The guest
Martine Rothblatt: Chairman and CEO of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company she founded to save her daughter's life, and the earlier founder of Sirius XM satellite radio. A self-taught polymath spanning satellite communications, medicine, law, transgender rights, and aviation, holding degrees from UCLA and a PhD in medical ethics.
What this episode covers
Tim Ferriss interviews Martine Rothblatt across an extraordinary range of fields she has personally pioneered. She recounts teaching herself biology overnight to find a treatment for her daughter's fatal pulmonary arterial hypertension, then licensing and developing the drug that became United Therapeutics' billion-dollar foundation. The conversation moves through xenotransplantation and pig-organ manufacturing, vagus nerve stimulation and bioelectronic medicine, digital consciousness and the Bina48 robot, and her gender transition and transbinary identity. Rothblatt also describes her family 'love night' tradition, the world's largest zero-carbon-footprint building, and her philosophy of questioning authority and 'identifying corridors of indifference.' Recurring themes are Alan Watts' dialectical thinking, scientific literacy, and the obligation that comes with every technological right.
Recommended on this episode
BookRecommendedISBN verified
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein
“it was so brilliant ... i just savored you know every page of that”
“his widow released the uncensored unedited version of stranger in the strange land it's like three times larger and like no holds barred i just savored”— Martine Rothblatt
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Time Enough for Love
Robert Heinlein
“my favorite book of all of his is time enough for love”
“my favorite book of all of his is time enough for love in which he covers almost every topic under the sun”— Martine Rothblatt
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Cosmos
Carl Sagan
“i watched the cosmos series over and over again and carl sagan was a genius”
“carl sagan was like an amazing amazing role model to me i watched the cosmos series over and over again and carl sagan was a genius”— Martine Rothblatt
BookRecommendedISBN verified
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn
“one of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named thomas kewan”
“one of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named thomas kewan ... his book ... it's called the structure of scientific revolutions”— Martine Rothblatt
BookRecommendedISBN verified
Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler
“another science fiction writer who i feel does such a great job of explaining concepts that can inspire people is octavia butler”
“octavia butler ... one of them very well known as parable of the sower parable of the talents and in these books she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority”— Martine Rothblatt
BookRecommendedISBN verified
Parable of the Talents
Octavia Butler
“another science fiction writer who i feel does such a great job of explaining concepts that can inspire people is octavia butler”
“one of them very well known as parable of the sower parable of the talents and in these books she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority”— Martine Rothblatt
ProductRecommended
Scientific American
Scientific American
“subscribe to scientific american ... two of like you know the greatest ways for lay people to learn”
“subscribe to scientific american ... i find scientific american and national geographic two of like you know the greatest ways for lay people”— Martine Rothblatt
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National Geographic
National Geographic
“two of like you know the greatest ways for lay people to learn about all different types of signs”
“i find scientific american and national geographic two of like you know the greatest ways for lay people which i do consider myself a lay person to learn”— Martine Rothblatt
BookRecommendedISBN verified
The Emotion Machine
Marvin Minsky
“a great book that i would recommend that goes into this subject in beautiful detail is called the emotion machine”
“a great book that i would recommend that goes into this subject in beautiful detail is called the emotion machine by marvin minsky”— Martine Rothblatt
The guest's own work
BookBy the guestISBN verified
The 4-Hour Body
Tim Ferriss
“i recommended it in fact in the 4-hour body this is more than 10 years ago and i did not get paid to do so”— Tim Ferriss
BookBy the guestISBN verified
Virtually Human
Martine Rothblatt
“that's the subject of my book virtually human that whole book is talks about how and when will society accept digital consciousness”— Martine Rothblatt
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
BookReferenced
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are
Alan Watts
