Acquired - Sessions- David Senra (Founders Podcast)

0:00I found this guy treated something a couple days ago whenever it was hilarious. He goes, most people's alarm clock is David Goggins telling them to wake up and get after it. My alarm clock is David's center yelling at me, telling me to be like Edwin Land. I was like, I repetition works.

0:31Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Today's episode is our next installment of Acquired Sessions, a video format on YouTube that we started playing with last year. Our guest today is David Senra of the Founders Podcast.

0:54David is quite possibly the only person we know who is more obsessed than us with business history and the lessons that great founders teach us. David, David Senra, that is, has read hundreds of founder biographies and done deep episodes on them all. I don't know that I'm at hundreds yet, is me, David, but I'm definitely in dozens. I aspire to be at hundreds, but David Senra...

1:18is just one of our closest podgaster friends and friends period out there his show is awesome here on this episode we had him out to my living room here in San Francisco and we had just a awesome really fun multi multi hour conversation just like the ones that he and I have scheduled every month on zoom when the mics are off. And it was super organic, super unstructured. We covered a ton of ground, including that I think two nights before we recorded. David was just coming up from LA where he had dinner with Charlie Munger. And so he spent a lot of time talking about that.

1:56Charlie's influence on David is more in influence on all three of us. A bunch of thoughts on advice generally. And as you can imagine, David just sprinkled dozens and dozens of historical examples and founder stories throughout the episode. It is crazy. Every time someone's making a point, he'll dive in. This is just like that thing Edwin Lan said that one time, or David Ogilvy or Coco Chanel or who have you. David is definitely close with the eminent dead.

2:22I will say after editing this episode, I had one enormous takeaway, David Senra is really, really into podcasting, so get fired up to meet him on his level. Alright, quick things, go follow ACQ2, brand new show, search at any podcast player available for free.

2:40become an LP. There's voting going on right now for our next episode, which LP's all have input on. And for every new LP that joins, we will shoot you an email to your inbox. Voting closes about a week after this comes out. And we are straight up picking whatever you tell us the next episode should be with really no editorial from us. So help us direct the next episode.

3:03Join the Slack. It is one of the only places on the internet with this super high level of incredibly thoughtful discussion by well-connected kind folks with a deep appreciation for history. People meet co-founders, they find jobs, and they get nuance takes on the news of the day in there. So join at acquired.fm slash Slack. Lastly, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only now.

3:32on to acquired sessions. So, David, do you want to tell us who you had dinner with the other night? I had a three-hour dinner with Charlie Munger. That was awesome. Where I could ask him any questions that you want. Well, first of all, I guess we should back up. It's like, there's a reason that he's so admired by so many people. But for me, particularly, you get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the work that we do, right? And so that's like a blessing and something that I know we've had conversations in the past that we deeply appreciate.

4:00But Charlie's a different level for me. Like I literally think of him, like the wise grandfather I never had. You know, I met all kinds of people. I don't really get like nervous or star struck. I was legitimately like shaking the day before. I was like, I cannot believe. I didn't want to tell them any people because like, there's no way this is going to happen. Like, I just, I won't believe it till it actually happens. We do very similar work, right? Or it's like, how many people have spent six, seven years?

4:28tens of thousands of hours reading hundreds of books about the history of entrepreneurship and investing and then not only reading it, taking notes on it, making a podcast. Charlie and Warren. Yeah. And the reason I bring that up is because you think about all the different companies and founders you guys have studied, all the different companies and founders that I've studied, right? And even amongst the rarest group of people, Charlie still stands out. And the crazy thing is he's 99, right?

4:54And so I get there and we start off in his library, which is the best place for me that you could possibly see. And set the stage more. How big is the library? How many books are we talking about? So one of his family members was there too, and she's like, oh, this is nothing. This is like the front view. Wait until you see the back. So it's similar to the room we're in, very similar size, and floor to ceiling shelves. And so I'm with a smokeable friends. In fact, mutual friends for us. So the people that set this up for us or for me was Andrew Wilkinson and Chris from Founders of Tiny or mutual friends. And so we're sitting there and there's actually a funny thing where it starts out and they know both Warren and Charlie they've talked to me before. So they go right into it and then like I'm sitting there and I had this whole list of probably like 25 questions. I was gonna ask if you'd like prepare it in advance. I know you did. I never got the chance to open my phone.

5:51because I was just sitting there, I was like, I'm looking at him. And he's, you know, very close. Like, you know, maybe a little bit further from me or a few more disrespectful to like, take up my phone. Yeah. That too. And I had, you know, read every single book on Charlie. I watched all of his videos, like, I have studied this guy forever. And so every time he had said, Hey, read this book, I go and read the book. And then I see a bunch of the books that he has recommended behind him. So people are like, Oh, was he as like, you expected? Like they say, Hey, be careful. Don't meet your heroes, right? It's like, he was

6:21unbelievably gracious. You know, I was like, hey Charlie, you mind if I take a look at your bookshelf, right? He's just like, do whatever you want. Just unbelievably polite. Still like biting intellect for rocious intelligence. At 99. At 99. So we were talking earlier downstairs where the scary thing about Charlie is.

6:42I remember asking a question about Henry Kaiser, this guy that was super famous when Charlie was younger. He built like 100 companies, built a Hoover Dam. Like he was as famous in his time as Elon Muskets today, right? But no one knows who he is. And I was asking questions about Charlie in the book. And his recall is just insane. So the point where I asked him, I go, how do you know this, Charlie? He goes, I knew it's partner. And then he starts telling stories about having a relationship with Henry Kaiser's business partner. And then all these people.

7:09Three hours of just unbelievable stories. And then I go, Charlie, how do you remember all this stuff? Do you take notes? Do you read the books over and over again? He's like, nope. And all I could think of was like, imagine. Wow. That guy's mind at 99 is still so short. I had brought a gift form because he talks about Rockefeller a lot of time. I bought him this special edition, centennial edition.

7:36version of Henry Flagler's biography. Oh, Flagler. So I live in Miami. The guy, Les Santaford, I think, is his author of that book. He is good friends with, there's only like one local book shop in Miami called Books and Books. And so Les is a local author who's good friends with the owner of that bookstore. So they did a, but you can't get this book anymore else. It's a special edition book. Because Flagler moved to Florida later in the year. After the Tanner Doyle thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, he's got a fascinating story we talked about that where He made him unbelievably wealthy because of Standard Oil. He's, you know, 50, 60, 70 years old when he's doing this, and he's just like, oh, what am I gonna do now? I'll build an entire state. When he gets to Miami, Miami is little less than 500 people living in a swamp. He just can't live there. There was no AC at the time. And so then he builds the world's first railroad over connecting the Florida Keys. He just essentially, like, you read that book and you're like, oh.

8:29Humans have no limits other than the ones we put on ourselves. And so that's what Flagler does. He stretches it. And he does some terrible things, too, where it's like, yeah, wanted to find a way to divorce his wife. So he literally moves to another state because he couldn't divorce in New York, bribes the government of Florida. They create the Flagler law, which allows him to get a divorce. Then he does that like a few things a few times. I think he's like in the 70s and Mary's like a 30 year old, like, just not all good. But that guy's like, oh, your rules don't apply to me, like I will build whatever I want. He built infrastructure hotels, everything else. This is like one of the things that I keep learning from Founders Podcasts and I'm curious if you do it intentionally or if you like try not to do it, but like every single time like, oh, people aren't perfect. Like none of your heroes are perfect. And do you find yourself like,

9:15Because we run it's on acquired a lot where like it's not as fun to tell stories about terrible people and so you you like don't want to show someone's negative side as much because it doesn't Like it's just it's what we really like we fall in love with them, right when we're doing right and you're like why they're the most extraordinary person on this one axis to ever live and we we should talk about how they're a flawed person in many ways, but it's not Fun to dwell on like you kind of want to like move through that and be like yep, yep, they were flawed Here's the next amazing thing that they did like how do you handle that like you know how a normal biography is written, right? It's like way too much family history like I want to know some family history I don't want five generations back stop like I don't want to know the origination their last name I don't need that I know like you're like the most qualified person in the world to critique a biography writing style at this point, so why we're reading is like everyone wants to know the climb

10:05It's like, how did you, you guys, I just went through your entire, to get part of the prep for Charlie is listening to all of your Berkshire episodes, right? Where you guys do a fantastic job on this, because like the first two was like the young Charlie, the young Warren. So I would literally, and I've done this forever, it's like, I don't, when you take a Warren Buffett, or Ben Franklin, or George Washington, or anyway, it's super famous, when we see them, it's like, oh, who's the Ben Franklin on the hundred dollar bill, right? Or who's of Washington on the dollar bill? Or who's Buffett on the meeting in Omaha? It's like, no, no, that's the guy that is,

10:35is enjoying the fruits of the person actually built the empire. I go and stare at pictures like a freak of young Charlie Munger when he was like 38, or a young Warren Buffett, right? They were like, oh, they were young people once. In our Berkshire series, did we end the first episode without even getting to Berkshire yet? I think we might. You have the bus partnership. You mentioned it on the Walmart episode, where it's like everybody says, oh, Sam Walton didn't start Walmart, so he's 44. Yeah, but he was...

11:02doing 25 years of practice and learning. And it wasn't just sitting on his ass. Starting a bunch of stuff that looked an awful lot like Walmart. Yes, learning from that. And so the, the, the, which is totally like, I mean, aside, but we have no agenda here. Uh, that is like, I think both an advantage that like we have all three of us and like kind of a secret that we have, which is that like, we wanted, we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon. And so we're like, how do we do Amazon, right? We got to do Walmart first.

11:28People want this. This is the right way to study things. I think I'm glad you brought that up because I think this is why people get a lot of value and I don't want it to make us about, hey, this is an acquired foundation. The reason that some of the people in our audiences are the most successful people in the world. They're all reading biographies. They're all studying history of business. I told you guys a few weeks ago, I was very lucky to have a two hour one-on-one lunch with Sam Zell that I didn't think was possible. What I realized in that conversation is like, you don't make, you don't send us all this company for almost $40 billion, right? 38 billion dollars, whatever it was. It's like, you don't build a company, sell for $40 billion, and then learn all these. It's like he was doing this since he was, since he was young. We were talking in his autobiography. I think my favorite episode of your podcast is the Kobe Bryant episode. Yeah. Cause like, this is what these guys are doing. They're like Kobe Bryant. They're watching game tape. They're watching game tape. They're working on the fundamentals from the time they're 12.

12:24Through the time they die. They don't stop. I think that's what we're listening to acquired and founders is you're watching game tape of history's greatest entrepreneurs Sam did this when he was younger But this ties together where Bill Gurley had a fantastic quote about this a treat about this when all that crypto was going crazy and like the run up and people are getting rich And he's like one thing I don't like and I'm paraphrasing because I wasn't expecting to talk about this He's like, I don't like that these young the younger people denigrating the people that came before them. And he's like, he made the point that none of the, none of history's gay entrepreneurs and investors did that. They had the opposite perspective. All of them had idols. You've just made the point. You can't understand Jeff Bezos until you say Sam Walton. You can't understand Sam Walton until you understand JC Penny and Soul Price and all these guys. And even all these contemporaries. Like the point that Walton always made was, I don't think my competitors are stupid. I want to go shop my competitors and get all of their very best insights and then bring them into my store. Yeah.

13:16100% they're learning machines. And so you get to Charlie's going times well back to this. You get to Charlie's bookshelf, and it's just biographies I've never even heard of. And I do this for a living. I do for a living. I was like, what is this book? And then I started looking, I was like, oh, I've just taken picture after picture after picture. I was like, I'm ordering every single one. So we're talking about this idea that the way to get truth is to weave together the tapestry of all of history, stories of things that are adjacent to understand like how this opportunity to start some business came to be. And you always have to, like all history is revisionist and all history is biased. And so I think one of the hardest things about making an acquired episode is figuring out like when we're looking at a source, like someone giving an industry talk who works at a company or like a biographer who chose to dedicate, you know,

14:05two years of our life to writing this book after working at Newsweek and covering the sector forever is like trying to mentally account for and discount from whatever bias and perspective they're coming in with to create whatever the source material is that we're using to then incorporate into our version of here's how this thing happened which is that's like I think it's the hardest part about what we do and I'm curious if you ever think about that.

14:30I think about all the time, because people are like, oh, like, survived with your bias or visions history and everything else. It's like, here's the problem. Like, humans don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. So, like, we could have this super long conversation between the three of us right now, then go into the room and write down, you know, what just occurred. Every single version is going to be different, because it's viewed through all of our experience, the way we think, the words we use. And so, what I'm looking at is, like, when I'm reading about Sam Walton, right? It's just like, the story we both hit on all the podcasts, because I've done a bunch of podcasts on Sam too.

14:59Where it's like the guys pissed off he's just like drive him to store the store and he's like mountain roads taking forever so he buys the plane and he realizes like oh this is a massive advantage because I'm doing something my competitors aren't right I'm flying over and you guys mentioned to two which I thought was hilarious and then he just lands is like who owns that let me land and then he you know buys for action so he's like we're gonna negotiate right now I want to buy it from you and so my point is like okay Yes, that most likely occurred. But what is the idea behind that? You can have an advantage by doing something your competitors are not doing, right? And this ties together with what you just said is like they all learn from somebody else. When we're reading these books and listening to these podcasts, it's like, what's the idea I can use in my life? We're not building the next Walmart. There's no way we read Titan that we could tell, did this actually happen? I don't know, but I'm looking for the ideas behind it. I'm going to verify for every single word in this book. That's ridiculous.

15:49And the truth is always, it is always the case that a clean narrative is grafted onto a fact pattern. And it's like, okay, well, what I care about is the lessons I can learn from the clean narrative, not it does the fact pattern. If you had all the facts in totality, did it necessarily mean that it, you know, this was premeditated? It's like, whether it was premeditated or not, you know, the facts are the facts and like, maybe I can duplicate it in a different realm. For what we do, I mean.

16:17I think I'll acquire more than you, but especially because you will do multiple episodes of different books on the same people. And multiple episodes on the same book. Yeah, and multiple episodes on the same book. Your format is bad. We're doing a narrative weave. We're shooting the moon a little bit more in this respect. Your format lends itself to so everyone is listening. Founders is more about...

16:40Hey, I just read this book, and I want to tell you what I learned from this book. And it's always biography, and sometimes you'll do five different biographies on Edwin Land. And if a choir was going to do Polaroid, we would do Polaroid. The episode would be Polaroid. Maybe it would be Polaroid part one and part two, or maybe at some point we have one there. We'd have someone on to talk about the story in addition to our one canonical episode.

17:04We would be shooting the moon on, like, let's make sure that we get the Polaroid story as right. It's almost like, how do we find the correct average of all of the other stories to create the canonical version? I wasn't expecting to quote Bill Gurley two times early, so far. But, um... Is that, you know, this is gonna be a good episode. That fantastic talk he gave, which to me is the best talk for entrepreneurs and investors on YouTube, it's called Running Down a Dream, how to survive and thrive in a career you love, right? And he says, he's like, listen, in the age of the internet, he's like, you don't have to be the smartest person.

17:33Charlie Munger, after talking to him, whatever mind that dude has, I don't have that. And I'm cool with that. I could not imagine trying to compete against that guy 40 years ago. He would destroy me. He's got a super mind that I don't have. But what Bill says is, you don't have to be the smartest person, but you can collect the most information and he holds you to a high standard in that talk. Bill's like, listen, in the age of the internet, all the information you possibly need is registered fingertips. You have no excuse not to do this. And so he gives the example of if you want to be a domain expert in whatever you're doing, like within two years of intense study, if you're doing that and you're focused on it, it's like you're gonna get to the point where like you know more than maybe anybody else. And so that's my whole thing was like when you talk to, you've never met a founder or an entrepreneur that's like kind of into entrepreneurship. It's like no, it's our lives. So of course, the reason why so many of them listen to both of our shows, right, it's because they're building machines where they literally can turn knowledge into profit.

18:31Right? I've become close friends with the guy through the podcast. He's a young kid. I don't mean to call him a kid. He's not a kid. But he's a lot younger than I am. And he's like 28 years old. And we were on the phone the other day because he had a very serious offer for company humans like 95% of. They were gonna give him $100 million. Right? Might as well say no to it. But the point is when you talk to him, You know, he's listened to all the episodes to read like 60 of the books. He'll text me a picture of like you want me to move to book. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure I read that. Like, he's like, oh, yeah, it's from this episode. It's like, oh, why? What if he finds one idea in a book, one idea in a podcast, and it gives a 10% improvement on his company? That's a $10 million idea. Yeah. Well, we were talking about this earlier, like...

19:14This dinner that you have it sounds like the Charlie is just like a very curiosity driven machine, but we know there there's lots of folks that have regular dinners Yeah, and have groups of people often geographically dispersed. Mm-hmm. Why did they do it? Why is it worth their time their money their effort? It's that they get one idea The leverage that they can get on that is Charlie tells the stories like yeah I made $400 million from reading barons for 50 years. He's like, what, what are you talking about, Charlie? I'm trying to quantify that. Because he does. He goes, I read, this isn't something he said at dinner. That firm said publicly. He's like, I read barons every all the time for 50 years. I found one idea that I can act on. I made $50 million on that deal. And then I took that 50 million and I gave it to Lilo. Is that the... Oh, yeah, yeah. I gave that 50 million to Lilo and Lilo turned it into $400 million. That's how I made $400 million from reading barons.

20:06Wow. And listen, I'm not, and this is another thing where I feel like everybody's like, oh, this time it's different. This is new. It's like human nature has never changed. It will never change. This time it's not different. You're just experienced. The difference is if you don't study the history that people came for, you're just ignorant and making mistakes that people already saw in the past. Learning from history is a form of leverage. He has billions of billions of billions of years of collectives like human history. You know, this guy spent 70 years and there's thousands of them. And like,

20:36Sam Walton's book, how many people spent 50 years in one industry, in the retail industry? And he distilled it down to the most important. And then you could read it in a week, and then you could listen to a choir's episodes. You can listen to David's episodes on Sam. Okay, this is good. In addition to that. So the question is, then do you have 90% of Sam's wisdom, or do you have 0.1% of Sam's wisdom after there's no way you have 90% right? Because like the time, like the instincts, I was just rewatching Peter Teal's talk at Y Commentary, he says, competitions for losers. And he goes, one thing that we do in Silicon Valley is we overrate, overvalue growth rates and undervalue durability. And he's like, that doesn't make sense for a technology company because all your profits, the vast majority of your profits are 20 years in the future. And so if you're trying to optimize for growth and that over optimization can cause your company to go to business, you're never going to collect that. You optimize your durability first, dummy. Like that's to me, like my interpretation, what he's saying, right? Yeah, so you're going to get, you know,

21:35One percent probably maybe five but that's still enormous leverage because you read it in five hours and he took 50 years And it's Sam Walton's with and it's what you do with the idea. I know you've talked about this before but like what was what was the moment where you like? I'm gonna I'm gonna start this podcast like it's crazy, right what you do you you talk to a microphone yourself every week. Yeah My friend not that I think you're crazy You are betting no, I definitely am nuts for sure And that's gonna be like we can talk about Did you guys read Jeff Bezos' last shareholder letter before he... Yeah. The best line he has is at the end, he's like, differentiation is survival. And so they think about that, like, how hard? They say, let's say somebody says, damn, I love what Ben, David, June, I'm gonna do the exact same thing. They can jump in and try to do that, right? But you have six years of experience, you have 600 hours out there. You have to counter position it, you have stuff. Or address a different audience or... Exactly. Which by the way, they definitely should, every time we talk to somebody who wants to...

22:34Without that, I'm always like, you absolutely should do this. And you will, even if you never succeed in terms of any numerical success, you will succeed because you are learning. So being a nut job and completely crazy is, I think, makes you harder to compete with. And we're gonna go all over the map here, but it's impossible not to be that. Think about how steeped you guys are in the same information that I am, where it always says, oh, you're the sum of your five friends or whatever, right? Well, it's also like what you...

23:03You know, some of your podcasts you listen to, and the books you read. And so what happens? Five friends, including your pair of social relationships. And so now what happens is like, you mentioned, dude, I can only read like one book about him, you'll go crazy. And so what happens is when I'm really interested in somebody, I will, I listen to Bill Gurley. Again, I just take advice from people who are smarter than me. Bill said, go collect everybody, everything you can. Okay, good, I'll do that. These are simple ideas. And so I'll find somebody that's interesting. I'll read everything about him. And so with Charlie.

23:31I have like a little Charlie Munger on my shoulder. I have a little Steve Jobs, a little Edwin Land, a little David Ogoofy, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, all these people that have been heroes of mine, James Dyson. And so now I'm presented with a situation like what would they do? And you have, if you read and spend it or everything that's out there about these people, like you'll have an idea of like how they would respond. Did you guys ever read Ken Cocianda's book Creative Selection?

23:52Oh, that's shocking. He worked on the original human interface for the iPhone. He made the keyboard for, when it was still like, the iPhone or something. Yeah. The keyboard, he made Safari before the iPhone. He has this excellent book that I've read like three times called Creative Selection. I think how Apple design products and golden age of Steve Jobs might be the subtitle. But he talked about that where he demoed to Steve, right?

