Acquired - 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

0:00Happy 10 years. Happy 10-year anniversary, Ben. It's crazy it's been 10 years. I know. Here we are brought you down here to Silicon Valley to record our 10-year anniversary holiday special here. I wanted a special place. Yeah, what are we doing? You keep like teeing up. Yeah. Let's go just come down. Oh, we'll just record it here and like clearly we're not at your house. I was actually thinking we should try and find the Silicon Valley house, the early Bachman Aviyato.

0:27There's Aviyato. Aviyato. Now the reason I brought you down here is I booked us a very special place to record. It's actually right over here. It's a house. Is this the Google house? It's the house. 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.

1:11Welcome to the Fall 2025 season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, David Resenthal, and we are your hosts. Well listeners, today we're going to do something very different than our holiday specials of years past.

1:39We've received a bunch of requests over the years to do an acquired episode on acquired itself and to unpack why acquired worked when 99% of podcasts do not, but it's always felt a little bit strange to me. And we've always shied away from analyzing our own company. Yep. But then this year, we turned 10 years old and thought, well, maybe it's time for something, at least a sort of pause and reflection to shout out the Coca-Cola episode on our journey to this point.

2:08and why acquired has worked. And so we thought, well, if we're going to do something, 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, someone who himself knows how to tell a great story. And there was really only one choice, Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, Liars Poker, The Blind Side, The Undoing Project, going infinite on and on and on.

2:38And of course, host of his own podcast against the rules, and Ben, you and I have looked up to Michael forever, so 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 to record in the literal garage where that nearly $4 trillion company got started. Yes, indeed.

3:00Well, 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 acquired.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 are being takeaways and exclusive photos from our research process. That's acquired.fm slash email chat about this episode with us and the whole acquired community in Slack acquired.fm slash slack.

3:30And if you want more acquired, check out our interview show ACQ-2. Our last episode was with Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of the New York Times Dealbook, host of CNBC's Squawk Box and author of 1929. That's ACQ-2 and any podcast player. So with that, the show is not investment advice. Dave and I may have investments in the companies we discuss in the show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. With that, onto our conversation with Michael Lewis. Well, Michael, thank you for joining us. Total pleasure.

3:59We have a little something since this is our tenure anniversary that we're celebrating, that we need to do before we start. Okay. So, you went to Princeton. I went to Princeton. Yep. My senior thesis would become impactful for acquired. I was a French literature major. I wrote my thesis on the history of Dom Perignon and...

4:21The marketing history of shrimp. Very serious. Very serious. A little different thing. Let's let you do that. Somehow, I conned the French department into letting me do this. And what probably 12, 13 years later, we made our LVMH episode. And it was a big moment for a choir. Moette and Chandon has just released the 2015 vintage Dom Perignon. 2015 is the year we started.

4:50So, I thought you were going to say that the effect that the Princeton thesis had 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 to a thesis, that it is thesis-like immersion in the subject.

5:08Well, I can tell you our episodes are much better than my actual thesis. But that is exactly how it feels. But that is the process we go through. Yeah. It's running for finals the night before. There's a lot of academic feelings that happen as we get close to recording day. So it's your show and I don't want to take it over. But I wanted to start by saying that I didn't discover it until this year. In July, I was at Google Camp, which is kind of a good way to discover or acquired.

5:38We should talk about where we are now, too. And we are, we are fitting in the Google garage where, yes. I mean, I don't know exactly. This was, I'm sure exactly what happened in the Google garage. So this was the nice, it's a nice idea. Like, literally, Susan Wujeski lived here. She had, I think, just bought the house. This was her house. She had just bought the house. And was looking to sublet part of it, like, just make some extra money on other people using the house. And posted a bulletin notice on the Stanford campus that there was space available here.

6:07And so Larry and Sergei's first desks when they got kicked out of Stanford's offices were right there. Right here, huh? I actually think this actual door desks saw horse is the one that they were using because 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. Thank you. Says to me, have you listened to acquired? And I didn't know what he was talking about.

6:34And I went and listened, I can't remember what I listened to first. I think it might have been the Morris Chang episode, but I had about eight different reactions to it, all positive. And I thought this is, it's kind of amazing, which you all are doing. So then I was from July until now, I've listened to maybe Ken of the episodes, which is a lot of our listening. The first thing struck me, couldn't not believe you were getting away with a four-hour podcast.

7:03And I couldn't believe that even after four hours, I was still looking for even more. You created the environment with the podcast that I try to create with the book. You grab the listener, like I try to grab a reader, and get them to the state of mind, well, they'll let you take them anywhere. And teach them about stuff that they don't even know they want to learn about.

7:24I think if we're gonna, we're doing this as a 10th anniversary sort of celebration. I'm honored and I feel like I'm a lot of my depth here because I'm just a new listener and I listened to all of it. I'm hardly the world's authority on your podcast and I didn't prepare it all except to listen to it. Except I did one thing and that was I went back and listened to you very first. Oh wow. Oh wow. Just to compare. And be kind, please. It is shocking.

7:53how different it is. 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 10-year journey. I think I can see some things you've learned. But I want to know what you think you've learned. Let's do the 10 lessons from the 10-year journey. Do you have your crystallized, because I don't want to taint you? No, no, no. It's actually one big thing.

8:21And if you say it, I'll acknowledge that you, you know, suck my battleship. And I have nothing to say. But I'm curious what you think. There's no way that first thing you did was ever going to become a hit. Well, I'm curious if you think, I've always believed something that's always been there from the beginning is the magic between me and Ben. That's interesting to me. You all meet it like a Passover sater. Yes. And you're...

8:49Colleague, you're not being colleagues at a VC firm. I'll come back to that. I want to talk a little bit about you as investors, but we'll come back to that. 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? We really just wanted to spend more time together. It was one of these things where... You're both straight.

9:10Yeah. Okay, this is about Mary. It's not a romantic relationship. 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 each other. 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. Just from a shared time perspective. Yeah, a little bit. My spouse loves it because...

9:35She doesn't actually want to spend that much time with me. No, I used to, all the stuff we do on a card, I used to just talk at her, and she wasn't interested. That is true. And my wife loves it. She 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 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 meet and there's a chemistry. Yeah.

10:04Explain that chemistry. What is it that makes you excited to see each other? David knew all the Apple rumors in real time, just like I did. You had read all the latest Ritekery posts. We bonded over Ben Thompson originally. And I think, you can tell me if this is mutual, but I looked up to you because you...

10:26were doing a thing that was mysterious to me, which was venture capital. I was a software engineer, and I got hired to work at a venture firm to do some incubation work. But I didn't know anything about the real job of venture capital. And here's David, someone who's just a few years older than me, doing that thing, but kind of in my peer age group. And I could lean over and be like, what are they talking about? I kind of felt like a...

10:50Fraud, in a lot of ways, isn't it? Like, I repressed this deep down. But if I'm honest with myself, I think I felt like a fraud as a VC because I'd never... But 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... Have you ever coded or you ever done any... I mean, I took some CS classes in college, but I'd never...

11:13built anything. So I was like, you know, you built so many products, you had products that millions of people use, and I was like, I'm just masquerading here. So you can see, they've been new stuff. It was exciting for you to know about. Yes. Did you feel the David new stuff? Absolutely. What kind of stuff? Business. Really? It was just French literature. It wasn't. No, no, no. I only found out years into doing acquired. He was a French lit major.

11:43But that's important, that French, that background. I ended up becoming this kind of broad curiosity about things other than business and technology. I hear it in your program. I hear it in your podcast. So when I'm thinking of it in my head, it's Kahneman and Tversky. I wrote a book called The End of Rogers. And you could see, if you could see two people. And then it got me thinking about collaboration. And I've had exciting collaborations with people. And the feeling I get is, This person is bringing out a better version of me, which is why I asked if your spouses were threatened, because Conovan diversky's spouses were threatened is too strong a word, but they were very aware that the relationship that was most important in their lives was not with their spouse. I got this sense from the undoing project that Conovan and diversky's relationship was very intense.

12:37I don't know that I would describe our relationship as. You know what? It was competitive. It was not competitive. Danny Coneman felt it was always at felt at risk of being dismissed, thought the lesser partner. There was a status difference between the two of them. Right going into it. Everyone in the world thought Amos was the smartest person they'd ever brought. You two didn't have that, ever have any of that.

13:05Not for me. But you said you felt like a fraud. I think I felt less. There were a lot of things when we started doing acquired where we were doing this business analysis podcast, but I didn't know finance. Which is funny because you think the keeper of the analysis is unacquired. And I'm more the keeper of the story. It's different though than a difference in status. I don't feel that you or I have ever felt we had a difference in status. And the number of fights we've had or real attention we've had is two, three ever in ten years. I mean, it's weirdly... Let's come back to this. And let's get to the lessons. What have you learned? We started thinking about what have we learned from the companies we've covered that we've then applied to acquired. In particular, acquired has clearly worked. 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?

14:06And so that's our frame. Okay, let's go with that frame. Yes. So the one I was gonna start with is the NFL. The product is scarce. 162 baseball games a year. It's called America's Past Time. You pass a lot of time with it. But with the NFL, 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 sport.

14:36That's made all the difference. And to me, what we do is insane for the podcasting industry. It's completely insane. We release for the last three years, we've released 12 episodes. The next year, we're going to do eight episodes for the whole year. Now, as a hobbyist podcaster, what I get told is you have to be on all the time. And I can't do it. And so I'm not going to do it. Podcasting is like your...

14:59Second 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, it's except for the scripted ones, which I do throw myself into. It really is. I do no preparation, and it is a convert. And I do do very much those. A scripted ones I do put time into. But 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. You didn't start out, though.

15:25We used to make 26 episodes a year, you know. They were 40 minutes long to an hour or 20 minutes. And so how do you go for that to realizing and did you really learn it from the NFL or did you just do it? We were starting to do it and then we covered the NFL and we're like, aha, this is what we're doing. Most of these things are actually I think our confirmation bias. We get some inkling that like we should continue to go in this direction like my in calling out Hermes 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 found our way to that probably four-ish years ago, maybe five years ago, where we used to feel like 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... 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,

16:20Maybe if we just admit that we are heavily constrained and then try to just lean into that constraint in the way that Hermès leans into every single Birkenberg must be handmade by one artist and we're going to 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...

16:46audio engineer Steven who does the literal waveform editing, but we go in and in a transcript highlight a thousand cuts per episode. It's this made with love product and it turned out we could actually build a big platform and a good business out of something heavily constrained.

17:04But that's not where you start. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So let's just people who don't know, where you start is, you're two guys who've met each other, and got a crush on each other. You're being with each other, and you get this idea that it would be really cool to do a podcast on...

17:22corporate acquisitions that worked. Yeah. That worked. Bad idea. Well, it is an idea. I was just starting to think. You could easily have started with the opposite. Corporate acquisitions that didn't. And you'd have done much more material. Which is what most press at the time was. Right. Let's talk about how crappy this acquisition is. So it's interesting to me that your first step right from the start is positive. It's like what worked. Yeah.

17:46Not what didn't work. It's what worked. That's because we were VCs, and I was trying to build companies. I mean, the goal was create things that have enough value to get bought, or go public. And when people buy things, it's because they're working. So let's try to reverse engineer what works. Understand why things worked. Right. So that's a different starting spot from almost all journalism. Yeah. In fact, If most journalists started there, it'd be accused of hegeography of... Yes. But because of where you're coming from, and because you're thinking of this in very practical terms, like, why did this work? You do get away with it. It's just that first episode, you're almost like different people. But I'm going to hold back on what I think you look. Because I want to see if you get to it. So what's the third episode that you have learned some lesson from?

18:36I think Berkshire, we learned so many things from, we did this three part. I think about it. I'm very sure. God, I have not listened to it and I am a big investor in Berkshire Hathaway. Good for you, so congratulations. Well, since when? I bought it right in the middle of the financial crisis, because I thought, 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 take down a Warren Buffett on the cover of the New Republic magazine.

19:05called the temptation of St. Warren. You can probably dig it off of the way back to Jesus. What was the thesis? The thesis was that he may have started out being who he says he is, but that he's become this very different thing in the marketplace. His money's not like other people's money. That's true. And you don't have a couple of things Warren Buffett has. And his money is valued differently, but secondly, he was willing to do deals that...

19:29And the time bothered the hell out of me. And what had happened was, like the Golden Deal or the Solomon Brothers deal, it bothered the hell out of me. He kept a CEO in place, who I thought should not have been there. I was there. Yeah, you lived through it. No, it was through. It's like a huge part of our purchase here. It turned me briefly, only briefly actually, cynical about Warren Buffett. And then I came out of it and fell in love with them all over again. But I had ridden this thing and pissed him off entirely. I mean, like I, it would clearly upset him.

