact when you’re talking to highly open people they’ll jump from one topic to another and if you’re less open you may not understand that there’s any connection between those ideas at all now the advantage to that is that you bring things together that are not normally conceptualized together and and also you’re a seeker of multiple pathways but the disadvantage as 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 and some of those might even be great ideas but the problem is is that while most great ideas are still going to fail pursuit of any great ideas unbelievably time consuming and costly and you can’t do everything at once 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 and you know how have you learned to deal with that conceptually but also practically right because you can have people around you that can help you with that too so how have you solved that problem given your openness yeah yeah you know that’s a good question i hadn’t really thought about it before i think that what what occurs is is a process of sort of aligning the opportunity with with the relevant sacrifice that you have to um in the in the investment world we call it good capital allocation so so the way that you do this with investments is you sort of create a hierarchy of your opportunities 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 fill that bucket first before you allow um warren buffett actually says this in an extraordinarily pithy manner he says you know when you’re 25 years old down and write down the top 25 goals that you have for your life draw a line under number five tear the page off keep the top five and don’t ever change and don’t do anything else i mean you can make you know some changes but it but it’s a it’s a capturing of this concept of hyper focus yeah and so i i think you have to uh if you have an extraordinary opportunity you’re willing to direct more sacrifice to that to that opportunity as you should and so it’s a it’s a it’s a mathematical it’s a math math-s balancing of the equation of how good is the opportunity and how much is it going to cost to pursue it right right well so so there’s a number of avenues of exploration that are germane to that observation 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 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 and that is not productive but part of the reason is this is that the typical manager so the typical manager first of all fails the empirical estimates are that 65 percent of managers add negative net value to their companies right so that’s a pretty damning that and that’s a pretty damning statistic yeah i do think that’s mostly chaos well well well that’s that that’s the so what happens to managers very frequently is that they spend the majority of their time with their worst employees 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 stellar performers and you spend all your time with them 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 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 you don’t have the time or the energy and they may not have the inclination i mean managers aren’t clinical psychologists and their employees aren’t people who are coming to them for psychological help so there’s an analogy there no one the other thing i think yep yeah yeah i think that that’s directionally partially partially correct i might say it a little bit different i think that at a high level it’s definitely a Pareto distribution and you want to you want to focus your time and energy on this sort of uber competent people that can get a lot of things done but you need to build a functional organization that has a lot of different people in a lot of different roles 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 you have to you have to understand how the entire organization functions up and down the hierarchy and i would say that chaos to me if things are going wrong in some element of the organization it’s the sort of hyper manager conscientiousness types that you’re describing they want to just get rid of the chaos they don’t want any change they don’t want they don’t want anything to sort of disturb the organization and i don’t i don’t think that’s actually exactly right i think there’s more subtlety to it 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 you get all these well maybe we should do this maybe they’re competing ideas yeah yeah yeah they um the the and that’s a sign of i think in the business context it’s a sign of one of two different things either you have not communicated the goal clearly as a leader or or you don’t have the right goal and and people aren’t sure what to do and and so they’re 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 now you 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 but it’s a to me it’s a sign it’s a smoke signal of something that you need to pay attention to and the other thing that i’ve typically i see that that causes chaotic behavior is people have a goal the goal is relatively clear and they realize they’re not going to be able to make the goal and so there’s sort of a fear or threat aspect that that’s starting to occur and they feel like whatever it is that they’re doing isn’t working and they need to make a change in order to make sure that they’re successful so both 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 and it’s not it’s not necessarily just that there’s a misalignment of competence i think would which was your description i mean it could well i well i guess i i’m also wondering it it 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 but you could imagine a situation where there’s a lot of different sub games in your corporate environment and they’re all necessary so maybe there’s a distinction let’s say between sales and research so that’s a good distinction the great people on the sales side aren’t going to be this same people who are the great people on the research side absolutely so right so there’s going to be there’s going to be a distribution of competence by specialized bin 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 because obviously nurse and doctor are similar but probably you know doctor and and and and graphic artists aren’t that similar and so it begs the question of what constitutes similarity and interest seems to be relevant in that regard right yes they are empirical yeah you know i think that if your goal is to is to run an any organization but well i’ll focus on a pharmaceutical company if you want to run it well you absolutely need to understand people 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 and and i think if 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 you have to know the boundary of what you know and what you don’t know and and if you can fill in the gap or if you if you can understand that and fill in the gap properly then you can the organization will function better because right right because you’re you’re sort of aligning different skill sets appropriately with what needs to be done 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 the you have to understand at least somewhat you have to have some concept of what their reference for 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 and so you need to sort of you need to align the way that you communicate with the of the communication because um i mean it literally is almost like a different language right right well and you know we we hear a lot of squawking about diversity in the culture wars that are raging but there is relevant appreciation for diversity and real true diversity is actually diversity of temperament because we know there are five temperaments dimensions of temperament we know they’re normally distributed and we know that there are different skills associated with them and and that those differences are real 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 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 now extroverts can also be impulsive and and and in extreme in the extreme you know there’s pathologies associated with every skill they can also you know that can degenerate into mania you don’t get anything without a cost but it is extremely useful to know that people are actually different you know the people who are higher neuroticism they’re going to be much more sensitive to threat and so you can imagine that that would be one of the things that would stop them from taking risks and that might be a very bad thing on the strictly 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 and agreeableness is particularly interesting in that regard because there are really pronounced advantages and disadvantages at the ends of the distribution so disagreeable people they’re they’re much more likely to bargain hard for themselves so