“A powerful and deeply moving account of a boy forced to grow up too soon and the man he fought to become.”
—Rob Henderson, bestselling author of Troubled
David Rhoiney was five when his father walked out, forcing David to become the “man of the house.”
Compton, Oakland, Long Beach: no matter where they turned, fear and hunger waited. Long nights in the homeless shelter. Drive-by shootings. Strangers in overalls dragging his mother away. As his world collapsed, David lost hope. No one was coming to save him.
But he could save himself.
When basketball threw him a lifeline, David grabbed it. So began an unlikely journey, one that carried him from living in a Volkswagen Jetta onto the courts of Division I, through the halls of the Naval Academy, into the corridors of national intelligence, and under the watchtowers of Guantánamo Bay. At last, scalpel in hand, David reached the operating room, where he could become the man his family needed.
Ed William, a former lawyer, spent several days interviewing David and spoke to dozens of people from his life. The result is Ed’s first book, No One’s Coming to Save You: The Escape of David Rhoiney, out from Infinite Books on 8 December and now available for pre-order.
Ed joins Jim to discuss:
The time David was forced to fight a schoolyard bully in front of his family.
David’s unusual experience of the Rodney King riots.
The note David wrote to God every night.
The English teacher who changed David’s life in one hour.
The prep school coach who cancelled David’s credit cards.
How a five-foot-three kid ended up playing Division I basketball.
David as a role model for young men.
The guilt underpinning David’s success.
The single word that describes David.
Why Ed’s interview plan fell apart in the first five minutes.
Why Ed was inspired by Into the Wild and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
How Ed captured David’s voice.
Much more!
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
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Links
Show Notes
Ed William & Jim O’Shaughnessy
Ed William: Writer, editor, former lawyer and author of No One’s Coming to Save You. Read Rough Cuts
The book: No One’s Coming to Save You: The Escape of David Rhoiney, out December 8, 2026. Pre-order
Infinite Books: The publishing imprint behind the book. Infinite Books
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Host of Infinite Loops, founder and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and author of the New York Times bestseller What Works on Wall Street. Follow Jim on X
Full transcripts: Transcripts and highlights from every Infinite Loops conversation. OSV newsletter
Books, Films & Ideas Mentioned
Into the Wild: The film Ed compares to the Houston chapter, where David almost stops to rest. Into the Wild
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Spielberg’s “no boring bits” approach that set the book’s pace. Raiders of the Lost Ark
Mad Max: Fury Road: Ed’s model for a story that never stops moving. Mad Max: Fury Road
The Pursuit of Happyness and Good Will Hunting: The stories Ed sees as the book’s closest film parallels. The Pursuit of Happyness / Good Will Hunting
What Works on Wall Street: Jim’s book, which David challenged him on in their first conversations. What Works on Wall Street
Behaviorism: The mid-century “give me a baby and I’ll make it anything” school Jim cites in the nature-versus-nurture debate. Behaviorism
Highlights
Never Run From a Fight
Ed William
So there’s a scene early in the book where he is getting bullied at school. Big guy. […] And David turns and runs home. Runs, runs. Gets home. “Thank God, I’m back.” This is in Compton. “I’m back at Granny’s. I’m safe.” And Granny’s is just this amazing place where there’s dozens of family members, cousins, uncles, people who... they say they’re related, he doesn’t even know how. You know, just constantly people coming and going. It’s a fortress. And he gets in the gates. He’s like, “Oh, thank goodness, I’m safe, I’m safe.” And his cousin’s there. And his cousin says, “What are you doing here?” And David says, “This guy, he was coming for me.” The cousin says, “What? So what did you do?” And David says: “Well, I ran.” And his cousin says, “Sit there.” So his cousin disappears. David sort of waits at the house, thinking, “What’s going on?” Half an hour later, his cousin and some of their friends pull up in the car, and David’s like, “What’s going on?”
And they’ve kidnapped the bully, and they get him out of the car and say, “David, we do not run in this family. We do not run. You’re going to have to fight this guy.” So they fight him. David gets his ass kicked. And then, you know, the message is he’s not going to run. And for the rest of the story, he isn’t running. Something comes for him... he goes back for them harder. But then there is a point towards the back third of the story where he suddenly realises that approach, he needs to moderate it. It got him this far, but sometimes you have to tactically retreat.
Finding a Style that Suits the Material
Ed William
You know, the style I use in the book is very different from how I write on my Substack. I write about films on my Substack, as sort of my first love, and I actually write in a completely different style there. For the book, it wasn’t so much a conscious decision as... a style emerges that fits the material. You know, in the first draft I was trying to write it the way that I write online, which is a little bit more, maybe not flowery, but cerebral, I suppose.Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
And it didn’t fit the material. And with the help of Dylan, who was my editor [..] it sort of lands on this style that I wasn’t expecting to land on, but that I think really fits the subject.Jim O’Shaughnessy
Briefly, what were you expecting, writing your first book, right? What was the transformation like? […] The thing that I love about the book, and the way you chose to write it, was what you just said. I read a lot, and I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies. It’s a very different style. What was it? Was that part of the transformation? It’s just like, “Okay, this is the way I normally write, but this is what I’m hearing, so I’ve got to completely revamp the way this gets written.”Ed William
Yeah, yeah, I think so. When you look back at these things, you then explain it away in a way that sounds like it was all pre-planned, whereas these things are much more... you’re fucking around and then something sticks, effectively. But after lots of backs and forth with Dylan, and thinking about it, talking about it... So the style is very sort of direct, uncompromising, quite profane, going back to how much David swears. Punchy, quite gritty style, no pretension, hopefully. And there’s four reasons, I think, why we landed on it. The first is that it suits David’s voice. It’s how he speaks. It wouldn’t work if I’m having these long, flowery, cerebral sentences. That’s not him. That’s not him.Two, it suits the story. You know, the most attractive... I’m sure this is what appealed to you about David’s story initially, is that it is a story. If this read like some dusty journalistic biography of Churchill that my dad’s got in his... you know, the dozens of war biographies my dad’s got in his bookshelf back home, it wouldn’t... I’d be doing his story a disservice.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.Ed William
It reads like fiction, but it’s true, is what I wanted it to be anyway. So that was two […] Three is that no one knows who I am. Relatively speaking, more people know who David is, but, you know, the size of David’s audience... I want far more people to read the book. And so the book needed to be something. It couldn’t just be a vanilla, by-the-numbers, routine thing. It needed to feel different. It needed to feel unusual. It needed to feel sort of like, “Huh, this is a new way of approaching this.”And then the final reason, actually, is that I think David’s arc... There’s a lot of bad stuff going around about young men at the moment, incels and all that sort of stuff. And I think lots of men and young men are looking for a role model. And I think David’s story genuinely is... I’m always hesitant to use the word “inspirational”, because as soon as you say, like, “an inspirational biography”, you think, “Okay, every biography, this is...” Do you know what I mean?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.Ed William
But I think for a certain young man reader, it genuinely is. And I wanted to use a style that was unpretentious and that was direct, and that, you know, younger readers, teenagers, could engage with.
Edited Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, hello, everyone. It’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today is very special for me because I have my colleague Ed William, who has written an incredible book on an incredible person, David Rhoiney. Ed, welcome.
