So the book I want to talk to you about today is called Soft War,
an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by Matthew Simmons.
The book is about 25 years old.
The first time I read this book was about five to six years ago.
And think if you're going to read a biography or a book on Larry Ellison,
this is the very first one you should read
because the author had access to Larry Ellison and traveled extensively with him for two years.
And they have these unbelievably, just brutally frank conversations in the book.
And so I wanted to read the book and look at it through the lens of,
like, can I get inside of the mind of Larry Ellison?
Ellison has had a very unique set of life circumstances.
He founded Oracle all the way back in 1976.
He's one of the wealthy.
Fast forward, you know, 50-something years later,
he's still one of the wealthiest people in the world.
And so I wanted to understand how he thought.
Now, the interesting thing about this book is Ellison annotated this book.
So he made an agreement.
He could not change anything that the author wrote.
but he was able to add his own footnotes in his own words.