they’re going to be formidable competitors and they’re going to be super blunt and they can be blunt enough to to to be offensive especially if you’re agreeable and neurotic but they’ll tell you exactly what the hell’s going on 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 they’re unbelievably useful 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 what closeness and intimacy now that’s not always appropriate but sometimes it’s unbelievably useful right and so yeah people will tell you what they really think and 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 they don’t like to upset the apple cart yeah yeah they don’t like interpersonal conflict at all yeah yeah so so you know we can we can see there that one of the upsides of viewing the world this way is that you can understand that people genuinely differ in their abilities but there is a very large number of potential games that people can play and if you’re running something like a corporation there’s plenty of games within the corporation where you 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 and so you can get the advantage of that diversity right you can get the advantage of the diversity you can maintain your standards of excellence all that happens though is the excellence what you’re measuring in terms of excellence in performance is going to change 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 that’s absolutely absolutely i mean that that is a very good description of good management right there is is to align personality and competence with the job right right well yeah that’s a good definition of that’s a good definition of merit that’s also not particularly exclusionary now derek mentioned for everybody who’s watching and listening derek mentioned this understand myself site and so understand myself is a site i set up with dr daniel higgins and dr robert peale who i’ve interviewed on this podcast to help people understand their personalities and it offers people a five-dimensional analysis of their personality and five dimensions is a lot by the way the world has four dimensions and so personality has five it’s a very complex structure and it breaks each of the two dimensions further down into two aspects so it gives you 10 different aspects of your personality and so you can take that and find out where you sit what your relative strengths are in relationship to your temperament and what your relative weaknesses are and if you take it with your partner then you can find out theirs as well assuming that they allow you access to it and also you’ll get a report that details out your similarities differences with that person because that’s also really useful to know right 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 and so if you don’t understand that there’s no shortage of opportunities for misunderstanding and friction 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 exactly i mean i think that’s one of the problems with things like like twitter the algorithms are driven to aggregate you into echo chambers of people who see the world similarly but that’s not how the world works we need good operations people and good sales and marketing people and good scientists and those are all different skill sets and so and and they have to talk across an organization in order to be able to to function optimally so you you can’t just stay in your silo and just do what you want to do without understanding that you know if the distribution function is not functioning optimally then then it’s going to cause disruptions for the sales team right so you know these things have to align across perspectives i guess so what did you learn in addition to what you learned in the baked foods industry what did you learn when you moved into investment banking and 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 and then what was what was the utility in that like socially and also in in terms of your development later development and work in the enterprise that you’re pursuing now yeah i think uh investment banking is is a highly technical highly conscientious i mean you work 100 hours a week i mean it’s it’s it’s a pretty brutal environment but you are exposed to a unbelievable stream of ceos and cfos and you 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 and it’s it’s a pretty um 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 and so you’re you’re involved in that whole process in in terms of writing a description of the company and what it is that they do so when you go market it to uh institutional investors and whatnot you can say look at this amazing company that’s created this new software or whatever it is you have to you have you become the uh the financial marketing arm of the organization and so you have to do all of the analysis of what the how competent the company is from a and um an income perspective and and how sustainable they’ll be and 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 a very young age it’s it’s it it’s just you and it’s it’s a very open environment so you’re you work on one deal for three months and then go right into the next one and then go right into the next one so it’s right how many companies do you think how many companies do you think you evaluated oh my gosh i don’t know i’ve got hundreds i couldn’t hundreds hundreds hundreds uh-huh and how long how many did you have to evaluate do you think i mean i know you came from a business background and when you moved into investment banking but how many companies do you did you have to evaluate before you felt that you knew what you were doing and what is it that you were looking for i mean so so we could imagine okay so and i’d like to start from basic principles so as as derrick 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 and so if you go to an investment banker you’re going to to find people who will invest in your company and there you’re going to they’re going to take a piece of your company as a consequence of working with you and so there’s a risk on both sides the risk to the investment bank is that the company fails or is fraudulent and the risk to the 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 and so that has to be negotiated and so as an investment banker you’re in a situation where you have to evaluate a company’s probability of success 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 there’s the management team there’s the timing in the market there’s the marketing team there’s there’s an endless number of things that go together to make a company work and it’s not at all obvious that you can take a look at a portfolio of stocks and you can assess the companies and predict which stocks are going to perform well because most money managers actually do worse than chance what what do you do you think that is different in investment banking and there’s something else i’d like to introduce into that 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 and part of the reason they’re looking for a return that high is that a number of the companies that they evaluate that look good won’t succeed and so there’ll be substantive losses did you get to the point where you felt that you were credible in your analysis of the growth potential of companies and if so what did you learn that enabled you to make that determination yes probably not then i 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 and what i mean by that is is science teaches you the discipline if if you pay attention the data will really help get you to the right answer and so i think a lot of investment investing early your sage companies is a bit of a um we would call it kentucky windage in the south but it’s it’s making guesses as to the competence of the management team and whether or not the idea is going to you know explode and take off yeah what what science says is um get hard data and then make a decision it’s it’s much more um cold and calculating analytical and much less intuitive now i do think that that intuition is important to be for being a good scientist it’s it’s you can’t just rely on what the spreadsheets tell you but um again there’s sort of an optimum balance of you you have if the data tells you something different than what your intuition is telling you listen to it no matter where you’re listening no matter what job you have the clothes you wear to work say a lot about you it’s time to take your style to the next level with mizzen and maine dress shirts you don’t have to sacrifice comfort for style their performance fabric dress shirts feel just as good as they look mizzen and maine invented the performance fabric dress shirt 10 years ago and they’ve practically perfected it it’s lightweight breathable moisture wicking wrinkle resistant and the most