19:59And then kind of started watching him for a longer, and I thought, you know, I just liked him. Just liked him. You couldn't help but like him. So I started to soften, and when we get to the financial crisis, I thought, well, his money is going to be so valuable here, that what is needed is credit. And I think it might, if he stays alive long enough, it might happen again soon. So you know, I've just didn't book sure before the legendary deals coming out of the financial crisis. Yeah. And so I bought a chunk of the A shares, and I've just sat on them.

20:28And let me tell you, can I tell you Warren Buffett's story? Yeah. I mean, this is a little talking a little bit out of school, but I've never met him. I know he was really irritated with me. And then I actually look back at that art. It's the only time I've ever looked back at peace I wrote. And I thought I overdid that. And when bright back to the New Republic and wrote another 5,000 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, I was working on the Sandbackman Fried book.

20:57I was talking to a publicist, completely unrelated to Warren Buffett. And she said, you know, I also represent Warren. And she said, and I told Warren that I've been talking to you. And he said, he has a question for you. And I said, what?

21:14Is he the Michael Lewis who bought shares back in the... No. I swear to God. I swear to God. So this tells you something about Warren, but more about Warren, more about me. And he said, he bought it, like, the book value to, you know, that thing, that ratio. He bought it as cheap as it's ever been. And he says, he says... You made the best choice ever. Oh, my God. Because then he says, then he says, so he's the Michael Lewis who sold some Berkshire Hathaway.

21:43two years ago and four years ago and he was like, why did he sell? So he's tracking, I'm not sure. I can't imagine he's tracking. He's like Vanguard here. No, no, no. And I said, well, actually, I actually just gave him a charity is what I'd done. I would give him the money away. And when he heard it, he'll be relieved to hear that kind of thing. It's like, so can you imagine that Warren Buffett is taking the time to watch who is coming in and out of the A shares?

22:13And thinking about it, I mean, I just thought he has that he and Munger had that whole thing about don't put your money in the index fund, put your money in a big bundle of stocks. Put it in a few stocks and watch those stocks like the Hawk. Like they watch that thing in a way that like just in history is anybody ever done anything. I mean, all these people are the maniacs. You don't build something like this. That's exactly right. So anyway, sorry, I just digressed you. What did you learn from your Berkshire? They are three episodes of Berkshire Hathaway.

22:40Well, as it applies to acquired, we got really obsessed with the circle of competence, that it's okay to have a giant, too hard pile. There's a bunch of things that, like, I'm not intelligently saying no to. We just, and just all the time, we'd be like, too hard piles. Every phone call we'd have would be like, what is it to hard piles? What is it to hard piles? Is it to hard piles? This is a Charlie had this thing. There was the, like, the yes pile, the no pile.

23:06And then the two hard pile. Or the two hard pile, I see, okay. And it's okay to just like... And the two hard... All technology was a two hard pile. Yeah, it was just all... Yeah, it was like... There might be something in here, but like I'm just too hard. It's basically admitting that like our opportunity cost is so high. Like the things that we say yes two are so awesome. That it's okay to say two hard to just a giant amount of things. Yup. And that was really freeing once we started just like...

23:32I mean, truly, I'm surprised. So what's an example of something that you... I'm surprised, you say this. Which two hard... One of the reasons, besides just wanting to meet you, because you've been an inspiration to us forever, that I wanted to meet you a few months ago, was Hollywood. We've had lots of opportunities to work with Hollywood. It keeps being... To this point, Tim does always invariably end up in the two hard pile.

23:58Are you talking about doing episodes about how, in Hollywood? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Will you with their enthusiasm and then take you down a rabbit hole where you will spend years of your life and Have nothing to show. Well, this is one of the reasons I want to talk to like

24:36Michael's a very smart guy. You've been very successful. I've gone down the rabbit hole. Yeah. I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down the rabbit hole and I've gone down

25:06the research and the writing of a book. 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 going our base. Podcasting, being an author.

25:22There's loose compounding elements to it, but there's not a literal... Not nearly what I thought. When I got into the business of writing books, I thought there was gonna... I thought about this a little bit, and I... So you're right. It's... You've probably done it better than... You're one of the few people who probably does have such a brand. But I thought... I'm going to move around America to the various arenas in ambition, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, movie business, sports, for various things.

25:47And I'll naturally attract the audience that is interested in that arena. And then I'll drag them along to the others. And it hasn't really happened that way. Even for you. Not really. Not really. The books have a kind of market. And it's a big market, big-ish market. But I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each book feels like another startup. And then I've got to go out and make it happen.

26:16Almost as if I've not written one now that's money ball audiences not necessarily correct the risk exactly and then the audiences end up just being different so It's just the way it is, but that's not true. 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 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. We're not all of it, but like, you know, we make epic systems about healthcare and all the people who listen to LVMH are now learning how doctors office IT works. So podcasts are unique in that it does have that true subscriber base.

27:00But unlike anything else where you click subscribe, there's not an algorithmic platform that disintermediates you. I mean, you think YouTube or 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 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.

27:26In 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 any time 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. There's this forever. Why does acquired work framework? There's a strong element of terror of what works.

27:52Constantly 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, LaGoura, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

28:12Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm.

28:39for months. 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. Legora's bed 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.

29:08And 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 LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting the early LaGora numbers essentially.

29:36speak 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 1200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.

30:00Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches 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 logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Are you more terrified than you were two years ago? Yes. So you grow. The terror growing at some point is not going to be a good thing.

30:29It's good to be a little on edge, but you don't want to get into 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 where we're going to get to the bull in the bear case at the end. But this is so back to the lesson that you gleaned from Munger and Buffett. It's okay to have a too hard pile. And the too hard pile is like doing things in Hollywood. But when I asked the question, did you ever run across this? Have you run across this? Have you ever had a subject?

30:58where you thought, ah, this is just too hard to do. Yeah. Oh, yeah. What would be the example of that? We cut pretty far down the line on doing an episode on the Fed. Yep. And we walked away from it. Yep. So you walked away from it? Yeah. We might come back, but it's been quite a while. It'll be a moment to come back to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad we didn't do it. Yeah, no, no. Although it's going to violate your rule about doing newsy things. We always try and find things. Must be timelessness is like a must.

31:27Must 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 if you listen to this an episode that we make five years after we made it, it's 80% as relevant. It will still be an important institution in the world. But like a CNBC article is worth 2% of its original value within a month.

31:52Right. Yeah. And we want to be worth 80% of our original value five years from now on a given piece of context. So does that mean you're picking institutions that you think will survive? Yes. Yes. But, well, okay. So that's like, so much of your stuff is tech and finance. We're in so much churn. Well, yes. This didn't used to be true. You look at anything pre-2020 through 2021. We had not yet discovered this principle. But our real bangers are timeless and timely.

32:19Doing Google this year was timeless and timely. Right. Having that, 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. What I like, 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 aren't people, it's not hot. And I found with, I think it's true, I basically all my books.

32:48Maybe a couple of exceptions, but a lot of the books. If I'm at a dinner party, and someone asked me, what are you working on? And after about 60 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. And I've learned just to not even talk about it, because he kills my interest to watch it kill their interest. But I know why I'm interested and why it's important. And I'm not...

33:17I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important that that's a really good sign. This is a difference between what you do and what we do. Because I feel like when I think through all your books, they're 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 kind of nobody's talking about.

33:40Whereas 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. The most famous corporations for people love it.

33:56but they don't really understand. There's a secret in hiding and plain sight. People didn't understand trade or jazz, or people didn't understand Google, we thought. There's three things that make a great acquired episode. One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that takes a hero's journey, where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity, how it starts as this thing that nobody cares about, and then it becomes the most important thing in the world. Two is there's a secret hiding in plain sight.

34:21like Costco. I think when the ordinary consumer sees Costco, they're like, oh, I love Costco. But when someone who's listened to the acquired episode on Costco thinks about Costco, they see like all the gears turning of the machine. Like we, 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 acquisitions. And now when we're gonna go spend two months of our life researching and making that like the acquired episode, it has to be something worthy of the acquired stage. When did that happen? I'm a little unclear. Again, getting back to this first episode you did and where you are now and the difference between them. What sort of propelled you into the current form of acquired? The decision to make it a business?

35:11and the decision to actually live off of what you earned from your podcast. So it had to work commercially. So then you started to make these adjustments. Is that how it worked? Yes and no. You're on the right track. I like the Berkshire. I thought you were going to say partnership as a lesson from it. So we did a series on Sequoia Capital, the venture firm. Yep. I went full-time on acquired in 2020.

35:38Five years in, Ben didn't go full-time until January 24, right? Correct. And the 23 being the 24. When I went. You remained equal partners? Yes. Oh, it wasn't a business we started. It was just like, I mean, we made money to our third year. But those three years while you're a full-time and you're a part-time, it was an equal. Equal. Yes, David was...

35:57Never 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 cross my mind. There we go. That's an important point. I guess I'm glossing over it because it wouldn't even cross my mind now. It's always been, a card has always been the two of us. It would be profane for it to be anything. It would actually break it.

36:24if we ever started trying to figure out, like, little carve-outs or pieces of the pie. Well, I did this, therefore I should get... It's true collaboration. You don't recognize there's no boundary where you start and you start. This is where I'm going with the story. It's funny, you know, because it's actually benchmarking in that way. Well, it's the quote. It's Leonie's quote. Okay. So, end of 22, FTX happens. And just where it's go up, feed all the podcast advertising market.

36:54you know, falls off a cliff. Our revenue dropped 40%. So we went from this wasn't a business. I went full time. We made it a business. It worked amazingly well. From 20 to 20 to 21. Right. And then our revenue dropped 40% overnight. And that was the moment when we changed everything. Oh, yeah. So how many episodes are you making in 2021?

37:19A lot. Oh, I see. Okay. But it's not no longer just corporate acquisitions. We started broadening with the Tesla episode in like 2019, maybe 18. And why did you broaden?

37:29It 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. You kind of foul hooked your audience. They were listening. What's a foul hook? When you go fishing, you catch the fish by the belly rather than the mouth. The hook gets in, or some weird way. You didn't actually catch the fish.

37:59in a honest way. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, we would get all these emails every time we meet people and they talk about the show. 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, eventually, we were like, well, we should believe that. So, can I, I'm going to, at that moment, I'm going to interject at what I noticed, because we're, that in that first episode, you were so unsure of yourselves. There is, you were so, choked both of them. And you have a background in theater. You were a kid. So you did not come across as people who'd been on stage. It was kind of an affectless performance. There was a flatness to it. You were afraid to, whether you knew or not, exhibit a lot of emotion. You didn't realize that one of your secret sauces is emotion.

38:57The way you respond to each other when you're presenting material is helping the audience understand how they should feel about it. That you're giving them sometimes very dry facts like, I don't know, are there revenues doubled every year for 100-year strength? And the artist may not know that that's an incredible thing. Right. And the way you respond even sophisticated listeners are helped. Oh.

39:24Pay attention now. That's an important thing. I should get excited about that. We used to share our research, such that we were doing research in the early days. I think we only had a single...

39:35Google Doc. We're just dumping everything into the same shared document. And we were on this. So by the time we would actually go to record the episode, it was a problem. Yeah, there's no surprise. There's no disagreement. We can't pretend to be surprised. Yeah, or you would be pretending to be surprised. Neither of us could act. I don't, when did we, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we

40:01No, it's going to happen when you come on. 100% 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 going to come together. But we had to add this thing called a production meeting about six months ago. One week before recording, we are required to get together and share, agree on an episode structure, but not share any details. Because we got so into this 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 completely different ideas. You're not taking a risk if it doesn't work sometimes. Yeah, right. But it's the difference between I mean, do you know how your heart sings when someone gets up at a podium with a script with a speech and they're going to read their speech? The artist is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing is going to happen. Like whatever's on that page, that's what's going to happen. Pretty announcing the score to the superman. It's exactly right. And that if you get up and you just start

40:59talking, the audience also knows, oh my God, this could be a disaster, they don't know where it's going, just some of that has a huge effect on the way the audience responds to the performance. And so that is not in the beginning. Do you remember when we started doing that? Well, I think in the first 10 episodes, first five episodes, we got feedback saying, you guys need to disagree more. But I don't think we quite realize that we should reveal surprises for each other until five years ago, three years ago. But at some point, we made it a, you know, an unwritten rule of like, we have separate documents, we prepare separately. We tried to do like, how are we search calls? That was five years ago, you say? So the vehicle. So we start with the corporate acquisitions in 2015. Yeah. And you two, knowing everything that you're going to say when you get on, basically. Yeah. And it's short. And it's 40 minutes. Yeah. So first, what you're going to do is like,

41:57I'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 syndrome. I'm trying, I can't get over enthusiastic because I'm afraid David's going to catch me and be like, you don't know what you're talking about. Okay. So plus there's, so there's an uncertainty about your own abilities. All right. So, so first thing that happens is you move off the corporate acquisitions. We went from acquisitions to IPOs. Right. Which was Unbelievable timing in 2017-18 when Uber, Pinterest, Slack, there's like eight IPOs in a row of tech companies that everyone had been following.

