The irony of Silicon Valley

The best career advice in the mid-1800s was “Go West, young man.” In the 1960s, as popularized by the movie The Graduate, it was “Plastics”:

Now it’s “Silicon Valley”: the supposed epicenter of creativity for high-tech projects.

The irony of Silicon Valley is also its failing that highlights how little we’ve benefitted from recent technology.

“The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.”
— Peter Thiel in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

If our communications wizardry amounted to a hill of beans, I wouldn’t have had two people in the past week recommend that I go to Silicon Valley. Physically traveling some place to conduct business is so 19th century; we have technology galore and I still need to go there to talk and give demonstrations? For some ideas, yes—but for all of them?

Does. Not. Compute.

Google is the poster child of Silicon Valley innovation yet its vaunted search engine cannot differentiate fact from fiction; a single determined person or group can pull the wool over its eyes to distort search results that, even when they aren’t warped by trolls with an axe to grind, waste oodles of time: when Google is done searching, your work has just begun as you scour their results and then individual pages trying to find what you’re looking for. If Google were as clever as they are reputed to be, they could have done what I did: code a way to instantly find almost anything.

IEEE Spectrum revealed that “two of Google’s signature innovations, Street View cameras and self-driving cars, were actually developed by 510 Systems, a small start-up that the tech giant quietly” purchased to give itself more tech PR oomph and panache.

“Some of Google’s largest businesses, like Android and Maps, were acquired. ‘ M. and A. is the new R. and D.’ became a popular catchphrase.”
— Claire Cain Miller in Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine

But there is no shame in buying technology: when there are 50,000 Davids to one Goliath, Goliaths can't always think of everything first; the shame is when corporate arrogance is so extreme they can’t admit that others may conceive the Next Big Thing.

“ We expected jetpacks, but we got 140 characters.”
— Peter Thiel

The digital revolution delivered countless miracles, all of which collectively seem to have a negative net benefit as evidenced by how Americans were happier, healthier, and financially more secure before the advent of the Internet and cell phones that have come to dominate our lives with few of us realizing how little we get for our phenomenal investment of time and money.

I attended medical school in one of the world’s biggest cities and later worked there, wishing I were an inventor but pathetically unable to conceive any great ideas. I tried and tried and tried and came up with almost nothing until I moved to the middle of nowhere, after which I was flooded with thousands of ideas: initially some good ones, then some great ones that will revolutionize key aspects of our lives in tangible ways that leapfrog what people now think is possible.

Would I have conceived all of those game-changing breakthroughs if I were in Silicon Valley sucking in polluted air, wasting time commuting via overly congested roads, and burning money on overpriced housing instead of using it to fund prototype development and testing? Almost certainly not.

“It has been my experience that there is no substitute for time where thinking is concerned. Why is it so? The answer seems to be that in many cases to think means to be able to allow the mind to stray from the task at hand. The mind must be able to be ‘elsewhere.’ This needs time.”
— Eric Hoffer, the only genius my professors ever raved about

That’s been my experience, too, with lots of evidence to substantiate it, such as the robotic chef I’m sitting next to that can produce food like Mom used to make or even better—not just a bit more yummy, but light-years superior, providing what people would call a Holy Grail if they could imagine such an advance was possible.

“ This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done [research on]. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
— Admiral William Leahy in 1945 advising President Truman on atomic weaponry

Admiral Leahy wasn’t stupid but he didn’t have the farsighted ability to grasp quantum leaps, just as animals cannot understand why we hold phones to our ears and spend so much time talking to them.

Without using artificial flavors, my robotic chef can make food that gives essentially unlimited pleasure. If you want much more enjoyment from food than you can from sex or drugs, you will be able to once I connect with an investor to fund commercialization of the relevant ideas; now only my girlfriend and I can delight in off-the-scale enjoyment that even billionaires with private chefs cannot imagine. They are comparatively in the Stone Age—and I am not in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley, eat your heart out!