comfortable shirt on the market you can wear their clothes to work throw them in a suitcase or keep them by your at-home desk for when you need to look sharp for an interview whatever you do and wherever you wear it know that you’ll look and feel amazing so whether you are attending an important 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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 so so it’s it’s hard to um it’s hard to make sure that that communicate communication game is played effectively and if you’re more removed at right right at the investment level it’s it’s your your source of information is that well well you don’t you’re much less likely to get the smoke smoke signal of the chaos somewhere halfway down the organization that something’s not functioning well if you’re kind of removed from that well i think that’s why so many big enterprises inevitably fail you know they get layers and layers of operation and at some point the information can’t propagate up the layers without disappearing or becoming biased in a way that’s completely unproductive like there might be built-in failure to gigantism in 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 yeah i think i think that’s part of it i think you don’t know what the hell’s going on but but i also think a big part of the reason you don’t know what’s going on is because the the chaos does tend to become a self-fulfilling propagation function and so it it as you add more layers the the mid-level layers add layers themselves 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 of success so it’s sort of it’s not are we achieving the goals as an organization that we want to achieve it is how many people do i have reporting to me and so right and so the the tendency to sort of build fiefdoms is just inevitable in a large business right too well and there’s some evidence you know from the from the comparative anatomy the evolutionary biology end of psychology that human beings human being group size tended to fractionate at about 200 individuals 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 right and so that’s a recipe for chaos as well you know i talked to frank magna who who’s run a very successful organization in canada and he had a rule and i can’t remember precisely the rule but his factories were capped at something like 400 employees he just built another factory after he got bigger than that because it was his experience 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 yeah yeah okay so let’s let’s turn to your your current company and so um 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 you know 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 but you have this niche where you seem to have managed that and also to be profitable you know and and people who are somewhat soured on capitalism listening to this might think well why does profit matter and the answer to that is well it’s an index that you’re running an efficient organization but without profit there’s no growth so if you if you’re not careful enough to run your enterprise profitably it’s not going to thrive i i think yeah i think on on the ethical sort of the implicit ethical question there i think one of the um 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 so so if if you develop a drug that actually really helps people there’s a um there’s an ethical exchange that occurs there there you know yes it it is costly for the patient to or the insurance company to to buy the product so you’re actually doing something that is is can be transformative in that patient’s life so so it’s a pretty valuable um trade i think to do something that really benefits people’s lives and and and to make dramatic changes in their health i mean that’s certainly a good thing to be able to look in the mirror in the morning and tell your and and realize that’s okay so why do you why do you think that matters let i’d like to take that apart i was just talking to joco willink yesterday and one of the things joco 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 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 he didn’t know although learned quite rapidly that that was an innate source of motivation and pleasure right now the cynics with regards to capitalism or the cynics with regards to human beings you know they they basically make the claim that well fundamentally people are motivated by nothing other than power right or maybe some combination of power and hedonism because you need power for some reason and it’s usually to serve some hedonistic goal 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 and the real reason you did that was for the power and the money and the claim that you’re making that you you know can be reasonably satisfied when you look yourself in the mirror or at least not too guilty that’s just a cover story for these other more fundamental motivations but you claim that as a primary motivation so why do you why do you believe that even of yourself you know i mean there’s reason to be cynical about ourselves just like there is about other people now you did decide to go into the business of pursuing cures for rare diseases but what 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 for social mobility or something like that um well but the the answer for me is because i know how i view the world but but um you know i i think that that the thing that motivates most really competent successful people that i know uh is a job well done a a functioning organization there’s there’s an element of of deep satisfaction that comes with with well um you know closing the endroptentropic gap as you would as you would say and moving towards a goal that that is um it’s probably dopamine related and has something to do with um there’s there’s a there’s a satisfaction in doing something doing something well you know i i think we we could look back to ancient greece and uh patmos and samots and some of the islands that we’ve been on and that’s really where capitalism developed and it you know if i make olive oil on my island and you make wine on your island and and we trade um there’s there’s an implicit ethic in that because if i make rancid olive oil and this is where the postmodernists are just completely wrong they think that that narcissistic you know self-interest is the sole motivation but if i make rancid olive olive oil you’re going to stop trading your wine with me i’m not going to get any more of your wine you might get some vinegar i might get some vinegar yeah that’s exactly what’s to happen and and and so you know there’s a and you know it 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 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 and so there so i’ve got to make better olive oil right and so there’s a um there’s an invitation to to excellence i think that it’s an implicit aspect of of the ethical side of capitalism that the so that’s see the other thing that that that blinds people’s vision to some degree is that we use terms that become abstracted and then then that carry with them an unfortunate baggage and capitalism is likely one of those 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 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 and so you the case you’re making was twofold with regards to implicit motivation and one is once you specify a goal there’s an intrinsic pleasure in moving efficiently towards that goal 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 and sometimes that’s true but i would say yeah that’s that’s not a goal that’s very easy to sustain in a social community right 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 and even if you’re not exchanging goods you’re going to be exchanging glances you’re going to be exchanging ideas you’re going to be exchanging well to the degree that you’re interacting with other people you’re exchanging then if you see those other people repeatedly the exchanges are going to be iterated 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 and you’re okay so you imagine that any goal that you have that’s going to be sustaining is going to have to serve the purposes of iterated exchange because otherwise it’s not going to function in the social environment people will just punish it out of existence so that sets a set of constraints on what your goals are going to be okay so now you have a set of constrained goals if you pause at one of those goals and start moving towards it there’s going to be pleasure in that but then you’re 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 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 yeah i i think you you actually touched on this in quite an elegant fashion but i think it was um was sapolsky when you when you did a podcast with him and