Transcript for Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers)

I looked for economic castles protected by unbreachable mood. Power requires a benefit in a barrier, so he's taking care of the benefit part by saying a castle. You have to have a pretty good understanding of why it's a castle and not a jack.

You're on a treadmill, and if you'd stop running that treadmill, you get creeps, but it's not power. The things that drive operational excellence can be mimicked.

There's a thing called power progression. There are times when certain types of power are available. The path to power is when you ever meets the road.

Hi, honey. A pleasure to be here. It's even more my pleasure.

One of the things that has really surprised me in the last five years has been that my understanding of the answer to that question has changed. And before I thought it was You do product market fit, and then you do strategy. And if you try and put strategy before product market fit, it doesn't, there's not much you can do with it. That's wrong. Actually, one of the I mentioned before, one of the great pleasures for me in my work is being able to talk to company founders. And one of the things that has surprised me is that conversations with them even at an early stage about strategic matters have a richness and relevance to me that was unexpected. And founders are practical people, right? I mean, it's very hard to do what they're doing and they have to be extremely focused and choose what's worthwhile spending time on. And so in observing their reactions and that dialogue, I could see that there was something going on that was meaningful to that. And this second book of working on all teas out why that's so more. But the answer to your question is, when should you thinking about this? The answer is always. And that's an odd answer. And so even before you have product market fit, It's worth thinking about strategy. Now it's not strategy in the sense of sort of this fully articulated strategic planning. We're going to do this. These are going to be the competitors. This is going to how we're going to answer them. This is how we'll price. Not like that at all. At the earlier stage, you can imagine, you know, wildly more degrees of freedom. And the questions are, of the business propositions that you're thinking of in trying to get to product market fit. What are the underlying characteristics that might tilt them towards the availability of power or not? And those actually are meaningful conversations. And certainly by no means certain, right, you're tilting probabilities, you're not creating a determination of things. And then later on, Once you've already have product market fit, then you have to understand your source of power if you're to understand what competitive position is because then you have to establish that. And then later on in a more stable phase when you're in a stability phase of business, you have to know what your source of power is if you have one because you have to know how to defend it. and then also it is also the foundational knowledge that you need for if there's another step because another thing that's quite surprising about iconic businesses is they often have a second act or third act or fourth act I mean think of AWS or Intel going into CPUs or Apple going into iPhones all not the original business right and that's and that's actually common not unusual And that's starting the process all over again.

As I said, I'm sort of a concept person, right? And so when you develop concepts, you have to be very highly constrained by their usefulness. Hey, I'm a great fan of the great mathematician, John Bonne-Neumann, and he had a view which really irritated a lot of mathematicians, which is that if mathematics wasn't guided by what was useful, it would become, I think, the word he used was aesthetic to aesthetic. and so any concept of elements like that it needs to be guided by usefulness. And dealing with strategy, the question is, what domain of things do you want to include in that conversation? Because the term is ubiquitous in business. I mean, do a Google search sometime. I've done one recently on Google Scholar for the word strategy and you'll get a million. I'm not exaggerating a million, yes. And so strategy for some people might mean everything that gets to the pile, I guess, to the top of a pile in terms of what you have to do that year. everything. And that's a perfectly legitimate definition. But what I have found is there is a very important narrowing. that makes it much more useful. So that's coming back to what I say in that final moment. It makes it much more useful to business. So my view is that you want to focus, it's very useful for a business to focus on the fundamental determinants of business value. And that's an arbitrary choice. It could be something else, but I can tell you from decades of business experience that that narrowing is very useful. And then so once you reach out understanding, it tells you some important things. So if you understand what drives business value, I mean, if you do the math of it, right, it's NPV of cash flow, right, expected cash flow. And what that tells you is that strategy is a long time concept. You're looking far out in the future. So think of Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor for the Japanese was this enormous tactical concept, success. They just destroyed the US ability, naval ability, and the Pacific Ocean. And the worst possible strategic move because it completely solved Franklin Delano Roosevelt's problem of how he could get the US citizens on board to attacking Hitler. The strategy of it was US's industrial might would eventually win the war and population. And the difference that are as time constant, tactical, sure strategy long. And so if you focus on value, that narrows what you think about and allows you to get rather concise and offer up advice to founders about what they need to pay attention to.

