10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

Happy 10 years. Happy 10-year anniversary, Ben. It's crazy it's been 10 years. I know. Here we are. Brought you down here to Silicon Valley to... record our 10-year anniversary holiday special here. I wanted a special place. Yeah, what are we doing? You keep like teeing up. Like, oh, just come down. Oh, we'll just record it here. And like, clearly we're not at your house.

I was actually thinking we should try and find the Silicon Valley house, the Ehrlich Bachmann Aviato. Aviato. Aviato. Aviato. Now, the reason I brought you down here is I booked us... A very special place to record is actually right over here. It's a house. Is this the Google house? It's the house. Where they had their first office in the garage? This is Google's first office right here. They gave it to us for the day. Like we can do our holiday special in it? Come on in.

Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?

Welcome to the fall 2025 season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Well, listeners... Today we're going to do something very different than our holiday specials of years past. We've received a bunch of requests over the years to do an Acquired episode on Acquired itself.

and to unpack why Acquired worked when 99% of podcasts do not. But it's always felt a little bit strange to me, and we've always shied away from analyzing our own company. Yep. But then this year, we turned 10 years old and thought, well... maybe it's time for something. At least a sort of pause and reflection to shout out the Coca-Cola episode on our journey to this point and why Acquired has worked. And so we thought, well, if we're going to do something...

we should bring someone in to do it with us. And we'd want someone who is great at dissecting the mechanics behind teams or companies, someone who distills complexity into simplicity, someone who himself knows how to tell a great story. And there was really only one choice. Michael Lewis. Author of Moneyball, Liar's Poker, The Blind Side, The Undoing Project, Going Infinite, on and on and on. And of course, host of his own podcast, Against the Rules, and...

Ben, you and I have looked up to Michael forever, so this was really special. Yes. And then, of course, there's the venue. We thought it'd be a fitting way to cap off the year of our three-part Google series to record... in the literal garage where that nearly $4 trillion company got started. Yes, indeed.

Well, listeners, if you want to know every time an episode drops, vote on future episode topics and get corrections on past episodes, check out our email list at acquired.fm slash email. And that email list just got a whole lot better with our first overhaul in Five years? So you'll now get episode summaries, our big takeaways, and exclusive photos from our research process. That's acquired.fm slash email. Chat about this episode with us and the whole Acquired community in Slack.

Acquired.fm slash Slack. And if you want more Acquired, check out our interview show, ACQ2. Our last episode was with Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of the New York Times Dealbook, host of CNBC's Squawk Box, and author of 1929. That's ACQ2 and any podcast player. And before we dive in, we want to briefly thank our presenting partner, JPMorgan Payments.

Yes, just like how we say every company has a story, every company's story is powered by payments, and JPMorgan Payments is a part of so many of their journeys from seed to IPO and beyond. So with that...

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. With that, onto our conversation with Michael Lewis. Well, Michael, thank you for joining us. Total pleasure.

We have a little something since this is our 10-year anniversary that we're celebrating that we need to do before we start. Okay. So you went to Princeton. I went to Princeton. Yep. My senior thesis would become impactful for acquired. I was a French literature major. I wrote my thesis on the history of Dom Perignon.

The marketing history of Shakespeare. Very serious college student David Rosenthal. Very serious college student. A little different than yours. They let you do that? They somehow iconed... the French department, into letting me do this. And what, probably 12, 13 years later, we made our LVMH episode, and it was a big moment for a choir. Moet and Chandon has just released the 2015... Vintage from Dom Perignon. 2015 is the year we started. So I thought you were going to say.

the effect that the Princeton thesis had on Acquired. I didn't think it was as specific as that. But I feel like when I'm listening to your episodes, I'm listening to someone who's worked for Up... a thesis. It is thesis-like.

immersion in the subject. Well, I can tell you our episodes are much better than my actual thesis was. But that is exactly how it feels. But that is the process we go through. Yeah. And claiming for finals the night before. There's a lot of like academic feelings that happen as we get close to recording.

day. So it's your show, and I don't want to take it over. But I wanted to start by saying that I didn't discover it until this year, in July. I was at Google Camp. which is kind of a good way to discover acquired. We should talk about where we are now, too. And we are sitting in the Google... A garage where— Yes. I mean, I don't know exactly— This was— I'm not sure exactly what happened in the Google garage. So this was the office. It's a nice idea. Like, literally—

Susan Wojcicki lived here. She had, I think, just bought the house. This was her house. She had just bought the house. And was looking to sublet part of it? Yeah. Like, just make some extra money on other people using the house? And posted a bulletin notice on the Stanford campus. That there was space available here. And so Larry and Sergey's first desks when they got kicked out of Stanford's offices were right there. Right here. All right. I actually think this actual door desk sawhorse is.

the one that they were using because Google pulled it out of storage for us. So I'm at this camp with a lot of kind of well-known people and a prominent CEO. Thank you. Says to me, have you listened to Acquired? And I didn't know what he was talking about. And I went and listened. I can't remember what I listened to first. I think it might have been the Morris Chang episode.

But I had about eight different reactions to it, all positive. And I thought, it's kind of amazing, which you all are doing. So then from July until now, I've listened to maybe 10 of the episodes, which is a lot of our listening time. The first thing that struck me, could not believe you were getting away with a four-hour podcast.

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

I think we're doing this as a 10th anniversary sort of celebration. Please, yeah. I'm honored, and I feel kind of like I'm a little out of my depth here because I'm just a new listener, and I listen to all of it. I'm hardly the world's authority on your... podcast, and I didn't prepare at all except to listen to it, except I did one thing, and that was I went back and listened to your very first house. Oh, God. Oh, wow. Just to compare.

Be kind, please. It is shocking how different it is from where you started, from where you have, you probably haven't ended up, but where you are now. So I'm going to start by this 10-year journey. I think I can see some things you've learned. But I want to know what you think you've learned. Let's do the 10 lessons from the 10-year journey. Do you have yours crystallized? Because I don't want to taint you. No, no, no. It's actually one big thing.

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

Yes. And you're going to be colleagues at a VC firm? Yep. I'll come back to that. I want to talk a little bit about you as investors, but we'll come back to that. Oh, boy. And how that's different from being a podcaster. point do you decide that, oh, there's a kind of odd chemistry here? We really just wanted to spend more time together. It was one of these things where... You're both straight.

Yeah. It's not a romantic relationship. We like to say that we each have two spouses. We have our actual romantic spouses that we have families with, and then we have each other. David and I shared a bank account before my wife and I shared a bank account. Are either of your spouses threatened by the relationship? No. Just from a sheer time perspective. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. My spouse loves it because...

She doesn't actually want to spend that much time with me. She likes that, like, you know, I used to, I used to, all the stuff we do on Acquired, I used to just talk at her. And she wasn't interested. That is true. And now she loves it because I get to talk to, you know. Although she gets the rough draft. Like my wife won't listen to episodes because she's like, I've already heard four versions of the episode. And unfortunately I heard like.

for worse versions. And because I endure that and give you feedback, the listener actually gets the better version. Right. So you meet and there's a chemistry. Yeah. Explain that chemistry. What is it that you, when you...

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

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

Fraud in a lot of ways as event like I repressed this deep down like But if I'm honest with myself, I think I felt like a fraud as a VC because I've never I went to Princeton. I was a French literature major. I worked on Wall Street. I worked briefly at the Wall Street Journal, and then I became a venture capitalist. I had no qualification to— Have you ever coded or you ever done anything? I mean, I took some CS classes in college, but, like, I'd never—

built anything. And so I was like, Ben had built all these things. You built the this for that website. You built so many products. You had products that millions of people used. And I was like, I'm just masquerading here. So you can see that Ben knew stuff. It was exciting for you to know about. Yes. Did you feel that David knew stuff? Absolutely. What kind of stuff? Business.

Really? It wasn't French literature. No, no, no. I only found out years into doing Acquired, he was a French Lit major. But that's important, that background. It ended up becoming YouTube. This kind of broad curiosity. about things other than business and technology. I hear it in your program.

I hear it in your podcast. So what I'm thinking of in my head is Kahneman and Tversky. I wrote a book called The Undoing Projects. And you could see two people. And then it got me thinking about collaboration. And I've had... exciting collaborations with people. And the feeling I get is this person is bringing out a better version of me, which is why I asked if your spouses were threatened, because Kahneman and Tversky's spouses were...

Threatens too strong a word, but they were very aware that the relationship that was most important in their lives was with, not with their spouse, but with... I got the sense from The Undoing Project that Kahneman and Tversky's relationship was very intense.

I don't know that I would describe our relationship as— Yeah, no, it was. Argumentative. Yes, it was. And competitive. It was not competitive. Danny Kahneman felt—was always felt at risk of being— dismissed thought the lesser partner um there was a status difference between the two of them right going into it uh everyone in the world thought amos was the smartest person they'd ever met you two didn't have that ever have any of that

Not for me. But you said you felt like a fraud. I think I felt less. There were a lot of things when we started doing Acquired where we were doing this business analysis podcast, but I didn't know finance. Which is funny because you've become more... you know, the keeper of the analysis on Acquired. Yeah. And I'm more the keeper of the story. It's different though than a difference in status. I don't feel that you or I have ever felt we had a difference in status.

The number of fights we've had or real tension we've had is two, three ever in 10 years. It's weirdly- Let's come back to those. Let's get to the lessons. What have you learned? we started thinking about what have we learned from the companies we've covered that we've then applied to Acquired. In particular, Acquired has clearly worked. Why?

Does that why have something to do with the fact that we study the world's best companies? Is there some osmosis that happens from the subject matter bleeding into the property itself? And? So that's our frame. Okay, let's go with that frame. Yes. So the one I was going to start with is the NFL. The product is scarce. 162 baseball games a year. It's called America's Pastime. You pass a lot of time with it.

But with the NFL, because the product is scarce, and then they have very smartly cultivated that and engineered it to be more scarce, more of an event-driven sport. That's made all the difference. And to me, what we do is insane for the podcasting industry. It's completely insane. We release, for the last three years, we've released 12 episodes.

Next year, we're going to do eight. Eight episodes for the whole year. Now, as a hobbyist podcaster, what I get told is you have to be on all the time. Yep. And I can't do it, and so I'm not going to do it. Podcasting is like you're...

second or third thing that you do, right? And you make more episodes, I think, per year than we do. That's correct. But they're just, you know, except for the scripted ones, which I do throw myself into, it really is. I do no preparation, and it is a conversation. And I don't do very much of those. The scripted ones, I do. do put time into. But it's a different sort of thing than what you're doing. It tends to be a very narrow little story that I'm telling. You didn't start out, though.

We used to make 26 episodes a year. They were 40 minutes long to an hour 20. And so how do you go from that to realizing, and did you really learn it from the NFL, or did you just do it? We were starting to do it, and then we covered the NFL, and we were like, aha. This is what we're doing. Most of these things are actually, I think, our confirmation bias. We get some inkling that we should continue to go in this direction. In calling out Hermes, it's because I think...

Quality and scarcity have become an important part of Acquired. And in some ways, we learned that from Hermes, but... We covered Hermes last year. I think we found our way to that probably four-ish years ago, maybe five years ago, where we used to feel like we were bad at podcasting because we couldn't make very many and because we didn't have a whole...

production team and we didn't have professional ad sales people and we didn't have- We weren't full-time for a long time. Yeah. And at some point, we kind of looked at each other and we're like, maybe if we just admit that we are heavily constrained-

and then try to just lean into that constraint in the way that Hermes leans into every single Birkin bag must be handmade by one artisan, and we're going to build a business model around that. And it turns out to be a great business. We sort of thought... Every episode is going to be entirely handcrafted by us. All the research, all the recording. We work with this amazing...

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

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

corporate acquisitions that worked. Yeah. That worked. Bad idea. Well, it is an idea. It was a starting space. You could easily have started the opposite, the corporate acquisitions that didn't, and you'd have done much more material. Which is what most press at the time was. It was, let's talk about how crappy this acquisition was. It's interesting to me that your first step right from the start is positive. It's like, what worked?

Not what didn't work, it's what worked. That's because we were VCs and I was trying to build companies. The goal was create things that have enough value to get bought or go public. buy things, it's because they're working. So let's try to reverse engineer what works. Understand why things worked. Right. So that's a different starting spot from almost all journalism. Yeah. In fact, if most journalists started there...

They'd be accused of hagiography of that. But because of where you're coming from and because you're thinking of this in very practical terms, like why did this work? You do get away with it. It's just. That first episode, you're almost like different people. But I'm going to hold back on what I think you learned because I want to see if you get to it. So what's the third episode that you have learned a lesson from?

I think Berkshire, we learned so many things from. We did this three-part saga on Berkshire Hathaway. God, I have not listened to it, and I am a big investor in Berkshire Hathaway. Good for you. Congratulations. Since when? I bought it right in the middle of the financial crisis. Because I thought, I mean, I had done a take. I mean, it's a little.

Putting it a little strongly. But oddly, I had written a takedown of Warren Buffett on the cover of the New Republic magazine called The Temptation of St. Warren. You can probably dig it off of the way back machine. What was the thesis? The thesis was that... He may have started out being who he says he is, but that he's become this very different thing in the marketplace. His money is not like other people's money.

And you don't have a couple of things Warren Buffett has. And his money is valued differently. But secondly, he was willing to do deals that And the time bothered the hell out of me. And what had happened was. Like the Goldman deal? It was a Solomon Brothers deal that bothered the hell out of me. He kept a CEO in place who I thought should not have been allowed. Were you there? I was there. Yeah, you lived through it. No, I was through it. This is a huge part of our.

It turned me briefly, only briefly actually, cynical about Warren Buffett. And then I came out of it and fell in love with him all over again. But I had written this thing. pissed him off entirely. I mean, like I, it would clearly upset him. And then kind of started watching him for longer. And I thought, you know, I just liked him, just liked him. You couldn't help but like him. So I started to soften.

And when we get to the financial crisis, I thought, well, his money is going to be so valuable here. What is needed is credit. And I think if he stays alive long enough, it might happen again soon. So you invested in Berkshire before the legendary deals coming out of the financial crisis. Yeah. And so I bought a chunk of the A shares, and I've just sat on them. And let me tell you, can I tell you a Warren Buffett story? Yeah. I mean, this is a little talking a little bit out of school, but.

I never met him. I know he was really irritated with me. And then I actually look back at that. It's the only time I've ever looked back at a piece I wrote. And I thought, I overdid that. I went right back to the New Republic and wrote another 5,000-word thing about Warren Buffett, in which I basically apologized for the first piece. I bought these shares in 2008. When I was working on Going Infinite, I was working on the Sam Bankman Freed book.

And I was talking to a publicist, completely unrelated to Warren Buffett. And she said, you know, I also represent Warren. And she said and I told one that I've been talking to you and he said he has a question for you and I said what he says Is he the Michael Lewis who bought shares back in the mansion? No, no, no. Yeah, I swear to God. I swear to God. So this tells you something more about Warren Buffett than me. And he said he bought it like the book value to that.

thing, that ratio. He bought it as cheap as it's ever been. And he says- You made the best trade in the Berkshire stock industry. Then he says, so he's the Michael Lewis who sold some Berkshire Hathaway. two years ago and four years ago and he was like why did he sell

So he's tracking. He's tracking. You're not like Vanguard here. No, no, no. And I said, well, actually, I actually just gave him a charity is what I'd done. I would give him the money away. That's unbelievable. And she said, he'll be relieved. to hear that kind of thing. It's like, so can you imagine, can you imagine that Warren Buffett is taking the time to watch who is coming in and out of the A shares and thinking about it? I mean, I just thought.

He and Munger had that whole thing about don't put your money in an index fund. Put your money in a big bundle of stocks. Put it in a few stocks and watch those stocks like a hawk. It's like they watch that thing in a way that like I just.