“If you have a radical innovation and you stand up in a room and say, ‘Look at this radical innovation!’ virtually no one will vote for it. … If you go into a room and ask, ‘How many people here believe in innovation?’ Of course, everybody will raise their hand. But you show them a true innovation? No hands. It’s really a conundrum.”
— Nolan Bushnell (author of Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent) in The Man Who First Hired Steve Jobs On Finding Unusual And Creative Talent

Steve Jobs asked Nolan Bushnell, then his boss, “How in the world do you figure out what the next big thing is?” Years later, Jobs complained how he was expected to come up with all the groundbreaking ideas at Apple. Bushnell concluded that even “the original Steve Jobs believed he had to find his own next Steve Jobs.”

The next Steve Jobs

The next Steve Jobs won’t seem like the next Steve Jobs; he will initially seem crazy to most people, just as Admiral Leahy’s mental limitations made him think it was nuts to believe that atom bombs would actually explode.

“Steve Jobs had to work the night shift at Atari because his poor hygiene and petulant manner made the other employees complain.”
— John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen in The Self-made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value

If Steve Jobs were alive and applied for a job today, he’d be lucky to get a minimum-wage job; the chance of him being offered a CEO position would be close to zero even though his ideas built the world’s most valuable corporation.

“The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.”
— Anonymous

People with average intellects cannot digest quantum leaps; anyone professing to have one is often deemed crazy.

“In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from [someone not already a well-known expert] would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.”
— Peter Thiel in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

An advertising slogan created for Apple Computer in 1997 brilliantly explained how “the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently” who are “crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Looking for ideas in all the wrong places

“You never know where the next game-changing idea will come from.”
— Richard Branson in What Inspires Me: Game-Changing People Everywhere

Like the song about looking for love in all the wrong places, corporate executives often look for ideas in all the wrong places—and people. Journalist Tom Foremski incisively observed that “original ideas are increasingly rare in Silicon Valley because the easy innovations … have been taken. Original ideas come from original experiences”—like those filling the lives of original people far from Silicon Valley who grapple with problems facing other consumers and sometimes solve them with Big Ideas that wouldn’t occur to folks leading more insular lives—lives that revolve around apps and websites but rarely anything that solves Big Problems.

But what if the perfect clones in perfect places don’t have the solutions we need? In Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent, Nolan “Atari” Bushnell advised hiring people who thrive on being different and hence might not fit in. The best business leaders understand this:

“It's nice when people agree, but if everyone thought along the same lines all the time, nothing would ever change. Every company needs mavericks. … Schools are all about being able to fit in. Many businesses then follow suit and encourage people to toe the line. The people who really make a difference are often those who don't quite fit in. The ones who don't act in the same way as everyone else and take risks rather than following the status quo.”
— Richard Branson in Yes Men? No Thanks!

Abraham Lincoln knew that. He said:

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”

In the years since, neuroscientists have begun to understand why people who raise eyebrows in church are more likely to be intellectually gifted. Life would be easier for employers screening Facebook posts if angels had great solutions to problems, but it’s just not reality.

In The Neurobiological Foundations of Giftedness, the authors wrote:

“Leonardo Da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Pablo Picasso illustrate exceptional individuals whose extraordinary accomplishments will forever stand out in history. Yet the autobiographical and biographical accounts of these figures reveal [behavioral] patterns … outside the normal range.”

Take Einstein. His name is and will forever be a synonym for exceptional genius, yet his genius did not arise in a vacuum: it came from the same mind that made him intensely interested in sex.

Evidence released after his death showed that Einstein couldn't get enough women. After nearly 3500 sealed pages of his personal correspondence were made public, the press had a field day with Einstein, calling him a “Phys-sex Genius,” a “Scientific Pimp,” a “Stud Muffin,” a “galactic womanizer,” and even a “sex-fiend.” Einstein's weakness for pretty women was indulged by chasing skirts that culminated in many affairs, including one with a “beautiful Soviet spy.” After infidelity ended his first marriage, “he spent some time deciding whether to shack up with his 42-year-old cousin, Elsa, or her 20-year-old daughter, Ilse.”

University of Alberta researcher Dr. Marty Mrazik noted that “excessive prenatal exposure to testosterone facilitates increased connections in the brain, especially in the right prefrontal cortex [and unique patterns of inferior frontal activation]. That's why we see some intellectually gifted people with distinct personality characteristics that you don't see in the normal population.” One of these is extreme creativity; another is a heightened interest in sex, which is affected by prenatal and subsequent androgen exposure.