24:21You're not going to describe it to him. You're going to demo and you're going to hand it to him. And so they iterate. You guys already know this. They iterate through a series of demos. And it's based on Steve's taste. Like he is not. Oh, let's talk about this. Nope. Do this. Do this that. And so Ken has a great line in the book where he's like demoing for Steve is like asking questions to the Oracle Delphi, except the Oracle Delphi would like respond with a riddle. And he's like, no, no, Steve was unbelievably like crystal clear. You understood him. Out of every single person I've ever studied,

24:49Steve Jobs is by far the clearest thinker I have ever come across. Like I just gifted at that. Charlie is like the oracle and it's crystal clear. You are not like you're gonna understand what he's the idea he's trying to get into your brain for sure. But my point being is like all of the people that we study, they don't denigrate the past. Steve Jobs, the reason I'm so obsessed with Evan Land, I read in a biography. When Steve was like 20 in his 20s, Evan Land is in like 70s.

25:17He goes and meets Edwin Land and he goes visiting Edwin Land was like visiting a shrine. He's like, he is my hero, more people should try to be like that. And then you guys made the point in that, you know, Jeff Bezos took a lot of ideas from Sam, who took a bunch of ideas from Sony too, Steve and Jeff. So that you always find these people were like, oh, I thought this was a Steve Jobs idea.

25:39No. No. It's an akia marida idea. Yeah. Or an urban land idea. Or an urban land idea. Like, when you used to watch the presentations that Steve would give, where he's like, oh, we're building at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. He put it, put up on screen. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off. He ripped that off.

26:06sort of personal pivot. And then somebody I've never asked you in all the hours we spent. It's crazy. This is the first time we've met in person. Like we spent hours and hours and hours on Zoom. How did you decide that this is what you were going to do with your time on this planet? And like, what led to this? Okay, so I, you know, our mutual friend, Jeremy, from Formula of Tiny. I just spent like a bunch of hours with him. He was in town. In one sentence.

26:35He, like, he psychoanalyzed me better. Anyway, I'll say whatever it has. He goes, you didn't have any mentors growing up. So you, like, you have, then you took it to, like, this extreme and he said it much more eloquently than I am, but he's like, you didn't have any mentors. So I view your career as, like, the psychopathic search for, like, mentors I can help you, you know? And so, like, to answer questions, like, I don't want to go into too much detail here, but, like, I've only had one habit my whole life, and that was reading. I was reading for as long as I can remember. My mom passed away from breast cancer a couple of years ago.

27:04And we didn't have a lot of money, long story, but it was the first person not only to graduate college, but high school in my family. I came from a family, unfortunately, both sides of family, no education, a lot of just bad habits. So I identified with a lot what Charlie Munner says, because he essentially observes about behavior and then tries to do the opposite, right? So I was just, let me give you an example. I was just up in Canada, actually at an event, Andrew Wilkinson was hosting for a bunch of entrepreneurs.

27:31me, Shane Parish from the Knowledge Project, and Farron of Shoot was up there, Ben Wilson from How To Take Over the World, and we were doing this panel together, and Shane's the moderator, and we don't know what we're gonna talk about beforehand. And so Shane asked the question, it's like, oh, what did you learn most from your upbringing, or something like that, right? And I go, I learned not to do cocaine and to graduate high school, like, so that kind of thing, right? And so there was just a bunch of anti-models. I thought about this as I was walking through the tenderloin this morning at San Francisco.

27:59And I was like, I should do this walk with my daughter as the best, like, hey, this way you don't do drugs. Like, this is the perfect example of, like, you would observe bad behavior and then you do the opposite. So, long story short, I've always been obsessed with reading. Like, one of the best things my mom ever did was even if we didn't have money for books, she would take me to the bookstore and just sit there. Like, you know, bookstores are so cool because they just let you read. No one comes to her, like, hey, you've been reading for an hour, like, you gotta get out of here, you know?

28:29and just reading, reading, reading. Was anybody who introduced you to reading a book so you just, there was just something about you. Sounds like it's mom. Yeah, but no, she wasn't a big reader. The only thing she read was the Bible. There was no books in the house when I was younger, ever. Like how did you be like? Mom, take me to the bookstore. I can't answer that. All I can say is my wife has known me for 15 years. And her thing, what she says is she likes my family and gets along with them. But she goes, how did that come from that?

28:59It sounds like you have a classic, like, you're the one who made it out story. Sam Hinky, our mutual friend, actually gave me the way to think about this. And it's called the founder of your family, right? And it's the person that, like, and I used to call them and it was a terrible name, but generational inflection points, because you'd read this in the biography where you have, like, generation after generation of just not good things happening. And then one person just says, it stops now.

29:25That's what Rockefeller did. Rockefeller, I always think of Sam Bronfman, the guy that did Seagrams. Oh yeah. And he's in Canada growing up. But like they were so, their parents had lost so much money. They think they were Jewish and they had to like escape from persecution and Russia. I can't remember where they came from, but they go and they have to start all over and they're in Canada and like there's no heating and like they're freezing and like, so he has this like psychopathic drive to change. But you stay with you forever.

29:53So, once he builds this massive company and literally changes the trajectory of all of his descendants and his daughter is an adult and she tells the story in the book where Sam is sitting there in a mansion by a next to a fire like shivering thinking about how embarrassing it was to have to go to school with tighter clothing. That guy is never going to go back to that and he never loses it. So, I just always been a reader. That's the only thing.

30:22ever like the only one unbroken habit I've always had. And so I just had this idea where like I was obsessed with podcasts forever. I was obsessed with audio before there's such thing as a podcast. Like I would listen to talk radio when I was a kid and at that time, you know, it's, it's not like there's no on-demand anything. You would listen to sports talk radio, politics talk radio. It's embarrassing. There was like this woman that used to be on a night and people would write in like, advice for love their love life. And I would listen to that. Just the idea of like, there's all this information. Oh man, I used to listen to Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.

30:52Do you ever listen to this? Like, it's when all the other radio programming sort of expires and then you enter the like one in the morning AM radio stuff and it was like, you know, aliens and like tons of paranormal stuff. But it was like, if you listen like, you know, the cabs game ends, I'm from Cleveland. And so like, then you listen to like the sports post game and then it goes into like the politics hour and if you still can't fall asleep, then you're into like aliens and it's like four hours of that stuff. Do you have a radio in your bedroom? Oh, yeah.

31:18Yeah, I'd be able to, I imagine my parents probably came and turned it off, but like, they'd leave it on while I fell asleep every night. And then remember, like, I remember, so you have to jump off from that, then the AM radio stations would then start streaming to your browser, your internet. It still wasn't on demand. So if you're not listening at three o'clock or 12, like, you miss it. And then once I saw a podcast with Mark Cuban's company was, he was just like broadcasting audio for sports games though, I think. I don't actually know. It's like an arrow. It's broadcast.com, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it was competitive with real player.

31:48which also wasn't on demand. That was just streamed radio. No, the first on demand was, the first time I saw this was like, this is insane. Like, especially for people that are learning machines using Charlie's, where it's like, I can go to, even today, like they do, you can go to any podcast player, type in whatever you want to learn about, and then you can hear somebody, it's usually spent hundreds of hours teaching you about this stuff. You can also find intellectual high quality content more easily now, because all content, because there were a limited number of channels.

32:22And a limited number of time slots, everything had to be produced for the lowest common denominator. And now you can opt into your niche and find the highest quality content in that niche. And like the only way to do that before was books. Like there wasn't an audio way to, there wasn't content. There wasn't niche audio content broadly available. And they weren't, there aren't really several million authors out there. Right. But there's several million podcasts. Right. But you made a good, you're, I think you were getting to a good point. It's like because the business model didn't support that. And so now, and there was no distribution. Yeah. And now with podcasting, it's like,

32:51You guys, I'm sure I think like 50% of my audience was in the United States, but then everywhere. So I was doing the earliest of founders. I remember it all changed because I couldn't figure out the business model, so you would do affiliate. At that time, I remember when I first started, you went through a bunch of business models. Yeah, so when I first started, they're like, hey, you contact the few podcasts advertising networks that were back then, because you guys started your show in 2016, right?

33:1915, 50. Okay, so I started in 2016. And you contact me, like, yeah, we can do ads for your show. Uh, you know, you need like 25,000 downloads in episode. And at the time of like, I'll never get there. Like, obviously, we've just skyrocketed past that. But like, that's impossible. That's like as many people as in a basketball arena. Oh, when you start visualizing the audience, it's like, oh, two and a half NFL stadiums show up for every acquired episode. Like, that's an insane. Yes. But do you guys think so? Do you guys think about that?

33:48Only in adding to the pressure in a good way. Like, it's a good motivator. I never think about it. You know what I think about it? How my show set up is why I say you and I and I. I like how you treat the audience as like the person you're in. It's one person. And I've done this forever. It's funny. I remember it's one of my friends that we were met up one day and I was like, man, I think I'm gonna try to make like a business around the fact that I read so much. And he's like, and he called me like six months ago a year ago, he's like, I can't believe you did that. He's like, I thought you were the dumbest thing I ever heard. But I just picture him when I started. It's like, oh, the whole idea behind the show was like, what if you've got to meet up once a week with your friend that reads a lot and he just tells you the stuff that he read that week? Like, interesting ideas. So I always pick one person to like, try and convince him to do the podcast with you or somebody else and you're just like, no, I'm an idiot. So one thing, we don't have like a bunch of prepared stuff, but one thing us three talked about is like, hey, why don't we talk about like,

34:44who's your influence on why you do what you do. And so I feel the greatest podcaster of all time is Dan Carlin from Harper History. That's like my, I think he's like, I can't believe what that guy does, right? You and him are like the only successful model log podcasters. Like I think it's the hardest thing to do in this medium and I can't, I mean, there's everyone else either has a guest on or a co-host. Yeah. Well, there's another guy that was that, so I took Dan Carlin and I was like, I was obsessed with this. I've listened to all those episodes. For like years, you were talking about phone sleep. I did that too. But I fell asleep to Dan Carlin. So I'd over and over and over again. To now where I listened to him, I'm like, it's like, it's like, it's, like, have Lovian. Yeah, I was like, no, don't wing this. It's not nighttime, bro. But there was another one that a friend of mine put me on. So there's this community named Bilber. Mm-hmm. He does the Monday morning podcast. He used to do it every Monday. Now he does, I think, Monday and Thursdays, right? He is

35:41One of the first podcasters when he was podcasting his his first episodes at the time he would do it He would call into a number and record right and then that there was a service that would transform that recording from your phone into An MP3 that you could upload and put on your iPod way before like anything and so wild how things if I mean, you know, we're here now in this recording setup that we have here, you know with Thousand dollars a year and like yeah, we start I remember when we first started I don't think you let me do this but I was like well Why don't we just talk at the computer and like set up quick time dude when I listen back to our first few episodes like Pixar and I'm like we it sounds like we were just talking at the computer Yeah, well we basically were yeah, that's that's when people like I have a lot of psychos that you're like I'm I started number one I go like oh like

36:31Please don't. If you're going to do like, I'm going to go on the opposite one of the things I'm going to talk about. I used to, because that way, at least by the time you get to one, you're a fan. But if you start at one, you're like, oh, these guys just suck. It's almost like there's great pleasure in hearing something that you think is excellent and fully baked and like, especially when it's been long running, you're like, oh, this has always been immaculate and perfect. And then you get to go see some of the early work and you're like, oh, you want the early, Charlie. I get that I can see where the magic was, even though they didn't know yet. Like it's a thing that the crew and the books that you're reading though. Like Sam Walton, when you tell a story where his landlord screws him over, and he goes, he goes, I'm not whipped. I found the store off. I'll do it again, right? And it's like,

37:26Yes, Walmart is a huge success. You guys made the point that there was a great point where it's like, you're never gonna think 25 years in the future when there's watermelons and donkey crap on the ground. That this is gonna be the richest family in the world, right? If you're right. And the most standardized form of retail. Yeah. And so you see like, oh, that same guy that became the richest person in the world that his now family has a rich family, whatever. It's like, he's imperfect too, just like I am. And so that is the only benefit of listening to an early acquired or early founders. It's like, oh, you see the improvement.

37:54Just like in the books, you've seen it. Well, it's fun too. I like going back and listening to some of your old episodes. I get to see your journey. I'm proud of you. I've been thinking about it and I was thinking about the head of our conversation here. I used to say all the time people, like, oh, I go back, I listen to the early episodes. I'm like, no, don't, it's so embarrassing. I actually think we always want to be embarrassed by our last episode.

38:19We've just constantly kept, like, every episode, like, we try and just notch it up. Because we keep picturing the stadium. And we're like, that's the, like, that's why I think about the stadium, because I think about the, like, the pressure of, like, we gotta do better next time than we did this time. And it's not just filled with, like, you know, Seattle's NFL fans. It's filled with, like, hundreds of thousands of the smartest people that, and this gets to, like, the psyche, like, the deep insecurities that at least I have of, like, I want to impress those people. I want those people to think I'm smart. And so I have to produce something

38:49unbelievably worthwhile of their time. And the minute that I don't, I'm like literally walking out in front of an NFL stadium full of people that I want to impress. And I didn't use to have that pressure, but once we found content market fit for acquired, with people that I've always thought highly of, I think we did. There were a couple of years where we kind of drifted. There wasn't that pressure to keep amping the bar and then- Right.

39:14It's like the 2017 era. I think you're never going to be embarrassed about your latest episode at the time we're making this is LVMH. You're never going to be embarrassed about that. That was excellent. It doesn't mean you can't keep improving 10 years from now. No, I look back at that. I think like, yes, that's certainly an episode. I don't know how you feel, but I'm proud of, but I look back at the time. We didn't know that was going to be a super popular episode. That was totally unpredictable.

39:43because we haven't shared this publicly yet. It's our number one episode by a huge margin. 40,000 more people have listened to that episode than the next highest, which was Amazon.com. That's incredible. I probably could have told you, actually, I was like, David, no one's gonna listen to Amazon, because everyone already knows this story, which was super wrong. But I either thought like, no one will listen to this one, or like, this will be our most successful episode with LVMH. Even after we recorded it, I was like, Or after we edited it because we had to like edit a lot of stuff, but I was like this is how much we didn't know, but it's not like our best ever, but I think it might be my favorite episode of yours. And I heard from a ton of other people that how much they liked it. Like it's right. It's right, but to the bottom of the conversation like.

40:26There's a bunch of stuff that we could have done better in that episode like a whole bunch So I do this all the time where like I'll go back and listen to all that episodes because people like this weird using a podcast is like no, this is a tool. That's a better. This is a two footage No, we need to even try to get better. It's like I was like Oh, I haven't read that book in like two years. I'll just listen to my episode on it and it like it's a tool for me. That's how I know it's good for other people, right? And so it's like and then I'll listen to them like oh wow I forgot that I need to keep that idea in my mind except but I'll hear myself like oh

40:53You said that in two paragraphs, I could have been one paragraph cut that part. That doesn't make sense. And so, yeah, I understand the improvement. What I'm saying is your quality is already super high. Like, it can increase and get better. It won't be wrong. But like, you're never going to be embarrassed. You're just like, oh, I could probably do it a 20%, 30% better, which is still excellent from the level you're at. So, the way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass, and he's unbelievably good, and we're so lucky to have him. And then he sends us a rough cut. I upload it to Descript, and then we listen, like,

41:23and read while we're listening, word-for-word sentence for sentence, and try to cut every unnecessary sentence. And we end up pulling out 20-ish minutes of just fluff. It's just like, okay, we could have been tighter in that point. Is there a way to get tighter in it without re-recording it? And I think that has dramatically contributed to episode quality, because by the time we ship it, neither of us feel that there are extraneous sentences. All right, listeners.

41:49Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, 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?

42:17So the founders did exactly what great founders do. Operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for 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.

42:36drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lugora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

42:56And 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 speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 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.

43:48Plenty 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 legora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. So I don't know if I'm like that. Like you're still one man show.

44:14I do every, no one touches anything. So like everything. So soup to nuts. I'm gonna answer your question, but I also think like we should just a perfect point to like how we became friends and why like I'm putting this out on my feed and no one, no one, you're gonna be the first non-David Senra voices that I ever heard on founders and they only would agree to do it and I only agree to do it with you guys is because like this goes back to like why I want to be surrounded with, first of all, people have like interest, super smart people, but also people that have like positive some thinking, right?

44:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy has his gigantic successful show. If that's like the best, he's got the closest podcast network. His fun is called Positive Sum, and that's how he acts. I join his network. This is like months later. And they're like, hey, like, you know, we have editors, whatever, like he has like this empire over there. And resources, he's like, what do you want? And I was like, I just want you to amplify my audience and then connect me with first, first rate advertisers. Cause like, I think acquired is a luxury.

45:13podcast, not maybe not actually premium. We got to go over the distinction there. We're like, we're saying, no, no, this is like, we're trying to set the bar here. But anyways, he's like, hey, do you want editors? You want any of this stuff? I was like, no, no, no one gets to touch my stuff. And people think, oh, like, do they tell you what books to read? No, Patrick liked my show. And he's just like, why would I tell you? Like, just whatever you're doing, just do it to more people now. And so The answer question, no, like I picked the books, I record them, I edit, I'm still one person show. I don't know if that happened forever, but I do think the fact that it just spent so much time with the material gets it in my brain. But the reason that, like, I wanna talk about the role you guys played in that, where we were gonna zoom, and for like the background here is like, you know, we had known of each other. I talked to Ben a long time ago because he was running this private podcast this like years ago. And so anyways,

46:06We're like, you're... That's also funny to think back, like, all the dead ends that we went to. Like, we went down a ton of them. You went down a ton of them. You're about to talk about some of them. Like, there's so many dead ends. But they're in the books, too. Yeah, but they're in the books. That's exciting. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They're in the books. They

46:35Everyone is hurting zero business. And this isn't the stock market trough, too, where you're just like, wow, all businesses are gonna go under. Everyone's gonna have jobs again. This is scary. And so we were like, well, what story should we tell? How about businesses that are adapting to make it through this tough time until like...

46:53show how serious we were about it. We changed the name of the show. It was like our three least listened to episodes, covering a pretty amazing stories, but we just branded it wrong. Like, canless is like the most interesting restaurant story you could ever hear about. And like, we didn't tell. That's the only time we've ever done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time we've done an intel. That's the only time

47:18You know like in your RSS feed you can change the name, right? We can't change the link like the it'll still say yeah, so you look at it from mine and it's auto-tellic the worst name auto-tellic comes from this one called slow AUTO T-E-L-I-C maybe I don't know I can't spell for I can't spell pronounce I have no grammar so I would be like you read so much I was like I don't pay attention to that stuff except the mi-mi-hi Yes, the guy that's like mi-hi Yes, it's it is an activity that you do for the sake of itself going back to your questions like why like I just love to read, I'm gonna do this if no one listens. That's how I know I'm gonna win. Because people are like, oh, would you do it for free? No, no, I paid to do this. For a long time. For a long time. I literally said I'm gonna quit. And I have the savings. I have a wife and a daughter to support. Now I have a son, a wife, a daughter and a son. And I was like, I bet you, I just put trust in myself. I'm going to, if I focus on this 70s a week, I'll figure out the business model. I don't think I'll ever get rich from it.

48:17But I will at least pay my bills, right? And so like every month, I'm like, oh, less money there. And like, so I pay to do it. So the idea where like, you know, again, people get, I think Steve Jobs talked about this. Like the older he gets, he said something like the older he gets, the more he realizes why people do things matters. And so he's always asking those questions. Like, I always say, like, how do you know that you found what you love to do? And people are like, oh, because like, I wouldn't sell my company. It's like, okay, there's another level. It's like, How much would you've had to pay Steve Jobs to stop working in Apple? The answer is, he wouldn't take all the money in the world. How much would you have to pay Charlie? A lot of people tried to stop Steve Jobs from working in Apple. Yeah, but like, think about that. Like, the idea is like, he's not doing it for money. He's in a different game. He's doing it for the sake of itself. And so I went through a bunch of different names. History's greatest men, history's greatest, like history, all these terrible names. And I just started narrowing it more and more and more to like founders.

49:14And I was like, oh, that's perfect. Because you weren't coming from the tech world. You weren't like... This wasn't content marketing. No, it was just like... The idea I had known about Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, and all these other people. And I remember you had Kevin Rose on your show a long time ago. So you guys remember his... He... Yeah, not that long ago. Maybe a year, year and a half. Yeah.

49:38Yeah, it just time flies because it was post it was he was he was he was pretty much already fully web 3 by the time we So do you guys remember foundation? Yeah, oh yeah, one of the first high quality Yeah, like imagine if you were to stuck with that show Like you know, I mean like it would have been a monster and it's like the only episodes that ever came out was like here's me interviewing Elon Musk Here's me interviewing Sam Altman. Here's me and like these people and also before they became like Elon had the model, that was the only thing he was just about to release the roadster. No, they were in the factory because I watched it all the time. They were in the factory building the model. That's right. So I don't know if you could buy it yet but it was like coming or whatever. And Elon looks way younger and like, you know, and then in 2015, Tim Ferris.

50:25I was a big fan of his podcast and read for our work week. I remember the way I just go. Do four-hour body change my life. Did it? Yeah. With the slow carb? Yup, slow carb diet. I did that too. Slow carb diet, cold showers. And the funniest thing is, this whole cold punch thing that's becoming a thing now, I'm like, was nobody reading Tim Ferriss in 2011? They were. They were. Yeah.

50:46It's just only our demographic was. Actually, that made me think of something. Let me interrupt this story, because I think it's really important. You're like, oh, is any of you any listeners, like no one's going to listen to our Amazon episode, they already know it. And so this is something that, like, and you're going to become the most successful. Are you going to quote Ogilvy? Yes. Yes. 100% into enough founders to know it. Yeah, because it's like, this is so key that people don't understand. It's like you're not advertising to a standing army or advertising to a moving parade.