you guys talked about um i hadn’t heard you mention this before but you talked about sort of the concept of a of a a reciprocity bank that’s that’s right right that’s where the reputation is yeah yeah that’s what right that’s a good description yeah and yeah and i think that so so if i go hunting you know it’s it’s 10 000 years ago and i go hunting and i’m successful and i share with you well that now we have mutual banking system we we have a a relationship that that transcends across time right because the next time you hunt you’re successful and i’m not you’re going to share with me yeah and i think that that that’s a good description of of the same thing in the line and the olive oil so derrick um i’ve been writing about um i’ve been writing this book we who wrestle with god as you know and i’ve been closing it up i’ve been writing the final chapter which is a chapter on the gospels and one of christ’s injunctions i believe it’s in the sermon on on the mount but it may occur in other places is to store up treasure in heaven and so i’ve been trying to understand extent and not on earth where moths can eat it or rust can get at it or it can be stolen and i’ve been trying to understand what that means 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 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 so you could imagine this is why the 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 their kids you don’t just have sex and reproduce that doesn’t work at all in fact if you just have sex and reproduce your children are very much likely to die they’re going to be abused they’re going to be abandoned so you have to have sex and then you have to invest for okay 18 years that’s a long-term strategy but it’s not 18 because there’s grandparent investment and there’s even great grandparent investment 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 and so that’s an implicit ethic now a fair bit of that has to do with reciprocity 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 so the idea would be you know a currency can inflate and collapse and you can lose everything but if you’ve stored up a body of good will 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 and that’s the hospitality by the way that’s made so much of in the old testament right and so and this is i think what human beings really figured out is that our best investment is in the minds of others like our and then you can imagine how that can be gained right because if the most important thing i have is my representation in the minds of others then i can use narcissistic manipulation and macuvelian manipulation to gain that reputation and here’s another thing that happens in the gospels that’s so bloody interesting is so christ’s primary enemies in the gospels are the people who gain reputation 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 aegis of divine inspiration but all you’re doing is falsely elevating your status in the marketplace right there you’re which is essentially exactly what he tells them you know there and and so they’re gaming the system in order to falsely obtain reputational points and that’s well there’s no difference between that virtue signaling is there those are the same thing yeah yeah yeah so so so so what do you do okay let’s go back to your company what do you do you think do you think that’s effective in terms of motivating your the people that you’re overseeing and mentoring what do you do in your company that’s effective in terms of providing them with a clear vision and what do you think the consequences of that are um i i think that well part of it we’ve touched on you you have to understand how communication propagates differently throughout different functions within the organization so so um and and it but you know ultimately there’s a there’s a hierarchical aspect of good communication of a goal you you have to have a clear sort of superordinate goal for the for the organization 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 so 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 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 and so it gets translated into different uh pertinent you know functional area pertinent goals but but all of those are subordinate to the the overall objective to the company 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 but then try to clearly communicate how that is translated to what it is that you need for them to do so but people um really appreciate clarity of of goal setting right it it um it’s comforting it from the standpoint of well you you want to know what it is that that is going to be the defining characteristic of success right right well and a failure for that matter because then you can avoid failure well yeah yeah people don’t don’t want to know what that is you know it is um failures the no fun part of it but but you do have to you have to set a goal because if you don’t set a goal you you can’t accomplish anything because you don’t know what it is that you’re supposed to be doing um i mean it’s sort of a statement of the obvious but but i think that look goal setting is implicit and it’s it’s wrapped up in who we are right like you’re i think your your identity is vision integrated it yeah it’s integrated into goal setting which is which is responsibility which is setting that boundary if your if your goal is to become a good lawyer well then you need to understand the law you you have to execute the law well in terms of your responsibility to your client like it it it sets the goal your identity sets the goal for what it is that you’re doing every day it’s your responsibility in the world if you want to be a good mother you have to take care of your children and so i think without a goal it’s you can’t i don’t think you can have an identity well you certainly can’t have clarity of emotional fun well i think i think i think that i think that identity properly understood is visionary and subsidiary so you need the highest order vision the thing at the pinnacle of the pyramid and then you have to differentiate down into actionable yeah into actionable steps right yeah yeah and i think that is what identity is and in the absence of visionary identity we default to things like sexual identity or ethnic identity or you know those are all we fractionate is what happened yeah well definitely well we certainly fractionate without a uniting vision virtually by definition 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 so you control a tremendous amount of both entropy and negative emotion but you also make the criterion for movement forward clear and what that literally produces positive emotion like as soon as you establish a goal and you move towards it you feel positive emotion that’s how the system works well i think one of the one of the most important aspects of narrowing focus is that well the the goal you could you could reconceptualize a goal as all of the things that you are not going to do because because the things that you that are going to distract you from the goal like if you have right pick up pick an example in biology if you if you are a lion pride and you are approaching a herd of zebra what the alpha lioness does is she actually communicates to the entire pride which zebra they’re going to carve out and focus on so right so she communicates the goal to the process so that they can they can set they can set a boundary and separate that zebra from the rest of them and then the whole pride can pounce on that zebra and it makes makes the hunt much more effective when you target your efforts highly highly specifically i think i think that’s what a hierarchy is it’s a it’s a procession from a general to a specific and that’s the same thing as a fractal etc right right well so so that means what the lion is communicating in large part is just how many zebras we’re not going to chase today exactly that’s right yeah and what the zebra and what the zebra is doing is so the lion’s trying to create order what the lion’s doing is is rank ordering the zebras based on you know who’s the slowest and the oldest right or most easily identifiable most easy yeah yeah and um so so she’s trying to create order in in the sort of chaos of the herd of zebras and what the zebras are actually doing is as prey animals and i do fundamentally think that a predator is an order creating hierarchy seeking um action and what prey often do not not always but most of the time they try to disrupt the hot the lion’s hierarchy yeah so so they do that with their go ahead well they do that with their camouflage running around yeah they just start running around zigging and sagging and actually what the what the camouflage with the black and white stripes do is disorient the sensory perception