Ed William
Thank you. Good to be here.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So let’s start at the beginning. We wanted to figure out how NFTs work, back when they were all the rage. And so, like normal, I said, “Well, let’s do one,” so that way we can learn about it. And... crazy story, I’ll leave that aside. The winning bidder, though, had the opportunity to either come on Infinite Loops as a guest co-host or nominate someone else. He chose to nominate David Rhoiney. I had never heard of David. And after the podcast, literally when we stopped recording, I said, “Will you let me make a movie about you?” And he kind of looked at me like, “You’re a weirdo.”
Ed William
Big question. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It ultimately turned into a book, and I think we made a much better choice making it a book. But let’s start at the beginning.
Ed William
Yep.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Tell me about how you approach the project. David is a friend of mine and he can be critical. If he doesn’t like something, he will tell you. And, spoiler alert, he loved the book. But please take me from the start all the way through.
Ed William
Yeah, sure. So the way I came into the project was, you emailed me and said, “Do you want to write a book?” And I said, “Yes. What’s the book?” And then we’ll deal with the after effects. After, you introduced me to David, and I was actually in Thailand when I first met him, travelling with my wife, and it was about 4am my time, Thailand time. And we had the call, and I just thought, “I just need to earn this guy’s trust. That’s my main thing.” Had the call, and I thought it went okay. And we agreed that I’d fly over and interview him for five days. He’d tell his story front to back. He’d give me a long list of people from his life who I’d speak to. So that’s what we did. So I went out and I met him, and that seemed to go pretty well.
And then I just started writing, and then here we are.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So one thing about David that I love is that list he gave you included people who don’t like David.
Ed William
Mm.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Did that surprise you?
Ed William
It didn’t, because you had told me that’s the type of person David is. And I didn’t get the list till after I’d spoken with him. And actually, I remember before I went, I was very nervous. My background, the listeners probably don’t know, is I was a lawyer before I started writing online, which is how we found each other. And so I’d never done a big interview project before. I’d never done a book before. It’s my first book. So I was so nervous, and I was sort of thinking, “Okay, five days of interviews. The first half day, I’ll just do softball questions, get to know each other. Won’t go into any of the harrowing stuff from his early childhood. We’ll just do it nice and easy so we can sort of get to know each other.”
So I can’t actually remember what the first question I asked was, but within seconds he was telling me about his father leaving him, the gun violence he experienced as a child. He gave this long, incredible... He basically gave his life story in half an hour, with all the nasty bits. So at that point I realised, “Well, okay, this guy’s pretty honest and pretty candid.” So when the list eventually came, I wasn’t surprised that it involved...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And go into it a little bit, because that’s what made me want to make a movie about him. I found what he overcame in his life to be incredibly inspirational.
Ed William
Yeah. So David was born in Hawaii. He moved to the West Coast, and his first five years were fairly normal. I mean, he can remember very little of them. Then one day... The book starts with his father turning up from a funeral back home. David runs outside, is excited to see his dad, and his dad goes inside. David follows him. His dad and his mum, you can hear them shouting at each other, clothes flying out the window. And then his dad sort of crouches down and says to David, “I’m going. You need to be the man of the house.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And how old was he?
Ed William
David was five years old. Yeah, yeah. Tells him, “Need to be the man of the house.” And a lot of the book is the psychological impact that one phrase like that can have on David’s entire life. I mean, that’s very much the framing. His quest to be the man of the house is very much the framing device of the book. So they were in Compton at the time, staying with David’s granny, his mum Dorothy’s mum. And what I actually found really interesting was that this is Compton in the 90s. You know, the chapters in the book go into more detail, we can talk about different anecdotes if you want, but a lot of crazy stuff happens. But actually, for a while, David has really happy memories of this period, because there’s all these colourful characters in the house.
You know, there’s his Uncle Rob, who was an incredible character, and was up to some less savoury shenanigans during the Rodney King riots. David remembers... First, David went out himself and saw an ear lying on the street and was like, “I shouldn’t be here,” so went back home. And then they were watching TV and... David is watching a TV reporter with some looting going on. And then David’s like, “I know this guy,” coming out of that shop, and it’s his Uncle Rob carrying a TV coming out of the shop. He says, “Mom, look at this.” So anyway, he’s got quite fond memories of this period, even though there were some dark sides as well.
Then... David’s mum suffered from really severe bipolar disorder. She has ups and downs. They leave Compton, which is very much where things really start going wrong. They leave Compton, they go to Oakland. One thing leads to another and, I mean, we can get into whatever part you want to get into, but there’s homelessness, there’s, as I say, gun violence, there’s David having to care for his mother. It goes dramatically wrong. I mean, they live in a Volkswagen Jetta before going to a homeless shelter. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
One of the things that David told me, which really did strike me, was he reframed. He told me it was as you’ve just described, but he said, “I choose to look at it as I was lucky to be living in a car in California and not New York.” He said, “Because New York, we would have had no heating and we would have gotten frozen out.” One of the things about his attitude which really impresses me is it almost seems like you can throw anything at David and he will figure a way out to either fix it or make it better or take advantage of it. How much of that did you see, both in David and the people you talk to about David?
Ed William
Yeah, he’s resilient. And actually this was one of the things... So when you first pitched me the project, it was just this incredible rags-to-riches story of someone born into horrible circumstances who achieves loads of incredible things. So again, we should say for the listeners, David has this horrible childhood, but it’s not just misery porn. He goes on to achieve some incredible things. He plays two Division I sports at the Naval Academy. He becomes a cryptologist, he becomes a surgeon. I mean, amazing life. So that was sort of the hook that got me into the story. But actually what makes him far more interesting as a character, despite all these amazing things he’s achieved, is that he’s not a superhero. He’s not perfect. And actually he fucks up, like, a lot, as we all do.
He does things wrong, he acts rashly, he has self-doubt, he worries that he’s in the wrong place, he worries that he doesn’t belong. But what’s so interesting about him is that he just does it anyway. And I think you’ve had similar experiences with him when you’ve been socialising with him, where you’ve noticed he’s not wanting to go to certain events and has gone anyway. And yeah, that’s part of who he is.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes. I took David to some events where I had him stay at my home, and he was normal, what I call “normal David”. He saw my Mac Studio and he’s like, “Can I make some videos on this? Because I’m doing this video series.” I’m like, “Sure.” And we told great stories. But then when we flew to the event, on the plane, he just looked at me and he goes, “You know, I’m nervous as hell to do this.” I’m like, “Why?” And he went into it. He was like, “Man, like, where I’m coming from and where you’re taking me are virtually two different worlds.” And then of course, at the end of the event, who is everyone crowding around? David.
Ed William
Yeah, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Did you see more of that as you were writing the book, in the way other people interacted with David?
Ed William
Yeah, so obviously not so much how other people interacted with David, just because I spoke to David mainly one-on-one or with the team. But I spoke to a lot of people from David’s life, all the way from high school teachers, basketball coaches, friends of the Naval Academy, people he worked with, mentors, school friends, his next-door neighbour, all kinds of things. And they’d all sort of been sucked into the story of David. You know, they were so excited that a book was being written about him. They were just delighted about it. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
What were some of the funnier or unexpected stories that you heard?
Ed William
Unexpected... I wouldn’t say this is one of the funnier ones, but there was a chapter towards... We can get into the style of the book maybe in a bit, because it’s quite fast-paced, fast-paced, fast-paced for various reasons. But he had mentioned that when he leaves the Naval Academy, before he goes on to become a cryptologist, at that point he thought he was going to go into the submarine programme. And he mentioned very briefly that he was sort of feeling a bit burnt out.