51:11And so like I will literally get on calls with like media company founders that are like selling ads or like building companies. I'm like, oh yeah, you must have read Olga. They're like, what? And I was like, these are not new lessons. Like if, and again, this comes from the humility to realize, hey, Warren Buffett's smarter than me. So if that dude in his shareholder letters is saying David Olga is a genius, I'm like, wait a minute. This dude, how many businesses has Warren Buffett looked at at that point? How many founders and managers has he looked at? And he's like, this dude's a genius. Yeah.

51:41This is not rocket science, guys. Just go like, search David Ogrevee in Amazon. Five books? Good. Order them. These days it's search David Ogrevee in your podcast, but you have choice. I went to, explain the standing army versus. So you're not advertising to, uh, standing army, you're advertising to moving parade. But what happens is like even when you put on the Sequoia episode, right, we went, me and David went on a hike and Stanford. And I was like, dude, you have this crazy back catalog.

52:10every single day, you have more people following your podcast feed than you had the day before. I was like, and not because I knew this because I was a subscription podcast, right? Recount briefly your business model journey. So I'll give you a shorter breakdown because like I went through so many of them, but I just put a hard pay. Well, listen to the first 30 minutes. You want to listen to all of them. Then you pay, right? And it convert. And this is when we had that chat that you're talking about. We got to go back to that.

52:35Dude, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. Yeah, because there's been times like this one where we're like, what the hell are you doing? But there's been other times where you come to us and you're like, do you know how good your Sequoia episodes were? And like, the fact that you four times the audience that you have now and none of the 75% of those people have ever heard this Sequoia episode, what are you doing? And so you guys, we had this hike, this is all gonna be the idea. Remember, not my idea. I don't, like, Everything has already been done, guys. Just speaking to the people listening, not you. You always know it's like, we've already been done. Just go see, hey, that person's smart. He learned from 40-year career. You're not gonna pick up an idea you can use this to. So, I told David, I was thinking about this. There's some cases where it's not true, but I think most truly like iconic world-changing businesses and founders.

53:24They build, they stand on the shoulders of giants, but they have one or multiple things that is novel that they come up with. It's the combination of these ideas. Like Sam Walton taking sole prices ideas and his competitors ideas and like, hey, what about, you guys are kind of ignoring these like 4,000 person communities. I'm pretty sure like the thesis beyond Walmart is like, will they just drive for our distances just to save money? Right.

53:45The answer is yes. Five hours. Right. Right. But that is a novel idea. Yeah, exactly. That's a whole thing. It's combining one big novel idea with a bunch of other things that you guys combined. David O'Grey's idea by republishing your Secura podcast. And then you text me like, oh my god, the downloads are crazy. Yeah. And because the vast majority, because you're not podcasting to a standing army, you're podcasting to a moving parade. And so I had known this because through my experimentation, I would take an old episode that I had done, do a preview, throw it up, and you'd get conversions every time, because it was new to them. And that was like, so Olga V, I created Olga V for that idea. That's an idea he got from Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker who were building advertising businesses 50 years before him. Is this a scientific advertising? Yes, yeah. Also a good Foundry's episode. Yeah, he's excellent.

54:40book scientific advertising sold like eight or 10 million copies. They kept it in Albert Lasker, so Claude Hopkins worked for Albert Lasker. Claude Albert Lasker thought that book was so good. He stored in a vault. He went like, he's like, he built. Because it was like the secrets of the industry, right? Like don't publish this because we don't want this getting out. I learned that because in Ogreby and advertising at the very end of the book, David's like, here, these are the six giants that I learned from.

55:03So I was like, oh, okay, well then I'm gonna Google search. Who's it? Like, I'm gonna read this book. This is not a rocket science again. So then he's like, oh, Albert Lasker made more money than anybody else in the history of the advertising business. He's like, hold up. What? Wow. Also, none of us know this guy's name. Yeah. And so then you realize it's like, he says in the book, he's like, his estate outside of Chicago was so big, he had 44 time employees. I'm like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, make these words make sense in my mind. That doesn't make any sense to me. So you read Albert Lasker.

55:30And then he tells you about Claude Hopkins. He's like, yeah, the information was so good that like I stored that in my vault for 20 years. And then once he sold his advertising, I think he gave it away like a token like $100,000, you know, to the people working there. And then they released it and Claude went off on his own and everything else. So these are not like, yeah. Okay, so you were doing the 30-minute hard cutoff when we had this. And so one satisfying, it's like, I'm gonna listen to 30 minutes of this episode and then like, I have to get someone's asking to pay for the rest. The conversion rates were higher, but you guys said this is where... You had a local maximum. This is where, like, you were really helpful. Like, David, first of all, you guys are nice. There's nothing language you use. You're like, you idiot. Like, and what you guys are so nice, it's like, dude, you're doing it wrong. Listen, for every one person, I think it was Ben that said, it's like, for every one person that would buy a podcast, there's a thousand or a hundred that would listen to him for free. Like, just, it's about a hundred. Yeah, probably even more than that, you know?

56:26And so then you guys would show me like, you open the kimono. You're like, these are our downloads. This is who we advertise with. This is what we charge advertising. You're just like, well, the other, the other really key insight is, so after spending a bunch of time with originally Kimberlite, then Glow, which is all delibson, and still what powers the acquired LP program, an interesting learning is most podcasts should generate about 50% of their revenue from direct monetization, some kind of membership program, or paywalling their feed.

56:54and about half from advertising and it should the mass should sort of work out where that's going to be the case for the type of podcast that we are where you have lots of founders and CEOs and hedge fund managers and the sorts of people listening you could never ask someone to pay you in membership what they are worth to the most valuable advertiser for that slot and so the way it sort of works out is like you're massively hamstringing your monetization potential if you make it membership only because you'd have to be like Yes, please pay two to five thousand dollars a year in order to get access to this private thing versus if you were to take that same piece of content and open it up to advertisers. You made the good point earlier and we can elaborate on that. Why you're so psychotic about this sentence needs to get out of here. These two sentences, let's remove it because

57:44if you could factor in the average hourly rate of the people in your audience. It is unbelievable. So even I think if you make what a million dollars a year, and we know people obviously in our audience just make a lot more than that, but I think a million dollars a year is about 500 bucks an hour or something like that. I don't know the math. I'm not a good math person. But like, so you're asking if they listen to an hour long purchase of founders. It's like, that's $500. Like, you cannot waste these people's time. So I never answer your question when you're like, hey, how do you guys think about this? Do you read it? Or do you cut them out? I use the script as well. I actually think

58:13the way I listen to founders is obviously listening to it and listening and reading like the super power of podcasts as you can listen to it when you're doing something else but when you're editing but I think I'm gonna put all my all my podcasts up on YouTube not I don't have any video but I think I'm gonna use Descript so like if you there is like some people have success just putting up the audio and audio like a static picture and you can listen to it on YouTube but I also think I was like well if I'm gonna do that I might as well just I have this, and that's kind of cool if you want to use it, but don't have to. We did not find success doing that. This episode will be the first episode this year that's on YouTube, because we basically said if there's not interesting video, then it's not a video podcast, and you can go find it in a podcast player. I'm using it just for search, and I would use it smart. I don't think I'm ever going to do video anything, because it's so much simpler to do. What I'm saying is I'm going to upload the MP3 to YouTube. I'm not making a video, just because it is, they're eventually going to have, they're not stupid, they're eventually going to have

59:07like the podcast player inside of YouTube. Like they released this like 40 page document I read on their podcast goals on YouTube. Did I say that you guys? No. I'll send it to you guys. So right now I have YouTube premium, so you can listen to them in the background like a podcast player, but they need to have podcast functionality. It's still like a video. Anyways, the way I do it is like, yes, I'm very aware that who's listening?

59:32I'm not ever going to waste a lot of their time. And what I've found with the more practice I have for the podcast is I'm able to edit on the fly. Like, I don't have a script, right? So like, I'll go through the book. I highlight, then write down whatever pops my mind. I don't, like, just, first of all, the highlights, am I excited about that? Oh, that's interesting. Highlight. Just go off instinct, right? And then write down, like, something that, oh, that's like this or that maybe think of this and I just write it down, right? Then I'll reread all these highlights the night before I record.

1:00:00So it's like the second time. You're doing this in physical books. Yeah, but you're putting your notes into read-wise. That happens after. Okay. That happens after. So the fifth time, every single book I do, I think I read the highlights five times. And the fifth time is me actually taking pictures of the physical book and putting in a read-wise. So Jeff Bay, I was thinking about this yesterday because I'm also slightly obsessed with Jeff Bezos. And you're slightly obsessed with a lot of founders. That's why when we're like, you're like, we're sitting in chairs like, dude, I'm gonna be Yeah, we were setting up the camera angles before. Because you want to love. We got to move David's chair a little bit. If you ever watched the old Jeff Bezos interviews, when he's like first starting Amazon, he's like skinny and bald. So it's the one that's like in that field outside the conference. Yes, I think there's no one. He's like sitting like you see grass man. I don't know if he's in a field. So but he like leans forward.

1:00:52and he's like, we're gonna be the most customer obsessed company ever. It's like, he's got that live in his face. That's why I am about founders. I'm like, you know. I feel like that dude's a psycho. But Jeff says something that he is. But Jeff says something in Invent and Wander, which is an excellent book, because it's all of his shareholder letters and transcripts of the speech. Yeah, Walter Isaacson did that, right? Yep. And all of his transcripts of the speeches, and he goes, do you really want to live in a world or to compete against somebody that's as good as you?

1:01:21I certainly wouldn't. That's what he states. And he's like, if you read a shareholder letters and listen to talk, he's like, he's constantly looking for unfair advantages. And I think part of the fact that I have now over 20,000 highlights from hundreds of books, and I still like 50 or 60 or maybe 80 books that haven't put in there yet, that are in my library. So it's like, my read wise account is an unfair advantage. Because anytime somebody's talking, it's like, I can immediately, oh, you said something, I search for that term and it pulls up. And it's like, oh, and then I see my highlight and I see my no, it takes so long.

1:01:50Like, so long to do that, but it's worth the extra five or two or three. And that's going to be graded into your process of making. Yes, because I'm reading something. I remember, no, I know I've seen this before. I can't remember it. Type in that term, and it pulls up every single instant. Wow. Instant sound. Take a break outside your room. It's an unfair advantage that I have with me all the time. And what I'll do is, like, whenever I'm waiting for it over today, right, just pull it read-wise, and it read-wise has the highlights feed.

1:02:19And I'll show you guys what it looks like. It looks a lot like a Twitter feed, right? Completely random. So I'm not choosing this. And instead of me reading Twitter all day, which is not a good use of your time, it's...

1:02:32Just highlight from the Dodge Brothers. I haven't read that book, you know, that was like episode, you know, probably in like the 115th. Billy Durant, who's the founder of GM. Sam Colt. And so are these ones that other people have liked a lot? No, therefore. No, it's just repotulating your own. So it's my form of practice. So you've got, let me give you an example. A healthy Twitter there on your phone. And is that what, like, how many times a day, like, how often are you just pulling a breed wise? And almost every day, and if I'm not doing it on a breed wise, I'll go to like my bookshelves. So what will happen is you can pull a book off my shelf and I'm thinking about this for like my kids long after I'm gone. My kids can like what was my dad into you know and they can go back and see oh and when he was 35 or 38 this is the podcast he made. Let me go find that book and then they pull off the shelf like oh this is the line he thought was interesting. Oh wow you see dad's handwriting here and like so I use this for myself where I can pick up a book and quote unquote read it reread it in 30 minutes by rereading my highlights and notes and now I'm like it's back in.

1:03:30back in front of mine. And then what happens is you can do this anytime. People are like, oh, I'm running late for lunch. I'll just do this, or I'll answer DMs, or I always have stuff to do with me. But I use it as a form of practice. The reason I said this is, it sounds stupid. People think it's maybe they think it's silly, I don't know. But I read this book, it's episode 212 Founders, it's called Michael Jordan the Life. It's a 600 page biography. And in that book, you just have this encyclopedia.

1:03:56knowledge to of the numbers of your episodes, which I'm so impressed by. I don't, it's only because I reference that all time, so when if you look up something over and over again. Yeah, yeah. It's repetition. Everything life is repetition. Stay in Walton's career is repetition. You know, like, it's like, I just think you're trying to, this is what I asked Charlie. Like, one of the most interesting things he said, he's like, one of the best things that ever happened to me is I got rich later in life. You know, like, he saw the time and how difficult it was. Like, he was talking about like, imagine you being like,

1:04:25super famous for rich when you're like 21 or 25 and how disorienting. He's like, I was a full grown man. Like with life experiences of the wife and kids. Yeah, I did, child who died. Yeah, I did not mention that. Yeah. Yeah. But like he had all, you know, full life experience and therefore also the main problem that happens is people don't know. They're like, I was the son of a poor man. Now I'm rich and my kids live an unbelievable amount of wealth and privilege. How do I deal with that? That comes up in the books for hundreds of years. The answer is no one knows.

1:04:54Right? And so with Charlie though, the benefit is he didn't have a famous last name or a lot of wealth. His kids were like grown. Right. They wouldn't have to do it that when you're five or seven or ten. He also gave me some advice that was fascinating. You do that, like, you got to pay that bill eventually though. Like his grandkids have to... Well, so how do you do it this way, right? Like, he's multibillionaire. Like, that's an insane... Right. This is a five generation. Not only is he a multibillionaire, he's still like, people like us talk for hours about him. He's like a celebrity.

1:05:24So I just read this fantastic book. I like reading obscure books because go back to what Jeff Bezos said, differentiation is survival. So I'll find weird books like me and Sam were in this, I was searching for books for you guys, I just couldn't find any. I will order them and bring them to you because I always bring books. And I was really, we went to three different bookstores. I'm not kidding. I brought energy drinks. Yeah. But no, we, like, bless Sam and his patients with me. And like, drove me all around Menlo Park in Palo Alto yesterday, going to bookstores. Like, I was literally looking for you guys. Like, you had specific books. Oh my God. No, no, I like going to use bookstores. And I'm like, I think of how my interpretation of you guys in my mind, and I just know if this book is good for that person. Like the Charlie, the Henry Flagler book, I knew that was good for Charlie Munger because of what he said. So I don't know what's going to happen. Now, I do have two books picked out for you guys, which I'll send you, but they're like newer books. But anyways,

1:06:13But that sounds like a great day driving around with Sam Pinkie and going to bookstores. Like, what would talk better day if you spent? Also, the peninsula is like beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, Sam's unbelievably intelligent and like, he's got a weird alien brain. There's always tell him, our mutual friend, Mitchell Baldritch, or that all three of us know, says, uh, Sam has a gigabrain. I think he's, I think, I think, I think his description of it. Um, but I like obscure books. I read this book that's very hard to find, like, 300 bucks. It's called The Invisible Billionaire, Daniel Ludwig. It was a richest person in the world in the 80s and no one knew who he was. He paid public relations firm to keep his name out of the papers, okay? And do what your competitors don't. Yeah, it's a gracious, like, I don't want to be known. And a lot of his was, like, shipping and oil and refining and mining and all that other stuff. But the author made the point in the book, like, how different a million in a billion is going back to Charlie Munger, right? Oh, yeah. And he goes,

1:07:09A stack of a million dollars and a stack of a hundred dollar bills is like 40 inches, you know? A billion dollars and a stack of a hundred dollar bills would be three times taller in the Empire State Building. Yeah. And so like for us, like, oh, that guy's kind of rich. It's like, no, the billionaire and millionaires are not in the same category. It's so disorienting. This is also a thing where like the English language has done us a disservice by naming two things that are a thousand times different.

1:07:34Very similar words. It sounds similar. Yeah, so they're not similar at all. Well, a lot of people are asking and like think about all the wealthy people that Charlie talks to. And they're asked like, okay, what do I do with like this wealth with my kids? And it's like, you know, if you give your kids a bunch of money, is it gonna demotivate them? And Charlie goes, Of course it's going to. But he's like, you know, it's like, again, like this should be obvious to you. So he says, I don't try to steer his kids or his grandkids into what they should do for a living, which is Charlie Munger's one of his best piece of advice that I took to heart. It's like, follow your natural drift. Like, how I pick books. There's been like 15 or 20 that I've read completely or half and it's like, I don't like this book, I'm not making an episode about it. I go to my bookshelf and I have like probably 80 or 100 books I haven't read yet, most come from the audience. And I was like, what am I most excited to learn about?

1:08:23Now, that's how I pick it right. So following that, you're definitely... Which is also more or less how we pick episodes too. We have a little bit more planning because now, like, there's such long lead times, but it's kind of like, what's interesting to us right now? 100%. So he's like, you know, don't try to steer them too much. And he's like, he definitely feels that some of them are going to be less motivated because they're born rich, but he said this was the most surprising thing. But he goes, you have to give them the money anyways or they're going to hate you for it. And I was like, that's like...

1:08:53Because my answer before this, I've read so many like family dynasty stories, and I'm not saying I'm trying to buy this thing. But they're not going to give the money. Or no, they did, and it ruined them. Like, did you guys, you guys haven't done an episode on the common case? That's the common case. TCI, John, John, Malone, all of that work. That's like, that will happen this year. So, you know why? That was one of the books that was recommended the most. They're like, you got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while you've got to do cable grab while

1:09:20And so you know the story I'm about to tell you where the crazy thing is like I'm always thinking about I didn't understand this before studying dedicated my life to setting history, right? Where it's like oh wow the decisions I'm making now can can reverberate through the generations. That's a crazy thing where Bob Magnus which is the founder of TCI is you know, he doesn't have any monies in rural Texas wants to do this you jump into this new industry cable, right? Full of cowboys little cowboys and he doesn't have money so his dad gives him a $2,500 loan.

1:09:49So Bob takes that $2500 loan, and then, let's say 40 years later, Bob dies, and he's got to pass on his money, right? That was created from the company and he created two his two kids. And he winds up giving them, I think, I don't know the numbers, I want to say like 200 million each, two cents. So think about that one decision. I think I talked about in the episode, and if I did, it's a big mess up on my part. And I stopped in that part. I'm pretty sure you did. I was like, hold on.

1:10:17Think about that like what if his dad didn't give him the 2500? Yeah, so his 2500 dollars turns into 400 million let's say 200 million each for his grandsons change his grandsons lives, right? See that means you rule a thumb you take like I don't know you probably three more generations after that of wealth guaranteed before they've gone because I think it went up their nose Like that was so it's pretty hard in one generation, but I don't know like The point was it's like, that wasn't good for them because they were not motivated. They did a bunch of drugs. I think they went to jail, like that kind of stuff. And you see that so much. So my thought was like, oh, like get them a little bit, but not enough that they don't have to work whatever and Charlie's like, they're gonna hate you. And like what's the point? It's such a good insolation. It's just like human nature. This is my biggest takeaway from Charlie. And I think the biggest benefit that people that listen to founders and acquired and then hopefully read a bunch of the books and do study on their own are gonna realize this is like,

1:11:12Charlie, I said it was how my notes. And this is the first thing. It's comforting. The conversation that Charlie was comforting, the same way that people tell me listening to founders is comforting, is like, Charlie has an almost complete indifference to problems. Troubles from time to time should be expected. This is inescapable, so why would you let it bother you? And the difference, and if you think about, that's the main takeaway from this three-hour dinner hat with them, right? And if you think about how does he avoid this?

1:11:39He avoids it by great things, have less problems. You're never going to escape problems, but if you're around great people, like they're not going to throw up, just like a great business doesn't throw up, big problem after big problem after big problem. Your wife, your kids, your friends, your coworkers. His whole thing is aimed for the highest quality you can get. And then that's going to solve 99% of your problems. And then when you have the problem, the inevitable problems are going to come. Okay, you just do with it. He talked about like when he lost money on Alibaba, he brought that up. You know that people try to make fun of him for whatever. It's like,

1:12:09You guys are missing the point, like, you're not gonna escape, get through life without making mistakes. The founder of IKEA has this great quote where he says, uh, making mistakes is the privilege of the active. Only those asleep make no mistakes. The person in the man in the arena. Yeah. Yeah. The Teddy Roosevelt idea. So, okay, so what do you think is the ideal way to handle it if at 35 someone becomes very wealthy, and so when their kid's memory starts around age, three, so for their entire kid's memorable lifetime, they've grown up in wealth and privilege. Like, how does one handle that? I have no idea. I have no idea. Like, I don't, the, the, me even giving the answer to that is like, uh, there's this guy named Charles Ketering or Kettering. I don't know how to pronounce this name. Uh, I read his biography. I think it's episode.

1:12:58127 or something like that. So he invented the electric starter. He founded AC Delco that gets acquired by GM. He is the head of research and development at GM when GM is the most valuable company and most like the cutting edge of technology company in the world at the time. There's a story from his wife and his daughter in that book saying, hey, when he dies, there's only one, there's only three words on his, on his tombstone. I don't know.