In history, has anybody ever done anything like that? I mean, all these people are, they're maniacs. You don't build something like this if you're not a maniac. That's exactly right. So anyway, sorry I just digressed here, but what did you learn from your three episodes of Berkshire Hathaway? Well, as it applies to acquired...

We got really obsessed with the circle of competence, that it's okay to have a giant, too hard pile. There's a bunch of things that I'm not intelligently saying no to. We used to say this all the time. We'd be like, too hard pile, too hard pile. Every phone call we'd have would be like, too hard pile. What is the expression you're using? Warren and Charlie had this thing. There was the yes pile.

the no pile, and then the too hard pile. The too hard pile. I see. Okay. And it's okay to just like... All of technology was a too hard pile. Yeah, it was just all... There might be something in here, but I'm just too hard. It's basically admitting that our opportunity cost is so high, like the things that we say yes to are so awesome that... it's okay to say too hard to just a giant amount of things. And that was really freeing once we started just like...

I mean, truly, on most of our phone calls. So what's an example of something that you, I'm surprised you say this. What's too hard for you? One of the reasons, besides just wanting to meet you, because you've been an inspiration to us forever, that I wanted to meet you a few months ago was Hollywood. we've had lots of opportunities to work with Hollywood. It keeps being too hard. To this point, they have thus always invariably ended up in the too hard pile.

Are you talking about doing episodes in Hollywood? No, no, no, no. Or to become a movie star? Creating TV shows, creating documentaries, adapting these stories into films. They all sound good until we start digging in and then we're like, The time it would take us to think through all the implications of this. We should just make another episode. The answer almost always is we should just make another episode. That's a really intelligent place to land. Because what they will do is.

Woo you with their enthusiasm and then take you down a rabbit hole where you will spend years of your life and Have nothing to show well. This is one of the reasons I want to talk to like

Michael's a very smart guy. You've been very successful. I've gone down the rabbit hole. Yeah. But you love reading books. I've gone down the rabbit hole knowing that it didn't have a whole lot else better to do at the time. It's like between books. It's a palate cleanser. You don't have a between books period. You know. We need to. Yeah.

have that. I don't have the machine you have. You've got an assembly line going. And it's a compounding asset. I mean, this is the craziest, craziest thing about podcasting and like a giant amount of why this has worked for us is we do... a lot of work that looks a lot like the research and the writing of a book. But when we make our book and we release it to the world, people click subscribe. And so when we release the next one, those same people go listen.

Almost guaranteed. We're always growing our base. Podcasting, being an author. There's loose compounding elements to it, but there's not a literal way to subscribe. Not nearly what I thought when I got into the business of writing books. I thought about this a little bit. So you're right. But you've probably done it better than any other. You're one of the few people who probably does have such a brand.

I'm going to move around America to the various arenas of ambition. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, movie business, sports, the various things. And I'll naturally attract the audience that is interested in that arena. Yep. And then I'll drag them along to the others. And it hasn't really happened that way. Even for you? Not really. Not really. The books have a kind of...

Market and it's a big market biggish market, but it doesn't I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me I feel like each each book feels like another startup and then I've got to go out and make it happen Almost as if I've not written one. Moneyball audience is not necessarily coming to Fifth Risk. Correct. Exactly. And the audiences end up just being different. So it's just the way it is. But that's not true with yours. That's not true for acquired. So every time.

If you were to take time off to go do something in Hollywood, you'd be abandoning this glorious network. The opportunity cost is so high of spending a month not making an Acquired episode because when we publish an episode of Acquired, the base does come with us. I mean, not all of it, but like, you know, we make epic systems about healthcare and all the people who... listen to LVMH are now learning how doctor's office IT works. Right. So podcasts are unique in that it does have that-

true subscriber base. But unlike anything else where you click subscribe, there's not an algorithmic platform that disintermediates you. I mean, you think YouTube or Twitter or any of these. When someone clicks follow or subscribe, they're like...

It's like signal in the algorithm, but it's not guaranteed. But like you subscribe in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and those people are actually subscribed and they're going to get the next episode. Right. And they learn to trust you. Yeah. They learn to trust you that if you're interested, they'll be interested.

In fact, what they're buying into is not the subject, but your interest in the subject. Yes, and I am terrified of betraying that trust. Anytime we make an episode, I think of it as a churn opportunity. If we put this in the feed, if we don't... live up to the expectations that our listeners have, we will burn them and they will leave us forever. In the why does acquired work framework, there's a strong element of terror of why it works.

Constantly terrified every time we make an episode. Every minute is a turn opportunity. Are we letting people down? All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our presenting partner, JPMorgan Payments. And we want to tell you about something pretty cool that we just did with them last week, which was a big live show in Las Vegas together. Acquired residency in Las Vegas, baby. No, no, no.

But what we did do is we took the stage at the beautiful Venetian Theater at AWS reInvent. We did four really just incredible interviews with the CEOs of Netflix, Perplexity. AWS, and JPMorgan payments. And I will say, Ben, it was extra special in retrospect. We were talking with Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix, and asking him how Netflix is reshaping Hollywood just a few hours before they announced.

the Warner Brothers acquisition, he has a pretty good poker face given that we were, you know, in Vegas and all that. Yeah, that he does. Also, very funny to interview Matt Garman from AWS at his own event. And I will say one of the most interesting conversations was with Max Newkirchen, the global co-head of JPMorgan Payments. We dug into this question that I've always wondered about.

How did the leading global bank also come to own this technology business that does $18 billion a year in annual revenue on its own, separate from the rest of JPMorgan? Yeah, it's wild. If JPMorgan payments were a standalone company... It would very likely be in the Fortune 500. But it's also part of JPMorgan. Max also told us about JPMcoin, developed by Conexus by JPMorgan, and how it's helped the bank and even Jamie evolve their thinking on how blockchain technology...

is transforming financial infrastructure. Overall, it was a great week. We hung out at JP Morgan's booth on the show floor and got to see their developer portal being demoed live in action to customers too. Yep. So if you want to learn more about these innovations in payments and how JPMorgan can help power your business, head on over to jpmorgan.com slash acquired. Are you more terrified than you were two years ago? Yes.

So the terror is growing. The terror is growing. At some point, it's not going to be a good thing. It's good to be a little on edge. Yes, yeah, yeah. But you don't want to get yourself in a situation where you feel like you have to do the same thing over and over. again because eventually it will get old we'll come back this is we're going to get to the bull in the bear case at the end but it's it's this is so back to your

The lesson that you gleaned from Munger and Buffett, it's okay to have a too hard pile. And you said, and the too hard pile is like doing things in Hollywood. But when I asked the question, did you ever run across this? Have you run across this? Have you ever had a subject? Where you thought, ah, this is just too hard to do. Yeah. Oh, yeah. What would be an example of that? We got pretty far down the line on doing an episode on the Fed. Yeah. And walked away from it. Yep.

So you walked away from it? Yeah. We might come back, but it's been probably three years. There'll be a moment to come back to it. Yeah, I'm glad we didn't do it in the past. Although it's going to violate your rule about doing newsy things. We always try and find things.

Timelessness is like a must. Everything we do must be timeless, the company we're covering. Nothing's timeless. So what do you mean by that? It must be that if you listen to this, an episode that we make five years after we made it. It's 80% as relevant. It will still be an important institution in the world. Right. But like a CNBC article is worth 2% of its original value within a month.

Right. And we want to be worth 80% of our original value five years from now on any given piece of content. So does that mean you're picking institutions that you think will survive? Yes. Yes. Okay, so that's like baseline, bedrock. Because you're in such a volatile land. So much of your stuff is tech.

tech and finance where there's so much churn. Well, yes. This didn't used to be true. You look at anything pre-2020, 2021, we had not yet discovered this principle. But our real bangers are timeless and timely. Doing Google this year was timeless and timely. Right. Having that, however you do it, you're getting to something that I try to get to when I'm picking subjects, but you're doing it in a slightly different way.

What I like, when my socks start to go up and down about a subject, is when I'm really interested in it and nobody else is. That there aren't people, it's not hot. And I found with... I think it's true of basically all my books, maybe a couple exceptions, but a lot of the books. If I'm at a dinner party and someone asks me, what are you working on? And after about 60 seconds, I can see their eyes glaze over.

like why is he interested in that you know it's just not registering with them in any way yeah and i've learned just to not even talk about it because it kills my interest to watch it kill their interest but i know why i'm interested and why it's important And I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important. That's a really good sign.

This is a difference between what you do and what we do. Because I feel like when I think through all your books, they're almost always a story of obscurity that once it becomes a Michael Lewis book. then it becomes a well-known phenomenon. Moneyball, like you are discovering these things that kind of nobody's talking about.

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

but they don't really understand it. There's a secret hiding in plain sight. A secret in hiding in plain sight. People didn't understand Trader Joe's, or people didn't understand Google, we thought. There's three things that make a great Acquired episode. One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that takes a...

hero's journey, where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity. How it starts is this thing that nobody cares about, and then it becomes the most important thing in the world. Two is there's a secret hiding in plain sight. like Costco. I think when the ordinary consumer sees Costco, they're like, oh, I love Costco. But when someone who's listened to an

the acquired episode on Costco thinks about Costco, they see like all the gears turning of the machine. Like we, there has to be some way that we can expose something. And then our third criteria is it has to be important in the world. And I think that's something we picked up later. I mean, we used to do these like...

like little $10 million acquisitions. And now when we're going to go spend two months of our life researching and making that like the acquired episode, it has to be something worthy of the acquired stage. When did that happen?

So I'm a little unclear. Again, getting back to this first episode you did and where you are now and the difference between them. What sort of compelled you or propelled you into the current form of acquired? The decision to make it a business? And the decision to actually live off of what you earned from your podcast. So it had to work commercially. So then you started to make these adjustments. Is that how it works? Yes and no. You're on the right track. I like the Berkshire.

I thought you were going to say partnership as a lesson from it. So we did a series on Sequoia Capital, the venture firm. I went full-time on Acquired in 2020. Five years in, Ben didn't go full-time until January 24, right? Correct. End of 23, beginning of 24. You remained equal partners.

Yes. Oh, it wasn't a business when we started. It was just like, I mean, we didn't make money until our third year. But those three years while you were full-time and you were part-time, it was an equal. Equal. Yes. David was. never once raised the issue. I'm depending on this for my livelihood, and it's my only thing, so I should own more or get a greater share that never once came up. That's great. It never crossed my mind. There we go. That's an important point.

I guess I'm glossing over it because it wouldn't even cross my mind now. Acquired has always been the two of us. It would be profane for it to be anything other than that. It would actually break it. If we ever started trying to figure out like little carve-outs or pieces of the pie for, well, I did this, therefore I should get. It's true collaboration.

You don't recognize there's no boundary where you start and you start. This is where I'm going with the story. It's funny you bring up Sequoia because it's actually benchmarky in that way. Well, it's the quote. It's Leonie's quote. Okay. So end of 22. FTX happens. Interest rates go up. Podcast advertising market falls off a cliff. Our revenue dropped 40%. So we went from this wasn't a business. I went full time.

We made it a business. It worked amazingly well. From 20 to 22. From 20 to 21 into 22. Right. And then our revenue dropped 40% overnight. And that was the moment when. We changed everything. Oh, yeah. So how many episodes are you making in 2021? A lot. Oh, I see. Okay. But it's no longer just corporate acquisitions. We started broadening with the Tesla episode in like 20...

19, maybe 18. And why did you broaden? It was David's idea. And he said, I have this thesis that the audience doesn't listen to us. because they want to hear if a tech acquisition worked or not. They want to hear the story and strategy of the most important technology companies. There you go. We get all this feedback. You kind of foul hooked your audience. Yes. They were listening. What's a foul?

hook. When you go fishing and the fish, you catch the fish by the belly rather than the mouth. It's like the hook gets in some weird way. You didn't actually catch the fish in an honest way. But yet we would get all these emails every time we'd meet people and they'd talk about the show. I'd be like, I love the story. You guys are just gifted storytellers. That's what we'd hear over and over and over again. And eventually we were like, well, we should believe that.

At that moment, I'm going to interject what I noticed. Because in that first episode, you were so unsure of yourselves. You were so choked. Both of you. And you have a background in theater. You were a kid. You were an actor. So you did not come across as people who'd been on stage. It was kind of an effectless. There was a flatness to it. You were afraid to, whether you knew it or not, exhibit a lot of emotion. You didn't realize that one of your secret sauces is emotion.

It's the way you respond to each other when you're presenting material is helping the audience understand how they should feel about it. that you're giving them sometimes very dry facts, like, I don't know, their revenues doubled every year for 100 years straight. And the audience may not know that that's something that's an incredible thing. Right. And the way you respond, even...

Sophisticated listeners are helped. Oh, pay attention now. That's an important thing. I should get excited about that. We used to share... our research such that we were doing research in the early days yeah i think we only had a single

Google Doc. We were just dumping everything into the same shared document. So by the time we would actually go to record the episode, it was stale. Yeah, there's no surprise. There's no disagreement. You can't pretend to be surprised. Or you would be pretending to be surprised. Neither of us are good actors.

We did a little cold intro. This is really important. So you added an improvisational component. Yes. There's another way of putting that. You're added risk. You're taking risks when you don't. know what's going to happen when you come on. 100% agree. Every episode now going into recording day feels like a high wire act because we haven't fully scripted it out. I'm like, I think this is going to come together.

But we had to add this thing called a production meeting about six months ago, one week before recording. we are required to get together and share, agree on an episode structure, but not share any details. Because we got so into this like improvisation thing that some of our episodes would sort of end and you're like,

That had no flow to it. Like you guys had two completely different ideas for the episode. You're not taking risk if it doesn't work sometimes. Yeah. Right? But it's the difference between... I mean, do you know how your heart sinks when someone gets up at a podium with a script, with a speech, and they're going to read their speech?

The audience is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing is going to happen. Like whatever's on that page, that's what's going to happen. It's like pre-announcing the score to the Super Bowl. It's exactly right. And that if you get up and you just start.

talking, the audience also knows, oh my God, this could be a disaster. They don't know where it's going. Just having just some of that has a huge effect on the way the audience responds to the performance. And so that...

That is not in the beginning. Do you remember when we started doing that? Well, I think in the first 10 episodes, first five episodes, we got feedback saying, you guys need to disagree more. But I don't think we... quite realize that we should reveal surprises for each other until five years ago, four years ago. But at some point, we made it an unwritten rule of we have separate documents, we prepare separately. We try to do separate research calls.

That was five years ago, you say? So we start with the corporate acquisitions in 2015. And you two knowing everything that you're going to say when you get on, basically. And it's short. And it's 40 minutes. So... And we're not confident. What you're hearing too is like, I'm supposed to be doing financial analysis as someone who's never been taught how to read a financial statement. Right. And so you're also hearing a little bit of like...

Imposter syndrome. I'm trying. I can't get overenthusiastic because I'm afraid David's going to catch me and be like, you don't know what you're talking about. Okay. So there's an uncertainty about your own abilities. All right. So... First thing that happens is you move off the corporate acquisitions. We went from acquisitions to IPOs. Right. Which was unbelievable timing in 2017-18 when Uber...

Pinterest, Slack. Yeah. There's like eight IPOs in a row of tech companies that everyone had been following. And then it went. really for two years and kind of culminated at the end of 2020 with DoorDash and Airbnb, which we recorded and released one day apart because we wanted to be there on IPO day. Once again, you're constraining yourself unnecessarily. Yeah, exactly.

Eventually, you get to, we're just going to do stories, big success stories, basically. So it was acquisitions, IPOs, then it was- broad histories and strategies of tech companies, and then broad histories and strategies of companies, period. And people. And people with Taylor Swift. Yeah, we frame them as companies. In a funny way, you're still constraining yourself. You feel like you need this frame. Yeah. And you actually...

You're not really living in a frame anymore. Yeah, but constraints are good. Like format, forcing yourself into formats. Sure, but at some point you're going to wake up and say, you know, we should be doing more biography. We should be doing more people. And if that person is not... is not naturally a huge corporation, you may still... I have a feeling there's an evolution to come. There might be. You haven't reached the end point of this.

