Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast)

I found this guy tweeted something a couple days ago whenever it was hilarious.

He goes, most people's alarm clock is David Goggins telling them to wake up and get after it.

My alarm clock is David Senra yelling at me, telling me to be like Edwin Land.

I was like, all right, repetition works. Got the truth now.
Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way.
Got the truth. Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal.
And we are your hosts. Today's episode is our next installment of Acquired Sessions,

a video format on YouTube that we started playing with last year. Our guest today is David Senra

of the Founders Podcast. David is quite possibly the only person we know who is more obsessed than

us with business history and the lessons that great founders teach us. David, David Senra,

that is, has read hundreds of founder biographies and done deep episodes on them all. I don't know that I'm at hundreds yet, as me, David, but I'm definitely in dozens.
I aspire to be at hundreds, but David Senra is just one of our closest podcaster friends and friends period out there. His show is awesome.
Here on this episode, we had him out

to my living room here in San Francisco, and we had just a awesome, really fun, multi-multi-hour conversation, just like the ones that he and I have scheduled every month on Zoom when the mics are off. And it was super organic, super unstructured.
We covered a ton of ground, including that I think two nights before we recorded, David was just coming up from LA where he had dinner with Charlie Munger. And so we spent a lot of time talking about that.
Charlie's influence on David, his and Warren's influence on all three of us, a bunch of thoughts on advice generally. And as you can imagine, David just sprinkled dozens and dozens of historical examples and founder stories throughout the episode.
It is crazy. Every time someone's making a point, he'll dive in.
This is just like that thing Edwin Land said that one time. Or David Ogilvie or Coco Chanel or who have you.
David is definitely close with the eminent dead. I will say after editing this episode, I had one enormous takeaway.
David Senra is really, really into podcasting. So get fired up to meet him on his level.
All right, quick things. Go follow ACQ2, brand new show.
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Voting closes about a week after this comes out, and we are straight up picking whatever you tell us the next episode should be with really no editorial from us. So help us direct the next episode.
Join the Slack. It is one of the only places on the internet with this super high level of incredibly thoughtful discussion by well-connected, kind folks with a deep appreciation for history.
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Lastly, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.
Now, on to Acquired Sessions. So, David, do you want to tell us who you had dinner with the other night? I had a three-hour dinner with Charlie Munger.
That is awesome. Where I could ask him any questions that you want.
Well, first of all, I guess we should back up. It's like, there's a reason that he's so admired, right? By so many people.
But for, for me particularly, you get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the work that we do, right? And so that's like a blessing and something that I know we've had conversations in the past that we deeply appreciate. But Charlie's a different level for me.
Like I literally think of him like the wise grandfather I never had You know, I've met all kinds of people. I don't really get like nervous or starstruck.
I was legitimately like Shaking the day before I was like I cannot believe I did I didn't want to tell that many people because like this is just there's no way this is gonna happen Like I just I won't believe it till it actually happens. We do very similar work, right? Where it's like, how many people have spent six, seven years, tens of thousands of hours reading hundreds of books about the history of entrepreneurship and investing, and then not only reading it, taking notes on it, making a podcast.
Us and Charlie and Warren. Yeah.
And so the reason I bring that up is because you think about all the different companies and founders you guys have studied, all the different companies and founders that I've studied, right?

And even amongst the rarest group of people, Charlie still stands out.

And the crazy thing is, he's 99, right?

And so I get there, and we start off in his library, which is the best place for me that you could possibly see.

Set the stage more.

How big is the library?

How many books are we talking about?

