10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

0:00 Happy ten years. Happy ten year anniversary, Ben. It's crazy, it's been ten years. I know. Here we are, brought you down here to Silicon Valley to uh record our ten year anniversary holiday special here. I wanted a special place. Yeah, what are we doing? You keep like teeing up. Oh just come down. Oh we'll just record it here and like Clearly we're not at your house. I was actually thinking uh we should try and find the Silicon Valley house. The early Bachman Aviato. This Aviato. Aviato. Aviato.

0:31 No, the reason I brought you down here is I booked us A very special place to record. It's actually right over here. Is this the Google house? It's the house.

0:44 The where they had their first office in the garage. This is Google's first office right here. They gave it to us for the day. Like we can do our holiday special in it. Come on in. Who got the truth?

1:06 Is it you, is it you, is it you Who we got Now Is it you, is it you, is it you? Down! Straight.

1:15 Another story on the way Welcome to the fall 2025 season finale of Acquire. the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts.

1:32 Well listeners Today we're gonna do something very different than our holiday specials of years past. We've received a bunch of requests over the years to do an acquired episode on acquired itself. And to unpack why acquired worked when ninety nine percent of podcasts do not.

1:49 But it's always felt a little bit strange to me, and we've always shied away from analyzing our own company. Yeah. But then this year we turned ten years old and thought, Well Maybe it's time for

2:00 Something. At least a sort of uh pause and reflection to shout out the Coca Cola episode on our journey to this point. And why acquired has worked. And so we thought. Well If we're gonna do something

2:13 We should bring someone in to do it with us. And we'd want someone who is great at dissecting the mechanics behind teams or companies. Someone who distills complexity into simplicity. Само knows how to tell a great story.

2:27 And there was really only one choice. Michael Lewis. Altar of Moneyball, Liar's Poker, the Blind Side, the Undoing Project, going if and on and on and on. And of course, host of his own podcast, Against the Rules. And Ben, you and I have looked up to Michael forever, so

2:45 This was really special. Yes. And then of course there's The venue. We thought it'd be a fitting way to cap off the year of our three part Google series.

2:53 to record in the literal garage where that nearly four trillion dollar company got started. Yes, indeed. Well, listeners, if you want to know every time an episode drops, vote on future episode topics and get corrections on past episodes, check out our email list at acquire dot fm slash email. And that email list just got a whole lot better with our first overhaul in five years. So you'll now get episode summaries, our big takeaways, and exclusive photos from our research process. That's acquired.fm slash email.

3:23 Chat about this episode with us and the whole acquired community in Slack. acquire.fm slash slack. And if you want more acquired, check out our interview show ACQ2. Our last episode was with Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of the New York Times dealbook, host of CNBC Squawk Box. and author of 1929.

3:41 That's ACQ two in any podcast player. So with that This show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and the show is for informational and entertainment purposes. Only. With that.

3:53 Onto our conversation with Michael Lewis. Well, Michael Thank you for joining us. Total pleasure. We have a little something since this is our ten year anniversary that we're celebrating. That we need to do.

4:05 Before we start. You went to Princeton. I went to Princeton. Yep. My senior thesis. would become impactful for acquired. I was a French literature major.

4:16 I wrote my thesis. On the history of Dom Parignon. And The marketing history of Shakespeare is how much you're comments. A little different than yours. The French department into letting me do this. And what, probably twelve, thirteen years later, we made our LBMH episode.

4:38 And uh It was a big moment for a choir. Muet Shandon has just released The twenty fifteen Vintage.

4:47 And Dom Paranyam, twenty fifteen is the year we started. So I thought you were gonna say uh that the th that the effect that the Princeton thesis had on on acquired. I didn't think it was as specific as that, but I feel like when I'm listening to your episodes, I'm listening to someone who's worked for up to a thesis. Thesis like immersion in a subject. Well I can tell you our episodes are much better than my actual thesis was. But that is exactly how it feels. But then that is the process we go through. Yeah. And cramming for finals the night before there's a lot of like academic feelings that happen as we get close to recording day.

5:21 So um It's your show and I don't want to take it over. But I but I wanted I wanted to start by saying That I didn't discover until this year. Uh disc in July. Uh uh I was at Google Camp.

5:34 Which is kind of a good way to discover acquired. Uh and We we should talk about where we are now, too. And we're we are sitting in the Google A garage where exactly what happened in the Google garage. So this was the nice it's a nice idea. Like literally uh Susan Wujski lived here. Uh she had I think just bought the house. She had just bought the house. And was looking to

5:57 sublet part of it? Yeah. Like just make m s some extra money on other people using the house. On the Stanford campus. That there was space available here. And so Larry and Sergey's first desks when they got kicked out of Stanford's offices were right there. Right here. All right. I actually think this actual door desk sawhorse is

6:19 the one that they were using'cause Google pulled it out of storage for us. So I'm at this camp with a lot of kind of well known people and a prominent CEO. Uh Thank you. And I didn't know what he was talking about. And I went and listened, I can't remember what I listened to first.

6:37 I think it might have been the Morris Chang. Uh episode. But the I had about eight different reactions to it, all positive. I and I thought this is a it's kind of amazing what you all are doing. So I then I was from July until now, I've listened to maybe ten of the episodes, which is a lot of a lot of hours of listening to this. The first thing struck me, could not believe you were getting away with with a four hour podcast. And um

7:02 And I couldn't believe that even after four hours, I was still kinda looking for even more. That that you you created you created the environment with the podcast that I tried to create with the book. You grab the listener. Like I try to grab a reader. And get'em to the state of mind where they'll let you take them. Anywhere.

7:19 uh and teach them about stuff that they don't even know they want to learn about. I think we're if we're gonna we're doing this as the tenth anniversary sort of celebration. Please, yeah. I'm honored and I feel like kinda like I'm a little out of my depth here because I'm just a new listener and I haven't listened to all of it. I'm hardly the world's authority. On your On your Podcast.

7:38 And I didn't prepare at all except to listen to it? Except I did one thing. And that was I went back and listened to your very first post. Oh wow. Oh wow. Just to compare. Be kind, please. It is shocking.

7:53 How different it is. From you where where you start from where you have you probably haven't ended up, but where you are now. So I'm gonna start by this ten year journey. I think I can see some things you've learned. Mm-hmm.

8:07 But I I wanna know what you think you've learned. Give me let's do the ten lessons from the ten year ten year journey. Do you have yours like crystallized?'Cause I don't want to taint you. No, no. I do have it's actually one big thing. Uh and Um And I'll and if you if you say it, I'll acknowledge that you, you know, sunk my battleship and I have nothing to but it's it's I'm I'm I'm curious what you think. There's no way that first thing you did.

8:33 was ever going to become a hit. Well it's I'm I'm curious if you think w I've always believed Something that's always been there from the beginning. is the magic between me and Ben.

8:44 That's interesting to me. You all meet at uh like a Passover Seder. Yes. And you're colleagues being colleagues at a V C firm? Yep. I'll come back to that. I wanna come I wanna talk a little bit about you as investors, but we'll come back to it and how that's different from being a podcaster. But At what point do you decide that oh there's a kind of odd chemistry here?

9:04 We really just wanted to spend more time together. It was the one of these things where You're both straight. Yeah. Yes. Okay. This is both married. It's not a romantic relationship. No, we we like to say that we each have two spouses. We have our actual romantic spouses that we have families with. And then we have we have to be able to do that. But like David and I shared a bank account before my wife and I shared a bank account. So are either of your spouses threatened by the relationship? No.

9:28 Yeah, yeah, I mean a little bit. My spouse loves it because She doesn't actually want to spend that much time with me. She likes to like all the stuff we do on acquired, I used to just talk at her. And she wasn't interested. That is true. My wife loves it because I get to talk to, you know. Although she gets the rough draft. Like my wife won't listen to episodes because she's like I've I've already heard four versions of the episode. And unfortunately I heard like four worse versions. And because I endure that and give you feedback, the listener actually gets the better version. Right. So you so you meet you meet and there's a chemistry. Yeah. Explain that chemistry. Like w what is it that you when you're

10:07 What is it that makes you excited to see each other? David knew all the Apple rumors in real time just like I did. Uh you had read all the latest Stratekery posts. We bonded over Ben Thompson originally. And I think Yeah. You can tell me if this is Mutual, but

10:23 I looked up to you'cause you were doing a thing that was mysterious to me, which was venture capital. I was a software engine and I got hired to work at a venture firm to do some incubation work, but I didn't know anything about like the real job of venture capital. And here's David, someone who's just a few old years older than me, like doing that thing, but kind of in my like peer age group. And I could I could like lean over and be like what are they talking about? Well it's I felt I kind of felt like a fraud in a lot of ways as a like I I repressed this deep down. Like uh but if I'm honest with myself, I think I felt like a fraud as a VC because I'd never But I d I w I went to Princeton. I was a French literature major. I worked on Wall Street. I worked briefly at the Wall Street Journal and then I became a venture capitalist. I had no qualification to ever

11:07 Coded a coded, or you ever done any I took some C S classes in college, but like I'd never built anything. And so I was like, Ben built all these things. Like you built the the this for that website. You had products that millions of people use and I was like I'm just masquerading here. They bend new stuff. And it was exciting for you to to know about. Yes. Did you feel the David knew stuff? Absolutely. What kind of stuff?

11:35 Business. Really? It was just French general. It was No, no, no. I I only found out years into doing it acquired, it was a French lit. Major. Yeah. But that's important.

11:45 It ended up becoming this kind of broad curiosity. About things other than business and technology. I f I hear it in your program. I hear it in your podcast. So what I'm thinking of in my head is Coneman and Toversky. Uh that I wrote a book called The Undoing Project. And and and you could see if you could see two people. And then that got me thinking about collaboration. And they s I've had Exciting collaborations with people. And the feeling I get is

12:12 This person is making is bringing out a better version of me. Which is why I asked if your th spouses were threatened, because the because Coneman Taverski's spouses were threatened too strong a word, but they were very aware that the relationship that that was the most important in their lives was with Not with their spouse. But with with I got the sense from the undoing project that um

12:33 Conan and Taverski's relationship was very intense. Mm-hmm. I mean I I don't know that I would describe relationships. Yes, it was. And competitive. Danny Kahneman felt um was was always at r felt at risk of being

12:53 Um there was a status difference between the two of them. Right going into it. Uh everyone in the world thought Amos was the smartest person they'd ever been. You two didn't have that ever have any of that. Not for me. But you said you felt like a fraud. I think I felt lesser like there were a lot of things when we started doing Acquired where we were doing this like business analysis podcast, but I didn't know finance. Like it was. Which is funny. Because you become more you know, the keeper of the analysis on Acquired. Yeah. And I'm more the keeper of the story.

13:23 It's different though than a difference in status. I don't feel that you or I have ever felt like a difference in Status. And f and the number of like fights we've had or or real tension we've had is like Two, three ever. In ten years. I mean it's it's weirdly. And let's get to the lessons. What have you learned?

13:43 We started thinking about what have we learned From the companies we've covered that we've then applied. Yep. To acquire. In particular it's Acquired has clearly worked.

13:52 Why? And Does that why have something to do with the fact that we study the world's best companies? Like is there some osmosis that happens from the subject matter bleeding into the property itself? And so that's our frame. Okay, let's let's go with that frame. Yes. So the one the one I was gonna start with.

14:13 Is the NFL. The product is scarce. Hundred sixty two baseball games a year. It's called America's Past Time. You you pass a lot of time with it. But with the NFL

14:24 Because the product is Scarce and then they have very smartly cultivated that and engineered it. to be more scarce, more of an event driven. Spore.

14:35 That's made all the difference. And like to me is I look at what like what we do is insane for the podcasting industry. Like it's completely insane. We release The last Three years. We've released twelve episodes.

14:48 The next year we're gonna do eight. Eight episodes for the whole year. Now, as a hobbyist podcaster, what I get told is you have to be on all the time. Yep. And I I can't do it and so I'm not gonna do it. Podcasting is like your Second or third thing that you do, right? And you make more episodes, I think, per year than we do. That's correct. But they're just, you know, th th they're it's except for the scripted ones, which I do throw myself into. It really is I do no preparation and it is a conversation. And I don't do don't do very much of those. The scripted ones I I do put time into. And And But I it's it's a different sort of thing than what you're doing. It tends to be a very narrow little story that I'm telling.

15:22 You you didn't start out, though. We used to make twenty six episodes a year, you know uh they were forty minutes long to an hour twenty. And so how do you go from that to realizing and did you really learn it from the NFL or did you just do it and then starting to do it and then we covered the NFL and we were like aha. that this is what we're doing. Most of these things are actually I think are confirmation bias. We get some inkling that like we should continue to go in this direction. Like my in calling out Air Ms, it's because I think quality and scarcity have become an important part of acquired. And in some ways we like learned that from Hermes, but we covered Hermes last year. I think we l found our way to that probably four ish years ago, maybe five years ago, where we used to feel like

16:05 We were bad at podcasting because we couldn't make very many and because we didn't have a whole production team and we didn't have professional ad sales people and we didn't have to We weren't full time for a long time. Yeah. And at some point we kind of looked at each other and we were like Maybe if we just admit That we We are heavily constrained.

16:25 And then try to just lean into that constraint. uh in the way that Hermes leans into every single Birkenbag must be handmade by one artisan. And we're gonna build a business model around that. And it turns out to be a great business. We sort of thought Every episode is going to be entirely handcrafted by us, all the research, all the recording. We work with this amazing audio engineer Steven, who does the the like literal waveform editing, but you know, we go in and in a transcript highlight a thousand cuts per episode. Like it's this made with love.

16:56 Product. And it turned out we could actually build a big platform and a good business. out of something heavily constrained. But that's not where you start. No, no, no, no. So how do we show you? So that's just for people who don't know. Where you start is you're two guys who've met each other and and got a crush on each on each other. You're being you love being with each other. And you you're gonna you get this idea that oh would be really cool to do a podcast on

17:22 Corporate acquisitions that worked. Yeah. It worked. Well, it is an idea. I I would have started. You could easily have started the opposite corporate acquisitions that didn't, and you would have done much you'd have much more material. Which is what most press at the time was. Let's talk about how crappy this acquisition is. It's interesting to me that your first step. Right from the start is Positive. It's like what worked. Not what didn't work, it's what worked. That's because we were VCs and I was trying to build companies. I mean that the goal was create things that have enough value to get bought and or or go public. And when people

17:58 buy things, it's because they're working. So let's try to reverse engineer one. Right. So that's a different starting spot from almost all journalism. Yeah. In fact If most journalists started there. they'd be accused of hagiography of Yes, that but you but you because of where you where you're coming from.

18:17 And because you're thinking of this in very practical terms, like how why did this work? You do get away with it. It's just That first episode. You're almost like different people.

18:27 But I'm gonna hold back on what I think you learned. I wanna see if you get to it. So you we got two what's the third episode that you have learned some a lesson from? I think Berkshire we learned so many things from. We did this three part God, I have not listened to it and I am a big investor in Berkshire Hathaway. Good for you. So actually since when? I bought it right at in in the middle of the financial crisis.

18:53 Uh because I thought I I mean I had done a take I mean it's not it's a little Putting a little strongly, but oddly, I had written a takedown of Warren Buffett on the cover of the New Republic magazine. called the Temptation of St. Warren. You can probably de k dig it off off of the way back. What was your thesis? The thesis was that He may have started out being who he says he is.

19:15 But that he's become this very different thing in the marketplace. His money's not like other people's money. And you don't have a couple of things Warren Buffett has. And his money is valued differently, but secondly, he was willing. Yeah. I and the time bothered the hell out of me.

19:31 And what it happened was like the Goldman deal. He kept a he kept a CEO in place. Who I thought should not have been. Were you there? I was there. Yeah, you you lived through it. No, it was through our series. It turned me briefly, only briefly, actually, cynical about Warren Buffett. And then I came out of it and fell in love with him all over again. But I had written this thing. And pissed him off entirely. I mean like I it would clearly upset him. And then kind of started watching him for longer, and I thought, you know.

20:03 I just f liked him. Just liked him. You couldn't help but like him. So I started to soften. And whether we get to the financial crisis, I thought, well, his money's gonna be so valuable here that he uh what is needed is credit. And I think it might if he stays alive long enough, it might happen again soon. So you invested in Berkshire before the legendary deals coming out of the financial crisis. Yeah. And so I I bought a chunk of the A shares and I've just sat on them. And let you can I tell Warren Buffett's story? Yeah. I mean this is the little talk I'm a little bit out of school, but

20:32 Uh I've never met him. Uh I know he was really irritated with me, and then I I actually looked back at that. It's the only time I've ever looked back at a piece I wrote and I thought, I overdid that. And went right back to the New Republican and wrote another five thousand word thing about Warren Buffett, in which I basically apologized for the first piece. I bought these shares in 2008. When I was working on Going infinite.