At what point do you start to feel confident? Like, we know what we're doing. Well, when the crash, you know, crash, when... The reset happened in 2022, 2023. So pretty recently. Crypto bubble, tech stocks plummet. Podcast advertising. Advertising budgets kind of dry up end of 2022. Ben and I looked at each other and it was like, it wasn't even like really a conversation.

We just knew what we had to do. We watched a lot of other people go for easy, secure money now. Try and keep the music playing. Right. And we were just like, party's over. We need to get to work. We need to... focus on only what is enduring and, like, make great, great, great work and stop doing everything else. Like, up until that point, we used to do these things called specials. We would just do...

Not totally random, but essentially random interviews. Undifferentiated topics. Undifferentiated topics. And we said, we need to start making stuff that is only out of one, only we can do, will only be great. We need to stop doing. everything else.

And we did it on the commercial side too. We said, let's go cut deals with our favorite partners. Get rid of most of our sponsors. And try to just figure out when we come out the other side of this that we have the best companies to work with commercially as well as. the most durable stories and brands associated with us because of the editorial side of the house. The JP Morgans of the world, did they join...

before you proved that this new way of doing it? No, we did a year. 2023 was the first year of this. What were those episodes? That was LVMH, that was the NFL, that was Portia, that was the beginning of what we were really doing. And I think that's when we started to build the confidence of like, oh, we can do something that...

Isn't it interesting that you grabbed this kind of commercial attention only after you went really long? Yes. And so then J.P. Morgan came in in January 24. So we did that year of kind of building. this out. You're right. It was only after we'd sort of leaned into acquired as a brand about durability, about compounding over decades and centuries. And I don't think I appreciated that as a person.

in the early days of acquiring, and it certainly wasn't what the show was about. Yeah. Anyway, so I got us a little off track. Your lesson number three was Berkshire Hathaway. And don't be afraid to have a too hard pile. Pick another. We're doing 10 of these. My frame for all this story was Sequoia. So this story is very different than Sequoia. But we interviewed Doug Leone.

who was one of the, I guess, two stores ago of Sequoia. And he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, Every other venture firm out there after the bubble popped were taking mulligan funds. They went to their LPs and they said, you know, there's nothing we can do on this one. We're going to be more disciplined next time. And we said, Absolutely not. We will never lose money for our investors, ever. We will do everything we can possibly do.

to make this fund in the black. And he said, I think the best line anyone's ever said on Acquired, he said, we looked at each other and you could burn cigarettes on our arms and we wouldn't flinch. And they spent the next like five years, they didn't raise another fund. And they just like... went to work with their portfolio. I think they stopped taking fees for a while. They stopped taking fees, yeah.

And got it back, and it ended up being a positive returning fund. This is how you get a reputation. Exactly. And that was that moment for us. And easy to lose one, too. And so they were really sensitive to reputation. Yeah. We'd studied enough businesses by that point where we saw what led to durability. And I think we already were awake to the idea that all that matters is the late years of compounding.

In any given year, you look at a Mag7 company and their profits from the last year are greater than the first 20 years combined or whatever. And I think realizing that... Being around and being respected on the other side of this economic chasm is the key to everything. Who cares about making money this year? It's about 5, 10, 20 years from now, and we have to... have the brand that people want to be a part of then. Right. But you don't know that you are a Mag 7.

It's kind of ridiculous to compare. When you make this decision, you don't know that there's going to be great riches 10 years out or five years out or three years out. Yeah. But really, I think we both so believed. It was like the burn cigarettes on our arm. I think we just both so believed that that was the right thing to do. So something had happened before that. And you had figured out how to do this. You'd figured out how to study a business.

in a way that was really interesting. The first episode's not that interesting. Yeah. There's just not that much I didn't know and thought of. Yeah. You know, whatever. And I don't know much about Pixar. And tell a story. And it's 30 minutes or whatever it is. Now, in that first episode, I think there are more ads than there are you two speaking. And now we pride ourselves on having the lowest ad percent in the entire industry.

So let's just pause here before we get to number four. How do you study a business? Like, what have you learned about how to study a business that's different from when you started out? Explain to the audience what you do to prepare, what you do to learn about a business. Great. He'll read everything ever about them. Yep, you do what I do. Yeah. Whatever's out there. Right.

So you do an AI. That's just the AI part of it. Who started with canonical? Who's done great canonical work in the past? And then what ideas do you have from reading the previous canonical work? And you then say, like, I wonder... If I can find this old YouTube video. And then those YouTube videos mention something else. And the spider web always starts with the pre-existing canonical work. Right. And at what point do you pick up the phone and start calling people who...

maybe have information that isn't on the World Wide Web. Zero ever until about 2023, and now that is the most important way that we can research. But probably about 50%, for me at least, about 50% of the way through, they'll start to get your arms around, then start calling. Right.

You don't call uninformed. No. You call knowing as much as there is to know. And then you start picking the brains of people who might know more and have not said. There's like the obvious people to talk to. Like, you know, for Google, we talk to Sundar or Demis or like, you know, like obvious. Then there's like the less, slightly less obvious. You just say that so casually. Who gets to pick up the phone and talk to the CEO of Google?

About Google. I mean, nobody. We're in a scale economy business. We're in a compounding business. Right? So the fact that you, when do you first realize that you can pick up the phone and call Tim? You're on this first name basis with all these people. When does that start? I think it was our Microsoft series when we talked to Steve, to Bomber. Steve, yeah. Steve.

Past acquired guest. Past acquired guest. I love name dropping in your world. It's so different from the name dropping in like Hollywood. None of your names mean anything in Hollywood. But they mean everything here. And the arenas are so funny because like.

these people aren't, most of them aren't famous, and they're 1,000 to 10,000 times wealthier than these Hollywood stars. It's just different yardsticks. Well, what's funny with Microsoft, so we had some acts, because Ben used to work at Microsoft. Which got us zero access. Well, no, no, no, but you knew something. Here's, in my mind, what sort of happened with this as I'm trying to think about how to answer Michael's question.

Because we had started in Seattle, and you still live in Seattle, and you had worked at Microsoft, when we started our Microsoft journey, we knew some people. Yeah, that's true. We were like, well, let's see if we can talk to Steve. And so then we talked to Steve, and we got his, you know. perspective on things. And it completely changed. Was that a cold email? I think it might have. Is that the first time you do that? First time we reached that high. Okay. Yeah. And you know what?

This is where reputation matters. Steve didn't get back to us for a day, and then we heard back, and he said, I don't listen to podcasts. I haven't listened to your podcasts. I talked to some people. But I talked to some people that I trust, and they say you're great. So let's hop on a call.

And we wouldn't have gotten the response back if— And he gave us probably three hours, four hours in research for— He did. Yeah. And you learned a lot. Yeah. Before we even interviewed him, that was later. Right. But just in research. I see.

And we learned a lot. Did you all have a moment where you thought, oh my God, let's keep doing that. That worked. Yes. Well, yeah. So then we were like, that worked great. Because it kind of worked with Jensen too. So originally when we had the idea in 2021 to do NVIDIA. We thought we were like an interview show then. We thought the interviews would be better than our core storytelling episodes because we hadn't discovered...

that the Ben and David storytelling is our N of 1 product. It is the thing that we uniquely can do that no one else can do. And we thought getting these big gets would be the key to success, which is funny because usually they underperform our standard format.

And so in 2021, we emailed NVIDIA through the warmest connection we could find and said, can we interview Jensen? We're planning to cover the company. Can we interview Jensen? And they said, they gave us a nice party line back. He's very busy. And then in 2022, we did our NVIDIA part one. We did our standard research process. And I think we did our part two. We did part two. And then we got a note from NVIDIA saying, Jensen has listened.

and wants to know who your inside sources are because it's the most correct telling of NVIDIA's story ever. And we were like, oh, this was all just public information. And if you're good at spidering the internet and just digesting it and thinking about...

why he would have said something at this point in time to this audience in these various random university talks and stuff. You can kind of piece together the story. But you're still flying by radar a bit. Yeah, we're totally flying by radar. Yeah, yeah.

But that landed us, they were like, that started the relationship and eventually. Then they're like, he wants to meet you. Do you want to do an interview and follow up on your episodes? But you did an interview episode with him, but it doesn't do as well as your own NVIDIA episode. That one may have been at some particular peak of NVIDIA buzziness, so it was probably our then-largest episode. Well, here's what happens with interviews. But everything makes it look small. They spike.

Yeah, and then they go. And those listeners don't retain the way that. Whereas if you look at our Costco episode, which is now two and a half years old, or LVMH, Hermes, Rolex, like they just. They just keep going. I mean, I'm sure your books are like this. Like, they just keep going. Yeah. Every time I bring out a new book, it has the same effect on the old books that a new podcast has on old podcasts. Yeah, it sells all the backlist. So yes.

All right, so I was asking you how you studied a business. You told me you read everything there is. And you must find when you go and read everything there is. You're very polite and you're very generous about citing your sources and all that. But you must find... My wife is an academic. My wife has a PhD. She was trained as an academic. And she was like, you guys got to cite your sources. Like, what are you doing? Well...

Yeah, but it's also, are you ever surprised by the weakness of the source material? Yeah. Yes. In fact, literally today- We are no longer surprised, but- We got an email. from a company that we recently covered saying, you said a factually incorrect story in the episode, and we know the book that you got it from because it was factually incorrect in that book. We told the author that it was factually incorrect, and it went out anyway. And now...

you're repeating the incorrect story. And we have now an errata section where we published our email list. And I bet you're mainly correcting other people's errors that you just repeated. I mean, sometimes they're ours. Sometimes they're ours. Sometimes we make a financial calculation error or something like that. Right.

So we read all sorts of material, and then we start to make phone calls in 2023. And now the phone calls have become extremely important, and you're making 25 of them in episodes. 40, probably across the series. And do you find that when you're reaching out by phone to all of these people, that they always want to talk to you? No. No, sometimes they don't. But usually when you approach it with a spirit of... I'm just trying to understand it's on background.

Yes, we are going to tell a narrative here. Our biggest question to you is what is most misunderstood and what... incorrect stories are out there where we can set the record straight. And you get lots of great information after that. It's a very good way to go about it. I do the same thing.

When I'm researching something, I don't know what the story is for the longest time. And I'm holding everything very loosely. And almost all the relationships I have with people I'm interviewing is, hey, this is all on background. I just want to try to understand this. Can I hop on a call? with you and they're usually pretty open to it and like I just want to be educated kind of thing and it's a great way to say like what's the stupid thing people say because everybody has an opinion

But it's not a trick. Like this isn't, here's one cool trick to get people to talk to you. I think you mean it earnestly and we mean it earnestly of like, I want to make something. It's good. Yeah. Everybody has different beliefs about the truth, but I want to. I want to make the story that most correctly approximates the average truth that exists from all these different truthy sources. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I don't think of it quite that way, but I do think it's like I want to make something that's good and pure and true and is like the thing that will, once it's said, there's nothing else to say. It's like done. Yeah. I got to imagine for your subjects, and I think a big part of us too, is like...

There's the truthy aspect, which is very, very important, but there's also the, like, this is going to be great. Like, this is going to be really fun. This is going to be entertaining to read, and people are going to consume it.

That's, I think, a huge motivation for our sources. So when you're working on one of these episodes, are you aware of how much fun you're having learning? And have you ever shut something down just because, oh, this isn't that much fun? That's kind of why we killed the Fed. We've definitely killed other episodes. If you can find fun in the Fed, man.

You are doing, you can find funding. You were doing, yeah. We can generate all that enthusiasm for each other's insights about the Fed. We killed Bell Labs because we couldn't find a through line. There were so many different stories and so many different characters. I know.

We might come back to it. Bell Labs, that's one that if I saw it, I'd say, yes, I want to listen to it. It feels like a Michael Lewis book. You could kind of do it as the history of the transistor, but then you miss all these other things like radar and... Yeah. There's so much stuff that came out of . Did you do Xerox PARC? No. No, no, but similar. That's a good. Yeah. It's another one. Right. Yeah. I guess Google still has this spirit where they're doing lots of stuff that .

Maybe you can't identify instantly. Quantum competing. Yeah, the payoff that's right around the corner. It's kind of like, let's just fiddle around, see what we find stuff. But corporate America, I think, just generally does less of that than it used to do a long time ago.

Am I wrong? No, I'm trying to think. That's an interesting... So I'm stealing this idea from our friend Hamilton Helmer, but he brought up this idea in conversation with us that... There is a positive benefit to monopolies because they create the cash flows that fund these sorts of boondoggle basic research. And a lot of the most important-

technologies that move society forward. You need some waste. Come out of these. You need fat. Yes. And like, boy, does Google have that. Right. I mean, their last quarter was their first $100 billion quarter ever. Right. Astonishing. I know. And that's how they-

fund, you know, the next Gemini. Yeah, all this. Right, right. And Waymo, and yeah. So actually, you just bring out your friend Hamilton Helmer. Yes. Who I'd never heard of until I listened to your podcast, and you do that thing, the Seven Powers thing. Seven Powers, yeah. Let's just briefly, since we're here.

how you study a business. That has been a useful analytical framework for you. Yeah. Whatever these seven powers are, and I'll never remember any of them. That's why we say them every episode. Network effects and all that. Yeah, yeah. What is about Hamilton?

Like, where did you find him, and why are you making him so famous? There's a lot of good frameworks out there for analyzing business strategy, and this one just clicked. I just read it, and I was like, that is actually the complete list. When? Did you read it? You found the book. I think it was 2020. I read the list and it was all gobbledygook to me. The words did not mean things. You have to know what they mean. If I asked you in plain English, can you brainstorm all the ways in which a...

industry-leading company gets away with being more profitable than their competitor and gets to keep being more profitable. That's the list you would come up with. What creates the moat? Yes. So why did you decide you even needed that framework? Oh, it goes hand in hand with the durability. If you're trying to study why is a business durable, the cause is the power.

We'd always been searching for a way to land the plane on the episodes. Like, we tell this story, and we finish the story, but that felt unsatisfying. What's the takeaway? Yeah, and so we've had all various... permutations of analysis at the end. Buy or sell or hold. Yeah. Bull and bear and grading and blah, blah, blah. Once we shifted to like, hey, we're studying these great companies, these durable businesses.

Power felt like a really good part of that, like, so what? Why? For me, a critical, critical part of process. It goes back to writing a senior thesis at Princeton. Everything needs to pass through multiple cycles of source material, through my brain, through my fingers, onto a keyboard, and recycle back through about three times. And so I don't use AI note-taking. I do write... physical notes and hard copy books like if i'm not doing that uh

I feel like it's not going to work. Yeah, yeah. What do you do? So I have exactly the same issue. I discovered I wanted to be a writer writing my senior thesis and no ambition to do it before then. And then all of a sudden I thought, oh my God, I love this. And what I loved was... just that was the constant recycling of the thought. And so what I do, the process, I don't want to get too far away from your podcast. So here I'm sitting with my notepad. So this is a filter.

If I'm talking to you, it takes effort to put it down on the page. I don't record anything. I've filtered it. It's interesting enough to me that it belongs on the page. Then I go home, and I write the notes up quickly, and that's another filter. If what's on the page interests me enough to put it in a Word document, then I've got it's filtered again. And I keep those notes while I'm working on a book. And the file will be...

500 pages long, maybe longer. And it's just stuff. And then I start thinking about how do you frame this story? What is this story? But that's months. usually down the road like and there are times when i get into something and i am months into it and i realize there's nothing here with sam bankman freed i was a year into it and i did not know what i was going to do with it until it blew up

And then I thought, oh, my God. I had the story. You would have been sitting there for a year watching other things, too. Do you think you would have not published the book if it hadn't? Oh, no. Wow. You would have killed the book. Well, I might have found a way to do it.