system of the lion so they can’t actually pick out one one particular zebra you know birds do the same thing if you if you come up on a a covey of of quail uh raccoon approaches a covey of quail they just explode in 40 different directions at once which disorients the predator right right and deer do that because they leap yeah yeah exactly exactly i think i think fundamentally a similar prey behavior across almost all aspects of i mean bees do the same thing when the bear comes along and tries to steal their honey the the whole swarm of bees just starts they create chaos for the bear they start stinging him all over the place right so there’s um so so but just just the the scientists figured this out about zebras i don’t remember the name but it’s fascinating uh they they darted a zebra and they just painted a red stripe i think that was the pulse i think that was sepulchre i think that was sepulchre yeah i think so so so and the and you know he’s dead in the deck the the lions could and what what they did was they they basically disrupt zebra’s chaos mechanism right okay so this is a good one of the things i wanted to talk to you today about was immunological function and this is actually a pretty good segue into that because one of the more fascinating things you taught taught me told me about was exactly how the immunological system targets its prey why don’t we take a segue into that 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 but do you want to walk everybody through a brief description of how the immunological system adapts to the to a target yes um you you actually you you covered this in in um i think it was maybe with with hoffman but you called it true enough which i think is actually a very very good description so um the there’s a there’s a sequence of activities that i would say seems to be a fairly common um behavior pattern within biology generally and and the immune system follows this same sequence so it’s when you’re confronted with the randomness of a pathogen the first thing you do is is react with the randomness because there’s there’s no other way to deal with randomness other than wander around randomly and so right so you throw everything including the kitchen sink at it yeah um not not well yeah yes and so and so what what happens is that and this is part of the reason you get tired when you first get sick you’ve got a bacterial pathogen that gets into your bloodstream and it’s growing and proliferating um what what your immune system does is it’s it creates millions billions of different plugs would be a good way to think about it and each of those plugs has a slightly different structure an analogy might be um you know an american plug versus a european plug for plugging in your computer but but imagine there are billions of them and so the the surface of a of a bacterium actually is highly specific it’s it’s got curves and valleys and uh you know you could imagine it um like an island of britain there’s a geography it’s a geog there’s a geography aspect of of a bacteria and so what 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 because once it can identify a particular shape in that geography then it if that shape is the same for all of the bacterial cells in your body then it can identify every single one of them and so what it’s what it’s trying to do is map the bacteria essentially and and it uses a really highly sophisticated sequence from the general to the specific in order to do that um and it starts with sort of a general high level um shape recognition um you describe this i think as a child grasping in a ball that doesn’t know how to grasp yet and and so there’s they use their whole arms they use their whole arms and it’s yeah it’s tight they can kind of grab so so the first thing that happens is the the whole arm grasp of the bacteria is not very good 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 and they they concretize that first level of analysis so how does the immune system like how did the cells that get uh like that initial how do how do they communicate the fact that they’ve established that grip there’s there’s um so 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 and they say no when the answer the t cell answer is no then what ends up happening is that antibody this sort of vaguely grasps the bacteria it gets copied so the the immune system stops making all the wild variation and it starts making more and more of the first level of antibody that has a little bit of grasp and then and then what happens is that that sort of first level call it from the shoulder to the elbow sort of this the childlike vague grasping of the ball the shoulder to the elbow becomes concretized and then there’s variations this is all called what’s called the chimeric rate region but there’s variation from the elbow to the wrist so the this part there are millions of copies made from here to here and then this part is allowed to be very yeah that’s very neat and so as that part varies what will happen is some as some copies of from here to here are better graspers some angle actually fits the fractal structure of the bacteria better and then and you get from here to here okay so this whole section from your shoulder to your wrist is fitting better than just this section yeah then what happens is that gets copied over and over and over again and this part is allowed to flex right right right so then then then you you get grip like this and so the grip just proceeds with a higher and higher level of of what’s called affinity it’s precision it’s proceeding from the general right specific and it’s getting better and better right right so you could imagine imagine trying to map a coastline with blocks and so you could imagine if your blocks were 10 miles by 10 miles you could push them against the coast and they obviously wouldn’t fit very well because they’re very low resolution but some blocks would fit better in some areas of the coast and others and so then once so maybe it would be a block or a triangle or a circle or something like that and then you could proliferate once you got the 10 square mile blocks in place you could proliferate like one one mile by one mile blocks and then 500 foot by 500 foot blocks and and map the coast very very precisely yeah so so what you what you’re describing is a fractal dimension actually right right and so i’m going to use a slightly different analogy and then translate that too so imagine you could you could get on a 200 foot boat and just sail around the island of britain i think that’s about 3000 kilometers or you could go in and out of every uh cove yep and that gets to 6000 kilometers call it and or you could get on a 10 foot rovo and and go in and out of every river and and little nook and cranny right or you could use a one foot measuring stick and measure around every single rock and so when you a fractal dimension is is a way of measuring it’s a way of mathematically measuring the complexity in something and so right the way you can discern this is that as your measuring stick decreases in size the total perimeter of the island of britain is going to dramatically logarithmically increase and so you go as you go from the 200 foot yacht to a one foot measuring stick you go from 3000 kilometers to 300 000 kilometers right right right it’s astronomical increase so what the what the immune system does is sort of true enough i think your description is perfect it’s sort of optimum fractal dimensional uh goldilocks this it it it it finds one or two or three different what are called so it just maps one cove it maps part of and then once it gets that that cove is the same on every imagine there are thousands of britains all over the atlantic ocean and you map one cove now your immune system goes okay i know this i know this one cove and all of these bacterial cells have this cove so i know how to identify all of them right don’t need to keep i don’t need to keep mapping the whole entire thing 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 yes yes and that’s a kind of understanding right 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 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 and that’s actually the definition of what constitutes right i think it’s the right boundary between order and chaos and and i mean the you you use a definition of truth i think it was with sam harris of um evolutionarily advantageous basically something like that right well sir it promotes survival and reproduction something like that right so here’s the definition 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 it’s done and so and and then the really interesting thing happens is that that library gets encoded in almost like a language in what’s called a memory b cell