20:53 I was working on the Sam Bankman Fried book. And um I was talking to A publicist. Completely unrelated to Warren Buffett.

21:03 And she said You know, I also represent Warren. And she said I told Warren that I've been talking to you. And he said, he has a question for you. And I said, what? He says, is he the is he the Michael Lewis who bought shares back in the National Coast? I swear to God. I swear to God. So this tells you something about Warren Buffett, more about Warren Buffett than me. And and he said he bought it like what the book value to s you know, that thing, that ratio. He bought it as cheap as it's ever been. And he says he says, but he made the best trade.

21:36 Then he says. So he's the Michael Lewis who Who sold. Some birth or half away. Two years ago and four years ago, and he was like

21:46 Why do you sell? So he's tracking I'm not going to be able to do it. I can't imagine tracking selling Vanguard here. No, no, no. And I said, well actually I actually just gave him the charity is what I is what I'd done. I would give giving the money away. That's and when he heard and she said that he'll be relieved to hear that kind of thing. It's like so can you imagine? Can you imagine that Warren Buffin is taking the time? To watch. who is coming in and out of the A shares.

22:11 And And thinking about it, I I mean I just thought He has that the he and Munger had that whole thing about don't put your money in an index fund, put your money in in in a big bundle of stocks, put it in a few stocks and watch those stocks like a hawk. It's like they they watch that thing in a way that like I just In history, has anybody ever done anything like that. I mean all these people are they're the maniacs. You don't build something like this for your own. So anyway, sorry I just digressed here, but you did you what did you learn from your Berkshire Hatha there are three episodes of Berkshire Hathaway. Well as it applies to acquired

22:43 We got really obsessed with the circle of competence. That It's okay to have a giant too hard pile. Uh there's a bunch of things that like I'm not intelligently saying no to say all the time would be like two hard pile. Every phone call we'd have would be. The the like the gas pile. The no pile.

23:05 And then the two hard pile. The two hard pile. I see. Okay. And it's okay to just like all the technology was a too hard part. Yeah, yeah. There might be something in here, but like I'm just Just too hard. It's basically admitting that like our opportunity cost is so high, like the the things that we say yes to are so awesome. That

23:24 it's okay to say too hard to just a giant amount of things. Yep. And that was really freeing once we started just like I mean truly unmute. So what's an example of something that you I I'm surprised you say this. One of the reasons besides just wanting to meet you, because you've been an inspiration to us forever, uh that I I wanted to to meet you a few months ago was Hollywood. Uh we've had Lots of opportunities to work with. Hollywood.

23:52 It keeps being does always invariably ended up in the too hard pile. Are you talking about doing episodes about how in how or d to become a movie star. Creating TV shows, creating TV shows, adapting into film the these stories into films. Uh they all sound good until we start digging in and then we're like the time it would take us to think through all the implications of this.

24:15 The answer almost always is we should just make another episode. That's a really intelligent w place to land.'Cause what they will do is woo you with their enthusiasm. And then take you down a rabbit hole. where you will spend years of your life.

24:33 And have nothing to show for. Michael's a very smart guy. You've been very successful. I've gone down the rabbit hole. Yeah. I mean I thought you'd knowing that wasn't didn't have a whole lot else better to do at the time. It's like between books. It's a palate cleanser. You don't have but a between books, period. You you know that yeah, I don't have that. I don't have a I don't have the machine you have. You've got an assembly line going. And it's a compounding asset. I mean, this is the craziest, craziest thing about podcasting, and like a giant amount of why this has worked for us is we do. A lot of work that looks a lot like the research and the writing of a book.

25:08 But when we make our book and we release it to the world. People click subscribe. And so when we release the next one, those same people go listen like it's Almost guaranteed we're always growing our base. Podcasting being an author.

25:21 There's loose compounding elements to it, but there's not a like literal. And I th so you're right. You're one of the few people who probably does have a brand. I'm going to move around America to the various arenas of ambition. Wall Street. Silicon Valley. Washington.

25:44 movie business sports But various things. And I'll naturally attract the audience that is interested in that arena. Yep. And then I'll drag them along to the others. And it hasn't really happened that way.

25:56 Even for you? Not really. Not really. Uh the books the books have a kind of Market. And it's a big market, big ish market, but it doesn't

26:05 I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book. feels like a another startup. And then I've got to go out and make it happen. Almost as if I've not written one. Exactly.

26:21 And then the audiences end up just being different. So It's just the way it is. But that's not true with you. That's not true. So every time If you were to take time off. to go do something in Hollywood, you'd be abandoning this

26:36 Glorious network. The opportunity cost is so high of spending a month not making an acquired episode because when we publish an episode of acquired, the base does come with us. Not all of it, but like I you know, we make epic systems about healthcare and all the people who listen to L VMH are now learning how doctor's office IT works. Right. So podcasts are unique in that it does have that true subscriber base. But unlike anything else where you click subscribe, there's not an algorithmic platform that disintermediates you. I mean, you think YouTube or uh Twitter or any of these, when someone clicks follow or subscribe, they're like It's like signal in the algorithm, but it's not.

27:14 guaranteed. But like you subscribe in Apple Podcasts or Spotify And Those people are actually subscribed and they're gonna get the next episode. Right. And they learn to trust you. Yeah. They learn to trust you that if you're interested, they'll be interested.

27:26 That we're th in fact what they're buying into is not the subject, but your interest in the subject. Yes, and I am terrified of betraying that trust. Like anytime we make an episode, I think of it as a churn opportunity. If we put this in the feed If we don't live up to the expectations that our listeners have. We will burn them and they wear us forever.

27:47 framework there's there's a strong element of terror. constantly terrified every time we make an episode. Every minute is a true opportunity. Are we letting people down? All right listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora.

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28:40 They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lagora's Bet Here is interesting, since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work. and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time. And they recently launched Lagora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And Ligora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Ligora numbers essentially

29:35 speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from twelve hundred legal teams in fifty countries. And crazily, they went from one million In about Eighteen months.

29:56 truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reach for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, You can learn more at Lagora.com slash acquired

30:18 And just tell'em that Ben and David sent you. Are you more terrified than you were two years ago? Yes. So you're growing the terror is growing. The terror is growing. At some point it's not gonna be a good thing. I mean it's it's good to be a little on edge. Yes, yes. But you don't want to get yourself in a situation where you feel like you had to do the same thing over and over again. Because eventually it will get old. We'll come back. This is we're gonna get to the bull and the bear case at the end of the year. But it's it's this is so back to your The lesson that you gleaned from Munger and and Buffett, it's okay to have a too hard pile. And you said, and the too hard pile is like doing things in Hollywood. But I when I asked the question, did you ever run across this? Have you run across this? Have you ever had a subject?

30:58 where you thought, ah, this is just too hard to do. Yeah. Oh yeah. What would be an example of that? We got pretty far down the line on doing an episode on the Fed. Yeah. And walked away from it.

31:08 Yeah. Uh so you walked away from it. Yeah. We might come back, but it's been kinda. Yeah, yeah, but I'm glad we didn't do it in the world. Although it's gonna violate your rule about doing newsy things. We always try and find things Must bi timelessness is like a must. Must. Everything we do must be Timeless, the company we're covering. Nothing's timeless. So what do you mean by that? It must be that like if you listen to this an episode that we make.

31:37 Five years after we made it. It's Eighty percent is relevant. Uh it's still it'll it will still be an important institution in the world. Right. But like a a C N B C article. is worth two percent of its original value within a month. Right. And we wanna be worth eighty percent of our original value five years from now, on any given piece of content. So you so does that mean you're picking institutions that you think will survive? Yes. Yes.

32:01 But okay, so that's like basically your general. So much of your stuff is tech and finance, where there's so much churn. Well, yes. This didn't used to be true. We we had not yet discovered this principle. But our real bangers are Timeless and timely. Doing Google this year was timeless and timely. Right. Having that

32:23 However you do it, that you're getting to something that I try to get to when I'm picking subjects, but you're doing it in a slightly different way. Um What I like what what gets m when my socks start to go up and down about a subject. is when I'm really interested in it. And nobody else is. There isn't that there aren't people it's not hot.

32:43 And I found with I think it's true of all I basically all my books. Couple maybe a couple exceptions, but a lot of the books. If I'm at a dinner party.

32:53 And someone asked me what I'm what are you working on? And After about sixty seconds, I can see their eyes glaze over. Like, why is he interested in that? You know, it's just not registering with them in any way. Yeah. And I've learned just to not even talk about it, because it kills my interest to watch it kill their interest. But I know why I'm interested.

33:13 And why it's important. And I'm not I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important. uh that that's a really good sign.

33:21 this is a difference between what you do and what we do. Because I feel like when I think through all your books There almost always a story of obscurity. that Once it becomes a Michael Lewis book. then it becomes a well known phenomenon. Moneyball. Like you are discovering these things that kinda nobody's talking about.

33:40 Whereas when we do something like Trader Joe's, someone says, What are you working on? And we're like Trader Joe's. They're like, I love Trader Joe's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is a difference. Your subjects are not obscure. Right. They're the most famous corporations in the world. People love it. Yeah.

33:56 But they don't really understand. A secret and hiding in plain sight. Uh people didn't understand Trader Joe's, or people didn't understand Google, we thought when we there's three things that make a great acquired episode. One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that ta takes a hero's journey, where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity. How it starts is this thing that nobody cares about and then it becomes the most important thing in the world. Right. Two is there's a secret hiding in plain sight. Like Costco. I think when the ordinary consumer sees Costco, they're like, Oh, I love Costco. But when someone who's listened to an a the acquired episode on Costco thinks about Costco, they see like all the gears turning of the machine. Like we there there has to be some way that we can expose something. And then our third criteria is it has to be important in the world. And I think that's something we picked up later. I mean we used to do these like little 10 million dollar acquisitions. And now when we're gonna go spend

34:47 two months of our life researching and making that like the acquired episode. It it has to be something worthy of the acquired stage. When did that happen? So I I'm a little unclear. Y I again getting back to this first episode you did and where you are now and the difference between them.

35:03 What sort of compelled you or propelled you into the current form of acquired? the decision to make it a business. And the decision to actually live off of what you were g what you earn from your podcast. So it had to work commercially. So then you m started to make these adjustments. Is that yes and no. There's um You're on the right track.

35:24 I like the Berkshire. Uh. I thought you were gonna say partnership as a lesson from it. So We did a series on Sequoia Capital. the venture firm. Yep.

35:35 I went full time on Acquired in 2020. Five years in. Ben didn't go full time until January Twenty-four, right? Correct. And a twenty-three being at twenty-four. You remained equal partners. Yes. Oh, it it wasn't a business when we started. It was just the like I mean, we didn't make money until our third year. But those three years while you're full time and you're part time. It was an equal.

35:55 Yes, David was uh never once raised the issue. I'm depending on this for my livelihood and it's my only thing. So I should own more or get a greater share that never once came up. That's great. We never crossed my mind. There we go. That's an important point. I guess I'm glossing over it because it like it wouldn't even like it didn't even cross my mind now. Equally. profane for it to be anything. It would actually break it. If we ever if we ever started trying to figure out like little carve-outs or pieces of the pie for well, I did this, therefore I should get It's true collaboration.

36:32 You don't recognize there's no boundary to where you start and you start. This is where I'm going with the story. It's funny you bring up Sequoia, because it's actually benchmarky in that way. Well it's the quote. It's Leonie's quote. Okay. So Uh End of twenty two. Uh

36:46 FTX happens. Uh interest rates go up. All the uh Podcast advertising market. Yeah. our revenue drop forty percent. So we went from this wasn't a business.

36:59 I went full time. We made it a business. It worked amazingly well from twenty to twenty two to twenty to twenty one into twenty two. Right. And then our revenue drop 40%. Right. And now was the moment. When

37:13 we changed everything and uh Oh uh yeah so how many episodes are you making in twenty twenty one? A lot. Oh, I see. Okay. And is it it's but it's not no longer just corporate acquisitions. We started broadening with the Tesla episode in like twenty Nineteen, maybe eighteen. And why did you broaden? Uh it was David's idea and he said, I have this thesis that the audience doesn't listen to us because they want to hear if a tech acquisition worked or not. They want to hear the story and strategy of the most important technology companies. There you go. So you actually feed it. Yes. They they were listening. What's a foul hook?

37:49 You when you go fishing in the fish you catch the fish by the belly rather than the mouth. It's like the hook gets the hook gets in there some weird weird way. Yes. You didn't actually catch the fish in the in an honest way. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we we get all these meet people and they talk about the show and be like, I love the story. Like you guys are just Gifted storytellers. That's what we hear over and over and over again. And like

38:12 Eventually we're like, well. We should believe that. So Can I I'm gonna at that moment I'm gonna interject what I noticed.

38:20 That in that first episode. You were so unsure of yourselves. Th there is. You were so choked, both of you. And you were you have a background in theater. You were a We want to. Yeah.

38:33 You did not come across as people who'd been on stage. You you was uh there was a It was it was kind of an effectless performance. It was flat there's a flatness to it. You were

38:44 You d you were afraid to Whether you knew it or not. Re exhibit a lot of emotion. You didn't реalize. That

38:53 One of your secret sauces. is a motion. It's The way you respond to each other. when you're presenting material is teaching the audio is helping the audience understand.

39:03 how they should feel about it. that you're giving them sometimes very dry facts like I don't know are their revenues doubled every year for a hundred years straight. And and and the audience may not know that that's something that's incredible. That that's an incredible thing. Right. And the way you respond. Even Sophisticated listeners.

39:22 Or helped. Oh. Pay attention now. This was a this that's an important thing. I should I should get excited about that. We used to Share Or research, such that we were doing research in the early days. I think we only had a single Google Doc that we weren't. So by the time we would actually go to record the episode, yeah, there's no surprise. There's no disagreement. We can't pretend to be surprised.

39:45 Or you would be pretending to be surprised. Neither of us are good actors. I don't when did we did a whole introduction. So you added an improvisational component. Yes. There's another way of putting that. You're added risk. You're taking risks when you don't know what's gonna happen when you come on. I agree. Every episode now going into recording day feels like a high wire act because we haven't fully scripted it out. I'm like, I think this is gonna come together. But Like we had to add this thing called a production meeting about six months ago, one week before recording.

40:18 we are required to get together and share agree on an episode structure, but not share any details. Because we got so into this like improvisation thing that some of our episodes would sort of end and you're like That had no flow to it. Like you guys had two different ideas. If it doesn't work sometimes. Yeah. Right? But it's the difference between I mean do you know how your heart sinks when someone gets up at a podium with a script with a with a speech and they're gonna read their speech. The audience is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing's going to happen. Like whatever's on that page, that's what's gonna happen. Pre-announcing the score to the Superman. It's exactly right. And that if you get up and you just start talking,

41:00 The audience also knows Oh my god. This could be a disaster. This could he they don't know where it's going. Just having Just some of that. has a huge effect on the way the audience responds to the performance. And so that that that's w that is not in the beginning. Do you remember when we started doing that?

41:19 Well, I I think as in the first ten episodes, first five episodes, we got feedback saying you guys need to disagree more. But I don't think we w quite realize that we should reveal surprises for each other until Five years ago, four years ago. But at some point we made it a uh you know. An unwritten rule of like We have separate documents we prepare.

41:38 We try to do like separate research cards. Five years ago, you say? So the big So we start with the corporate acquisition in two thousand fifteen. Yeah. And you two knowing everything that you're gonna say when you get on, basically. Yeah. And it's short. And it's forty minutes. Yeah. So And we're not confident. What you're doing too is like

41:57 I'm supposed to be doing financial analysis as someone who's never been taught how to read a financial statement. Right. And so you're also hearing a little bit of like imposter synthesis. I'm trying I can't get over enthusiastic because I'm afraid David's gonna catch me and be like, you don't know what you're talking about. Okay. So plus there's so there's a uncertainty about your own abilities. All right. So First thing that happens is you move off the corporate acquisitions.