I might have found a way to do it, but I hadn't found a way to do it. And it was always the same conversation with my editor. It was, I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is. When I don't know what the end is, I don't know what the beginning is. And it's that simple.

And it wasn't that, oh, I smelled fraud or anything like that. It was just... it didn't have shape to it it was just it was picaresque experience after picaresque experience it was like don quixote but the but the first chapter over and over and over and over and so there was material there is why i kept coming back it was fun there were endless scenes there were you know but it was just like

Yeah, but scenes don't make a play. They're necessary but insufficient. But the bigger point, I don't want to be talking about me. We'll be talking about you. But this process, you are doing, I smell this from your... your work you're doing something that rhymes what i with what i do you are gathering before you make judgments you're open to learning things you're trying to be the world's best student you want people to want to teach you

And then if people want to teach you, they will teach you. And then you can take what you learn and you can present it in the best way you can present it. I basically take a note in two scenarios. One is... Oh, I just figured out how that works, and that is so cool. Like when I learned how a mechanical watch worked. You're the master of the like, this is such a cool thing. You got excited. This is in some ways irrelevant to the business success of Rolex, but I...

It will make my year to explain on air how a mechanical watch works and how an escapement is a thing. My excitement around that. Those are some of the greatest moments. It is. Or the Costco ballet or like, yeah. Yeah. So there's the, I just figured out how something worked. And then there's the, I just made a connection. Yes. I'll be on a run. I'll be listening to an audiobook. It'll be the third audiobook that I've listened to about a certain subject. And I'll hear something and think,

Oh, that's why. And I'll stop and I'll write my little Apple note. This timestamp in this book, you know, just realized why. I can't think of an example right now. This happened. And then later I go and I look it up in the Kindle book and I figure out how I want to explain the connection that I just learned on air. But it has to come from the...

I have to remember and bottle up my excitement of learning it in that moment to share that enthusiasm with the listener. Yeah. Yep. That's all very familiar to me. All right, listeners.

Now is a great time to tell you about a great friend of the show, WorkOS. And since we recorded this episode in the garage where Google started, we thought this would be a fitting moment to talk about when a startup exits their proverbial garage phase. and starts to become a real business. Garages were a little more popular back in the day with HP or Apple or in the 90s with Google and Amazon, all founded in garages.

Today, though, it's more likely an SF apartment or a coffee shop or a hacker house. But, you know, the key question remains, what do you do after you find product market fit and when you start scaling? One big answer is moving upmarket and finding your first enterprise customers. And the best way to do that is WorkOS. WorkOS makes it easy to add all the things that enterprises require. Single sign-on, skim.

permissions, audit logs, all with simple drop-in APIs. It lets you scale revenue bigger and faster earlier in the life of your company, or if you already have some of this functionality, to just simplify your code base. As we've been saying all season, this is...

Even more important in the AI era, AI products need deep access to sensitive data to be impactful. So these security features are just the price of admission for enterprises. You really don't want to be late to this. We talked on our Google series about... Even with how successful they are today, by initially ignoring the enterprise, Google left the door open to competitors for a while. Google Docs and their original G Suite were so good. I mean, amazing productivity apps on the web.

but they lacked enterprise features for years, leaving the door open for Microsoft to catch up and respond with Office 365. Yeah, it's funny. We were talking with WorkOS founder Michael Greenwich about this, and he was making an impassioned pitch to us that... Google should have won the entire web-based productivity market, given they were first and they had better technology. Get your enterprise story right early on.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Sierra, Replit, Vercel, hundreds of other AI startups too, they all rely on WorkOS as their enterprise-ready auth solution, and you should too. So if you're ready to get started with just a few lines of code for SAML, SCIM, RBAC, SSO, authorization, authentication, and everything else to please IT admins and their checklists, check out WorkOS. It's the modern software platform to make all this happen.

That's WorkOS.com, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. So give me a fourth example of a lesson learned from an episode.

This we learned, I feel like I learned from Ben Thompson, which is... Tell the audience who Ben Thompson is. Ben Thompson is the author of Stratechery. Proprietor of Stratechery. Founder of Stratechery. We did an episode on him and with him. A few years ago. But his writing is sort of the thing that we bonded over when we met. He's a great strategy technology writer. A, the internet niches are way bigger than you think they are. So if you think you're writing about a niche topic...

The internet being a global community of four-ish billion people means that any little niche There might be six people in your geography that care about it in your local town, but there's millions of people online. And the internet is your way to reach them. So no matter how niche you are, it's actually way, way bigger. And the corollary to that is in the media business.

In podcasting, you can grow your audience and thus your revenue and thus your importance in the world. All outputs can scale completely independently of your inputs. David and I effectively do the same thing that we did. not 10 years ago, but two years ago to make an episode. But the audience has grown so much that like every output from the business is dramatically different, even though all the inputs are the same. And so we really like took to heart the niche of smart people who care about.

how these businesses work and why the world is arranged in this way is large. And we don't have to scale our operation to reach them. We just have to keep making the highest quality stuff.

giving people reason to share it. What is your operation? I mean, we're in here with a large group of large men. Thanks, guys. This is a bigger operation than usual. But this isn't your normal operation. What is your operation? I have a basement studio. It's an office that we happen to have some lights and a camera in. I built a studio in my backyard. So that's the YouTube. You mentioned that you send your stuff to an editor without naming the editor. His name's Steven.

Stephen is the last name. He does. I'm not sure he'd want us to share on air. So Stephen. So the mysterious Stephen. He's an independent contractor. We're his only client. And he works only for you. And he's the best. He's the best. So he's clearly good at his job. Steven is as maniacal about creating the best audio. And video when we do it. No assistance. We do everything. You don't have an ad sales agent. We love doing the ad sales ourselves.

You're doing it right. We love doing the business equally as much as we love making the show. And I love the alignment. The business and the content are equally important and they're like married.

Yeah, it's funny. You're preparing for this. We're always tempted to just talk about the business because we love the business as much as the show, but we never talk about the business. So let's just stop here for a moment because I want to talk about this. First, before we move on from Steven. So Steven is in this rare position of basically being the only person who helps you create this thing. Yeah.

How different is the... We hired a wonderful production crew because we wanted to have a great video for today. Right. So how different is what you give... What comes out of Stephen from what you give him? Eight, nine hours of raw audio with dozens of retakes, sometimes hundreds of retakes. We produce each other as we do. Hundreds of retakes? Yeah. David will say a paragraph and I'll be like...

Wait, wait, I want to do that in an acquired tone. Wow, that's amazing. Hundreds of retakes. That's incredible. I would have guessed like if you just asked me five. Hundreds. You sound like a millennial. I just want to be appropriately amazed. The number of literallys that we cut. We need to cut literally all the time. Literally. I see. Totally. The retakes, though, are different.

thing the retakes are we didn't say that clearly enough we didn't land the point i made a point where i wasn't paying enough attention to what david was saying because i was like looking over at my notes and then i make the same point and he's like oh i think you missed it i just said that can you

just say the last thing. Oh, I see. Just give me an aha and then we'll move on. Or I explain something in twice the amount of time and David's like getting bored and he's like, that was a real monologue. I think we got to keep the story moving. And I'm like... I agree. When I wrote it in my notes, I was really excited about it, but...

Now that we're in the moment, I can feel that it's slowing down the energy. So let me take two minutes. Let me retype some stuff and let me figure out if there's a condensed way to say that so that it can flow seamlessly in the energy of the story. Right. But that is all in the... Eight, nine hours that we delivered him. So he's cutting it in half. Yeah. Yeah. And when it comes back to you from him. So he turns eight, nine hours of that into an intelligible. Into like five?

I think it's probably appropriate to call it like release candidate one to use like a software analogy. All right. And then we make five to 800 additional cuts. to cut another hour off of it. And that stuff- Are you doing it on the page? Are you doing it by listening? On the page. We use a tool called Descript, which we sort of use it not.

But you're not listening to it, you're reading it. We are listening to it and we are watching. And how long does that take? Days. Three days. Three days to edit. Yeah. Because we usually do two cycles of that. And then do you send it back to him after you've done that? Yeah. And then we do it again. And then you do it again.

I listen at 1x and you have to feel where you get bored or feel where you're just like, I don't care. You have to get so sick of the material where you're just cutting the bone. You're the hero of this. I can't bring myself to do it. I listen on 2.5x. You are the hero for doing that. You don't actually listen to it at normal speed? It's so... Ben really jumps on the grenade for this. Almost always. You can cut the beginning.

of almost everything. There's always throat clearing. Our beginnings always drag. Yeah, wind up. You don't need it. You just go right to it. And then once I start to feel it get taut. I just love it. I love it. I love it. The hardest thing is getting the stuff out in the first place. And then once it's out on the page, then you can start, ah, each time it gets better. I find there's no despair associated with it.

And there's stuff in the original draft that is a remnant of the point you thought you were going to make. And by the time you get to the end, you're like, that's actually not the important thing here. I no longer need that whole setup or that aside. Or it's in there in all kinds of other ways. Yes. Yeah. But it's important that you had the idea, but it's buried in the story some which way. David will often highlight something and go, at Ben.

Okay to cut, belaboring. So the minute you're there, you know it's got to be cut. Yeah. Mostly, right? If one of us wants to cut, it's cut. And so you get... Five hours down to whatever it is, three and a half, four. Three and a half is the sweet spot. And how do you know when you're done? We run out of time. Deadline, yeah. So deadlines. Deadlines, yeah. You're never really done. I would love one more edit.

we'd always there's always more yeah yeah yeah we have both the gift and the curse of deadline and next episode coming whereas like you have a infinite timeline right no no no i haven't i i mean i owe a book on june the first that will come out september the 29th that i will start writing on january the 5th and i will write it in five chunks and each chunk will be delivered at the end of the month and i won't be

go back so wait wait what happens if you get to june and you're like no i'm not uh can't can't okay so it's it's a hard it's a drop dead yeah but i i always find i even once i establish that deadline which is a reasonable deadline because i've done all spent a year doing the work yeah i have the material By the way, it's very polite of you to ask me questions about myself. Are you kidding me? No, but it's somehow if you take your deadline seriously.

That's the key. You take the deadlines deadly seriously. And you just refuse to violate them. Then you're serious when you establish them. your mind just finishes when it needs to finish. And I'm always like...

a couple of days ahead of it yeah so i would talk a little bit about the business side because this is something that i certainly don't know anything about in in your lives but you turn this into a very lucrative franchise and you go out and you and and unlike most podcasts you're not you're not subcontracting the sale of ads to some other company, and you're not just promiscuous in who you have as advertisers. So you have two or three, four, whatever it is, major advertisers. Four every season.

and some stability there. When you go, walk me through, pretend Michael Lewis, Inc. is your target, that you want me to be the anchor tenant in your building. And you're coming in to tell me why I should do this. Give me a sense of it, what that sounds like. I'll let David give you the sales pitch. The philosophy of the whole thing comes from we want to create a durable business on our side and a great listener experience on the listener side.

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

It's the biggest complaint I get about my podcast. It's like, I've got to listen to these ads. The very first ad we ever sold, we said, what sponsor could we get that would make people perceive acquired to be a higher quality brand? So we could like have our cake and eat it too. We'll get our revenue. I tried this. I had a thought about this on mine and no one ever took me up on it. Really? Just find the things I actually use.

And it will be fun to talk about them. I want to tell the whole world about ex-officio underpants. And I can't get ex-officio to return my calls. I mean, that kind of thing. Foolish. Literally, you're telling me that Michael Lewis calls Exhibition. I didn't hear it for free. I didn't. I just gave them a list of things that I really love, just love. Oh, you've got to call them. That's the problem. Well, that probably is the problem. That is it.

My podcast company does not actually sell the ads. Another company sells the ads. And so it's just that I thought that was the way to make it seamless is actually what's integral to my life will be the things that we're talking about. So that is a... structural blocker to creating the best experience. And everything has a trade-off.

The trade-off for us is we spend an enormous amount of time engaging with our sponsors. We write a custom read for every single sponsor, every single episode. We try to write it as if we're almost like... talking about what we think is interesting about the business. We're doing this like mini two-minute analysis. And, you know, there's some horse trading there of we have to make these points, okay. But like for the most part, and the best sponsor relationships are the ones where they say like,

Yeah. Your listeners are going to respond the best. To what you have to say. Yeah. So if you're Michael Lewis Inc., we want you to be a sponsor. I would say we're not coming to pitch you really. We're deciding a year in advance. Now two. Now two years in advance. What do we want our slate of partners to look like? So we start. Michael Lewis Inc. we think is going to be super strategic for us in 2027, 2028. We start planning like, OK, how are we going to make this happen?

How are we going to make sure that you, Michael Lewis, think is as good as we think it could be? How are we going to make sure that we're going to work really well together, that you're going to see massive ROI from us? At any point, do you sit there worrying that... You're compromising the shows because of the relationship you're about to have with an advertiser? No. There's been companies that...

don't feel Switzerland enough that come to us that want to sponsor. And we just like the idea of not picking a venture capital firm to say, we think this is the best venture capital firm. too much of a picking teams thing. I've never heard anybody say that. They don't feel Switzerland enough. Is this a cliche in the VC business? No, I think I just- That's a lovely line. So you're looking for Switzerland. Yes. And what do you mean by that?

Companies that we think are great, where we don't have to take a side in a big contentious current thing conversation. Would you take Coca-Cola? We don't really deal with consumer companies. Okay, here we go. B2B companies with very high LTV products. So not ex-officio underwear. Basically, we want companies that...

are doing a significant number of multi-million dollar annual deals with customers. Because we want to feel like we can deliver a couple incremental of those for you. Directly attributable to us. Yeah, and then it's just a no-brainer. Many of our... sponsors have been ROI positive on signing one large customer who heard about them unacquired. That is awesome. And often it's not even just heard about unacquired, it's...

Events are a big part of this. So we do events with almost all of our sponsors. So there's the funnel of like heard about and acquired that helps. But then like we're doing an event together with them. We're sitting next to their best prospects. So I'm thinking about hiring you. What kind of event will you do for me?

We're happy to join for a customer dinner. We're happy to speak at your big annual customer conference. We're happy to go to a sporting event with you, with your top clients. We're happy to... At that sporting event where you do like...

Fireside chats. Yeah, fireside chats. Interview your CEO. Interview a legend from the sport. How many hours of your time am I going to get? A couple days. And while we're there with you, it's like, hey, how can you maximize using us? You promise to be my friend? Yeah, of course. You'll be my friend, too, in the bargain?

We're great friends with a whole bunch of... Okay, so then it gets even better. Let me tell you more. Tell me more. I'm getting interested. I'm on the edge of my seat here. The reason this whole thing works is that... People who listen to Acquired are the most valuable audience in the world. And so if you want to market your B2B software or financial product or whatever to them. Founders are executive decision makers. Right. But really, I'm going to take a step back. I think the whole...

business side and a lot of the content too, but the whole business side of Acquired starts with we were venture capitalists. We're not media people. So we have just always taken an approach. You're aspiring to be a great partner to them. You're going to help.

Recruit employees. You're going to help with whatever. And so we just like, great, that's how we approach our partners. Right. Why do you think, maybe you've just answered the question, why do you think no other podcast has approached their business in the way you approach your business? I think we just came at it from like.

You think everybody was coming from a kind of media space, and the media space was kind of bad business. Okay, here's a take. The media business model of splitting the commercial activity from the editorial. Yep. is a societal benefit that we all benefit from, from publications like the New York Times. Yep. It was started for journalism. It is really good for journalism that exists. The rest of media seems to have adopted it, and everyone doesn't need to.

If you're the host of Acquired, it's kind of great if you're going and learning about your sponsor's business and working with them and trying to build partnerships with them. It was almost like we had the luxury of getting to rethink.

what our operational model looks like. So then the thing that brought it full circle a couple years ago is we added an investment fund. So not our public company sponsors, but almost all of our private company sponsors. We invested them, so it came full circle. You created an investment fund. You two were the ones who were making the investments. Yes.