42:35And then it went really for two years and kind of culminated at the end of 2020 with DoorDash and Airbnb which we recorded and released one day apart because we wanted to be there on IPO day. But once again, you're constraining yourself unnecessarily. Yeah, exactly. Eventually you get to, we're just going to do stories, big success stories basically. So as acquisitions, IPOs, then it was...

42:59Broad histories and strategies of tech companies and then broad histories and strategies of companies. And people. And people. In a funny way, you're still constraining yourself. You feel like you need this frame. And you actually, you're not really living in a frame anymore. Yeah, but constraints are good. Format. At some point, you're going to wake up and say, we should be doing more biography. We should be doing more people. And if that person is not You know, it is not naturally a huge corporation. You may still... I have a feeling there's more... There's an evolution to come. That you're not just... You haven't reached, like, the end point of this. So, what point do you start to feel confident? Like, we know what we're doing. Well, when the crash, you know, crash, when...

43:52the reset happened in 2022, 2023. So pretty recently. Crypto bubble, tech stocks, plummet, advertising. I got to advertising budgets kind of dry up into 2022. Ben and I looked at each other and it was like, 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 easy, secure money now. Try and keep the music playing. Right. And we were just like parties over. We need to get to work. We need to focus on only what is enduring and make great, great, great work and stop doing everything else. Up into that point, we used to do these things called specials. We would just do not totally random, but essentially random kind of interviews and differentiated topics. We need to start making stuff that is only an of one. Only we can do will only be great. We need to stop doing everything else.

44:48And we did it on the commercial side too. We said, let's go cut deals with our favorite partners 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 the most durable stories and brands associated with us because the editorial side of the house. The JP mortgage of the world. Did they join?

45:12before you proved that this new way of doing it. No, we did a year. 2023 was the first year. And what were those episodes? That was LVMH, that was the NFL. Okay. That was the beginning of what we were doing. And I think that's when we started to build the confidence of like, oh, we can do something that... Isn't it interesting that you grabbed this kind of commercial attention only after you went really long?

45:39Yes. And so then JP Morgan came in in the January 24. So we did the year of kind of building this out. You're right. It was only after we had sort of leaned into acquired as a brand about durability, about compounding over decades and, you know, centuries. And I don't think I appreciated that as a person in the early days of acquired and it certainly wasn't what the show was about. Yeah. Anyway, so I got us a little off track.

46:08Your lesson number three was Berkshire Hathaway, and don't be afraid to have a two-hard pile. Yeah, pick another one. Okay, well, we're gonna have a new 10 of these. By frame for all this story, it was Sequoia. So, this story is very different than Sequoia, but we interviewed Doug Leoni, who was one of the, I guess, two stories ago of Sequoia. And he told us that after the .com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the .com bubble fund.

46:38Every other venture firm out there after the bubble popped, we're taking Mulligan funds. They went to their LPs and they said, you know, there's nothing we can do on this one. We're going to be more disful next time. We said, absolutely not. We will never lose money for our investors ever. We will do everything we can possibly do.

46:58to make this fund in the black. And he said, I think the best line anyone's ever set on a choir. 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. And they just like went to work with the portfolio. They stopped taking fees for a while, stopped taking fees. Yeah.

47:19and got it back and it ended up being a positive returning fund. This is how you get a reputation. Exactly. And that was the moment for us. And easy to lose one too. And so they were really sensitive to reputation. Yeah. Yeah. We'd studied enough business 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.

47:45Like in any given year, you look at a Mag 7 company and their profits from the last year are greater than the first 20 years combined or whatever. And I think realizing that being around and being respected on the other side of this, you know, economic chasm is like the key to everything. Who cares about making money this year? It's about 5, 10, 20 years from now. And we have to like have the brand that people want to be a part of them.

48:14Right, but you don't know that you are a Mag 7 podcast. It's got a ridiculous to compare. You know what I'm saying? When you make this decision, you don't know that there's going to be great riches 10 years out or five years out or three years out. Yeah. But really, I think we were just, we both so believe it was like the...

48:35burn cigarettes on our arm, I think we just both so believed that that was the right thing to do. So something had happened up before that, and you would figure it out how to do this. You'd figured out how to study a business in a way that was really interesting. The first episode's not that interesting. It was just not that much I didn't know and thought of.

48:55you know, whatever. I don't know much about that. And it's 30 minutes or whatever it is. Now, in that first episode, I think there are more ads than there are you all speaking. But now we pride ourselves on having the lowest. Yes, I know. I know. I know. So, let's pause here before we get to number four. 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.

49:26I don't read everything ever about them. So you do what I do. Yeah, whatever's out there. Right. That's just the AI part of it. Who started with canonical? Who's done great canonical work in the past? Right. And then what ideas do you have from reading the previous canonical work? And you know, you then say like, I wonder if I can find this old YouTube video. And then those YouTube videos mentioned something else. And the spider web always starts with the pre-existing canonical work. Right. And at what point do you pick up the phone and start?

49:56calling people who maybe have information that isn't on the worldwide web. Zero ever until about 2023 and now that is the most important way. So that's probably about 50%. For me, it's about 50% of the way through the start to get your arms around then start calling. Right. You don't call uninformed. No, 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 said. There's like the obvious people to talk to. Like for Google, we talk to, you know, Cedar, Demis are like, you know, like obvious.

50:26Then there's like the less slightly less obvious. You just say that so casually. Who gets to pick up the phone? And talk to the CEO of Google about Google. I mean, nobody. We're in a scale. We're in a compounding business. Right? So the fact that you, when do you first realize that you can pick up the phone? That's a good question. And call Tim.

50:51Oh, you know, you have, you're on this first name basis with all these people. When is that so? I think it was my Microsoft series when we talked to Steve to bomb it. Steve, yeah. Steve. Yeah, Steve. That's the choir guest. That's the choir guest. Steve, I love it. I love the name dropping in your world. It's so different from the name dropping in like Hollywood. No, your names mean anything. But they mean everything here. And the arenas are so funny because like these people aren't, most of them aren't famous and they're...

51:18a thousand to 10,000 times wealthier than most of these Hollywood stars. This is different yard system. Well, it's funny with Microsoft. So we had some acts because Ben used to work at Microsoft before. Which got a zero access. Well, no, no, but you knew something 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. Because we had started in Seattle and you still live in Seattle and you'd worked at Microsoft. When we started our Microsoft journey, we knew some people. Yeah. That's true.

51:48We're like, well, let's see if we can talk to Steve. And so then we talked to Steve, and we got his perspective on things. And it completely seems like a whole email. Is that the first time you do that? First time we reach that high. OK. Yeah. And you know what?

52:05This 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 talked to some people that I trust, and they say you're great. So let's hop on a call. And we wouldn't have gotten the response back if... And he gave us probably three hours, four hours in research for... He did. Yeah. And you learned a lot. Yeah. Before we even interviewed him, that was later. Right. But just in research. I see.

52:33And we learned a lot. Did you all have a moment where you said, oh my god, let's keep doing that, that worked. Yes. Well, yeah, so then we were like, that worked. It's a kind of work with Jensen too. So originally, when we had the idea in 2021 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 that the Ben and David storytelling is our end 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.

53:01which is funny because usually they underperform our standard format. And so in 2021, we emailed Nvidia through the warmest connection we could find and said, can we, can we interview Jensen? And they said, they gave us a nice party line back. He's very busy. And then in 2022, we did our Nvidia part one. We did our standard research process. And I think we did our part two. And then we got a note from Nvidia saying, Jensen has listened.

53:27and wants to know who your inside sources are because it's the most correct telling of NVIDIA's 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. And so that's what we're like. But you're still flying by radar a bit. Oh, we were totally flying by radar. Yeah, yeah. But that landed us. They were like, That's sort of the relationship and eventually then they like I want to meet you and then 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 and video episode 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 makes it they they small they spike faster Yeah, and then they and they and those listeners don't retain. Yeah, right whereas if you look at our

54:26Costco episode, which is now two and a half years old, or Helvia Mage or Mez Rolex, they just keep going. I'm sure your books are like this, they just keep going. Every time I bring out a new book, it has the same effect on the old books that a new podcast has on old books. Yeah, it sells on the back list. So yes. All right, so I was asking you how you studied a business. You told me you read everything. Yeah, so 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... My wife is an academic. My wife has a PhD, she was trained as an academic, and she was like, you guys gotta say your sources. Like, what are you doing? Well, yeah, but it's also... Are you ever surprised by the weakness of the source material? Yeah. Yes.

55:20In fact, literally 10 years. We are no longer surprised, but we got an email from a company that we recently covered saying you said a factually incorrect story in the episode and we know the book that you got it from because 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 erratic section where we published our emails. And I bet you're mainly correcting other people's errors that you just repeated. I mean, I'm sometimes there are. Sometimes there are. Yeah.

55:50Sometimes we make a financial calculation error or something like that. Right. So we read all sorts of material. Yeah. And then we start to make phone calls in 2023. And now the phone calls are becoming extremely important. And you're making, yeah, 25 of them. Google is 40. And do you find that when you're reaching out by phone to all of these people that they always want to talk to you? No. No. Sometimes it makes. Yeah. But usually when you approach it with a spirit of, I'm just trying to understand that it's on background.

56:18Yes, 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. And you get lots of great information after that. It's a very good way to go about it. I do the same thing.

56:35When I'm researching something, I don't know what the story is for a long time. And I'm holding everything very loosely. And almost all the relationships I have with people I'm interviewing is, hey, this is all I'm background. I just want to try to understand this. 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 a stupid thing people say because everybody has an opinion.

57:00but it's not a trick. Here's one cool trick to get people to talk to you. I think you mean it earnestly and we mean it earnestly. I want to make something good. Everybody has different beliefs about the truth, but I want to make the story that most correctly approximates the average truth that exists from all these different truthy sources. I don't think of it quite that way, but I do think it's like I want to give you something that's good and pure and true and it's like the thing that will Once it's said, there's nothing else to say. It's like done. Yeah. I got to imagine for your subjects, I think a big part of us too, is like, there's the truthy aspect, which is very, very important, but there's also the, like, this is gonna be 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?

57:59and do you ever, have you ever shot something down just because, oh, this isn't that much fun. The fat. That's how we kill the fed. We've definitely killed other episodes. If you can find fun in the fed, man. Yeah. You are doing it. You can find fun. You were doing it. Yeah. 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. We might come back to it. Bell Labs, that's one that, if I saw it, I thought, yes.

58:28It feels like I'm like a Lewis book. You could kind of do it as the history of the transistor, but then you miss all these other things like radar and... Yeah, there's so much stuff they came out about. Did you do Xerox Park? No, no. That's a good one. Yeah. It's another one. Right. Yeah. I guess Google still has this spirit where they're doing lots of stuff that maybe you can't identify instantly. Quantum reading. Yeah, the payoff that's right around the corner is kind of like...

58:56Let's just fiddle around see what we find stuff. I mean, the corporate America's, I think this generally does less of that than it used to do a long time ago. But the big tech. Am I wrong? No, I'm trying to think that's an interesting, so I'm stealing this idea from our friend, Hamilton Helmer, but he brought up this idea in conversation with us that there is a positive benefit to monopolies because they create the cash flows.

59:23That fund these sorts of boondoggle basic research and a lot of the most important Yeah, technologies that move society forward. You need some ways come out of these 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 now that's how they fund you know the next Gemini right Ryan Waymo and yeah. So actually you just bring up your friend Hamilton Helmer. Yeah. So I had never heard of until I listened to your podcast and you do that thing at the seven powers. Seven powers. Yeah. Let's just briefly since we're here how you study a business. That has been a useful analytical framework for you. Yeah. Whatever these seven powers are. And I'll never remember any of them. That's why we say I never have work of facts and all that. Yeah. What is about Hamilton?

1:00:13Like, where did you find him? And why is he making him so famous? 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 it. I think it was 2020.

1:00:31I read the list and it was all gobbling. 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 industry leading company gets away with being more profitable than their competitor and gets to keep being more profitable? That's the list you would come up with. You might find out what creates the moment.

1:00:58So, why did you decide you even needed that framework? How does it end with the durability? If you're trying to study why as a business durable, the cause is the power. We'd always been searching for a way to land the plane on the episode. It's like, we tell this story, and we finish the story, but that's unsatisfying. What's the takeaway?

1:01:23various permutations of analysis at the end. Buy or sell or hold. Yeah, you know we do bull and bear and degrading and blah blah blah. Once we shifted to like, hey, we're studying these great companies, these durable businesses. Power felt like a really good part of that, like so what? Why? For me, a critical, critical part of process. It goes back to writing a senior thesis at Princeton.

1:01:51Everything 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. And so like I don't use AI note-taking, I do write physical notes in hard copy books like if I'm not doing that.