So one of his family members was there, too. And she's like, oh, this is, like, nothing.
This is, like, the front room. Wait till you see the back.
Yeah, so it's, like, it's similar to, like, the room we're in. Like, you know, very similar size.
And, you know, floor-to-ceiling shelves. And so I'm with a small group of friends.
In fact, mutual friends for ours. So the people that set this up for us, or for me, was Andrew Wilkinson and Chris from the founders of Tiny, who are mutual friends.
And so we're sitting there and there's actually a funny thing where it starts out and they know both Warren and Charlie. They've talked to him before.
So they go right into it. And then like, I'm sitting there and I had this whole list of probably like 25 questions.
I was going to ask if you like prepared in advance. I know you did.
I never got the chance to open my phone because I was just sitting there. I was like, I'm looking at him and he's, you know, very close.
Like, you know, maybe a little bit further for me. That would feel super disrespectful to like take out my phone.
Yeah, that too. And I had, you know, read every single book on Charlie.
I watched all of his videos. Like I have studied this guy forever.
And so every time he had said, hey, read this book, I go and read the book. And then I see a bunch of the books that he has recommended behind him.
So people are like, oh, was he as you expected? They say, hey, be careful. Don't meet your heroes, right? It's like he was unbelievably gracious.
You know, unbelievable. I was like, hey, Charlie, you mind if I take a look at your bookshelf? Right? He's just like, do whatever you want.
Just unbelievably polite. Still like biting intellect, ferocious intelligence.
At 99. At 99.
So we were talking earlier downstairs where the scary thing about Charlie is, I remember asking a question about Henry Kaiser, this guy that was super famous when Charlie was younger he built like 100 companies built the Hoover Dam like he was as famous in his time as like Elon Musk is today right but no one knows who he is and I was asking questions about Charlie in the book and his recall is just insane so the point where I asked him I go how do you know this Charlie he goes I knew his partner and then he starts telling stories about being knowing like having a relationship with henry kaiser's business partner and then all these three hours of just unbelievable stories and then i go charlie like how do you remember all this stuff like do you write like do you take notes you read the books over and over again he's like nope and all i could think i was like imagine wow that guy's mind at is still so sharp. I had brought a gift for him because he talks about Rockefeller all the time.
I bought him this special edition, centennial edition version of Henry Flagler's biography. Oh, Flagler.
So I live in Miami. The guy, Les Sandiford, I think is the author of that book.
He is good friends with, there's only like one local bookshop in Miami called Books and Books. And so Les is a local author who's good friends with the owner of that bookstore.
So they did a, you can't get this book anywhere else. It's a special edition book.
Because Flagler moved to Florida later in. After the Standard Oil thing.
Yeah, yeah. He's got a fascinating story.
We can talk about that, where he was unbelievably wealthy because of Standard Oil. He's 50, 60, 70 years old when he's doing this.
And he's just like, oh, what am I going to do now? I'll build an entire state. When he gets to Miami, Miami is a little less than 500 people living in a swamp.
Because you can't live there. There was no AC at the time.
And so then he builds the world's first railroad connecting the Florida Keys. He just essentially, you read that book and you're like, oh, humans have no limits other than the ones we put on ourselves.
And so that's what Flagler does. He just stretches it.
And he does some terrible things too where it's like he wanted to find a way to divorce his wife. So he literally moves to another state because he couldn't be divorced in New York, bribes the government of Florida.
They create the Flag the flagler law which allows him to get a divorce then he does that like a few thing a few times i think he's like in the 70s he marries like a 30 year old like just not all good but that guy's like oh the your rules don't apply to me like i will build whatever i want he built infrastructure hotels everything else this is like one of my the things that i keep learning from founders podcasts and i'm curious if you do it intentionally or if you like try not to do it, but like every single time I'm like, oh, people aren't perfect. Like none of your heroes are perfect.
And do you find yourself like, cause we, we run into something on acquired a lot where like, it's not as fun to tell stories about terrible people. And so you, you, you like don't want to show someone's negative side as much because it doesn't like,'s just it well we like we fall in love with them too right when we're doing right and you're like wow they're the most extraordinary person on this one axis to ever live and we we should talk about how they're a flawed person in many ways but it's not fun to dwell on like you kind of want to like move through that and be like yep yep they were flawed here thing that they did.
Like, how do you handle that? Like, you know how a normal biography is written, right? It's like way too much family history. Like I want to know some family history.
I don't want five generations back. Stop.
Like, I don't want to know the origination of their last name. I don't need that.
I want to know like. And you're like the most qualified person in the world to critique a biography writing style at this point.
So. So why we're reading it is like, everyone wants to know the climb, right? It's like, it's like how did you you guys I just went through your entire to get part of the prep for Charlie is listening to all of your Berkshire episodes right where you guys do a fantastic uh job on this because like the first two is like the young Charlie the young Warren so I would literally and I've done this forever it's like I don't when you think of Warren Buffett or Ben Franklin or George Washington or anybody super famous when we see them it's like, oh, who's the Ben Franklin on the $100 bill, right? Or who's Washington on the dollar bill? Or who's Buffett at the meeting in Omaha? It's like, no, no, that's the guy that is enjoying the fruits of the person that actually built the empire.
I go and stare at pictures like a freak of young Charlie Munger when he was like 38 or young Warren Buffett, right they were like us they were young people once yeah in uh in our Berkshire series the first did we end the first episode without even getting to Berkshire yet I think we might have a partnership you mentioned on the Walmart episode where it's like everybody says oh Sam Walton didn't start Walmart his 44 yeah but he was doing 25 years of practice and learning and he wasn't just sitting on his ass. Starting a bunch of stuff that looked an awful lot like Walmart.
Yes, learning from that. Which is totally, I mean, aside, but we have no agenda here.
That is, I think, both an advantage that we have, all three of us, and kind of a secret that we have, which is that we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon. And so we were like, how do we do Amazon, right? We got to do Walmart first.
People want this. Like this is the right way to study things.
I think I'm glad you brought that up because I think this is why people get a lot of value and I don't want it to make us about, Hey, this is an acquired founder show. The reason that some of the people in our audiences are the most successful people in the world, they're all reading biographies.
They're all studying the history of, uh, told you guys a few weeks ago, I was very lucky to have a two-hour, one-on-one lunch with Sam Zell that I didn't think was possible. What I realized in that conversation, it's like, you don't make, you don't, Sam Zell sold his company for almost $40 billion, right? $38 billion, whatever it was.
It's like, you don't build a company, sell for $40 billion, and then learn all this. It's like he was doing this since he was young.
We were talking in his autobiography. I think my favorite episode of your podcast is the Kobe Bryant episode.
Because this is what these guys are doing. They're like Kobe Bryant.
They're watching game tape. They're watching game tape.
They're working on the fundamentals from the time they're 12 through the time they die. They don't stop.
I think that's what listening to Acquired and Founders is. You're watching game tape of history's greatest entrepreneurs.
Sam did this when he was younger. But this ties together where Bill Gurley had a fantastic quote about this, a tweet about this.
When all that crypto was going crazy and the run-up and people were getting rich. And he's like, one thing I don't like, and I'm paraphrasing because I wasn't expecting to talk about this.
He's like, I don't like the younger people denigrating the people that came before them. And he's like, he made the point that none of history's greatest entrepreneurs and investors did that.
They had the opposite perspective. All of them had idols.
You just made the point. You can't understand Jeff Bezos until you study Sam Walton.
You can't understand Sam Walton until you understand JCPenney and Sol Price and all these guys. And even their contemporaries.
Like the point that Walton always made was, I don't think my competitors are stupid. I want to go shop my competitors and get all of their very best insights and then bring them into my store.
Yeah. 100%.
They're learning machines. Yeah.
And so you get to Charlie's, going to go back to this, you get to Charlie's bookshelf and it's just biographies I've never even heard of. And I do this for a living.
I do it for a living. I was like, what is this book? And then I started looking.
I was like, oh, I'm just taking picture after picture after picture. I was like, I'm ordering every single one.
So we're talking about this idea that like, that, uh, the way to get truth is to weave together the tapestry of all of history stories of things that are adjacent to understand like how this opportunity to start some business came to be. And you always have to, like all history is revisionist and all history is biased.
And so I think one of the hardest things about making an acquired episode is figuring out like when we're looking at a source, like someone giving an industry talk who works at a company or like a biographer who chose to dedicate, you know, two years of their life to writing this book after working at Newsweek and covering the sector forever is like trying to mentally account for and discount from whatever bias and perspective they're coming in with to create whatever the source material is that we're using to then incorporate into our version of here's how this thing happened, which is, that's like, I the hardest part about what we do and i'm curious if you ever think about that i think about all the time because people are like oh like survivorship bias or revisionist history and everything else it's like here's the problem like we humans don't see things as they are we see them as we are so like we could have this super long conversation between the three of us right now then go in another room and write down you know what just occurred And every single version is going to be different because it's viewed through all of our experience, the way we think, the words we use. And so what I'm looking at is like when I'm reading about Sam Walton, right? It's just like the story we both hit on all the podcasts, because I've done a bunch of podcasts on Sam too, where it's like the guy's pissed off.
He's just like driving to store to store and he's like mountain roads taking So he buys the plane, and he realizes, like, oh, this is a massive advantage because I'm doing something my competitors aren't, right? I'm flying over, and you guys mentioned it, too, which I thought was hilarious. Sideways.
And then he just lands. He's like, who owns that? Let me land.
And then he, you know, buys for action. So he's like, we're going to negotiate right now.
I want to buy it from you. And so my point is, like, okay, yes, that most likely occurred.
But what is the idea behind that? It's do, you can have an advantage by doing something your competitors are not doing, right? Yeah. And this ties together what you just said.
It's like they all learn from somebody else. When we're reading these books and listening to these podcasts, it's like, what's the idea I can use in my life? We're not building the next Walmart.
There's no way if we read Titan that we could tell, did this actually happen? Right. I don't know.
But I'm looking for the ideas behind it. Not, oh, I'm going to verify for every single word in this book.
That's ridiculous. Right.
And the truth is always, it is always the case that a clean narrative is grafted onto a fact pattern. And it's like, okay, well, what I care about is the lessons I can learn from the clean narrative, not does the fact pattern, if you had all the facts in totality, did it mean that it you know this was premeditated it's like whether it was premeditated or not yeah you know the facts are the facts and like maybe i can duplicate in a different realm for what we do i mean on a i think on acquired more than you but especially because you will do multiple episodes of different books on the same people and multiple episodes on the episodes on the same book.
Right. Your format is better.
We're doing a narrative weave. So like, you know, we're shooting the moon a little bit more in this respect.
Like your format lends itself to, so if anyone is listening, like founders is more about, Hey, I just read this book and I want to tell you what I learned from this book. And it's always a biography.
And like, sometimes you'll do five different biographies on Edwin land. And like, if a choir was going to do Polaroid, we would do Polaroid.
The episode would be Polaroid. Maybe it would be like Polaroid part one and part two, or like maybe at some point we'd have like someone on to like talk about the story, you know, in addition to our one canonical episode.
But like we would be shooting the moon on like, let's make sure that we get the Polaroid story as right. It's almost like, how do we find the correct average of all of the other stories to create the canonical version? I wasn't expecting to quote Bill Gurley two times early so far, but, um, he, that's how you know, this is going to be a good episode.
That fantastic, uh, talk he gave, which to me is the best talk for entrepreneurs, investors on YouTube It's called running down a dream. Yep How to survive and thrive in a career you love right and he says it's like listen in the age of the internet He's like you don't have to be the smartest person right Charlie Munger after talking to him I whatever mind that dude has I don't have that and I'm cool with that Like I could not imagine trying to compete against that guy 40 years ago Like he would destroy me, right? He's got a super mind that I don don't have.
But what Bill says is you don't have to be the smartest person, but you can collect the most information and he holds you to a high standard in that talk. Bill's like, listen, in the age of the internet, all the information you possibly need is right at your fingertips.
You have no excuse not to do this. And so he gives the example of if you want to be a domain expert in whatever you're doing, like within two years of intense study, if you're doing that and you're focused on it, it's like you're going to get to the point where like you know more than maybe anybody else.
And so that's my whole thing was like when you talk to, you've never met a founder or an entrepreneur that's like kind of into entrepreneurship. It's like, no, it's our lives.
So, of course, the reason why so many of them