How are you doing? It's quite full circle. We're only a year in, but we've invested in five of our sponsors, and several of them are more valuable than when we've invested. Yeah. We asked ourselves, we're like, how do we do this? The focus is the show.

venture capital firm with a podcast. It doesn't work. We need to be a podcast for the venture capital firm. The way we make this work is we just invest in our sponsors. We put all this work into finding the best partners for our sponsors in every category that we think are great. Why wouldn't we just invest in them?

We don't do any incremental work. Do you invest in all of your sponsors? No, but a lot of the time, like, we'll just get a call that, hey, we're raising an up round. We want to talk about it in the next ad read. And we say, oh, that's cool. Can we invest a couple million dollars? And they're like,

The round's like 300 million. So no one on the cap table is going to care. And we love that you're more aligned with us now. So we'll make room. So you're only really accepting as sponsors companies that you would like to invest in. That's essentially the frame we put on the whole thing. It's not a perfect overlap. JPMorgan is not an example. Right, right. We like having a couple public companies, JPMorgan, Shopify, ServiceNow. And how deep is this market? How many acquires could be created?

on the back of this business model? Oh, I think a lot. The question that I'm always wondering is, why aren't there more acquireds out there? I'm asking that question now. Like, why? Here's the ingredients. Two hosts that independently go do research and through storytelling, like narrative storytelling and analysis, create a conversational audiobook. Could be about businesses, could be about sports teams.

could be about political parties, could be about any arena of ambition, as you would say. There should be unacquired in all these other verticals. In fact... The business vertical. There's a lot more money in business. Yes. In tech and finance. I think there's a bit of a cold start. If you were to propose going and creating an acquired for sports.

You would, the sort of risk I guess we took, we didn't think about it as risk at the time because it was just a hobby, was you're looking at years of no or little monetization. Right. Because it's going to take a long time to build up the audience. Right. Versus, oh, I could go join a network. I could make a show on The Ringer. I could do whatever. Acquired was path dependent on us having day jobs. For sure. Right. And day jobs in the industry that you're going to cover, right?

We built half the relationships and all the know-how and all the shorthand from being in the industry before. So I asked you how many inquiries could be created in just your space? What percentage of the advertising revenues do you think you're hoovering up in the way you're hoovering them up? In business podcasts? The B2B, the B2B, the kind of people you will accept.

as your sponsors. How many times over? Fortunately, there are a lot more people who want to sponsor Acquired. That's what I mean. How many more are there? A lot. We're probably three or four X oversubscribed.

on people who really could convert on becoming sponsors if we said, sure, we'll take you. How come you don't spawn an extra acquired or two? Why don't you create the next yous? Then we're not acquired. Then we're not us. I see. Do less. Then we become CEOs. Right. We do not want to build a company. No, it's funny. There's a line that you don't have bosses. Yeah.

You have incentives. Yeah. But you don't have bosses. And we're not other people's bosses. That's my life too. I have a lot of incentives. I have no bosses. When you're in any kind of creative thing, there is this benefit. to not just following the financial incentives and and not trying to kind of like milk every last penny out of it and to creating scarcity not just for the sake of the scarcity but for the sake of the quality yeah and

Only do it if it's great. If you only do it, it's a long-term strategy. I mean, it's not that I think all my books are great. I don't write them, though, unless I think they're going to be great. I just don't. Why would you allocate? Let's say you have a portfolio of however many more years you think you're going to write, 20, 30. Why would you allocate?

A year. A year and a half. Why would you blow a slot on a bad book? That's a gaping hole. I give you a reason why some people might. A publisher offers me a gazillion dollars to write a book about X. I know the book's going to suck because it's not actually a good idea for a book. And it's not going to be fun to do because all the fun is and it may be great. Is there any chance any of those dollars make your life better at this point? Zero. So this is the thing people miss.

What is Lane Kiffin going to get out of an extra couple of million dollars going to LSU from Ole Miss? Yeah. The average athlete is taking a few million dollars more to move his wife and kids from one family, one city that loves him and that he loves, to some strange place where everybody's going to be unhappy.

People do this all the time. All dollars do not have equivalent value. No. The marginal dollars have way smaller value than the early dollars. Sometimes they end up having negative value. And you become a person who that's what you're about.

It's like you're saying, I'm going to be the person who just follows the financial incentives rather than I'm going to control the, I'm going to let these incentives do, they could be useful. They get you out of bed in the morning for a while. But you have to kind of control them.

So I love that you're not milking the market. I think there's two different things that we're talking about here. One is milking the market, yes or no. The other one is do you want to build an enterprise or do you want to...

stay a boutique. So to your question for us, why don't we create more acquires? We don't want to manage other shows, podcast hosts. People often tell us, oh, you're building this business. You guys are sort of foolish because there's all this key man risk. You're building this great business, but if either of you leave, unfortunately, your business has low enterprise value. And we're like, but if we sold this business...

Then we would just go start Acquired. We're already doing the thing. Yeah, the dream is what we're doing. All right, so I took us off on a sidetrack. We've only gotten through four. I want to hear the fifth. We've gotten like five or six or seven. We've got a bunch of these.

What's the fifth lesson you've learned? Founder control was a huge one. Is this from Google? I think we, again, this is one of these things that we learned early, but then got reinforced through episodes. Meta, Rolex. Trader Joe's. Ikea. Yeah. Yeah. Like stay private, be family owned. You don't even have to say, I met as a public company, but founder controlled. I mean, Google too. Google's founder controlled.

The important things in the world probably should be big publicly traded corporations, but there's these amazing, wonderful things you can create by being boutique and maintaining control. I think there's an argument to be made that in any industry where they're both private and public companies, the private companies end up being...

much better run. Mostly bad things happen when companies go public, and certainly less pleasant. So public or private, your point is founder control. But there's also just a personal choice element. Last year, we- We had a, like, existential crisis is way too dramatic. But I think something that was on our minds was, like, are we being wussies?

We're not doing Hollywood. We're not adding more shows. We're not building an enterprise. What triggered this? Are we being wussies? We were currently researching Bell Labs. And I think I felt like we were chasing this. esoteric-ness. So we sought some advice, and we went to one of the best investors ever, who we've gotten to know who's a fan of the show, somebody everybody would know. And we asked him to dinner, and we just sort of...

Like, hey, we've got this, you know, we could do all these things. We're not like Hollywood, et cetera. And we sort of expected his comment to be like, dream bigger. Like, you know, go for it. Like, you know, you guys are being wussies. And he sort of sat there and he thought a minute and he said, I have seen so many founders become trapped in prisons of their own making in their own companies. And they're successful prisons. Yeah, yeah.

You guys have avoided that fate. Don't go down that road. But what is... I'm missing, actually, the connection. Why, if you were less wussy-ish, would you have created... Hire people, take on...

Start a second show. Oh, I see. You meant business wussies. Yeah, business wussies. I thought you were saying you were avoiding the controversies. Oh, yeah, that's a whole separate wussies. But no, no, we asked ourselves, are we being business wussies? Right, I see. But they sort of go hand in hand, like cheap...

growth is covering the current thing. I've been toying with this idea of stored potential energy, that great businesses have a stored potential energy that you can't see in the current financials. Great people have that too. Great people have that too. They have these reserves that come out when they need them. And they're not presented in the obvious markers. Yes, they aren't sparkling there in front of your eyes in any way.

And I think we're trying to store up as much potential energy and acquire it as we can rather than any time there's a way to... make it show up on the financial statements, sort of like letting out the pressure and being like, yup, second show. Yup, more ads. Yup, dynamic ads from an ad network. You can say yes to all these things and you can sugar high the current profits.

Or you can try to figure out how to store up as much potential energy as you can. And I think once you kind of hit the point in life where money won't make you any happier, then there's actually not a point. to letting any of that potential energy out. It just creates goodwill for everyone, most principally, selfishly yourself, to keep it bottled. Right. All right. So how do we get on that?

We got on that from Founder Control. That was Founder Control. So that was number five. Number six. Okay, I've got one from... This is a non-obvious one. Also, can I just say, like... Sometimes we do some stuff like this. We are not like saints. We're capitalists. Like we're running a capitalist enterprise here. Sometimes we hire a production crew. Sometimes we, last year we added a fourth ad slot.

We always had three. Last year, we looked at ourselves and we said, there's four-hour podcast episodes. We're currently at like 2%, 3% ad load. Everyone else is at 15%. God forbid we go to 4.5% of time.

We indulge occasionally. All right, listeners, this is a great time to thank our friends at Sentry. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y, like someone's standing guard. Which is exactly what they do. for developers. Sentry helps teams debug everything from errors to latency issues and fix them before users get mad. And since this episode we are reflecting on 10 Years of Acquired, it's fitting to look at Sentry's journey, which actually looks a lot like our story.

They started in 2008 as a tiny open source project, not even a company. And the goal was to solve one simple problem. Alert me when something is broken. It wasn't born out of a big budget or a funding round. No big strategy offsite. Just a developer seeing something broken in the world and fixing it. And from there, they just listened to what developers needed. More language support, insight into what happened before an error, who was affected, which release broke, and where the bug lived.

Century delivered all these and slowly started compounding and making the product better every week for 17-ish years. And that's why more than 150,000 organizations trust them today. And the range of those companies is incredible. Disney+, Duolingo, friends of the show over at Vercel and Anthropic, there's Cloudflare, GitHub, Atlassian, also a ton of indie developers who are shipping features at two in the morning.

Sentry has just become a key part of how modern software gets built. The product has grown the way the best companies do, expanding organically into other tools that give developers granular context like tracing, profiling, and session replays. And now Sentry is taking the next step with AI. Their agent, Sear, can pinpoint root causes with nearly 95% accuracy by using everything that Sentry already knows, including errors, logs, traces, and code.

It even suggests fixes. And because Sear has that full context, it can review a pull request and spot bugs before they ever ship. This is not noisy code review. This is like real error prediction. So as Acquired celebrates our own decade of learning and improvement, it is fitting to partner with a company that has been on a learning and improvement journey right along with the rest of the software industry over that same time.

Yes. So thanks to Sentry for helping make sure that everyone's favorite apps work the way they should. You can check them out at sentry.io slash acquired. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y dot I-O slash acquired. And just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, so sometimes we make episodes that either we think are going to be great or we're just really interested in them and they like, in the numbers wise, they don't perform.

The great thing about podcasting is it's always within a 20%, 30% range. So it's not like it's a total flop. But give me an example of the podcast, the extreme version of the one you all were most excited about. that didn't resonate with your audience in the same way. Okay, so the lesson here is going to be... Yeah, Nintendo. We thought Nintendo was going to be a big...

It's such a great, it's an incredible history, incredible story, incredible company, N of one company, durable over 100 years plus, has been through so many iterations. People love it. You know, 20% underperformed our benchmark at the time. We were like, oh, man.

And then we did a part two to really dig ourselves deeper. And you know what people don't love is part twos. And they really don't love part twos when they didn't love part one. Let me tell that joke again. It's so funny that you like it even better the second time. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

It's a necessary subset. You never tune into something called part two without part one. And so the dumbest thing you can do if you're focused on growth is have an underperforming part one followed by a part two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But... We did it. And you liked it. We had a great time. Nintendo, it's like one of the most interesting companies ever. It started as a Yakuza company. It's crazy. How did it start?

It was playing cards. So gambling was illegal in Japan after the Meiji Restoration. And so they made Hanafuda cards, which are... cards in Japan, and the Yakuza was the main customer. And then they got into toys, and then they way later found their way into video games. The Japanese Mafia was the main customer. Yes. That's funny. Yeah, this is amazing, amazing story, and they have this...

philosophy called lateral thinking with withered technology, which is, if you look at Nintendo systems, you can go way, way, way back. It's not bleeding edge technology. It's like a couple generations back technology. How can we take withered technology? And think outside the box with it. So the Wii is the best example of this. The Game Boy was the original example of this. The Game Boy is basically a calculator. But it didn't have a color screen. It had two buttons.

But it was this incredible success. You can see the passion. I feel like I'm about to get you into part three. Yeah, exactly. We're going to do part three. Okay, okay. But here's the lesson. Another episode that was totally like this. Indian Premier League cricket.

Underperformed. Love that show. Incredible story. Thanks. Incredible story. You either really loved it or didn't listen at all. Yeah, this is the lesson. It's the first of your shows I listen to.

You started with IPL. You know why? You are making the point here. This is why we did IPL. This is the point. It's all worth it if we just got Michael. I'm a partial owner of the Rajasthan Royals. You are not. I have a Royals jersey. Minaj is the majority owner, right? Yes, that's right. He's the majority owner.

So it's a very tiny slice. But I haven't been over. I still can't explain the game. But the league. Wait, wait, wait. How did you become a minority owner? Two friends. I really leave their names out of it. but you know who they both were. Okay. Call and said...

There's this guy who's got this cricket team. He wants to make it the money ball of. Oh, they're the Oakland A's of the IPL. Yeah, exactly. I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he'd be open to having you invest. And they were both good filters. If they were interested, it was already smart. And I also thought it was small enough that if it went wrong, it would be an amazing story. And even if it goes right, even if it goes right. Have you met Lalit Modi? No.

No, no, I haven't met anybody but Manoj. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. No, I know there's a whole— Have we got a subject for you? I don't want to redo your podcast. It's just like there may be some way down the— So that was the other thing I was thinking. Like a number of— work out a number of ways. So anyway, that was the first one I listened to. And you, that was an unbelievable story. Oh, it's unbelievable. Everybody in the world should listen to this thing.

And it underperformed. And yet it underperformed. Okay, but here's the lesson. Both Nintendo and IPL, they were the first listening experiences for some... incredibly influential people who have changed the direction acquired. I think we can share the whole story. Yeah. Nintendo was specifically listened to by one person on the meta executive team who found it.

thought it was amazing, sent it to the entire meta executive team, right? And then they all listened, right? We built a relationship with them. And then when JP Morgan called us and said, we've got Chase Center. Yeah. And they were like, well, what would you do?

And we asked this person, like, hey, do you think Mark would want to do it? And he said, I don't know, but I'm going to ask him right now. Right. And so without the Nintendo episode. Without the Nintendo episode, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't do this. No 6,000 person. And we have some similar stories with IPL. The point is that doing episodes that one or both of us is just insanely passionate about. Where did you learn this from? From doing these episodes and underperforming. No.

We learned it from LVMH. I pitched that like three times and you were like, okay. No, but LVMH was a banger. It performed great. Which is why we learned the lesson that if one of us feels passionate about something. Go for it. I'm making a different point, which is that if one of us feels passionate about something, even if the episode is a relative dud.

it's still worth doing because invariably somebody latches onto that passion. This is exactly right. If you don't feel anything, there's a chance nobody's going to feel anything. But if you feel a lot, someone's going to feel something. Someone's going to feel something. Yes, that's right.

That's right. So trust that feeling. Yeah. Yeah. It's about the magnitude of the way a small number of people feel about episodes, often more than the spread. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, sometimes we're passionate about something. And it becomes a banger. That's the ideal. Rentech, Renaissance Technologies. That was amazing. That was an incredible episode. That's one of the episodes I've listened to. I loved it too. So great. It's one of the two great mysteries on Wall Street.

how they do what they do, and who is Satoshi. Those are the two. I kind of like the take that they invented machine learning. a decade or two before and kept it secret that resembles LLMs and that they were able to find signal that existed only in really weak ways in a- predictable alpha generating. But that nobody else found it, too, so that it all went away because they hid it at the same time that they found it. Yes. That's mind-blowing, if true, that that could still be going on.

I mean, you can see why it worked through the 90s. Yeah. It's really hard with like Jane Street and Citadel and all these other places looking for every bit of signal in the marketplace. It is an amazing story. And that is of the books I didn't write. that I wished I'd written. Did you consider doing that? So Jim Simon's son had a kid in my oldest child's class in high school. And I tried, I said, look, I can't do it unless you want me to do it.