Earlier, I've talked about these economic structures that provide durability in terms of refuge from weathering arbitrage of everybody who wants to eat your lunch. And so that's what power is. So you have to understand What is an economics? I think you're asking me questions that get pretty deep into theory, or I hope you don't. This is a two-conceptual. But you have to say, you have to understand how competition takes place and say, what is it that creates some kind of refuge? And what it is is there's something in what you do that gives you either a cost or price advantage over others. So let's say your lower cost and that's that's the benefit and the barrier side is that there's something that is durable about that, that makes it over time that you can't, that competitors can't take away from you. So benefit in a barrier called the 2B or not to be test right. And if you have that, You can think of that immediately translating it into a value because that will give you good margins out into the foreseeable future, which is what you're after. And so I don't know if that's what we're getting into the weeds here, but that's what it's about. And so power is those structures, let me give you a quick example. So one I use in the book. So Netflix would scale like on a piece right. more subscribers, the cost of their content is a very large fixed cost about 50% of their cost structure over a year. they can take that fixed cost and spread it over more subscribers, so their cost per subscriber is less. So, versus somebody with fewer subscribers. So, if they face the same prices as their first subscriptions as their competitors, they will be more profitable. So that's a scale economy. And that's an example of a type of power and a common one I'd say. But these things are hard to achieve, because they're kind of the holy grail.

I think the conversation always goes too long.

That's a great question, Lonnie. And because I think that The path to power is, you know, is where the rubber meets the road. And it's very complicated and nuanced, but I'll give you a few thoughts along it. And frankly, that our next book, the second invention, that's what it's about. It's not the path to power. So in a book, there's a thing called Power Progression, which says it tells over the cycle of a business. There are times when certain types of power are available. And the converse of that is times when they're not available. And so there's some that only are really available in the when you reach a stability phase of business pretty far out there. And so if you're starting a company take those off the table. So those two are branding and process power. So so I often, you know, I find that there's a confusion about this because brand recognition for a startup may be incredibly important, but you can get brand recognition by buying and adding the Super Bowl. That's not power that you paid for it. And so take sick branding and process power and process power is really sort of operational excellence on steroids kind of and usually is imitable. So it's usually not. So take those off table and then a kind of resource type power which is you have something that is a value that if you transferred it to somebody else it would be a value to them but you own the rights. So the barrier is law. for example, or lack of knowledge from others. And there are classes of businesses that are like that, so prescription pharmaceuticals. If you're the first person to come up with Viagra, that's worth a lot of money. If you took that license and gave it to somebody else, it'd be worth a lot of money to them. But that's a different class and it's usually not the types of things that I'm dealing with. And it's kind of obvious to everybody. So the key challenge there is can you invent a pharmaceutical that that's effective for a large market. So you can take those three off the table and that then leaves tower positioning, scale economies, switching costs and network economies. And the important thing to keep about online there is that they're sequenced. almost every startup that you want to deal with starts with counter positioning because remember what product market fit is primarily is a substitution. It's you are coming up with a way to satisfy a more or less existing need in a novel way that creates more value. Now, sometimes you tap into entirely new needs, but it's not so often. Amazon was up against brick and mortar stores. Google was up against Yahoo, and so on. And so you're usually substituting. And that substitution is so you're a competition at that point as functional competition. And if you don't have counter position in that point, a pretty high risk from an incumbent who already has the capabilities necessary to do that. They just have to extend their product or do this or that. And so, but counter positioning is the refuge from that. And then you go into the other three types of power, scale economy, surplus. that I cannot end network economies and those depend on your steel relative competitors. This is pretty cursory, but that's what I'd say. I'll focus on those four. And I would recommend that you think pretty hard about whether you think there's UF counter positioning to start.

Right. You've done the right thing by not having me go through and define each of those. But you're listeners will need to sort of go back to my book and see what those things are to get me over. We're going through the shorthand as we should. But all of us, I won't be completely obvious to them.

Yes, that's right. There's some people have done some really good summaries of this or our chat GPT even better. A lot of cases. Chat GPG. If they get it right, sometimes I find it right.