And his best friend, a guy called RL, who features in the book, who I spoke to, lived down in Houston, and he’d mentioned that he stayed there for a little bit, just to sort of rest before he goes back into it, which in itself is quite unusual for David. He’s not a man to rest. Anyway, I was planning on mentioning it in a paragraph, just to sort of move the narrative on. And I spoke to David a bit more about it. I spoke to RL, I spoke to RL’s older brother, who’s sort of a basketball legend at the Academy. And I spoke to RL’s mum, Mrs Lewis, who David had spoken really highly of, who was the warmest, so full of Texan charm and just... it was the most delight... I left the call and said to my wife straight after, “That was the most delightful woman I’ve spoken to in my life.” She was just so charming.
But anyway, they all talked about this period when David was living there as incredibly meaningful to them. And David also talked about it as incredibly meaningful for him. And not much actually happens from a story perspective, but the more I talked to them about it, the more it felt important to the story somehow, even though plot-wise it isn’t. And it actually became one of my favourite chapters of the book. It’s David resting for once, which just doesn’t happen. It’s about the halfway mark of the book, David resting. And the chapter slows down a little bit. And there’s lots of really interesting parallels with his childhood growing up in Compton, the connection with family he feels there. And it’s really similar but also really different. Have you ever seen the film Into the Wild?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah.
Ed William
So I’m a big film guy, so I couldn’t help but... through the book, different films are popping into my head. And there’s this bit where the submarine programme doesn’t go through. He gets some bad news, which is sort of a recurring theme of the book. And he just thinks for a second, “I could stay here. I’ve got family around me.” Found family, but family around me. “I could just rest.” Barbecues and ball games. Like, he could just take the foot off the gas on a longer-term basis.
And then he just feels like, “No, I need to achieve something. I need to do something. I’ve got some greatness in me, some fire in me.” And he leaves. And that was such an interesting scene. And it made me think as well of, going back to Into the Wild, there’s a scene in it which I still think is so sad, of the old man, I can’t remember the actor who plays him, who the main character finds, and they form this really close relationship. And then the main character, I can’t remember his name, has to go back into the wild. And the old man says to him, “Why don’t you... I could adopt you. I could be my grandson.” And he says, “No, I need to go back out there.” And then the camera sort of lingers on this old man.
And there’s sort of a scene at the end where David’s leaving. And, you know, Mrs Lewis, who he’s so close with, is this lovely woman, and she’s so happy for him that he’s going, but they will... She said to me, “Like, I consider David my son. I consider David my son. Our life was so much richer with him there.” And I just thought it was such a... And this came out of a paragraph that I wasn’t even meaning to write. And it became such an interesting chapter in the book and such an interesting part of his story.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. He is such an interesting contrast in personality traits, right? He is very ambitious. He’s very talented. You mentioned he was in cryptography and he solved some big cases. No PhD, right? And so the PhD guys were all like, “Who is this guy? And why should we listen to him at all?”
Ed William
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But the other thing about David that has been a constant through my relationship with him is his just veneration of, and love and need of, family. Talk a little bit about that. His relationship with his mom, which was challenging. His goals, because his mother featured very prominently in why he wanted to achieve.
Ed William
Yeah. And again, to go back to how I thought it was a sort of conventional... conventional is the wrong word. Not a conventional story at all, but a rags-to-riches story. You know, that was what originally got me into it. And another thing that then deepened it and made me far more interested on a character level was his relationship with his mum, which is so interesting. So she raises him and his brother Jonathan alone, because his father leaves. She has, as I said, severe bipolar. And their childhood is moments of shocking dereliction, effectively, of her duty as a mother, but also moments of, like, immense love and immense care. I mean, on two, multiple occasions, there are guns pointed at David or members of the family, and she steps in between them and says, “This isn’t happening.”
You know, when David goes to the... I need to be careful, I’m not giving away too much of the book here, but there is a lot more. But when David goes to the Naval Academy, he sort of has some big fear that he’s leaving her behind. And she’s been going through a really severe... She has not been with them for a year, in mind. She’s been with them in body, but they’ve been caring for her. And he’s so fearful of leaving her. And he sort of sits down and says, “Do you understand what’s happening? I’m going to Annapolis. I’m not going to be here.” And she sort of says, “Son, you’re fine. You go.” And, like, that was it.
So I just think it’s such an interesting relationship, where it’s not as simple as she was a bad mum, she was a good mum. She’s a human. It’s a human, complicated relationship, which is just so much, from my perspective as a biographer, so much more of an interesting angle. And then I think the question that then tied in... So I’m rambling. I’m not sure this related to your original question, but it’s interesting anyway. So the question that I found really interesting to the book was that what David was wrestling with was his...
He knows that the best way he can save her, he can be the man of the house, he can provide for her, is by leaving and making something of himself, whether it’s becoming a basketball player, which were his early hopes, or becoming a surgeon, which is his ultimate hope. And he knows in his heart he can’t help her there. But then there’s also the guilt of: is the best way to help her by leaving her behind? And am I doing this for her or for me? And again, they’re really, like, knotty human questions that I found so interesting to write about, and so ripe for sort of unpacking in the book.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And another thing about David that I find interesting, and it relates back to the people all gathered around him at the end of the event. One of the titles we considered for the book was Born to Fit Out. And that was one of his lines to me. He was like, “I always felt like I was born to fit out, but then I worried, how will I ever fit in?” And I guess he chose the way of fitting in by just excelling. And I’ve never really met anyone who does the kind of deep dive on a subject, any subject, like David. So let’s bring in his basketball coach, because that was a very important relationship.
Ed William
Yeah. Coach Sladky.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But it was not always a smooth relationship.
Ed William
Yes, well, yes. So another theme in the book is, you know, he has a father-shaped absence in his life.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
And he finds different men, boys, to fit at different times of his life, and sometimes they’re the right fit, sometimes they’re not. I mean, his mum has a sequence of boyfriends, two particularly feature in the book, who are not good to David, not good to his mum. But one of them has a son, a guy called Darren, who features in the book, who’d been in juvie. He personally was up to no good, but he really took David under his wing and said, “David, I don’t want you to do what I’m doing. I want better for you.” Anyway, so, yes. David then meets Coach Sladky at the Naval Academy prep school. Dave Sladky. He died in 2016. I think he’s... And David finds the father he was looking for.
I couldn’t speak to him, he’s passed away, but I spoke to his son Matt, who said how highly his dad spoke of David. And he came from a certain model of basketball training that saw... he was serious on the sort of Xs and Os of basketball, but he saw it as life coaching, basically, as a proxy for life coaching. And he was a huge stickler with cleanliness. He made all his boys turn their socks inside out before they cleaned them. What skin products to use, all these sort of things. He was teaching these boys to become men. And that’s sort of what David found.