There's no point. And he said, like, Dad, just like, no, no, no. This whole business of kind of doing it by radar completely from the outside, you know you're going to get so many things wrong. Yeah. And it's like, and embarrass yourself. That you need to be so inside so that you don't, so that the person you're writing about doesn't read it and say like, that's just completely wrong. And I could have done that book. But why? You know, that.

that didn't appeal to me what appealed to me was he was at the end of his career i didn't need all the secrets but i needed some of the secrets and uh and i and i would need him and i but that's one that's on my oh that's too bad that one got away yeah if a butterfly flapped its wings differently and he collaborated it would have been fabulous yeah yeah it would have been a fabulous book um all right number seven

There's a different twist on the NFL, but we definitely learned it from the NFL. Create spectacle. All right. Our live event strategy. Yeah, there's twofold. One, we now... have stopped thinking about acquired as a habit for people. Most podcasts, your dream is to create a habit. And ours, we've thrown that out the window and said- You don't do enough of them. Right. So we need to create events. It needs to be the current thing.

when we release an episode for whatever your group of friends or acquaintances is. It has to be the water-cooled conversation. It has to be Monday Night Football. And then once a year, we have to have a Super Bowl. And doing the... Chase Center Show and then the Radio City Show.

Very small amount of people in the audience. 6,000? So it's, yeah, great. It's the world's largest indoor theater. It's 6,000 people in this incredible venue in New York City. Relative to the number of people who listen to our episodes. Even if it were 50,000, it would still be. It's point. 0.4% of the audience? It's a very small. It's a tiny percentage. But the amount of heat and light created from the idea that you did that show is...

more impactful to building the franchise of Acquired than any given episode, maybe even than a whole season of episodes. What's the first spectacle you created? Well, Chase Hunter was the first spectacle. How long ago was that? We had been stepping... That was... 18 months. So you just started doing... September 24th. Yeah. We had been...

We did a show in Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, but it was one section. But actually, by being able to say we did an arena show, even though it was only a thousand people, we talked about it on air as the acquired arena show, and that... We were able to say to J.P. Morgan, to Chase Center, to the Warriors, we have done this before. I'm going to ask a couple of rude questions. Your Radio City Music Hall event was with Jamie Dimon, 6,000 people.

And Meredith Kopitlevian, New York Times CEO, and Barry Diller. Okay, so the three, how many people are there for them and how many people are there for you? We did not announce the guests. Oh. So they were all there for acquired. Mostly because I wanted to give this answer. We knew Michael at the end of the year was going to ask this question. So all I knew was it was going to be acquired with a guest.

Was it sold out before you announced The Guest? We never announced The Guest. So The Guest is a surprise? Yeah. Oh. It hurt in my soul when we did Chase Center. Afterwards, reflecting on it, there was this little thing of like... Did all those people show up because it said Mark Zuckerberg on the poster? Yeah. Well, now you know. So now we know. So now you know. So this is your form of spectacle is these big public shows. Yeah. Any other forms of spectacle on the horizon?

Well, we are doing the actual Super Bowl. We basically manifested this. Are you the halftime show? I wish. Us and Bad Buddy were going to be on set. I would love the reaction of the NFL fan base if they were told that it's not going to be music this year. Ben and David are coming out. It's just going to be an acquired episode. Yes. Yes, with Peyton and Eli Manning.

That would be so good. Manicast is the only way I watch Monday Night Football now. We're doing the Innovation Summit. So the NFL is launching. Launching an Innovation Summit the Friday before the Super Bowl because the Super Bowl is here in San Francisco this year.

They're launching an innovation summit Friday before the Super Bowl with all the big partners in the NFL, with Roger Goodell. It'll be in the city in San Francisco, and we're going to emcee it. Okay. So do you know who your guests are going to be? We do. They haven't been announced yet, but it'll be on par with our past. Where are you doing this? SFMOMA. SFMOMA. Oh, okay.

It's not going to be open to the public. It'll be streamed. So it'll be a different style of event. It'll be VIPs from the Super Bowl. It's for the NFL's partners. Right. But yeah, it's going to be incredible.

All right. Let's go to, I think we're at number nine. All right. So we made Costco in the back half of 2023. It was one or two episodes after we made Nike. Nike, I think, ended up being a fine episode, but I tried way too hard, like way too much pressure on myself. I want to speak for you on the Nike episode.

It came out flat. We read nine books between us to prepare. I think it was 11. It was just too much for all sorts of reasons. And so we were burnt out. We were not happy. We decided to do Costco. I said, I just got to... I've got to take a different approach here. I've got to play loose on this one. I can't play tight, to use the sports analogy. And I said, let's find the one book, the right book. Right.

Helped that there was only really one book. Read that book, Saul Price's Autobiography. Read that. Use that as the main source. You got maybe one of the best primary source. interviews ever. The CFO of Costco gave you a One-on-one presentation. Come over to the office, and I'll sit you down and give you the entire whiteboard and PowerPoint on how the Costco business model works. And we spent the whole afternoon together, and it was unbelievable.

And that time that you spent with Richard. That was the whole episode. And we didn't need to do more than that. When you went into it, did you know anything? Yes. What did you know? When we went into starting work on Costco, we do nothing. Correct. I knew a lot going into that meeting with Richard. I wanted to be able to hear the things he was saying that were different.

than common wisdom. There's a lot of think pieces out there about Costco. The Wall Street Journal loves to write about it. Investors love to write about the stock. So you can kind of read that stuff. It was Charlie Munger's favorite company. There's lots of stuff out there. And I wanted to hear... This was actually one of the last pieces of research because I wanted to be really prepped. What did you know you were talking about?

when you're working on an episode and you're going for a run and you make some connection or some insight occurs to you and you stop and you write it down. Give me a few of the ones about Costco. Low skew count drives everything. Oh.

All right. That's the starting point. The number of things they have on the shelf. Do you want the Charlie Munger talk? The number of things they have on the shelf. So unlike Walmart, they have billions of things on the shelf. Walmart has 100 to 200,000. You get what you get and you don't pitch a fit.

Whatever's there is there. 4,000 things. Yep. Walmart is 100,000 to 200,000. Yeah. And here's all the knock-on effects of that. If you only sell 4,000 things, it doesn't take a lot of volume before very quickly. you are a meaningful seller to every single one of those vendors, suddenly you become really important to that vendor. Your merchandisers, since you only have 4,000- So your incentives start to align. Yes.

The merchandisers have a very small portfolio. You're not dealing with 100 vendors. If you're a Walmart buyer, you're dealing with hundreds of vendors. You're dealing with seven, and you would know the absolute crap. out of their product line. If you sell chocolate, you monitor the price in the cocoa commodities markets. And if it takes someone who's managing a very small portfolio to stay that attuned to each one of the things, small skew count means that

any given thing on the shelf flies off the shelf pretty quick. So there's not, yeah, so the turnover is faster, so there's more flow. They're getting, they're getting paid. In some cases, they're getting multiple turns of cash flow before they pay the first time. On average, it takes them. 27 days to sell through their entire inventory, which means that's on net 30 terms, three days of grace where the inventory is actually financed by the vendors and then some.

I think on average, it's 27. So some SKUs are selling in two days that they're turning. They're turning it 10 times a month. There's no working capital in this business other than building more Costco's. Right. Low SKU count for Costco is like low. Low episode volume for you. Yes. 100%. Yes. Right. And low number of partners so we can put like all of our energy behind very few. You know, it's not really natural for a business to sell less of things. Sell fewer things.

You could sell more things. And actually doing that. And when you walk into, it is the odd experience when you walk into Costco is the absence of choice. Yeah. And in fact. Consumers kind of like not having too much choice. There's all this research showing that if you sell 30 different kinds of jams in the supermarket, you will sell less jam than if you sell three kinds of jam. Because the people just be paralyzed by the choice. Yes.

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

You didn't know about any of this when you went into the episode. No. The only reason we did the episode was it was Charlie Munger's favorite company. Give me another lesson. How are we doing on time? Is this the last?

This is acquired, Michael. I know. You said you didn't have any plans tonight. We were sitting down with Morris Chang and he was talking about TSMC. And he told us that one of the ways that they aired was... trying to exit the integrated circuit market or diversify from that market and go into solar memories. And there was one other thing too.

And none of those were as good of a business. And the key insight was you're already in the best business. Integrated circuits are the future and will be for a long time, and you're already the best at them. So stop. trying to do other things and just do that really well. Probably to a fault and with a bias, we believe that about Acquired.

Every time we look at anything else. We're already doing the thing we should be doing. We're already doing, yes. Don't go do something that we're less good at or it's going to be less fun. We should always just make another good episode. However, you have decided to become venture capitalists.

Again. So here's a question. I'm curious. What's the difference between what you do and what a normal Silicon Valley venture capitalist does before they put money in a company? Do you think you know more than they do? I think there's a top-level misconception about what the venture capital industry is. All right. I think a lot of people think it is an analytical industry. You're learning all about the company. You're doing diligence. It's not that you're not. You are doing that.

But that's the commodity. It's an access business. Especially at the growth stage. Early stage, there's more picking involved. But that picking is like a super art. Early stage picking is not a, you know. understanding a company. It's a whole different thing. So the entire bet that we've made in this chapter of our venture capital careers is a bet that getting into the best companies is just an access thing.

You know, growth stage, private companies, you can tell what the good ones are. Most people can't get in. If you can, you should. I mean, we do the work in choosing our sponsors, and then we're like, okay, great. Box checked. Our sponsors are not non-obvious companies that all growth stage investors don't want to get into. But the kind of work that you do to do a podcast episode about a company, does it bear any...

resemblance to the kind of work a VC does about a company before they invest in it? I don't think so. I wrote a lot of investment memos in my early stage career. They're all about... How big could this thing be if it goes right? But you're almost always investing, at least I was, at the napkin stage. And so you're mostly making stuff up. You're dreaming what this market could look like when it materializes.

You don't know. You're really just making a founder bet, and then you're trying to support it with all this structural information that is very imprecise. You're acting like you know the third or fourth decimal place when in reality, you barely know the first one. You answered my question was, are these two things similar? And you're saying basically not so much? They're not. So that means that being a venture capitalist in no way really prepared you to create.

these podcast episodes, because they're very different things. Well, I think it prepared us to create the business that we created, for sure. But what have you learned? I'll put the question another way. What have you learned about telling a story? No, no, I think like reading your books and, you know, being a liberal arts major at Princeton for me. Studying the businesses that we studied for Acquired helps me.

make acquired far more than any investment memo I ever wrote. In fact, I remember in one of my last few years of being a venture capitalist, one of my partners asked me how I- like learn so much so quickly about different industry dynamics. And I was like,

It's not because I'm talking to all these early stage companies, none of which know what the future looks like. It's studying these mature businesses and understanding what markets can look like at maturity. Acquired helped me be an investor much better than... the other way around. Gotcha. What can you do now as storytellers that you couldn't do 10 years ago? I think we think about narrative structure and acts and what a story is. Right. When we're reading books sometimes.

A lot of books, especially corporate history books, are this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened. That's fine for cataloging history. It's not a story. That is not a story. And at a certain point, we realized, like, you can't do and this happened. Right. It's the why of it. It's the...

It's the story flow. The queen died and then the king died is not a story. The queen died and then the king died of heartbreak is. Yeah. If someone just told you, if told me 10 years ago, that two guys without any... previous really literary podcasting any kind of experience we're going to create this four-hour conversation about an individual company and people are going to be mesmerized by it people are going to listen to the whole thing and want even more

I said that doesn't sound like very promising. I wouldn't put money into that. Yeah, if you were an early stage BC. It's like why it works is a really good question. Because it's not obvious. It's counter to much of what's going on in the culture. tension spans supposedly getting shorter, blah, blah, blah. But it does work. It clearly works. It works as a business, but also works as just a creative thing. And the why of it is like, you must think about this all the time.

the why of it. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of different answers to this. One giant tailwind for us is a year after we started the podcast, AirPods came out and it became societally acceptable to just...

listen to stuff while you're moving about the world. While you're talking to your mother. Yes. So our brains all got two input channels. Like we used to only... focus on one thing at a time everyone now focuses on two things at a time you can't do the same thing like you can't read and listen at the same time but you can drive and listen you can run and listen you can do the dishes and listen and so we have

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

Spotify. Spotify didn't enter podcasts until 2018 and now is, I think, over half of the market. Brought hundreds of millions of people into podcasting. Apple Podcasts not becoming YouTube was actually great for us. Right. That it's a place to... When you get a listener, you really get a listener. And it's like this durable, incredibly valuable place to accumulate listeners. Spotify is too, but... YouTube in its own way too.

But there were zillions of podcasts and not many are doing what you're doing. So they all have the best. Corporate America becomes ever more important. Yeah, that's completely right. It's like what is going on in the economy. is mysterious to people. Yeah, the financial crisis. These companies, a lot of your episodes have been about these companies, about Tesla and NVIDIA and Microsoft and Google, and people don't really get them explained to them.

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

exists between us and there's so many there's there's a million times over the last 10 years where like if we hadn't just been you know so that burn cigarettes on our arms aligned that like it wasn't even a conversation but like had our partnership been slightly different like it would have fractured that's why we're still here so you know i want you to do i want to conclude this conversation

because we don't want to go three hours. But I want to do it by doing the seven powers and apply it. I want you to apply. One of our most requested seven powers for acquired. Apply it to acquired. Great. And then I can learn what these seven powers are. All right. So we are definitely a scale economies business. The fact that there's a large number of listeners to amortize all the inputs across makes it... so that we can do an unreasonable amount of things for each episode.

If you were going to try to compete with Acquired today, you couldn't do all the stuff that we do. You don't start with a million listeners. Right. Or the access. And you could do it for one or two or three episodes. But if it didn't grow quickly, at some point, you'd be like, it's not even about the money. It's about like...

why am I doing all this work when no one is listening to it? And it would feel like that. So there was this path-dependent thing of we always had the right product for the current amount of value that it created in the world. which you can use a listener base as a proxy for. And now because the listener base is large, we can afford to do things other people can't, which is sort of the definition of scale. I'll put this even much more simply. Let's say...

We and another podcast made the exact same episode. We've got a million and a half subscribers. They have zero. Our episode is a lot more valuable, even if we said the exact same words in the exact same way. Yep.

Okay, scale economies, yes. Counterpositioning everywhere. Counterpositioning everywhere. Explain counterpositioning. We're going to do a little meta thing and also explain these powers. Okay, explain these powers. Counterpositioning is when you do something that your competitors just...

cannot respond to. Give me an example outside of the podcasting room. Yeah. So what's a great example of this? Southwest Airlines launches. They only use 737s. Everyone else who already has fleets of other planes. can't do all the streamlined operations that Southwest is going to do because they have all these other sunk costs in this diversified fleet. Yeah. Or counter position that we're not volume driven.

Most podcasts sell their ads on a CPM basis, and they are incentivized to make as many episodes as possible with as many ad slots as possible. Our business is entirely structurally different. Yes. To your benefit. We also don't have shareholders. So we can do all these non-economic things because the thing we're solving for, the quotient, is actually our lives. Right. That's why you use four episodes as opposed to six or eight or one.

Yeah. Right. Right. It'd be cool if it ends up being just one episode a season. This is David's dream. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. That's my nightmare is that we actually, we can't end up, if we end up at one episode a year or one episode a season, we're...

It's time to hang it up. Here's a rule. We don't work with agencies. If an agency reaches out and says, we want to place ads on your podcast, we write them a very nice note. If we're able to get to the email and say, oh, we don't work with agencies, but thank you so much for your interest.

Can you imagine working at a podcast network where there's a revenue opportunity and you're saying, sorry, we just don't, you're a middleman in a transaction and so therefore we won't take your dollars. Right. Yeah. Counterpositioning is in the number of shows you do. So the kind of shows you do. That's how it expresses itself, but because our business is structurally different than most others, others can't do what we're doing.