Yeah, so I agree with your observation, but I don't want to be unkind. I mean, there are two things to keep in mind here in terms of making people feel better about that incorrect slide in the deck. One is that founders have to be optimistic, right? I think it's an important quality that they may be understate the risk a little bit. But they're so committed to, I'm going to do this thing that they go through that and that may give them an advantage over a large corporation trying the same thing. The other is that Despite the name seven powers, which makes it sound like, oh, you can kind of sort this out, actually understanding whether or not there is a type of power in place is hard. I mean, if I did it with my colleagues here at Strategy Capital and we're looking at a well-known company, it might take us weeks to answer that question for a single company. And it comes down to the hard part of the industry economics is what really are the economic relationships and it's very hard. So with those caveats that sort of, I think you put them with some courtesy, I'll say some of the obvious ones are I mentioned before people sometimes think they have brandy power which but another one that I think I've heard you mentioned is people often think that they get scale economies through data and I'd say that that's possible, but it's rare. And the reason it's rare is not because there aren't scale economies in data, but rather that the range of scale that the existing competitors have are often large enough to be able to put them in a in shouting distance of each other so that the differences in their cost per unit is not that great. And the curve flattens, in other words, which is typical of any, because the most common scale economy is you've got a big fixed cost, and then you pro-rate that. And as you get more and more scale, percentage cost advantage of a fixed cost advantage like that goes down and that that's a pretty frequent one that we see we sort of laugh whenever we say we hear somebody say they have a flywheel which It kind of gives you the idea of network economies. There are often flywheels, ones that really are material, are rare. The key thing here is materiality, not whether the flywheel exists, but whether the effect is strong enough to really tilt returns.

I mean, I mean, I have called it a type of power, so for me, it's only those things which clear the significance barrier, a hurdle rather, that they're a large material, right? And so there are lots of things that I would say have network effects, but not network economies.

Yeah. So for me, the difference is maturity. You know, is that whether whether the value benefit is large enough to engender a price delta significant enough to give you materially different margins into the future.

Yeah, it's not an impact. It's a material impact. So it could have if it's a penny to your bottom line. That's one thing if it's if it's a billion dollars or something else.

Oh, I, I, you could turn almost anywhere and get some, some modest network effects. And, you know, any, any platform business would probably likely have some modest network effects. You, you asked me earlier, and it's surely sent me about burn lift. I'd say that, you know, they probably have network effects involved, but not network economies.

Yeah, the right advantage that they get is not not material.

I'm not entirely sure. I'll take a guess, but I'll take it as sort of an uninformed guess. I haven't really studied it carefully. I think that over time, if I had to guess, I'd say they're probably modest sale economies in the business, and over time Uber has just very successfully played a war of attrition, and that's both been in how they run their business. They made one sort of initial misstep, which is they misdefined their business. They said it was international transportation and it's not that business is extremely geographically specific. You know, if you have a great position in the Bay Area, it doesn't help you have one done, right? And so there are four rays into China and everything really didn't make, but they pulled back on that, focused down on understanding their source of power, which was a geographically specific scale economy. And then they've done interesting things like Uber, Eats where they've tried to You know, utilize the platform that they have to get other opportunities for the one side of their platform, the drivers. And so if I had to, if I had to guess, I'd say it was a well played war of attrition with modest scale economies.

Yeah. It only works because there aren't modest scale economies. If there weren't any, then if they did all this stuff, they're still have a good one to see.

Power requires a benefit in a barrier. Right. You have to have something that you do. that gives you a better outcome than your competitors, lower cost or higher price, and then something that makes it impossible for somebody else to mimic that. So mode is the second. So it's not, it's not synonymous with power because you can have a, you could have a motor round or very undesirable piece of property. And wouldn't get you far. So, but, and, and, but I think it is pretty synonymous with barrier. I, you know, I think Warren Buffett sort of, Charlie Mongerick, who I admire enormously, I think I get credit for sort of popularizing those concepts. And, and I think the way they think about it is, is good. I'd say that that, um, Seven powers is probably more systematic and comprehensive in saying that. I don't think that there's this wonderful, I don't know if you read any of Microsoft, any trust literature that came out of the, no, they're a lawsuit, but there was a communication between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett was saying why he couldn't invest in Microsoft, so he just didn't understand it, right? And so that meant you didn't, you know, the idea of network economies and what the motive was there. You didn't understand. So I think, but I think the concept of the motive is a good one. The idea that you have something that gives you a refuge from competing forces.