42:20 We went from acquisitions to IPOs. Right. Which was unbelievable timing in twenty seventeen, eighteen when Uber Pinterest, Slack. Yeah. Uh there's like eight IPOs in a row of tech companies that everyone had been following. And then it it went really for two years and kinda culminated at the end of twenty twenty with DoorDash and Airbnb, which we recorded and released one day apart. Because we wanted to be there today on IPO Day. Once again, you're constraining yourself unnecessarily. Yeah. Exactly. Eventually you get to we're just gonna do stories. Big success stories basically. So as acquisitions

42:56 IPOs. Uh then it was broad histories and strategies of tech companies and then broad histories and strategies of companies period. Companies and people And people with Terror Swift and frame them as complicated. In a funny way, you're you're still constraining yourself. You feel like you need this frame. Yeah and you actually you're not really living in a frame anymore. Yeah, but constraints are good. Like format for sure. You should but at some point you're gonna wake up and say, you know, we should be doing more biography. Yeah.

43:27 And uh if that person is not You know. i is not naturally a huge corporation. You may still I have a feeling there's more there's there's more there's an evolution to come. That you're not just saying you haven't reached like the end point of this. So

43:42 At what point do you start to feel confident? Like we know what we're doing. Well, When the crash you know crash when when Uh

43:51 The reset happen in twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three. So pretty recently. Crypto bubble, tech stocks, plummet, advertising budgets kinda dry up end of twenty twenty two. Ben and I looked at each other and it was like it w it wasn't even like really a conversation. We just knew what we had to do. We watched a lot of other people. Go for it.

44:12 Easy secure money now. Try and keep the music playing. Right. And we was j we were just like Party's over. We need to get to work. We need to focus on Only

44:23 What is enduring. And like Make great, great, great work and stop doing everything else. Like up until that point we We were we used to do these things called specials. We would just do

44:33 You know, not totally random, but essentially random. Interviews. Interviews and undifferentiated topic. And we said, Yeah, we need to start making stuff that is only N of one. Only we can do will only be great. We need to stop doing Everything else. And we did it on the commercial side too. We said, let's go cut deals with our favorite partners. Yeah. And try to just figure out when we come out the other side of this that we have like the best companies to work with commercially as well as

45:02 the most durable stories. and brands associated with us because of the editorial side of the house. The JP Morgan's of the world. Did they join before you proved that this new way of doing it? No, we did a year. 2023 was the first year. And what were the episodes. What were those episodes? That was LVMH, that was the NFL. Okay, BUSHA, that was Step Down. That was the beginning of what we were really episodes. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's when

45:30 We started to build the confidence of like oh we can do something that Isn't it interesting that you grab this kind of commercial attention? Only after you went really long. Yes. And so then J P Morgan Came in in the January twenty four. So we had in the year of kind of building

45:47 This out. We had sort of leaned into acquiredism. brand about durability, about compounding over decades and, you know, centuries and

45:58 I don't think I appreciated that as a person. uh in the early days of acquire, and it certainly wasn't what the show was about. Yeah. Anyway, so I we I got us a little off track. Your lesson number three was Berkshire Hathaway.

46:11 And don't be afraid to have it too hard pile. Okay, well, then I'm going to do it. Uh We interviewed Doug Leone. Uh, who was you know, one of the the

46:26 Yes. Two stores ago of of Squia. And He told us That after the

46:33 dot com crash for the the Sequoia fund that was the The dot com bubble fund. Every other venture firm out there after the Bubble popped. We're taking mulligan funds. They went to their L Ps and they said

46:46 You know, there's nothing we can do on this one. We're gonna be more disciplined next time. We said Absolutely not. We will never lose money for our investors. Ever. We will do everything. We can possibly do. to make this fund in the black. And he he said the best I think the best line anyone's ever said on acquired. He said, We looked at each other and you could burn cigarettes on our arms and we wouldn't flinch. And they spent the next like five years, they didn't raise another fund. They just like

47:12 Went to work with the portfolio and like they stopped taking fees for a while. And And and got it back and it ended up being a you know a positive returning fund. This is how you get a reputation. Exactly. And the easy that moment for us. And easy to lose one, too. And so I mean it's so th that they they were really sensitive to reputation. Yeah. Yeah.

47:33 We had studied enough businesses by that point where we saw what led to durability. And I think we already were awake to the idea that all that matters is the late years of compounding. Yet like in any given year you look at a mag seven company and they're profits from the last year. are greater than the first twenty years combined or whatever. And I think Realising that

47:58 being around and being respected. On the other side of this you know, economic chasm. is like the key to everything. We who cares about making money this year. It's about five, ten, twenty years from now. And we have to like have the brand that people want to be a part of then.

48:14 Right. But it does but you don't know that you are A Mag seven. Podcast. It's kinda ridiculous to compare to the when you make this decision, you don't know that there's gonna be great riches ten years out, or five years out, or three years out. Yeah.

48:31 But really like I think we were just we both so believe it was like the Burn cigarettes on our arm. Like we just both so believed that that was the right thing to do. Yeah, so something had happened up to before that. And you had figured out how to do this. You'd figure out how to study a business. in a way that was really interesting. The first episode's not that interesting. Yeah. There's just not that much I didn't No, and thought of it. You know, whatever. What's thirty minutes or whatever it is. The a there are now in that first episode, I think there are more ads than there are you all T you two speaking. And now we pride ourselves on having the lowest. Yes, I know the entire industry. So let's just let's uh pause here before we get to number four.

49:12 How do you study a business? Like what have you learned about how to study a business? That's different from when you started out. Explain to the audience what you do to prepare. What you do to learn about a business. Great. Yeah. He'll read everything ever about them. So you do what I do. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever's out there. Right. Right. So you do what AI that's just the AI part of it. Who's who started with canonical, who's done great canonical work in the past. And then what ideas do you have from reading the previous canonical work. And you know, you you then say, like, I wonder

49:46 if I can find this old YouTube video and then those YouTube videos mention something else. And the the spider web always starts with the pre existing kind of. Calling people who maybe have n information that isn't on the world wide web. Zero ever until about twenty twenty three, and now that is the most important way that we can. But probably about fifty percent for me at least about fifty percent of the way through the like start to get your arms around, then start calling. Right.

50:12 You don't call uninformed, you call knowing as much as there is to know. And then you start picking the brains of people who might know more and have not seen. There's like the obvious people to talk to like you know, for Google we talked to, you know. Send our demos are like you know, like obvious. Then there's like the less

50:28 Slightly. You just say that so casually. Who gets to pick up the phone? What is part of the compounding effect. And talk to the CEO of Google about Google. I mean nobody. We're in a scale economy business. Nobody's in a compounding business. So the fact that you When do you first realize That you can pick up the phone. That's a good question.

50:49 Called him. I think it was my our Microsoft series when we talked to to Steve. Steve, Steve. Cast acquire guests. Cast acquired guests. I love n name dropping in your world is so different from the name dropping in like Hollywood. None of your names mean anything in Hollywood. And the and the arenas are so funny because like these people aren't most of them aren't famous and they're a thousand to ten thousand times wealthier than these these uh Hollywood stars. So we had

51:26 Some access'cause you Ben used to work at Microsoft. Uh before zero access. Well no, but you knew some people like here's in my mind what sort of happened with this as I'm trying to think about how to answer Michael's question. Um Because we had started in Seattle and used to live in Seattle and you had worked at Microsoft, when we started our Microsoft journey. We knew some people. Yeah. We're like, Well let's see if we can talk.

51:50 To Steve. And so then we we talked to Steve and we got his you know perspective on things. And I think it was.

52:01 First time we reached that high. Okay. Yeah. And you know what? This is where reputation matters. Steve didn't get back to us for a day and then we heard back and he said, I don't listen to podcasts. I haven't listened to your podcasts. I talked to some people, but I talk to some people that I trust and they say you're great. Yeah. So let's hop on a call. And we wouldn't have gotten the response back if he gave us probably Three hours, four hours in research for He did. Yeah. Yeah.

52:26 And you learned a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But uh just in just in research. I see. And did you all have a moment where you thought, Oh my God, let's keep doing that. That works. So originally when we had the idea in twenty twenty one to do NVIDIA. We thought we were like an interview show then. We thought the interviews would be better than our core storytelling episodes, because we hadn't discovered

52:50 that the Ben and David storytelling is our N of one product. It is the thing that we uniquely can do that no one else can do. And we thought getting these big gets would be the key to success. Uh, which is funny'cause usually they underperform our standard format. And so in twenty twenty one we emailed NVIDIA through the warmest connection we could find and said can we come to the company

53:11 Can we interview Jetson? And they said they give us a nice party line back. He's very busy. And then in twenty twenty two, we did our NVIDIA part one, we did our standard research process. And I think we did our part two. We did part two, we did. And then we got a note from NVIDIA saying Jensen has listened. And wants to know who your inside sources are because it's the most correct telling of NVIDIA story ever. And we were like, oh, this was all just public information. And if you're good at spidering the internet and just like digesting it and thinking about why he would have said something at this point in time to this audience in these various random university talks and stuff, you can kind of piece together the story.

53:49 And so But you're still flying by radar a bit. Yeah, oh we're totally flying by radar. Yeah, yeah. But that landed us, they were like, uh that started the relationship and eventually do you want to do an interview and follow up on your episodes. But that but you did an interview episode with them, but it doesn't do as well as your own NVIDIA. Episode.

54:08 That one may have been like at some particular peak of NVIDIA buzziness, so it was our probably our then largest episode. Well here's what happens with interviews. They spike faster. Yeah. And then they go on and they and those listeners don't retain. Yeah. Whereas if you look at our um Costco episode, which is now two and a half years old.

54:29 Or um L VMH, Ormes, Rolex, like they just They just keep going. I'm sure your books are like this. Like they just they just keep going. Yeah. Every time I bring out a new book, it has the same effect on the old books that a new podcast has on old podcast. Yeah, it sells all the backlist. So that so yes. All right, so um I was asking you how you studied a business.

54:50 Yeah. You read everything news. So and you must find When you go and read everything there is. You're very polite and you're very generous about citing your sources and all that. But You must find

55:04 My wife is an academic. My wife has a Ph was trained as an academic and she was like, You guys gotta cite your sources, like what are you doing? Like Yeah, but it's also i but you you Аю евзed by The weakness of the source material.

55:19 Yeah. Yes. In fact, literally to we are no longer surprised, but we got an email from a company that we recently covered saying you said a a factually incorrect story in the episode and we know the book that you got it from'cause it was factually incorrect in that book. We told the author that it was factually incorrect and it went out anyway. Right. And now you're repeating the incorrect story. And you know, we have now an errata section where we're publishing our email. And I bet you're mainly correcting other people's errors that you just repeated. I mean sometimes there are. Sometimes there are.

55:50 Sometimes we make a financial calculation error or something like that. Right. So we read all sorts of material. Yeah and then and then we start to make phone calls in two thousand twenty three. And now the phone calls are more are are have become extremely important. And you're making twenty five of them in the level of forty, probably. And do you find that when you're reaching out on by phone to all these people that that they always want to talk to you or No. Sometimes it makes. Yeah. But usually when you approach it with a spirit of I'm just trying to understand its own background.

56:18 Yes, we are going to tell a narrative here. Our biggest question to you is what is most misunderstood? And What incorrect stories are out there where we can set the record straight. Right. And you get lots of great information after that. Yeah, yeah. It's a very good way to go about it.

56:33 Yeah. It's and I do this I do the same thing. When I'm researching something, I I don't know what the story is for a longest time. And I'm holding everything very loosely and all the almost all the relationships I have with people I'm interviewing is hey, this is all in background. I just want to try to understand this. Yeah can I hop on a call with you? And they're usually pretty open to it. And like I just want to be educated kind of thing. And it's a great way to say like what's the stupid thing people say. Because everybody has an opinion. But it's not a trick. Like this isn't here's one cool trick to get people to talk to you. W I think you mean it earnestly and we mean it earnestly of like.

57:06 I wanna make something It's good. Everybody has different beliefs about the truth, but I wanna I wanna make the story that most correctly approximates the average truth that exists from all these different truthy sources. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think of it quite that way. I but I do think it's like I want to give Vic something that's good and pure and true and is like is like the thing that will Once it's said

57:30 There's nothing else to say. It's like done. Yeah. I gotta imagine for your subjects, I think a big part of us too, is like There's the truthy aspect, w which is very, very important, but there's also the like This is gonna be

57:44 Great. Like this is gonna be really fun. This is gonna be entertaining to read and people are going to Consume it. That's I think a huge motivation for our sources. Have you so when you're working on one of these episodes Do you are you aware of how much fun you're having learning? And do you ever have you ever shut something down just because oh, this isn't that much fun?

58:03 The Fed. If you can find fun in the Fed, man. You are you are doing you're you're you can find function. We can generate all that enthusiasm for each other's insights about the Fed. We killed Bell Labs because we couldn't find a through line. There were so many different stories and so many different characters. I know. Bell Labs, I that would that's one that I if I saw it, I thought, yes, I want to listen to it. And feels like a Michael Lewis book. There you could kinda do it as the history of the transistor. But then you miss all these other things like radar and

58:36 Um Yeah, th so much stuff that came out about it. Did you do Xerox Park? No, yeah. It's another one. I guess Google still. has this spirit where they're doing lots of stuff that

58:49 Maybe you can't identify instantly the payoff that's right around the corner. This kind of like Let's just fiddle around, see what we find stuff. I mean, but corporate America is I think just generally does less of that than it used to do a long time ago. Uh the big technology No, I'm trying to think uh that's an interesting So uh

59:08 I'm stealing this idea from our friend Ham Hamilton Helmer, but he brought up this idea in conversation with us that Um there is a positive benefit to monopolies. Because they create The cash flows.

59:22 that fund these sorts of boondogle basic research. And a lot of the most important Yeah. Technologies that move society forward come out of these You need fat. Yes. And like, boy does Google have that. Right. I mean you just their last quarter was their first hundred billion dollar quarter ever. Right. Astonishing. I know.

59:43 And that's how they Fun you know. The next general. Right. So th actually you just bring out your friend Hamilton Helmer, who I had never heard of until I listened to your podcast and you do that thing at the seven powers. Let's just briefly since we're here How you study a business.

1:00:01 That has been a useful analytical framework for you. Yeah. Whatever these seven powers are, and I'll never remember any of them. But it's why we say I'm everyone's network effects and all that stuff. Yeah. Uh what is about Hamilton? Like where did you find him and why is you making him so famous? Th there's a lot of good frameworks out there for analyzing business strategy, and this one just clicked. I just read it and I was like, That is actually the complete list. When Did you read it? You found the book. I think it was twenty twenty.

1:00:30 Uh He was I read the list and it was all gobbling. I mean it didn't the words did not mean things. But if you know what they mean. If I asked you in plain English, can you brainstorm all the ways In which A uh industry leading company.

1:00:48 gets away with being more profitable than their competitor and gets to keep being more profitable. Right. That's the list you would come up with. Yes. Yeah. Right. Right, but so so why did you decide you even needed that framework? We

1:01:04 Oh, it's hand in hand with the durability. Yeah. If you're trying to study why is a business durable. Mm The cause is the power. We'd always been searching for a way to land the plane on the episodes. Like we tell this story. Yep. And we finish the story, but that So what satisfying.

1:01:21 What's the takeaway? Yeah, and so we've had all various permutations of analysis at the end. Buy or sell or hold. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once we shifted to like hey, we're studying these great companies these durable businesses Power felt like a a really good. part of that like

1:01:41 So what? Right. Why? For me a critical, critical part of Process. It goes back to writing a senior thesis at Princeton.

1:01:51 Everything needs to pass through multiple cycles of source material through my brain, through my fingers, onto a keyboard, and recycle back through about three times. Yep. Uh and and so like I don't use AI note taking. I do. Right. physical notes and hard copy books like if I'm not doing that.

1:02:08 Uh I feel like it's not gonna work. Yeah. So I have exactly the same uh issue. And it I discovered I wanted to be a writer writing my senior thesis and no ambition to do it before then. And then all of a sudden I thought, Oh my God, I love this. And my love was just that, was the was the constant recycling of the of the thought. And so what I do It might the the process, I don't want to get too far away from your podcast, but I'm not sure what I've got here sitting with my notepad. Yeah, yeah. So this is a filter.

1:02:37 Like if I'm talking to you It takes effort to put it down on the page. I don't record anything. That I've filtered it. Yeah. It's interesting enough to me that it belongs on the page. Then I go home. And I write the notes up quickly.

1:02:48 Uh and That's another filter. If what's on the page interests me enough to put it in uh in uh in a word document, then I've got it's filtered again. Yep. Um and I d and I keep those notes while I'm working on a book. And the file will be Five hundred pages long, by the way, maybe longer, by the time and it's just stuff.

1:03:08 And then I start thinking about Yeah. How do you frame the story? What is this story? Um but it's that's months.

1:03:15 Usually down the road. Like and there are times when I get into something and I am months into it and I realise oop There's nothing here. With Sam Bangman Fried, I was a year into it. And I did not know what I was gonna do with it.