1:13:25because that's what he would say over and over and over again. And there's a, he's having this conversation. Same thing. He was the son of a poor man. He is now a rich man. His kids are rich. He's talking to other people that have the same experience. His peers are like, what do you do? And the answer that they came up with? I don't know. Yeah. Because it's so dependent on who the person is. Like, maybe you give them money going to Bob Magnus' grandsons. Maybe they're, you know, they're like Warren Buffett's kids, where like they run foundations and they want to give them money away. And I don't think they're Koch addicts. I don't know, but like,

1:13:54You don't, it just dependent on the person. So if there was a simple, if there was a correct answer, I think some of these guys would figure it out. Well, that's the thing about humans, right? Like every person is different. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I have no idea. Really, and that's the biggest thing where I think this is one of the lessons I learned from the podcast where, you know, you mentioned this at the beginning, Ben, where most of these people are just so, they're like, best in class in this one dimension in the world. And of course, to get that, They had to be poor. They couldn't optimize all of the areas of the life at what they did for their work, right? Sam Walton is one of the rare guys where he gets to the end. He knows he's dying because he's got cancer all over his body when he's writing that book. And he's like, listen, if I could do everything again, he's like, yeah, I miss some of my kids childhood. They worked in the stores and he took them with them. But he's like, I'd do it again. I had to do this. I had to get after it. I had to improve.

1:14:50A lot of them, you know, get into their lives and like, aw, I regret. The founder of IKEA has the best words on this. He said, you know, I had three sons growing up. He started IKEA when he was like 17, worked on it until he was like 80 something. And he's like, I sacrificed my three sons childhoods. I regret it. He goes, it's, anybody that has kids knows that childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered. And so like, we were hanging out today. We were going to do recording, go to dinner. And I was, my plan was I want to see my son. He's like, and my daughter, it's like, I'm going to take the red eye.

1:15:20And I realized I was like, yeah, but I want to spend time with David and Ben, so I'm leaving early and tomorrow morning. But it's like, I'm doing this as fast as possible. And if I had you, I'd like fly back and forth. Because like, your kids are thinking about like, the rest of you guys have with your parents, are they still alive? Yep. Yep. Okay. So you get to talk to them, see them, but you have your whole life, right? When your kids are small, there's like this tiny window when they're like two to five to six, where you're...

1:15:43everything to them. Even my... You don't have to talk about that. I absolutely feel this way. Even my 10-year-old daughter, like right now, she must spend time with me. Like, it was the cutest thing ever. I was leaving going to LA to see Charlie and then coming up to San Francisco to see you guys. And she texts me, she goes, I'm wearing your sweater, because like, it makes me feel close to you. Like, while you're gone, you know what I mean? But if you ask her, do you want to spend moving night with dad and mom, or do you want to go play world blocks with your friends?

1:16:10for sure, the way they're friends. And she loves me, don't get me wrong, but like, their friends are way, they're really important to them. Yeah. Where like every day I miss my son's about to turn three, it's like, I'm not gonna get back that day, and there's only like a thousand of those days. Yeah. And my wife won't have any more kids, even though I was like, I don't want a bunch of, like, what exactly? Because I don't want a bunch. And it's like, no way, I say, hey, I don't have to get pregnant, so that's fine. Something that Buffett and Munger did with the Graham group that like, was way ahead of its time that now anybody can do is they formed their social networks outside of geographic barriers, and they found their like most compatible, most like-minded, highest level of talent, you know, peers, and then they just like gone planes and got to go see them, you know, and like that was really hard to do back in the day, and now anybody can do it. It's kind of like the Bill Gurley, you know, you have no excuse not to do that. You also, but here's the thing, where people get wrong, is they're like, oh, I want to meet this guy.

1:17:08You have to do the work necessary to make them worth your time, right? Which is the unfair advantage that the three people sitting in this room have is that it doesn't matter. That's why in the last six weeks I've gone to lunch or dinner with multiple billionaires. And the people that you get to talk to and also this office is like, this dude is crazy. He's read 300 biographies of entrepreneurs. There's no way I'm going to have dinner with him and not pick up one idea. And then now I've built this machine where that's an interesting idea. I'll just plug it into this business. It's not a financial transaction by any means, but there's no...

1:17:37The reason it's not that like Charlie was the first person I met that I was actually nervous about. And it's the reason I'm not nervous because I know I've done the work. Like you can't pull me in a room with anybody on the planet. And I'm not going to be able to tell them at least one interesting thing. It doesn't mean I'll be the most the best dinner they've ever had in their life. That's not what I'm saying. It's just like, they're gonna hear something that's like, oh, that's interesting. And that goes through their own brain. And it's only because I've spent six years and same with you guys. It's like, oh, you should feel comfortable. Like you guys mentioned earlier, it's like,

1:18:05your audience feels like, you know, to football fields and like, oh, it's a little bit of like, you didn't use a word in security, but like, you know, a little like nervousness. I want these people to like, like me. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like you're pushing you from bottom. But you know, like, you've most likely read, you're, you're, you know, more about the subject than they do. Sure. I do. But I need to make something worthy of their time. Yes. That is admirable. Yeah. It's like, who cares? I could spend all the time in the world and fail to synthesize

1:18:34the narrative and the takeaways, and all of a sudden that I've just, you know, that I failed them. Regardless of how much work I did, the product wasn't good. So that's the thing. It's hard to not have the product be good because you did the work. I guess it's my point. Yeah, I think we now have a process that means that when you and I put in the work, the product is good, but it took a long time to arrive at that. It's almost like, This is another Sam Hakey thing, trust the process. The point I was making there, though, is because you guys do so much preparation, and it's now your life's work, it's just so much, it's gonna be so hard not to add value to the people in your life, whether it's friends that never show up on a podcast, or friends that you don't have a business relationship with.

1:19:31Like, you're just gonna add value because what you do is so rare. Like, I, Neville Robocon has this, he's influenced my thinking a lot too. And he has this thing in, in the, Neville, the Omnic and Evolve by our friend Eric Jorgensen. And he's just like, if you read an hour a day that puts you in the 0.001% of humans, and I'm like, that can't be true. No, that's, that's the dirty secret of acquired and founders is that people don't read books. So if you just read them and then tell people what's in the books, you're gonna, a hundred acts of the market for books. And I couldn't believe that. I was having dinner with the same friend that was telling me, like I told him, oh, I'll try to fill the business around like my reading. This is like a couple months ago. And he's like, you vastly overestimate how much people read. And he goes, how much do you, how many books a year do you think the average person reads? I was like, I don't know, 12. It's like 0.5. I remember asking a book publisher. He said America reads a book a year. Well, he quoted some other study. I said 12. He's like, 12.

1:20:25He's like, it's zero. The average is zero. It's crazy. Yeah, it's your point. I've become friends with a bunch of writers, some of them I met through the podcast, and they've been telling me, like, teaching me about the publishing industry and just breaking down, like, 98% of books ever published sell less than 5,000 copies. It's parallel. The book business is the venture business.

1:20:48which is so interesting to me how the advance model works. It's quite similar to a seed financing. I mean, they put out $50,000 for an advance on your book, which covers your cost of living while you're writing it. And they kind of don't care about recouping it, because the whole business is about, do I sign up?

1:21:09You know, James Clear this year, and you know when you have Michelle Obama on your hands and you have to pay for it, but you don't know when you have a James Clear on your hands. And when that becomes the book that America reads this year, you better make sure it's in your publishing house and not one of the other three big or four big, whatever it is, publishing houses. Seed funding is better because their advances are recoupable.

1:21:30Right. So it's like, we're having this long conversation. That's the most preferred stock. Yeah, we were talking before. It's participating preferred. We were talking before we started recording. It's like, man, Jimmy Sony would be great to do a session with just because he's got this historical knowledge of PayPal. PayPal being so important to like Silicon Valley history. And he, we were talking about this. And he's like, no, like, I have to pay that back through sales. I'm like, oh, because the thing is going back to like, you guys listen to GameCraft, Blake Robbins. Oh, yeah. Every episode. Yep. So excellent.

1:21:58So good. Unbelievably good. And what I loved about is how they focused on the business model innovations and how one decision by some random group of programmers in the 1980s affected a business model decision 10 years later, whatever. And I was talking to you about this. They go, the books are fantastic. They're the best products in the world. You can, there's a great quote in poor Charlie's Omnick, which says that there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. For Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, that is literally true, right? Yep.

1:22:25And what I don't understand is you guys have such a high value product and you haven't innovated in the business model at all. And so I was telling Jimmy, I was like, do you know the deal? Think about this as an entrepreneur. You're not a writer, you're an entrepreneur, and your product just happens to be a book. But you can make money off that any kind of way you want. You can just get creative. I go, People think it's crazy where I'm like I'm trying to be the Jay-Z of podcasts and people like what the hell is wrong with you and I did like that if you don't episode on Jay-Z that episode I did on Jay-Z is one of my most popular people I bet I love you so like I can't believe I've listened to Jay-Z is has the founder mentality and he had it since he was a kid and you just see everything his whole career and people look at him like oh like This is another thing about intelligence manifests itself in different ways. It's not always like credentialed in many cases. It's not right but like Jay-Z is a

1:23:12straight-up genius if you listen to him and what he did and he looked at he's like yeah he says it from the gico he's like I thought I told you characters I'm not a rapper he's like I'm a businessman and rap just happens to my product and so I'm gonna think about it like that I go Jimmy should do that I go why don't you just find a deal like Jimmy like Jay Z did with Samsung he's like what are you talking about well that's like two founders entrepreneurs whatever you know founders yeah he's in the title you want to put up They care about ownership like they own their work and realize that you could the business model matters which is why I brought up gamecraft So what Jay-Z did this is usually this is his magna-corder holy grail probably came out 2013 so he goes he goes You know I could I record this this this album and then I could sell like normal, you know stream it and it's all for $10 you want the physical copy etc etc He goes what if I just want my money guaranteed?

1:24:01So he goes to Samsung and says, Samsung, you're launching this new app, this new phone, and you have your own app on it. I'm going to sell you, I will sell you a million copies, $5 each. You give me $5 million guaranteed from an album. I'm still going to own it so he gets a streaming app. He goes, and so what I'll do is you pay me $5 million. The first million people that get access to my album are going to be Samsung, whatever phone was coming out. You download it for free if you have this device. And so it's advertising to the Samsung and it's guaranteed money to him. I go, dude.

1:24:28You're writing about technology founders. I was like, there's these venture capital funds that have 80 billion dollars of asset center management. Just like, hey, will you pay me a million dollars right this book? And then you say, hey, this book is now presented by whatever firm. This is why me and you, as you have talked about this privately, you guys already know this was like, there's been like, something like 15 acquisition or investment offers for founders. I said no to every single one. A lot of them are like this, where it's like, oh, well, you have the attention of people that are valuable. You just said the worst thing that happened to a venture firm is they miss

1:24:58the hit of that, so they have to expand. They have to make sure they catch that, right? So it's like, hey, we'll pay for founders or whatever, give you X amount of money, pay you to do it. You do exactly what you do. The only difference is, essentially, they're trying to buy up our inventory forever. It's like, hey, founders is presented by X company. If you're going to raise money, email here. And the response I have when I get these pictures is like, if I did that, that means I'm not actually learning the lessons in the books, which is like, you never give up control. It's like, No, that's actually bad. Let's dive into a deal structure on that. What if you weren't giving up control, and what if you weren't giving up economics forever, you're just doing a period of time buyout of all your adamantory? This is the intelligent thing. This is what Tegus is doing with investing the best. And this is why it's crazy to me when I talk to people and they don't understand this. I had a conversation with a founder.

1:25:53And he's like, it's really weird, I'm not gonna say who it was. He's like, it's really weird that this company is running ads on that podcast every single episode forever. And I'm like, not okay. And I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go.

1:26:06David Ogrevey ran the same exact ad in the same magazine for 30 years, and it was still effective. And so I went, I was like, what do you think Coca-Cola has been doing for 100 years? This is not new ideas. So either Coca-Cola is really dumb, or... Exactly, exactly. And I don't think so dumb. And Apple has the prime billboard in every major city in America to advertise whatever the latest iPhone is. For ever. So I talked to Michael Elnick, who's the co-founder of Tees. And he's an... Wait, we all knew each other. Great deal.

1:26:36And we talked about this, like, and this is another example, because this somewhat affects our business, because when there's like a decline in overall economics, like ad markets, you just shrink a little bit and ad rates come down, and it's like, oh, you're doing exactly what investors do. Like, what are Charlie and Buffett do when there's a crash? They don't deploy! Deploy! You read Izzy Sharpe's fantastic autobiography, the founder of Four Seasons, right? And he says it, he goes there.

1:27:02He's building what didn't exist at the time, the only chain of five-star hotels at the time. And he says, I grow, and this is every founder does. It's Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Crowley Frick, when they ever sessions, that's when they grow. So what he would do is his competitors would pull back on advertising, he would spend more. And he says he claims, I think in the book, he increases market share by like 25% or 28% using this over and over again. Because human nature is, oh crap, things are short and they cut. This is what Olga be said. Olga be said, if you need advertising,

1:27:31to sell your product, it's not a marketing expense, it's a production cost. It's a actual cost of manufacturing your product. And so what Tegas Michael Elnick did that was just a genius move was, first of all, he knew something was working, right? And he scaled up through podcast ads. And he knew it was effective. And then he's like, okay, well, now you have all these people in the tech industry. They're stocks creating everybody's running and treat.

1:27:58What does he do? He goes, oh, there's probably available inventory. And so he goes, hey, Colossus Network, I'd like to buy up every single ad inventory for 2023 on every single one of your shows. That's how you know that likelihood that guy is going to win. Like, I don't know the details of his business. It's private and everything else. It's like, that's the right decision. The same decision. That's what overview would have done. That's what Buffett and Munger do when they put money in. That's what Coca-Cola does. It doesn't matter the economic climate. You're ever going to see less Apple billboards, you can see, let's call it, no. It's interesting to think about this in the venture business, right? Which obviously, as we record this here in mid-March, 2023, there's a lot going on in the venture business. It's so dynamic right now that I feel like we don't know the last two iterations of what have happened because we've been recording and I haven't checked my phone. That's how fast the world is moving right now. Things are happening very quickly as we speak.

1:28:56But I think a consequence of that, to your point about like you should advertise heavier during recessions, I think customer differentiation among venture firms is declining rapidly, right? Like, what is... Well, no, it was until interest rates went up. But now... Nobody even... I think both the up and the down cycle is...

1:29:20Both, I think you're commoditized. I totally disagree with this. I think when capital was a commodity and money was free, it was extremely hard to differentiate yourself as a venture firm or any financial firm, but it should be easier than ever to differentiate yourself because the thing- Okay, so how do you differentiate yourself right now? You guys are doing it. I mean, well, one of them, let's abstract away.

1:29:48speaking to the acquired audiences as one of them, or as a gigantic means of differentiation. Well, it's just that you're XYZ average venture firm out there, having money and writing the checks. Right, but yes, having money, right? But like, I you're from now, it's like six to 12 months from now, that's going to be differentiating. 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.

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1:31:53So I have a thought on this one. I don't know anything about venture investing to I don't know anything about investing period like I get to talk to super smart investors and I'm sure the questions I'm like hold on you had to find that for me and I'm sure that like this kids an idiot But when you guys were talking a little bit about like your business and like your venture game in general is I just think of like what one of my favorite things that I heard Jeff Bezos say is you know for years people were like hey, when are you gonna do?

1:32:22physical retail. When you can do physical retail, when you can do physical retail, and he says something that was crazy, he's like, physical retailing is an ancient business. And I love that term. It's like an ancient business. So I'm not going to do it until I know like I can, it's so hard to improve on an ancient industry. It has to be completely differentiated. You mentioned I heard you on one of your podcasts where you're like, you went to the Amazon Go store just as like, uh, like your curiosity. It's not like you needed something. And so you guys are probably right. That story too, where it's like at one time they were going to do like,

1:32:50put like meat and like all this other stuff that you'd have to like talk to somebody's like no you have to redo this this doesn't make sense the key that the differentiation here is that you walk and you walk out not walk in talk to some guy like he's like cut in salami for you like you gotta get that out of there and so I've had this thought because I've read a bunch of biographies on investors too and like investing is an ancient business like yeah and we're just doing it in different ways now and so I was like well If you wanted to invest, right? Let's say you wanted to invest in private companies, which people have been doing forever. I always think of like, where did JP Morgan get his deal flow? And you know, he read through the history. It's like, people like, oh, that was JP Morgan bank. Like, no, there's no retail bank. Like, you're not going in there. There's no ad sign on the door. It's like, here's JP Morgan company. He's like, it was a relationship based. It's like, you got in if you knew somebody, right? I read this biography that's incredible. I highly recommend people read it.

1:33:47It's episode one of three of founders. It is the richest woman in America, Heady Green. I can't remember the stuff. I love how he denies that he knows every number, every episode, and then busts out three more. Oh, it's only because I like reference this all the time. So Heady Green, right? It's only because you reference every episode all the time. One day, it's just going to be a recording of just all the episode numbers. But Heady, you are an algorithm. You are your read-wise app. That's how I get it. So The Heady Green, though, was so wealthy that she bailed out the city in New York.

1:34:17Like that book has unbelievable stories. This is, I've never heard this person's name and they bailed out the city of New York. Yes. Her family, so when she was alive, the richest city in the world per capita was like New Bedford, Massachusetts. Oh yeah, well, yeah, well, yeah. So her family made so much whaling. And the way they looked at the family fortune is I am a steward of this money. My job is to make it grow so that the next generation has more. And then they want, so she's like the third generation of these whaling. And then whaling, like it...

1:34:45It died out. I think the generation before her, so they had to figure out how to make money. The technology stocks of her day, rowroads, like she made a ton of money, rowroads, and then she'd buy land, like real estate in New York and everything else. But anyways, my point being, and I had this conversation with Patrick one day. I was like, think about it. Like, that was an ancient, investing in ancient business. So like, you wouldn't do it head-e-green, did? Like, where did she get her deal from? People knew her.

1:35:10the new shoes wealthy they knew that she was the first person to go to in financial panics they called financial panics what we call recessions and depressions now and there was like you know every three years back then and so what she would do she had a desk in chemical bank in Manhattan so the advantage there is geography physical location you're at the center of finance in america you need to be here you build a reputation so literally there's stories in the book where there'd be a line of people in financial crashes waiting for her desk He's like, okay, I'll save my rose stocks pennies on the dollar. Cornies, Vanderbilt did the same thing. She invested with him and a bunch of other people, right? And I was like, but what would you do today? Like, you're an, you're, you want an edge. Everything we're talking about is like, you need an edge, right? You can't play, Ed Thorpe has a great, the great quote in his book. He's like, I've been a manager, money manager for 50 years. One thing I know is you, you, the surest way to get rich is only play games and make investments where you have an edge, right? Right. Which is another way of saying do something your competitors don't.

1:36:04or can't. Or with Edwin Land. So Edwin Land plays a huge role in my life. Founder Polaroid C just here, because he said I have a personal model. It may not fit anybody else. Don't do anything somebody else can do. And so I was like, oh, okay, I don't think anybody else can do founders the way I do it. So I'm just gonna do this, right? So my point of being is like, how would you do it today? Well, you would, it would look very much like what I think you guys are building. And I'm not an investor, so I don't know anything about your world. But it's just like, I'd spend my time reading and learning about business history.

1:36:34Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett did that. Every single investor you guys have probably read about does that all the time. They read counseling, right? I would share what I know that's going to build my network of other people. Those people are eventually getting somebody deals. Then I have this huge advantage that you couldn't even do 10 years ago, or 15 years ago because it's interesting as a podcast, right? It's like, now I could record all the stuff I'm learning, right? Which we should say, like there have been iterations of this. Like this is how...

1:36:55Union Square Ventures became Union Square Ventures. Our Foundry Group became Foundry Group because blogging, blogging, and then Brad and Jason writing the book on venture deals. I mean, it's like, Angel, venture hacks with Naval and Ravi. I have two other examples. It's like, it's not even venture. Like, what is the most successful content marketing of all time? Uh, Michelin? No. Berkshire, shareholder. Of course. Berkshire, shareholder. Of course. Because this is how you know, genius.

1:37:22It is the greatest act of salesmanship because you never even see the sale happening. It's like, hey. And they spend, you know, you guys have probably done this research how much time they spend on those letters. It's like half a year, seven, eight months for every letter. And this is now like, oh, I just jotted down to what I learned this year. And the crazy thing is like, he's. How many people have, this is something Charlie talked to. Oh, so this is a great, great thing that this came up there. Did you talk about the letters with him? No, I asked him about like, so I was explaining to him. I was like, Charlie, I'm literally in the middle of like,

1:37:51reading about you when you were around my age. So every time I read a book, I'm like, okay, I first of all, I know what year they're born. So every time I go through the books, I'm like, how old are they? And I write down, okay, he's 24 here, he's starting. I want to know what they were doing in and around my age. And so I was like, Charlie, I'm thinking about you guys. You just started. Your fun starts to be like 41 or something. I don't remember what it was, right? And I was like, then you start out, you're trying to figure things out. You could see them kind of figuring out, making mistakes. You guys in an excellent job on your episode, talking about what they learned from.

1:38:20getting to get away from the Ben Graham, get to one of excellence. Great businesses are rare, we should be in there. And then there's let time do all the work. And I was like, and now you guys put up the greatest investment record the world's ever seen. It's like, are you surprised? He goes, of course! He's like, of course I'm surprised. How could you not be? We want to be successful and we were ambitious and driven, but there's no way you could say it. What's Brookshire's market cap right now? I don't know.

1:38:48500 billion yeah whatever it is but he said um But the the the reason that popped my mind when like when I was asking him Like these these questions. Let me actually get the exact notes. I don't want to mess up The way he said it because his lines were just excellent And so he goes yeah surprise how successful him and Warren turned out like how could you not be surprised and then he says something was fascinating he goes I think we get too much credit And I was like, whoa, that's interesting. Why do you think that, Charlie? And he's like, I find it odd to be so wealthy and loved. These are not exact words. These are my interpretation of his words. Let me just be clear here. I find it so odd that to be wealthy and loved, that's not a usual human reaction. And then my note.