He also, actually... So, David, again, this is a fun little bit which I related to. I think everyone, no matter how you’ve grown up, the first time you get money, you spend it. And I did that. Obviously, for David, it was times a thousand. He’d grown up with zero money at all. And then suddenly, when he’s in the Naval Academy, he’s getting a stipend. So he just goes crazy with his first paycheck and racks up credit card after credit card, and all crap that he doesn’t need, basically.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Ed William
And then Coach Sladky was a finance nerd, basically, and he drills into David... You know, one of the reasons David’s most known today is as a sort of financial guru on social media.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
And it’s Coach Sladky who sort of drilled that into him in the first place, because he said, “I’m cutting off your credit cards. I’m redirecting 50% of your paycheck to this IRA I’ve set up.” Yeah. He then has another coach after, who they have a more confrontational relationship, at Division I basketball, where, you know, David is beset with injuries, and it doesn’t end the way he wanted it to end.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And let’s talk about that for a minute too, because David went from becoming the man of the house at five, living in cars, taking care of his bipolar mother, and then he gets into Annapolis. Talk a bit about...
Ed William
Yeah. Fish out of water.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But also, how did that happen?
Ed William
Oh, I see. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And then what it felt like for David when he shows up at Annapolis, because he told me... David swears a lot.
Ed William
Yeah. And on that, just before this call, I looked at my notes from my original interviews with David.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
The word “fuck” came 1,445 times. Yes. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And so in the expletive-filled story, which was amazing, he tells me about when he first got to Annapolis. And I’m sure he told you the same story, but I’m gonna let you tell it.
Ed William
Well, to go back to the first question, about how he got to Annapolis, right? There was a moment after they’d been homeless where a figure from David’s childhood comes back into his life and brings some trouble with him. And that’s when the shotgun incident I mentioned, when Dorothy steps between David and the shotgun, happens. And at this point, David is... I can’t remember, but he’s not five years old anymore. He’s 10, 11, 12. And he realises, “I need to get... It’s not going to happen to me. I need to get us out of this situation.” And he starts latching on to anything he can as a way to get out. So first he finds art. He has a cousin who draws pictures of Tupac and The Lion King and Biggie and whatever, and he sort of becomes obsessed with painting. And with David, everything’s instrumental. So it’s not just a love of painting. He’s going to become an artist so he can pay for his family. He could buy his granny a house. He can buy his mum a house. That doesn’t work out. He...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Although, let me interject. He is a very good artist. Yeah, okay.
Ed William
Very talented. He is. Yeah, he is. Maybe if he kept it going, that’s what he’d be doing. You know, if he was...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I would not put it past him.
Ed William
Yeah, yeah. No, he’s very talented. And actually, the reason that doesn’t go well is because they move again. Another boyfriend, another move, and they lose all their stuff. He loses all his supplies. Anyway, so he’s latching on to various things to try and find his ticket out of there, desperately. You know, he’s flailing around and he stumbles across basketball. And he starts playing at Vets, the local park in Long Beach. He’s in Long Beach at this time, and he’s pretty good. He’s not amazing, but he’s pretty good. Vets pickup basketball is, like, ruthless. You’re on the team if you’re good enough. If you’re not... So he’s turning up and he’s just on the sidelines. He’s never getting… on the side of the court. He’s never getting played. But he enjoys it and he’s decent.
And he’s like, “This could be my ticket out.” So there’s a No Parking sign outside his house. He spends hours and hours and hours shooting against the No Parking sign. Then he starts dribbling the ball to school. Then he finds a mentor and he goes all in on basketball, basically. And he gets better. He gets better. He gets better. He’s still too small. He’s at the time 5 foot 2. You know, he’s hit puberty and he’s still 5 foot 2, and you’re screwed if you’re that small with basketball. So he’s praying and praying that he becomes taller.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Which he did.
Ed William
Which he did. He did. So he’d write on a piece of paper every night, “God, please make me 6 foot 2 and 220 pounds by the morning.” And every night he’d then get up and look in the mirror and be like, “Shit, I’m still small.” Anyway, he keeps playing, and he does have the growth spurts, and he hustles his way into getting noticed by a Naval Academy recruiter, who comes and says, “You’re good. I think you’d be good on the team.” At this point, David barely knows who the Academy...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Ed William
He’s seen the Army-Navy football game on CBS, so he’d sort of heard of the Navy. You know, his father was actually in the…
Jim O’Shaughnessy Marines, I think.
Ed William
Yeah, in the Marines. Yes. So he knows of the military, but it never crossed his mind that he’d go and join, and certainly not as an officer. But he gets recruited, basically. And so he starts off going to the preparatory school in Annapolis... sorry, in Rhode Island. And he arrives and he’s a fish out of water. And one thing he said to me that I thought was quite interesting is that the defining struggle of his childhood, in his words, was poverty. It was, “How am I going to feed myself tonight?” Racism he hadn’t directly encountered, because he was friends with and living in African American neighbourhoods, and his family and friends were African American, and his life was so insular that he wasn’t out in the world enough to experience it directly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Ed William
And it wasn’t until he got out into the big bad world that then poverty no longer becomes a problem. But then he’s realising he’s having to prove himself in a whole another way. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
One of the things he said to me that really resonated with me was that he wasn’t really sure how much of it was him, ie, “These people think I’m bad because I’m black,” and how much of it was really... they really thought that.
Ed William
Yes. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And then he told me some stories where, unfortunately, he got confirmation that, yeah, certain people, certainly not everyone, but certain people really did feel that.
Ed William
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And talk a bit about the way he decided to deal with that, because I found that very instructive.
Ed William
Mm. Well, again, I think... to deal with the racism specifically, he was like, “I’m gonna beat them.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Basically, what he said was, “The only way I can win here is to better, and not just a little better. I have to be significant. I have to be a quantum leap above.”
Ed William
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. One of the things about David is I think he’s probably one of the top, I don’t know, 20 people that I know who puts more pressure on himself than other people putting pressure on him.
I mean, I spent a weekend with him and his family, and I’m like, “Just calm down. You’ll be okay.”
Ed William
Yeah. He’s relentless. Absolutely relentless. And I think another thing I tried to sort of tease out in the book is that David spent his entire childhood having to fight tooth and nail to prove himself to everyone.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Not only that, but he had to fight tooth and nail for everything.
Ed William
For everything. Yes, correct. Everything. And he had to throw himself out there aggressively, and he had to do that in the Naval Academy as well. He has to prove himself over and over again. And then there’s a point in the book where he has made it, and he has to calibrate his approach. He has to learn to...
So there’s a scene early in the book where he is getting bullied at school. Big guy. David’s little, and a big sixth grader, who’s a scary guy, everyone’s scared of this guy, I think he’s older than sixth grade, is coming for David at school. And David turns and runs home. Runs, runs. Gets home. “Thank God, I’m back.” This is in Compton. “I’m back at Granny’s. I’m safe.” And Granny’s is just this amazing place where there’s dozens of family members, cousins, uncles, people who... they say they’re related, he doesn’t even know how. You know, just constantly people coming and going. It’s a fortress. And he gets in the gates. He’s like, “Oh, thank goodness, I’m safe, I’m safe.” And his cousin’s there. And his cousin says, “What are you doing here?” And David says, “This guy, he was coming for me.” The cousin says, “What? So what did you do?” And David says: “Well, I ran.” And his cousin says, “Sit there.” So his cousin disappears. David sort of waits at the house, thinking, “What’s going on?” Half an hour later, his cousin and some of their friends pull up in the car, and David’s like, “What’s going on?”