1:03:27 Until it blew up. And then I thought, Oh my God, I had the story. Oh no. You would have killed the book. I might have found a way to do it. I might have found a way to do it, but I hadn't found a way to do it. And it was always the same conversation with my editor. It was

1:03:50 I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is. When I don't know what the end is. I don't know. What the beginning is. And it's that simple. And it wasn't that oh I smelled fraud or anything like that.

1:04:02 It was just It didn't have shape to it. It was just w it was picteresque experience after piccaresque experience. It was like Don Quixote, but the but the first chapter over and over and over and over. And so there was material there, which is why I kept coming back. It was fun. There were endless scenes, there were you know, but it was just like I don't know. Yeah, but scenes don't make a scenes don't make a play. They're necessary, but insufficient. Yeah. So but the bigger point, I hate to go we I don't want to be talking about me. We'll be talking about you. But this pro you are doing I said I smell this from your your work.

1:04:36 you're doing a s a s something that rhymes what I d with what I do You are gathering before you make judgments. You're open to learning things. You're trying to be the world's best student. You want people to want to teach you.

1:04:50 And uh and then if you if people want to teach you They will teach you. And then you could take what you learn and you could present it in the way the best way you can present it. I basically take a note. In two scenarios. One is

1:05:04 Oh, I just figured out how that works. And that is so cool. Like when I learned how a mechanical like this is such a cool thing. It was like I we got excited. This is in some ways irrelevant to the business success of Rolex. But I It will it will make my year to explain on air how a mechanical watch works and how a an escapement

1:05:26 And It is or or the Costco Ballet, or like So there's the I just figured out how something worked, and then there's the I just made a connection. And I it's um like I'll be on a run. I'll be listening to an audiobook. It'll be the third audiobook that I've listened to about a certain subject. And I'll f I'll hear something and think,

1:05:49 Oh that's why. And I'll stop and I'll write my little Apple note, this timestamp in this book. You know. Just realised why I can get an example right now, this happened. And then later I go and I look it up in the Kindle book and I figure out like how I wanna explain the connection that I just learned on air. But it has to come from The

1:06:10 I have to like remember and bottle up my excitement of learning it in that moment to share that enthusiasm with the listener. Yeah. Yep, that's that's all very familiar to me. All right, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done.

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1:08:05 That Ben and David sent you. So give me a fourth example of uh lesson learned from an episode. Uh this we learned I I feel like I learned from Ben Thompson, which is Tell the audience who Ben Thompson is. Ben Thompson is the author of Stratekery, proprietor of Stratton. Proprietor, founder of Strategry. We did an episode on on him and and with him uh But his writing is sort of the thing that we botted over when we met. He's a great strategy technology writer. A the internet

1:08:34 Niches are way bigger than you think they are. So if you think you're writing about a niche topic. the internet being a global community of four-ish billion people. means that any little niche There might be six people in your geography that care about it in your local town, but there's millions of people online. Right. And the internet is your way to reach them. So no matter how niche you are, it's actually way, way bigger.

1:08:58 And the corollary to that is In the media business? In podcasting You can grow your audience and thus your revenue and thus your importance in the world. All outputs can scale. completely independently of your inputs.

1:09:14 David and I effectively do the same thing that We did. not ten years ago, but two years ago to make an episode. But the audience has grown so much that like every output from the business is dramatically different, even though all the inputs are the same. And so we really like took to heart the niche of smart people who care about how these businesses work and why the world is arranged in this way is large, and we don't have to scale our operation to reach them. We just have to keep

1:09:41 making the highest quality stuff. And giving people reason to share it. What is your operation? We were in here with a large group of large men. And this is a bigger operation. But this isn't your normal operation. What is your operation? Uh I have a basement studio, you know, it's an office that we happen to have some light camera in.

1:10:02 I built a studio in my backyard. So that's you. You mention that you send your stuff to an editor without naming the editor. His name is Steven. Steven is part of what we do. He does. I'm not sure he'd want us to share on air. So Steven. So Steve Steven. He's an independent contractor, we're his only client. And he works only for you. And he's the best. He's the best. So he's clearly good in his maniacal about Creating

1:10:29 The best. Audio. Products. And video when we do it. But we we yeah, no, we there's no assistance, no we do we we do everything. We don't sell you don't have an ad sales, no. We don't sell. We love doing that. We love doing that ourselves. You do that right. We love we love doing the business equally as much as we love making the business. And I love the alignment. The business and the content are equally important and they're they're like Married. Yeah, it's funny. You're preparing for this. Like we're always tempted like to just talk about the business. Cause we love the business as much as the show, but we never talk about the business. So I want to so let's just stop here for a moment because I want to talk about this. First of before we move on from Steven. So Steven is in this rare position of basically being the only person who helps you create this thing. Yeah. Yeah.

1:11:07 How different is We hired a wonderful production crew because we wanted to have a great video for today. So How different. Is what you give

1:11:18 What comes out of Stephen from what you give him. Eight nine hours of raw audio with Dozens. We produce each other as we go. Hundreds of retakes? Yeah. Yeah. David will say a paragraph and I'll be like

1:11:34 Wait, I want to do that in an acquired tone. Wow, that's amazing. Hundreds of retakes? You do hundred- That's incredible. I would have guessed like if you just asked me five. Hundreds of the yeah. You sound like a millennial. I just want to be um appropriately amazed. You can't do hundreds of literally that we cut literally all the time. Literally totally but the retakes though are a different thing. The retakes are We didn't say that clearly enough. We didn't land the point. I made a point where I wasn't paying enough attention to what David was saying because I was like looking over at my notes and then I make the same point and he's like oh I think you missed it. I just said that. Can you just say the last

1:12:15 Oh I see. I explain something in twice the amount of time and David's like getting bored and he's like, that was a real monologue. I think we gotta keep the story moving. And I'm like I agree.

1:12:29 Uh when I wrote it in my notes I was really excited about it, but now that we're in the moment, I can feel that it's slowing down the energy. So let me take two minutes, let me retype some stuff and let me figure out if there's a condensed way to say that so that it can flow seamlessly in the energy of the story. Right. But that is all in the Eight, nine hours. And what so and so he's cutting it in half. Yeah.

1:12:51 Yeah. And when he comes when he when it comes back to you from him. So he be he he turns. Eight nine hours of that into an intelligible. Into like five? Uh And then we make Five to eight hundred additional cuts.

1:13:09 to cut another hour off of it. And that stuff works. Are you doing it on the page or you're doing it by the page? Uh We use a dis a tool called Descript. Uh Which we we sort of use it. Not

1:13:21 But you're not listening to it, we are listening to it and we are watching it. And how long does that take? Days. Three days. Three days to edit. Yeah. Because we usually do we usually do two cycles of that. And then do you send it back to him after you've done that? Yeah. And then we do it again. And then you do it again. I listen at one X and you have to like feel where you get bored, or feel where you're just like, I don't care. Like you have to get so sick of the material where you're just like cutting bone. You you're the hero on this. I can't bring myself to do it. I listen on on two and a half X. Just it's it's

1:13:49 You don't actually listen at to it at normal speed? Ah it's so Like Ben really jumps on the grenade for this. Almost always. You can cut the beginning.

1:14:01 Of w almost everything you're always throat clearing. Yeah, wind up. You don't need it. You just go right to it. Yeah. Yeah. And uh and then once I start to feel like get taught. I just love it. I love it. I love it and like I like make the hardest thing is getting the stuff d out in the first place. Yeah. And then once once it's out on the page, then you can start ah Each time it gets better. I find I there's no despair associated with it.

1:14:25 And there's stuff in the original draft that is a remnant of the point you thought you were gonna make. And by the time you get to the end, you're like, That's actually not. The the important thing here.

1:14:35 I no longer need that whole setup or that that's it. Or it's in there in all kinds of other ways. Yes. Yeah. But it's important that you had the idea. But it's buried in the in the story some which way. Yeah. David will often highlight something and go at Ben Okay to cut, belaboring. So w the minute you're there, you know it's

1:14:53 Gotta be cut. Yeah. Yeah. Mostly right. Yeah. Always cut. Yeah. Yeah. And so you get Five hours down to whatever it is, three and a half, four. Three and a half is the sweet. How do you know when you're done. We run out of time. Yeah. So Demon, that's it like you're never done. You're never really done. I would love one more edit.

1:15:12 We'd always there's always more. Yeah, the yeah, yeah. We have both the gift and the curse of Deadline and next episode coming where it's like you you have a Infinite timeline, right? No, no, no. I have a day I I mean I owe a book on June the first that will come out September the twenty-ninth, that I will start writing on January the fifth. And I will write it in five chunks, and each chunk will be delivered at the end of a m the month.

1:15:34 And I won't be able to go back. So wait wait, wait, what happens if you get to June and you're like. Can't okay, so it's a it's a hard deadline. It's a drop dead. Yeah. But I I always find I if once I s establish that deadline, which is a reasonable deadline because I've done all I spent a year doing the work, I have the material. By the way, it's very polite of you to ask me questions about myself. No, but but that that it's Somehow, if you take your deadline seriously.

1:16:03 That's the key. You take the deadlines deadly seriously, and you just refuse to violate them. Um then you're serious when you establish them. And Y your mind just finishes when it needs to finish. I I and I'm always like a couple of days ahead of it. Yeah. So I would talk a little bit about the business side because this is something that but I I certainly don't know anything about in in your lives, but you turn this into a very lucrative franchise.

1:16:29 And you go out and you and and unlike most podcasts, you're not You don't subcontracting the s the the sale of ads to some other c company. And you're not just promiscuous in who you have as advertisers. So you have Two or three, four, whatever it is. Major advertisers you can every season.

1:16:46 And um And some stability there. When you go Walk me through. Pend

1:16:54 Y uh Michael Lewis Inc. is your target that you want me to be a sp like the anchor tenant in your building. And you're coming in. To tell me why I should do this. Give m give me a give me a sense of it with that lesson. I'll let David give you the sales pitch. The philosophy of the whole thing comes from We want to create a durable business on our side and a great listener experience on the listener side.

1:17:18 And I always feel as a listener so disrespected when there is this content of the podcast that is Diamond quality. And then they are running McDonald's ads. in the middle. Usually not read by the host, usually with some jingle playing underneath. It bothers the hell out of me too, and I haven't been able to do anything about it.

1:17:38 I I I agree. Uh it And I It it's It's the biggest complaint I get about my podcast. It's like I gotta listen to these ads.

1:17:47 the very first ad we ever sold, we said what sponsor could we get? That would make people perceive acquired to be a higher quality бран. So we could like hammer cake and eat it too. We'll get it. I had a thought about this on mine and no one ever took me up on it. Which is find the things I actually use. And I'll and I and it will be fun to talk about them. I wanna I wanna tell the whole world about ex officio underpants. And I can't get ex ex officio to return my calls. I mean that kind of thing. Foolish. I can't sleep in the Wait, so I don't know. You're telling me that Michael Lewis I didn't hear from Diddy. I did not. I just gave them a l I gave my podcast a list of things that I really love, just love. Oh you gotta call them that's the that's the problem. Well it pro that probably is the problem.

1:18:36 Does not actually sell yet. Another company sells the ads. And so it's just I that I thought that was the way to make a seamless is actually integr what's integral to my life will be the things that we're talking about. So that is a structural blocker to creating the best experience. Right. And

1:18:54 Everything has a trade off. The trade-off for us is we spend an enormous amount of time engaging with our sponsors. We write a custom read for every single sponsor, every single episode. We try to write it as if we're almost like talking about what we think is interesting about the business. We're doing this like mini two minute analysis. And you know, there's some horse trading there of we have to make these points. Okay. But like for the most part, and the best sponsor relationships are the ones where they say like, Yeah. W your listeners are going to respond the best way to what you have to say. Yeah. So so if if you have the Lewis Inc, we want you to be a sponsor. I would say

1:19:27 Pitchy really. We're deciding a year in advance. Now two. When we're when we're w now two years in advance, like what do we want our sleep Right. So we start

1:19:39 Michael Lewis Inc., we think is gonna be super strategic for us in twenty twenty seven, twenty twenty eight. We start planning like okay. How are we gonna make this happen? How are we gonna make sure that we we we really you you, Michael Lewis, think is as good as we think it could be. How are we gonna make sure that we're gonna work really well together, that you're gonna see massive ROI from us. At any point do you sit there worrying that You're compromising the you know, the the shows because of your the relationship you're about to have with an advertiser?

1:20:06 No. There's been Companies that don't feel Switzerland enough. that come to us that want to sponsor and we just like the idea of not picking a venture capital firm.

1:20:19 to say we think this is the best venture capital firm. It's like too much of a picking team. I've never heard that. They don't feel Switzerland enough. Is this a is this a Is this a cliche in the VC business? No, I think I'm line. So you're looking for Switzerlands. Yes. And what do you mean by that? Companies that we think are great where we don't have to take a side in like a big contentious current thing conversation.

1:20:47 We don't really deal with consistently. Okay, here we go. B2B Companies with high Very high L T B process. So not ex not not ex officio underwear. Basically we want companies That Are doing a significant number of multi-million dollar annual deals with customers because we want to feel like we can deliver.

1:21:07 a couple incremental of those for you. So you get the money. Yeah. And then like it's just a no-brainer. Many of our sponsors have been ROI positive on signing one large customer who heard about them unacquired. That is awesome. And often it's not even just heard about unacquire. Events are are a big part of this. Uh so we do events with almost all of our sponsors. So There's the funnel of like heard about and acquired that helps but then like we're doing a event together with them. We're sitting next to their best prospects. So I so I'm I'm thinking about hiring you. What kind of event will you do for me?

1:21:39 We're happy to join for a customer dinner. We're happy to speak at your big annual customer conference. We're happy to give them this pitch. We're we're happy to go to a a sporting event with you with your top clients. We're happy to at that sporting event where you do like Some Fire side chat. Some little Fireside Chatter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interview your CEO. Interview a legend from the sport. How many hours of your time am I gonna get? Couple days. How can you maximize using us? You promise to be my friend? Yeah, cool.

1:22:12 We're we're great friends with a whole bunch of Okay, but so then it gets even better. So we um Let me let me tell you more. Tell me more. I'm getting interested. I'm on the edge of my seat here. The reason this whole thing works is the people who listen to acquire are the most valuable audience in the world. And so if you want to market your B2B software or financial product or whatever to them. Founders are executive decision makers. Right. But r really, I'm gonna take a step back. I think the whole business side and and a lot of the

1:22:41 Content too, but the whole business side of acquired starts with We were venture capitalists. We're not media people. So w we have just always taken an approach. You're aspiring to be a great

1:22:51 partner to them. You know, you're gonna help recruit employees, you're gonna help with whatever. And so we just like Like great, that's how we approach our partners. Right. Why do you think Maybe you've just answered the question. Why do you think no other podcast has approached their business and the way you approach your business?

1:23:06 I think we just came at it from like this this You think everybody else coming out from a kind of media space and the media space was kind of bad business. Okay, here's a take. The media business model of splitting

1:23:18 the commercial activity from the editorial. Yep. Is A societal benefit that we all benefit from from publications like the New York Times. Yep. It is starting for journalism. It is really good for journalism that that exists. The rest of media seems to have adopted it. And everyone doesn't need to. Right.

1:23:38 If we're the hosts of acquired It's kind of great if you're going and learning about your sponsor's business and working with them and trying to build partnerships with them. It was almost like it, um we had the luxury of getting to rethink what our operational model looks like. So then the thing they brought it full circle. A couple years ago is

1:23:55 We added an investment fund. So not our public company sponsors, but almost all of our private company sponsors. We invested them. So it came full circle. You two were you were we you were the ones who were making the investments. Yes. Is it any how you're doing? It's quite full circle. Yeah. We're only a year in, but we've we've invested in uh five of our sponsors and several of them are more valuable than when we've invested. Yeah. Uh uh we uh we we we asked ourselves, how do we do this? The focus is the show. If we're for a venture capital firm with a podcast, it doesn't doesn't work. We need to be a podcast for the venture capital firm.

1:24:27 The way we make this work is We just invest in our sponsors. We put all this work into building finding the best partners for our sponsors. in every category that we think are great, why wouldn't we just invest in them? We don't do any increase. Can we invest in all of your sponsors? No, but a lot of the time like we'll just get a call that, hey, we're raising an up round. We we want to talk about it in the next ad read and we say, Oh, that's cool. Can we can we invest a couple of million dollars? And they're like The round's like three hundred million, so

1:24:50 No one on the cap table's gonna care, and we love that you're more aligned with us now, so we'll make room. So you you're only really accepting As sponsors Companies that you would like to invest in. That's essentially the frame we we put on the whole thing. It's not a perfect smoke room. No, but JP Morgan is not an exact. Right, right. We we think it we like having a couple public companies, JP Morgan, Shopify, ServiceNow. And how deep is this market? How many acquired could be created?

