Sam Hinkie

That's half of what I talked to founders about.

It's just that how to build the API to the other person's brain.

It doesn't matter what you say, it matters what they hear and it matters how they feel.

That's not a way to manipulate someone.

It's a way to deeply understand their set of problems

And to the extent you have edge, and you won't always, to the extent you have edge, define it clearly in a way that aligns their incentives with that solution.

That's mostly it.

All of the people that I talked to along the way that gave me more and more scope, more and more leash to be me and to lean into the kinds of things I want to do, almost all of those conversations started just that way.

Going back to Carol for a second, I love that answer.

What can he teach us about playing a truly long-term game?

And I guess for those that don't know Carol well, you need to describe the insane game that he's been playing for decades.

He just turned 85 a couple of weeks ago.

He's basically written five books in 50 years and he's not done.

And he's trying to finish another one that will maybe be a sixth or a seventh, really on two subjects, both of which you sort of would round out to power is the thing he's writing about.

He starts with an end in mind in a bunch of ways where he knows the last sentence of the book before he starts writing it.

He knows the outline of the book before he knows the details.

So he knows a set of outline of like where this thing is going to go and what the big chunks of it are going to be.

And he can zoom out and see a systems view of how the whole thing works and explain it to someone that's a novice.

Some of what he's written about is government.

I'm not without care, but politics is not top of my list at all for things that I care about.