David Southwell

In fact, they should be shorting your stock like crazy.

And it's awfully tempting to be arrogant.

And then when things go badly, it's awfully tempting to be depressed.

And to my mind, the challenge is staying in the middle.

You can't be arrogant when things are going well, and you can't be depressed when things are going badly.

You may make the wrong decisions, but a lot of the stuff that happens in this industry is really not necessarily foreseeable.

Science happens, and there's a reason that the FDA makes us start with chemistry or basic biology and take it through

into animals and then take it into, you know, healthy humans and then take it into sick humans, that it's a pretty brutal drop off in success rates as you move through that development cycle.

The problem with blaming other people in this industry as a CEO is you're blaming someone that either is on your board or and in which case you should have convinced them to do what you wanted.

or you're blaming someone who works for you.

And that is absolutely not fair because they work for you.

And it's up to you to apply a filter to what the people that work for you are trying to do.

So it's very hard to blame mistakes on anyone other than yourself, unless there's some absolutely extrinsic market event.

It's really tough to not blame yourself, but it's always, it's difficult to blame yourself because you could get fired.

Hey, you know, at some point one has to have self-confidence and say, if the worst comes to the worst, I'll do something else.

The main thing, I grew up in England in the 60s and 70s.

And England in the 1970s was a pretty grim place.

Margaret Thatcher got elected in 1979.

And back then, if you made more than £20,000 a year, your unearned income was taxed at 98%.

I mean, it was a grim place.