1:25:15 on the back of this business model. Oh, I think a lot. The question that I I'm always wondering is why aren't there more required out there? I'm asking that question now. Here's the ingredients. Two hosts that independently go do research and through storytelling, like narrative storytelling and analysis, create a conversational audiobook. Could be about businesses, could be about sports teams, could be about Hollywood movies, political parties, could be about any how any arena of ambition, as you would say.

1:25:45 There should be unacquired in all these other verticals. The business vertical because there's a lot more time more. A lot more money in business. Yes.

1:25:57 Cold start, but if you were to propose Going and creating an acquired for um Sports. Uh You would

1:26:05 th the sort of risk I guess we took. We didn't think about it as risk at the time,'cause it was just a hobby was You you you you're looking at years of No or little monetization. Right. Because it's gonna take a long time to build up the Right. versus

1:26:19 Oh, I could go join a network. I could join make a show on the ringer. I could, you know, do whatever. Acquired was path dependent. on us having day jobs. For sure. Right. And day jobs in the industry that you're going to cover. Right.

1:26:32 Right. We built half the relationships and all the know how and all the shorthand n uh from being in the industry before. So I asked you how many quirks could be created uh in in just your space. What percentage of the advertising revenues do you think you're hoovering up? In the way you're hoovering them up.

1:26:51 In like b business. The B to B like the things you pick the kind of people you will accept. As your sponsors. How many times their uh Fortunately for it th there are a lot more people who want the sponsor acquired then how many more are there?

1:27:08 A lot. We're probably three or four X oversubscribed. Okay. On like People who really could convert. on becoming sponsors if we said, Sure, we'll take you. How come you don't spawn an extra acquired or two? How can we why I think that that uh why don't you create why don't you create the next use?

1:27:26 Then we're not acquired. Then we're not us. Do less. Then we become CEOs. Right. We do not want to build a company. Yeah, so I know you've just said no, it's funny you cite there's a line. Um That you don't you don't have bosses. Yeah.

1:27:41 You you have incentives. Yeah. But you don't have bosses. And we're not other people's bosses. That's like my life too. I have a lot of incentives, I have no bosses. When you're in any kind of creative thing. There is this benefit.

1:27:54 to not just following the financial incentives. And and not trying to kind of like milk every last penny out of it. And to Creating scarcity. Not just for the sake of the scarcity, but for the sake of the quality.

1:28:07 Yeah. And Only do it if it's great. If you only do it it's it's it's a long term strategy. I mean it's not that I think all my books Are great.

1:28:17 I don't write them though unless I think they're going to be great. Yeah. I just don't. Well why would you allocate it, let's say you have a portfolio of however many more years you think you're gonna write, twenty, thirty. Why would you allocate you know, I don't know how to why would you blow a slot on a bad boat. That's a gaping hole. I'll give you a r a reason why uh some people might A publisher offers me gazillion dollars to write a book about X. And how I know the book's gonna suck,'cause it's not actually a good idea for a book.

1:28:45 And it's not gonna be fun to do because all the fun is in it may be great. Is there any chance any of those dollars make your life better at this point. Zero. So this is the thing people miss. What is Lane Kiffin gonna get out of an extra couple of million dollars going to LSU from all this? Yeah. The average athlete is taking

1:29:02 A few million dollars more to move his wife and kids from one family to one city that they loves him and that he loves to some strange place where everybody's gonna be unhappy. People do this all the time. All dollars do not have equivalent value. No. The the marginal dollars have w way smaller value than the early dollars. Sometimes they end up having kind of negative value. And you become a person who that's what you're about. It's like you're saying I'm gonna be the person who just follows the financial incentives rather than I'm gonna control the I'm gonna let these incentives do

1:29:31 That can be useful. They get you out of bed in the morning for a while. But you you have to kinda kinda control them. So I love that you're not milk in the market. I think there's two different things you that we're talking about here. One is uh

1:29:42 Milking the market, yes or no. Uh, the other one is do you want to build an enterprise or do you want to Stay a boutique. So like to you to your question for us like why don't we create more of it, like we d we d we don't want to manage other Show podcast host. People people often tell us like oh you're building this business, you guys are sort of foolish because there's those all this key man risk. Like your building is great business, but if either of you leave unfortunately your business has low enterprise value. And we're like

1:30:09 Okay. But if we sold this business then we would just go start acquired. We're already doing the thing with you. Yeah, the the dream is what we're doing. All right, so I took us off on a sidetrack. We've only gotten through I want to hear that. We've gotten like five. We've got a bunch of things. I want to hear the what's the fifth lesson we've learned. Founder control was my a huge one. Is this from Google? I think we learn we again, this is one of these things that we like learned. Early but then got reinforced through episodes.

1:30:40 Trader Joe's. Ikea. Yeah. Yeah. Uh like stay private, be family owned. You don't even have to say my meta's public company, but but founder control. I mean uh Google too. Google's founder controlled. The important things in the world probably should be big publicly traded corporations, but like there's these amazing wonderful things you can create by being boutique and and maintaining control of it. I think there's an argument to be made that in any industry where they're both private and public companies, the private companies end up being much better run. And I mean like that mostly bad things happen when companies go public and certainly less pleasant. So public or private, your point is founder control. But there's also just like a personal choice element. Uh

1:31:17 Last year. We existential crisis is way too dramatic. But I think something that was on our minds was like Are we being wassies?

1:31:29 We're not doing Hollywood. We're not uh adding more shows, we're not building an enterprise. What trigger this? Are we being wassies? We were currently researching Bell Labs. And I think I felt like we were ch like chasing this like Esotericness. So we s we sought some advice.

1:31:46 And we Went to one of the best investors. ever who who we've gotta know who's a fan of the show, you know, some somebody everybody would know. And uh We we asked him to dinner and we just sort of Like, hey we we've got this, you know.

1:31:57 We could do all these things, we're we're not. Like Hollywood, et cetera. And we sort of expected his comment. To be like Dream bigger, like you know, go for it. Like, you know, when you guys are being wassies. And he sort of sat there and he thought a minute and he said,

1:32:11 I have sien so many. Founders. become trapped in prisons of their own making. In their own companies. And they're successful prisons. Yeah, yeah.

1:32:22 You guys have avoided that feat. Don't go down that road. But what is I I'm I'm missing actually the connection. Oh why if you why if you were less wussyish. Would you have created people, uh take on

1:32:37 Oh, start a second show. Oh, I think business movies. I thought you were saying you were avoiding like the controversy. Yeah, that's a whole separate wussies, but no, no, we asked ourselves, are we being business wossies? I see. But they sort of go hand in hand. Like cheap growth is covering the current thing. It it will uh I've been toying with this idea of um uh stored potential energy. That like great businesses have a stored potential energy that you can't see in the current financials. Mm-hmm. And Great people have that too.

1:33:09 Mm. Great people have that too. They have these reserves that you just that come out when they need them. And they're not like presented in obviously. They are sparkling. Yes. They aren't sparkling there in front of your eyes in any way. And I think we um we're trying to like store up as much potential energy and acquire it as we can rather than Any time there's a way to uh make it show up on the financial statements, sort of like letting out the pressure and being like, yep, second show. Yep, more ads. Yup, uh dynamic ads from an ad network. Yeah. Like just you can say yes to all these things and you can sugar high the current profits. Right. Or you can try to like figure out how to store up as much potential energy as you can. Right.

1:33:50 And I think once you kind of hit the point in life. Where Money won't make you any happier, then there's There's actually not a A point.

1:33:59 to letting any of that potential energy out. It just creates goodwill for everyone. Most principally. Selfishly yourself to to keep it. Bottled. Right. Right, so how do we get on that?

1:34:11 I don't know how we got from the under control. Uh Okay, I've got one from um This is a non obvious one. Also, can I just say like

1:34:25 Sometimes we do some stuff like this. We are not like saints. We're capitalists. Like we're running a Capitalist enterprise. Sometimes we hire a production crew. Sometimes we uh last year we added a fourth ad slot. We always had three. Last year we looked at ourselves and we said There's four hour podcast episodes. We're currently at like two percent, three percent ad load. Everyone else is at fifteen percent. Right. God forbid we go to four and a half percent of time. So like we we indulge occasionally. All right listeners.

1:34:55 Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is uh no longer the hard part. Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks Are real.

1:35:21 Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI control tower. Yep, AI control tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with Any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system. Every AI agent visible and secure in one place.

1:35:49 And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than twenty years building the operational backbone of the enterprise, the workflows, governance, approval, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security. ServiceNow already runs more than a hundred billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than eighty-five percent of the Fortune five hundred. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates. And in a future, that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is Who's managing them all? So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out service now.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, so sometimes we make episodes.

1:36:45 That either we think are gonna be Great. Or were just really interested in them and they like In the numbers wise they don't perform. They don't the great thing about podcasting is like it's always within like a 20, 30 percent range. Right. So it's not like it's a total flight. But give me an example of the of the podcast, the extreme version.

1:37:04 Of the one you all were most excited about. that didn't resonate with your audience in the second. Well so the the lesson here is g is gonna be Yeah. Nintendo. We thought Nintendo was gonna be a Uh big.

1:37:17 It's such a great it's an incredible history, incredible story. Incredible company. And of one company durable over a hundred years plus. Uh has been through so many iterations, people love it. Uh you know, 20% underperformed our benchmark uh at the time.

1:37:34 Um we're like oh yeah. And then we did a part two to really dig ourselves into the thing. You know what people don't love is part twos. Yeah. Let me tell that joke again. It's so funny that you're gonna do that a second time. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. It's a necessary subset. You never tune into something called part two without part one. And so the dumbest thing. thing you can do if you're focused on growth is have an underperforming part one followed by a part two. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But We did it. And you liked it.

1:38:07 We had a great time. Nintendo. It's like one of the most important things. It's an interesting thing. I mean it started as a a Yakuza company. It's crazy. How did it start? It was playing cards. So gambling was illegal in Japan, uh after the Meiji Restoration. Okay. And so they made Hanafuda cards which are cards in Japan, and the Yakuza was the main customer. And then they got into toys, and then they way later found their way into the city. Japanese Mafia was the main core. That's funny. Yeah. This is amazing, amazing story. And then they bring they have this uh philosophy called lateral thinking with withered technology.

1:38:42 Which is uh if you look at Nintendo systems, even going way way back, it's not bleeding edge technology. It's like How can we a couple generations back technology? How can we take withered technology? And think outside the box with it. So like the Wii is the best example of this. The Game Boy was the original example of this. The Game Boy is basically a calculator. But like you know, it didn't have a color screen, two buttons, like, you know. But it was this incredible success. You can see the passion. I feel like I'm about to get you into part three. Okay, okay, but but here's the lesson. Another episode that was totally like this, Indian Premier League cricket.

1:39:16 Underperformed, love that show. Incredible stories. Incredible stories. You either really loved it or didn't listen at all. Yeah, this is the lesson. It's the first of your shows I listened to. That was starting with IPL. You are making the point. This is why we did IPL. I'm a partial owner of the Rajasthan Royals. You were not I'm Royals jersey. You are not Minaj is the majority owner. Have you heard the book? He's the majority owner. So it's a very tiny slice, but I but as we I've I haven't been over. I still can't explain the game. But the league how did you become a minority owner? Two friends. I'll leave their names out of it.

1:39:52 Um But you know who they both were. Call and said There's this guy who's got this cricket team, he wants to make it the money ball of they're the Oakland days of the IPO. Yeah, it's exactly. And he's he'd be open to having you invest. And they were both Good filters. Like

1:40:12 If they were interested, it was already smart. And I also thought It was small enough that If it went wrong, it would be an amazing story. And even if it goes right, even if it goes right. Have you met Lollet?

1:40:25 Norista. No. No, no, I haven't met anybody but Minoge. And uh and it's Oh boy. No, I know there's a whole subject for you. It's just like there may be some way down the So that was the other thing I was thinking. Like it th a number of this could work out a number of ways. So that anyway, I that was the first one I listened to. And you That un that was a un That was an un it's an unbelievable story. Oh, it's unbelievable. Everybody in the world should listen to this thing. And then it underperformed yet it underperformed. Okay, but here's but here's the lesson. Both Nintendo and IPL

1:41:00 We Got they were the first listening experiences for some incredibly influential people who have changed the direction. Actually here, let's acquire it. I think we can share the whole story. Yeah. Nintendo was specifically listened to by one person on the meta executive team who found it. Thought it was amazing, sent it to the entire meta executive team. Right. And then they all listened. Right. Built we built a relationship with them and then when JP Morgan called us and said

1:41:25 We've got Chase Center. Yeah. And they were like, Well, what would you do? And we ask this person, like hey Do you think Mark would want to do it? And And he said, I don't know, but I'm gonna ask him right now.

1:41:35 Right. And so without the Nintendo episode, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't do it. And we have some similar stories with IPL. The point is that Uh Doing episodes.

1:41:47 Uh That we W one or both of us is just like Insanely passionate. Where'd you learn this from? From doing these episodes and like underperforming.

1:41:57 But We learned it from L VMH. Oh. I pitched that like three times and you were like No but L VMH was a banger. It performed great. Which is why we learned the lesson that if one of us feels passionate about something. Go for it. Oh no, but I'm making a different point, which is that if one of us feels passionate about something, even if the episode is a relative dud, it's still worth doing. Because someone else's latches onto that. This is exactly right. If you don't feel anything, no there's a chance nobody's gonna feel anything. But if you feel a lot, someone's gonna feel something. That's right. Yeah.

1:42:25 That's right. So go so trust that feeling. Yeah. Yeah. It's about the magnitude of the way a small number of people feel about episodes, often more than the Yeah. Spread. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

1:42:37 No, and sometimes we're passionate about something. And it becomes a banger. That's the ideal. Rent Tech, Renaissance Technologies. That was Amazing. That was incredible. That's one of the episodes I've listened to. I loved it too. So great. It's one of like the two great mysteries on Wall Street.

1:42:53 How they do what they do. And who is Satoshi. Those are the two. I kinda like the take that they Invented. machine learning. a decade or two before and kept it secret that resembles LLMs and that they were able to find signal that existed only in really weak ways.

1:43:14 in in a predictable alpha generating But that nobody else found it too. So then it all went away because they hid it at the same time as they found it. Yes. That's mind blowing. If true. That that could still be going on with I mean

1:43:30 You can see why it worked through the nineties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard with like Jane Street and Citadel and all these other places looking for every bit of signal in the marketplace. It is an amazing story. And that is of the books I didn't write that I wished I'd written. And did you consider doing it? Oh I so Jim Simon's son Had a kid in my oldest child's class in high school. And I tried I appro I said look.

1:43:55 I can't do it unless you want me to do it. There's no point. And he said like that just like No, no, no. I this whole business of kind of doing it by radar f completely from the outside, you know you're gonna get so many things wrong. Yeah. And it's like an embarrass yourself that you need to be so inside so that you don't so that the person you're writing by doesn't read and say, like

1:44:15 That's just completely wrong. And uh And that I could have done that book. But why? You know, that that That didn't appeal to me. What appealed to me was he was at the end of his career.

1:44:26 I didn't need All the secrets. But I needed some of the sequence. And uh and I and I would need him. And uh but that's one that's on my oh that's too bad that one got away.

1:44:39 Yeah, if a butterfly had flapped its wings differently and he Collaborated. It would have been fabulous book. Yeah. It would have been a fabulous book. Um All right, number seven. It's a different twist on the NFL. But we definitely learned it from the NFL create spectacle.

1:44:55 All right. A live event strategy. Yeah, there's twofold. One, we now s have stopped thinking about acquired as a habit for people. Most podcasts, your dream is to create a habit. Yeah. And ours, we've thrown that out the window and said We don't do enough of them. Right. Right. So we need to create events. it needs to be the current thing when we release an episode for whatever your group of friends or you know acquaintances is. Like It has to be the water cool conversation. It has to be Monday Night Football. And then once a year we have to have a Super Bowl. Yeah.

1:45:24 And doing The Chase Center show and then the Radio City show. very small amount of people in the audience. Six thousand? Six thousand. So it's yeah, great. It's the world's largest indoor theater. It's six thousand people in this incredible venue in New York City. Relative to the number of people who listen to our episodes. It's point Uh point four percent of the audience? It's a very small. But the amount of heat and light created from

1:45:52 than the idea that you did that show. Right. Is more impactful to building the franchise of acquired than any given episode, maybe even then a whole season of episodes. What's uh what's the first spectacle you created? Well Tay Center was the first spectrum. So you just start. September twenty-fourth. Yeah. This is been um Uh we did a show in Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.

