Robert Edward Grant and Dave Asprey discuss how connecting ideas across different fields drives innovation. Asprey draws from his work in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, fintech, and clean energy to show how knowledge from one discipline solves problems in another.
Polymath and I described you as that earlier. What does that mean to you?
Polymath is someone who's a bit of a rebel academically, from the perspective that they don't want to necessarily be thrown in any one bucket or into one discipline. And I think we have a world that's very much focused on hyper specialization and trying to bucketize and categorize people and things and say, you know, never the twain shall meet. You know, in ancient times, polymathy was just the process of learning. You'd realize that the quadrivium, which is really the study of number in itself. Number in space is geometry, so number in itself is arithmetic, Number in time is music, and number in space and time is cosmology. And so the ancients had to become, well rounded because they realized that our brains are not actually hard drive storage units. And a lot of the latest research is showing that our thoughts are not necessarily local as well. And as a result, they thought maybe the brain is more like an antenna. And that antenna needs to be balanced. And in order to be balanced, just like any athlete, you have to make sure that you don't just work out your right arm and then let your right arm become hypertrophied and your left arm become atrophied or, you know, you can't become a great athlete unless you have that balance. The same is true with our mental calisthenics. It's the same is true with our brains. And our brains to be effective, antenna have to have that balance. And in order for us to achieve that balance, we have to work out all the different aspects of our brain and be able to be cognizant also of the mirror relationships of the brain. For example, the right temporal lobe, if you're right handed, is the place that we process music, but the left temporal lobe is the place that we process mathematics. So then one could say that maybe mathematics in the brain's language is just the abstract form of music. And at the center of our brains is we process geometry. And so we could then say that geometry is the music that we experience with our eyes. And geometry becomes the, you know, the experience that we have with our eyes related to the abstract form of mathematics. So this is really what polymathy is, to realize the interconnectedness of all these disciplines and use it to your highest benefit and realize that all of it is actually part of the same story.
What a beautiful, beautiful way of explaining this interconnectedness. I've always found that when someone leaves an industry that they hyper specialized in and goes into a new industry where they don't know much, that's when most of the innovation happens. My friend Naveen Jain, who runs viome, we run a mastermind together and have worked together for many years. He's in his, I think, seventh industry, that is in tech, where he came from. And each time you come in and go, why is it like that? And you learn to think differently. So I feel like those people who step into the beginnings of being a polymath oftentimes are the ones who are doing the most positive change in the world, if that makes sense.
Well, you know, one of the things I realized, I worked in the healthcare field for a long time and I also worked in big pharma, if you can believe that. I was previously president of Allergan Medical.
Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
I was previously CEO of Bao Shin Lomb Surgical. And you know, I, I lived an entirely different life. You know, this was. I left that FIELD probably about 12, 13 years ago now. I started my own group of companies that span many different sectors from fintech to cryptography to. I do have a couple pharma companies in my portfolio, as well as clean energy. And one of the things I noticed when I worked in the healthcare field though, was that some of the best innovations would happen when we would take ideas that would be used in cardiology, for example, which I was working in, electrophysiology in particular.
Cool.
And then apply these same principles to things like ophthalmology or aesthetic medicine. And when we could cross disciplines even within, you know, larger sectors like healthcare, that's when the best innovation would come to light and we would see this over and over and over again. You learn something and see it one way, and then you start to apply that same level of thinking to the problems that exist in an entirely different field. And just as Einstein said, right, you, you cannot solve problems of the same level of thinking that created those problems or where those problems were created. You have to go to a higher dimensional perspective. And I think that's what polymathy allows you to do. It allows you to find patterns in solving problems and then apply those patterns that you've basically been able to ascertain to very different problems that might have some similarities just by tweaking them a little bit. And I think that's, that's really where I've seen the most innovation come out. And I have been a very prolific inventor. You know, I've almost 100 patents now and across many, many different fields. And most of the innovations I've seen have been things that came out of other fields that were kind of out of left field for a new sector.