And they’ve kidnapped the bully, and they get him out of the car and say, “David, we do not run in this family. We do not run. You’re going to have to fight this guy.” So they fight him. David gets his ass kicked. And then, you know, the message is he’s not going to run. And for the rest of the story, he isn’t running. Something comes for him... he goes back for them harder. But then there is a point towards the back third of the story where he suddenly realises that approach, he needs to moderate it. It got him this far, but sometimes you have to tactically retreat.. And yeah, I don’t want to give it away, but he does, and it goes from there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And it was one of the things we talked about a lot. Literally, he said, “Jim, you live in a different world than I do.” And he’s fascinated, almost like an anthropologist, right? He wants to be able to take in the entire scene, see how people are interacting, but never falsely. In other words, he’ll modify his behaviour, but it doesn’t change who David is. So he might tell somebody that they’re a fucking idiot, but he will do it in a far more polite manner, right? And one of the things about him that really just continued to impress me... I joked to him, I said, “Is Chumbawamba’s ‘I get knocked down, but I get back up again’ your theme song?” And he goes, “A little bit,” right? And, you know, it takes a lot of courage. Just, like, put aside what he was going through. It takes a lot of courage for anyone in life to... I mean, he could have been from a middle-class household with a mom who didn’t have psychological issues, and it still would have taken a lot of courage. Do you think it was that bully moment, or the gun moment, or... Because another thing he said to me, which really stuck with me: when I was staying with him, he showed me a picture from, I think he was probably 14, and there were a bunch of other kids in the picture. And he started pointing to them. “Jail. Dead.” You know. And then he looked at me and he goes, “I knew that if I didn’t take action, and if I didn’t just keep taking action, I was going to end up like them.”
And to me, that kind of courage, under that kind of pressure, under all of the myriad things that were happening in his life... I find the refined David, the surgeon, he still looks at things like, “Okay, what’s wrong with this picture?” And it motivates him to try to solve problems. He’s really good at it, right? And I talk to him once a week via Zoom, and, you know, I said, “So how’s the new job at the hospital going?” And he immediately goes into everything that could be corrected.
Ed William
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I think that’s one of the reasons why he’s interested in our world, right? Venture investing, that sort of much quicker pace. But talk a bit about his dive into finance, because that was really remarkable to me for a couple of reasons. Number one, David can get to almost anyone. I mean, if Ben Graham were still alive, David would know him. But he also does the deep and heavy work. Talk about how he takes that approach, not just in finance, but his entire life.
Ed William
Yeah, well, the origin of finances is a combination of his childhood, and the amount of money he spanked as soon as he had the ability to spank it, and Coach Sladky’s advice. And David is initially sceptical of anyone. You have to earn David’s trust.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes. Very much.
Ed William
You have to earn... You have to earn it. And so even as Coach Sladky, who he did respect, was telling him all these things, he was still thinking, “I need to look this up myself.” David was doing applied mathematics at the Naval Academy, so he was a maths brain. And so he just did the deep dive. He read every... I mean, you know the textbooks better than I do, but he read every textbook. I’m sure he read your book.
And he does that for every part of his life he goes into. He goes all in. He does nothing else. I mean, even basketball... there was the BNL, the... I think it’s the Burnett Neighborhood Library, near him.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Ed William
And he would go there. He’d play basketball every day, and when he couldn’t play, or when it was night or whatever, he’d go to the library and he’d pore over basketball manuals, coaching manuals, training manuals, fitness manuals, whatever. But also, who were the good players locally? Who’s getting name-dropped on the forums? It was quite funny. So he said he was constantly browsing SoCal forums to find the names of the people he needs to be one better than if he’s going to get into college. And actually, I was researching this book, I spent hours and hours on SoCal forums finding the names, and finding when he was mentioned and stuff. But it goes back to the point we said earlier, about he likes a challenge, and... he has a pathological need to win, which is how he’s got as far as he did, and he will go all in.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what were some of the surprising things? Obviously you’ve already described how we brought you into the project. What surprised you the most?
Ed William
I’d actually say... I mean, we’ve done a lot on David’s story. I’d never written a book before, so that whole process was surprising, beginning to end. I mean, if I look back at my first draft, which I thought was pretty good at the time... I had a quick look at it earlier, and it is so embarrassing how bad it is. Which I hope is a process every writer thinks about their first draft... I don’t know. You might...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I certainly did.
Ed William
Yeah, same thing. I suppose I was most surprised, in the writing process, how much of the book comes together in that last 5%. Like the difference between what the book was long past the first draft, when it was effectively 95% done in terms of the structure and that sort of thing, and how much you then squeeze out of the final parts of the process. And actually how the style... You know, the style I use in the book is very different from how I write on my Substack. I write about films on my Substack, as sort of my first love, and I actually write in a completely different style there. For the book, it wasn’t so much a conscious decision as... a style emerges that fits the material. You know, in the first draft I was trying to write it the way that I write online, which is a little bit more, maybe not flowery, but cerebral, I suppose.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
And it didn’t fit the material. And with the help of Dylan, who was my editor, who’s like... “Dylan’s your editor? Then your floor’s pretty high.” Like, it’s sort of a... yeah. And it sort of lands on this style that I wasn’t expecting to land on, but that I think really fits the subject.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Briefly, what were you expecting, writing your first book, right? What was the transformation like? I’ve written four, as you know. I just completed my first fiction, which Dylan is going to tear apart, thank God. And I absolutely... like, you looked at my first attempts, which I was, you know, “Hey, of course, this fiction ain’t so hard.” Oh, they were horrible, horrible. And the thing that I love about the book, and the way you chose to write it, was what you just said. I read a lot, and I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies. It’s a very different style. What was it? Was that part of the transformation? It’s just like, “Okay, this is the way I normally write, but this is what I’m hearing, so I’ve got to completely revamp the way this gets written.”
Ed William
Yeah, yeah, I think so. When you look back at these things, you then explain it away in a way that sounds like it was all pre-planned, whereas these things are much more... you’re fucking around and then something sticks, effectively. But after lots of backs and forth with Dylan, and thinking about it, talking about it... So the style is very sort of direct, uncompromising, quite profane, going back to how much David swears. Punchy, quite gritty style, no pretension, hopefully. And there’s four reasons, I think, why we landed on it. The first is that it suits David’s voice. It’s how he speaks. It wouldn’t work if I’m having these long, flowery, cerebral sentences. That’s not him. That’s not him.
Two, it suits the story. You know, the most attractive... I’m sure this is what appealed to you about David’s story initially, is that it is a story. If this read like some dusty journalistic biography of Churchill that my dad’s got in his... you know, the dozens of war biographies my dad’s got in his bookshelf back home, it wouldn’t... I’d be doing his story a disservice.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Ed William
Should it... It reads like fiction, but it’s true, is what I wanted it to be anyway. So that was two. Three was... well, I’ve forgotten three, but I’ll skip to four. Was that... I’d like to think that... Oh, sorry, I’ll go back to three. Three is that no one knows who I am. Relatively speaking, more people know who David is, but, you know, the size of David’s audience... I want far more people to read the book. And so the book needed to be something. It couldn’t just be a vanilla, by-the-numbers, routine thing. It needed to feel different. It needed to feel unusual. It needed to feel sort of like, “Huh, this is a new way of approaching this.”