Network economies, not really, but there's some water cooler effect of people talk about acquiring episodes, especially within companies. Right. we release an episode, it becomes a topic of discussion. This is a weak power, but it exists to a small extent. If you like Acquired, more people liking Acquired is valuable because you get to talk about it with more people. No switching costs.

Switching costs is a power that's super easy to... Explain switching costs. Salesforce. Yes. Anything with an implementation. You've got your CRM on Salesforce. Okay. And... You switch to another CRM is just a huge amount of cost associated with that. Even though, let's say on a day-to-day basis, it's the same price or cheaper, it's just such a pain and an economic tax to...

do a new implementation of something. Right. Yep. There's none of that. Sponsors can switch. One click away. Listeners can switch. There's no cost of switching out of acquired into whatever might come along. No. No cost. We're going to replace acquired. Yep. Don't have that. Can I just also say, this is so weird and uncomfortable for me. Because while I think we've created this beautiful gem and I love thinking about it and talking about it with you, it is terrifying to...

Talk about it with everyone. also feel so self-aggrandizing to talk about what a great painting I've made. No, no, no. But it's very useful to think about this in this way. You've got a framework. Let's think about you and your framework. What's the next power? Branding. Yes. Yes. Again, thought exercise, same product released by a different podcast, not called Acquired, people just acquired more. Right. Yep. And that's just growing. Yeah. Yep.

Cornered Resource. The business owns us. Explain Cornered Resource. Give me an example. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Intellectual property. Okay. Patents. Disney owns the likeness of Mickey Mouse. Okay. You don't get to build a business that benefits from the economic value driven by Mickey Mouse.

Now, we're assuming that you're a cornered resource, that the reasons that people are tuning in is that it's your lovely voices and the way you enthuse over this stuff. It could be that you've just actually found a thing. That everybody wants. And that if two other people came in, they'd do it even better. And there are people who create, it's early, they're small, but things that resemble acquired a lot. The Step Change podcast by our friend Ben Idelson is one of them.

It's doing really well for a podcast that has three episodes because there's magic in the format, even if it's not us. That is, if there is a corner resource, it's you or your editor. Whose name you won't divulge. So suggesting that perhaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, it could be a good reason. And then the last one is process power. Which almost always businesses don't have. We have in spades.

We totally have it. It's the same thing you have. Because we kind of fail to articulate how an episode comes together. We tried on this conversation three times. I don't think we could regrade it. And we didn't really explain to you exactly mechanically how an episode comes together. Except I can understand the iterations, but you vomit out eight hours. If your editor decides what's the best five, it comes back to you and you cut. But what do I show up with on recording day? Oh, I see.

we should maybe do this a little bit here process can i guess sure because i actually don't know what you show up with the recording you both i assume you each take a kind of part of the story like either the history or um current analysis of the business, and you're responsible for that. And you go learn about it. But there's got to be some improvisation here so that you don't tell each other exactly what you've learned. More or less. I'm responsible for the story with we carve out a...

one or multiple chunks that Ben will take, and then Ben is responsible for the analysis. Right. And then you probably have some lines you want to say that you know you want to say. but you want to say them naturally. So you kind of have them stored in the back of your head, and you wait for the moment where you can drop it where it sounds casual-like. But if that doesn't happen, you set it up. Ben's point, SKU is everything in Costco.

That kind of insight, you can reduce it to something you want to get across in a line or two. What's hard about improv is... disposing of all the things you imagined that were going to happen in the conversation before they happen, and nobody does it perfectly. And so there's this tension between the script and what's happening organically between the two of you. The truth is it's...

It's both. It's both, right. So I write a script. I write 10,000 to 20,000 words. You do? In sentence form, word for word. Do you read it? No. Well, I mean, I read it. It doesn't come out of my mouth. It comes out as a natural conversation. So you write it, but then you put it to one side.

I have three screens in front of it. You're kind of reading it. I'm kind of reading it. Yeah, yeah. Are you? But Ben interjects, and it doesn't come out exactly as I wrote it. It doesn't sound like a script. That's good. But part of my process is I need to write a script. To know what you think. yeah yeah it makes complete sense but also to have it as a crutch there when we're performing right like

We can't keep all this in our heads. But the real crutch you have is you can do it for nine hours and it's only going to be four. You don't have to be perfect. You can screw it up every which way. And you have a real-time feedback agent. I'm like, this is dragging. I don't care about any of this prehistory. Like, cut, cut, cut, cut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, but yet, all we hear. the audience here is is that's amazing oh that's so interesting it's incredible i never thought of it that way

You're the best. I love you. So we don't see any of the other stuff. No, no, no. It's in there. It's in there somewhere. Okay. All right. So take me further into the process. So you have a script and you don't, Ben, you don't have a script. I have a giant text edit document with just a whole bunch of mechanical points I want to get across. I have some story points in there that I know.

I want to interject in David's story, but I know the things that I'm going to bring to the episode that I really care deeply about are explaining how something works. So I have written out bullet point by bullet point by bullet point. And then- And we've usually identified where that's going to- Enter in. Right. Yeah. But this thing works because it doesn't sound like you're reading anything. Yeah. But the reality is it's a hybrid. Okay. The reality is that this is a hybrid. Yeah.

And there's all sorts of stuff in there that we are sort of looking at about six hours into recording. And we're like, that's not going to make it in. And that's OK. That turned out it was not at a salient point. Right. But the point of process power, we can describe all this. I'm sure you have described in painstaking detail how you do it. But that doesn't mean anybody else can write a Michael Lewis book.

The process, but your point is you have the process power. But the point of process power is you can tell them it's uncopyable. Oh, I see. That's interesting. You have a process that can't be replicated even if you explain to someone. Even if we explain in excruciating detail exactly what it is. What pops to my mind is that the magic, the pixie dust in a process is trust. That it's like something that you get when you trust a process. Hear it.

Trust the process. Darrell Moore goes to Sam Hinckley, but the ownership of the 76ers, they didn't trust the process. They wanted the process. They wanted to replicate what they had been doing in Houston, but they didn't trust it. Where does trust show up for you? I was just about to say that I think I trust my process. And it's self-trust, but that's a form of trust. And I know if I just told it to someone.

And they wouldn't try to do it. They'd be thinking, they'd make them, they'd wig out. Yeah. I got to record the things. I got to do this. And so that, in fact.

Doing it my way would be a kind of weird handicap for them. That's the process. If you were to copy-paste the process, it wouldn't have the same results and it might in fact be a handicap. Right. But there's something emotional going on there. The difficulty in replicating it. I also think it's because when you describe your process, it is lossy compression.

The way compression works in computing is you're taking a large amount of data and you're compressing it down into a smaller amount of data, a different file format. And if it's lossy, it means that you can never fully recreate the original work. This is the MP3 codec. Okay. Or a JPEG. Okay. A JPEG doesn't actually contain all the RGB values from the original photo, but a human kind of can't tell most of the time, and so it's fine. Right.

Explaining a process is a lossy compression of the actual process. That's true. That's true. You're actually not giving them everything. And you're not doing it intentionally. No, it's just impossible. Language is a lossy compression of thought. Yeah, true.

That's an interesting observation. Language is a lossy compression of thought. I'm trying to think if the reverse is also true for some people. And uncompressing information, it's so funny. When you and I are communicating, I had a thought. I compressed it into a very narrow bandwidth.

thing of speech, I told it to you, you uncompressed it into your brain, it might actually mean a pretty different thing to you than it means to me. That insight is at the bottom of my creative process. I assume when I write a book...

that what goes into people is something different than came out of me, that they are going to take it and reassemble it in a different way. And so I have to construct it in a way that there's a hole for the reader to go in and just... do what they need to do with it. The more I just let the story tell itself, the less I tried to influence the way he thought about the story, the more the story landed. And then, of course, when you do that...

You're giving people lots of options in how they see the story, how they understand the story. It's the risk you take. But it's what makes it alive. And it's why you get this huge range of response to a given story. But you've got to actually just accept that when you're saying something, the other person gets to understand it however they want to understand it.

and if you don't do that what you get is something that's dead the next day it's like yeah yeah you made your point but i didn't hear it i don't want it this is always one of our like key goals with every episode is like no matter what you think about the company right you're gonna enjoy this episode and you're gonna learn something from it and then you may come away thinking like

It's about understanding. This company is terrible. You may come away thinking this company is righteous. Yep. Sometimes we don't nail it. We don't always nail it, but that's the goal. I think it's the creatively fun goal because that's the challenge. rather than just imposing your editorial view on the world. Present it in as elegant way as possible and let the reader make what they make of it. Once you realize that's the thing to do, it's so much more fun.

then trying to muscle people around it's it's all of a sudden you're dancing with a reader instead of like hurling them all over the dance floor it also requires you to learn something new while you're making the creative work like if if you come in with a point of view And you come in.

Let's say we tried it. I was so afraid when we were making Trader Joe's that we were going to remake the Costco episode. And I was like, this episode is going to suck because we're not going to have the original enthusiasm that we had. It's just like Costco but not as good. Or it's Costco but it's for furniture like Ikea.

You have to have new insights that delight you as you're researching it so that you can make something great. And I think the reasons acquired will eventually fail, I don't think come from like... platform disruption. Like, oh, TikTok's going to make it so people want short form instead of acquired. Maybe, but the more likely reason that we eventually fail is we stop being delighted.

by new things we discover. So we have nothing new to deliver to listeners. Right. I agree with that. If you were to ask me how you were going to fit, that's exactly the kind of thing I would say. You'd run out of gas or run out of material.

made your socks go up and down. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to thank one of our very favorite partners, Shopify. And David, we recorded... This episode with Michael, the week after Thanksgiving, and while you and I were nice and festive and coming off of some relaxing time with family, the Shopify team had been cranking.

Because Black Friday and Cyber Monday is, of course, the biggest sales weekend of the year for merchants around the world. Yeah. At the very same time as we were recording, Toby was sharing the final stats. So... Shopify merchants did $14.6 billion in sales over the weekend, which was up 27% from last year. Over 15,000 entrepreneurs made their first sales and 81 million unique shoppers bought from Shopify merchants. That is absolutely nuts. That four-day sales volume number.

That's almost twice as much as Shopify's entire annual volume when they went public in 2015, of course, as we chronicled on our Acquired episode on Shopify back a few years ago. Just wild. And part of that growth was that for the first time this year, a few merchants were able to sell on Black Friday directly inside ChatGPT, thanks to Shopify's partnership with OpenAI. So like no links or redirects.

Consumers could ask ChatGPT about Black Friday deals for products they're interested in, and Shopify loaded actual checkout flows directly within their ChatGPT conversations. This is super cool. Glossier, away. Nike Strength, Majuri, Spanx, and Skims were all live on ChatGPT on Black Friday with Shopify. This is just one example of why Shopify is so awesome and one of our very favorite companies in the acquired universe.

Shopify lets anyone sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And it's not just startups. It's General Motors, it's Estee Lauder, it's Mattel, and on and on and on.

So whether you are just starting out or you're operating at global scale, Shopify helps you sell anywhere your customers are. So get started at shopify.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, how are we going to end this? This is your show. Carveouts. Carve-outs, yeah. Why do you call them carve-outs? What does this even mean? Okay, so you'll appreciate this. It was my wife's idea back towards the beginning of the show. She used to listen to...

Slate's, I think it was a culture gab fest. Yes. And they do cocktail chatter at the end of episodes. And it's just like, hey, something unrelated. And she was like, you guys should do that. That's fun. Well, I understand the idea of it. Why is it called a Carvel? Well, okay, so then we were like, this was in a phase of Acquired where we wanted to brand everything around acquisitions. Okay, there we go. And so we thought, okay, what can we call this? We're not going to call it Cocktail Chatter.

We came up with the idea of a carve-out, like in an M&A transaction. A carve-out is like this piece of the purchase price goes to this set of shareholders. special reason their employees or whatever okay so these are the things we're carving out as things that delight us that have nothing to do with the rest of the episode yes but the name is is just residual it's just a residue of your former incarnation yeah we used to brand

We used to have a thing called the LP show because we had all these little branding cards. Playbook is sort of a remnant of the older version. So what are we going to do? What are the specific things? We have some categories that we're going to throw out and then you've got to tell us and we'll tell you things this year. that we loved in this category, typically pieces of media or products or something like that. All right. We usually start with books.

That's kind of funny, having you here. I mean, so many of your books have been our carve-outs over the years. Really? Absolutely. So it's books that I've read in the last year? Yeah, books this year. So I've got to confess, I've had a very weak reading year because I've been really deep in two projects where I've been working.

And when I'm working, often all I'm reading is for work. But I can think of a couple, one at the beginning of the year, one I just put down. First one I read because my son was in high school at the time. had read it and he was enthusing about this 800 page novel and i and i thought that that just didn't happen very often and it's it's it's been out a long time it's called the name of the wind by patrick rothless and it's a fantasy trilogy

He never got to the third book, and I don't know what's happened to him. He's, like, blocked. But I'm not found. It's like a George R. R. Martin situation. I'm hoping he's an acquired listener. And I would tell him, I can come help get you unblocked. I know how to unblock writers. I have a secret power here. Do you have a secret life as a fiction ghost writer? No, I do not. But I do have a secret life as a coach to writers and other writers. And this thing was...

It was so compelling. I couldn't believe how good it was. And I couldn't believe how good it was that he hasn't, he's just gotten stalled. But The Name of the Wind, Patrick Roth, was right at the beginning of the year. Very beginning of the year. At the end of the thing I just finished, it's not like it's a great book, but I think it's so short.

And it's something that is speaking to our moment in our, especially how we govern ourselves. It's, I always mispronounce his name, it's Vannevar Bush. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who essentially created the American Science Project. And it's a little, it's a basic, I think he started it as a memo to FDR, then FDR died, and it ended up being a memo to Terry Truman about what America could do if the government, in the right way.

got behind science. He was saying, look, what we did with the Manhattan Project, we can do with biology. We can do with the other hard sciences. He was describing not a top-down approach, not like the government is going to just decide. We're going to fund it. and let the scientists figure out what they need to work on. That was the big insight. So those are two books. How about you? What books do you?

Similar to you, it's been a research-heavy year. Yeah, we have young kids, so fun books are. Right. One great book I read for research was Last Man Standing to prep for the Jamie Dimon interview. That was really good. Total page turner.

Made it. It was a great time. Is it about him? Yeah, it's about the ascendancy of his career. And then two is, I just love reading Morgan Housel. And his new book, The Art of Spending Money, is... is really fun i mean it's where i get most of my like latent ideas of hey hey dummy money's not going to make you any happier he's a great explainer oh great so good uh my two are um first one is a reach back to

December of last year with the Mars episode, Emperors of Chocolate by Joel Glenn Brenner. You ever read that? It's so good. I once... I had a chocolate-related story, and I flipped through it, and I didn't ever have time to read the whole one. But yes, I know the book. It's the dual history of Hershey and Mars together. It's the, I believe, the only big book she ever wrote.

And it's just a masterpiece. It's so good. The other one, Morris Chang's autobiography that we got to read. It is currently only in Chinese. But we got to read an English version of it to prep. How did you do that? Who translated for you? This woman, Karina Bao, did a translation for us. Just for you.

She was working on it as just a pet project anyway and accelerated it for us. Okay, books, podcasts, number two. Well, this is a layup. Your podcast is the big addition to my rotation this year. Well, thank you. It started in July, and I've listened to, I don't know, 10 of them or something. Well, thank you. But what is in your rotation besides Acquired?

And against the rules, of course. Well, I don't listen to my own thing. I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History. I listened to The Smartless Guys because I like them. Your interview on that was great, too. It was fun to do it. um what else will i listen to the daily some uh every now and then i'll dip into a right-wing thing just to hear it just you know there isn't that that any any recommendations

No. Not really. And then kind of random stuff. Like every now and then Bill Simmons will have something I want to hear. I love Bill Simmons. I just don't have time. He's prolific. You have eaten my podcast hours. You've eaten a lot of my podcast. Apologies to Bill. No, no, and I can tell you where I was, like treadmill in Denmark when I listened to the Indian cricket thing. Isn't that the most fun thing about listening? You remember a place. You do remember a place.