Lincoln’s dilemma for employers is: go with choirboys bereft of brilliance, or go with gifted people even if they are human and hence not always perfect angels.

“There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.”
— Elbert Hubbard

If the business school playbook for identifying talent were optimal, the world would not be mired in problems and companies would be less threatened by innovations they don’t see coming.

Thinking of (or licensing) the Next Big Thing before a competitor does

“[It is] essential to tap into top innovation talent (either internal or partnering) to stay relevant with product development and evolution.”
— Influencer Kat Cole, Group President of FOCUS Brands

Wise words. Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz has a somewhat different perspective:

“ Living in the same city as Microsoft, I’m only too aware that, even in low-technology businesses like coffee, the Next Big Thing could knock the dominant player into second place tomorrow. I keep pushing to make sure that Starbucks thinks of the Next Big Thing before it has even crossed anybody else’s mind.”

But no company can think of everything before competitors do—not even Google populated by brainiacs. When there are thousands of Davids to one Goliath, it isn’t realistic to think that a corporate Goliath will always be the first to think of the Next Big Thing. I don’t have one major food breakthrough; I have several, beautifully dovetailing together. The chance of a food company hiring someone who subsequently thinks of those inventions is essentially zero, so Schultz’s strategy won’t harvest epochal, synergistic innovation.

“Now the big Silicon Valley companies find themselves in the same vulnerable position as the incumbents whose business models they once overturned. They know it is only a matter of time before the next big idea puts them out of business — unless they are the ones to come up with it.”
— Claire Cain Miller in Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine

Food companies are walking dinosaurs

Scientists don’t know if dinosaur extinction resulted from volcano eruptions or a massive asteroid impact, but dinosaurs were oblivious to the impending danger until their D-day arrived and all hell broke loose. Many food companies don’t realize that they are essentially walking dinosaurs: still alive and blissfully unaware of what will crush them.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the Chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
— Sam Walton, founder, Walmart and Sam's Club

Mr. Walton was correct, but the biggest threat to executives hoping to keep their jobs and fat paychecks isn’t individual customers voting with their wallets but inventors like me with game-changing ideas. Changing the game usually changes the winners. The fall of Kodak, Polaroid, Motorola, Smith Corona and other once-great companies proves that success can vanish. Wise executives know that innovation is the best way to immunize themselves from the risk of obsolescence.

People eat for two reasons: nutrition and taste. I can give them better nutrition and immensely more pleasure and convenience. I can also save them a lot of money and time while fostering their health, so many food executives now sitting pretty will be looking for jobs once their D-day arrives—and it will: the ignominy of going from the C-suite to asking, “Do you want fries with your order?”

Understandable skepticism

My girlfriend, a psychologist, confided that when we first met and heard me matter-of-factly mention what I could do, she thought I was just a bullshitter full of hot air, thinking “there's no way he does any of those things.” She eventually realized everything I said was true when she saw working models of things she once presumed were just fantasy.

People draw inferences based on their life experiences. The Next Big Thing arrives once in a blue moon in most homes and is generated in any one home so rarely most people assume that major innovation occurs only in faraway places like Silicon Valley.

Problems crying out for solutions

In my lifetime, I’ve seen more problems develop and snowball than have been solved. Neither government, companies, nor even Silicon Valley solved more problems than they created; the digital delights of the latter gave us computers and 140 characters that gave people addictive ways to fritter away their lives while becoming more sedentary than ever, thus ballooning bodies like never before. The food industry is complicit in this assault on physical and financial health—health problems are so costly they’re helping bankrupt the United States, the greatest economic superpower in history.

My medical school professors stressed that doctors are ethically obliged to help people whenever they can. Countless people would risk their lives to save Bill Gates, hoping he’d generously reciprocate, but considerably fewer would risk their neck to save a young and presumably poor black male in an inner-city hospital, as I did when I broke the rules one uncharacteristically slow night and left the ER (and hence my malpractice insurance coverage) to take over a code being botched by the resident internal medicine physicians who were responsible for his care.

I didn’t know in advance the code would succeed (85% of in-hospital codes failed then), but as a professional, I couldn’t resist any problem I could get my hands on. As a doctor and now as an inventor, I live to solve problems.