listen to both of our shows, right,

it's because they're building machines

where they literally can turn knowledge into profit, right?

I've become close friends with the guy through the podcast.

He's a young kid.

And I don't mean to call him a kid.

He's not a kid.

But he's a lot younger than I am.

And he's like 28 years old.

And we were on the phone the other day

because he had a very serious offer for a company he owns like 95% of and they were gonna um they were gonna give him a hundred million dollars right he winds up saying no to it but the point is like when you talk to him um you know he's listened to all the episodes it's read like 60 of the books he'll text me a picture of like he won't even tell me about the book and I'm like I'm pretty sure I read that like he's like oh yeah it's from this episode it's like What if he finds one idea in a book, one idea in a podcast, and it gives a 10% improvement on his company? It's a $10 million idea. Yeah.
Well, we were talking about this earlier. This dinner that you have, it sounds like Charlie is just a very curiosity-driven machine, but we know there's lots of folks that have regular dinners and have groups of people, often geographically dispersed.
Why do they do it? Why is it worth their time, their money, their effort? It's that they get one idea. The leverage that they can get on that is astronomical.
Charlie tells a story. He's like, yeah, I made $400 million from reading Barron's for 50 years.
And you're like, what the? What are you talking about, Charlie? And Charlie's like, well. How do you quantify that? Because he does.
So he goes, I read. This isn't something he said at dinner, I've heard him say publicly.
He's like, I read Barron's every, all the time for 50 years. I found one idea that I can act on.
I made $50 million on that deal. And then I took that 50 million and I gave it to Lee Lu.
Is that the? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
In Seattle. I gave that 50 million to Lee Lu and Lee Lu turned it into $400 million.
That's how I made $400 million from reading Barron's.