1:46:18 Uh but it was one section. But actually by being able to say we did an arena show, even though it was only an people. We talked about it on Air as the Acquired Arena Show and that We were able to say to to JP Morgan, to Chase Center, to the Warriors, like we have done this before. I'm gonna ask Rude couple of rude questions. Your You're a radio city.

1:46:39 uh music hall event. Was it with Jamie Diamond? Six thousand people. And Meredith Copit Levian. New York Times CEO and Barry Diller. Okay. So the three How many people are there for them and how many people are there for you? We did announce the guests.

1:46:53 Oh. So they were they were all there for acquired. We knew Michael at the end of the year was gonna ask this question. So I so the I knew was it was gonna be acquired with a guest. Was it sold out before You announced the guest? We didn't guess. So the guest is a surprise. Yeah. Yeah.

1:47:14 Oh. It hurt in my soul when we did Chase Center afterwards reflecting on it. There was this little thing of like Did all those people show up because it said Mark Zuckerberg on the poster? Yeah. Well now you know now we know. So now you know so are you gonna so that's this is your form of spectacle is these big public shows. Yeah any other forms of spectacle on the horizon? Well we are doing the actual Super Bowl. So this is come. We we basically manifested this. Uh the halftime show?

1:47:37 I wish I'm us and that buddy we're gonna be. I would love the reaction of the NFL fan base. Yes. They were told that it's not gonna be music. Ben and David are you. It's just gonna be an acquired episode. Yes, with Peyton and Eli Man. That would be so good. It's like the way I watch Monday Night Football now. Oh we're doing the innovation summit. So the NFL is launching. Innovation Summit the Friday before the Super Bowl'cause the Super Bowl's here in uh in San Francisco this year. So they're launching an innovation summit Friday before the super bowl. With all the you know.

1:48:11 big partners in the NFL with Roger Goodell. Uh it'll be in the city in San Francisco and we're gonna MC it. Okay. So do you know who your guests are gonna be? We do have been announced yet. But it'll be it'll be where with our business. Where are you doing this?

1:48:26 Uh SF Moment Moment. Oh. It's it's not uh it's not gonna be open to the public. It'll be it'll be streamed. Yep. Um So it'll be a different style of event than for the supervisor. It's for uh it's for the NFL's partners. Right. Um But uh but yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be Incredible.

1:48:45 All right. Let's go to I think we're at number nine. So We made Costco Uh

1:48:53 In the back half of twenty twenty three. But it was one or two episodes after we made Nike. Mikey I think ended up being a fine episode, but I

1:49:03 tried way too hard, like w way too much pressure on myself, I won't speak for you on on the Nike episode. And it It uh It came out flat. We read nine books between us. Right to prepare. I think it was eleven. So it was just Too much for all sorts of reasons.

1:49:17 And so like we were like burnt out. We're not happy. We decided to do Costco. I said like I think I just gotta

1:49:24 I gotta take a different approach here. I gotta play loose on this one. Like I can't, you know, play tight to use the sport's analogy. And I said like let's let's find the the one book, like the right book. Right. Help that there was only really one book. Read that book, uh Salt Price's autobiography. Right. Read that. Use that as the main source.

1:49:43 Uh You got Maybe one of the best primary source At least ever. The CFO of Costco gave you a

1:49:50 Yeah, just come over to the office and I'll sit you down and give you the entire whiteboard and PowerPoint on how the Costco business model works. Uhhuh. And we spent the whole afternoon together and it was And between those two things, the book And that time that you spent with Richard. That was that was the and we didn't need to do more than that. When you went into it, did you know anything? Yes. What did you know?

1:50:11 When we went into starting work on Costco, we did we do. Nothing. Correct. I knew a lot going into meeting with Richard. I want I wanted to be able to hear the things he was saying. That were

1:50:22 Different. than common wisdom. When you there's a lot of think pieces out there about Costco. The Wall Street Journal loves to write about it. investors love to write about the stock. So you can kind of reach it. Charlie Mugger's favorite company, you know, there's lots of stuff up there. And I I wanted to hear I uh this was actually one of the last pieces of research'cause I wanted to be really prepped. What did you

1:50:43 You know you were talking about when you're working on an episode and you're going for a run and you stuff and it you make some connection or some insight occurs to you and you stop and you write it down. Well give me a few of the ones about Costco. Low skew count drives everything. Oh. All right. That's that's the like the the number of things they have on the Do you want the Charlie Munger talk? This is the number of things they have on the shelf. So unlike Walmart, they has billions of things on the shelf. You get what you get, you don't pitch a fit. Whatever's there is there. Four thousand things. Yep. Walmart is a hundred to two hundred thousand. Yeah.

1:51:19 And here's like all the knock on effects of that. If you only sell four thousand things. It doesn't take a lot of volume before very quickly. You are a miningful seller. to every single one of those vendors products. Those vendors.

1:51:34 suddenly you become really important to that vendor. Your merchandisers, since you only have four thousand So your incentives start to align. Yes. The merchandisers have a very small portfolio. You're not dealing with 100 vents. You're dealing with seven. And you would know the absolute crap out of their product line. If you sell chocolate, you monitor the price in the cocoa commodities market. Right. And if it takes someone who's managing a very small portfolio to stay that attuned to Yeah.

1:52:04 Small skew count means that Any given. Thing on the shelf. Flies off the shelf pretty quick. So there's not yeah, so the turnover's faster so there's more flow.

1:52:13 They're getting they're getting paid. In some cases, they're getting multiple turns of cash flow before they pay the first time. On average it takes them twenty seven days to sell through. their entire inventory. Which means that's on net thirty terms, three days of grace, where the inventory is actually financed.

1:52:32 by the vendors and then some. I don't think on average is twenty seven. So some SKUs Are selling in two days that they're turning. They're turning it ten times a month. There's no working capital in this business other than building more Costco's. Right. Low skew count for Costco is like low. Uh

1:52:49 Low episode volume for you. Yeah, yeah, right, right. A hundred percent we listen right. And low number of partners, so we can put like all of our energy behind. You know, it's not normal it's not really natural for a business to sell less of things. Sell fewer things when you could sell more things. And everybody do doing that. And when you walk into C it is the odd experience when you walk into Costco is the absence of choice. Yeah. And in fact Consumers kind of like not having too much choice. This is the dream. There's all this there's all this research showing that if you if you sell thirty different kinds of jams in the supermarket. You will sell less jam than if you sell three kinds of jam.'Cause the peop the people just be paralyzed by the choice. Yes.

1:53:27 And you smell you feel like Costco, someone has made all these decisions for me. And they're good decisions. Yes. It's curated. Yeah. You can't just run this strategy willy-nilly. If you're only gonna sell very few things, you're only gonna make very few episodes, it puts a lot of onus on making. exceptional choices on the things that you do choose to carry. Right. So it's like a very high leveraged strategy.

1:53:48 But th you didn't know any about any of this when you s went into the episode. No, we were just I The only reason we did the episode was it was Charlie Mugger's favorite company. Alright, give me another give me another lesson. How we doing is this the last? This is acquired, Michael. Okay, I know. You said you didn't have any plans tonight.

1:54:08 We were sitting down with uh Morris Chang and he was talking about T SM C and he told us that one of the ways that they erred was trying to exit the integrated circuit market or diversify from that market and go into solar memory. And there was one other thing too. And none of those were as good of a business. And the the key insight

1:54:30 Was You're already in the best business. In integrated circuits are the future and will be for a long time and you're already the best at them. So stop. trying to do other things and just do that really well.

1:54:41 Uh Probably to a fault and with a bias, we believe that about acquired. Every time we look at anything else. We're do are doing the thing we should be doing. Don't go do something that we're less good at, or right. We should always just make another person. You have decided to become venture capitalists. Again. I'm curious. What's the difference between what you do

1:55:03 And what I a normal Silicon Valley venture capitalist does before they put money in a company. Do you think you know? I think there's a there's a there's just a uh Um I think there's a top level misconception about what the venture capital industry is. All right. Uh U I think a lot of people think it is a analytical

1:55:22 industry, you're learning all about the company, you're doing diligence. It's not that you're not. You are doing that. But that's the commodity. It's an access business. Especially at the growth stage. Yeah. Early stage there's more picking involved. But that picking is like a super

1:55:38 Art. It's not a uh early stage picking is not a, you know understanding a company. Right. It's it's a it's a whole different thing. So the entire bet No. we've made in this chapter of our venture capital careers is a bet that getting into the best companies is just an access thing. The you know growth stage private companies you can tell what the good ones are. Most people can't get in. If you can, you should.

1:56:02 All right. With where w we do the work in choosing our sponsors. And then we're like okay great. Box checked. Our sponsors are not um non obvious companies that all growth stage investors don't want to get into.

1:56:15 But the kind of work that you do. An a podcast episode about a company. Does it bear any? a resemblance to the kind of work a VC does.

1:56:25 Uh about a company before they invest in it. Uh, I don't think so. I wrote a lot of investment memos in my early stage career. They're all about how big could this thing be if it goes right? But you're almost always investing, at least I was at the napkin stage. And so you're you're m mostly making stuff up.

1:56:45 You're you're like dreaming. what this market could look like when it materializes. But like You don't know. You're really just making a founder bet, and then you're trying to support it with all this like structural information that is a very um imprecise. Right. You're acting like you know the third or fourth decimal place when in reality you barely know the first one. You answer my my question was is are these two things similar and you're saying basically not so much. So that means that

1:57:10 Being a venture capitalist. in no way really prepared you. To create These podcast episodes because they're very different things. Well, I think it I I think it prepared us to create the business that we created. Okay. But what have you learned? Put question another way. What have you learned about telling a story?

1:57:26 Uh that you didn't know what how to do it. Reading your books and you know uh being a liberal arts, you know, major at Princeton for me. Studying the businesses that we studied for acquired. helps me make acquired far more than any investment memo I ever wrote. In fact, I remember in one of my last few years of being a venture capitalist, one of my partners Uh Asked me how I

1:57:51 like learn so much so quickly. About different industry dynamics and I was like It's it's not because I'm talking all these early stage companies, none of which know what the future looks like. It's studying these mature businesses and understanding what markets can look like at maturity. Acquired helped me be an investor much better than

1:58:08 The other way around. Gotcha. What can you do now as storytellers that you couldn't do ten years ago? I think we think about narrative structure and acts. Uh. And and what a story is. Right. When we're reading.

1:58:22 Books sometimes. A lot of books, especially corporate history books, are This happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened. Yep. That's fine for you know cataloging history. It's not a story. That is not a story. And at a certain point we realized like But you can't do and this happened. Right.

1:58:39 It's the Y of it. It's the It's the story flow. If someone just told you He's told me. Ten years ago.

1:58:52 The two guys. Without any previous really literary podcasting, any kind of experience. Укреплею conversation. about an individual company.

1:59:03 And people can be mesmerized by it. People can listen to the whole thing and w and want even more. I said that doesn't sound like very promising. Like I wouldn't put it I wouldn't put money into that. Yeah, you wouldn't as if you're an early stage meeting. So it's like it's like why it works is a really good question. 'Cause it's not obvious. It's counter to much of what's going on in the culture, like sh tension spans supposedly getting shorter, blah, blah, blah. But you Okay. Yeah.

1:59:26 It does work. It clearly works. It works as a business, but also works as just a creative thing. Um and the why of it is like I mean you must think about this all the time. The why of it.

1:59:37 Yeah, I mean there's a bunch of different answers to this. One giant tailwind for us is a year after we started the podcast, AirPods came out. Yeah. And it became societally acceptable. To just listen to stuff while you're moving about the world. While you're talking to your mother. Yes. Yeah. So there they're um Our brains all got two input channels. Like we used to only

1:59:59 focus on one thing at a time, everyone now focuses on two things at a time. you can't do the same thing, like you can't read and listen at the same time, but you can drive and listen. You can run and listen, you can do the dishes and listen. And so we have this massive tailwind of people have like a large number of minutes throughout the day where they're doing stuff that they can also listen. Right. Yeah. Which that's true for all podcasts, but like

2:00:23 There are a couple things that are true for all podcasts. One one one is AirPods. Uh It' bas basically all the platform stuff that happened over the last 10 years. And we started at the right time to advance. So AirPods. Um Spotify. Spotify didn't enter podcast until twenty eighteen and now is I think over half of the market. Uh brought hundreds of millions of people into podcasting. Apple Podcasts not becoming YouTube was actually great for us. That it's a place to to When you get a listener, you really get a listener.

2:00:50 And it's like this durable, incredibly valuable place to accumulate listeners. Spotify is too, but Uh YouTube in its own way too. But there are zillions of podcasts and not many are doing what you're doing. So so it's they all have the requested. Yeah, that's that's completely right. It's like that what is going on in the economy. is is mysterious to people. Yeah. These companies these companies, a lot of your episodes have been about these companies. About Tesla and NVIDIA and and and and Microsoft and Google and They people don't really get them explained to them. So that's that's a big part of it.

2:01:27 If I had pitched you on acquired in twenty fifteen, There's no way I would have said acquired helps you understand why the world is arranged the way it is. Yeah. But now I think that is absolutely the promise that we come through on. Right. I think the biggest reason acquired works is is kinda how you started off the conversation. It's just It it's our partnership. Like it's it's uh if just one of us were making acquired it would be A shadow of itself, like the magic.

2:01:54 exists between us and there's so many there's there's a million times over the last ten years where like If we hadn't just been You don't. s that burned cigarettes on our arms aligned that like it wasn't even a conversation, but like had our partnership been slightly different, like it would have fractured. That's why we're still here. So I know I want you to do I want to conclude this conversation.

2:02:15 'Cause we don't want to go three hours. Uh but I but I but I wanna do it. By doing the seven powers and apply it. Seven powers for acquire. Apply it to acquire. Great. And then I can learn what these seven powers are. All right, so we are definitely a scale economies business. The fact that there's a large number of listeners to amoritise all the inputs across. makes it

2:02:42 so that we can do an unreasonable amount of things. for each episode. Mm-hmm. I mean If you were gonna try to compete with acquired today, you couldn't do all the stuff that we do because the million listeners. Yeah, or the access or the And you could do it for one or two or three episodes, but if it didn't grow quickly at some point. You'd be like, it's not even about the money, it's about like, why am I doing all this work when no one is listening to it? Right. And it would feel like that. So there was this path dependent thing of. We always had the right product.

2:03:11 for the current amount of value that it created in the world. which you can use a listener base as a proxy for. And now because the listener base is large. we can afford to do things other people can't, which is sort of the de the definition of scale time. Let's say We and another podcast made the exact same episode.

2:03:31 We've got a million and a half subscribers. They have zero. our episode is a lot more valuable. Even if we said the exact same words in the exact same way. Yep, okay. Scale economy is yes. Oh uh counterpositioning everywhere. Counterpositioning explain everyone. Okay. Can we do a little meta thing and also explain these powers everywhere. Okay, explain these powers. Counter positioning is

2:03:51 When You do something that your competitors just Cannot. respond to. Give me an example outside of the podcasting world. Yeah, so what's a great example of this? Um

2:04:01 Southwest Airlines launches, they only use seven thirty sevens. Everyone else who already has fleets of other planes can't do all the streamlined operations that um South West is gonna do because they have all these other sunk costs in this diversified fleet. Yeah. Or counter position that we're we're we're not volume driven. Most uh podcasts sell their ads on a CPM basis.

2:04:23 And they are incentivized to make as many episodes as possible. Right. With as many ad slots as possible. Right. Our business is entirely structurally different. We also don't have shareholders. So we can do all these like non economic things because the The The thing we're solving for the quotient is actually like our lives. Right.

2:04:41 That's why you need four episodes. As opposed to six or eight. Or one. Yeah. Right. Right. Be cool if he ends up being just one episode a season. This is David's commitment. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. That's my nightmare is that we actually we can't end up if we if we end up at one episode a year, we're or one episode a season where We it's time to hang it up. Time to hang it up. We we don't work with agencies.

2:05:02 If an agency reaches out and says we want to place ads on your podcast, we write them a very nice note if if we're if we're able to get to the email and say, Oh, we don't work with agencies, but thank you so much for your interest. Can you imagine working at a podcast network where there's a revenue opportunity and you're saying sorry, we just don't You're a middleman in a transaction and so therefore we won't take your dollars. Right.