1:39:36tied to why I think the Berkshire letters are the greatest content marketing of all time. He goes, I don't know, I wonder if this is because they spent so much time teaching others. So what is, when you guys are acquired, you guys are teaching, right? Berkshire, I'm gonna go to Paul Graham too. Berkshire, they're teaching, like, you could just not read a book and just read Berkshire's letters and you're gonna get a fantastic education, right? And then in there is like, oh, by the way, we'd like to be the buyers of choice. So if you happen to know of this business, like, this business that you want to get your hands on, like, you know, you care about it and he does this excellent product differentiation. Call me. Yeah. The greatest content. What are the, what is like, how much money do they make off of that? And obviously, um, and I think this is probably, I don't even know if it's on the list of things that they care about, but like, it's also marketing for their businesses, like, totally.

1:40:21I have gyco car insurance, because it's a Berkshire Hathaway company. This is how we talk. I'm drinking. I feel an extra kinship for Brooks running shoes. Absolutely. Where in Brooks right now? Okay, so. I learned how to read it. I changed. I changed out. I was in a polo hoodie right before I came over. I watched a documentary on Ralph Lauren. I just did a podcast. I just listened to your episode. Yeah, I think it's episode 288. I wonder if I'm right. It is good. Let's see if I'm right though. Let's see if I'm right. I could be wrong. I could be full of crap. It's 288. Okay.

1:40:49So, but before that, I had watched a documentary on him, like years ago, and I found out that he did the, I always go to Ben for the proper pronunciation. Like, we'll do the same podcast. I will, I say like a Keo Marita, and then he's like, Akio Marita, I'm like, all right.

1:41:03I go with Ben. I go with Ben. Oh, you get the, I will give you the correct American pronunciation. It's unclear if it's actually right or not. So he did the same thing that a few did, you know, like they, they were struggling in the early days of Sony. They get this huge order. They're like, we're going to take a hundred thousand units or whatever it is, but take off Sony and put on our name. And a key is like, we have no money. Yeah. But he refused to do that because I'm not building your company, building mine. I love that like, that entrepreneur like bull headed Tennessee. Same thing with Ralph. Ralph was broke.

1:41:30Him and his wife are living in a house, our apartment with a train running over top of them. They're sleeping on a mattress, and he's making ties, and Bloomingdale's like, we'll take them. We love them. Take that name off, you're gonna be our house brand. And he packs up his ties, he's like, I'm not here to build your brand, I'm here to build mine. Which is fun because later in life, he would make so much money on just licensing out his brand. He's like, I don't make any of the products. I literally just licensed the brand. Hearing that made me buy more polo clothes.

1:41:59Hearing your affinity for Geico makes you buy Geico. The advertisers you have on acquired because they love you. Your audience, I know you guys vet them and like you have a ton of people that want to advertise that you don't let. It's like that goodwill that you're building up. The goodwill that Buffett built up. Another, the second maybe most, and by the way, there's a litmus test for that. It's does the acquired, like I want.

1:42:25to only work with sponsors that I want to so full-throatedly endorse that I feel the acquired brand gets stronger by working with them. And like if you can actually just keep doing that durably, I think that is like an amazing way to build a brand. And you know, we try, it doesn't always work and sometimes we just don't sell ad slots because we're like, well...

1:42:47We the bars here it long term like okay, I miss a week on advertising doesn't matter I'm doing this for you when we get on the phone the first time we talked do you guys love podcasting? I love podcasting you can do it forever. I'm gonna do forever. We say the same thing. It's like one week in a we could do this another 40 years, right? So the same thing is like the same goodwill that you're talking about. It's why I'm drinking I don't even drink energy drinks, right? But like, the format for founder. You showed up with five Jacogos. This is the only energy drink I found and I only found it because I was driving home on Thanksgiving and all the coffee shops are closed and I heard Jaco's podcast and I know he has this and he says he's in Wawa's and I was like, wait, there's a Wawa on the turnpike.

1:43:27I was like, I can just go there, like they're there, and I bought them, and then I was wired for the whole drive home. I was like, oh, they work, man, this is fantastic. The point there is like, it's not like when I went to the energy drink, I was like, oh, maybe I'll do rock star monsters. Like, no, they didn't make a podcast that I love. You were not evaluating energy drinks at that point. The format for our founders, I got from Jocco. I found his podcast because he was on Tim Ferriss's, his podcast at the very beginning was just him reading books.

1:43:53for an hour and a half saying, oh, I like this session. And he does it for autobiographies for military people. And I was like, oh, I should do this for autobiographies of founders and everything else. So for the combination of ideas, the second best version, and you guys know this more than me because it's your world. And I don't know anything. I had spent three weeks reading Paul Graham's essays. Paul Graham's essays changed my life. They're reason I need to. Yeah, probably changed my life. So we can get there.

1:44:19The reason to finally jump and dedicate my life to founders came, my wife was sleeping in bed next to me. I'm up late a night. I read programs, essay, how to do what you love. I talk about this on such a good one. Episode 275, 76 and 77, those are right. I know that for sure. Are the three program episodes I did. I talk about this snap. How he changed my episode, episode, changed my life or that essay changed my life in 275. So then I'm re, so I spent three weeks going through every single one of his.

1:44:46So something his new essay is lack that they had it before. She used to have this bright orange box at the top. It says, do you want to start a startup? Apply to Y-combinator. Apply to Y-combinator. Yeah. And so, I was like, think about, so, again, it's not like you went, I thought about this, like, what is the founders version of Y-combinator? What's the acquired version of Y-combinators, right? You have to be very careful like who you partner with and what you're doing. So it's like, what is the orange box, right? It's not like you go to Paul Graham's and he's got like, 10 banner ads. He's just like, no. He works for Yahoo. He knows it doesn't work. Your attention is here. And it's like, he didn't know that starting like comedy. You can go back and read his essays about it, watch his interviews. I had no clue. Just like Charlie told me. He's like, no, I did not expect to build what was called the Summer Founders program. You know, it wasn't even. That's the best thing about...

1:45:38learning about the company and founder history is like they didn't there's no way when you could interview Sam Walton when he's he's shoes the bottom of shoes has watermelon donkey crap yeah he's not gonna like hey guys and we're just man in the world yeah and so I love this idea of hey all of these discussions about the the the business benefit all comes from it's the byproduct of educating people sharing people. That's why people love Charlie and Warren White, all three of us off them. How much of us three learn from him? That's right. It's like, yeah. It's such a good point. I wanted to cry when I met him. Because of their content marketing. Every time it sounds straight, but like. These lessons change my life. They're gonna change the trajectory of my kids' lives. Yeah. Like that is, and you know, he probably hears that a million times a day, but it doesn't matter. It's like, I got a chance to tell him that. That's it. It is crazy. He educated America on investing.

1:46:30while still managing to do it better than anyone else. There was some funny things about that too where he says, like, you know, they get, he says something like, well, you know, they're completely, he says, you both in your episode you talk about snowball. Snowball has that quote from Buffett and Larry talks about it's really important to have an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard. Inner scorecard is his dad. It's like, I'm doing this because I know it's good. Outer scorecard is like, I'm doing this. What are the people going to think about me? New slash.

1:46:58No one's thinking about you. They think about themselves. So outer scorecard people cannot have, like it's almost really hard to have a happy life having an outer scorecard. I like Charlie's description of that better. He says, I think it was Andrew that asked him the question. Maybe Chris asked him a question. He's like, we're driven to succeed like to pressure dad or your mom. There's a great question. And he goes, no.

1:47:20He goes, I had an inter-clock. And I've always had an inter-clock. And he goes, I have an inter-clock, and I always had an inter-clock. I did this because I wanted to do it. And he goes, and he goes, and he's like, you think Buffett's like that? He goes, Buffett has an inter-clock, too. And it's just like, this idea where they did it their way, regardless, they don't care what other people think. He said this about the fact that they keep some of their wholly owned businesses. And like, oh, the profits are less, or they kind of just let them run out, and like, there's just keep the cash. And then people are like, oh, you should invest the cash, and he's just like,

1:47:50No, because we were opportunists. We're individual opportunity driven is the line that he has about that. Right. You were going somewhere, David, earlier, with the discussion of being a professional investor and how it's less differentiated than it's ever been before. Well, where I was going with it was, I bet. Look at the reaction on Twitter and elsewhere and I think in them.

1:48:17You know, much of the country to what's happening with this Silicon Valley bank situation, not that this is a current events podcast, but like, it's also, by the time this comes out, it's gonna be, it's gonna be old news, right? Hopefully things will just be calm and settle down and there'll be no more impending crises. Yeah, right. But another one's coming eventually, like, just like Charlie says, you're gonna have another unintended problem a year from now. Yep. I think you are right, Ben, that just having capital to invest.

1:48:43will be different in cheating, going forward. However, I think the aggregate brand and reputation of the venture industry has taken a massive hit, totally massive hit over the last.

1:48:53several years. And you're not holding up. And it keeps going down. SVB is revealing to how other people think of Silicon Valley. What I'm specifically referring to is VC's behavior and reactions on Twitter over the past week. But that's just emblematic of the direction things have been going for years now. And part of it's related to tech in general, but I think there's a specific maybe hatred is strong.

1:49:21brand decline of the venture capital industry. Yeah, I agree with that. Tie it to differentiation among venture firms. So yes, while as the market goes down, having capital will be differentiating and like the number of participants will go down in the industry and whatnot. But how do you stand out in this market as like, if in aggregate your industry is thought less of and people don't want to work with you, right?

1:49:49How do you turn that tide? Yeah, if the next Sam Walton has the opportunity to raise venture capital dollars and he's like, you know what? I think I would rather just figure it out another way and not build in that ecosystem. I think there are a lot of people out there right now who want to start businesses and are like, I'm not going to raise venture capital because of that. And I don't need to. And it was a lie that I needed to. Right.

1:50:16Can I tell you from the founders perspective, because I talked to a ton of founders. Yeah. I'm going to go down, I think, hopefully we'll see, talking to more founders than any non VC, right? I get offers all the time, like, hey, you want to invest in my company, I've said no to all of them. Like, just because I'm just, like, I'm focused on founders. Like, I don't care about anything about my past. Absolutely. We have these conversations. And it's just like, what VCs don't understand is like, how much founders hate them?

1:50:41Yeah, they hate them, and it's not they hate the good ones. They love the good ones, right? Like, I'm not gonna say some of the brands that I've heard about, they're like, oh no, like we raise money from much people, they're good, they don't mess with us, but if we ask a question, or we need something, they jump on it, you know? And the problem is, this is not like, it's a natural distribution of any industry. Like, there's going to be crappy founders and great founders. There's gonna be crappy investors and great investors. And so I really think it ties back to the the principle that Buffett and Munger built their business on is like only associating themselves with the best people on the best companies. And that's all so much other problems. So yeah, my issue is like there's a lot of VCs in my audience too. And they're nice people. Don't get me wrong, right? Some of them I've talked to was just like, who gave you money to invest? Like, what is going on here? Well, what I don't like is like the best ones, like this is what I like about Patrick, right? If you talk to the people that Patrick has invested in, he doesn't like, here's a list of 10 things I took

1:51:41two minutes to think about. He's asking quite, he does exactly what he does on his show. He asks questions. And if you need something like, I'll do whatever I can because he's got a good network and I'll help him out. But he's saying like, if I have to tell the founder what to do, then why did I invest in like, that doesn't make any sense. So what happens is I'll get these emails like, I love your show, etc, etc. Here's like 10 ideas for you. It's just like you read them. It's like you hired like an assistant or a researcher. Maybe you're with this yourself. You thought about this for 30 minutes. Like,

1:52:07I think about this all day everyday. I've thought about this every day for years, man. Like, that's not helpful. Like, what are you doing? Like, you're just making... I have a lower opinion of you, because, like, this is a dumb idea. And the only way to about that is, like, do you know who Brace Roberts is of... Yeah. Okay. So, he has... This is, again, I've never reasoned to capital. I've never made a venture capital investment, but I talked to a ton of founders, and he has the greatest description. He's like, what is the product that founders are buying from VCs? It's not money, because everybody's got money.

1:52:37Like, that's a, like, well, it used to have money. Or, yeah, I guess you, but still, like, there's, the least you get though, like, there's still a lot of people. There's still gonna be investments made in comparison to venture in the 70s, yes. He said, two words, improved odds. That is the best, from a founder, that is the best description. It's like, if I take investment from you as opposed to its other guy over here, it's other grow over there, like, who is going to meet founders? All they care about is, can you help my company succeed? Is it more likely than my company succeeds? I'm dedicating my life to this, man.

1:53:07This is not a game. Like, can you make my company succeed? And sometimes you can do the money, sometimes you can network. There's other people sitting right across me that could probably help with distribution. That is actually a value-eyed. Like, that is the difference. Like, if I was going to be a venture capitalist and God knows I would not be, right? I would just start a podcast. And then I would do it for six years, and I would get really valuable. And then my inbox is full of people.

1:53:31I don't have deal flow. It comes in. Yeah, it comes inbound. I have a friend, Chris. Chris Powers, he syndicates real estate investment. Rich people like to invest in real estate. There's all these tax benefits. And he says, David, even with like, this guy's done like, I think he's got either a billion or two billion dollars of industrial class real estate under management right now. And he's like, even he's like, David, I just was interviewing and doing my podcast.

1:53:56Again, same thing. Educational. Interviewing people, operating in a real estate industry and interviewing founders. And just doing, because he'd like to do, he wanted to talk to those sort of people, happen to press record, put it out there, never really promoted it. He's like, he moved with my small audience. He goes, I've raised, he goes, it changes the dynamic from, hey, I'm Chris. I'm setting an outbound, hey, I'm Chris. This is what I do. This is like, can we talk? Can we set up a meeting too? Oh, Chris, love your podcast. How can I get 5 million in your front?

1:54:22Yeah, it reverses it because, you know, they get to know you as a person. This is what I don't like also in that. It sure cuts the relationship. But you just said, it's a relationship, right? Which I think there's too much of this, like, calendar, like, Tetris, that, no offense, that venture capital play, because they try to do with me where our founders do this too, where they're like, hey, love you show, love you to talk to you. Can we talk? And I reply back, yeah, that's something up. Then I get like, And then they're like, I'm like routed to an assistant. And then it's like, oh, you know, uh, how about six weeks from now, you know, Joe Smoll has 30 minutes, three weeks from now. And I've done this like once or twice. And now my response is, that's no way to build a relationship. Here's my phone number. Just text or call me when, when you're free. I'm not a 30 minute block in your calendar. And if, dude, we have the inbound that Austria get. It's like, I'm already almost hitting a limit to how many deep relationships I can build.

1:55:15So I'd rather instead of talking to a million people, I'm not a fester. Instead of talking to a million people for 15 minutes, I'd rather talk to five or 10 people over and over and over and over again. That's what Charlie... Charlie... You haven't talked a lot about this and you've rubbed up on me a lot on this. I've changed my mindset and my daily behavior hugely because of our conversations. Charlie and Warren. They go relationships. They found people they like and mirrored in trust. They repeat like and mirrored in trust over and over again in the letters and their talks. And then they just did business with them forever. Yep.

1:55:45It's not this wide but shallow, and that's where you get the bad behavior. And anybody that's high quality can see through it, and it's not going to work with you. And you're only going to succeed, like you guys, your business is parallel, you're only going to succeed if you get the very best ones. It's interesting though, like the, man, just like so much in life, like Warren and Charlie, really, like they're just so often right. And if you think about like, if you buy the premise that the aggregate opinion of the venture capital industry, has declined a lot of things. It may continue to decline, whether it does or doesn't. It's meaningfully worse than it used to be. What have Warren and Charlie done? And to your point about the best content marketing ever, what is what they do? It's a combination of a hedge fund and a private equity firm. What is the aggregate opinion, public opinion of hedge funds, managers and private equity firms over the last 50 years, nothing but down? What is the aggregate opinion of Berkshire, nothing but up? It's amazing.

1:56:40This is one advantage that I have the fact that I'm not an investor so I don't have to keep up on like to some degree venture capitalist have to like know what's going on right and I close myself off like yeah I was having dinner with Sam and his wife and they're asking like his wife was asking me like hey Do you know about this person? No, do you know about this? And Sam's like, he's got a very limited like, he said in his face, he's like, you can ask him about like, both, but this dude's not watching TV, he's not doing any other stuff, right? We keep him in a, you know, hotout bag. And the good thing about that though is somebody actually, essentially the way I use like Twitter or any social media is like, I put out little snippets from my podcast and text. You put out a lot on Twitter. In text, so form, right? Yeah.

1:57:22which has been really working for you. I'm going to read something that has over a million views in 24 hours because everything's going on and because I just had dinner with Charlie. So I'm going to read this and then I'll go back to, this is an amazing thing, by the way. So I go, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature. Now, I didn't put this because of the bank run. Like, I was just thinking, I was like, oh, this is, I was reading my highlights. When I post this, like, with regards to the bank run. No, no. I remember I reread my highlights every day. Yeah. And so when I reread my highlights, I was like, oh, that's good one. I just put on Twitter.

1:57:52Oh my god, they look like just the greatest timing in history. Yeah. Exactly. Well, like, it wasn't intentionally. I knew it was going on, but it never said, oh, let me, I need an SVB tweet. I don't have any money in SVB, like, whatever. So it goes, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature, and then this is all Charlie speaking. One of my favorite stories is about the little boy in Texas. The teacher asked the class, if there are nine sheep in a pen and one jumps out, how many are left? And everybody got the answer right, meaning eight, right? Except this little boy who said, none of them are left.

1:58:19And the teacher said, you don't understand arithmetic. And the little boy said, no teacher, you don't understand sheep. And so, so having good. Okay, when you were in the room with Charlie for several hours, how did, like, in natural conversation, are they just pulling out these, like, parables and these fables? Like, you know, let me, let me ask that question. The best responses tweet, I didn't even, I missed it myself. He goes, was, The child Charlie himself. I'm like, oh my God, that's exactly what he would have done. He would have been the kid. He would have been the kid. So the reason I think it's so powerful, like the storytelling ability, you guys have, how I try to break down things to aphorisms, you ask, like, why is this guy on my phone, right? I only think in stories, I think people only learn through stories, and then one-liners, right? That's why Charlie, David Olgaby, that idea is like, he says it in a creative way, and you remember fair.

1:59:12Charlie Munger says, hey, if you don't learn probability, you're going to go through life as a one-legged man in the asking contest. That's so good. So you laugh, and then you think about it and it's like, oh, I'm going to get my ass kicked. So that's the way this is here because it's Ernest Shackleton. His family motto was, by endurance, we conquer. So we're in the podcast business. You know, people are like, you can't do podcasts. There's like two million of them. It's like, dude, there's like 70 or 80% of them that have quit. Right? And 8% in the business contest right now.

1:59:40Me and Patrick were just talking about this. I just saw him in person in Miami and we were talking and I showed him this. It's like, dude, for podcasts like Me and Patrick's and yours, business categorized in business have at least 10 episodes and I think released at least once a week. You guys, I think are really scheduled less than that, right, two weeks? Every two or three. Okay. So those three categories, it's like, but in terms of minutes of content per week, we're the same as everybody else. But like that was one thing, like they released once a week, right?

2:00:1018,000 and the business category is the second most popular pod like the second most populated podcast category behind and I go you know the first spirituality faith. Yeah, oh a two-crime is falling off then Yeah, no way so this is I'm gonna start so there's a thing about that where I heard somebody said they're like Founders like church for entrepreneurs and I might start dropping podcasts on Sunday and No, no, I'm not kidding and if I do video I swear to God, I went and looked. I looked at pulpits. I was like, I'm not going to get involved. I swear to God. I swear to God. You're a crucifix topic. I'm not going to get a desk. Think about, my mom was like, fundamentalist Christian stuff. I'm like, I had to go to church my whole life. And she's like, this is pretty crazy. Not in bad way. I don't mean that to majority.

2:00:59They're learning from the same book every week, over and over again. The stories you can tell are limitless. It's one book. I can do the same thing. I have access to all the books in the world. Like, I can do that. So I do think there's an element of totally five years from now. People are going to be like, this is the moment where David started the cult. It's right here on video. We're talking about it. Colts are the best businesses. 100%. If you listen to my episode in and out, episode 244, there's no way I got that right. By the way. Oh, now we go though. I did that.

2:01:29You keep talking, I'll look up if you got this right. I did that episode because... It's 2.4, of course. Is it? Oh my god. I read that book because the best businesses in the world are cults. That's what the founder of Trader Joe's. He wrote his autobiography. He said that Trader Joe's was a cult for the overeducated and underpaid. Right, and that's not to say that like, like, cults.

2:01:53are amazing businesses. That's not what you're saying. You're saying the very best businesses. And now it calls them. They use this terminology in their business. Cheerful cult. It's a positive cult. I'm not talking about Jonestown. Let's get together and freaking drink mass suicide. I'm talking things that hopefully you're building a product that's good for the world. We had Gary Tanon back in the day and he was talking about Palantir at the very beginning and he was like, Oh, Palantir was a cult. That's why it worked. Well, this idea also influenced me is zero to one Peter Teos book.