Analyzing why people code made me better at advanced cardiovascular resuscitation. During codes I focused on factors I could address, such as electrolyte imbalance, but ultimately many codes are caused by what we eat.

In an upcoming article I will present evidence that the food industry pressured the White House to water down the Let’s Move program developed by First Lady Michelle Obama. She knows what processed and restaurant food is doing to us.

In Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss revealed that food executives often don’t eat the junk they produce, with good reason: they’re smart and can afford much healthier food that’s often more flavorful, too. Their hapless customers are just guinea pigs being fed food that is obviously hurting us: you don’t need “MD” after your name to see the resultant obesity that causes or contributes to diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), heart disease, stroke, other vascular disease, cancer, arthritis, metabolic syndrome, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and much more, including people looking and feeling older than they should, as well as being less intelligent and creative: what we eat unquestionably impacts the mind.

As a doc committed to helping people, I’ve spent years developing solutions to this problem that are practical: that is, are equally or even phenomenally more appealing to consumers and are great for food companies that get on board but terrible for those that don’t, enabling technology to “fire everybody in the company from the Chairman on down,” as Sam Walton said. As a physician, I will have no compunction for helping food dinosaurs go extinct.

Seeing a major problem clobbered by someone from nowhere (not Silicon Valley) will also help restore the can-do optimism that once buoyed the American spirit, as Peter Thiel suggested by saying that people in the 1950s welcomed big plans instead of reflexively dismissing them. Ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Eureka!

After I began this article but before I completed it, I invented a new noncontact method to measure blood circulation giving physicians a way to quantitate baseline flow and how it changes with activity, position, emotions, drugs, and even food. Would I have thought of that if enveloped in the hubbub of a city? Probably not. I usually have the attention span of a fruit fly but research indicates how distractions also impair the efficiency of folks with good concentration. Once interrupted, it takes a while to get back on track.

Inventing involves connecting what initially seem like isolated dots of information. If the mental journey to make those connections takes longer than your average time between interruptions, you’ll lose most of your good ideas. Thus to put your thinking cap on, get out of the city, away from the ‘burbs, turn off your cell phone and TV, and tune into what’s cooking in your mind.

My related articles:

I could have saved Radio Shack

Find the next Steve Jobs by giving him a minute to prove it

Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

Matchmaking between Venture Capitalists and Inventors

Control freaks, creativity, and your career and Self-censoring is bad for your career and the economy: These articles illustrate how Google inadvertently (read: stupidly) damages your career and our economy: by forcing people to censor themselves lest we offend someone, violate an ever-increasing number of rules for political correctness, or give a potential employer reason to think we’re not a cookie-cutter-perfect robotic clone every minute of every day.

When Big Brother Google combs through your life it might emphasize the 0.01% of the time you weren’t perfect and ignore the 99.99% you were. Fearing that, people routinely zip their lips or tone down their opinions, but doing that progressively strengthens the self-censoring part of the brain that becomes so adept at filtering we often don’t realize how we internalized the censoring. But those filters aren’t selective, nixing bloopers along with good ideas. Hence it isn’t surprising that Abraham Lincoln observed how “folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”

And Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.”

And H. L. Mencken:

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”

People who unabashedly express themselves are more interesting and more creative. As the world has enforced ever more draconian limitations on behavior (so much so that even Harvard-educated President Obama makes PC mistakes) it has done more harm than good: the benefits are largely an illusion, and the drawbacks are evident in myriad second-rate products and services. As Peter Thiel said above, our surroundings are indeed strangely old. Better things are coming from me and some others but considerably fewer than what we should have. If we had jetpacks and flying cars and whatnot, more of us would have good-paying jobs.

Read like Bill Gates, boost your IQ

Other related articles:

Wired: Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way. Can Skateboarding Legend Rodney Mullen Help It? Commenting on that in another Wired article, Katherine Sierra wrote “… the idea that skate culture could energize a languid tech world. Is skateboarding the EpiPen the Valley needs? No. Please no.”

Jeremiah Owyang: Your Tech Startup Doesn’t Need to be in Silicon Valley.

Microsoft Is The New Google, Google Is The Old Microsoft

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