“you are a fan of alan watts and specifically the book subtitle on the taboo against knowing who you really are”— Tim Ferriss
MediaReferenced
Her
Spike Jonze
“the film of a few years ago her in which like uh i do yep so i was watching that movie”— Martine Rothblatt
MediaReferenced
Black Mirror
Charlie Brooker
“i don't know if you have watched the series black mirror before but i find some other episodes to be very strong”— Tim Ferriss
MediaReferenced
Upload
Greg Daniels
“there are a few other somewhat similar um series that are streaming now upload and whatnot so it's a it's an idea that's catching on”— Martine Rothblatt
ProductReferenced
SiriusXM
SiriusXM
“i thought about it like like i was getting subscribers at siriusxm you know people said to me oh martin you'll be lucky to have a hundred thousand subscribers”— Martine Rothblatt
ProductReferenced
Tesla
Tesla
“i've felt like the same kind of feeling when i was driving one of the first teslas and i was looking at the manual and i saw how much electrical power it output”— Martine Rothblatt
ProductReferenced
NeuroSky EEG headset
NeuroSky
“i was given a um a christmas present ... one of these neural sky headsets that lets you kind of like play a game just with your thoughts by controlling your eeg signals”— Martine Rothblatt
MediaReferenced
Alive Inside
Michael Rossato-Bennett
“was recently re-watching segments of a documentary i saw called alive inside and the subtitle is a story of music and memory”— Tim Ferriss
ProductReferenced
Yamaha Music Program
Yamaha
“all of the kids were in the yamaha music program where they learned piano and violin instruments like that and we would practice songs”— Martine Rothblatt
ProductReferenced
Neuralink
Elon Musk
“people like elon musk has formed a whole company neurolink where he's working on downloading a human a whole human brain”— Martine Rothblatt
Big reveals from this episode
- Rothblatt had her last biology class in high school; she taught herself medicine night after night in the hospital library after her daughter was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary arterial hypertension.
- She applied the legal research technique of 'Shepardizing' (following footnotes to footnotes) to medical journals, eventually finding a Glaxo Wellcome molecule that lowered only pulmonary artery pressure.
- Securing the failed drug required 15 different Glaxo executives to sign off; she licensed it for $25,000 plus 10% royalties, and has since paid Glaxo over a billion dollars in royalties.
- United Therapeutics engineers a growth-hormone-receptor knockout into pigs (copying a Peru/Ecuador 'Laron's disease' population) so transplanted pig organs stop growing inside humans.
- Dr. Kevin Tracey taught her the vagus nerve touches every cell and surfaces at the ear's cymba conchae, where electrical stimulation produces therapeutic effects.
- Rothblatt believes traditional Chinese acupuncturists genuinely mapped the vagus nerve pathways accessible from the earlobe through millennia of trial and error.
- On the last patent-issuing day of 2019 she received a patent for an 'Alzheimer's cognitive enabler' that reads brain signals to speak on a patient's behalf.
- She built a 150,000-square-foot net-positive-energy facility in Silver Spring, Maryland, the largest zero-carbon-footprint building in the world.
Worth remembering
- Bina48 is a digital and physical robot copy of Rothblatt's wife Bina's personality and memories, created when Bina was 48, to inspire girls toward computer science.
- When her daughter was diagnosed about 2,000 Americans had pulmonary arterial hypertension; thanks to new medicines, roughly 50,000 Americans now live with it.
- Rothblatt notes the odds of any random molecule actually working safely in the human body are less than one in a hundred.
- Her first 'lightning bolt to the soul' came at a NASA tracking station in the Seychelles at age 19, when engineers said a strong enough satellite could let receivers fit in your palm.
- Each year only about 30,000 kidneys, 3,000 hearts, and 2,000 lungs are available for transplant, far below demand.
- The documentary 'Alive Inside' showed dementia patients hearing music from their youth could then hold coherent conversations after being previously near-catatonic.
- The Rothblatt family's 'love night' is a Friday tradition (now on Zoom with about 20 people) where each person shares what love meant to them that week.
- Rothblatt cites Marvin Minsky's 'The Emotion Machine' on building software that lets a computer feel emotions like love.
- United Therapeutics refurbishes rejected donor lungs in a glass dome with artificial blood and air, with transplant surgeons guiding technicians remotely; over 150 lives have been saved.
- Her favorite saying is 'identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them' - pursue ignored, unmet needs like COVID long-haulers rather than crowded fields.
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