2:02:21It's like, you know, he says that. It's like the best businesses, like startups look like cults. You have to inspire emotion in people otherwise. You can't stand out in the world. You certainly can't have repeat behavior and in a sea of choices for someone to keep choosing you over and over and over again. It's like how founders have to be weird. This is one of the main things that was created by ordinary people. But I have to be in tension about this. I'm glad you said, oh, this is where we get in on camera and on recording that David is started as cults.

2:02:51No, I go crazy. People start talking about me. A bunch of them say, David's two obsessive podcasts. And I'm like, I'm glad they say that because even now, there's a couple. No, it's like I see an opportunity that other people don't, which is the same thing in the book. So I think podcasts in general are just fun to make. And I'm obsessed with it. But they're also going to be wonderful businesses because they're prone to be cheerful cults. And how do you know that you have a cult? You just Google.

2:03:20and see if the people have tattooed themselves with the brand. How many people are walking in with a Joe Rogan's face on his tattoo? Or a Joe Rogan face tattoo on their skin? A ton of them, right? Really? Yes. How many people have tattoos of the Apple Apple? A ton of them. There's an insane number with Mario. We learned this in the Nintendo. Mario, Tesla, in and out. There's a ton of, dude, I like cheeseburgers in my favorite meal.

2:03:42I'm not tattooing it in an out logo on my arm, dude. You take another level and you see this over and over and over again. And so when I analyze businesses, I'm not just doing this, like, it's not a game to me. I was like, oh, can I use these ideas and building my business? And like Warren Buffett says the greatest thing. And this is, I think speaks to why you guys are so like, hey, we know how big our audience is and we're gonna take the seriously. Seriously, Warren goes, a brand is a promise. That's the best description of a brand. It's just like...

2:04:09I talked about the fact that I stayed in this hotel brand. I'm not gonna say what it is. In Austin, I loved it. I stayed in Santa Monica. I loved it. I found out they had one in San Francisco. I didn't check the reviews. You came here and they broke their promise. I told you to stay with us. And that's the biggest thing. A brand was a promise. I know this is gonna be excellent. The hotel's fine. It is in like...

2:04:28It's in a tenor line. It's like or like not a place you want to stay No, I like if I wasn't traveling alone. There's no way I'd let my wife This is the major misconception about San Francisco every meeting people who don't live here think that it's you know an absolute hellhole in wasteland A specific part of it is yeah, but like And unfortunately that part is mostly where the hotels are. Yeah, which is not good for the city because I'm not ever staying I'm staying with you or I'd stay in like I'd stay out in Silicon Valley like I've stayed at the Rosewood, which is really nice. Yeah, that is the most expensive hotel, which is good. I didn't pay for it. So I never does. That's the whole business model. I didn't know how much it was. It was really nice though. Thank you. I gotta take that person.

2:05:13Yeah, so, like, again, I don't mean it in like a, but I am very intentional, but like, hey, I'm not gonna break my promise. I want you to know, and you guys do the same thing. It's like, if I press play on an acquired episode, this is why, like, Dan Carlin is, you know, I read one book an episode. He reads like 30. He only does two a year or one a year. Like, I know there's no way I'm gonna press play. It's gonna be good. And he didn't do the work necessary. Yeah. That's all we feel. We all feel. I mean, you, yeah.

2:05:39In our own ways, we all definitely feel that about what we're doing. Can I get some feedback? How can we make acquired better? Or have you ever had moments where you paused an episode and we're like, oh, I want to talk to Ben and David about this right now, because I have some feedback. No. You probably just text us if you did. No, but first of all, or the model, not necessarily just the content, but like... No, well, you guys said on your benchmark dinner episode, I think, was like, you know...

2:06:08There's a few podcasters that I was conversation with Sam and I was like, there's a few podcasters that they know what they're doing. And they know by what their position in the market is, how they're thinking about it and I'm not gonna say who, but you guys hit it. What makes you special is the Edwin Land thing. Don't do anything somebody else can do, right? What you said is like, your marquee thing is these super inde- Blake made the funny, Blake Robinson said the funny thing on Twitter. I saw all I loved it. He's like, only a choir could say, all right, let's bring this home and it's so an hour and a half left. That's your brand.

2:06:38People know it totally. Yeah. And I think what you're doing here with like the sessions is like a way to also, it's like, there's no, you can't increase your amount of episodes as you can do because they take so much work to do. But you also have a way to surface all this information that you guys have that's valuable to other people in different formats. Well, we were talking about this a little bit before, which I hate saying we were talking about this before we were recording. It might have been we just recorded. But you were also thinking about potentially doing something similar. Yeah.

2:07:07And there's like, for the core episodes, we spend so much time preparing. But then for stuff like this, we don't prepare at all because our whole career is prepared. Does this make sense? What is the right...

2:07:25Number and format of sessions, because this is the second session. We're still figuring sessions out. In your dream world, as an acquired listener, what do sessions look like? I mean, your sessions should be, replace your interviews. Anything that's a non-acquired, long-deep time, just make them a session. There's enough people interviewing founders and investors, but we need more conversations. So if I ever did, people, if you ever do an interview show, first of all, I wouldn't do an interview show.

2:07:51You interview as a skill, it looks easy. Like I always tell Patrick, you're world class at this dude. Like you have, you wield, you've been in a week and now twice a week for eight, nine years. And he's just, it's for, I like to read. He likes to ask questions. So therefore our formats match the personality, right? And so what I tell him is like I've been on the other side of it. It's like you can tell, it's not, he doesn't have a list of questions in front of him because you can help. His good question just came off of a response of what? Like a lot of people like, um, And it's fine, but like the Tyler Cowan thing where he just like, he has his questions and you just said something interesting. He's not gonna follow up and he's gonna go on the next question. It feels very odd because you're like, are you guys not having a conversation? No, they're not. That guy left you an opening and how did you not take that opening? They're not. But Tyler, you have to do, let's tie this to Jay-Z and Jay Cole. And the answer question also about like, I'm glad you guys are so much nicer. Do you have any feedback? Because like, I can't stand feedback. We're like not in the sense of...

2:08:48Like, I told you, I text you guys this one time. We're like, uh, one guy was like, hey, I don't like that you reference the, like the super power of the show is that it's not like the episode of Ralph Lauren is going to tell you how Ralph thinks like Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller and Paiso. And it's like, you literally know all your episode numbers by heart. And like, so to me, it's just one large conversation on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history, on history,

2:09:14Could you save that for at the end and just do it like as carve out like acquired? And I was like, don't listen to acquired. I'm not going to. I have a singular vision for how this is going to go. And that's why I own and control and operate the entire thing. It's even further than that. It's like, I'm not putting on a show. Like, there's a lot. I loved Anthony Bourdain when he was alive. I read his books. He had a huge influence on me. Like, anytime I traveled to a place that he went to, I'd go and watch it. Have you done an episode of him? Yeah. 2.19.

2:09:41There's no way that's right. There's no way. There's no way that's right. Fact checkers. It's called the oral biography. That format should be done more where his assistant had interviewed an assistant friend at interviewed a bunch of people actually knew Tony and were there in his last days. And then she organized an interview into this biography called Bourdain, the definitive oral biography, I think. And is it 2019? It's 2019.

2:10:10And so like, where was I going at that? I went on a digression, but oh, so there's a line in the book that I love. It says, the line between Tony and his show is non-existent. Yeah. Right? That's why people like, I hear a lot of people talk about podcasting. It's like, oh, you don't actually know what the superpower of podcasting is, right? Where it's like, to me, one of the superpowers of podcasting is it's authenticity scaled, right? Yes. When I meet with founders, I listen to founders, and we have a three hour dinner.

2:10:34They all say the same thing. This is like a three hour episode of Founders. It's like the same person there, right? And I think that is a thing that you did really well, and we sort of accidentally did well. But I realized over time why that makes both of the things we've built as durable as they are. A lot of people play characters on the internet. Which in other mediums plays really well. Is an easy trap to fall into.

2:11:04It's a way to catapult growth. If you adopt a polarizing character, you can get a bunch of followers. There's a lot of dividends that pay to it, but it's exhausting to maintain over time. And it has a conflict where when people meet you in real life, they're like, oh, weird. And so when you actually are just yourself, it's going to probably grow more slowly because I'm not as polarizing, it would be horrifying to live as...

2:11:30a polarizing character that you play on the internet in real life also. And so you have this more like slow organic growth path. But like it is, there is this cool byproduct now where like I sit down with someone and they're like, yep, exactly the same as I expected. This is why I said, have Blake Robbins on here, because he gave me the dynamic, that spectrum that he talks about. Blake is a super smart person in general, but he's like the way you think about this.

2:11:57is there's a spectrum. This is not my idea, this is my spectrum because it's like how much time do people spend with you, right? He's like on one end of the spectrum, you have these like 30-second tiktokers of dance, right? And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum as you move down, they spend more time with you. All the way on the spectrum, you have the Twitch streamers, right? Which he helped incubate 100 thieves, 40 thieves, 100 thieves, where they're spending like 40 hours or 50 hours a week with you, right? He goes, David, you're like one, you're not, they don't spend 40 hours with you.

2:12:24but you're one click. One click to the left. And they're going to wind up spending 10, 20, 100, 200 hours with you. And you keep moving down and you're like, let's say you do 10 minute YouTube videos, you know? And it's like the deeper you go down there, it's why I think the guy's name is Nate Shot. When you're like, 100 Deaves has a new product and he announces it, you'll see a line down the block. Because hundreds of thousands of people have spent all their time with them. And so it's like, oh, Nate Shot has something to all come down here and you see this over and over again.

2:12:52And then Blake says you could have like a TikTok has a 10 million followers, yet they can't even get 3,000 people to show up somewhere. And so I think that is the way to think about so. That's algorithmic throttling too. TikTok is almost a zero signal if somebody follows you. It's like it doesn't matter. It doesn't actually matter. Or YouTube. It's like they subscribe to your channel. Like maybe that'll come up in one of the top eight videos that shows up at the top of the screen of like what they should watch next but like maybe not.

2:13:21So my point in all that is if they're spending a lot of time with you. And I love, this is my flip of what Charlie Mugger says that you need to learn the big ideas in the main domains like physics, psychology, because they carry the most freight. I flipped that to time carries the most weight. As long as what we're doing, and you said we're not playing characters, we are passionately interested in this. We're not going to quit. Then we just have a long period of time. You'll get what you deserve.

2:13:47You'll get the audience you deserve. You'll get the business opportunities and everything else. It's like time goes the most way. I know I'm not going to quit. You're going to have to pry the microphone from my cold dead hand. And I'm just going to let the chips fall where they are. That doesn't mean I'm like lollygagging here. Like I'm on it seven days a week. I'm going to try to put work myself in a position. So it's something I learned from Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple, right? And he's like...

2:14:10People hear that speech he gives, which he's fantastic. He's like wearing shorts and he's like, and it's like, I don't even know if he's in the polo, the turtleneck yet. But he mentions like, what they're going to do. And everybody focuses on the fact that he's like, we're going to, you know, there's no sex in the products anymore. And we're going to do the four quadrant thing. A lot of people in the technology industry particularly know that speech and like, yeah, let's cut the fat and like put all of our A players, fire the B and C players, put all of our A players in these four products that we're going to make, right? But they miss desktop, laptop.

2:14:38high-end consumer and pro for both laptop and desktop. Those are four categories, right? They missed what he said earlier when he talks about Nike. He's just like marketing. He's like Apple sucks at marketing. We have to be a great marketing company. And so he said something where I read the quote and then my reinterpretation of this, right? And people don't know that it's in Ken's, no, it's in this book called Insanely Simple. I think that guy's name is Ken Siegel. And he's like, he was an ad guy at a company for Apple. And he's like, TWA, TWA Chiant Day.

2:15:07That's the ad agency. So he goes, and every Wednesday, actions express priority. So there's another maximum, right? He's like, I don't care what people say, I can hear like what they do. So when people ask me, like, first people, you talk to the founders, like, hey, like, what would you do about this? I never answer, it's like, well, David Senor would do this. I would say, hey, well, Charlie Munger would tell you this, or Steve Jobs would do this, or like, hey, I heard a story right here. Cause like, my opinion is useless. It's, you know my opinion on business building and how I build my business. Doesn't matter what I say, it's like, what is he, how is he?

2:15:36approaching founders, like, why is he making decisions? That's the important part, right? And so Steve told you that marketing was important to his actions, because every Wednesday at like three o'clock, or I forgot the time, they had like a three hour meeting, he would approve, have to approve every single piece of advertising marketing that went out for Apple. There's not a billboard in Kentucky that went out without him saying, yes, that's gonna go out, right? And so in that speech, actually listen, what are you saying? He's like, listen, I feel that the products we're making in Apple make people's lives better. I want

2:16:04He says this line he goes, I want everybody in the world to own an Apple device. We know that it's not going to happen because it's so expensive but he goes and to do that we have to get really good at marketing. So my interpretation of that on the podcast what I said is like if you feel your product can improve people's lives. I think you guys already know because you get thousands of messages just like I do that. Yes, listening to choir listening to founders will improve people's lives and work, right?

2:16:29then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing. Well, that all that means is not get good at marketing so our ad rates can go up or that we can be celebrities during that. It's no. So these messages for all these of history's greatest entrepreneurs that are dead, but there's ideas don't die with them. And then therefore acquired founders can gather these ideas and push them down the generations. So that's why I mean. It's like, I'm not daily dallian. Yes, I'm going to let time carry all the weight, but I'm going to do everything I can so more people at least know. And if you try founders like, oh, this sucks or whatever, whatever, I'm cool with that. But I just want you to have the opportunity to know it exists. And me and you have had these, I'll say you've had these conversations where it's like, guys, I'm telling you right now, I've said this to you, there's millions of people that would benefit from listening and quiet. They just don't know it exists yet. So we got to come up in fine ways to make sure that people know it exists, because they will love it. And it will make their lives better. Amen. All right, listeners.

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2:18:59So 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. This may be an area, I'm curious to see what you think about this, where our shows and approaches are a little different, most curious, what you been thinking about this. A lot of these stories are just incredible stories, too, that are just like worth, I think worth telling just for the sake of the story. Yeah, it's interesting how sometimes I'm like, I'm not sure that we came up with a lesson that I would advise a founder to follow, but I know this was very entertaining and as true as we possibly can make it. Yeah. And so like every single episode I've listened to, there's lessons in there. Oh yeah, nothing. I'm not saying there's not lessons. Of course there are. But like sometimes we'll do it episode like

2:19:56I always feel this way about the most recent episode, but we just finished making the Nintendo episode. I was like, can I, like if you put the best fiction writers in the world. That's true. And you said, come up with the best corporate-ish story that you could imagine. You couldn't write something this good. I guess the thing I was referring to is a little bit the survivorship bias where someone did something that I would not recommend anyone do and it still worked. That's what made for a great story. It's like more of Chang and TSMC. It's like he invented the notion of a fabulous semiconductor company before there was any demand for that and then it turned out that his timing was exactly right that like within a couple of years a whole ton of

2:20:37you know, fabulous companies spun up and wanted to use his foundry, but like he created a solution in search of a problem and like no founder should do that, but my god did he pull a rabbit out of a hat. There's a good number of acquired episodes where I'm like, we should be crisper I think about pointing out where like I don't this was inadvisable, but amazing that it worked. I think that goes back to the game tape analysis where we talked about Kobe Bryant, Jordan did this too, where it's like I read this 600-page biography of Kobe and in the biography, they interviewed his high school girlfriend. And they're like, what was it like to date Kobe Bryant in high school? I was surprised he had a girlfriend. That's great. Oh, not for very long. It's like, what was it like to date Kobe Bryant in high school? It's like, well, our dates consisted of me going to his house and watching tapes of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. That's the whole thing. We're not leaving. I'm not taking it at the dinner. We're literally going to watch this thing.

2:21:34I think the game tape analysis of that is just like, it is helpful to realize that a lot of this stuff, it's impossible to plan in advance. It's one of the great, I mean, Steve Jobs has a ton of great quotes. Oh, one of the best ones. He's like, if they can connect the dots, it's impossible. It's impossible. You're only gonna connect the dots looking backwards. So you have to put something in faith and something. You can call karma, religion, God, intuition, but you have to do something. I just did a reread, Ray Crox autobiography, the guy from McDonald's.

2:22:03Again, and hit me, yeah, I've been thinking about the Steve Jobs quote too. And this is why it's so valuable to read. You mentioned this in the McDonald's episode. If you think about this, like, he's a perfect illustration of what Steve observed 50 years after Ray dies for God's sake. He's just like, he goes to selling paper cups. Paper cups leads him to selling multi-mixers, which are like, uh, make milkshakes. Right. Multi-mixers goes, like, why the hell are you have eight, why does these McDonald brothers out in San Bernardino have eight of my machines? Like, people, he'd have a hard time selling one. That goes to

2:22:33the franchise system, which he didn't even do well. Then he meets Harry Sombra and then Harry Sombra is like, dumbass. You don't even know what business you're in. You're not gonna, he's like, you don't build an empire of a 1.4% cut of a 15 cent hamburger. You build an empire by owning the land upon which that hamburger is cooked. Those five things. There's no, he's selling, he's selling. From paper cups to real estate. Yeah. He sold paper cups for 17 years. Yeah. But he's just like, hey, I have to go in my gut to the point where he got divorced over this. His wife was like, You can't do this Harry and he's like, you have to trust my instincts. That's one thing, to what Ben said way back in the beginning of the conversation that you're really good at highlighting, like he was a terrible person. And he didn't try to hide it. Most people in autobiographies are trying to hide it. Yeah. He's literally like, thank you very much, June Martino, my first employee for missing every single one of your kids birthdays. You're gonna get some stock in McDonald's, gonna get you rich, but 20 years later I'm gonna fire you. Yeah.

2:23:30and he didn't, you don't have to put that story in there. He chose to put that that's crazy, dude. I said on the podcast, I was like, listen, it's interesting, like I'm glad he persisted interesting ideas or business, but like not only do I, we never want to do business with this guy, I wouldn't even want to be his friend. Yeah. Like I wouldn't want to do business with Steve Jobs, but I want to be his friend, you know? Oh yeah, he did. Yeah, I feel like the opposite. What's that? Like I had to want to do business with Steve because you could, and create incredible things together, but I'm not sure you'd want to be friends. I think the difference is from a founder's perspective, there is no working with Steve Jobs, it's working for. You hear the stories of how even treated his subcontractor, or the owners of the companies that contracted. These guys are empire builders, they're literally building worlds, they're not used to being, Charlie was talking about this, because he loves Lilo.

2:24:25The new guy, the BYD guy, do one. I don't know his name, something like that. Those guys, he loves Lee Kwan U from Singapore. And what you realize is it's like, these are founder types, but you can't be, like founders are benevolent dictators, or in some cases they're dictators of their own company. And like, some people call Lee Kwan U, you know, a dictator is like, oh, we can't do that in America, even if that would be beneficial. But all of them.

2:24:53There's no working with them. They're going to be in complete control of the situation, even being in the room with them. I'm not saying they'd be rude or mean, but you're a subordinate to them because everything is very crock. Everything is, he says in the book. Perfection is difficult. I'm demanding perfection with Donald's. I will constantly keep expanding this empire till I die. If you get in my way, I will run you over. He says in the movies, If my competitor was drowning, I'd walk over and put a hose in his mouth and he goes and he was on the other end of the call as McDonald Brothers because they're fighting over this and he goes, would you do the same? And the state of thing is it's like you're gonna have to compete on my level or else I will literally destroy you. Yeah. So Warren and Charlie are so interesting. I'm trying to decide if they are the complete opposite of that or if they actually are like that just in their own ways.

2:25:48Every single person has some kind of like their public persona is for that level, right? It's not like a podcast where they're gonna listen to Joe Rogan for 1600 episodes like you know who Joe is you can't hot He's going three hour shows three days a week for 15 years You have probably a good idea who he is you see flashes of like you know imperfection like we all have I Don't think you just you don't get to that level without having he's got short they all got sharp elbows like you ever heard read stories about how Warren Negotiates, it's like 1250 bid. What about 14, 1250 bid? What about 13, 1250 bid? That's because he's already spent 10 years analyzing your business, and he knows exactly the price that he's gonna buy it for. And so now he's telling you the price he's gonna buy it for. This wasn't like a new consideration that popped up, and he's like, oh, look at this, a business. It's like, no, at this scale, he's operating at like, he knows all the businesses. Yeah. And this is from the Jim Clayton's autobiography.

2:26:43where he buys, um, Clayton Homes. Right. And he even said, like, he wanted to sell a buffet, he idolized Buffett. And he talks about like, he wasn't insulting him by any means, but he's like, Warren wants the microphone. And if you're in an area where Warren doesn't have the microphone, he is not interested. And I've heard that about Warren a lot, you know? So this is like, is there, is there world builders? Like, he runs everything. You think you're gonna go from being poor to having $200,000,000 and not distort your perception in the world? Yeah. It's impossible.

2:27:11Say more about Warren wanting the microphone. What does that mean? Like literally in person. Like they would do, I think they were doing Jim Clayton was at either like an event to talk to the employees or whatever the case was. Like he like Jim wanted to have input and he's like Warren would not allow it. Like he monopolized this. And I've heard that about Warren. Like same thing. We're like, you're gonna just gotta be an element of him that you know, loves the shareholder meetings. Oh, of course. Well, he didn't need to do that. He created an event about how he loves. He wants to have a million people come. Yeah, you know how he loves it because he's still doing it. Right. Right. Like, he doesn't have to do anything in the world that he doesn't want to do. Right. And that's how you know he loves it. Like, they're beyond, I told, we talked about earlier, like, just how disorienting must be to, like, have, and I would love to know this feeling coming wrong, like, have a $200 billion net worth. It's like, you're living life on like God mode.

