#382: Safi Bahcall — On Hypnosis, Conquering Insomnia, Incentives, and More

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I ask you a personal question? Now I just feel like broken time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Lead him Paris show this episode is brought to you by Peloton I love peloton. Peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule, making it to the studio, or dealing with some commute to the gym. I have a peloton bike in my master bedroom at home and it is one of the first things that I do in the morning. I wake up, meditate for say 20 minutes and then I knock out a short 20 minutes ride, usually high intensity interval training or hit. Then I take a shower and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's beautifully convenient and has become something that I actually look forward to and I was skeptical in the beginning. I didn't think I would dig it and I really do. So you have a lot of options for one. If you like, you can ride live with thousands of other peloton riders from across the country on the interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. I tend to use a lot of the classes on demand and have four to six of them that I've bookmarked and use over and over again. There are up to 14 new classes every day with thousands of classes on demand and there are a variety of workouts to choose from. 45 minutes classes, 20 minutes burns, hip hop, rock and roll, low impact or high intensity? Pick the class structure and style that works for you. Peloton has an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City. They really do have great instructors of every possible personality and style and you can find one that you love no matter what you're in the mood for. Personally, I use Matt Wilpers a lot, but I use a bunch of them. I'm promiscuous and enjoy classes from a lot of their instructors. With real time metrics, you can track your performance over time and continue to beat your personal best. I did not think the gamification would work for me and they really hit the nail on the head. It does work, at least for me, tremendously well to keep me pushing consistently. So discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com that's spelled onepeloton.com. Enter the code Tim podcast all one word at checkout and get $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Get a great workout at home anytime you want. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code Tim podcast to get started. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. Hiring can be hard, really hard, and it can also be super, super expensive and painful if you get it wrong. I certainly have had that experience firsthand, multiple times, and I am not eager to repeat it. So I try to do as much vetting as possible on the front end. And today, with more qualified candidates than ever, you need a solution. You need a platform that helps you to find the right people for your business. LinkedIn jobs does exactly that. More than 600 million users visit LinkedIn to learn, make connections, grow as professionals, and more than ever discover new job opportunities. In fact, overall, LinkedIn members add 15 new skills to their profiles and apply to 35 job posts every 2 seconds. That's a crazy stat. LinkedIn does the legwork to match you to your most qualified candidates so that you can focus on the hiring process, getting the person into your company who will transform your business. They make sure your job post gets in front of the people with the right hard skills and soft skills to meet your requirements. They've made it as easy as possible. So check it out. To get $50 off of your first job post, go to LinkedIn.com tim. Again, that's LinkedIn.com tim. To get $50 off of your first job post. Terms and conditions apply, but check it out. LinkedIn.com slash Tim well, hello, my cute little Maguire. Ladies and germs, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to interview and attempt to deconstruct world class performers, to tease out the skills, the habits, the routines, all of those things that help them to do what they do. And my guest today is a repeat guest, a very popular guest, Safi Bacall. S-A-F-I last name Bahcall at Safi Bacall on Twitter and Instagram. He is the author of Loon Shots, subtitled how to nurture the crazy Ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries. And he's done at least two of those things himself, so he knows of which he speaks. Loonshots describes when an idea from physics, he's a physicist, among other things, tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better. The book debuted number three on Wall Street Journal's bestseller list. And you can listen to my first episode with Safi at Forward slash Safi. In this episode, we talk about all sorts of things we haven't covered before, including hypnosis. He knows a ton about that. Conquering insomnia, thoughts on depression, optimizing incentives, and much more. But first, just a little bit more on Safi. If you haven't heard the first episode, Safi received his phd in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi cofounded a biotech company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its ipo and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named Ernst and Young's New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama's Council of Science Advisors on the Future of National Research. He's a heavy, also a great guy. And related to this episode is a documentary, which I believe I mentioned in the conversation itself. But trip of compassion. Trip of Compassion is the most impactful documentary I've probably seen in the last five years, and I highly, highly encourage everyone to check it out. It's incredibly important. And the short link that'll take you there, I don't earn a penny from it, is Tim blog trip. I encourage everyone to check it out. So without further ado, here is the incredible safi bacall. Safi, welcome back.

Thanks. Really glad to be back.

And I thought we could start with a chapter of your life and a capability that I know nothing about. And that is hypnosis.

Oh, man.

Where does hypnosis enter the stage and why hypnosis?

Oh, man. I don't think I've talked about that anywhere. In fact, I think a lot of people don't know that. I studied that, and I'm glad this is just between you and me so this doesn't get out there like, oh, he's the hypnotizing CEO, or something like that. So nobody will ever use that phrase on me, ever. So that's good. Well, it started with a thai food truck.

Okay.

So about when I was in grad school, maybe 20 years ago, I was at Stanford, and the physics, they really didn't have any good food. Like, anything that was sort of edible around. And kind of across the campus, there was this thai food truck, which was awesome. My mouth was watering. Still thinking about it was this, like, great thai food truck. So I used to trek across and it was parked right outside the psychology building. And so on my three or four times a week, I would try to get it. One day, I saw a sign outside a door that said hypnosis class. I was like, what's that like? Hypnosis is this, like, freaky thing with, like, you wave something and people go, bark like dogs or Stanford. So I went in. At some point, I just got curious. I peeked in, and there were all these really tall, big, super athletic looking people, not what I expected, peering into a door that said hypnosis. It turns out it was like half the Stanford football team. So I'm like, now I'm getting curious. Why is half the Stanford football team studying hypnosis? So eventually, after probably three or four more walks, thai food, lunches, I go in and I sit down, and it's being taught by a physician from the Stanford medical school who had written one of the classic books on hypnosis. And he starts by kind of debunking some of the myths around it, that, oh, this is kind of freaky thing. And it's actually a very natural state, and there's a very important evolutionary reason we have developed this state to allow ourselves to be hypnotized. And what hypnosis is, as he explained, is in ordinary life, there's something called the magic number seven. As you sit there, or as I sit here, or as anybody sits down in your audience and imagines the world around them, they can kind of be aware of roughly seven different things around them, plus or minus two. The famous article the magic number seven, plus or minus two, hypnosis is really the state of bringing that down to one. You're just focused on one thing, and it turns out everybody, practically everybody, has the ability to go into a hypnotic trance. Why? Why does that exist? There's a very interesting reason evolutionarily why it makes sense if you are being chased by a tiger and the tiger has clawed a little bit of your leg, and it's incredibly painful, you really only want to be focused on one thing, getting away from that damn tiger.