And then the final reason, actually, is that I think David’s arc... There’s a lot of bad stuff going around about young men at the moment, incels and all that sort of stuff. And I think lots of men and young men are looking for a role model. And I think David’s story genuinely is... I’m always hesitant to use the word “inspirational”, because as soon as you say, like, “an inspirational biography”, you think, “Okay, every biography, this is...” Do you know what I mean?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
But I think for a certain young man reader, it genuinely is. And I wanted to use a style that was unpretentious and that was direct, and that, you know, younger readers, teenagers, could engage with.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I showed the manuscript to a friend of mine who’s very erudite. He loves to read. He particularly likes to read biographies and autobiographies. And he sat with it and read most of it in a couple hours. And he came back and he went, “What else has this author done?” And I was like, “Actually, this is his first book.” And he goes, “You know, get the fuck out of here.” Because he basically said, “This makes David alive to me.” And he said to me, “I could think...” And he referenced some other biographies, and he said, “This might actually become a new way of writing biography, because it is very different.” I remember when I first read it, I was like, “Whoa, Ed, why the fuck am I giving this guy... Ed, what have you done?” But then the more I read it, the more perfect I found it, because I think you’re absolutely right. Authenticity. You know, everyone talks about it, right? You have to be authentic, you have to be authentic, and very few people pull it off. How did a nice young Brit, with a very different background, how did you manage to write in what I think is a quite incredible and vivid and alive voice that is very much David?
Ed William
Oh, well, thank you. I hadn’t heard that story, so that’s good to hear. Thank you. But I mean, I interviewed David for this project over five days in total. And then again, I read a draft of the book up to him over several days. So I had dozens of hours of interviews with David. Plus, he went through a spurt in 2021 where he did a lot of podcasts. He has a YouTube channel, he posts things on his X. So there’s a lot of David speaking out there. So I did my due diligence. I read that, I listened to that over and over again. I got a transcript, I read it over and over again. I tried to start my scenes, my stories, with what David had told me, word for word, and then I’d change it completely. But it meant that I was building out of something that was true to his voice. I tried to use him as the starting point at all times. I tried to completely extinguish myself from the book, basically. There’s an author’s note, but other than that, I am not in the book. I’m not there. It is David is in the book. With one caveat, in that I just couldn’t help film popping up in the book. So, you know act quotes...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know he loves films too.
Ed William
Well, he’s a movie guy as well.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Ed William
Exactly. Exactly. So I felt like I wasn’t doing him a disservice by doing that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
So, you know, act titles are film quotes, and films are weaved all the way through. There’s lots of little Easter eggs, little mini quotes or whatever.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And did you think of it cinematically? Did you think of it that way, in the way you were structuring the story? Because you pointed out that you kind of decided you were going to write it like it was fiction, because there’s a lot of exciting stuff in this story. But was that the vision? Like, “I want to see this on screen”?
Ed William
Yeah, yeah, of course. I tried to visualise it as I went. And I was reading a lot of biographies as I went, but I actually found thinking of different films as I went helped me more, just because that’s how my brain works. I talked about Into the Wild...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
What are some of the other movies that inspired you?
Ed William
Yeah. So I suppose there’s three sort of buckets. It’s a Pursuit of Happyness story. It’s a Good Will Hunting story. It’s, you know, there’s that out. But I think more interestingly, I remember hearing this thing where, when Spielberg made Raiders of the Lost Ark, he was like, “Why don’t we just... don’t include the boring bits? What if it just moves? What if it just keeps on moving?” And I was like, “Well, why does this book need to be 400 pages? Why couldn’t it be 200 pages and keep on moving?” Same with, like, Mad Max: Fury Road. And I said, “God, that would be quite cool to do a biography sort of in that style.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
And then the other thing: I heard someone describe E.T. as, like, a micro epic, in the way that it’s a story about one boy and an alien, and it’s, you know, mini, but something about it, something ineffable about it, is epic. It’s sort of this, like, sweeping tale, human tale. I can’t articulate it better than that. But I was thinking of David’s story as a micro epic, in that it’s just one man’s story. And other biographies I read, like, ended with... I read one biography, which is sort of the closest comp I could find, about... I’ve forgotten his name, but he grew up in bad circumstances, but then it ended with him taking down bin Laden or something. You know, and that is an epic.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
And that’s not David’s story. But I tried to find a way to bring the epic into a micro story. I don’t know. That’s a vague answer, but it’s what I was thinking anyway. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And so now that you’ve gotten to sort of live inside David’s head, inside David’s world, if somebody said they bought your book, and they looked at you and they said, “Ed, like, give me the too long, didn’t read. What’s David really like? What’s his essence?”
Ed William
What’s his essence? Relentless. Relentless. In everything. Yeah. Relentlessly ambitious. Relentlessly determined to provide for his family. Relentlessly determined to succeed.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Relentlessly self-critical.
Ed William
Relentlessly self-critical. Absolutely.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Relentlessly “I can do better.”
Ed William
Yes, 100%. And so can you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right. Yes. That’s a really important addition, right? And one of the things that I hope the book achieves is, there are a lot of kids out there right now, and they don’t even have to be in his dire circumstances, right? And reading the book, I think, will inspire them: “Wow, look at what he overcame. And, you know, here I am sitting in Greenwich, Connecticut. Mom and Dad are both doing well and helping me with my schoolwork. I better be a little relentless myself.” How much of that do you think is innate versus learned?
Ed William
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently, because I just have a daughter who’s now 14 months.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I know.
Ed William
And we have some friends who have daughters who are around the same age. And I think before, I always wanted to think that a lot was nurture…
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Then you had a child…
Ed William
… and I’m quickly realising that there’s probably a little bit more nature in there. My wife and I always joke, because my wife is much more down to earth and a problem solver than I am. I’m a bit up in the clouds. And so I want the baby... I mean, she can be whatever she wants to be, this is a joke, but, like, I always like the idea of our daughter being, you know, like me, loving films or books, or being sort of more cerebral. Whereas Megan, you know, would love our daughter to be scrappy, and out in the world getting stuff done, and grubby knees. And we always joke that, like, Megan’s winning. And I could nurture our little one however I want, but her nature is she wants to be out being scrappy.
So to go back to David, I think he didn’t have the nurture. So does it have to be nature? I’m sort of thinking as I’m talking here, but the only trouble with saying it’s nature is it implies a lack of agency. It implies that you’ve just got what you’re given, which is clearly not true. David’s story is clear evidence against that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly.
Ed William
So I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is. It’s both.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. I think epigenetics is an interesting way to look at it. Like, yeah, the gene is there, but it needs to be turned on or off. And I think that your book shows those genes getting turned on, right?
Ed William
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The kind of shame he felt when he didn’t fight the bully, and that was brought on by his relative saying, “Yeah, no, we don’t roll that way.” And then he’s like, “Okay.” And that one got turned on. As you were talking, though, it reminded me of the funny story, probably apocryphal, about a British lord who said, “Before I was married, I had six theories on how to raise children and what they would be like.” He goes, “Now I have six children and no theories.”
Ed William
Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Because even brothers and sisters raised in the same household... in many studies, they find them to be as dissimilar as the neighbour kid.
Ed William
Interesting. Interesting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And so it’s always fascinated me, because, you know, there’s a whole school of thought that we’re blank slates, right? You can make us. In the middle of the 20th century, behaviourism was the dominant school of psychology. And, you know, the practitioners would say, “Just give me six babies. Tell me what you want them to be. If you want him to be a lawyer, I’ll make him a lawyer. You want a doctor, I’ll give you a doctor.”
Ed William
So it was all nurture.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
All nurture.