They're very place-specific. And no, the Acquired podcast is the new thing. Great. All right. How about you all? I listened to an episode of Invest Like the Best about a year ago. which was a really, really long interview with Graham Duncan. Oh yeah, that was really good. That was really good. That was originally, didn't Patrick do that as like a private podcast? Yes. And then he did a shorter version. I didn't listen to the shorter version. I only listened to the like super long one.

One of my biggest takeaways from that is about having the correct grip, that you don't want to have too tight of a grip on your work, but you don't want to have too loose of a grip. You need to play with an appropriate grip. for whatever the task is that you're trying to do. And if you're gripping too tight, you're going to pull it. It's going to feel too mechanical, too unnatural. And if it's too loose, you're not minding the shop enough. You've got to get your head back in the game.

I've been amazed my career at just how useful sports analogies are to writing. I'm sure to everything. But these physical memories translate pretty neatly to what the mind is doing too.

Like when I write a book, I'm on a pitcher's mound. It takes me back to pitching in high school. And I'm thinking of the reader as the hitter. Getting meaning across to a reader is tricky in a way that... fooling a hitter is tricky and and it's just i can feel that connection and so these physical analogies are really useful even if they're sometimes a stretch

Speaking of sports, mine is the Glue Guys podcast, which I think we both went on this year. Which actually was the origin of us meeting. Those guys are great. They are great. I think we told them on the episode. I tell them. I'm like, you guys got some magic here. You got to keep doing this. You keep telling everybody that they run their podcast business in the wrong way. And you're right. And you depress everybody else. You figured out how to do it. Nobody else has. They've got magic.

They are taking it seriously and keeping doing it, but I think it's a really, really... They have the really rare dynamic of just the three of them together. Regardless if they have a guest, don't have a guest. They're equally good.

They're very different personalities. Yeah, it helps. Can I just say that? Something inside me feels so crunchy. I don't think we've figured out a better way to do it. I don't think we figured out the way to do it and everybody else should just snap to our way. It's like... We have an enormous amount of privilege that we can run a business in this way, and most people have constraints that prevent them from doing this.

It's not that we're right and everybody else is wrong. It's that we have set up a particular system that works for us. But it is like you're right and I'm wrong. That it really is a way of running a business that we could have done with against the rules. And I'm going to go think about it. But anyway, so what's our next card? Okay, next category is videos, movies, TV shows. So I just saw a movie two days ago, two nights ago. We went to the theater.

Whole family went to the theater. Wow. And Jay Kelly. It's new. Noah Baumbach's new movie. And it's George Clooney. I guess you'd say he's playing George Clooney with a midlife crisis. it's a fame he's playing a famous actor who's trying to sort out uh the meaning of his life it's just magical it's a beautiful movie and an ambitious really ambitious movie and that i was i've been thinking about it

kind of since I saw it, like what exactly it was getting across. And what it's getting across, I think, being famous like a movie star is, puts you at a certain distance to the world around you. And that distance has a price. And it was sort of taking the measure of that price. And what makes that more general is that I think everybody has to make some decisions about the distance that they keep the world at.

And this was a way of having that conversation and entertaining what that distance should be. Got to see it. I have so many. But there's one that's like... You're a TV guy. I love movies and I love television. I have no video games to recommend, but I have lots of these. The one that's just head and shoulders, everything else, and is the greatest performance art I've ever seen in my entire life is the rehearsal season two.

All right. Nathan Fielder and Eric Natarnicola, who we actually got to work with. Eric and A24 Films shot the sort of concert film. part of our Radio City show. And collaborating with Eric was unbelievable. Yeah, he was so great. But before any of that, I saw the rehearsal of season two and my jaw is just on the floor with the level of- You were talking about this for months. Ambition.

Nathan's a complete psycho. And it's the highest commitment to the bed I've ever seen in any form of media. I mean, I don't want to spoil anything, but have you seen it? I have not seen it. I will now go see it. It is... I was shaking. Okay. I'm a lighter video guy. I'm a YouTube guy mostly. My YouTube for the year is one I've recommended before, a past collab. Doug DeMuro is still killing it. I think Doug is probably my favorite YouTuber. What does he do? He's the biggest car reviewer.

I'm not really that into cars, but he's just delightful. Well, the car guys did this first. They got everybody interested in cars who weren't interested in cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Doug does these delightful reviews of like... I just love watching mid-range SUV reviews that I'm never going to buy. I just love them. So listeners will like this. David falls asleep to this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You watch Doug in other things too, but Doug is your...

Yeah, he'll release a new review and I'll watch it as a one sleepover five nights. Is this what you watch before you go to bed? Totally. So how does it affect your dreams? That's a good question. Do you dream? Do you have Lightning McQueen dreams? No, no, no, no. The beauty of Doug, his key insight was all the other car YouTubers are making videos for car enthusiasts. Right.

He makes videos for people who need to buy a family SUV. Oh, I see. Gotcha. I mean, he also reviews supercars and et cetera, et cetera. But most of his content is about the Hyundai. No, seriously, I thought you would spend half your dreams in automobiles. No, no, no. I want to list a bunch. I'm not going to give commentary on them just because a lot of people are watching stuff over the holidays and here's a bunch of things I've loved in the last year. Tires, the TV show, so funny.

F1, the movie, I thought was very entertaining. I gotta watch it. Beautiful production quality. My favorite tribute, Expensify paid $40 million for the... Rumored. Rumored $40 million for the sponsorship of the fake team in the movie. That's right. That's so great. Andor, some of the best thing, if not the best thing in the modern Star Wars franchise available on Disney+. The show Fallout, so good, and season two is about to come back. I think that's Jonah Noland and Lisa Joy.

Again, artists. Like I was saying about Nathan Fielder. Severance was amazing. Silo has a new season coming out that I can't wait. The books are really good. Yes. I like the books. Yeah, those are my TV recommendations. Nice.

Next category, which might just be me, is video games. Just you. Just me, yeah. So one of the greatest moments in my parenting journey, thus far my older daughter is four, is... I got her into video games. We play video games together now every night, and it's just like, it's the best. This is what I have been waiting for. But I need to give a shout-out again to Sea of Stars, which is an indie throwback RPG.

which I bought just for me on my Steam Deck, and we were on vacation in Santa Barbara, and she was like, Dad, what are you doing? And that was it. I wasn't trying. It was like she came up to me as I'm playing this indie RPG. And she started playing it. I never would have guessed that this was my daughter's entry into video games. And then two, Kirby and the Forgotten Land on the Switch is perfect. We can play it together. It's co-op. It's great for me. It's great for her. It's awesome.

So your daughter is at an age where she'll do anything you want to do. No. Because she wants to be with you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know my daughter. She is extremely independent. It's anomalous and awesome. Yes, this is a rare occurrence. Okay, all right.

She runs the house. Like, yeah, no, no. So this is like so much joy for me. Great. Products. What are some products that you have come to own in the last year that you have just thought are awesome or improved your quality of life? I found a new pen. I got it here. Let's see what it is. And it's just like I needed a pen that had just the right sort of fine point and that it's kind of generous with the ink, but it doesn't explode on an airplane.

And doesn't smear, I imagine. It doesn't smear it. I'm looking at it now. The Arzteca rollerball pen, 0.7 fine. And I just ordered a whole case of them because... It's finally got a pen I just love. Listeners, if you want to write like Michael Lewis, we have the answer. This is an example of explaining someone's process. So that pen is a thing. What else? Other products this year?

The Fujifilm X100 VI, I previously specifically did not carve it out and carved out a different camera. I've started carrying the Fujifilm and now love it. It's amazing. I've got a two-year-old and it's just so nice to have more than just smartphone pictures. of family. It's awesome. Nice. I'm just looking at what I have on. Ex officio. We're not going to talk about those. That wasn't this year. Not until they sponsor me. Anyway, that wasn't this year.

You're actually on my feet. These are things. These socks, I ran out of white socks in London. I went over to, is it Uniqlo? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they didn't have any. I was just looking for athletic socks, right? And they have these other things instead.

They've turned out to be so much better than the athletic socks. And they come in different colors, like a light gray. You can wear them as dress socks. You can wear them as athletic socks. And they, like, whenever I, I don't know about you, whenever I find something I love.

What's about to happen is it's about to be discontinued. So you need to buy all of them. You need to buy all of them. Yes. Right. So I didn't get quite all of them because I got them in London. I was going to have to fly back with them. But I bought basically what was in the store at the moment. And these shoes.

so um those ons these are ons and um oddly i spent a couple days with roger federer this summer and i and i just discovered them so i we had the uh the on conversation and made me kind of like acceptable to him. But I think these aunts, I was a hoka guy. Also great. Also great. Nike basically blew it, right? 100%. They got rid of their stores. They thought it's all going to be online and on and Hoka roll in.

I'm a little torn, but not that torn. I'm kind of, these awns are just like, and I don't know what it is. Especially the white ones. I'm getting criticized for it because I started wearing them instead of even dress shoes. I went on Colbert with these. I got eight calls saying you can't do that again. Really? Yeah. I see people wearing ons all the time. They just don't look good on TV or whatever. But I've been overwearing both the Uniqlo socks and the ons. But that's a sign of enthusiasm.

That's right. There you go. And isn't the Federer On deal like one of the best endorsement deals by an athlete ever? Measured by how? How much money he gets paid? Didn't he do like an equity deal early with On? Oh, I don't know. I think that might be right. He only aligns with companies whose products he really likes. Rolex. It's an amazing... How easy it is, right? Also, he's Roger Federer. He's also Roger Federer.

It's similar, but I bought a Ramo a suitcase this year and I love it. It's just a suitcase, but like, I love it. I got... What's it called? I can tell you. Ramoa. LVMH bought this. It's a suitcase. German suitcase company. They make the aluminum shell suitcase. You got a little pep in your step every time you show up. Well, I got the... It's exciting to find new luggage.

It totally is. I mean, I don't know why it is so exciting, but it's hard to find new luggage. Well, my whole life I've just been like a… Three middle-aged men sitting around talking about luggage on a podcast. No, no. You know, you find the new bag. You know your life is going to be different. I've always been a minimal packing.

backpack only, maximum efficiency. You assume you're going to be washing your clothes wherever you go? Yeah, but this is the first time I've just been like, you know what? I'm just going to get a nice piece of luggage. It's not the most efficient way to put it, but I just like it. It makes me happy.

That's great. Parenting? Parenting, yeah, let's go to parenting. Feel free to decline on this. You both have really little kids. Two and four and one. Four and 18 months, yeah. So the first is discovering guided access on the iPad. It's an accessibility setting where you can make it so none of the buttons do anything and it doesn't respond to taps. So on an airplane, they can't mess with Miss Rachel. And then he's going to be like...

F you, dad. Make it work. So these are products for parenting. These are products if you are a parent of... of kids our kids age the last one is the movie toy story we it's the first movie we introduced him to it was my favorite movie growing up um and it's been really fun you took to it

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

a portable crib. So when you're traveling, you basically just put your baby in a sensory deprivation chamber. Oh, you set up the noise machine right next to it, too. You really isolate them. And for most kids, I remember hearing about this from people, they're like, it's a miracle.

And I tried it with our older daughter and she was just like, like absolute nuclear, you know, like no way is this going to work. And so I shied away from it. And then we went on a trip recently and I brought it back for my younger daughter because I was like, all right, well, we'll give it a shot. Works like a charm.

Can I just interrupt here for a moment? Yeah. Is it a kind of end zone dance you're doing of your business model that you're just at the end of this offer-free endorsements of consumer products without actually nobody having to pay you for it? No, no, no. You just do it. You do this with a flick of the wrist. This is fun.

We don't even need the advertising revenues. No, we just started because it was fun. These are things we like. That's good. It's good. Yeah, yeah. That's good. And then my last one, this is... Fun because it's a tie-in with our Radio City show. I brought the whole family to New York for Radio City. Bluey. We got to do a Bluey episode someday.

incredible phenomenon. I don't know if it's crossed your readers. No, what is it? Bluey is the greatest kids show ever made. Bar none. That's a big claim. It's this guy in Australia, in Brisbane, and... He made it. He was, I think, an animator for Peppa Pig and then made this. But the claim isn't that crazy. I love Bluey. Disney agrees with David. Yeah. Disney has been trying to buy Bluey.

for years, for ever escalating amounts of money. They just did a deal, which I think is the first of its kind, to use Bluey IP in the Disney universe without owning it. I think news just came out today that Bluey is coming to Animal Kingdom in Disney World in 2026. It's basically like it's the Pixar. Who owns Bluey? Think of it as Pixar of this generation. Is Bluey owned by his creator? Yeah, yeah. Who is his creator? Joe Brom. This is Guy.

It's like the Muppets. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's like Jim Henson in the Muppets. So in New York, in New York City, you can buy tickets. You get like a 45-minute window. You can take your family, you can take your kids to... Bluey's house, a recreation of Bluey's house inside a building in Union Square. That's great. If you've got kids into Bluey, go to New York, take them to...

My kids would find that a little strange. Okay. It's true. We keep saying kids. Kids of, you know, eight and under. Yeah, eight and under. But yeah. All right. That's all we got for Carvettes. That's all we got too. Michael, anything else? Thank you so much. This is so much fun. What a joy. Thank you for giving us your evening. This is the longest I've spoken to anyone in the last 40 years. Thank you for doing this with us. My pleasure.

Anytime. I'll see you at your 20th. Great. We'll see you in 10 years. All right, listeners. Thank you so much for listening and being on this journey with us. David, very fun way to try to unpack why Acquired worked there with Michael. If you had told us 10 years ago when we made the Pixar episode that we'd be sitting down with Michael Lewis to...

Analyze ourselves. And trade notes. Oh, this is how my creative process works. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Thank you, Michael, for doing this with us. So good. We have another thank you to Shep Films. This is the crew that made this one look so good. You'll notice that this was not just David and I setting up a few cameras like we've done with Steve Ballmer or Morris Chang.

this was actually produced. And so we have a giant thank you to the Shep Films, S-H-E-P Films Company. They do amazing work. They've made like full two-hour movies with Pedro Pascal and, you know, make sci-fi movies. And they do stuff like this. And so we're just delighted to have worked with them. Thank you to our partners this season, JPMorgan Payments, trusted, reliable payments infrastructure for your business, no matter the scale. That's jpmorgan.com slash acquired.

To Sentry, the best way to monitor for issues in your software and fix them before users get mad. That's sentry.io slash acquired. To WorkOS, the best way to make your app enterprise-ready, starting with single sign-on. in just a few lines of code. Shopify, the best way to sell, whether online, offline, AI, anywhere.

whether you are a large enterprise or just a founder with a big idea. That's shopify.com slash acquired. Listeners, if you like this episode, go check out our episodes on TSMC, Hermes, Costco, the NFL, Berkshire, or any other episode that we talked about. They were with Michael. After this episode, check out ACQ2. We had Andrew Ross Sorkin on, and it was awesome. Speaking of trading notes on the creative process, very different job that he does, but, you know, rhymes with acquired in some ways.

So you can search ACQ2 in any podcast player. Come talk about this with us in the Slack. Or if you don't want the Slack, but you do want email. We just did a huge, huge overhaul to our email system. It's no longer just going to notify you when a new episode comes out. There's all sorts of goodies in that notification email, like our takeaways from the episode, some behind the scenes photos.

corrections from past episodes, it's the place to be. So you can join that at acquired.fm slash email. It really is beautiful. We might have some more upgrades to all the... That's right. What do you call it? Like the Chrome around Acquired? Yes. Coming in 2026. So stay tuned. That's a great way to put it. Well, with that, listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you who got the truth now?