Wow. And listen, I'm not, and this is another thing where I feel like everybody's like, oh, this time is different.
This is new. It's like human nature has never changed.
It will never change. This time is not different.
You're just experiencing, the difference is if you don't study the history of the people that came before you, you're just ignorant and making mistakes that people already solved in the past. Learning from history is a form of leverage.
he has billions and billions or not

billions and billions of years

of before you're just ignorant and making mistakes that people already saw in the past uh learning from history is a form of leverage he has billions and billions or not yeah billions and billions of

years of collectives like human history you know this guy spent 70 years and there's thousands of

them and like sam walton's book how many how many people spent 50 years in one industry in the retail

industry and he distilled it down and then most important and then you could read it in a week

and then you could listen to acquire's episodes you can listen to david's episodes on sam okay this is good in addition to that so the question is then do you have 90 of sam's wisdom or do you have 0.1 of sam's wisdom after there's no way you have 90 right because like the time right the instincts i was just re-watching uh peter Thiel's talk at Y Combinary. He says competition is for losers.
Oh, yeah. And he goes, one thing that we do in Silicon Valley is we overrate, overvalue growth rates and undervalue durability.
And he's like, that doesn't make sense for a technology company because all your profits, the vast majority of profits are 20 years in the future. And so if you're trying to optimize for growth and that overoptimization can cause your company to go out of business, you're never going to collect that.
You optimize for durability first, dummy. Like, that's to me, like, my interpretation of what he's saying, right? Yeah, so you're going to get, you know, 1% probably.
Maybe 5%. But that's still enormous leverage.
Because you read it in five hours, and he took 50 years to accumulate everything. And it's Sam Walton's wisdom.
And it's what you do with the idea. I know you've talked about this before but like what was what was the moment where you're like i'm gonna i'm gonna start this podcast like it's crazy right what you do you you talk to a microphone yourself every week yeah um my friend not that i think you're crazy oh i definitely am you are but no i definitely am nuts for sure um and that's gonna be like we could talk about um did you guys read jezos' last shareholder letter before he yeah one of the best lines he has is at the end he's like differentiation is survival and so they think about that like how hard they say let's say somebody says damn I love what Ben and David are doing I'm gonna do the exact same thing they can jump in and try to do that right but you have six years of experience you have 600 hours out there you have to counter position against us or address a different audience or exactly by the way they definitely should every time i talk to somebody who wants to i i without i'm always like you absolutely should do this yeah and you will even if you never succeed in terms of any like numerical success or like you will succeed because you are learning So being a nut nut job and completely crazy is i think makes you harder to compete with and it's also we're gonna go all over the map here but it's impossible not to be that like think about how seeped you guys are in the same information that i am where it always says oh you're the sum of the first of your five friends or whatever right well it's like it's also like what you get some of your podcasts you listen to and the books you read.
And so what happens- Five friends, including your parasocial relationships. And so now what happens is like, you mentioned, dude, like you only read like one book about him, you'll go crazy.
And so what happens is when I'm really interested in somebody, I will, I listen to Bill Gurley. Again, I just take advice when people are smarter than me.
Bill said, go collect everybody, everything you can. Okay, good.
I'll do that. This is very.
These are simple ideas. And so I'll find somebody that's interesting.
I'll read everything about them. And so with Charlie, I have like a little Charlie Munger on my shoulder.
I have a little Steve Jobs, a little Edwin Land, a little David Ogilvie, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, all these people that have been heroes of mine, James Dyson. And so now I'm presented with a situation.
It's like, what would they do? And you have, if you you read and spend everything that's out there about these people, like you'll have an idea of like how they would respond. Did you guys ever read Ken Kosienda's book, Creative Selection? About that? Oh, that's shocking.
He worked on the original human interface for the iPhone. So he made the keyboard for when it was still like Operation Purple or something.
The keyboard. made safari before the iphone he has this excellent book that i've read like three times called creative selection i think the the design how apple design products and golden age of steve jobs might be the subtitle but he talked about that where he's he demoed to steve right and you're not going to describe it to him you're going to demo and you're going to hand it to him and so they they iterate, you guys already know this, they iterate through a series of demos.
And it's based on Steve's taste. Like he is not, oh, let's talk about this.
Like, nope, do this, do this, that. And so Ken has a great line in the book where he's like, demoing for Steve is like asking questions to the Oracle Delphi, except the Oracle Delphi would like respond with a riddle.
And he's like, no, no, Steve was was unbelievably like crystal clear. You understood him.
Out of every single person I've ever studied, Steve Jobs is by far the clearest thinker I have ever come across. Like he's just gifted at that.
Charlie is like the Oracle and it's crystal clear. You are not like you are going to understand what he's the idea he's trying to get into your brain for sure.
But my point being is like all of the people that we study they don't denigrate the past they steve jobs the reason i'm so obsessed with edwin land i read in a uh biography when steve was like 20 in his 20s edwin land is in like 70s he goes and meets edwin land and he goes visiting edwin land was like visiting a shrine he's like he is my hero more people should try to be like. And then you guys made the point in that, you know, Jeff Bezos took a lot of ideas from Sam.
Who took a bunch of ideas from Sony too? Steve and Jeff. So you always find these people where you're like, oh, I thought this was a Steve Jobs idea.
No. It's an Akio Morita idea.
Yeah. Or an Edwin Land idea.
Like when we used to watch the presentations that Steve would give, where he's like, oh, we're building at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. He put it up on the screen.
He ripped that off wholesale. Edwin Land said that exact word.
But that's the point. It's like you're never going to find anybody gets to the top of their profession without doing the work, like studying the people that came before them and learning from them and admiring them.
This is a good sort of personal pivot and it's like i've never asked you and all the hours we've spent it's crazy this is the first time we've met in person yeah like we spent hours and hours and hours on zoom uh how did you like decide that this is what you were going to do with your time on this planet and like how did what led to this okay so i you know our mutual friend jeremy from formerly tiny um i just spent like a bunch of hours with him he was in town in one sentence he like he psychoanalyzed me better than anybody else ever has he goes you didn't have any mentors growing up so you like you have then you took it to like this extreme and he said it more much more eloquently than I am but he's like you don't have any mentors so I view your career as like this psychopathic uh search for like mentors that can help you you know and so like to answer your questions like I don't want to go into too much detail here but uh like I've only had one habit my whole life and that was reading I was reading for as long as I can remember uh my mom passed away from breast cancer a couple years ago and she we didn't have a lot of money. Long story, but I was the first person, not only to graduate college, but high school in my family.
I came from a family, unfortunately, both sides of the family, no education, a lot of just bad habits. So I identify with a lot what Charlie Munger says, because he essentially observes bad behavior and then tries to do the opposite.
So I was just, let me give you an example. I was just up in Canada, actually at an event, Andrew Wilkinson was hosting for a bunch of entrepreneurs.
Me, Shane Parrish from the Knowledge Project and Farnham Street was up there, Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World, and we were doing this panel together. And Shane's the moderator, and we don't know what we're going to talk about beforehand.
And so Shane asked the question, it's like, oh, what did you learn most from your upbringing or something like that, right? And I go, I learned not to do cocaine and to graduate high school. Like, so that kind of thing, right? And so there was just a bunch of anti-models.
I thought about this as I was walking through the tenderloin this morning at San Francisco. And I was like, I should do this walk with my daughter as the best.
Like, hey, this way you don't do drugs. Like, this is the perfect example.
Like, you observe bad behavior and then you do the opposite. So long story short, I've always been obsessed with reading.
Like, one of the best things my mom ever did was even if we didn't have money for books, she would take me to the bookstore and just sit there. Like, you know, bookstores are so cool because they just let you read.
No one comes to her and is like, hey, you've been reading for an hour. Like, you got to get out of here, you know, and just read and read and read.
So I was— Was there anybody who, like, introduced you to reading in books? Or you just, like, there was just something about you. Sounds like it's mom.
Yeah, but no, she wasn't a big reader. The only thing she read was the Bible.
There was no books in the house when I was younger, ever. So how did you be like, mom, take me to the bookstore i can't answer that all i can say is like my wife knows has known me for 15 years and her thing what she says is she like likes my family and gets along with them but she goes how did that come from that i know it's like it sounds like you have a classic like you're the one who made it out story sam, our mutual friend, actually gave me the way to think about this.
And it's called the founder of your family, right? And it's the person that, like, and I used to call them, and it was a terrible name, but generational inflection points. Because you'd read this in the biography where you have, like, generation after generation of just not good things happening.
And then one person just says, it stops now. That's what Rockefeller did.
Rockefeller. I always think of Sam Bronfman, the guy that did Seagram's.
Oh, yeah. And he's in Canada growing up.
But like, their parents had lost so much money. They think they were Jewish and they had to like escape from persecution of Russia.
I can't remember where they came from. But they go and they have to start all over.
And they're in Canada and like,'s no heating and like they're freezing and like he so he has this like psychopathic drive to change but you that stays with you forever so like once you know he builds this massive company and literally changes the trajectory of all of his uh descendants and as his his daughter's an adult and she tells a story in the book where Sam is sitting there in a mansion