Ed William
Interesting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Guess how that turned out. And, you know, the research on the more nature side, that replicates, that proves out, etc. But like you said, I believe that it isn’t just automatic, right? Agency is required. And you can be the brightest, most gifted, talented individual in the world, and if you are not agentically going after those gifts that you have, they wither and die.
Ed William
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing with David as well is, even though he didn’t have the parental guidance that many of us have, he was very good at identifying an opportunity when he found one, from someone who could fill that role. So one of my favourite things about the book, which again I didn’t realise until I spoke to lots of people and did my research, is that there’s lots of people in David’s life who just appear for one moment, one conversation or whatever, and a combination of their kindness and generosity, and David’s ability to realise “I’m getting something here that I could use”, has such an outsized impact. So, like, there’s one teacher called Ms Schught, who I spoke to. It’s so interesting, because David had told me about Ms Schught, an English teacher. After David had got into the Academy, he needed his SATs to be a certain score. And David likes, unsurprisingly, given everything we’ve said about him, maths and sciences. Black and white.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, yeah.
Ed William
No bullshit. No floaty, you know, essays which could be right, could be wrong.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right, yeah.
Ed William
Right or wrong. So English was never his forte. Never liked it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right, right.
Ed William
And he had to get his English score up. And he was just despairing, because he just thought, “I can’t do this. I cannot do this.” And he told me about Ms Schught as this incredible figure who gave him absolutely everything. You know, he spoke so highly of her as someone who mentored him, gave him just what he needed to get over the line on his English score. And I spoke to her and she said, “Oh, of course I remember David. David was one of the special ones.” She speaks so highly of him. But she said, “I gave him one hour, two hours I gave him. I gave him so little.” And she was shocked that David remembered it with such intensity, because she said, “You know, I really cared for him, but I was doing my job. I just gave him an hour.” But it meant so much to him. And then he keeps on referring to it all the way through his life. Later in life, he needs to pass some tests that had more of an English component, and he goes back and he’s thinking of that moment. He keeps on using that memory throughout his life. Which, yeah, it was cool.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The thing that I think about a lot with him, to pick up on what you’re saying: he will relentlessly go after something, to a point where... like, I love rabbit holes, as you know, and I will spend days, sometimes weeks, trying to figure something out. He puts me to shame. I mean, honestly, one of the first times, after we became friends, we were chatting with each other, and he starts breaking out all these... “You know, in What Works on Wall Street you say this, but I think if you refer to these papers that I read over here...” I’m like, “Wow, okay, good for you.” What do you think about the multiplicity of his interests?
Ed William
Yeah, that was another thing that sort of hooked me on the story. There’s sort of an aggregate effect of everything he’s excelled at that is just ridiculous, to be honest. And I think it goes back to what you were saying, that he’ll just do the work. He’ll do the deep dive on whatever it is he’s doing. Go back to what you were saying about PhDs: he didn’t have a maths PhD, and he was doing cryptology, and he only got into cryptology at very late notice, because he was planning to do the submarine programme.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Ed William
Which in itself is incredibly elite. I mean, there would have been some good chapters in the book if he’d done it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
But that didn’t work out. One of the various setbacks. And he’s like, “Well, what do I do now?” And he chats to someone and gets advised to give cryptology a go, because he’s got a mathematics degree, and he’s barely heard of it. I mean, obviously they would have covered it briefly in the Academy, but it’s not something... And he then goes deep, and PhD people are sceptical, whatever. But then, right before he does medicine, when he’s already accepted medicine as a... he does cryptology for a few years and then switches to do medicine. And his final posting, he’s agreed to do medicine, so he should really be coasting, because he knows he’s not going to be a cryptologist. So he’s put in, effectively, a think tank for about six months. And he has a mentor called Sil Gonzalez, who I also spoke to, who’s an amazing guy, and apparently Sil said that the PhD person came in and was like, “This kid has got it. This kid is smart.” And it’s just because he put the work in.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And what’s interesting too, to me, is he doesn’t have contempt for certification. I mean, after all, he is MD and he has all these advanced certs on robotic surgery and everything else. But it’s sufficient but not enough, would be the way I would put it, with the way David looks at the world.
Ed William
Yeah. There’s an element, of course, of, like, you do it to prove you can.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
You know, David is a DO rather than an MD, doctor of osteopathy. And medicine has these arcane things where there’s more MDs than there are DOs.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Ed William
DOs are newer. This is slightly less prestigious. So when David is taking his board exams, he’s like, “I’m gonna fucking do the MD exam as well, to prove that I’m as good as these guys.” And of course he nails it. He nails both of them. But yeah, there’s definitely an element of, “Yeah, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna show him.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And then, of course, he goes on for the specialised training. Is that in the book, or no?
Ed William
So the book ends... I was thinking, I wasn’t sure where to end the book. Is this giving it away? I don’t think it’s giving it away, really. The book ends with him in 2017, with him fulfilling the man-of-the-house promise. I’ll say that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
So that’s just when he’s graduating as a surgeon. So we include one surgery scene in the book, but then specialisation afterwards, that’s for the sequel.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
How much of an impact do you think the Navy had on David as a person?
Ed William
As a person? Good question. For his life, enormous. Absolutely enormous. I spoke to his sponsor... They have sponsor parents at the Naval Academy, just people who... they can go for a hot meal and get their washing done, and they’re local. And I spoke to his sponsor mum, a woman named Maureen, and she was a 70s Vietnam hippie protester, you know. And she said to me, “The last thing I ever expected was to have any sort of relationship with a military institution.” And she’s like, “But the difference that it makes to these people’s lives, in terms of how they can go on, even if they don’t stay in the military...”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
The network... And I very much found everyone I spoke to from the military was, “He’s one of ours. We’re going to give you everything you need on this man.” So I think on his life, enormous. It made his career. As a person, maybe not as much as you’d think. He’s such a strong personality.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
He is.
Ed William
He’s such a strong personality. And speaking to people from his childhood, I think he was still like that then. I think he has always had that in him. He’s become more confident, certainly, but that comes from success.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
So whether it transformed him as a person, I’m not sure it did. It definitely transformed his life.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
He once joked to me that if I was in the military, any branch, he goes, “You’d be in Fort Dun or the...” But one of the reasons we get along so well is I do see a little bit of that, or a lot of that, in him. But what mitigates it for me is he’s right. What I love about him is it wasn’t just what is wrong with it.
Ed William
It’s how he can fix it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly. He’s not a yapper. You know, there’s so much of that online, where “this is wrong and that is wrong”, and of course they offer no solution. I don’t honestly think David is looking for wrong. He just notices it quickly because he’s a very bright guy, but then immediately goes into “how do I solve this” mode. And I think one of his annoyances, to use a polite word, is he can see so clearly how what he’s suggesting is a vastly superior way to do it. And he would test those out on me, and I’m like, “You mean they don’t do it that way already?”
Ed William
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And he’s like, “No, they don’t.” And so he is a really interesting mix, to me, of a deeply analytical person but also a deeply emotional person who really cares. And it’s not because he wants it done his way. It’s because he wants his patients to have the absolute best care. He wants the nurses to be on a schedule that is not going to overburden them or overtax them, etc. And so he would run the solutions by me, and most of the time I would simply say, “I just can’t believe it isn’t already done that way.” And then, of course, comes the slew of fucks.