2:28:04It's insane. I was watching this video, I don't know if it's true, but Jeff Bezos' private jet has its own private jet. His new yacht has a chase yacht. I think it's like a guest yacht. I think it's so that he knows the biggest yacht in the world and there's a yacht that will sail behind it. This maybe will become so successful someday that I will regret my words on this.

2:28:30I got to imagine having a yacht is actually not like additive to your life. Oh, so this is a fun, I think that's more problem than... Yeah, so I think it was Ralph Lauren sold his yacht and it's now a charter yacht because he was like this thing was more work than any of the businesses I've ever run. One of the most interesting ideas I've heard, and it comes from our mutual fund, Jeremy, who I think we mentioned earlier in the podcast. Hopefully we did, Jim Credit. I actually was talking to him in David Perot.

2:28:59and I'm pretty sure Jeremy said this, not David, but he's like, I would actually make the argument because everybody's like, oh, like, what does Charlie talk about? Call the Berkshire jet the indefensible? The indefensible, yeah, right. And then, was there a second one at the indefensible to the indefensible before they bought nap jets? And now it's like, we should be honest. So you look at, you look at, like, how could you possibly spend, like, you know, these yachts cost $25,000 an hour to operate in fuel or some crazy number that planes are the same, like, you know, how expensive they are. And Jeremy makes the point and Jeremy knows because he's been buying businesses forever and he's exposed to, like, great wealth. People, you know, unbelievable amount of wealth. He goes, he makes the argument that they're actually underpriced assets. And I was like, oh, tell me why. Well, he's like, that's not what I would expect to hear. Yeah. I'm going to tell you this book that just proved his point. I actually got a text in my telling us.

2:29:48Um, so he's like they use it not for it's you know like yawning sitting there sunbathing right he's like they're using it for like customers and Invest in potential and so I had heard this I'll tell you about how this relates to invisible billionaire So I had heard this because again, I've never raised money. I don't pay attention to the venture industry. I don't know anything about it I just have a bunch of founder friends and founders tell founders everything and so I'll have these discussions where they're like They describe the courting process that they get from some of these well-known super famous people and it's like, well, the process you just described to me sounds like an old rich dude that wants to sleep with a young woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What would we do, right? What I actually put in the episode, but there's a bunch of this in Nintendo history because Warner Brothers bought Atari and so Warner Brothers was running Atari as Nintendo was kind of like. And this is how they courted Nolan. That's how they courted. Yeah, so that's how Warner Brothers courted

2:30:43Atari and Nolan and then how they tried to court Nintendo was the private jets the was there's Clint Eastwood. They put Clint Eastwood on the private jet with a turtle and flying close to coast to coast. So when they're taken by the company history doesn't repeat human nature does. Yeah, these founder dudes are running technology companies now and they're like, yeah, oh yeah, this I'm not gonna name who they're like, oh yeah, he gave us he picked us up in Manhattan in his private helicopter and we landed at his Hampton State.

2:31:09Do you think he got the deal? He got the deal. This guy said, hey, what are you doing? It's Friday night. What are you doing Saturday morning? Okay, come on my private job and we take you to California with me. Here, you want to stay with your girlfriend at this mansion that I'm not using in XYZ. So Jeremy's explaining this. It's like the equivalent of like a luxury suite at a sports arena. It's for getting deals. But they're operating at a different level where it's like, oh, these influence. And some founders, the smart ones don't let Like Sam Walton, you know, he's like, don't give us, don't give me a freaking gift. That's why, like, the whole, everything in Bentonville is like, you can't, like, come in here and like... Because they know it works. Yeah. If you give a Walmart salesperson, like a bottle of gin or something, it's going to influence him where he's just like, I want your price. You guys did a great job on your episode. He's like, tell me your lowest price and then I'm going to go to your, it better be your low price because I'm going to this guy and if you tell me a dollar, he sells me 98 cents.

2:32:03Don't waste my time. I'm going, I'm not, you're not going to hear from me again. I have an obligation to the customer to do this to find the lowest price for them. Yeah. Because everything, his entire thing, the low cost structure thing. That's, that's a, that's a Walton thing. That's a sole price thing. That's a Jeff Bezos thing. That's a Rockefeller thing. That's, that's the most common theme in history of entrepreneurship. Every single thing. Jeff is like, we're going to have a low cost structure. We're going to have a low cost structure. We're going to be efficient. We're going to be efficient. Somewhere along the line, 25 years later, now that...

2:32:28Start-up technology, start-up is like, we can just spread money all the time because there's no interest rate. There's just money coming back. He built Amazon in a pretty different time than founders today. The business laws of physics were different with their were interest rates versus when there weren't. Well, he started when there were none. That's true. And then the environment changed as he was building it. Yeah. But like, you know, while it would have been stupid for Amazon to spend a hundred million dollars on something, on like crazy marketing activities in 1997. Like you could imagine that in 2018, if all of your competitors had raised a billion dollars and were, you know, trying to chase market shares as fast as possible, you either have to exit that market because you're going to lose or play that game on the field. I find, even better find a different way. Like be more resourceful. But like, be more resourceful. It's like, it's easy to say, but like,

2:33:26uh hiring all when all your competitors are hiring all the best engineers by throwing a million dollars a year at them like yeah you're just not gonna be able to build a good product if you don't try to play that game also yeah for sure but like the whole thing like when Peter Tio says this in his book program says it it's just like sort of don't have the advantage right of you're not gonna out spend Microsoft or Netflix on, so you gotta find underdeveloped talent, right? You gotta find these people that if they work the credentialed or if they were the well-known, then they're gonna go take, you're gonna work for me $80,000 and some stock options or go make a million dollars a year in Netflix. So that's the whole thing. It's like you're not gonna win unless you're capable of finding underdeveloped talent. Silicon Valley used to be able to build high growth and profitable startups. Well, the rule used to be you couldn't go public until you had over $100 million in revenue and you were profitable.

2:34:15Like, you didn't hit both of those boxes. You weren't gonna IP. And in 2021, of all the companies that went public, it had to be single-digit percentage that were profitable with that. Yeah, I don't know. It's crazy. The game just changes. Well, to your point, if you have free money, you know, the money supply, grass like a span, it's raining down, that's going to build. Did you listen to Doug Leoni on, I knew you guys had him on your show, but did you hear him on, if that's like the best? Yeah, he was great. Like, he said, he's like, this, he was telling crazy stories.

2:34:43I loved everything about that guy. I loved him when I heard him on your podcast, too. It was like that tough love. This is what I'm into, right? And he still has, I think maybe my favorite quote, favorite quote, said live on an acquired podcast of you could burn cigarettes in our arms if we wouldn't flinch. And then he has a great line. He's like, I want you to know we were killers. We weren't killers to make the most money. We were killers to get the job done. But he made the point and then, you know, very few people probably know more about the venture industry and that guy, right? I want to, I would imagine he's up there.

2:35:11And he's like, of course, like your money raining down. He didn't use that word. It's just creates bad habits. Yeah. It is crazy how many things in my life I falsely attributed to something that were not just interest rates. Like so many things. The answer is just like, Oh, it is that way because we live in a zero interest rate environment. And I, the human brain life to tell stories. And at the end of the day, it's like, Things are the way they are because of mean reversion and what the current interest rate climate is I wish I'm gonna pull up something like this is what I mean goes back to Buffett like if you just we should I wish I knew this I had read this I didn't remember it though. This is Warren Buffett on interest rates, right? He says always this from Loss of gravity the log in snowball. No, this is from his

2:36:01shareholder letters and eight. He said in 84, 88. I think the intro to Snowball, I think the scene that open to Vignette that opens it is Sun Valley right before the bubble bird, the tech bubble bird. Oh, no, this is like decade half four. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. This is why it's like so it's like, God, like you could have made you such better decisions. I could have made such better decisions if you had just known this and he had known it for 40 years before it happened. I posted this on Twitter and I and open up the next day, I'm like, why does this have two and a half million views? It's like Elon, we're polite. He goes, yep. I was like, oh, okay. I was like, what the? Like, what the? Like, damn, you two were really like interest rates. That's all grand prize on steroids. So I go, Warren Buffett, I know interest rates and the headline is they power everything in the economic universe. So that was what Elon was responding up to. And this is Warren, writing in the 80s. The value of every, exactly what you're saying, the value of every business, the value of a farm on apartment house, or any other economic asset,

2:36:59is 100% sensitive to interest rates. That's because all you're doing when you're investing is transferring money to someone now in exchange for a stream of money which you expect to come back in the future. And the higher the interest rates are, the less that present value will be. Interest, this is fantastic. Interest rates are to asset prices, sort of like gravity is to an apple.

2:37:20When interest rates are low, there is little gravitational pull on asset prices. We just lived through this, right? Hold on. When interest, when interest book. Yeah, when interest rates are low, there is little gravitational pull on asset prices, interest rates power everything in the economic universe. Because I found that because all this, just remember this, flation went crazy like a year or two ago, whatever. And I was like, okay, everything that happens, all I do is I have, you can buy the Kindle version of Buffett shareholder letters for like two bucks. I know, I think. And I search it for like,

2:37:49interest rates inflation and I just go and I read okay, this is what he did a billion dollars off that two dollar purchase there you go and so like you'll say okay this is what he said inflation and then you see what year he said it and this is like and that's where I found that I go what do you say about interest rates boom 1980 whatever and he just laid out and it's funny because what he also did right there is for every college finance sophomore that's having to go through a class to do DCFs, and they're like, I don't understand this. This is complicated. He just explained conceptually a discounted cash flow model there in a way that was unbelievably digestible. He's so good at that. The clarity of thought. Because he wants the microphone. But also, he just educated you in a way that makes more sense, and is interesting, and you're entertained by, and you might build a business off that, and then you might want to sell one day, or whatever the case is. This is where

2:38:41I'm spending a lot more time of really trying to work on storytelling ability and concession. The value is in the compression and the distillation. If you could listen to an audio book for 25 hours, but if I can give you the best idea or one idea that changes your life and I could do it every week or whatever, in a couple minutes, some of that value is going to be brought back to me. And all that comes from is what I realize is all my heroes have...

2:39:10What they have in common is the unbelievable clarity of thought. Steve Jobs, Charlie, you're not going to be like, oh, what does that mean? They take unbelievably complex things. You're not advertising to a standing army, you're advertising to a moving parade, make it in a memorable way, and you carry that maximum with you forever. How do you get better at that? You said you're working on it. Reps. Just straight up reps, thinking about it, and then hearing yourself back so the advantage I have of that edit is...

2:39:35Yeah. You can say something and like, oh, that was so good. And you hear it back. And sometimes it's even better or many times it's worse. It's like, oh, I lost. I was, I know what I'm saying. Yeah. But you miss this part that doesn't make any sense. And so normally it's a cut it. I don't think I've ever re, I don't think I've ever re recorded it. We only did that for one episode ever. It's really hard to do. What, re record? Yeah. Do you know which episode we did it for? No. It was recent. NFL.

2:40:04David and I got on and re-recorded 40 minutes of material over maybe 15 different parts of the episode. The original recording of that episode was really rough. The NFL episode was too long. When we started, it took way too long to get to the interesting part, the Pete Rosell era.

2:40:22And so we had this massively bloated beginning, and then we had a story arc that didn't cleanly resolve, and we had a bunch of concepts where we didn't nail the explanation. And so we went in, we cut half of the first epoch of the story. We recorded new bits to create nice rising action and resolution on the Rosell era, and then we recorded another...

2:40:46like 10 areas where we were just like, this wasn't said super tight. And I'm really curious if people noticed because we had to like, we basically had a voice act, like we had to listen to the way that we sort of came into that segment, get that in our heads. This was your theater background that we're coming in. And then like, pick it up from there. But yeah. You're editing is so good. We've talked about like back catalog sponsorship and you told me what you're doing was like Zoom info. And I've been listening to your back catalog and it's like, dude, it sounds like it was there the day you did it.

2:41:15It is perfect and I know because we talk about this that that ad was not there, but it sounds like it's there. That's the goal. The NFL episode is what I meant over like it's a crazy story but even there is like a lesson where like you guys I text us to you like totally changed the way I think about things or maybe we were talking on zoom about this. We're like I never thought of that the NFL is like the largest media company. Yeah, yeah either and the funny thing is that's like that was a David Rosenthal insight that like.

2:41:39The NFL is the single largest media property by value. And the funny thing is, if you go look at the, because we did this for the Nintendo episode, you go look at the largest media properties. They list Mario, they list Pokemon, and then, and I think if you sort the list includes like video games and movies. And so there's like the MCU in there and their Star Wars in there, but like they don't think.

2:42:05The NFL is way bigger than all of those. But it's not on the list because people don't think of it as like a mediator. I'm looking for stuff like that. Both to do episodes on and is for investing too. What is something that is just so in the air that people don't even realize what it is? What's a comparison we can make that is super eye-opening, but people haven't thought to compare those two things before. Which is why I tie things in to past.

2:42:33Because it's like, oh, the idea behind this is like, we've seen this before. Yeah, yeah. I reread the show notes on the Johnny I episode I did. Johnny said something was great. And he said, he goes, one of Steve's talents was identifying markets full of second rate products. And so he would be like, oh, there's the opportunity here. And we're both, we're all podcast addicts, right?

2:42:58and the reason that we get along. And it's a market full of secondary products. And because you know how hard it is to do. Yeah. And when you go and listen to other business podcasts and like, I had a friend, his friend has a podcast and he's like, Hey, these three guys, they have large social media followings, but it does not translate to episodes where people don't understand. Yeah, really well. Yeah. And they're like, would you listen to their episode and give it feedback, right? And we went to like, so I was like, yeah, let's do it. And I go, um, It's three guys sitting around talking whatever happens to pop to their mind. What did you expect to happen? What just kind of was happening. I was thinking the same thing. I was like, what we did to all listeners, we apologize. There's zero chance that people aren't, do people interested in entrepreneurship and investing are not finding this interesting? Because the prep for this is not three guys that have a million other things to do.

2:43:54Three guys that spent the last eight years doing this. Over and over again, that's going to cop up naturally in a conversation that you can, but oh, I didn't know about this. Maybe there's a bunch of people probably like, I didn't know who everyone land was. I didn't know Ogrivi. I never thought about the NFL as a large media company. So now, but their problem thing is like there's no value proposition. This is actually something that I can tie into much of what we've talked about over the last couple hours. People are going to do what they want to do. And if People can do what they want to do and are given unfettered freedom to run it. They can do great things. If people are forced to do things that they don't want to do, they're not going to make great things. Or either forced to or choose put themselves in a situation for whatever reason when they're doing something. They don't want to be doing. They're not going to be very good at it. I think that's one of the reasons why we find ourselves so attracted to episodes that highlight craft is because that's sort of like how we think about acquired. Like if LVMH benchmark, it's like

2:44:51people who do few things but do them exceptionally well are just so entrancing to study. I think this goes back to the way you were just saying, and I'm going to go to the craft things, like Charlie again has these simple ideas, like most of the problems are that you're just not intensely interested in what you're working on. Yeah. And he's like, I don't care how smart you are, and Charlie's smarter than almost everybody else. He goes, I was not successful until I moved myself into a position where I worked on something that was intentionally interested in. That's just these like small rules carry most of the weight. It's like, how bad do you actually want it?

2:45:20And if you're not willing to do this thing, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, entrepreneurship is for a very small percentage. I'm not one of these people to think everybody can be an entrepreneur. I would like to see more of them, but there's no safety net. It's like, no one's telling you what to do. No one had to tell you guys, hey, you should buy microphones and do a bunch of research and pick up your name. We didn't buy microphones to start. I think the most interesting thing is that like, I think we talked about this concept before on air is that, If someone's gonna advise you on starting a podcast, they would say, do a 30 to 40 minute episode and do it weekly. And you release it at the same time all the time. Have a guess so that way that person promotes it too. And we're like, okay, well, we do the opposite of all of those things. And I think it's like, the conclusion I've come to is advice is an average. And reality is a distribution. And averages suck because they hide the distribution.

2:46:18You kind of want to know the shape of the distribution and you kind of want to know like things that apply to your specific data point, not like the average thing. And I think like advice is always an average that hides the distribution. And if you know that you're actually an outlier in some way, then you have to sort of like selectively follow advice because it may not apply to you. Charlie told me a fantastic story about this where he's just like he was singing the praises of BYD that they're kicking ass like he told me like the Not just me, I mean, it's a group of people. They make batteries for cars. Yeah, but he started out like, like, doing like knock off cell phones in Korea or something. And then like, he, I forgot the guy's founder's name and I apologize, but like, he was telling the life story. But he was saying that the founder, that Charlie and Lulu, Lulu, Lulu, gave the founder advice and he ignored it.

2:47:14and he was right. He's like, don't go in electric cars or whatever it was that he did. He's like, and he, you know, selling, I think he said like two billion cars, I forgot what two million cars meant. There's no way he sold two billion cars in a year. So like he's like sold two million cars in China. Yeah, so it's just like, and he did it, and he gets all the credit because Lee and me told him not to do it. And he's just like, same to your point. It's a game tape. It's just like when Kobe is watching this particular, play of Michael Jordan. That may never appear in his life. And maybe the move he did wasn't the right move for what Kobe did, but maybe it influences his other thing. The life is complex and messy. And you can think you're really smart, and until you have two and a half year old, and they ask you, why is that the way? And you answer the question. And then their follow question is going to be why. And eventually you're going to get to a level where like, I don't know. Like, I don't know why everything ends and I don't know. Yeah, it's like, I don't know.

2:48:09And so, of course there's no certainty. That's why if you crave certainty, you've got to get a job. But there wasn't even Facebook when I was in college because I had to work full time and went at night. But my college did not have Facebook. It was just coming out. So we had MySpace. And my MySpace, you could put a quote right at the head of it. And I've always thought this for my entire life was like there's no security in life-only opportunity. And I think that's what it did. So investors and entrepreneurs are are going for opportunity at the expense of security. And if you need security, you can get a job, but we see like, everybody's like going to tech, going to tech, going to tech. I'll give you all this money. I think this is a super misprice thing. I think people who crave security, which I get, like all humans crave some level security, mis sort of misprice security because no jobs are as secure as we think they are, but they definitely cap your upside. And people, it's like,

2:49:04is founding a company or going into business for yourself as an entrepreneur extremely risky? Yes it is, but is it actually that much riskier than a job where you could get laid off, where the sector could go through a downfall, or like, there are a lot of things about having a job that are not nearly as secure as people think they are. Steve Wozniak and Jobs, they're like, worst-case scenario, which isn't worth, what does it go good jobs?

2:49:27We broke anyways. Right. Let's just try and he like sells his van for like 50, Steve sells his van for like $1500. He's like, oh, I'm just all in on Apple. Like, to me that's like, again, I think a lot of this is like, people are asked it's like, it's entrepreneurship, like a Nate, it can be taught. Can there be a school of entrepreneurship? And I was like, well, ask Charlie Munger if he taught a business class. What did he say? He's like, I would just teach the history of what you guys do. He's like, I teach the history of a hundred companies. And I would talk about what went right and what went wrong.

2:49:56There's no security. He's not saying, yeah, take my class, and on the other end, you get this degree that guarantees business success that doesn't exist. Well, that's what's quite like, they have been teaching entrepreneurship for the last 50 years. So I went to the UCF, which is this like diploma mill, essentially, and they was in the pilot entrepreneurship program, right? The very first year. And it's a two year program. Take us back to that. Yeah.

2:50:26Were you thinking about what was your relationship to entrepreneurship before starting the Founders podcast? So like I have never been on a job interview. I've only had two jobs in my life like I was but I was like there was no entrepreneurship there was no entrepreneurship like community There was no entrepreneurship industry, right? So like my first business was This is a long story, but like I had been accustomed to I was talking about this yesterday by the time I was 17 I had been accustomed to working full-time and going to school Right, so people are like, oh, you work a lot on founders. It's like, I don't have to go to school. I've been like, do this all the time. You're looking half time as part of this. There's a long story here that would take me like 30 minutes, but my dad sat me down when I was like 15. He's like, listen, you don't have to pay rent, but I don't have any money for you. So if you want something, you gotta go get it, right? And the good thing about my dad, he's a Cuban immigrant, not educated, but the best piece of advice that he ever gave me and my brother.

2:51:23was a maximum. He's like, don't have fast things, right? So he does it in like a blue collar, he's a truck driver, or like, you know, that kind of thing, where he's like, he prized himself on the fact that like, like, he'll work 72 hours straight, right? But he never made a lot of money, never had an education, like his mom wasn't good, and whatever. And they had to skate casters, Cuba. My dad was born in Cuba. Wow. So it's like, imagine like, I talked about this on, because you know, Patrick's at the end of every investment, the best episode he said. Yeah, he's like, what's the nicest thing ever did to you, or for you, did to you. For you. And I was like, man, something that it was a decision that happened way before I was born. And my grandfather is in Cuba in 1959.

2:52:08And he, again, not an educated man, he worked as a butcher and worked in a factory that made shoes. He's married and he's got a baby. That baby is my dad. And Castro comes to power. And he doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't speak English. And yet he had some kind of insight that I need to get out of here, right? And he goes to a country, picks up, loses everything, not that you had a lot anyways. Goes to a country knows nobody doesn't speak a language. When I sat down, the first thing me and Sam Zell talked about, and I think helped bond us, that's the point where at the end he said he liked my energy and everything, but so hopefully like me, I don't know, was in his story, I was like, because I had obviously read his autobiography, and one of the first things me and Sam talked about was, Sam, I understand and empathize with their story because Sam's story is his dad being Jewish.