next to a fire, shivering,

thinking about how embarrassing it was

to have to go to school with tighter clothing.

That guy's never going to go back to that

and he never loses it.

So I've just always been a reader.

That's the only thing ever,

the only one unbroken habit I've always had.

And so I just had this idea where I was obsessed with podcasts forever. was obsessed with audio before there's such thing as a podcast um like i would listen to talk radio when i was a kid and at that time you know it's it's not like there's no on-demand anything you would listen sports talk radio politics talk radio it's embarrassing there was like this woman that used to be on at night people would write in like advice for love their love life love life.
And I'd listen to that. Just the idea of like, there's all this information.
Oh man, I used to listen to Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Do you ever listen to this? Like it's when all the other radio programming sort of expires.
And then you enter the like one in the morning AM radio stuff. And it was like, you know, aliens and like tons of paranormal stuff.
But it was like, if you listen, like, you know, you know, the, the Cavs game ends, I'm from Cleveland. And so like, then you listen to like the sports post game and then it goes into like the politics hour.
And if you still can't fall asleep, then you're into like aliens. And it's like four hours of that stuff.
Do you have a radio in your bedroom? Oh yeah. Yeah.
I'd be able to, I don't, I imagine my parents probably came and turned it off, but like would leave it on while I fell asleep every night. And then remember, like, I remember, so you have the jump up from that, and then the AM radio stations would then start streaming to your browser, internet.
It still wasn't on demand. So if you're not listening at three o'clock or 12, like, you miss it.
And then once I saw- Wasn't this what Mark Cuban's company was? His was like broadcasting audio for sports games, though, I think. I don't actually know.
It's kind of funny. It's like an era of- It's broadcast.com, right? Yeah.
Yeah. And it was competitive with RealPlayer, which also wasn't on demand.
That was just streamed radio. No, the first on demand was, the first time I saw this, I was like, this is insane.
Especially for people that are learning machines using Charlie's, where it's like, I can go to, even today, like they did, you can go to any podcast player, type in whatever you want to learn about, and then you can hear somebody, it's usually spent hundreds of hours teaching you about this stuff. You can also find intellectual, high-quality content more easily now, because all content, because there were a limited number of channels and a limited number of time slots, everything had to be produced for the lowest common denominator.
And now you can opt into your niche and find the highest quality content in that niche. And like the only way to do that before was books.
Like there wasn't an audio way to, there wasn't content. There wasn't niche audio content broadly available.
There aren't like several million authors out there, but there's several million podcasters. But you made a good, I think you were getting to a good good point.
It's like because the business model didn't support that. And so now- And there was no distribution.
Yeah. And now with podcasting, it's like, you guys, I'm sure, I think like 50, I don't ever look at analytics, but I think last time I looked, it was like 50% of my audience was in the United States, but then everywhere.
And so I was doing, the early days of founders, I was just, I remember it all changed because I couldn't figure out the business model. So you would do like affiliate you know at that time i remember when i first started you went through a bunch of business models yeah so when i first started they're like hey um you you contact like the few podcast advertising networks there were back then you know because you guys started your show in 2016 right 15 15 okay so i started in 2016 and you contact me like yeah we can do ads for your show.
You know, you need like 25,000 downloads an episode. And at the time, I'm like, I'll never get there.
Like, obviously we've skyrocketed past that. But like, that's impossible.
It's like as many people as in a basketball arena. Oh, when you start visualizing the audience, it's like, oh, two and a half NFL stadiums show up for every acquired episode.
Like, that's an insane. Yes.
But do do you guys think so do you guys think about that only in in uh adding to the pressure in a good way like it's a good motivator i never think about it really you know what i think about it how my show set up is why i say you and i and i yeah it's like right i like how you treat the audience as like the person you're it's one person so like one and i've done this forever it's like i it's funny i remember it's one of my friends that we were met up one day and i was like man i think i'm gonna try to make like a business around the fact that i read so much and he's like and he called me like a year like six months ago a year ago he's like i can't believe you did that he's like i thought you were the dumbest thing i ever heard but i just picture him when i started it's like, the whole idea behind the show was like, what if you got to meet up once a week with your friend that reads a lot and he just tells you the stuff that he read that week? Like interesting ideas. Did it even cross your mind to like try and convince him to do the podcast with you or somebody else? Or you're always just like, no, I'm in it.
So one thing, we don't have like a bunch of prepared stuff, but one thing us three talked about is like, hey, why don't we talk about like who was your influence on why you do what you do and so i feel the greatest uh podcaster of all time is dan carlin from hardcore history that's like my i think he's like i can't believe what that guy does right you and him are like the only successful uh monologue podcasters like i think it's the hardest thing to do in this medium.