and those are kept in a library and so the next time that bacterial cell comes into the body the the sequence of fractal dimensions of antibodies from the broad to the more and more specific that’s all maintained so so it it can identify the bacterial cell at multiple levels of analysis large coves and small coves right so if there’s a mutation it doesn’t have to start from square one you 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 match okay okay so there’s there’s two things that are relevant there practically speaking i would say and the first is if you’re negotiating with someone like your wife it’s useful to to let her let’s say wander around the problem space until she comes up with a first approximation of a solution 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 and then what you’re doing as you’re negotiating is you’re you’re getting a you’re getting a tighter and tighter grip yep yeah yeah i i think i think i i think that the immune system it is perhaps a good analogy to hypothesize about in terms of the way that human thought yeah yeah it strikes me as highly probable i think the human thought sort of proceeds from the general to the specific yeah so that maybe um you know with you would know this better than me but but with a child they sort of learn the hierarchy of things as as they mature at a young age so so a blueberry might be something like food fruit berry blueberry oh you know that’s proportionate to word length by the way the shorter words the shorter words map on to more fundamental concepts right and those words have been conserved in linguistic history that’s fascinating because yeah yeah they call those primary level or base level words yep cat is one by the way wow yeah yeah yeah that’s the same thing as the antibody gaining sophistication as it proceeds sort of down the i i call it cone centricity but it’s really concentric but with an other imagine a upside down traffic home is really a hierarchy but you’re you’re getting more and more specific as you have and more and more technically sophisticated okay so imagine this imagine this then then so the an archetype is like a shoulder it’s like this it’s like this from the from the shoulder to the elbow it’s like it’s a general purpose problem solving approach and it isn’t you have to make it specific right to match it to the precise conditions that obtain in the environment but the stories we conserve the narratives we conserve are those general purpose problem solving tools that have the broadest possible application then you can imagine this too derrick 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 you your functional your functional your your general functionality would be massively impaired and so it’s like that yeah it’s like the antibody is it goes yeah 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 yeah yeah you’re you’re you’re looking for a pattern similarity at the level of analysis that matches the new problem appropriately you you were sort of describing this earlier 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 seeds 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 okay so so so well so imagine that there’s a behavioral space where evolutionary competition between strategies occurs and we we’ve already agreed on the fact that the strategies that are going to work consistently across time in a social organization are going to be functions of iterated reciprocal interactions they have to be because that’s what defines a society okay so now imagine those are all laid out through behavioral cooperation and competition okay now imagine you have a mapping function and you can map those strategies that’s what a story is okay now imagine those stories have levels of generality and specificity 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 specific application is actually quite a complex act right it’s like you can take a general 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 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 it’s a great starting place i don’t know if this analogy is is appropriate but i think what you’re describing is the changing of the 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 so so so actually what’s happening there is is the same thing as the antibody is the the the boundary is moving the boundary is getting closer and closer to the target and i think yeah definitely definitely well and in some ways too the target might also be coming clearer and clearer right because because you imagine that’s happening in two ways right 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 you’re trying to get rid of the noise you’re trying to yeah yeah the perceptual noise exactly and that and that is a matter of zeroing in which is you know basically how we describe it and and yeah yeah yeah yeah that that’s how that’s how bees rank order um that’s they rank order flower beds based on the frequency of bees coming back from flower bed and and saying this is a flower bed of value which which they communicate uh in a pretty sophisticated manner 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 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 bed so what ends up happening is you you create a hierarchy from the general to the specific it’s sort of a parade of distribution is what it is where you’re targeting the the sacrifice more and more and more algorithmically to the most to the highest value right okay and so okay so so let’s walk through that so it’s random to begin with because the bees go in every direction okay now some bees come back and report now you i think you told me that the length of the dance of the individual bee is proportionate to the store that they’re trying to indicate and so 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 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 you’re that’s your commitment to the goal and so that’s a pretty valid indication at least of your estimation of how valuable that goal is yeah well i mean the dance if you if you watch the sugar plum fairies the dance increases in the level of excitement to indicate the procession towards value right so right i think i think that’s what you’re just is that is that what you’re describing um yeah well you you want to think about how well how bees would indicate to each other the reliability of the message and it’s got to be something like that that the bee a bee that’s willing to risk a lot of effort in the dance has obviously found a source of energy yeah yeah well i think i think it’s actually more precise than that so so there’s sort of three so this guy bond frish yeah i got the nobel prize for discovering this in like 1973 and um what he discovered three different elements of how bees encode the location of value in a language i mean their dance is is really a sort of a proto language and what they do is they they find a flower bed they gorge themselves on nectar so they’re they’re covered in pollen and nectar so so one telltale sign of a valuable flower bed is that bee actually comes up and he throws up in the middle of the of the hive and so he smelled he’s just covered in flower smell and then and then he he does a dance and there are two aspects of the dance that actually create a vector um one is the length of the dance and it’s it’s it’s extraordinarily precise so the length of the dance every second i think represents about a thousand meters so if one second dance says the flower bed is a thousand meters away the curvature from the so the bee sort of goes in a straight line and then he curves back to the start the curvature of his dance indicates the direction of the flower bed as an angle off of the direction of the sun i mean it’s unbelievably sophisticated so the week five he looks up at the sun he says okay this bee just told me the flower bed is 45 degrees off the angle of the sun so go east you know a thousand meters and yeah yeah it’s unbelievable so then what i i don’t know that this part is true 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 uh nectar there more and more bees come back right right and they dance and so that creates a hierarchy right there’s more and more bees that are dancing and that yeah track more attention i wonder if they get more precise in their specification too as further exploration occurs probably on i would it’s probably a weighted average of all the bees coming back and doing a very similar dance that that right tells you um where the flower bed is and so that yeah they ultimately direct their sacrifice in a highly intelligent algorithmic way and the sacrifice is their willingness to expend energy right when we talk about sacrifice here’s the bees burn up energy flying around so that’s the sacrifice yeah well another thing this varn fish