1:02:09I feel like it's not about work. It's not about work. What do you do? Exactly the same issue. 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 constant recycling of the thought. And so what I do, the process, I don't want to get too far away from your podcast. So I have to do more than my no-pass. So this is a filter. 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. It's interesting enough to me that it belongs on the page. Then I go home and I write the notes up quickly. That's another filter. If it's on the page, interest me enough to put it in a Word document, then I've got it's filtered again. I keep those notes while I'm working on a book. The file will be 500 pages long, but it may be longer. It's just stuff.

1:03:08And then I start thinking about, how do you frame the story? What is this story? But that's months, usually down the road. And there are times when I get into something and I am months into it and I realize, oh, there's nothing here. With Sam Beckman-Freed, I was a year into it. And I did not know what I was going to do with it until it blew up. And then I thought, Oh my god. I have a story. You think you would have been sitting there for a year watching it? I think you would have not published the book if it hadn't. Oh no. Wow. You would have killed the book. Well, 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, I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is, what I don't know what the end is. I don't know what the beginning is. And it's that simple.

1:03:59And it wasn't that, oh, I smelled fraud or anything like that. It was just, it didn't have shape to it. It was just, it was picker-esque experience after picker-esque experience. It was like Don Quixote, 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 there was this like...

1:04:21But scenes don't make a play. They're necessary but insufficient. So the bigger point, I don't want to be talking about me. We'll be talking about you. But you are doing, I smell this from your work. You're doing something that rhymes 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.

1:04:50And then if people want to teach you, they will teach you. And then you could take what you learned, and you could present it in the best way you can present it. I basically take a note in two scenarios. One is, oh, I just figured out how that works, and that is so cool. Like when I learned how on a cable match works, this is such a cool thing. You guys are excited. This is in some ways irrelevant to the business success of Rolex.

1:05:21It will make my year to explain on air how a mechanical watch works and how an escapement is a thing. And my excitement around it is. Or the Costco ballet or like, yeah. So there's the, I just figured out how something worked. And then there's the, I just made a connection. And it's 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 hear something and think.

1:05:49Oh, that's why. And I'll stop and I'll write my little Apple note. This timestamp in this book, you know, just realized why, I can think of 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 want to explain the connection that I just learned on air. But it has to come from the, I have to like remember and bottle up my excitement of learning it in that moment to share that enthusiasm with the listener.

1:06:17Yep, 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. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore. Yep, your risk surface changes every week now.

1:06:43A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this, quote unquote, shadow AI, running with no security review at all. Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta agent.

1:07:11Think of it as a GRC engineer that's governance risk and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half, which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment. And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here. And literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at Vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

1:08:08So give me a fourth example of lesson learned from an episode. This we learned I feel like I learned from Ben Thompson, which is Kelly audience who Ben Thompson is Ben Thompson is the author of Stratekery, a provider of Stratekery. We did an episode on him and with him a few years ago. But his writing is sort of the thing that we bonded over when we met. He's a great strategy technology writer. A the internet niches are way bigger than you think they are.

1:08:37So 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. 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. David and I effectively do the same thing that we did not 10 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

1:09:33how 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 making the highest quality stuff and giving people reason to share it. What is your operation? We're 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? I have a basement studio, you know, it's an office that we happen to have some light to the camera in.

1:10:02I built a studio in my backyard. So that's the YouTube? You mentioned that you send your stuff to an editor without me being the editor. His name's Steven. Steven is... Steven's a part of our mobile video. He does, I'm not sure he'd want us to share on here. So Steven. So the mysterious Steven. He's an independent contractor where his only client works only for you. And he's the best. He's the best. So he's clearly good at his job. Steven is a maniacal about creating the best audio.

1:10:32and video and we do it. But yeah, no, no assistance, no. We do everything. You don't sell, you don't have to add sales. We do. We love doing this. We love doing the business. You do the right. We love doing the business equally as much as we love making it. And I love the alignment. The business and the content are equally important and they're like.

1:10:52Married. Yeah, it's funny. We're preparing for this. We're always tempted to just talk about the business, because we love the business as much as the show, but we never talk about the business. So let's just stop here for a moment, because I want to talk about this. First, before we move on from Stephen, so Stephen is in this rare position of basically being the only person who helps you create this thing. Yeah. How different is the... We hired a wonderful production crew because we wanted to have a great video for today. Right. So, how different is what you give... What comes out of Stephen from what you give him?

1:11:22eight, nine hours of raw audio with dozens of retakes, sometimes hundreds of retakes. We produce each other as we do. Hundreds of retakes? Yeah, David will say a paragraph, and I'll be like, wait, I want to do that in an acquired tone. Well, it's amazing. Hundreds of hundreds of retakes. You do 100. That's incredible. I would have guessed like if you just asked me five.

1:11:46You sound like a millennial. I just want to be appropriately amazed. You can't do hundreds. Literally is that we cut. 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?

1:12:15Oh, I see. Just give me an aha and then we'll move on or 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 got to keep the story moving and I'm like I agree When I wrote it 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 and the energy of the story right But that is all in the eight, nine hours. So he's cutting it in half. Yeah. Yeah. And when it comes back to you from him. So he turns eight, nine hours of that into an intelligible. Into like five-ish? I think it's probably appropriate to call it like release candidate one to use like a software analogy. All right. And then we make five to eight hundred additional cuts.

1:13:09to cut another hour off of it. And that stuff coming. Are you doing it on the page? You're doing it on the page. We use a tool called Descript, which we sort of use it not. But you don't listen to your reading. We are listening to it, and we are watching. Yeah, yeah, watch it. How long does that take? Three days. Three days to edit. Yeah. 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.

1:13:35I listen to 1x and you have to 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 the bone. You're the hero on this. I can't bring myself to do it. I listen to 1.5x. You're the hero for doing it. You don't actually listen to it at normal speed? It's so... Ben really jumps on the grenade for this. Almost always. You can cut the beginning.

1:14:02of almost everything that's always throat clear. I begin to always try. Yeah, wind up. You don't need it. You just go right to it. Yeah. And then once I start to feel it get taught, I just love it. I love it. I love it. And like, I like make it. The hardest thing is getting the stuff out in the first place. And then once it's out on the page, then you could start, ah, each time it gets better. I find there's no despair associated with it. And there's stuff in the original draft that is a remnant of the point you thought you were going to make.

1:14:31And by the time you get to the end, you're like, that's actually not the important thing here. I no longer need that whole setup or that size. Or 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 story some which way. Yeah. David will often highlight something and go, at Ben, okay, to cut, belaboring. So the minute you're there, you know it's got to be cut. Yeah. Yeah. Mostly right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so you get Five hours down to whatever it is, three and a half, four. Three and a half is the sweetest. And how do you know when you're done? We run out of time. Yeah. So deadline. Yeah. So deadline is like you're never really done. You're never really done. I would love one more at it. We'd always, there's always more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have booked the gift and the curse of deadline in the next episode coming, whereas like you have it.

1:15:21Infinite timeline, right? No, no, no. I have... I mean, I owe a book on June the 1st. It will come out September the 29th, that I will start writing on January the 5th, and I will write it in five chunks, and each chunk will be delivered at the end of the month, and I won't be able to go back. What happens if you get to June and you're like, I'm not a...

1:15:41I can't. Okay, so it's a hard deadline. It's a drop-dead. Yeah, but I always find, even once I establish that deadline, which is a reasonable deadline because I've done all, 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. It's great, but somehow, if you take your deadline seriously, that's the key. You take the deadlines deadly seriously, and you just refuse to violate them.

1:16:10Then you're serious when you establish them and your mind just finishes when it needs to finish. And I'm always like a couple of days ahead of it. So I would talk a little bit about the business side because this is something that I certainly don't know anything about in your lives, but you turn this into a very lucrative franchise. And you go out and unlike most podcasts, you're not subcontracting the sale of ads to some other 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. And some stability there, when you go, walk me through, pretend Michael Lewis Inc. is your target, that you want me to be like the anchor tenant in your building. And you're coming in to tell me why I should do this.

1:17:06Give me a sense of it with that list. 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. And I always feel as a listener so disrespected when there is this content of the podcast that is diamond quality. And then there's a record scratch. McDonald's ads in the middle. Usually not read by the host, usually with some jingle playing underneath.

1:17:35It bothers the hell out of me, too, and I haven't been able to do anything about it. I agree. It's the biggest complaint I get about in my podcast. It's like, I gotta listen to these ads. The very first ad we ever sold, when we said, what sponsor could we get that would make people perceive acquired to be a higher quality brand?

1:17:57So we could, like, have our cake and eat it too. We'll get. I tried this. I had a thought about this on mine and no one ever took me up on it. Just find the things I actually use.

1:18:05And it will be fun to talk about them. I want to tell the whole world about ex officio underpants. And I can't get ex officio to return my calls. I mean, that kind of thing. Foolish. I can sleep with it. You tell me that Michael Lewis. I didn't hear it from me. I just gave them a list of things that I really love, just love. Oh, you got to call them. That's the problem. That probably is the problem.

1:18:35I mean, does not actually sell the ads. Another company sells the ads. And so it's just, I thought that was the way to make a seamless is actually what's in the world for my life will be the things that we're talking about. So that is a structural blocker to creating the best experience. And everything has a trade-off.

1:18:56The 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 many 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, your listeners are going to respond the best to what you have to say. Yeah, so if you have a Lewisink, we want you to be a sponsor. I would say we're not coming to pitch you. We're deciding a year in advance. Now two years in advance, what do we want our sleigh of partners to look like? So we start, like Lewisink, we think is going to be super strategic for us in 2027, 2028. We start planning like, okay.

1:19:47How are we going to make this happen? How are we going to make sure that we really, you, Michael Lewis think is as good as we think it could be? How are we going to make sure that we're going to work really well together, that you're going to 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? 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 to say we think this is the best venture capital firm. It's like too much of a picking team. What do you think? I've never heard anybody say that. They don't feel Switzerland enough. Is this a cliche in the VC? No, I think that's a lovely line. So you're looking for Switzerland's. 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...

1:20:43current thing conversation. The industry doesn't take Coca-Cola. We don't really deal with consumers. Okay, here we go. B2B companies with high, very high LTV products. So 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.

1:21:07a couple incremental of those for you. So you can charge lots of money. Yeah, and then like it's just a no brain. Many of our sponsors have been ROI positive on signing one large customer who heard about them on acquired. That is awesome. And often it's not even just heard about on acquired. It's events are a big part of this. So we do events with almost all of our sponsors. So there's the funnel of like heard about on acquired that helps but then like we're doing a event together with them.

1:21:33We're sitting next to their best prospects. So I'm thinking about hiring you. What kind of event will you do for me? 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 this pitch. We're happy to go to a sporting event with you with your top clients. We're happy to... At that sporting event, will you do like some... Fireside chat. Some of the fireside chat. Interview your CEO. Interview a legend from the sport. How many hours of your time am I gonna get?

1:22:03It's a couple days. Yeah. We're there. And while we're there with you, it's like, how can you maximize using us? You promised to be my friend. Yeah, of course. You'll be my friend too in the bargain. We're great friends with the whole bunch of, okay, so then it gets even better. Okay. So we, let me tell you more. Tell me more. I'm getting interested. I mean, the edge of my seat here. The reason this whole thing works is the people who listen to a choir to the most valuable audience in the world. And so.

1:22:28if you want to market your B2B software, financial product, or whatever to them. Founders are executive decision makers, right. But really, I'm gonna take a step back. I think the whole business side, and that's a lot of the content too, but the whole business side of acquired starts with, we were venture capitalists. We're not media people. So we have just always taken an approach, you're aspiring to be a great partner to them. You know, you're gonna help recruit employees, you're gonna help with whatever. And so we just like, You're 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 in the way you approach your business? I think we just came at it from like this. You think we just come at it 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 the commercial activity from the editorial is...

1:23:23a societal benefit that we all benefit from, from publications like the New York Times. It is really good for journalism that exists. The rest of media seems to have adopted it and everyone doesn't need to. If we're the host of acquired, it's kind of great if you're going and learning about your sponsors business and working with them and trying to build partnerships with them.

1:23:46It was almost like 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 of years ago is 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 created an investment fund. Yeah. You were the ones who were making investments. Yes.

1:24:09Is it how you do it? It's quite full circle. We're only a year in, but we've invested in five of our sponsors and several of them are more valuable than when we've invested. Yeah. We asked ourselves, we're like, how do we do this? The focus is the show. For a venture capital firm with the podcast, it doesn't work. We need to be a podcast for the venture capital firm. The way we make this work is we just invest in our sponsors. We put all this work into finding the best partners for our sponsors in every category that we think are great. Why wouldn't we just invest in them?

1:24:37We don't do any income on work. Do you invest in all of your sponsors? No, but a lot of the time we'll just get a call. Hey, we're raising it up round. We want to talk about it in the next ad read. And we say, oh, that's cool. Can we invest a couple million dollars? And they're like, the round's like 300 million. So no one on the cap table is going to care. And we love that you're more aligned with us now. So we'll make room. So you're only really accepting as sponsors companies that you would like to invest in.