And I can't, I mean, everyone else either has a guest on or a co-host.

Yeah.

Well, there's another guy that was,

so I took Dan Carlin.

I was obsessed with him.

I've listened to all his episodes.

For years, you talked about falling asleep.

I did that too.

But I fell asleep to Dan Carlin.

So over and over and over again,

to now where I listen to him,

I'm like, it's like, it's like. Pavlovian.
Yeah, I was like, no, don't wait. It's not nighttime, bro.
Wake up. But there was another one that a friend of mine put me on.
There's this comedian named Bill Burr. He does the Monday morning podcast.
He used to do it every Monday. Now he does, I think, Monday and Thursdays, right? He is one of the first podcasters.
When he was podcasting his first episodes, at the time, he would call into a number and record, right? And then there was a service that would transform that recording from your phone into an MP3 that you could publish. You could download and put on your iPod.
This is way before anything. It's so wild how things have done.
I mean, we're here now in this recording setup that we have here, you know, with thousands of dollars of gear. And like, yeah, we start, I remember when we first started, I don't think you let me do this, but I was like, well, why don't we just talk at the computer and like set up QuickTime.
Dude, when I listened back to our first few episodes, like Pixar, and I'm like, we, it sounds like we were just talking at the computer. Yeah.
We basically were. Yeah.
That's when people people are like i have a lot of psychos that they're like i start on number one i go all the way through i'm like oh like please don't yeah if you're gonna if you're gonna do like go in the opposite order this is one of the things i wanted to talk about i i i used to um because that way at least by the time you get to one you like you you you're a fan but if you if you start at one you're like oh these guys just suck yeah but like that it's almost like um there's great pleasure in hearing something that you think is excellent and fully baked and like uh especially when it's been long running you're like oh this has always been immaculate and perfect and then you get to go see some of the early work and you're like oh oh, it's so rough. It's like what you were talking about.
You want the early Charlie. I can see where the magic was, even though they didn't know yet.
It's the same thing you see in the books that you're reading, though. Like Sam Walton, when you tell a story where his landlord screws him over and he goes, I'm not whipped.
I found this store. I'll do it again, right? And it's like, yes, Walmart is a huge success.
You guys made the point that there was a great point where it's like, you're never going to think 25 years in the future when there's watermelons and donkey crap on the ground that this is going to be the richest family in the world, right? And the most standardized form of retail. Yeah.
And so you see like, oh, that same guy that became the richest person in the world that now family has a rich family or whatever. It's like, he's imperfect too, just like I am.
And so that is the only benefit of listening to an early acquired or early founders. It's like, oh, you see the improvement.
Just like in the books, you see the improvement. Well, it's fun too.
Like, I like going back and listening to some of your old episodes. I get to like, see your journey, you know? Like, I'm proud of you.
Like, the, but I've been thinking about that. i was thinking about ahead of our conversation here like i used to say all the time people like oh i go back i listen to the early episodes like no don't it's so embarrassing i actually think like we always want to be embarrassed by our last episode we've just constantly kept like raising every episode like we try and just notch it up because we keep picturing the stadium and we're like that's that's the like that's why i think about the stadium because i think about the like the pressure of like we got to do better next time than we did this time and it's not just filled with like you know seattle's nfl fans it's filled with like hundreds of thousands of the smartest people that and this gets to like the psyche like the deep insecurities that at least i have of like i want to impress those people I want those people to think I'm smart.
And so I have to produce something unbelievably worthwhile of their time. And the minute that I don't, I'm like literally walking out in front of an NFL stadium full of people that I want to impress.
And like, I didn't used to have that pressure, but like once we found content market fit for acquired with like people that I've always thought highly of, That's is the driver now there were a couple years where we kind of drifted there wasn't that pressure to keep amping the bar and then right it's like the 2017 era yeah i think you're never going to be embarrassed about your your latest episode at the time we're making this is lvmh you're never going to be embarrassed about that that was excellent and like that it doesn't mean you can't keep improving 10 years from now I look back and I think yes that's certainly an episode I don't know how you feel that I'm proud of but I look back at the time so we didn't know that was going to be a super popular episode totally unpredictable because we haven't. It's our, our number one episode by a huge margin, 40,000 more people have listened to that episode than the next highest, which was amazon.com.
I probably could have told you, actually, I was like, David, no one's going to listen to Amazon because everyone already knows this story, which was super wrong. But I either thought like, no one will listen to this one or like, this will be our most successful episode with LVMH even after we recorded it I was like or after we edited it because we had to like edit a lot of stuff but I was like this is how much we didn't know but it's not like our best ever but apparently I think it might be my favorite episode of yours and I heard from a ton of other people that how much they liked it like it's thank you it's really but to the conversation, there's a bunch of stuff that we could have done better in that episode.
Like a whole bunch. So I do this all the time where I'll go back and listen to old episodes because people are like, that's weird you listen to a new podcast.
It's like, no, this is a tool. That's how you get better.
This is a tool. No, we didn't even try to get better.
I was like, oh, I haven't read that book in like two years. I'll just listen to my episode on it.
And it's a tool for me. That's how tool for me.
That's how I know it's good for other people, right? Right. And so I was like, and then I'll listen to it.
I'm like, oh, wow, I forgot that. I need to keep that idea in my mind.
But I'll hear myself like, oh, you said that in two paragraphs. That could have been one paragraph.
Cut that part. That doesn't make sense.
And so, yeah, I understand the improvement. But what I'm saying is your quality is already super high.
Like it can increase and get better. Don't get me wrong.
But like you're never going to be embarrassed. You're just like, you're just like oh i could probably do it 20 30 better which is still excellent from the the like the level you're at so the way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass and he's unbelievably good and we're so lucky to have him and then he sends us a rough cut i upload it to descript and then we listen like and read while we word for word, sentence for sentence, and try to cut every unnecessary sentence.
And we end up pulling out 20-ish minutes of just fluff. It's just like, okay, we could have been tighter in that point.
Is there a way to get tighter in it without re-recording it? And I think that has dramatically contributed to episode quality, because by the time we ship it, neither of us feel that there are extraneous sentences. All right, listeners, we want to share with you a new friend of the show, AnRock.
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So, I don't know if I'm, like, that... You're still a one-man show, right? I do everything.
No one touches anything. So, like...
Everything. Soup to nuts.
I'm gonna ask your question, but I also think, like, we should... This is a perfect point to, like, how we became friends and why like, I'm putting this out on my feed and no one no one you're going to be the first non-David Senra voices that ever heard on founders and only would agree to do it and I only agree to do with you guys is because like this goes back to like why I want to be surrounded with first of all people that have like interest super smart people but also people that have like positive some thinking right Patrick O'Shaughnessy has this gigantic successful show uh invest like the best he's got the Colossus podcast network his fund is called positive sum and that's how he acts I joined his network this is like months later um and they're like hey like like you know we have editors whatever like he has like this empire over there yeah and resources he's like what do you want and i was like uh i just want you to amplify my