2:05:23 Yeah. Counter positioning is the in the number of shows you do. So the kind of shows. That's how it expresses itself, but the the because our business is structurally different than most others. Network economies, uh not really, but there's some water cooler effect. Of People talk about acquired episodes, especially within companies. Right. So

2:05:45 Uh we release an episode, it becomes a topic of discussion. This is a really weak power. But it exists to a small extent. If you like acquired, more people liking acquired is valuable because you get to talk about it with more people. Right. No switching costs. Swi switching class isn't powered, but super easy to Explain switching class. Salesforce. Yes, yes. Okay. And

2:06:08 Okay. Associated with that. Even though, you know, let's say on a uh day to day basis, it's the same price or cheaper. It's just such a pain in an economic tax. Two do a new implementation of something. Right. Yeah.

2:06:29 Listeners can switch. There's no cost of switching out of acquired into whatever might come along. No, no cost. Yep. Don't have that. Can I just also say this is so weird and uncomfortable for me. Cause like while I think We've created this like beautiful gem and I love thinking about it and talking about it w with you.

2:06:50 It is terrifying. Um Um, talk about it with everyone and also feel so self aggrandizing to like We are just a little thing. What a great painting I've made. No, no, no. This is good, but it's very useful to think about this in this way. You've got a framework. Let's think about your frame you and your framework. What's the next power? Uh branding. Uh yes.

2:07:10 Uh same again, thought exercise, same product released by a different podcast, now called Acquired People, just Acquired More. Right. Yep. Um and that's just growing. Yeah. Yeah.

2:07:20 Uh cornered resource that uh the business owns us. Explain cornered resource. Give me an example. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Uh intellectual property. Okay. Uh patents. Disney owns the likeness of Mickey Mouse. Okay. You don't get to build a business that benefits from the Economic value driven by Mickey Mouse. Right. Now we're assuming by government dividends. We're assuming that you're a cornered resource. That the reasons that people are tuning in.

2:07:46 Is it's your lovely voices and the way you enthuse over this stuff. It could be. that you've just actually found a thing. That everybody wants. And then if two other people came in, they'd do it even better. And that we there are people who create the other. Uh it's early, they're small, but things that resemble acquired a lot. The Step Change podcast by our friend Ben Iidelson is one of them, where like It's doing really well for a podcast that has three episodes because the the there's magic in the format even if it's not us.

2:08:13 Yeah, but that is if there is a corner resource, it's you or your editor. Or yeah, or whose name you won't root a bunch. So suggesting the price. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. It could be a code. Okay. Uh and then the last one is process power. Which almost always businesses don't have. We've pr and we have in space. We we totally. Because we we kind of fail to articulate. how an episode comes together. We tried on this conversation three times. And we didn't really explain to you exactly

2:08:42 mechanically how an episode comes together. Except I can understand the iterations, but you you you vomit out eight hours. If your editor decides which the best five, it comes back to you and you and and and you cut. But like what do I show up with on recording day? Oh I see. So We should maybe do this a little bit here, process. Can I guess? Sure. Cause I actually don't know what you show up with the recording. You both

2:09:05 I assume you each take a kind of part of the story. Like either the history Or um current analysis of the business and you're responsible for that and you go learn about it and But but we're there's gotta be some improvisation here, so that you don't tell each other exactly what you've learned. More or less. I'm responsible for the story.

2:09:25 With we carve out a one or multiple chunks that Ben will take. And then Ben is responsible for the analysis. Right. And then you probably have some lines you want to say. That you know you want to say.

2:09:38 Uh but you wanna say them naturally. So you kinda have them stored in the back of your head and you wait for the moment where you can drop it where it sounds casual like. But if you don't if that doesn't happen, you set it up. Like Ben's point, like Skew is everything in Costco. The the y th that that kind of insight, the kind of you can reduce it to an s some something you want to get across in a line or two. What's hard about improv.

2:10:01 Is Disposing of all the things you imagine that were gonna happen in a conversation before they happen and nobody does it perfectly. And uh so there's this tension between, you know, the script and what's happening organically between the two of you. The truth is is is it it it's both. It's both. So I I wr I write a script. I write to twenty thousand words. You do. In sentence form, word Do you read it? Uh no. Well well, I I mean I read it, it doesn't come out of my mouth.

2:10:28 It it comes out as a natural conversation. So you write it, but then you put it to one side. I have three screens in front of you. I'm kinda reading it. I'm kinda reading it. Yeah, yeah. Are you? But but it but Ben interjects and it's you know it doesn't come out exactly as I wrote it. It doesn't sound like a script. Uh yes, but part of my process is I need to Right. A script.

2:10:45 Yeah. Yeah, I it makes complete sense. Well but also to have it as a as a crutch there when we're performing. We can't keep all this in our heads. But the real crutch you have is you can go you're gonna do it for nine hours and it's only gonna be four. So that you can you can make any kind you know, you don't have to be perfect. You can screw it up every which way. You have a real time feedback agent. Where like I'm I'm like this is dragging. I don't care about any of the prehistory. Like cut, cut, cut, cut. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:11:11 And then but yet yet all we here The audience is, that's amazing. Oh, that's so interesting. It's incredible. I never thought of it that way. You're the best, I love you. So we don't see any of the other stuff. No, no, no. It's in there. It's in there somewhere. Okay. All right, what uh so m take me further into the process. And so you have you have a script and you don't pen you don't have a script. I have a

2:11:36 giant text edit document with like just a whole bunch of mechanical points I want to get across. I have uh some story points in there that I I know I want to interject in David's story, but I know the things that

2:11:52 I'm gonna bring to the episode that I really care deeply about or explaining how something works. So I have like written out bullet point by bullet point by bullet point. And then the lower that's gonna Enter in. Yeah. But it only this thing works because it doesn't sound like you're reading anything. Yeah. But the reality is it's a hybrid. Okay. The reality is that it is a hybrid. Yeah.

2:12:13 And there's all sorts of stuff in there that like I we are sort of looking at about Six hours into recording were like That's not gonna make it in. And that's okay. That turned out it was not at a salient point. Right.

2:12:23 But the the point of process power there's like uh w we can describe all this. Y you could probably I'm sure you have Describing Painstaking detail. How I do a lot of it. But that doesn't mean anybody else can write a Michael Lewis book.

2:12:35 The process, but your point is you have the process power. But the point of process power is you could you could tell them it's Oh I see. Oh I see. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Then you have a process that can't be replicated even if you explain it. What pops to my mind Is that The the magic the pixie dusk. in a process is trust.

2:12:57 And it's like something. L You get. When you trust a process. Hear it.

2:13:03 Trust the process. Gary goes to Sam Hinkey, but the ownership of the Phil 76ers, they didn't trust the process. They wanted the process. They wanted to replicate what they would been doing in Houston, but they didn't trust it. Where does trust show up? I was just about to say that I think I trust my process. And it's it's a it's self-trust, but that's a form of trust. And I know if I just told it to someone. and they wouldn't try to do it, they'd be thinking uh they'd be it'd make them they'd wig out.

2:13:34 Yeah, I I gotta record the things. I gotta do this. I got and so that in fact Doing it my way would be a kind of weird handicap for them. That's the process, but like if you if you were to copy paste the process. It wouldn't have the same results and it might in fact be a handicap. Right.

2:13:49 But there's something emotional going on there. Uh the the uh the the the difficulty in replicating it. I also think it's Because When you describe your процес.

2:14:00 It is lossy compression. The way compression works in computing is you're taking a large amount of data and you're compressing it down into a smaller amount of data, a different file format. And if it's lossy, it means that you can never fully recreate the original work. The MP3 codec is a JPEG. A JPEG doesn't actually contain all the RGB values from the original photo, but like a human kind of can't tell most of the time, and so it's fine. Explaining a process is a lossy compression of the actual process. That's true. That's true. You're actually not giving him everything.

2:14:35 And you're not doing it intentionally. No, it's just language is a lossy compression of thought. Yeah. True. That's an interesting observation. Language is an a a loss of compression of th of of thought. Try to think of the reverse is also true for some people. Well and and uncompressing information, it's so funny when you and I are communicating, I had a thought, I compressed it into a very narrow bandwidth thing of speech. I told it to you, you uncompressed it into your brain. It might actually mean a pretty different thing to you than it means to me. That insight. Is at the bottom.

2:15:02 Of my creative process, I assume when I write a book. that what goes into people is something different than came out of me. That th that they are gonna take it and reassemble it in a different way. And so I have to construct it in a way that there's a hole for the reader to go in and and just do what they need to do with it. Like that the more I just let the story re tell itself, the less I I tried to

2:15:26 Like influence the way he thought about the story. The more the story landed. And then of course when you do that You're giving people lots of options, uh, you know, in how they and how they see the story, how they understand the story.

2:15:39 It's the risk you take, uh And But it is it's what makes it alive. And it was and it's why and it's why you get this huge range of response to a a given story. But you that you got to actually just accept that when you're saying something.

2:15:55 the other person gets to understand it however they want to understand it. And if you don't do that, what you get is is something that's dead the next day. It's like yeah, yeah, you made your point. But I didn't hear it. I don't want it. This is always one of our like

2:16:09 key goals with with every episode is like no matter what you think about the company. Right. You're gonna enjoy this episode. and you're gonna learn something from it. And then you may come away. Thinking like To that understanding. This company is terrible. You may come away thinking this company is righteous. Yep. But like sometimes we don't nail it. Yeah, but we don't always nail it, but that's the that's the goal. Yeah, no, that's it. I think it's a it that's it's a it's the creatively fun goal. Yeah. Cause that's the challenge.

2:16:35 rather than just imposing your editorial view on the world. Present it in as elegant way as possible and let the reader make what they make of it. Uh once you realize that's the thing to do. It's so much more fun. Than trying to muscle people around. It's it's all of a sudden you're dancing with a reader instead of like

2:16:53 It also requires you to learn something new. while you're making the creative work. Like if if you come in with a point of view. And you come in Let's say we try to I was so afraid when we were making Trader Joe's that we were gonna remake the Costco episode. And I was like, this episode's gonna suck because we're not gonna have the original enthusiasm. Yeah, or it's Costco, but it's for furniture. Oh, this is totally different. You have to have new insights that delight you as you're researching it.

2:17:23 so that you can make something great. And I think the reasons acquired will eventually fail. I don't think come from like platform disruption, like oh TikTok's gonna make it so people want short form instead of acquired. Maybe, but the more likely reason that we eventually fail is we stop being delighted. by new things we discover, so we have nothing new to deliver to listeners. Right.

2:17:47 I agree with that. If you were gonna ask me how you were gonna fit that's exactly the kind of thing I would say. You just run out of you'd run out of gas. A run out of material. Yeah. Major socks go up and down.

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2:19:00 All right, where how are we gonna end this? This is your show. I've carved. Carve outs, yeah. We gotta do we so again. Carve outs. What does this even mean? Okay, so um Yeah, uh you'll appreciate this. Uh it was my wife's idea back towards the beginning of the show. She used to listen to um Slates uh I think it was the Culture Gab Fest. Yes. And uh they uh they do cocktail chatter. At the end of episodes. It's just like hey, yep.

2:19:25 Something unrelated. And uh She was like, You have to do that. That's fun. Well the I understand the idea of it. Why is it called a Carmack? Well, okay, so then we we were like this was in a phase of acquired where we wanted to brand everything as like around the go.

2:19:38 And so we thought, okay, what can we call this? We're not gonna call it cocktail chatter. Uh we we came up with the idea of a carve out, like in an M and A transaction, uh You know Carve Out is like this piece of the purchase price goes to like this set of shareholders for Special reason they're employees or whatever. Okay. So these are the things we're carving out as things that delight us that have nothing to do with the rest of the episode. But but the name is is just residual of it's just a residue of your former incarnation. We used to have a thing called the LP show because of the old branding things.

2:20:11 Older version of the third. Yeah, yeah. So what are we gonna do? Where are carve out? What are the specific things? We have some categories that we're gonna throw out and then you gotta tell us and we'll tell you things this year that we loved in this category, typically pieces of media or products or something like that. All right. We usually start with books. That's kind of funny. Having you here. Uh I mean so many of your books have been our years. Absolutely. So it's books that books that I've read though that in the last year. So I've gotta confess I've had a very weak reading year because I've been I've been really deep in two projects where I've been working And when I'm working, I'm of often all I'm reading is for work.

2:20:50 But I can think of a couple. One at the beginning of the year and one at the one I just put down. First one I read because my son was in high school at the time.

2:20:59 had read it and he was enthusiastic about this eight hundred page novel. And I and I thought that that just didn't happen very often. And it's It's it's been out a long time. It's called The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothes, and it's a fantasy trilogy. He never got to the third book. And I don't know what's happened to him. He's like blocked. But I I've not found Martin situation. I'm hoping he's an acquired listener. And I would tell him I can come and help get you unblocked. I know how to unblock writers. I have a secret power here. And so Do you have a secret life as a fiction ghostwriter?

2:21:31 I do not know. But I do have a secret life as a coach to writers. And uh Other writers. And it's it this thing was s it was so compelling. I couldn't believe how good it was. And I couldn't believe how good it was that he hasn't he's just gotten stalled. But the name of the wind, Patrick Ruffice, read at the beginning of the year. Very beginning of the year. At the end of the thing I just finished, it's not like it's a great book, but I think it's like it's so short. And

2:21:56 It's of it's something that Is speaking to our moment. In our It's basically how I govern ourselves. It's um

2:22:03 I always mispronounce his name it's V Vanavar Bush. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Who who essentially created the American Science Project. And it's a little, it's a basic, I think he started it as a memo to FDR, then FDR died, and it ended up being a memo to Terry Truman about what America could do. If the government in the right way. got behind science. He was saying look, what we did with Manhattan Project we can do with biology.

2:22:26 We can do we can do with the other hard sciences. He was describing not a top down approach, not like the government is gonna just decide. We're gonna we're gonna fund it. and let the scientists figure out what they need to work on. Was that was the that was the big insight. So those are two books. How about you?

2:22:42 What books do you um Similar to you, we've been it's been a research heavy year. Yeah, we have young kids, so fun books are Uh one great book I read for research was Last Man Standing to prep for the Jamie Diamond interview. That was really good. Total Page Turner. Um Made it.

2:22:59 It was a great thing. Yeah. Uh and then two is I just love reading Morgan Housell. And his new book, The Art of Spending Money, is is really fun. I mean, it's where I get most of my like latent ideas of hey hey dummy money's not gonna make you any happier. He's a great explainer. Yeah.

2:23:18 Great explanation. Uh my two are um First one is a reach back to December of last year with the Mars episode. Um Emperors of Chocolate by Joel Glenn Brenner. You ever read that? You know. I once

2:23:32 I had a chocolate related story and I flipped through it and I didn't ever have time to read the whole thing. But yes, I know that's so it's the dual history of Hershey and Mars together. Yep. She It's the I believe the only big book she ever wrote. And um it it's just a masterpiece. It's so it's so good.

2:23:50 Uh the other one, um Morris Chang's autobiography that we got to read. It is currently only in Chinese. Uh but we got to read an English version of it to prep. It's it's so I mean you can't. How did you do that? Who translated it for you? This uh woman Karina Bow did a translation for just for you. Yeah. She was working on it as a as just a pet project, uh anyway, and uh uh accelerated it for us.

2:24:14 Uh okay, books um Podcasts. Number two. Well, this is this is a layup. It the only the I the your podcast is the big addition to my rotation. Well thank you. I started in July. And I've listened to, I don't know, ten of them or something. Thank you. But what in your what is in your rotation besides acquired?

2:24:33 And against the rules, of course. I g well, I don't listen to my own thing. Uh I listen to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History. I listen to uh The Smartless Guys. 'Cause I like them. Your interview on that was great too. It was fun to do it. Um What else will I like? Listen to the daily some. Uh

2:24:52 Every now and then I'll dip into a right wing thing just to hear it. Just no. Th there isn't that that Any any recommendations? No.

2:25:03 Uh Not really. And And then kinda r you know, random stuff. Like every now and then Bill Simmons will have something I w I want to hear. I love Bill Simmons. I just don't have time. Like it's prolific. You have eaten my podcast, Alex. You've eaten a lot of my podcast. No, no, and I can and I can actually tell you where I was, like treadmill in Denmark when I listened to the Indian cricket thing. Isn't that the most fun thing about this? You remember a place. They're very place specific.