1:25:01That's essentially the frame we put on the whole thing. It's not a perfect mobile app. Yeah, JP Morgan is not an example. Right, right. We think we like having a couple public companies, JP Morgan, Shopify, ServiceNow. And how deep is this market? How many acquires could be created on the back of this business model? Oh, I think a lot. The question that I'm always wondering is why aren't there more acquires out there? I'm asking that question now. The format. Here's the ingredients.

1:25:27two 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 arena of ambition, as you would say. There should be unacquired in all these other verticals. In fact, the business vertical. There's a lot more 10 more. Much more money in business. In tech and finance.

1:25:55I think there's a bit of a cold start. If you were to propose going and creating an acquired for sports, you would, the sort of risk, I guess we took. We didn't think about it as risk at the time because it was just a hobby was, you're looking at years of no or little monetization because it's gonna take a long time to build up the audience. Versus, oh, I could go join a network. I could make a show on the ringer. I could do whatever. Acquired as path dependent.

1:26:25on us having day jobs for sure right and day jobs in the industry that you're going to cover right yeah right we built half the relationships and all the know how and all the shorthand and uh from being in the industry before so i asked you how many cards could be created 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 in like business be to be the be to be like the things you pick the kind of people you will accept as your sponsors. How many times will there are fortunately there are a lot more people who want to sponsor acquired than that's what I mean. Like how many more are there? A lot. We're probably three or four X oversubscribed 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?

1:27:21Why don't you create, why don't you create the next use? Then we're not acquired. Then we're not us. Do less. Then we become CEOs. We do not want to build. Yeah, so you know, it's funny. There's a line that you don't have bosses. Yeah. 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 that I have no bosses.

1:27:50when you're in any kind of creative thing there is this benefit to not just following the financial incentives 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 yeah and only do it if it's great if you only do it's it's a long-term strategy I mean it's not that I think all my books are great I don't write them, though, unless I think they're gonna be great. I just don't. Well, why would you allocate? Let's say you have a portfolio of however many more years you think you're gonna write 20, 30. Why would you allocate, you know, I don't know how long? A year. A year and a half. Why would you blow a slot on a bad book? Well, I give you a reason why some people might publish or offers me gazillion dollars to write a book about X. And how much? I know the book's gonna suck, because it's not actually a good idea for a book.

1:28:45And it's not gonna be fun to do because all the fun is and it may be great. Is there any chance any of those dollars make your life better? No. 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 wholeness? Yeah. The average athlete is taking a few million dollars more to move his wife and kids from one family to one city that loves him and that he loves to some strange place where everybody's gonna be unhappy.

1:29:10People do this all the time. All dollars do not have equivalent value. No. The marginal dollars have 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 going to be the person who just follows the financial incentives. Rather than I'm going to control the, I'm going to let these incentives do, they could be useful. They get you out of bed in the morning for a while. But you have to kind of control them. So I love that you're not milking the market.

1:29:39I think there's two different things that we're talking about here. One is milking the market, yes or no. The other one is do you want to build an enterprise, or do you want to stay a boutique? So do your question for us are like, why don't we create more of wires? We don't want to manage other shows, podcast hosts. People often tell us like, oh, you're building this business. You guys are sort of foolish because that was all this key man risk. You're building this great business. But if either of you leave, unfortunately, your business has low enterprise value. And we're like, Okay. But if we sold this business, then we would just go start acquired. We're already doing that. Yeah, the dream is what we're doing. All right, check us off on a sidetrack. We've only gotten through four. I want to hear that. We've gotten like five sets of seven. I want to hear a number of what's the fifth one. Okay, yeah, go ahead. Founder control was my huge one. Is this from Google? I think we met again. This is one of these things that we like learned.

1:30:35early, but then got reinforced through episodes, Meta, Rolex, Trader Joe, yeah, like stay private, be family-owned. You don't even have to take Meta's public company, but yeah. Founder control. I mean, Google, Google's Founder control.

1:30:51The 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 maintaining control. I think there's an argument you may that in any industry where they're both private and public companies, the private companies end up being much better run, and I mean, mostly bad things happen when companies go public, and certainly less pleasant. So public or private, your point is found or controlled. But there's also just like a personal choice element. Last year, we...

1:31:20We had like a existential crisis as way too dramatic. But I think something that was on our minds was like, are we being wooseys? We're not doing Hollywood. We're not adding more shows. We're not building an enterprise. We're triggered this. Are we being wooseys? We were currently researching Bell Labs. And I think I felt like we were chasing this like esotericness. So we saw some advice. And we went to one of the best investors.

1:31:50whoever we've got to know is a fan of the show. Somebody everybody would know. And we asked him to dinner and we just sort of like, hey, we've got this, you know, we could do all these things. We're not like Hollywood, etc. And we sort of expected his comment to be like dream bigger, like, you know, go for it. Like, you know, you guys are being buses. And he sort of sat there and he thought a minute and he said, I have seen so many founders become trapped in prisons of their own making in their own companies.

1:32:20And they're successful prisons. Yeah, yeah. You guys have avoided that feat. Don't go down that road. But what is, I'm missing actually the connection. Why, if you were less wishy-ish, would you have created higher people take on...

1:32:38I thought maybe I thought you were saying you were avoiding like the country. Yeah, that's a whole separate wussies, but we asked ourselves, are we being business wussies? Right. I see. But they sort of go hand in hand like cheap growth is covering the current thing. It will. I've been toying with the side of a stored potential energy that like great businesses have a stored potential energy that you can't see in the current financials. And.

1:33:07It's great people have that too. Great people have that too. These reserves that come out when they need them. And they're not presented in the office. They aren't sparkling there in front of your eyes anyway. And I think we're trying to store up as much potential energy and acquire it as we can, rather than anytime there's a way to...

1:33:30make it show up on the financial statements, sort of like letting out the pressure and being like, yep, second show. Yep, more ads. Yep, dynamic ads from an ad network. You can say yes to all these things, and you can sugar high the current profits, or you can try to figure out how to store up as much potential energy as you can. I think once you hit the point in life where money won't make you any happier, then there's actually not a point.

1:33:59to letting any of that potential energy out. It just creates goodwill for everyone, most principally, selfishly, yourself, to keep it bottled. Right. Right, so how do we get on that? I don't know how we get on that from you. We found our control. We found our control. Number five, number six. Okay, I've got one from, there's a non-obvious one. Also, can I just say like, Sometimes we do some stuff like this. You're not like saints or capitalists. Like we're running a capitalist enterprise. Sometimes we have a production crew. Sometimes we 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 15 percent. God forbid we go to four and a half percent of time. So like we indulge occasionally. All right listeners.

1:34:55Now 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 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.

1:35:22Exactly. 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.

1:35:49And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 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 100.

1:36:08billion workflows annually, and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. 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?

1:36:31So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. OK, so sometimes we make episodes that either we think are going to be great or we're just really interested in them and they like in the numbers wise, they don't perform.

1:36:54They don't. The great thing about podcasting is like it's always within like a 20-30% range. Right. So it's not like it's a total flop. So give me an example of the podcast, the extreme version of the one you all were most excited about that didn't resonate with your audience in the same way. Okay, so the lesson here is going to be Nintendo. We thought Nintendo was going to be a big, such a great, it's an incredible history, incredible story, incredible company, And of one company, Durable over 100 years plus has been through so many iterations, people love it. We know 20% underperformed our benchmark at the time. We're like, oh, man.

1:37:36And then we did a part two to really dig ourselves in. Really like, yeah, just like. And you know what people don't love is part twos. Yeah. It's really don't love part twos when they do love part one. Let me tell that joke again. It's so funny that you like it about a second time. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It is a necessary subset. You never tune into something called part two without part one. And so the dumbest 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. We had a great time. It's like one of the most interesting companies ever. It started as a Yakuza company. Like it's crazy. How did it start? It was playing cards. So for gambling was illegal in Japan after the major restoration. Okay. And so they made Hana-Fuda 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 Mofu with the main core. Yes. That's funny.

1:38:34Yeah, this is an amazing, amazing story. And they have this philosophy called lateral thinking with weathered technology, which is if you look at Nintendo systems, you can even go way, way, way back. It's not bleeding edge technology. It's like, how can we recover generations back technology? How can we take weathered technology and think outside the box with it? So like the Wii has 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, as you didn't have a color screen, the 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. Yeah, exactly. We're gonna do part three. Okay, okay, okay. Buddy, here's the lesson. Another episode that was totally like this, Indian Premier League cricket. Underperformed, love that show. Incredible source. Incredible story. You either really loved it or didn't listen to it. Yeah, this is the lesson. It's the first of your shows I listened to.

1:39:26You started with I.L. You know why? You are making the point here. This is why we did I.P.L. This is the whole worth it if we just got Michael. I'm a partial owner of the Rajasthan Royal. You are not. I've always jersey. You are a manage. Is the manage dirty owner, right? He's a majority owner. So it's a very tiny slice but as I haven't been over, I still can't explain the game but the league. How did you become a manardi owner? Two friends, I actually leave their names out of it. But you know who they both were. Okay.

1:39:56Call and said, there's this guy who's got this cricket team, he wants to make it the money ball of... There are the Oakland days of the IPL. Yeah, exactly. And he'd be open to having you invest. And they were both good filters. Like 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 Lollit?

1:40:26Modi? No. No, no, I haven't met anybody but Manoj. Oh boy. Oh boy. No, I know there's a whole. Have we got a subject for you? I don't want to redo your podcast. It's just like there may be some way down. So that was the other thing I was thinking. Like a number of this could work out a number of ways. So anyway, that was the first one. Let's do it.

1:40:46That was an unbelievable story. Oh, it's unbelievable. Everybody in the world should listen to this. Yeah. And it underperformed. And yet it underperformed. Okay, but here's the lesson. It's both Nintendo and IPL. We got, they were the first listening experiences for some incredibly influential people who have changed the gender. Actually here, 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.

1:41:15I thought it was amazing, sent it to the entire meta executive team. And then they all listened. We built a relationship with them. And then when JP Morgan called us and said, we've got Chase Center. Yeah. And they were like, well, what would you do? And we asked this person, like, hey, do you think Mark would want to do it? And... And he said, I don't know, but I'm going to ask him right now. Right. And so without the Nintendo episode... Without the Nintendo episode, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't do it with Chase. No, 6,000 person. And we have some similar stories with IPL. The point is that...

1:41:45doing episodes that we, one or both of us is just insanely passionate about. Where did you learn this from? From doing these episodes and on the performing. No, we learned it from LVMH. I pitched that three times and you were like, okay. LVMH was a banger, it performed great. Which is why we learned the lesson that if one of us feels passionate about something. Go forward. 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.

1:42:14because... That page is very... Someone else's secret. Someone else's secret. Yes, that's exactly right. And if you don't feel anything, it's a chance nobody's gonna feel anything. But if you feel a lot, someone's gonna feel something. Someone's gonna feel something. Yes, that's right. Yeah. That's right. 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. That's spread. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, sometimes we're passionate about something and it becomes a banger. Well, that's the ideal.

1:42:43Rentech, Renaissance technologies. That was amazing. That was incredible. That's one of the episodes I've listened to. I loved it too. It's so great. It's one of the two great mysteries on Wall Street. How they do what they do. And who is Satoshi? Yeah, those are the two. Those are the two. I kind of like the take that they invented machine learning.

1:43:04a 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 in a predictable alpha generating. But that nobody else found it too so that it all went away because they hit 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 you can see why it worked through the 90s.

1:43:33Yeah. 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. Did you consider? So Jim Simon's son had a kid in my oldest child's class in high school. And I tried, I said, look, I can't do it unless you want me to do it. There's no point. And he said, like, Dad, that's like, No, no, no. This whole business I'm kind of doing it by radar completely from the outside. You know you're going to get so many things wrong. And it's like it embarrass yourself that you need to be so inside so that you don't, so that the person you're riding by doesn't read and say like that's just completely wrong. And I could have done that book, but why? That didn't appeal to me. What appealed to me was he was at the end of his career. I didn't need all the secrets, but I needed some of the secrets.

1:44:30And I would eat him. But that's one, that's on my, oh, that's too bad that one got away. Yeah, if a butterfly had flapped its wings differently and he collaborated. It would have been fabulous. Yeah. Yeah. It would have been a fabulous book. All right, number seven. There's a different twist on the NFL. But we definitely learned it from the NFL. Create spectacle. All right. We now live event strategy. Yeah, this twofold.