audience and then connect me with first first rate advertisers because like i think acquired is a luxury podcast not maybe not luxury premium we got to go over the distinction there from lvmh but like we're saying no no this is like we're trying to set the bar here but anyways he's like hey do you want editors you want any of this stuff i was like no i don't want no one gets to touch my stuff like people think oh like does do they tell you what books to read and like no patrick liked my show and he's just like why would i tell you like just whatever you're doing just do it to more people now um and so to answer the question no like i pick the books i record them i edit i'm still one person show i don't know if that'll happen forever but i do the fact that it just, like, spends so much time with the material gets it in my brain. But the reason that, like, I want to talk about, like, the role you guys played in that, where we were getting on Zoom, and for, like, the background here is, like, you know, we had known of each other.
I talked to Ben a long time ago because he was running this private podcast. This was, like, years ago.
And so, anyways, we're, like, you're... That's also funny to think back, back, like all the dead ends that we went to.
We went down a ton of them. You went down a ton of them.
You're about to talk about some of them. There's so many dead ends.
But they're in the books too. Yeah, but they're in the books.
That's exactly it. Merrill would change the name of the show to adapting.
Oh my God, that was a dead end. That was on me.
I didn't know this. That one was on me.
Tell the story. COVID happened and we were like, no one wants to hear these like stories of like extreme capitalism.
Like we're like the X games of capitalism. And like this is a moment where like everyone is hurting.
Zero business. And like this is in that the stock market trough too where you're just like, wow, like, you know, all businesses are going to go under.
No one's ever going to have jobs again. This is, you know, this is scary.

And so we were like, well, like, what story should we tell?

How about businesses that are adapting to make it through this tough time?

And to, like, show how serious we were about it.

We changed the name of the show.

It was, like, our three least listened to episodes covering pretty amazing stories.

But we just branded it wrong.

Like, Canlis is, like, the most interesting restaurant story you could ever hear about.

We did Intel. That's the only time we've ever done Intel.
That's the only time we've done Intel. But because it was adapting, not quite, it was stupid.
So stupid. But there's no way to do, like learn rather than screw up.
Do you want to know the first name of founders? Ooh. You know, like in your RSS feed, you can change the name, right? But you can't change the link.
Like it'll still say. The URL, yeah.
So you look at it from mine and it's Autotelic. The name autotelic comes from this book called flow that a-u-t-o-t-e-l-i-c maybe i don't know i can't spell for i can't spell pronounce i have no grammar so i'd be like you read so much i was like i don't pay attention to that stuff is that the mihi yes the guide of flow yes it's it is an activity that you do for the sake of itself going back to your questions like why like i just love to read i'm gonna do this if no one listens like that's how i know i'm gonna win because it's like people like oh would you do it for free it's like i no i paid to do this like like a long time for a long time like i literally said i'm gonna quit and i'm gonna i have the savings i have a wife and a baby or a daughter to support now i have a son a wife a daughter and a daughter, and a son.
And I was like, I bet you, I just put trust in myself. It's just like, I'm going to, if I focus on this seven days a week, I'll figure out the business model.
I know, like, I don't think I'll ever get rich from it, but I will at least pay my bills. Right.
And so like every month I'm like, oh, less money there. And like, so I paid to do it.
So the idea where like, uh, you know, again, people get, I think Steve Jobsve jobs talks about this like the older he gets he said something like the older he gets the more he realizes why people do things matters and so he's always asking those questions like i always say it's like how do you know uh that you found what you love to do and uh people are like oh because like i wouldn't sell my company it's like okay there's another level it's like how much would you have had to pay Steve Jobs to stop working at Apple? The answer is he wouldn't take all the money in the world. How much would you have to pay Charlie? A lot of people tried to stop Steve Jobs from working at Apple.
Yeah, but like, think about that. Like the idea is like, he's not doing it for money.
He's in a different game. He's doing it for the sake of itself.
And so I went through a bunch of different names. History's Greatest Men, History's Greatest, like history, all these terrible names.
And I just started narrowing it more and more and more to like founders. And I was like, oh, that's perfect.
There is a question. Because you weren't even, like you weren't coming from the tech world.
You weren't like, this wasn't content marketing. No, it was just like, the idea I had known about like Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, and all these other people.