Right. And so he's taking care of the benefit part by saying a castle.

He's got a cover. But one of the tricks to understand any powers you have to have a pretty good understanding of why it's a castle and not a shack. So I'll give you a Netflix example. So a company I admire a lot, you know, and I think if some of the things that they had to do to develop their business were so important for their business, that aren't the don't guarantee a castle. So for example, UI development, it's been an enormous amount of resources on trying to get just the very best UI. I mean, a zillion AB tests, all kinds of things. Their recommendation engine, everybody's got to know this story about how that went. They're interface with the content of world and all this. So those things are important. There are things they have to spend a lot of time and resources on, but they can largely be mimicked. So when Netflix and your earlier phase is fighting Blockbuster, when Blockbuster finally threw in the towel and said, well, we don't want better do a mail or a DVD business. If you looked at the Blockbuster site, their UI site, you couldn't tell a different from Netflix. I just copied it. And so all that thoughtfulness about which things you put first and now you structure it and all that to make the suitable was inimitable. So that's an understanding of looking at the properties you have and trying to figure out if they're a castle or a shack.

I'd say there are a few, and it's a little bit different. You know, I'm not a great fan of the strategicly-driven organization because it that idea, because it fuses over how this knowledge is useful at different stages in the business. And so for somebody in that position, say a product manager or an existing successful business. So it's important in terms of just understanding their business to know what their source of power is because they, and that can inform them about, you know, what it is that they're working for and also they may see things But since they're down in the weeds, they may see things that are important to that, that they need to bring other people's attention, because they're the ones that really have the knowledge of what that's going on. There's another aspect I mentioned before this idea of transforming, of starting up entirely new things. And usually, I wouldn't say, it's not uncommon for ideas about that to bubble up from down below. So that's another source. If you're, so let's separate a business into three phases as, you know, origination take-off instability. So the answers I've given are more in this stability phase. In the take-off phase, let's say you've launched a product, you've gotten customer traction. Now you're in a phase where there's just very rapid growth, probably other entrance like you. What are you facing? What you're facing is, remember that underneath all of this is a change in technology. That's what made the product market fit possible in the first place, but that doesn't just stop. that if you're in a technology way, often they're all kinds of offshoot, both for you and the compliments to your business or anything else going on at the same time. And to win at that stability phase, which is really a market share of win. You have to be aware of those and understand, okay, we have to incorporate this new feature, or maybe now things have gotten to the point where this new market segment is our product is attractive for it. This is meat potato stuff for somebody at that level. And it may well be the decisive element in terms of whether you win that market share battle with the other contenders. And so you have a very, very important role at that point. And so I'd say the first thing to do with your question is to make sure you think about the different phases of this. And then ask what those responsibilities are.

read the book and then have conversations with your colleagues about the topic because it is sort of you know internalize what that means and how you know as have conversations with them about do we really have this kind of power what's going on here what's important what isn't You know, those conversations tend to allow you to sort of get a better grip on things. I mean, in the case of Netflix, read actually had me come in and train the top 100 people and Netflix and strategy where I actually ran classes in the company. But that's unusual, I'd say. And I didn't, and I didn't have the book yet. And so I think the book, I get people pretty far down that path already.

I sadly don't have time. I do often do, you know, fireside chats, a company meetings, and that kind of thing, but not a full, full-blown course. And I'm not teaching a Stanford anymore either. And so, I enjoyed that immensely. A wonderful people to work with, but sadly, I don't have the time.