1:45:00have stopped thinking about acquired as a habit for people, most podcasts, your dream is to create a habit. And ours, we've thrown that out the window and said, you 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 acquaintances is. Like, it has to be the water cool conversation. And then once a year, we have to have a super bowl. Yeah. And doing the Chase Center Show and then the Radio City Show. Very small amount of people in the audience. I mean, 6,000? 6,000. So, yeah, great. It's the world's largest indoor theater. It's 6,000 people in this incredible venue in New York City relative to the number of people who listen to our episodes. Even if it were 50 episodes. It would still be. It's 0.4% of the audience. It's a very small percentage. But the amount of heat and light created from the idea that you did that show is

1:45:57more impactful to building the franchise of acquired than any given episode, maybe even then a whole season of episodes. What's the first spectacle you created? We'll take a center, it was the first. That was 18 months. So you just started in 2004. Yeah. We did a show in Climate Pledgerina in Seattle, but it was one section. But actually by being able to say we did a nervous show. We had credibility.

1:46:25We talked about it on Eras, the acquired Arena show, and that had some... We were able to say that it should JP Morgan, to Chase Center, to the Warriors, like, we have done this before. I'm gonna ask a couple of rude questions. Your radio city musical event was with Jamie Diamond, 6,000 people. And Meredith Copat-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 not announce the guess. Oh.

1:46:54So they were all there for acquired. Honestly, because I wanted to give this answer. We knew Michael would be in here. It was going to ask the question. So all I knew was it was going to be acquired with the guest. Would it sold out before you announced the guest? We announced the guest. So the guest is surprised. Yeah. 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.

1:47:23Well, now you know. So now we know. So are you doing it? So that's 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... We basically manifested this. Are you the halftime show? I wish. I wish. I wish. Us and Bad Buddy, we're going to be... I would love the reaction of the NFL fan base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not going to be music. Ben and David are just going to be an acquired episode. Yes. Yes, with Peyton and Eli Man.

1:47:52That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good. That would actually be so good.

1:48:20We do, but it will be, it will be, it will be, it will be, it will be, it will be, it will be, it will be, it will be streamed. So it will be a different style of event than, it will be VIPs for the, it's for the NFL's partners. Right. But yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be incredible. All right, let's go to, I think we're in number nine. All right, we're at home stand.

1:48:50So, we made Costco in the back half of 2023, but it was one or two episodes after we made Nike. Nike, I think, ended up being a fine episode, but I tried way too hard, like way too much pressure on myself. I want to speak for you on the Nike episode. And it came out flat. We read nine books between us to prepare. I think it was 11. It was just too much for all sorts of reasons. And so, we were burnt out.

1:49:19We're not happy. We decided to do Costco. I said, I don't know, I just gotta take a different approach here. I gotta play loose on this one. I can't play tight to use the sports analogy. And I said, let's find the one book, the right book, helped that there was only really one book. Read that book. Salt Price is autobiography. Read that. Use that as the main source. You got maybe one of the best primary source.

1:49:47and it was ever the CFO of Costco gave you a one-one presentation. 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. 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? When we went into starting work on Costco, we do nothing. Correct.

1:50:16I knew a lot going into literature. Going into literature. I wanted to be able to hear the things he was saying that were different than common wisdom. 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 read that stuff. It was Charlie Mugger's favorite company. There's lots of stuff up there. And I wanted to hear, this was actually one of the last pieces of research because I wanted to be really prepped. What did you know you were talking about?

1:50:45when you're working on an episode and you're going for a run and you make some connection or some insight occurs to you, you stop and you write it down. What, give me a few of the ones about Costco. Low skew count drives everything. Oh, all right. That's the, like, the start of things they have on there. Do you want the Charlie Munger talk?

1:51:07The number of things they have on the shelf. So unlike Walmart, there's billions of things on the shelves. Walmart has 100,000 to 200,000 skis. You get what you get, you know, pitch a fit. Whatever's there is there. 4,000 things. Yeah. Walmart is 100 to 200,000. Yeah. And here's like all the knock on effects of that. If you only sell 4,000 things, it doesn't take a lot of volume before very quickly, you are a meaningful seller to every single one of those products, those vendors. Suddenly you become really important to that vendor. Right, go.

1:51:37your merchandisers since you only have 4,000. So your incentives start to in line? Yes. The merchandisers have a very small portfolio. You're not dealing with 100 buyers. You're dealing with hundreds of vendors. 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 markets. Right. And if it takes someone who's managing a very small portfolio to stay that attuned to each one of the things, small skew count means that any given thing on the shelf, flies off the shelf pretty quick. So there's not, yeah, so the turn-off is faster, so there's more flow. 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 27 days to sell through their entire inventory, which means that's on net 30 terms, three days of grace where the inventory is actually financed by the vendors and then some.

1:52:35And I think on average is 27, so some skews are selling in two days that they're turning. They're turning at 10 times a month. There's no working capital in this business, other than building more Costco's. Right. The low skew count for Costco is like low...

1:52:49low episode volume for you. Yes, 100% we like. Yes, right. And low number of partners so we can put like all of our energy. 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 actually doing it. And when you walk into it is the odd experience when you walk into Costco is the absence of choice. Yeah. And in fact.

1:53:12consumers kind of like not having too much choice. There's all this research showing that if you sell 30 different kinds of jams in the supermarket, you will sell less jam than if you sell three kinds of jam. Because the people just be paralyzed by the choice. Yes. And you smell, you feel like Costco, someone has made all these decisions for me. Yeah. And they're good decisions. Yes. It's curated. Yeah.

1:53:35You can't just run this strategy willy-nilly. If you're only going to sell very few things, you're only going to 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. But you didn't know about, hey, this one used to go into the episode. No. The only reason we did the episode was it was Charlie Munger's favorite company. Give me another lesson.

1:53:59How are we doing this time? Is this the last? This is a quiet Michael. You said you didn't have any plans tonight. We were sitting down with Morris Chang and he was talking about TSMC and he told us that one of the ways that they aired was trying to exit the integrated circuit market or diversify from that market and go into solar memory. Memories and there was one other thing too. And none of those were as good of a business. And the key insight was you're already in the best business. 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.

1:54:43Probably to a fault and with a bias, we believe that about acquired. Every time we look at anything else. We're doing the thing we should be doing. Don't go do something that we're less good at, or it's gonna be less fun, or right. We should always just make another comparison. Oh, well, you have decided to become venture capitalist again. So here's a quick question. I'm curious. What's the difference between what you do and what a normal Silicon Valley venture capitalist does before they put money in a company? Do you think you know more? I think there's a... There's just a...

1:55:13I think there's a top level misconception about what the venture capital industry is. All right. I think a lot of people think it is a analytical 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. Yeah. Especially at the growth stage. Yeah. Early stage, there's more picking involved. But that picking is like a super art. It's not a early stage picking is not a, you know, understanding a company early. It's a whole different thing. So the entire bet that 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 growth stage, private companies, you can tell what the good ones are. Most people can't get in if you can, you should. All right, you know, I mean, with the way we do the work in choosing our sponsors and then we'd be like, okay, great. That box checked, our sponsors are not

1:56:12non-obvious companies that all growth-stage investors don't want to get into. But the kind of work that you do to do a podcast episode about a company, does it bear any resemblance to the kind of work of VC does about a company before they invest in it? 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?

1:56:39But you're almost always investing, at least I was at the napkin stage. And so you're mostly making stuff up. You're dreaming what this market could look like when it materializes, but you don't know. You're really just making a founder bet, and then you're trying to support it with all this structural information that is a very imprecise. You're acting like you know the third or fourth decimal place. When in reality, you barely know the first one.

1:57:04You answered my question was are these two things similar and you're saying basically not so much? So that means that being a venture capitalist in no way really prepared you to create these podcast episodes because they're very different things. Well, I think I think it prepared us to create the business that we created for sure. But what have you learned? I've put a question another way. What have you learned about telling a story? No, I think you didn't know what how to do. Meeting your books and you know, being a liberal arts 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 asked me how I learned so much so quickly about different industry dynamics.

1:57:56It'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 the other way around. Gotcha. What can you do now as storytellers that you couldn't do 10 years ago? I think we think about narrative structure and acts and what a story is. Right. When we're reading books sometimes.

1:58:23A lot of books, especially corporate history books, are this happened and then this happened and then this happened. That's fine for cataloging history. That is not a story. At a certain point we realized, you can't do and this happened. It's the why of it. It's the story flow. The queen died and then the king died is not a story. The queen died and the king died of heartbreak. If someone just told you, he told me 10 years ago, two guys, without any previous really literary podcasting, any kind of experience. We're going to create this four-hour conversation about an individual company. And people are going to be mesmerized by it. People are going to listen to the whole thing and want even more. I said that doesn't sound like very promising. Like I wouldn't put money into that. Yeah, as you've heard in early stages. It's like why it works is a really good question. Because it's not obvious. It's counter to much of what's going on in the culture.

1:59:21pension spans, supposedly, getting short or blah, blah, blah. But it does work. It clearly works. It works as a business, but it also works as just a creative thing. And the why of it is, like, I'm, you must think about this all the time. The why of it. Yeah. 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 slightly acceptable to just...

1:59:48Listen to stuff while you're moving about the world. Why are you talking to your mother? Yes. Our brains all got two input channels. We used to only focus on one thing at a time. Everyone now focuses on two things at a time. You can't do the same thing. 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.

2:00:13this massive tailwind of people have like a large number of minutes throughout the day where they're doing stuff that they can also listen. Which that's true for all podcasts, but like... There are a couple of things that are true for all podcasts. One is AirPods. It's basically all the platform stuff that happened over the last 10 years and we started at the right time to advance. So AirPods.

2:00:34Spotify. Spotify didn't enter podcasts until 2018 and now is I think over half of the market brought hundreds of millions of people into podcasting. Apple Podcasts not becoming YouTube was actually great for us that it's a place to when you get a listener you really get a listener and it's like this durable incredibly valuable place to accumulate listeners. Spotify is too but YouTube, but it's on way too. But there are zillions of podcasts, and not many are doing what you're doing. So they all have that. Corporate America becomes ever more important. Yeah, that's completely right. It's like what is going on in the economy is mysterious to people. The financial crisis. These companies, a lot of your episodes have been about these companies, but Tesla and Nvidia and Microsoft and Google and people don't really get them explained to them.

2:01:26So that's a big part of it. If I had pitched you on acquired in 2015, there's no way I would have said acquired helps you understand why the world is arranged the way it is. But now I think that is absolutely the promise that we come through on. Right. I think the biggest reason acquired works is is kind of how you started off the conversation. It's just, it's our partnership. It's just one of us we're making acquired. It would be a shadow of itself, like the magic.

2:01:54Exist between us and there's so many there's there's a million times over the last 10 years where like if we hadn't just been you know, so that burn 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 to do I want to conclude this conversation because we don't want to go three hours But I but I want to do it by doing the seven powers and apply it. I want you to apply it. I want you to apply it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. I want you to do it.

2:02:49If you were going to try to compete with acquired today, you couldn't do all the stuff that we do. We don't start with a million listeners. Right. Or the access. 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? And it would feel like that. So there was this path-dependent thing of we always had the right product for the current amount of value that it created in the world.

2:03:16what you can use at 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 definition of scale. I put this even much more simply. Let's say we, and another podcast, made the exact same episode. 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.

2:03:40Yeah, okay, scale economies. Yes Counterpositioning everywhere counterpositioning yeah, okay, can we do a little meta thing and also explain these? Okay, explain these powers. Okay counterpositioning is when you do something that your competitors just cannot respond to Give me an example outside of the podcast thing. Yeah, so what's a great example of this? Southwest Airlines launches. They only use 737s Everyone else who already has fleets of other planes can't do all the streamlined operations that Southwest is going to do because they have all these other sunk costs in this diversified fleet. Yeah. We're kind of in position that we're not volume generally. Most podcasts sell their ads on a CPM basis and they are incentivized to make as many episodes as possible with as many ads as possible. Right. Our business is entirely structurally different. Yes.

2:04:32We also do your benefit. Don't have shareholders. So we can do all these like non-economic things because the thing we're solving for the quotient is actually like our lives. Right. Which is not as opposed to six or eight or one. Yep. Right. Right. It'd be cool if it's up being just one episode. This is David's story. No, no, no, no, no. That's my nightmare is that we actually, we can't end up, if we end up at one episode a year or one episode a season where It's time to hang it up. Here's a rule. We don't work with agencies. If an agency reaches out and says we want to place ads on your podcast, we write them a very nice node. 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 in the middle of a transaction. And so therefore, we won't take your dollars. Right. Yeah.

2:05:24So, you're, so- Counting positions didn't get all of that. Counting positions is that in the number of shows you do. So, the kind of shows you do- That's how it expresses itself, but the- because our business is structurally different- Yeah, different, rather- the, like, others can't do what we're doing. Right. Network economy is, uh, not really, but there's some water cooler effect of people talk about acquired episodes, especially within companies. Right. So- We release an episode, it becomes a topic of discussion. That's a really important thing. This is a 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. Switching costs is a power that's super easy to explain switching costs. Sales force. Yes. You get to see our own sales force. And to switch to another CRM is just a huge amount of costs associated with that.