2:25:30 No, it's uh the acquired podcast is the new thing. I've been I how about you all? I listened to an episode of Invest Like the Best about a year ago. which was the really, really long interview with Graham Duncan. Oh yeah, that was really good. That was really good. That was originally didn't he Patrick do that as like a private podcast? And then he did a shorter version. I didn't listen to the shorter version, I only listen to the like

2:25:54 Super long one, but uh One of my biggest takeaways from that is about having a uh the correct grip. That you don't wanna have too tight of a grip. on your work, but you don't want to have too loose of a grip. You need to play

2:26:08 with an appropriate grip. for whatever the task is that you're trying to do. And you'll if if you're gripping too tight, you know, you're gonna pull it. Or you're gonna it's gonna feel too mechanical, too unnatural. And if it's too loose, like you're not minding the shop enough. You know, you're you you get you gotta get your head back in the game. And there's an a Yeah, there's a I've been amazed my career how and just how useful sports analogies are to to Writing. Uh I'm sure to everything. But the these physical memories. translate pretty neatly to how the mind with the mind is doing too. And that

2:26:40 Uh Like when I write a book. I'm on a pitcher's mound. It takes me back to pitching in high school. And I know and I'm I'm thinking of the of the reader as the hitter. Getting meaning across to a reader is

2:26:51 is tricky. In the way that Fooling a hitter is tricky. And it and it's just I can feel that connection. And so these physical analogies are really useful. Even if there's sometimes a stretch. Speaking of sports, mine is uh the Glue Guys podcast, which I think we both went on this year. Yeah. Uh which actually was the origin of us of us uh meeting. Um

2:27:11 Those guys are great. They are great. I think we told them on the episode. I d I tell them hold on like you guys gotta like you guys got some magic here. You gotta Gotta keep doing this. You keep telling everybody that they run their b their podcast business in the wrong way. And you're right. Well I thought it they just th they just they've got magic. Like they just like They are

2:27:35 Taking it seriously and keeping doing it. But like I I think it's a really, really They have the really rare dynamic of like just the three of them together. regardless if they have a guest, don't have a guest. Like it's they're they're equally good. They're very different personalities, yeah.

2:27:50 Can I just I'm so uh Like something inside me feels so crunchy. I don't think we've figured out a better way to do it. Like I don't think we figured out the way to do it and everybody else should just snap to our way. It's like We have an enormous amount of privilege that we can run a business in this way, and most people

2:28:08 have constraints that prevent them from doing this. It's not that we're right and everybody else is wrong. It's that we have like set up a particular system that works for us. But it is like you're right and I'm wrong. That I that it it is really is a way of running a business that we could have done with against the rules. And it And I'm gonna go think about it.

2:28:26 Uh But anyway, so what's our next card? Okay, okay, next next category is um Video slash shows movies slash shows. Videos, movies, TV shows. So I just saw a movie two days a ago, two nights ago. We went to the theater. Whole family went to the feel. J Kelly.

2:28:43 It's new. No Obama. And it is it's George Clooney I guess you'd say he's playing him he's playing George Clooney with a midlife crisis. That he that it's it's It's a fame he's playing a famous actor who's trying to sort out

2:28:57 uh the meaning of his life. It's just magical. It's a beautiful movie. And a ambition really ambitious movie. And then I was I've been thinking about it. Kind of since I saw it, like what exactly it was getting across. With getting across, I think. Being famous like a movie star is.

2:29:16 puts you at a certain distance to the world around you. And that distance has a price. And it was sort of taking the measure of that price. And and which What makes that more general is that I think everybody. has to make some decisions about

2:29:31 The distance That they keep the world at. And uh this was a this is a way of having that that conversation and and entertaining what that distance should be. Gotta see it.

2:29:43 I have so many. But there's one that's like a you're a TV. I love movies and I love television. The Um, like I have no video games to recommend, but I have lots of these. The one that's just head and shoulders about everything else and is the greatest performance art I've ever seen in my entire life is the rehearsal season two. All right.

2:30:00 Nathan Fielder. And Eric Natar Nicola, who we actually got to work with. Uh Eric and A twenty four films. Shot. The

2:30:09 sort of concert film. part of our Radio City show. And collaborating with Eric was unbelievable. But before any of that. Uh I saw the rehearsal season two, and my jaw is just on the flo with the level. You were talking about this for months. Ambition. Uh

2:30:26 Nathan's a complete psycho, and it's the highest commitment to the bit I've ever seen in any form of media. I mean it I don't want to spoil anything, but it have have you seen? I have not seen it and I will now go see it. It it is uh Uh uh. I was shaking. Okay. Yeah.

2:30:43 I'm I'm a lighter uh video guy. I'm a YouTube guy mostly. Um My my YouTube uh uh for the year is is one I've recommended before a a past collab. Uh Doug DeMiro is still like killing it. I just like I think Doug is probably my favorite YouTuber. Like he's just uh What does he do? He is uh he's the biggest car reviewer. Like, I'm not really that into cars, but he took delightfuls first. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And Doug is like he does these delightful reviews of like

2:31:12 I just love you know watching like mid-range SUV reviews that I'm never gonna buy. So listeners will like this. David falls asleep to this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, like uh he'll he'll release a new review and I'll like Why is what you watch before you go to bed? Totally. So how does it affect your dreams? That's a good question. Do you dream do you like have Lightning the Queen dreams? No the beauty of Doug, his his key insight was, you know, all the other car YouTubers Making

2:31:45 Videos for car enthusiasts. Right. He makes videos for people who need to buy a family TV. Gotcha. I mean he also reviews supercars, like et cetera, et cetera. But like most of his content is. No. No, it's not. I want to list a like a bunch. I'm not going to give commentary on them just because a lot of people are watching stuff over the holidays, and here's a bunch of things. Tires. The T V show so funny.

2:32:12 F1 the movie. I thought was very entertaining. I gotta watch it. Beautiful production quality. My favorite tribute uh Expensive I paid forty million dollars for the Rumored. Rumored$40 million for the sponsorship of the fake team in the movie. That's right. So great. And or some of the best thing, if not the best thing in the Star Wars modern Star Wars franchise available on Disney Plus. uh the show Fallout.

2:32:36 so good and season two is about to come back. I think that's uh Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy Again, artists. Like I was saying about Nathan Fielder. Severance was amazing. Silo has a new season coming out that I can't wait to next it's been the books are really good. Yes. I like the books. Yeah, those are my T T V recommendations.

2:32:54 Nice. Uh next category, which might just be me, is video games. Just you. Just me. Yeah. So One of the greatest moments in my parenting journey, thus far my older daughter is four. Is I got her into video games. We play video games together now every night and it's just like it's the best. And like this is what I have been waiting for.

2:33:12 But I need to give a shout out again to Sea of Stars. Which is an indie throwback RPG. Which I bought just for me on my Steam Deck. And we were on vacation in Santa Barbara and she was like Dad, what are you doing? And that like that was it. Like I was like I wasn't trying. It was like she came up to me. as I'm playing, you know, this like indie RPG.

2:33:33 And like she started playing it. Like that was like I I never would have guessed that this was my daughter's entry into video games. Uh And then two. Kirby uh and the Forgotten Land on the Switch is like Perfect. We can play it together. It's co-op.

2:33:47 Uh it's great for me, it's great for her. It's awesome. So your daughter's at an age where she'll do anything you want to do. No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know my daughter. She's extremely independent. It's anomalous and awesome. Yes. This is a rare experience. Okay. All right. She runs the house. Like yeah, no no. Uh so this is this is like s so much joy for me. Great. Products. What are some products that you have come to own in the last year that you H Just thought are awesome or improving quality of life.

2:34:16 I found a new pen, I got it here. Let's see what it is. And it's just like I needed a pen. It had just the right sort of Fine fine point. And then it that It's kinda generous with the ink.

2:34:27 But it doesn't explode on an airplane. And doesn't smear, I imagine. Doesn't smear it. I'm looking at it now. The Rs Teca. roller ball pen fine and I just ordered a whole case of them because I I it just it's finally got a pen I just love. Listeners, if you want to write like Michael Lewis, we have the answer. This is an example of that company is explaining someone's process. So that so my that pen is w is a thing. What else other products this year?

2:34:53 The Fujifilm X one hundred VI. I previously specifically did not carve it out and carved out a different camera. I've started carrying the Fuji film and and now love it. It's uh amazing. I've got a two year old and it's just so nice to have more than just smartphone pictures. A family. It's awesome. Nice. I'm just looking at what I have on. Like came over here. So maybe ex ex officio. That's that's we don't but we're not gonna talk about those. That wasn't this year. But the the uh but anyway that wasn't this year. But this year, actually, on my feet. These are two these are things.

2:35:27 These socks. I ran out of White Sox in London. It went over to Is it UniClo? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they didn't have any I was just looking for athletic socks.

2:35:35 Right. And they have these other things instead. They've turned out to be so much better. Then the athletic socks and they come in different colors, so you can you can like a light gray, you can wear them as dress socks, you can wear them as athletic socks. And they like

2:35:49 Whenever I I I don't know about you, whenever I find something I love What's about to happen is it's about to be discontinued. So you need to buy all of them. Right. So I d I I'm I got I didn't get quite all of them because I was flying I got'em in London, I was gonna have to fly back with them. But I bought an I bought basically what was in the store at the moment. And these shoes. So um Those on? These are on.

2:36:09 And um Oddly, I spent a couple of days with Roger Federer this summer. And I and I just discovered them. So I we had the uh the on conversation and made me kind of like acceptable to him. But it was um but the on I think these these on I was a hoka guy. Also great. Also great.

2:36:28 Nike basically blew it, right? They let these hundred percent. They got rid of their stores, they thought it's all gonna be online and on and Hoka roll in. I'm a little torn, but not that torn. I'm kinda these on are just like un there. I don't know where it is. It's it's uh Especially the white ones. I get I I'm getting criticized for it because I started wearing them instead of even dress shoes. And like on I went on the Colbert.

2:36:53 with with these And Like I got eight calls saying you can't do that again. Really? Yeah, like it looks been wearing ons all the time. Yeah, they just don't look good on TV or whatever. So but I've been I've been over wearing both the Uniclos socks and the but I but that's a sign of enthusiasm. That's right. There you go. And isn't isn't the Federer on deal like one of the best endorsement deals by an athlete ever? Measured by how? How much money he gets paid. Didn't he do like an equity deal early with on? Yeah. I think that might be right. He only aligns with companies whose products he really likes. Rolex. It's an amazing It's a ma how easy it is, right?

2:37:28 Also he's Roger. He's also Roger Fetters. It's similar but well similar but to uh I bought a Ramoa suitcase this year and I love it. It's just a suitcase, but Like I I love it. I got um uh Ramoa, uh L VMH bought this uh it's a suitcase company German suitcase company. They make the the like aluminum shell suitcase in your step every time you show up. Well and I got the um It's exciting to find new luggage. I mean I don't know why why it is so exciting, but it's hard to find new luggage. Three middle aged men sitting around talking about luggage on the podcast. No, it you know, where you find the new bag.

2:38:06 Life is gonna be different. I've always been a minimal packing, like backpack only, like a just maximum efficiency. You assume you're gonna be washing your clothes wherever you go. Yeah, yeah, but but this is the first time I've just been like, you know what? I'm just gonna get a nice piece of luggage. And like it's not the most efficient way to put but like I just like it, it makes me happy. It's great. Uh the um parenting? Uh parenting. Yeah, let's go to parenting. Uh

2:38:29 Feel free to decline on this. The young parents. Uh four and eighteen months. Yeah. So the first is discovering guided access on the iPad. It's an accessibility setting where you can make it snow the buttons do anything and it doesn't respond to taps. So on an airplane.

2:38:47 They can't mess with this reach. F you dad. Make it work. So these are products for parenting. These are products for parenting. If you are a parent Of uh Of kids are kids age. The last one is the movie Toy Story. We it's the first movie we introduced him to. It was my favorite movie growing up. Um and it's been really fun.

2:39:07 Uh he took to it, he loves Mr. Potato Head, he calls it Tape Ohead. And so he always runs into the room and says, Tape Ohead TV and that means I want to watch Toy Story. So As I alluded to my older daughter is a um independent woman, shall we say. Uh we bought this when she was younger.

2:39:24 And she completely rejected it, the slumber pod. Uh do you have one of these? Oh yeah. Yeah. So this is a Blackout tent. We have two of these. uh a portable crib. So when you're traveling, you basically just put your you put your baby in like a sensory deprivation. When you set up the noise machine right next to it too, you really I see. And for most kids, I like I I remember reading hearing about this from people, they're like it's a miracle. And I tried it with our older daughter and she was like

2:39:50 Like absolute nuclear, you know, like no way is this gonna work. Uh And so I shied away from it. Uh And then we went on a trip recently and I brought it back for my younger daughter'cause I was like, All right, well we'll give it a shot and Pointly good job. Can I just interrupt here for a moment? Yeah. Is it a kind of end zone dance you're doing of your business model that you're just at the end of this all offer free endorsement of consumer products? Yes. Without actually nobody having to pay you for it. No, no, no, you're not going to do it. You just do it. You do this with a flick of the wrist because we don't even need the advertising revenues.

2:40:21 No, we just started because it was a lot of things. These are things we like. Okay. That's good. That's good. Yeah, yeah. That's good. Uh and then my my last one, this is um Fun'cause it's a tie in with our Radio City uh show about the whole family. to uh New York for Radio City. Uh Bluey. We gotta do a bluey episode someday, is this?

2:40:40 incredible phenomenon. I don't know if it cross tier readers. No, it isn't. Uh Bluey is The greatest kid show ever made. Burn on. Uh it it is that's a big claim. uh in Brisbane and he made it uh he was I think an animator for Peppa Pig.

2:40:57 And then made this blitz. And it's it's like I love Bluey. Like it's just so Disney agrees with David. Yeah. Disney has been trying to buy Bluey. uh for years. Oh uh for yeah ever escalating amounts of money. And they just did a deal which I think is the first of its kind. to use Bluey IP. in the Disney universe without owning it. Uh I think I think news just came out today that Blue is coming to Animal Kingdom in Disney World in twenty twenty six.

2:41:25 Uh it's it's basically like it's the Pixar. It's it's think of it as Pixar of this generation. Yeah, yeah. Who is it? Joe Brown. This is guy. It's like the Muppets. Uh yeah, yeah it is. It's like Jim Henson in the Muppets. Yeah. So In New York, in New York City.

2:41:39 You can buy tickets, you get like a forty five minute window, you can take your family, you can take your kids. To Blueie's house, a recreation of Blueie's house inside a building in Union Square. That's like great. If you get kids in the Bluey.

2:41:52 Go to New York, take him to My kids would find that a little strange. Okay. It's true. We keep saying kids, kids of age under yeah. But No. That's all we got for Carvets. That's all we got too.

2:42:07 Michael Pleasure. Thank you so much, Far. What a what a joy. Thank you for giving us your uh your evening. This is the longest I've spoken to anyone in the last 40 years. Um thank you for doing this with us. My pleasure.

2:42:21 Any time. See you at your twentieth. All right, listeners. Thank you so much for listening and being on this journey with us. David.

2:42:31 Very fun way to try to unpack why Acquired worked there with Michael. Uh if you had told us ten years ago when we made the Pixar episode that We'd be sitting down with Michael Lewis to Analyze ourselves. And trade notes. Oh trade notes. My creative process works. Yeah. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Thank you, Michael, for doing this with us. So good.

2:42:56 Uh we have another thank you to Shep Films. This is the crew that made this one look so good. You'll notice that. This was not just David and I setting up a few cameras like we've done with Steve Bomber or Morris Chang.

2:43:08 this was actually produced. And so we have a giant thank you to the uh Shep Films, S H E P Films. Company. Uh, they do amazing work. They've made like full two hour movies with Pedro Pascal and You know, make sci fi movies.

2:43:23 And they do stuff like this. And so we're just delighted to have worked with them. Listeners, if you like this episode, go check out our episodes on TSM C, Hermes, Costco, the NFL, Berkshire. Or any other episode that we talked about. There with Michael. After this episode, check out ACQ two.

2:43:38 We had Andrew Ross orkin on and it was awesome. Speaking of trading notes on the creative process. very different job that he does, but uh you know rhymes with acquired in some ways. So you can search A C Q two in any podcast player. Come talk about this with us in the Slack.

2:43:53 Or if you don't want the Slack, but you do want email, we just did a huge, huge overhaul to our email system. It's no longer just gonna notify you when a new episode comes out. There's all sorts of goodies in that notification email. like our takeaways from the episodes, some behind the scenes photos, corrections from past episodes, it's the place to be. So you can join that at acquired.fm slash email. It really is beautiful and uh We might have some more upgrades to all the what do you call it? Like the Chrome around acquired. Yes. Coming in twenty twenty six, so Stay tuned. That's a great way to put it. Well without listeners. We'll see you next time.

2:44:32 We'll see you next time. Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you Who got the truth now

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