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we're all in this phase of wondering. exactly how generic AI is going to play out. My own view, currently, I don't see any change in seven powers from it in terms of an eighth power or something, but the issues that it brings up like scale economies. I mean, think of scale economies. If you have a fixed cost of trying to develop a model of a billion dollars, you don't think or network effects will AI models develop so that they learn in a way that for one user's interaction helps another user's interaction. That would be a powerful network economy or if it learns, if you think of if it learns about you and becomes a better psychiatrist or something, then that's a switching cost right. So all these things are relevant to which business models will work and I find that useful. But I think in general the way I think about it is it's a It's sort of a standard form of potentially very powerful technology that is being introduced into the business world and just asking how that plays out. I currently tend to think of that sort of three types of plays. There's the company that's the technology play itself. So if you think of micro processors that would be Intel, if there's the companies that wouldn't exist without the technology. So for for for semiconductor, it would be Microsoft. And then the companies that utilize the technology, but they have existed before and after. So for semiconductor, there would be automobiles. These ton of chips, but there were still cars before and so So I'm kind of of the view very much uncertain at this point that the general of AI will, it's biggest impact, will be that tertiary class. It will be used in a lot of things that existed before and exist after, but are made better by it, like semiconductors and normal bills. And so it reminds me sort of, if you think of really big technologies like this, it reminds me sort of a electricity. When electricity came, you could completely reconfigure a factory slower. You no longer had to have. You could have the power source, essentially, at the operating unit of an operator. But that took a lot of redesign and incorporation, investment, learning, complements, all kinds of stuff. I tend to think this will be more like that. There will be some fewer cases. People will want to have them right. They're turn paper with jetGPC or something. But if you think of businesses, it's hard for me to think of a single functional area in a business with redesign, couldn't benefit. Accounting HR, R&D, you know, all have uses of this, but requires incorporation, which is always, yeah. So that's kind of my view. But there certainly will be businesses that couldn't exist without it, and there are some that are coming up. And some of those that in fact, the businesses that empower the tertiary need, they're the ones that bring in. But if you go back, this will date me, but if you go back into Business history that that can I guess it was the 90s there's a sink hope this is process range hearing you know the idea that you would you could take computer sensibility into business processes, redesign them, and get these monstrous cost savings. And it was a gigantic consulting opportunity for people, whole companies developed based on that. And it sort of feels kind of more like that to me. But it's very interesting. I could be wrong, but it feels different than crypto. It feels like there's more in real ultimate use case. I mean, if it really is true, what they say, that a 50% improvement in programming, efficacy is not uncommon. Just that propositional loan is worth an awful lot of money, if you think how many programmers are in the world.

You know, it's a great question. I mean, I'm always looking for it. Because if you find it, it probably means it's so obscure that it will also be a great investment opportunity. We're looking all the time, but so far no, so far I'm pretty satisfied that seven is an exhaustive set. But never say never, you know, you know, it's an empirical seven, not a theoretical seven.

One of the great thinkers in strategy was this Harvard Professor Michael Porter and he and probably 40 years ago, made the very controversial statement. The operational existence is not strategy. And he got a lot of people of the Harvard Business School faculty really mad at him because that's what their careers were about. And it sounds like he was dissonant. But the point he was making was when you get to kind of this end state, if you already have power, that things that draw have operational excellence can be mimicked because you can hire a consulting firm with who has best practices, knowledge is to come in and get you up to snuff. You can hire people from your competitors, you know how to do it better in that. And that's kind of true. But it's also true in this take-off phase in a business when we talked about before, when you're trying to attain competitive position, operational excellence is everything. And so if you think of not strategy, not statically endpoints like Professor Porter was, but if you look at dynamically how you get there, operational excellence is essential for strategy. And so think of those things I mentioned before about Netflix about their UI and recommendation editor and so on are international rollout all those things. They were in a battle to get some more subscribers than other people. And those were critical. But in themselves, they're critical in obtaining competitive position, but in themselves, they're not sources of power typically. Unless there's some very tight considerations here are very demanding considerations for the unless. If they're really there have to be a material. But they also have to be opaque or some way people can't easily imitate them either that you don't understand what's going on or it might be opaque. So for example, think of TSMC. So when they put up When they put up the latest fab, and get that operational, are there a lot of steps in doing that? that they kind of know how to do with their staff is trying to do it, but it's not documented necessarily, and you can't imitate it. Maybe they have it, I don't know if they have processed it or not, but it takes that level of complexity. In my book, I use the example of Toyota and a car manufacturing is complex enough that you can have this opacity in terms of material steps, but it's not common. So if you're in stability phase of business, you're stuck with this funny thing, which is most of your day is on those issues, and it should be. Because if you don't do it, a competitor can and they can end up better than you. And so you're on a treadmill. And that's the way businesses. That's fine. And if you stop running that treadmill, you get creamed. And so you got to do it, it's most of your day, but it's not power. And there are those rare cases where it's so material and so inimitable that it can be power, but they're rare.