2:06:14Even though, you know, let's say on a day-to-day basis, it's the same price, we're cheaper. It's just such a pain and an economic tax to do a new implementation of something. Right. Yep. There's more than that. People can... Another pie of gas is one click away. This nurse can switch. There's no cost of switching out of acquired into whatever might come along. No cost. Once you replace acquired. Yep. Don't have that. Can I just also say this is so...

2:06:40weird and uncomfortable for me. Because while I think we've created this beautiful gem and I love thinking about it and talking about it with you, it is terrifying to talk about it with everyone and also feel so self-aggrandizing to talk about what a great painting I've made. No, no, no. But it's very useful to think about this in this way. You've got a framework. Let's think about your framework. What's the next power? Branding. Yes.

2:07:10Again, thought exercise, same product released by a different podcast, not called acquired, people just acquired it. Right. Yep. And that's just growing. Yeah. Yeah. Cornered resource. The business owns us. Explain cornered resource. Give me an example. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Intellectual property. Okay. 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.

2:07:40Now we're assuming that you're a cornered resource. That the reason that people are tuning in is that you're lovely voices in the way you enthuse over this stuff. It could be that you've just actually found a thing that everybody wants, and that if two other people came in, they'd do it even better. And there are people who create, it's early, they're small, but things that resemble acquired a lot, the step change podcast by our friend Ben Itelson is one of them, where like, It's doing really well for a podcast that has three episodes because there's magic in the format even if it's not us. Yeah, but that is if there is a coronary resource that you or your editor, or yeah, or your name you won't be able to. So suggesting that perhaps yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, it could be a good reason. Okay. Okay. And then the last one is process power, which almost always businesses don't have. We have in space. We told the same thing you have because we kind of fail to articulate

2:08:35how an episode comes together. We tried on this conversation three times. And we didn't really explain to you exactly, mechanically, how an episode comes together. Except I can understand the iterations, but you vomit out eight hours. If your editor decides which the best five, it comes back to you and you cut and cut. But 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. Because I actually don't know what you show up with the recording.

2:09:05I assume you each take a kind of part of the story, like either the history or current analysis of the business, and you're responsible for that. And you go learn about it. But there's got to 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 with We Carvout, one or multiple chunks that Ben'll take, and then Ben is responsible for the analysis. Right.

2:09:32And then you probably have some blinds you want to say, that you know you want to say. But you want to say them naturally. So you kind of 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 that doesn't happen, you set it up. Like Ben's point, like SKU is everything in Costco. That kind of insight, you can reduce it to something you want to get across in a line or two. What's hard about improv is disposing of all the things you imagine that we're going to happen in a conversation before they happen and nobody does it perfectly. So there's this tension between the script and what's happening organically between the two of you. The truth is it's both. It's both. I write a script. I write 10 to 20,000 words. You do. In sentence form. Do you read it? No.

2:10:25Well, I mean, I read it. It doesn't come out of my mouth. It comes out as a natural conversation. So you write it, but then you put it to one side. You have three screens in front of you. You're kind of reading it. I'm kind of reading it. Yeah, yeah. But Ben and your Jackson, it doesn't come out exactly as I wrote it. It doesn't sound like a script. That's good. But part of my process is I need to write a script. To know what you think. Yeah, yeah, it makes a complete sense. But also to have it as a crutch there when we're performing. Right.

2:10:52We can't keep all this in our heads. But the real crutch you have is you can go, you can do it for nine hours and it's only going to be four. So you can make any, you know, you don't have to be perfect. You can screw it up every which way. And you have a real-time feedback agent. I'm like, this is dragging. I don't care about any of this free history. Cut, cut, cut, cut. And then yet, all we hear, the audience hears is, that's amazing. That's so interesting. It's incredible. I never thought of it that way.

2:11:20You'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. So take me further into the process. So you have, you have a script and you don't, Ben, you don't have a script. I have a giant text edit document with like just a whole bunch of mechanical points I want to get across. I have some story points in there that I know I want to interject in David's story, but I know the things that I'm going to 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 we've usually identified where that's going to enter in. Right. Yeah. But all 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 this is a hybrid. Yeah. And there's all sorts of stuff in there that like we are sort of looking at about six hours into recording. We're like,

2:12:18That's not going to make it in. And that's okay. That turned out it was not a salient point. Right. But the point of process power, there's like, we can describe all this. You could probably, I'm sure you have described in painstaking detail. How I do it. How do you do it? But that doesn't mean anybody else can write a Michael Lewis book.

2:12:35the process, but your point is you have the process power. But the point of process power is you can tell them. It's on top of you. It's on top of you. Oh, I see. Yeah, that's interesting. And you have a process that can't be replicated even if you explain this. Even if we're explaining, excruciating detail, exactly what it is. What pops to my mind is that the magic, the pixie dusk in a process is trust. That it's like something that you get when you trust a process. Hear it.

2:13:04Trust the process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

2:13:30and they wouldn't try to do it, they'd be thinking, they'd make them wig out. I got to record the things. I got to do this. And so, in fact, doing it my way would be a kind of weird handicap for them. That's the process, Felik. If you were to copy paste the process, it wouldn't have the same results, and it might, in fact, be a handicap. But there's something emotional going on there. The difficulty in replicating it. I also think it's because...

2:13:58When you describe your process, 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. This is a MP3 codec. OK. Learn a JPEG. A JPEG doesn't actually contain.

2:14:21all 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 in everything. And you're not doing it intentionally. No, it's just impossible. Language is a lossy compression of thought. Yeah, true.

2:14:40That's an interesting observation. Languages and a lousy compression of thought. I think if the reverse is also true for some people. An 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 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 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 just do what they need to do with it. Like, the more I just let the story tell itself, the less I tried to, like, influence the way he thought about the story, the more of the story landed. And then, of course, when you do that,

2:15:33You're giving people lots of options in how they see the story, how they understand the story. It's the risk you take. But it's what makes it live. And it's why you get this huge range of response to a given story. But you've got to actually just accept that when you're saying something, the other person gets to understand it however they want to understand it. And if you don't do that, what you get is something that's dead the next day.

2:16:02It'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 key goals with every episode. No matter what you think about the company, you're going to enjoy this episode and you're going to learn something from it. And then you may come away thinking like...

2:16:21It's about understanding. This company is terrible. You may come away thinking this company is righteous. Yep, but like... Sometimes we don't nail it. Sometimes we don't always nail it. But that's the goal. Yeah, I think it's the creatively fun goal, because that's the challenge 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. Once you realize that's the thing to do, it's so much more fun than trying to muscle people around.

2:16:51It's all of a sudden you're dancing with a reader instead of hurling them all over the dance floor. It also requires you to learn something new while you're making the creative work. Like if you come in with a point of view and you come in...

2:17:04Let's say we try to, I was so afraid we were making Trader Joe's that we were going to remake the Costco episode. And I was like, this episode's going to suck because we're not going to have the original enthusiasm that we had. Just like Costco, but not as good. Yeah, yeah. Or it's Costco, but it's for furniture. And we're like, oh, this is totally different. You have to have new insights that delight you as you're researching it 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. I agree with that. If you were to ask me how you were gonna say, that's exactly the kind of thing I was saying. You just run out of gas or run out of material that made your socks go up and down. All right, listeners.

2:18:01Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers. And how fast you can use that signal to guide what you shipped next. This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved. So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to Statsig.com slash acquired to get started.

2:19:00Alright, how are we going to do this? Is this your show? Carvouts? Carvouts, so yeah, we got to do it, so okay. Carvouts. What does this even mean? Okay, so you'll appreciate this. It was my wife's idea right back towards the beginning of the show. She used to listen to Slate's, I think it was a culture gap fest. Yes. And they do cocktail chatter at the end of episodes. It was just like, hey, something unrelated. And she was like, you got to do that.

2:19:29That's fun. Well, I understand the idea of it. Why is it called a carvout? Well, okay, so then we were like, this was in a phase of acquired where we wanted to brand everything. I was like, around that question. Okay, there we go. And so we thought, okay, what can we call this? We're not gonna call it cocktail chatter. We came up with the idea of a carvout, like in an M&A transaction, a carvout is like, this piece of the purchase price goes to like this set of shareholders for...

2:19:51Special reason they're employees or whatever. 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 the name is just residual up. It's just a residue of your former incarnation. Yeah, we used to brand. You wouldn't use everything called the LP show because of you know, we had all these little branding cars. Playbook is sort of a remnant of all their version. So what are we going to do? What are carve out? What do we have some categories that we're going to throw out? And then you got to tell us and we'll tell you things this year that we

2:20:20loved 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. I mean, you care. I mean, so many of your books have been on our minds over the years. Really? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So it's books that I've read in the last year. Yeah, books this year that, yeah. So I've got to confess, I've had a very weak reading year because I've been really deep in two projects where I've been working and when I'm working, I'm often all I'm reading is for work.

2:20:50But I can think of a couple, one at the beginning of the year, one I just put down. First one I read because my son was in high school at the time, had read it, and he was enthusing about this 800-page novel. And I thought that just didn't happen very often. And it's been out a long time. It's called The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. And it's a fantasy trilogy.

2:21:14He never got to the third book. And I don't know what's happened to him. He's like, blocked. But I'm not fan. I'm hoping he's an acquired listener. And I would tell him I can come and help get you unblocked. I know how good lock writers. I have a secret power here. And so do you have a secret life as a fiction ghost writer? I do not. But you have a secret life as a coach to writers and other writers.

2:21:39It's this thing was 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 the guy's got installed but the name of the win Patrick Ross was rather 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 it's of it's something that is speaking to our moment in our especially how I govern ourselves it's I always mispronounce his name is that of our bush. Oh, yeah, yeah, who who essentially created the American science project. And it's a little, it's a basic, I think he started as a memo to FDR and 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 like, what we did with Manhattan Project, we can do with biology, 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.

2:22:35and let the scientists figure out what they need to work on. And was that was the big insight? So those are two books. How about you? What books do you? Similar to you, we've been, it's been a research heavier. Yeah, we have young kids, so fun books are. Right. 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 made it. It was a great time. Is it about going in? It's about, yeah, it's about the ascendancy of his book. Jamie here.

2:23:04And then two is, I just love reading Morgan Housel, and his new book, The Art of Spending Money, is really fun. I mean, it's where I get most of my latent ideas of, hey, dummy money's not gonna make you any happier. He's a great explainer. Oh, great explainer. Yeah. My first one is a reach back to December of last year at the Mars episode. Emperors of Chocolate by Joel Glenn Brenner. You ever read that? You're so good. I once...

2:23:33I 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 the whole thing. So it's the dual history of Hershey and Mars together. Yep, yep. She... It's the... I believe the only big book she ever wrote. And it's just a masterpiece. It's so good. The other one, Morris Chang's autobiography. Oh! We got to read. It is currently only in Chinese.

2:23:58Uh, but we got to read an English version of it to prep. Uh, it's, it's, I mean, why did you do that? Who translated for you? Uh, woman Karina Bowel. Yeah. Translation for us. Just for you. Yeah. She was working on it as a, as just a pet project, uh, anyway, uh, uh, accelerated it for us. Uh, okay, books, um, podcasts number two. Well, this is, this is a layup. The only, the, uh, your podcast is the big addition to my rotation. Well, thank you. I started in July.

2:24:25and I've listened to, I don't know, ten of them or something. Well, thank you. What is in your rotation with the sides acquired? And against the rules, of course. I don't listen to my own thing. I listen to Malcolm Gladwell's revisionist history. I listen to the smartless guys because I like them all. Your interview on that was great, too. It was fun to do it. What else will I like? Listen to the daily sum. Every now and then, I'll dip into a right-wing thing just to hear it.

2:24:56Just, no. That, that... Any, any recommendations? No. Not really. And then kind of, you know, random stuff. Like, every now and then Bill Simmons will have something I want to hear. I love Bill Simmons. I just don't have time.

2:25:13It's prolific. You have eaten my podcast, Alice. You've eaten a lot of my podcast. And I can tell you where I was, like treadmill in Denmark when I listened to the Indian Cricket thing. It's not the most fun thing about this. You remember a place. You do remember a place. They're very specific. And no, the acquired podcast is the new thing. How about you all? I listened to an episode of Invest Like The Best about a year ago.

2:25:42which was a really, really long interview with Graham Duncan. Oh, yeah, that was really good. That was really good. That was originally, did he, Patrick, do that as like a private podcast? And then, yeah. And then he did a shorter version. I didn't listen to the shorter version. I only listened to the like super long one, but one of my biggest takeaways from that is about having a, the correct grip that you don't want to 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 with an appropriate grip.

2:26:11for whatever the task is that you're trying to do. And 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 gonna get your head back in the game. And there's a, yeah, there's a, I've been amazed my career, just how useful sports analogies are to writing. I'm sure to, everything. But these physical memories translate pretty neatly to how with the mind is doing too. And that, 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 it. And I'm thinking of the reader as the hitter. Getting meaning across to a reader is tricky in the way that fooling a hitter is tricky. And it's just I can feel that connection. And so these physical analogies are really useful, even if they're sometimes a stretch.