figured out which this is even more fascinating is the bees can lie so so you can have cane bees enabled and a cane bee will come back and do a dance but not be covered in pollen and and not have found that valuable of a flower bed so it’s a virtue signaling bee he’s a virtue signal to be yeah and the other bees will pay less attention if you don’t if you don’t have sort of highly potent flower smells i wanted to did one fish figure out why a bee would falsify his report i mean obvious the obvious answer is obvious answer is for attention you know but it’s not easy to translate that into the bee world yeah yeah i don’t know that we know that part but narcissists those are narcissist bees by the way post-modernist bees yeah yeah they signal for treasure when that exists right right well i mean this tells you a lot right because the the post-modernists think that there’s no hierarchy it’s just all made up and and we can sort of invent whatever hierarchy you want to well bees can find value right so so so it’s so deep in nature that if bees can do it well human beings can damn well do it right well and i would bet my bottom dollar that the systems that are activated when a bee watches another bee dance in a particularly motivated way are mediated by dopamine it’s highly probable right because that’s well that’s conserved so far down yeah i bet i bet you’re right and and so it’s going they definitely they have all kinds of interesting behaviors i mean when i when a hornet comes in and starts trying to take bees they scream they literally scream predator threat and and so they they have they have behavioral patterns that are prey and predator i mean going and finding the flower is a predatory behavior it’s it’s it’s value constructing right when the value hierarchy yeah when the bear comes that’s a predatory threat to the bee they create chaos right right around to just to disrupt the goal seeking behavior of the predator and so so the the level of actually they sort of balance level of chaos and order depending on the situation so so when a hornet comes to the nest what they’ll they’ll actually do is is a highly highly almost hyper ordered uh uh dance they they surround the the hornet and all the bees around the hornet start beating their wings in in synchronous fashion and they raise the temperature so they can they can survive i don’t know like 106 degrees and hornets died 104 degrees it’s it’s the same thing right so they like a fever yes a fever it’s a wow that’s amazing isn’t that amazing right they cook they cook the wasps they cook the wasps they literally us without cooking themselves right so that’s that’s right on the border of chaos and right right right perfect management right on you know it’s like it’s like the peak of a beithoven symphony or something it’s it’s as far as you can possibly push it and still maintain order right right okay so let’s let’s close this up by by tying some things together 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 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 how did your intellectual interests align with your pursuit in the new company well i’m i’m fundamentally just a really curious person so so i love learning new things and i i realized i had an entropic gap in terms of my knowledge and when i started with the biopharmaceutical company that’s a that’s an inadequate description of what i did not know actually and so i just went to work i i read i just started reading i went to classes i’ve i just did all i could to to educate myself on every dynamic of biology i i possibly could 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 and then okay and then you got deep now why do you think you got so deeply interested in this particular company like what was the calling there so one of the things derrick that i’ve been working on you tell me what you think about this because i think it’s an extra cool idea i think that what’s occurred to me as a consequence of walking through the biblical stories is that the yawa the god that’s presented in the old testament is a dynamic process that’s conscience on the one hand so that calls you out on your misbehavior and that’s calling on the other so god is the spirit of conscience and calling that’s a good way of thinking about it and so calling makes itself manifest in those things that grip your interest and conscience makes itself manifest in it’s like the grip of it’s almost like the grip of it’s something like predation because when you do something wrong that behavior that element of yourself should be eradicated and conscience tells you what part of you should die and it tells you what part of you should die instead of you right and so calling is like the the bee dance in some ways 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 and the united spirit that’s presented in the old testament looks like the dynamic interaction of calling and conscience and and i really like that i mean it makes sense to me because we can follow our calling and we should attend to our conscience and if you’re doing something you’re really interested in and your conscience is clear things are going pretty nicely for you like that’s a good place to be so okay so you came across this company and so what was it in that that called to you do you think i mean initially it was the the dynamic environment of the academic challenge that was highly intriguing and so i think that was definitely part of it but i you know you you uh to summarize what you just said you you speak about adventure i think that an adventure you don’t necessarily have to have exactly the right calling to to go on an adventure i think right can be a low resolution adventure be a low resolution adventure it could yeah yes exactly i think i think that what ends up happening if you if you just an adventure is that first step into chaos like the bee getting up in the morning and flying around it doesn’t know what the flower that is the only way to find it is to just start down the path and i think that maybe maybe conscience is the as you proceed down the path your your accuracy of path direction evolves you bet you are more specifically yeah and i i don’t know exactly how that happened well i think it’s this what we’ve been discussing it’s sort of well you’d learn more about pathways that that lead nowhere yeah it’s gaining it’s gaining knowledge about where to set the boundary between order and chaos i think i think it’s something like that because because you need a you need a little bit of chaos if you don’t have chaos you you can end up with the wrong goal well it also if there’s no chaos too the other problem too is that you know you have to pursue in a goal a goal in a manner that allows you to pursue other goals when you’re done with that goal so as you’re pursuing the goal you want to be accreting information that allows you to pursue other goals right 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 you don’t ever want to sacrifice that to the specific goal you know this is why like a liberal arts education is such a good thing because knowledge of multiple domains increases the meta knowledge right right it’s it’s it’s algorithmic or analogic pattern recognition that and i think this has actually been helpful to me in terms of my lack of highly specific background in the pharmaceutical industry i’ve done other things that actually um 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 and i come in and go well why what because because over here in this in this functional area we did it this way and so you you ask the questions that can actually i’m i’m a source of chaos i guess would be hopefully just because you want to you want to constantly be tilting you towards the optimum which requires knowledge that’s multi-dimensional it’s multi-dimensional yeah 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 and being specialized in a given area is very useful because there’s a minority of people who are specialized and so that marks you out it gives you something to trade but then there’s a much smaller number of people who are specialists in two relatively unrelated domains simultaneously right so maybe you’re one in a thousand here and you’re one in a thousand here and assuming there’s some overlap you’re one in five hundred thousand in that in that overlap and then if you add a third domain of specialty well there’s like one of you yeah and so yeah i think that’s that’s actually a real problem in the world is that what you’re describing in some respects is sort of what ian mcgillchrist talks about in terms of highly highly left-brained specializations such that you’re hyper myelinated and concretized in one area which doesn’t allow for this dynamism understanding how multiple functions may interact the