Yeah, yeah, you know, and there is an consulting firm that offers to bring you up to speed, you know, making more like Amazon as a service.

So I'd say they're right and I'm right. Yeah, they're right because there are this incredible, I mean businesses really hard, right? And there are just a multitude of things you have to pay attention for. I'm right because all those things fall into those three categories. So it's an exhaustive set and it simply comes out of the map, you know? So we're both right, let's say.

Personally, I am very, very concerned about the debt trajectory of the United States and many countries around the world, but I'll pick on the United States, but it's trend going on everywhere. We're on a trajectory for this extremely high indebtedness. And so if you think about the last 30 years, right, there's been a crisis about once every 10 years. So there's the dot com bust, there's the financial crisis, there was COVID. You know, nothing makes me think that the frequency will be a lot less. I don't know what it is. Who knows? These are all uncertain events. But imagine if we got to one of those, and we had no dry powder. And dry powder for us is the ability to heavily deficit spend take on debt. And fortunately our government did that in both the financial crisis and in COVID. And because that people had jobs, if my own view about the financial crisis is that if we hadn't done that, plus having been denied to you as the head of the Fed, we would have gone into another great depression. It was that ugly. So this current debt trajectory, you don't know how long it will take, exactly. But eventually that will mean we will not have drive out, or people will not respect the credit worthiness of this country. And so that worries me a lot. And it utterly will affect the idea of company founding, because if you get into a crisis like that, it just, you know, the capital markets lock up and it gets very difficult to do anything. And to really stretch my credibility here. Oh, pine on just how hard a problem this is to solve. The reason this is so difficult for this country to solve in other countries is that it is right at the crux of the delicate dance between capitalism and democracy. So if you think about The problem, of course, that's driving all this as entitlements. There's sort of discretionary spending, you know, the certain recovery programs and stuff. But those can go away. The underlying trend that people just can't get their arms around as entitlements. And anybody who looks at the numbers can see that every economist knows that. But that's not an easy fix. And the reason it's not an easy fix is there are two opposing views of what's going on. And there's no way to resolve those two views. One is that that capitalism is for patients and results in more and more inequality and the government has to do something about it. And the other is that the government is on a path that is creating socialism that will undermine our freedom and economic sufficiency. And the poster child for the repatious capitalism one is that I don't know if you've seen the recent analysis of inequality in the United States. It just came out much more robust analysis than has said that basically inequality in the last 60 years, the United States is unchanged. But that's post-transfer post-tax inequality, which basically says the amount of taxing and transfer I'm going on was about right. So it says that the amount we're spending is about right from that perspective. The compensates for other inequities. And we should be spending that much. So we should tax more. and the other the poster child for the other point of view of the dangers of government is the steadily increasing without interruption percentage of the economy that is government and to levels the 75 years ago people would have thought absolutely impossible. So there are these two views about what's going on. One is that we're compensating for the normal inequities of capitalism and the other is that we're headed down a path to socialism and ruin. And that leads to a deadlock, which is you don't tax anymore, and you don't cut spending. And that leads to deficits. And so anyway, a long rant, sorry, but that trend is extremely politically difficult to deal with and and extremely threatening and and that concerns made immensely.

Yeah, I mean, I am an optimist, really, in a way. And I do, there's a famous Austrian and eventually American economist, ending Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote this wonderful book, Theory of Economic Development, a way back when over 100 years ago, where he took the unusual view of saying that the vitality of an economy depended on entrepreneurs. And I ascribe to that. I think that that creativity and action are the ways society and people advance. And I think the US and a free society has huge advantages in that. And I think that I'm feel very lucky to be in a place and in Silicon Valley, but it would be in a place in a country where that is vital and active and that's and I think that's that's sort of grounds zero for me and so so I think you see that alive and well I think and and there are people that are very enthusiastic about that and as I am

I sort of alluded to it before, but just remember action is the first principle of business you do stuff. And my book is very oriented towards that. The idea was not to tell you what to do, but to give you sort of guide, post-fall, you're on that journey. And so I just to people that are enthusiastic about it, I encourage you to do stuff. That's where it all starts. And I can think about it and maybe help help a little bit, but it's mostly doing stuff.