2:27:02Speaking of sports, mine is the Glue Guys podcast, which I think we both went on this year. The actual origin of us meeting. There's got a great. They are great. I think we told them on the episode. I tell them, all I'm like, you guys got it. You guys got some magic here. You gotta keep doing this.

2:27:20You keep telling everybody that they run their broadcast business in the wrong way, and you're right. And you depress everybody else. You figured out how to do it, nobody else has. Well, they just, they've got magic. They're just like, they are taking it seriously and keeping doing it. But I think it's a really, really, they have the really rare dynamic of just the three of them together. Regardless of they have a guest, don't have a guest. They're equally good.

2:27:48They're very different personalities. Yeah, it helps. Can I just... I'm so... 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 have constraints that prevent them from doing this.

2:28:11It's not that we're right and everybody else is wrong, right? 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 it really is a way of running a business that we could have done with against the rules. And I'm gonna go think about it. But anyway, so what's our next category? Okay, okay, next category is videos, movies, movies, movies, TV shows. So I just saw a movie two days ago. Two nights ago, we went to the theater. Whole family went to the theater. Wow.

2:28:41J. Kelly. It's new. Noah Bombak. It's a new movie. And it is George Clooney. I guess you'd say he's playing George Clooney with a midlife crisis. He's playing a famous actor who's kind of sort out the meaning of his life. It's just magical. It's a beautiful movie. And really ambitious movie. And I've been thinking about it kind of since I saw it. Like what exactly it was getting across.

2:29:12And getting across, I think, being famous like a movie star is, 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. But what makes that more general is that I think everybody has to make some decisions about the distance that they keep the world at.

2:29:34And this was a way of having that conversation and entertaining it with that distance should be. Gotta see it. I have so many, but there's one that's like- Yeah, you're, you're looking at TV. I love movies and I love television. The, like, I have no video games to recommend, but I have lots of these. The one that's just head and shoulders back to everything else, and is the greatest performance art I've ever seen in my entire life is the rehearsal season two. All right. Nathan Fielder and...

2:30:02Eric Natarnacola, who we actually got to work with. Eric and A24 Films shot the sort of concert film part of our radio city show. And collaborating with Eric was unbelievable. But before any of that, I saw the rehearsal season two and my jaw is just on the floor with the level. You were talking about this for months. Ambition.

2:30:26There could be a complete psycho and it's the highest commitment to the bit I've ever seen in any form of media. I mean, I don't want to spoil anything, but have you seen it? I've not seen it. I will now go see it. It is. I was shaking. Okay. All right, I'm a later video guy. I'm a YouTube guy mostly. My YouTube for the year is one I've recommended before a past collab.

2:30:53Doug Demiro is still killing it. I think Doug is probably my favorite YouTuber. He's the biggest car reviewer. Like, I'm not really that into cars, but he's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full. He's just a life full.

2:31:23Yeah, yeah, like he'll release a new review, and I'll like watch it. Is this really what you sleep over like five minutes? This 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 and the queen dreams? What do you have? What do you kind of do? No, the beauty of Doug, his key insight was all the other car YouTubers are making videos for car enthusiasts. Right.

2:31:48He makes videos for people who need to buy a family. Oh, I see. Gotcha. I mean, he also reviews supercars and like, et cetera, et cetera. But like, most of his content is about like, you would spend half your dreams in automobile. No, no, no. No, it's not. I want to list up 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 I've loved in the last year. Tires, the TV show, so funny.

2:32:13F won the movie. I thought it was very entertaining. I got a lot of beautiful production quality. My favorite tribute, uh, Expansify paid $40 million for the- Rumored. Rumored $40 million for the sponsorship of the fake team in the movie. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's so great. Uh, Andor, some of the best thing, if not the best thing in the Star Wars, modern Star Wars franchise, Vail Lawn Disney Plus, uh, the show Fall Out. So good in season two is about to come back. I think that's a Joan and Oled and Lisa Joy, again, artists.

2:32:43Like I was saying about Nathan Fielder. Severance was amazing. Silo has a new season coming out that I can't wait. The book's certainly good. Yes. I like the books. Yeah, those are my TV recommendations. Nice. Next category, which might just be me as 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. It's just like it's the best. This is what I have been waiting for.

2:33:13But I needed 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 was it. I wasn't trying. She came up to me as I'm playing this indie RPG, and she started playing it. I never would have guessed that this was my daughter's entry into video games. And then two.

2:33:41Kirby and the Forgotten Land on the Switch is like perfect. We can play it together. It's co-op. It's great for me. It's great for her. It's awesome. So your daughter is in an age where she'll do anything you want to do. No, because she wants to be with you. No, no, no, no, no. You don't know my daughter. It's extremely independent. It's anomalous and awesome. Yes, this is a rare occurrence. She runs the house. Yeah, no, no. So this is like so much joy for me. Great.

2:34:09Products. What are some products that you have come to own in the last year that you have just thought are awesome or improved quality of life? I found a new pen. I got it here. Let's see what it is. And it's just like I needed a pen that had just the right sort of fine point and that it's kind of generous with ink, but it doesn't explode on an airplane. It doesn't smear. I imagine. It doesn't smear it. I'm looking at it now. The R is Tekka roller ball pen 0.7.

2:34:36Fine, and I just ordered a whole case of them because it's fine. I got a pen. I just love it. Listeners, if you want to write like Michael Lewis, we have the answer. This is an example of that company. That company is going to sell a lot of pencils. So that pen is a thing. And what else other products this year? The Fujifilm X100VI. I previously...

2:34:56specifically did not carve it out and carved out a different camera. I've started carrying the Fuji film and now love it. It's amazing. I've got a two-year-old and it's just so nice to have more than just smartphone pictures of family. It's awesome. Nice. I'm just looking at what I have on, like, camera here. I think the X-Fishio, that's... No, no, it's a weird, but we're not going to target those. That wasn't this year. That wasn't... We're only talking about... Not until I get the role. But anyway, that wasn't this year. But this year, actually, on my feet, These are things, these socks, I ran out of white socks in London. I went over to, is it uniclo? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they didn't have any, I was just looking for athletic socks, right? And they have these other things instead. They've turned out to be so much better than the athletic socks and they come in different colors so you can even like a light gray, you can wear them as dress socks, you can wear them as athletic socks. And they, like, whenever I, I don't know about you, whenever I find something I love.

2:35:53What's about to happen is it's about to be discontinued. So you need to buy all of them. Yes, right. So I got all of them because I got them in London. I was going to have to fly back with them. But I bought basically what was in the store at the moment. And these shoes. So those ons. These are ons. And oddly, I spent a couple days with Roger Federer this summer. And I just discovered them. So we had the on conversation and made me kind of like, acceptable to him, but it was, um, but the, I need these, these, I was a Hoka guy. Also great. Also great. Nike basically blew it, right? They let, they let you, they let, they got rid of their stores. Yeah. They thought it's all gonna be online and on and Hoka roll in. Yeah. And I'm a little torn, but not that torn. I'm kind of, these on's are just like, un, they're, I don't know what it is. It's, it's, uh, especially the white ones. I get, I'm getting criticized for it because I start wearing them instead of even dress shoes.

2:36:51and like on, I went on the cold bear with these, and like, I got eight calls and you can't do that again. Really? Yeah, like it looks, it's just... I see people 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 unit close-socks and the ones. But I've been at the sign of enthusiasm.

2:37:09That's right. There you go. And isn't the Federer on deal like one of the best endorsement deals by an athlete ever measured by how much money he gets paid? Didn't he do like an equity deal early? Oh, I don't know. I think that might be right. He only aligns with companies whose products he really likes Rolex. Yeah, it's an amazing. It's amazing how easy it is, right? Also, he's Roger Federer. He's also Roger Federer. It's similar. Well, it's similar, but I bought a remote suitcase this year and I love it. It's just a suitcase, but Like, I love it.

2:37:40I got- I can tell you- Remoa, LVMH bought this. It's a suitcase, kind of German suitcase company. They make the aluminum shell- Yeah, you got a suitcase. You're stepping your step every time you show up. Yeah. Well, I got the- It's exciting to find new luggage. It did totally. I mean, I don't know why it is so exciting, but it's hard to find new luggage. Well, my whole life, I've just been like- Three middle-aged men sitting around talking about the new podcast. No, you know, you find the new bag. You know your life is gonna be different. I've always been a minimal packing, like, back- pack only like just maximum efficiency. You assume you're gonna be washing your clothes wherever you go. Yeah, yeah. 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 it. But like, I just like it, it makes me happy. It's great. The parenting? Parenting, yeah, let's go to parenting. Feel free to decline on this. We, we, for the young parent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two and four and four and 18 months. Yeah.

2:38:38So the first is discovering guided access on the iPad. It's an accessibility setting where you can make it some of the buttons, do anything, and it doesn't respond taps. So on an airplane, they can't, they can't mess with this Rachel. And then he's going to be like, if you dad make it work. So these are products for parenting. If you are a parent of kids are kids age, the last one is the movie toy story. It's the first movie we introduced him to. It was my favorite movie growing up. And it's been really fun.

2:39:08He took to it. He loves Mr. Potato Head. He calls it Tapo Head. And so he always runs into the room and says, Tapo Head TV. And that means I want to watch Toy Story. So as I alluded to, my older daughter is an independent woman, shall we say. We bought this when she was younger, and she completely rejected it. The slumber pod. Do you have one of these? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So this is a blackout tent. You have two of these. You put it over.

2:39:33a portable crib. So when you're traveling, you basically put your baby in like a sensory deprivation. Oh, you set up the noise machine right next to it too, you really? Yeah. And for most kids, I remember reading, we were hearing about this from people that like it's a miracle. And I tried it with our older daughter and she was like, like absolute nuclear, like no way is this gonna work. And so I was shyed away from it. And then we went on a trip recently and I brought it back for my younger daughter because I was like, all right, well we'll get a shot.

2:40:02Boil it like a charm. 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 offer free endorsement? Yes, yes, yes, without actually nobody having to pay you for it. No, no, no, you do it. You do this with the flick of the list, because we don't even need the advertising revenues. No, we just started because of it. These are things we like. It's good. It's good. That's good. And then my last one, this is...

2:40:30Fun because it's a tie-in with our radio city show brothel whole family to New York for radio city Bluey, we got to do a bluey episode someday. It's this incredible phenomenon. I don't know if it's crossed your readers. No, what is it? Bluey is the greatest kid show ever made bar none It's that's a big claim. It's this guy in Australia in Brisbane and He made it, he was, I think, an animator for Peppa Pig, and then made this blend. It's like... But the claim isn't that crazy. But the claim isn't that crazy. I love Bluey. Like, it's just so... Disney agrees with David. Yeah. Disney has been trying to buy Bluey for years. Oh. For 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. I think news just came out today that Bluey is coming to Animal Kingdom and...

2:41:24Disney World in 2026. It's basically like, it's the Pixar. Who owns Bluey? Think of it as Pixar of this generation. Just Bluey owned by his creator? Yeah, yeah. Who is his creator? Joe Brown. This is Guy. It's like the Muppets. Yeah, yeah. It's like Jim Henson and the Muppets. So in New York, in New York City, you can buy tickets. You get like a 45-minute window. You can take your family, you can take your kids to Bluey's house, a recreation of Bluey's house inside a building in Union Square. That's like great. If you've got kids in the Bluey, go to New York, take them to glue it. My kids would find that a little strange, okay? It's true, we keep saying kids, kids up here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's all I got for Caravans. That's all we got, too. Michael, thank you so much. Thank you so much. What a joy. Thank you for giving us your evening. This is the longest I've spoken to anyone in the last 40 years. Thank you for doing this with us. Thank you. My pleasure. Anytime.

2:42:22I'll see you in your 20th. I'll see you in 10 years. All right, listeners. Thank you so much for listening and being on this journey with us. David, very fun way to try to unpack why acquired worked there with Michael. If you had told us 10 years ago, when we made the Pixar episode that we'd be sitting down with, Michael, it was to analyze ourselves and trade notes. Oh, my creative process works. Yeah. Unbelievable.

2:42:52Unbelievable. Thank you, Michael, for doing this with us. So good. 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 Bommer or Morris Chang. This was actually produced. And so we have a giant thank you to the Shep Films, SHEP Films company. They do amazing work. They've made like full two hour movies with Pedro Pascal and make sci-fi movies, 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 TSMC, Hermes, Costco, the NFL, Berkshire, or any other episode that we talked about there with Michael. After this episode, check out ACQ2. We had Andrew Ross sorkin on, and it was awesome. Speaking of trading notes on the creative process, very different job that he does, but rhymes with acquired in some ways. So you can search ACQ2 in any podcast player.

2:43:51Come talk about this with us in the Slack. 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 going to 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.

2:44:20We might have some more upgrades to all the... That's right. What do you call it? Like the chrome around acquired? Yes. Coming in 2026. So, as they did. That's a great way to put it. Well, with that listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.