Ed William
Have you noticed... because you’ve been doing these calls for, was it three years, if not more? Have you noticed... Because, you know, David, we should say, is, in relative terms, a young man. I mean, he’s 42 or something.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, from the perch of 66, he’s a child. He’s a baby.
Ed William
And his career’s developed. Have you noticed, like, a change in how those conversations have gone?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, he has become much more tolerant.
Ed William
Interesting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And it happened in my life too. I, when I was younger, was quite a proselytiser, and it was my way or the highway. You know, it’s like the Eliot poem: “I shall tell you all. I shall tell you,” when the woman looks at him and says, “That isn’t what I meant at all.” And so I noticed that I went through a period where I really became keenly aware of the fragility of all humans, myself included. And I’m seeing that sort of calmer approach with David now. He still gets fired up, there’s no doubt about that, but he is much more patient. I think it’s because he’s been in these systems for so long, he realises, “Okay, incremental. I’ll settle for it. Right? If I can get these five or ten things in, then the system is going to be that materially better.”
Ed William
Yeah. Got to play the game.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right. And in earlier conversations he was, as you pointed out, black or white, yes or no, good or bad. And if it wasn’t perfectly good, it was bad. And I definitely got that sense that he has become more wise in that regard. It doesn’t take anything away from his talent, his ambition, etc. And I often wonder, and I want to get your opinion, where do you think David ends up?
Ed William
I’ve wondered this. At one point I thought, you know, would he go into politics? And I think he’d find it too frustrating.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I think so too.
Ed William
I think he’d find it too frustrating. So it’s interesting, actually, because when I first met David in 2023 (summer was when I flew out to meet him), at the time I thought he was going to be relentlessly all in, exclusively on medicine.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
And actually at that time he was thinking of businesses, and he had all these... he was so excited, all these business ideas. Which made me think that there will be a next chapter. What that is, I don’t know. I don’t think it will be medicine forever. I mean, I don’t know enough about the... Presumably there’s a whole medical entrepreneurial world out there in America which I just don’t know about.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, there is.
Ed William
So some sort of medical company would be my guess, but I have no idea. But I think he’ll want to find a new mountain to climb. David likes having a mountain to climb. You know, because he was a general surgeon... The book ends in becoming a general surgeon. He went back into training to become a vascular surgeon. You know, he was a cryptologist, he was doing really well, wanted a new mountain to climb. Went into medicine. General surgeon, doing really well, wanted a new mountain to climb. A vascular surgeon, where he’s now doing, by all accounts, very well. I’m sure he’ll find himself a new mountain.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. To me... and, you know, he’s very involved. And obviously, I think I asked him once, I said, “Are you extra involved because of the situation?” He said, “Maybe at first, but no. These young people, my children, mean the world to me, and I really want to try to give them everything I didn’t have. But that’s no longer the reason. I genuinely love doing it. I love coaching my son, I love helping my daughter with her gymnastics.” And yeah, he’s just... I wouldn’t say peripatetic, but he needs to be moving.
Ed William
Yeah, absolutely. And actually on that, there’s a moment towards the end of the book where he meets his first daughter, who is his now-wife’s from a previous relationship. But yeah, she’s David’s daughter. And Kim, his wife, says, “I want you to come and meet my daughter.” They’re sort of newish in the relationship, and David is so nervous about it. He’s just thinking about... he knows from his childhood, like, what... Mum’s new man, how much that can fuck you up. And he’s absolutely determined that he’s not going to be that. But he’s really thinking about it. He’s thinking about, “How can I...?” And she was a Peppa Pig nut at the time, so he was like, “Okay, I’m going to, like, talk to her about Peppa Pig.” He was planning his way in, to sort of show that he was... And he was thinking about it so much that he didn’t realise until it happened. He’s like, “You don’t need to, like, think. This is just so... I love this. This is so... This isn’t something you plan for, right? I love this girl, and she’s part of my life.” And he just thinks, “Oh gosh, why didn’t I... why didn’t I have that? Like, who were these men from my childhood who couldn’t see how good this is?” And then, yeah, he’s had two more kids since, and by all accounts is very much the same.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So if I ask you to write another book... what mistakes did you make on this one? Hopefully you’ll make novel mistakes on the next book. But what mistakes did you make with this one that, obviously, you learn from and won’t repeat?
Ed William
Good question. What mistakes did... I mean, I felt like I was... I don’t know if you find this from your multiple books, but I found writing a book is just a series of existential crises punctuated by, like, brief moments of self-belief, which evaporate the moment you sort of get to the next page.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
You know, I think in my first draft I tried to force it into something that the story didn’t want it to be. I tried to put myself in it too much. I needed to sort of swallow my ego, step away from the story, stop trying to impress people, and let the story emerge in the way that it wants to rather than how I want it to.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And have you found that you’re better at getting into somebody else’s head now, after having done this project?
Ed William
I mean, yeah. I haven’t become Derren Brown, but... I wouldn’t say I can read people better or anything. I think I do, like, enjoy thinking about the story potential of people when I meet them and they’ve had interesting lives.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah.
Ed William
You know, because suddenly everything’s a potential subject.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
Which sounds slightly serial-killery, but... It’s weird writing a book, because it’s both incredibly difficult, long night of the soul stuff, but also, as long as you just get up and keep writing, eventually a book appears.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Ed William
Like, you just got to keep doing it. You just got to keep on doing it, and be ruthless with yourself, and have a good editor. And so it sort of made me feel like it doesn’t have to be a big... You can just start. I could just start again and just keep writing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. What kind of book would you like to write next?
Ed William
I’ve got two ideas. As I keep saying, I love film, so I’d like to do something film. I’ve got dozens and dozens of film books at home. What? I don’t know. I had some ideas. I’ll speak to you about one idea which I still like, but I’m not sure. I’m trying to find a story that isn’t there in it, maybe. Something film-related, I don’t know what. Or I have been playing around with fiction as well, because I feel like this book is quite a good stepping stone into fiction, because I was trying to think of it with a fiction writer’s mindset. So I don’t know. Another book, yes. What it is, I’m still working that out.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I originally conceived of telling David’s story as a movie. This make a good movie?
Ed William
Oh yeah. It’d be an amazing movie. Yeah, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Now I’m going to pull a trick on you. As you know, my final question is: we make you emperor of the world, and you can’t kill anyone, you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp, but we give you a magical microphone, and you can say two things into it that are going to incept everybody in the world. Whenever their next morning is, they’re going to wake up and think, “You know, I just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times, I’m going to act on them.” But here’s the curveball I’m going to throw at you. I want you to give me two that you think David would give the world.
Ed William
So the book ends with David returning to where he went to medical school, and he does the keynote address at the commencement. The commencement address, is that the phrase in America? Yeah, just the commencement address. And the first thing he says is, “Strive to better.” And the second thing he says is, “Treat everyone...” He said this was advice he got given by a doctor: “Treat everyone as if they’re your mum and dad.” And, like, I really like that. You know, treat everyone as your family. I think that’s what he’d say.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I like that.
Ed William
Be better and treat everyone as your family.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And when are we releasing the book?
Ed William
The 8th of December. Tuesday, the 8th of December.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So it’s coming quickly.
Ed William
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Ed, I love the book. I think you did a great job. I love David. So I think everyone is going to love this book.
Ed William
I hope so. Thank you very much.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Thanks for coming on.
Ed William
Thank you.
Great book! Can't wait to listen to this episode! 💚 🥃