patterns of behavior may interact across domains right it’s a kind of blindness of specialization yeah yeah and i think you can’t i can’t i think you cannot be right brain integrated in your thinking without being multi-dimensional education i don’t right right so that’s a good okay well the well the other thing that 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 and 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 and right and these have been conserved right the best of the past is the conservation of these first pass approximations that’s archetypal and biblical stories is what right right yeah it’s the first it’s the first part of the arm it sort of gives you a a doorway into the maze okay so then okay so then imagine this too so so this is this has something to do with a certain degree of cultural homogeneity so imagine that there’s a hundred of us and we were all raised on the same stories okay now these are stories that are like they’re first pass approximations to solutions but because we all know the stories they’re also first pass approximations so partial solutions that we would already regard as ethically viable because we’ve got the same initial yeah we’ve got the same language that’s right right right yeah you can’t you can’t you can’t have a functional society without a shared language doesn’t work you and i can’t communicate if we don’t have the same language right well and maybe what we’re talking about here is like the prototypical elements of a shared language of value yeah i think i think it’s sort of a language of morality maybe yeah well i don’t know i don’t know if there’s a difference between a hierarchy of value and a morality i think those might be the same thing yeah i i i think so too i think i think this exists in biological systems broadly it’s more of a micro level than a mac than the macro level that you’re describing but i think you know you could you could define you have to give 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 i think all living things have the ability to do that they they all share it and you know there’s a good reason for that because the physical world itself outside of nature and living things is somewhat chaotic right there’s even in at the quantum mechanical level or quantum physics level we know that things can be waves or particles they can randomly become something completely different so there’s a dynamism that’s in the physical world so i think by definition biology has to be able to navigate a highly complex environment that shares the tension between order and chaos yeah well it seems like that it seems like that in the archetypal accounts because the constituent elements of reality in the narratives of value are order and chaos and the third element is the ability to traverse that border i mean so in the daoist world view you just see that absolutely clearly is what’s the world made of well it’s made out of chaos so that’s something like entropy and it’s made out of order and that’s something like predictability and then and and the dynamic interaction between them what would you say and then it’s the ability to mediate between those two forces dynamically that constitutes well you said it constitutes life it certainly constitutes consciousness that’s for sure does it constitute life yes likely it’s acted out i mean i mean it’s happening at the cellular level it’s happening at 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 yeah that’s too bargaining but but you know and every species is doing this differently but they’re basically doing the same thing well you look at look at well look at the look at the dragon archetype the dragon fight story i mean the there that’s a map of value and what it says so and you believe this was the core value in alchemy in circling this inventor which was in that what you most want to find will be found where you least are inclined to look and young’s take on that was well your weakest at your blindest point and so of course you have to go into chaos you can’t find value if you don’t that first step on into chaos 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 it’s deadly right right right yeah exactly and then they have to revert to a random search at least to some degree yeah so i i think this this boundary setting mechanism um it it enables different species to direct what it is they’re doing it’s a it’s sort of an intelligent direction of behavior um that that is phenotypically specific so so you know a to a bat they’re 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 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 this is a completely different way of seeing the world right well and for 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 positive possible reputation in the minds of other people yeah i think yes yes and i think that that right by definition i think that by definition you touched on this very nicely earlier it has to transcend different perspective and different world views so god has to take into account the variation of agreeableness and the variation of neuroticism right it’s outside of all that yeah because you need neuroticism right because you want the zebra who’s hypersensitive to the lion that’s threatening right to alert the whole herd to alert the whole herd you need that so yeah so but but for some reason you know wait i think chaos is fundamentally a prey response so so the the zebras create chaos when they sense the predatory lion approaching them and that for some reason i have to think about that that’s that’s very interesting because that that also means that the victims should sow chaos victims should sell chaos exactly exactly that i think you know maybe part of it is is that in higher ed we are teaching people that they are victims yeah your sole reference frame of the world is that you know sort of this weird dichotomy where you can be anything and do anything you want to be totally unconstrained yeah well yeah but but there’s this hyper oppressive patriarchal hierarchy that is going to keep you from being successful and you have no chance of being successful well it’s going to eat you basically we’re teaching young people that they cannot be successful and so of course they’re going to have a prey response to being told you’re being preyed upon well that’s very interesting i hadn’t thought about that that that’s sowing of chaos as a prey animal response that’s very interesting yeah off to stew on that hypothesis but yeah yeah yeah stew on it because i think um 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 life go make something of yourself and become a better person and um all of the good things that happen downstream of that that is the predatory side of the equation i think in in translating the analogy to nature and the the prey side of the equation is sort of hyper victimization where and we’re teaching young people yeah well that that first pattern deteriorates into predator and the second pattern deteriorates into prey right yeah yeah exactly right and i think that’s probably true i think that’s probably true and 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 in extremis uh you know narcissistic bully is the hyper predator right it’s directional the the the far left has the vector correct i mean those people definitely exist yes yeah and those tendencies yeah but but the categories the ideological category categorization of every predatory behavior as narcissistic psychopath is just well misses the nuance of right right the olive oil for wine trade that is that actually does have an ethic built into it that they just say well that doesn’t exist right all treasure hunting behavior is not predatory exactly well how’s the bee going to eat right right right okay okay well that’s a good place to end derek that’s a good place to end you know that’s a nice that’s a nice summation of what we’ve been discussing so for everybody who’s watching and listening i’m going to continue to talk to derek for another half an hour on the daily wear plus side as i do with all my guests 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 but it’ll probably be a continuation of the biological analogy because i think it’s i think it’s extremely useful so if you want to join us for that do so to everybody who’s watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention derek thanks very much for talking to me today yeah yeah well i’m glad we got to weave in like the practicalities of your career into you know the philosophical and biological discussions that we’ve had before that’s exactly what i was hoping to accomplish and i think we managed that so thank you very much for that sir and let’s take five and for everybody watching and listening again thanks for your time and attention