Yeah, just do it. And life life is full of surprises. You'll end up in a place you didn't expect. Amazing.

Sure. I'll do my best here. I'm not very good on lightning.

One book that is extremely wonky, but, and I can only take it in very small doses, but is magnificent as one called the Road Reality by Roger Penrose, who is this brilliant mathematician. And it will be very daunting for anybody unless you're a deep math person, but his, brilliance in our edition just shine through in this thing and it's just it's an amazing book. I would say there's another book, boy, I wish I could remember that the name maybe you can get the name of the author, a book called Jean by this geneticist and I think it's a Harvard medical school professor that's about the history of genetics and He is an absolutely luminous writer. I mean, it puts me to shame. I'm embarrassed when I read it because I think how pedestrian am I writing as he's, and incredibly knowledge about the history of genetics. And I think that's such an important topic. So those are two that I would recommend. I would fairly, fairly wonky, but I like them both.

Yes, just amazing. You read it and you go, how do you think of that phrasing? I mean, it's just amazing.

I'm a huge movie fan and have been all my life and I'm particularly keen on animated films. But the movie that I've recently seen that I liked particularly was American fiction. I thought that it didn't make any of sort of the easy choices in a movie and as a result was just incredibly interesting and thoughtful and thought.

In my office, just this last week, we actually put a Persian rug in our entry room. And this is what's called a Farahang Suri Crog. And it's 150 years old. And it Had an effect in me that I didn't expect, which is, it is a work of great beauty. And it was all hand on before machines. You get all this wonderful variation of the actual icons and a rug and the different die colors. And I find that every morning when I walk in, I go, that's really beautiful. And it's uplifting. And it shows you the importance of or the value of the quality of art. I mean, it's just just kind of blows my mind actually. So that's probably not the usual product discussion that you get.

Oh, that's good. I'm a car guide too. So I didn't answer in the car.

Yeah, I'm a big believer in that. I mean, I think that, you know, it's sort of your place and how you connect to it has an important grounding effect. And before I talked earlier about creativity, and I think surrounding yourself in an environment that stimulates that is really important. And so I couldn't agree with it more.

One is what Clint East would advice to actors, which is don't just do something stand there. And so there are a lot of things that are long-termish with kind of low signal to noise. And you can often just do a lot of stuff that you think makes a difference, but it really doesn't. And so that's one. The other one, which is some of your profound, I think, was one that a famous Sri Lankan journalist was a mentor at mine and very dear friend. And he had a favorite expression that I adhere to all the time, which is everything is all about something else. Wow. Deep. And that's so true if you're dealing with this power stuff. When if you're really dig down everything is all about something else.

So yeah, so I have some that I admire great deal. I'm a tremendous fan of Winston Churchill's. You know, a quirky, most really great people are quirky, you know, and he qualified. There are things you could say about. I mean, you might have liked that so much, but he was a genius and at great fortitude. human sense, he understood things long before other people. I've got given my marks. Some of the great artists I admire enormously. I'm just immediately in book right now and sort of the last 20 years of Michelangelo, which is a wonderful book actually, which is a very interesting period because in his first 70 years, he sort of finished, you know, he finished up all the, he wasn't going to do sculpture anymore. He just finished the last judgment, which was the wall of the system chapel, and that I think the last major fresco he did. and a lot of his friends at that time, he was exiled from Florence and looking at Rome and the out of this Roman community and a lot of his close friends that had recently died or had to go these soys at this inflection point in this life. at 70, which in those days was very old. And yet he went on to do some of the most remarkable architecture in the history of the world. And so, you know, you've got to admire that, you know, I mean just to look. I'm sorry doing that which is that rare second act so but but I think for world leaders Winston Churchill is very high. I'm a fan of Teddy Roosevelt. I'm gonna say to in this country.

Yeah, so as I say, I'm, I'm an idea person and I'm about trying to empower company founders. And so, so, uh, the only thing I can say is, um, you know, read the books, spread the ideas, start your own company, those are the things that would make me happy.