Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
01:07:13 · Andrew Huberman
[01:07:13] S1: The kindest thing. Alright, this is a bit of a weird one, but I've carried the message that I got forward through basically everything. Once people hear it, if they thread it back through portions of today's conversation, I think they'll, they'll know how I've done that. So when I was in graduate school, I initially joined a different laboratory. You do rotations. And I joined a laboratory doing excellent work that was very popular at the time, that was really on the cutting edge of molecular genetic techniques for looking at neurons. And it was all the rage at the time, but I had this absolute love obsession for the work that I had done in my second rotation on stuff and in a field that was pretty crowded. And I found myself having joined this other lab and sneaking into the lab that interested me more at night and doing experiments. The woman who ran that lab, which is my graduate advisor, Barbara Chapman, she came to me one day and she just said, Listen, I'm totally okay with the fact that you didn't join my lab. Her lab was already very successful anyway, publishing papers in science, etcetera. And she said, But you just seem to really love this stuff. And the only thing that's really going to determine your success is how badly do you want to know the answers to the questions that you're working on? I was like, okay. So I broke up with the other lab. I joined her lab. We published eight first author papers. My career went, but that was all the consequence of working on things to try and answer questions that I was most curious about. That was an incredibly kind thing to do. It also required a lot of humility and boldness on her part because she was basically saying like dump them, come back to me. And I had to trust that it wasn't because of some sense of rejection in her and it wasn't. Had extremely strong ego. Honestly, I think that's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for me because it showed a belief in me. It showed that she understood that I didn't have enough self understanding and enough, frankly, guts to just say, I don't want to do the thing that everyone else is super excited about. I want to focus on the thing that I'm most excited about, which takes a strong mind and is much easier to do once you've had some significant success in a field.
01:09:18 · Andrew Huberman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
It's easy to do when you're like, Oh yeah, everyone said that, that was done, that area was done, no one listens to that music, but then we had like two platinum albums. It's easy to just carry on. But when you're making the decision to go into this area that you know, most people are like, why would you go there? Like, no one works on that anymore. And it turns out that the wheel of the field rotated too, and I found myself exiting my PhD lab with the skills that were best suited to what was most important in the field next. And I had to be very careful, because now the landscape matched my internal curiosity. And now I had to make sure, yes, I'm going into this for the right reasons, and it was true. And likewise, with starting a podcast, I loved running a lab, I truly did. Loved teaching at Stanford, I still do. But it was really... I just have this itch, I've got this knowledge in me that I know people can benefit from. I did not anticipate what came with being public facing, that was like not anticipated. I had no training in that, in being media. And I'm like, fuck it, I want to do this. And I just pulled all the stops out and just went for it. [01:10:22] S0: Here we are. Can you say that line one more time? What was her phrasing of it?
01:10:26 · Andrew Huberman
[01:10:26] S1: Success is determined by how precisely you match your genuine curiosity to the work that you do. You do have to understand the field you're in and pay attention to it, because all experiments are so hard. Building any company is hard. Doing any podcast, if it's done right, is hard. So you have to make sure that it's really true to you. And not to puff him up too much, but I think one of the reasons why Elon is admired by so many people... Yeah, some people dislike him, but I think one of the reasons why deep down, people either greatly admire him or envy him is not his money. It's his ability to ignore what people say about what he should be doing. I had a guy come on my podcast who I actually like and respect, and he was telling me all the things that Elon and the top technologists should be doing. They should be helping people this way and that way. I'm like, Wait, electric cars, and I do think OpenAI is heading to some very interesting things that relate to medicine and benevolence there and on and on. And he's like, yeah, that's what they should be doing. Not this other stuff, not Mars. That's like telling Metallica to play the Grateful Dead. Metallica or Metallica because that's what they love. That's the music they fucking love. And the Grateful Dead or the Grateful Dead because that's the music they love. Like, you have to be yourself. The big tragedy is when people don't go in the direction of their genuine curiosity because they're trying to, quote unquote, succeed. So the kindest thing someone did for me was to gently, but very clearly tell me, follow your curiosity, answer the questions, solve the problems related to that, and you can't go wrong. And to not do that is kind of a slow death, frankly.
01:11:56 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, S2
[01:11:56] S0: A wonderful, awesome place to close. Andrew, thank you so much for your time. Thanks. If you enjoyed this episode, visit colossus.com. You'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors, and companies that we admire most. Learn more at colossus.com slash subscribe. [01:12:22] S2: Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
01:13:05 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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