Sam Hinkie

But he can write it in a way that makes it accessible.

If you can read and you like good storytelling, then he can write it in a way that makes it accessible.

And the truth is what he's done is compress a decade of research into 500 pages.

Isn't there so much to learn from that?

And isn't that the whole idea, which is you're trying to sort of find people that have done all that work and can compress it down in some way that you don't have to do it.

Wouldn't life suck if he went out and learned all those lessons and then for the next person that came along and wanted to learn those lessons had to pay the same price he did.

But instead, he's got this machine called a book that can send it to the rest of us in a way that can really help.

Having studied him and read his stuff, what have you learned about the pros and cons of power?

His kind of big thesis is for a long time, people would say power corrupts and he often says power reveals.

When you get to a certain level of power, you might say, in sort of a capitalist terms, you get to sort of F you money, that it reveals who you really are, can kind of do the things unconstrained that you've always wanted to do.

But I think about it much more from a sort of a systems perspective that it shows you how the system works and how I think of it like a

little kid's Play-Doh maker.

You put raw Play-Doh in the back and you get this shape out the front and what that looks like.

And it's wildly different than people anticipate.

I think of it sometimes like, I guess, the Pacific salmon that sort of spend their whole life making this one journey back upstream to spawn in this one spot.

And as soon as they do that,

they die.

That's largely what he shows you is an effort like that, which is to be successful in this place.

You couldn't hold anything back to win a tournament that was that big, no matter what your seating was.

The two men he profiles, their seating in life was not high.