2:53:04Getting the last train out of Poland before the Nazis bomb it literally the last train out 18 members of his family his dad went around to saying we gotta get out of here. This is not good. So I know we're gonna stay they're all dead Sam Sam's dad and his mom have a daughter they get to America his mom's pregnant Sam is born in America And so in that book Sam's dad's always telling him you don't understand how lucky you are to be born here And I was like, I understand that mentality because I grew up meeting, Cubans have this thing called Nutriwenna, which is, they don't celebrate, my wife's coming on me, so they, I married into a Colombian family, they did this too. They don't celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day. They do it the night before. It's a Christmas Eve. And so I grew up, you know, as far as long as I can remember, I was like, 8, 7, 10, 10 years old, meeting people that came over on rafts. And you would see these things, I've seen these in person.

2:54:00All right, it's just like the rafts. Think about how great, how bad it has to be. It's like 50 miles, right? 90 miles, right? I'm gonna go over to the study of the University of Miami. You just sit on this. 90 miles. You're, you're a parent. Hopefully, you might be a parent one day. Like, you love your kids. Way more than you love yourself. Like, yeah. There's people that came hundreds of thousands of people went to the edge of the island and put their kids on a raft just to hopes that they get to America.

2:54:30And so the problem is, is like, you don't make the announcement to the everybody. He's like, hey, tomorrow, we're leaving on a raft, could you get caught? You know, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right,

2:54:58was one of the ones that escaped. He went on a, their raft was made out of like a truck tire. Like, you know, like, think of like a, size of like a bulldozer tire, right? Wow. It's his uncle and two 14 year old boys. They get off path, right? They run out, their water wind up being like contaminated. So you can't drink, you'll die. How do they propel it anyway? Like, how do you make sure it gets to Florida? So you have like, they somehow have ores and some have like, like, see that blanket over there? Like you try to make a, A sail out of like a blanket or something. Some of these are unbelievably in the level of ingenuity. For uneducated, they don't have the internet. It's an unbelievable. And so in his case, I know they had ores, I think they had a sail. They get close enough to the Bahamas. They haven't drink water for like three or four days. A pigeon lands on the ore. They wind up killing the pigeon, opening it apart and drinking the blood.

2:55:55That's the only thing that's saved. And so now he gets to America. Then she gets to go from the Bahamas to America. Now his son makes millions of millions of dollars, as a professional fighter, celebrity, and all this other stuff. So anyways, long story short, my dad's still alive, my mom passed away. But I really think my dad, he did not baby me at all.

2:56:22figure out how to get a job. And so I worked at, back then, this is something that Paul Graham made the point of, right? He's like, dude, when I was a kid, the only jobs available are you like get a scoop ice cream or something. And like, you've probably met them. I met some 17 year old founders, a bunch of founders where you talk to them, they're on their second company. I'm like, what?

2:56:41They're like, oh yeah, when I was like 9th grade, I like did this like Gmail plugin or like, I mean, I had this staff tool. Yeah, I mean, $40,000 a month. And like my music is so much money. My parents let me drop out of high school so I can do this business. I'm like, I worked at a car wash, dude. I made $4.65 an hour, you know? So anyways, long story short, I would go to school year round, right? Because I'd figured this out where it's like, oh, Most people in summer school, they were forced to, I went to public school and all that, right? And so people would go to public school and they would be forced to because you failed something else. But if you elected to do that in six weeks, you get a full semester's credit and there's two, six weeks to make like mini-mesters. So I always, even when I was in college, I did this. I would go to school year around, right? And so in high school, I went to school so much that by the time I got to my last year as a high school, I was in this program called OJT, which is on the job training. So instead of having six periods, you leave after the fourth period.

2:57:38And you'd have to have a job, and you'd get two other credits. Your employer would have to fill out paperwork because David cleaning cars. And like, oh, there's a baby that came in and threw up. He did a good job with that. I was disgusting. But the benefit of that was being able to work full time. Make enough money where I could buy. I bought a new car with my own money, all that and other stuff.

2:58:04And so like then I realized like oh like I think I was making like $400 or $500 a week in high school which is freaking really yeah, this is like late 90s early 2000s And then I was got promoted to being a detailer and that's like you have client list and then you start to film relationships and it's like every other business like right and they're like hey I love what you do would you do this at my house or would you do it on my boat that you don't do or like whatever and so my first business was just detailing cars and boats and taking out other stuff, where I was like, okay, I spent an hour waxing this guy's car. I might make 20 bucks. I do it at his house. I make $150. And so I've always just had that, and again, this is not like, this is the story you guys read in the books and the history. It's like, there's no master plan here. It's like, hey, I need to make money. See opportunity. All of my other friends were working at McDonald's Chick-fil-A, where you just said something like, they cap.

2:59:01Yep. I never had a kept upside. Right. And then so I did all these other businesses I started in college because I thought it was going to be a lawyer. And this is so silly because everybody, one of my friends that are lawyers hated, I dodged a bullet there. Well, this is, that's the dream, like the immigrant dream is for like the kids to become lawyers and doctors. Well, my parents, not my parents. So my parents never said the word college to me once. Not one time because they're both high school dropouts. So like, They never like I was one of the only kids in high school never have a curfew like my parents knew I was independent and left me they gave that's the best thing to get is like take care of yourself. Yeah, they thought my mom told me she's like I just thought you were a lot smarter than everybody else in our family So the like we trusted you right this is also driven too, but she Because you have to stand like being smart in this family is not like being like the bar is low in the sense that like

2:59:58They're both coming from multiple generations of people that did not prioritize education or self-improvement. So that's why I'm so ferocious in this, because I didn't see that. And so this demonstrated when my mom was dying of cancer. So Hippo has this thing where they're not going to share paperwork or information unless it gets permission from the person. And my mom could choose whoever she wanted to. She could have chose her husband.

3:00:24Right, they had a bad relationship. They should have got divorced and remarry. They should have stayed divorced, but whatever. And you see that with actions. We said actions express priority. She's like, we're in there. And she's like, who do you want to paperwork? Who do you want to communicate? She's like, David, not her other kids, not her husband, not her sister. And she trusted me implicitly. And so I essentially like, they never met at college. So I just kept this routine. I was like, people are like, oh, um, they're like, what do you want to do for a living? And like, I remember watching

3:00:54TV when I was younger. I was like, well, I want to be rich. And you think when you're younger, you know anything, like, who's rich on TV? Like, I liked Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I was like, you'd be a judge or a doctor. And I was like, oh, I can't see blood. Like, that freaks me out. So that ain't going to be an attorney. Okay. So I went to school and I worked full time and I was trying to do hustle anything I could do. And so the idea was like, okay, I'm just going to go to undergrad for business because I'm interested in business anyways. But I'm only doing that till I get, till I go to law school.

3:01:22Right? And this point of the story was not to go on this deviation, but I was in the entrepreneurship program, the pilot one. Right? Because I was already interested in trying to make money in any way possible. And this is how bad the entrepreneurship was. And this is why I'm kind of jealous of these young kids, where now you actually have an entrepreneurship industry and there's stuff you could learn from. The head, the main, what is it called? Like the main subject, entrepreneurship 101, right? The curriculum. Yeah, but there's all these others.

3:01:52classes, but entrepreneurship 101 is run the teacher, right? What is her credentials? Her dad started an AC company in Florida. You're gonna make a lot of money. Yeah, that's a good one. And he died on the job because he got electrocuted to death. Oh God. And she inherited the company and then she ran it. And so she's the teacher. And so like the curriculum is terrible. It was terrible. The best thing and this relates to what all we do for a living now, which I could have never predicted is there was a guy that this is kind of like Charlie Munger says you should read, if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business, read Les Schwab's autobiography, which I did, because Charlie told me to, did it like, episode long time ago. And he's like, this guy made a ton of money in a really hard business, which is like tires and like, it all changes and stuff like that. And so the guy was coming into the class, he was going to donate like three or five million dollars to have a building name after him. And he had one pre-requisite, he goes, I want to talk to your entrepreneurship students before I give you this money.

3:02:50and I learned more in one hour from that dude than I did in two years on entrepreneurship because he would talk for like 20 minutes and he's like open up to questions. Yeah. And I lit him up with question after question after question and I remember to this day just like the simple way this is like, you know, he was building his business in the probably the 80s and 90s and he's like, how did you know where to expand? And he's like, we would pull the car registration data from the DMVs, right? And we would know how many car owners there were in this specific radius. And we'd have to hit like, let's say we need 40,000 car owners in a three mile radius. There's, are there any other stores? Put a store right there and they did that over and over and over and over again. Yeah. And so like he had ideas like that and just like, again, you learn through experience. Like that guy could teach us way more because he actually did this compared to. Yeah. I think probably all three of us have a like unintended impact of

3:03:48college entrepreneurship programs on us. I have a minor in entrepreneurship. Yeah, really? Yeah, from Ohio State. Similarly, only everyone to public school. Yeah. I was a little different. I was really into computers. When I was 10, my dad and I found a PC on the side of the road and he was like, do you want to install Linux? And I was like, what's Linux? I'm like, Tommy, use a terminal. I was really lucky that my dad is an engineer. And so I went to college for computer science. But you'll wait for me back up.

3:04:17You found a PC on the side of the road. I'm willing to bet that thing is just old. He's like, I, because we're looking at the, you know, you're like, at that point, you could open computers. So we're like, looking at it, he kind of like, pokes it apart, looks and says, like, go all the pieces. Like, this is just an old computer. That's throwing away. That's amazing. All right, keep going. So you majored in computer science? Yeah. But I like went in thinking like I want to have some kind of like, I want to do business and tech, but I didn't know what that meant. And so I found my way to a club called the Business Builders Club and they were like, oh, there's like a real, like an actual minor that you can take. And so sort of like through student organizations found my way to actually doing something in the College of Business, which like,

3:05:05I go back and forth on whether undergraduate business stuff is useful, because on the one hand, I can play the movie. You're not wearing all your shoes. It's all about people. You guys have all that amazing stuff. We just came back to my bachelor party and half the crew is the business builder's club Ohio State friends that I made there. The content sucks, but the relationships are everything. The relationship, that's what you do. The stuff you're learning is actually super important, but you don't have the context for why yet. It's like you're working on a DCF model and you're like, I don't...

3:05:33This is useless to me. Or you're like learning about depreciation and emeritization. You're like, this is awful. Because I have nothing, whereas my face is classes were awesome. Like there's labs. Like I can touch and feel the things and understand mechanical advantage and how the free body diagram works. But in these business concepts, they're like super abstract. And they weren't useful to me then. But like I went and took a Coursera class last year or two years ago on accounting. Because I was just like, okay, like I want to actually understand accounting. In part, because we talk about it on acquired all the time, and David understands the stuff more than I do, and I keep it. But it's so much more useful when you understand where the rubber meets the road in the real world. It would just be beneficial, just go out and try to sell something. Get real-world experience. What did Charlie just rewrite? You guys read the towel of Charlie Munger?

3:06:26No. I've heard it's good. I can't believe it. You've got to look at it for the episode or not. I might have. I own the hardcover, the Kindle, and the audiobook. That should tell you, like, it's worth it. By the way, I own the audiobook and the Kindle of almost every book that I own. Including the hardcover too? No. I don't know. You're not a hardcover person. Oh, because you can also switch. Yep. That's the Whisper Sink or whatever it's called. And all the time, I actually hate that they sink and they, because it, like, My common workflow in doing acquired research is I listen to the book and then I'll take some notes and apple notes of like half quotes where I'm like I gotta look this up later and then I go back in the Kindle and I search for the actual quote and like pull out the data to be able to use it in the episodes.

3:07:10I think listening to the audiobook before reading the book is very helpful. It gives you a basic overview. It's almost like reading a Wikipedia page before you read the biography. It's not enough detail, but like you have, okay, it's like watching a movie for the second or third time, you know how it ends, and it gives you pick up on things you missed the first time. In the tale of Charlie Munger, though, Charlie was talking about this where he's just like, I learned about business at the Buffett grocery store, right, from the cash register. It's like, because that money is the lifeblood of all, I think the quote in the book is like, money's a lifeblood of all businesses, and that's where the cash was. That's where the money was at this point.

3:07:40And it's like you just learn, and he says, like you learn the importance of like showing up one time. How to work with people you don't like. Like how to service it, like take care of your customers. Like these are things that are all like universally applicable. That there is another form of education. Like that's the biggest the key of experience and why it's so important. It's the most valuable form of education because it's education of life. Like I love to read. Like more than almost anybody else. Like you guys obviously love to read.

3:08:09There's just so much things you can't learn from books. So this is like, it's not enough. David, what was your college entrepreneurship? Well, it's funny. It's more thematic than an actual impact, but I can remember I've talked about this before. Princeton had, at then, just one entrepreneurship class. It was like one class in the Department of Electrical Engineering. I was not an electrical engineer, but people knew about this because like, oh, this is cool. Right. So senior year, I had already...

3:08:34The recruiting happened in the fall, so I was already like had my job, investment banking job that was going to go do. Yeah, a whole other kind of worms. But I was like, oh, you know, I'll take this class. It's supposed to be good. I'm going to go work on Wall Street. I should learn about high-tech entrepreneurship. It wasn't the name of the class. And it was like all, you know, guest lecture. It was case method. Case method. And Ed Shal, the professor would have guests come in.

3:09:01One of the guests, either the last or like the second or last class, was Tim Ferris. What? Before he published the four-hour work. No way. He gave, he asked Buffett a question, and he asked if he didn't guess what was Tim. And this is what, oh he totally hustled this. He traded on that name for years before he made it as Tim Ferris. Because he just went in for one class. It was one class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one day of...

3:09:28one course and that was like this case study class and I think he had taken the class when he was a Princeton and the professor liked him and kind of took a shine to it. So you and I are then our guest lecturers at Columbia. Oh yeah totally. Yeah. Oh yeah. We're just like. So he came in and so he was working on the book but it was like done but like was about to get published and so he came in and the whole like class was like basically.

3:09:53telling his story and then, like, chilling the book. I remember in my notes, like, for the class, I titled them, I haven't still somewhere on an own computer. The title was Supplement Guy. Do what you love. Do what you love. Do what you love. Do what you love. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And then I had afterwards, uh, talking about missed opportunities. He is. He was, he was, like, he's older than me, but he's not that much older. He's not only been out for a couple years. So, class ends and he was like, Hey guys, anybody want to hang out? I'm gonna go hang at terrorists. If you want to come, Princeton has eating clubs instead of they do a fraternities, but one of them is terrorists and Jenny was actually in terrorists. Basically, I'm gonna go hang out and have a good time with anybody who wants to come along and I was like, yeah. Now I'll see you on the podcast a second later. I love how this just was uncovered in random conversation, right? It was just like computer science.

3:10:50investment banking, law, no comment denominator. I use theater more than I use computer science. The idea of venture capitalists and podcasters, right? I went and my daughter asked me to go speak at career day. Oh, hell yeah. And this is last year so she would have been, she would have had this thing. She would have had a fourth grade, right? I can't wait. And so she's like, well daddy, you have a weird job.

3:11:20Like when you come in, yeah, it's like when you come in and like give a talk and so you mentioned earlier like entrepreneurs are like odd ducks and like crazy people They don't like they don't like they see rules. It's like oh, that's just words are down on paper like I'll just do my own thing So I show up and I'll see how I'll do anything for you like whatever you want And so I show up and that there's two to each class at the school she has as two teachers, right? And so they're like, oh, well, we didn't hi mr. Center. We didn't get your email Did you get like did you bring like a thumb drive? I'm like

3:11:49What was I supposed to email him? Why would I have a thumb drive? And they're like, you're a PowerPoint presentation. And I go, have you ever made a PowerPoint presentation? Never. And I go, no, but I go, they're nine. Why would I make a PowerPoint presentation? And so I go there. And I was like, I was like, listen, I'm fine. Like, I went, like, I got this. Like, they're like, you're gonna wing it. They didn't use the word wing it, but I forgot what it was. So, you're like, no, really? I got this. I show up, right? And they're all like sitting on the floor.

3:12:15And he's like 39 year olds. Like you're like stand up. No, no, no, no. And so I want to see some energy. And I was like, I talk for two minutes, right? I have 30 minutes slot. I go, I talk for two minutes. I was like, listen, um, don't listen to your parents. Don't listen to your teachers. I go follow whatever you're intensely. I just came Charlie Mungers. What are you interested in?

3:12:38Keep following that. Even if it doesn't, there's not an obvious career path. And I used to where I go. It's highly likely that the job that you're going to have has not yet been invented. I was like, there was no such thing as a podcaster. Like I couldn't go to school for podcast engineers. Or whatever. So that was like the two minutes somewhere and I said a little bit more than that. I go, okay, now what questions do you have for me? And so I spent the next 28 minutes. I told them the importance of reading.

3:13:04I was like, listen, your friends are going to be stupid apps. I was like, you're going to have no attention span, learn how to read and read whatever you're interested in. Um, you know, like your daughter's probably like, oh my god. So I'm telling you the funny thing. So then 28 minutes, and then they're telling me about books they love. They're like, oh, I like Harry Potter and I like this and I like travel. And we had like the greatest time, right? So I come back, I see, there's like nine in the morning, I leave. Um, and I, my daughter gets out, you know, later on in the day, and she goes, daddy.

3:13:33Thank you very much. My friends thought your talk was the best. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I'm glad they liked it. I go, well, let me ask you a question. Who came after me? And they're like, oh, is it, you know, John's mom or something? And I was like, oh, what does John's mom do? She's like, I go, well, first of all, she's shooting a PowerPoint. She goes, yes, everybody did a PowerPoint. And I go, what does John's mom do? She goes, oh, she's a corporate attorney. I'm like, yeah.

3:13:57They're nine years old, and you know? And also, that's like the alternate future for you. Like it was like, you would have had a power play. It was like, Bizarro David, going after you. I mean, interesting like what you would, yeah, but then again, I was living in Florida and like the law there is not a lot, like you'd have to move to like DC, like the law there is like insurance, like.

3:14:19So I met the San Francisco airport, right, which is way nicer than Miami International Airport, by the way. It's like, I've never been to Miami. Oh, it's like third world, man. It's real. Like the ceiling is low. They have the new, they built like this new part, but SFO was way nicer than mine. And I see this billboard of, it says, the worlds are the America's largest personal injury attorney.

3:14:40That guy was in Orlando. I was going to school in Orlando at the time. His name is John Morgan. He was famous back then. And now he has. So, like, that, I would probably work for him. Like, I'm like chasing ambulances or whatever. 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, Yeah, I just thought it was funny. I was like, you also have to think independently. They're nine years old. Like, they don't want to sit through. I don't even want to sit to a PowerPoint. Nobody wants to sit through a PowerPoint. No, you should try to, like, I would have just brought a video game console or something. I was like, that's my video. You know, maybe you could just say, Blake and Mitch. Blake Robinson, Mitch Lasky made the point in one of their game craft episodes I never even thought of. They're like, you know, hard it is.

3:15:19How few pure software companies are that do over the sell over a billion dollars a year in software. And how many game companies, they said on the podcast like, there's so many video game companies that make so much money. Yeah. I think I say this bigger than the video game and she's bigger than music movies and books combined or whatever. Has been since the 90s. Yeah, that's the, that was the interesting thing we uncovered on the Nintendo episode. Is that stat gets bantied around bantered, bandied?

3:15:47Bandit around a lot right now, which is, it's very interesting because like the video game market has done this, but the video game market has basically always been larger than TV and movies combined, but has never gotten attention or like been thought of. It's one of the secrets that's been out there for 30 years that people have paid attention to. Yeah. All right. I'm afraid of these memory cards filling up. This has been wonderful. Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. Listeners, thank you.

3:16:15We almost never say this, but I think we gotta do this again. Let's do it again. I'll be here next week. Thanks, guys. We'll see you next time. All right, bye. All right, listeners. Now 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...

3:16:43crazy 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,

3:17:22go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. Well, listeners, thank you for going on the journey with us with David. We would love your feedback on the session's format as we sort of continue to refine it. It's obviously very different than our LVMH and Nintendo style episodes and getting your thoughts on how we can continue to improve it would be hugely helpful. Also go check out the founders podcast search founders in any podcast player.

3:17:47Also, if you want to go deeper, you can become an acquired LP to come closer into the acquired kitchen. We have bi-monthly Zoom calls, and we just announced that we will be asking our LPs to help us pick future episodes, so you can join at acquired.fm slash LP. You should subscribe to our second show, ACQ2, formerly the LP show, for expert interviews with founders and investors, just search ACQ2 all one word in any podcast player.

3:18:16Also, join us in the Slack, discuss this episode and all the others. There's now over 15,000 smart, thoughtful kind members at acquired.fm slash Slack. It's pretty cool. I think David that represents only like five to 10% of those of you out there who listen every month. It's funny. I literally texted Ben yesterday and I was listening to the Nintendo episode that we just released. The way we talk about the acquired Slack, it kind of makes it sound like only 15,000 people listen.

3:18:44to acquired. No, that is 5% of the people that listen to acquired. Yeah, all the rest of you come join us in the Slack acquired.fm slash Slack. I don't know. It's just a great way for us to get a better pulse on all of you who you are and what you like or don't like or want us to improve about the show. So that's all we got listeners. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.