And I remember you had Kevin Rose on your show a long time ago.

So you guys remember his –

Again, not that long ago.

Maybe a year, year and a half.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It just – time flies.

Because it was post – he was –

It was during COVID.

He was pretty much already fully Web 3 by the time we – So do you guys remember Foundation? Yeah. Oh, yeah.
He's like one of the first high quality... Yeah.
Like, imagine if he would have stuck with that show. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it would have been a monster.
It's like the only episodes that ever came out was like, here's me interviewing Elon Musk. Here's me interviewing Sam Altman.
Here's me. And like these people, and also before they became like icons of our time.
That's it. Elon had the Model S.
That was the only thing. He was just about to release the Model S.
He had the Roadster. No, no.
They were in the factory because I watched it all the time. They were in the factory building the Model S.
That's right. So I don't know if you could buy it yet, but it was like coming or whatever.
And Elon looks way younger and like, you know. And then in 2015, Tim Ferriss, I was a big fan of his podcast.
I read like, you know, 4-Hour way i just four-hour body changed my life did it yeah with the slow carb yep slow carb diet i did that too slow carb diet cold showers like i did and the funniest thing is like that this is like this whole cold plunge thing that's like becoming a thing now i'm like was nobody like reading tim ferris in 2011 like that was a huge part of yeah well It's just only our demographic was. Actually, that made me think of something.
Let me interrupt this story because I think it's really important. You're like, oh, is anyone going to listen to our Amazon episode? They already know it.
And so this is something that, like, Engine of the Queen becomes the most successful. Are you going to quote Ogilvy? Yes.
Yes. I've listened to enough founders to know.
Yeah, because it's like this is so key that people people don't understand. It's like, you're not advertising to a standing army, you're advertising to a moving parade.
And so like, I will literally get on calls with like media company founders that are like selling ads or like building companies. And I'm like, oh yeah, you must've read Olga Vita.
They're like, what? And I was like, these are not new lessons. Like if, and again, this comes from the humility to realize, Hey, Warren Buffett's smarter than me.
So if that dude in his shareholder letters is saying, uh, David Ogilvie is a genius. I'm like, wait a minute, this dude, how many businesses has Warren Buffett looked at at that point? How many founders and managers has he looked at? And he's like, this dude's a genius.
Yeah. This is not rocket science guys.
Just go and like, let's search David Ogilvie and Amazon five Five books, good. Order them all.
These days, it's search David Ogilvie and your podcast player of choice. That's, I went to- Wait, but explain the Standing Army versus- So you're not advertising to Standing Army, you're advertising to Moving Parade.
But what happens is like, even when you put on the Sequoia episode, right? Me and David went on a hike in Stanford. And I was like, dude, you have this crazy back catalog.
Every single day, you have more people following your podcast feed than you had the day before. I was like, and I, because I knew this because I was a subscription podcast, right? Recount briefly your business model journey.
So I'll give you a shorter breakdown because like I went through so many of them. I just put a hard paywall.
Listen to the first 30 minutes. You want to listen to all of them.
Then you pay, right? And it converted. This is when we had that chat that you were talking about.
We got to go back to that. We were like, dude, you're doing it wrong.
You're doing it wrong. Because there's been times like this one where we're like, what the hell are you doing? But there's been other times where you come to us and you're like, do you know how good your Sequoia episodes were? And like the fact that you have four times the audience that you have now and none of the 75% of those people have ever heard the Sequoia episode.
What are you doing? And so you guys, we had this hike. This is an Olgavie idea.
Remember, not my idea. I don't get like everything has already been done, guys.
Just speaking to the people listening, not you. You obviously know.
It's like we've already been done. Just go see.
Hey, that person's smart. He learned from 40-year career.
Like, you're not going to, the idea is you're not going to pick

up on an idea you can use is silly. So I told David.
I do think, though, I was thinking about this.

There's some cases where it's not true, but I think most truly, like, iconic, world-changing

businesses and founders, they build, they stand on the shoulders of giants, but they have

one or multiple things that is novel that they come up with. It's the combination of these ideas, like Sam Walton taking SoulPrice's ideas and his competitor ideas and like, hey, what about, you guys are kind of ignoring these like 4,000 person communities.
I'm pretty sure like the thesis behind Walmart is like, will they just drive far distances just to save money? The answer is yes, five hours right but that that like that isn't a novel idea yeah exactly it's a very it's that's the whole thing it's combining like one big novel idea with a bunch of other things that you guys combined david ogre's idea by republishing your sequoia podcast and then you text me like oh my god like the downloads are crazy yeah and because the vast majority because you're not podcasting to a standing army you're podcasting to a moving parade and so i had known this because through my experimentation i would take an old episode that i had done uh do a preview throw it up and you'd get conversions every time because it was new to them and that was like so olga v i credit olga v for that idea that's an idea he got from Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker who were building advertising businesses 50 years before him. Is this a scientific advertising? Yes.
Yeah. Also a good founders episode.
Yeah. He's excellent.
That, that, that, um, that book scientific advertising sold like eight or 10 million copies. They kept it in Albert Lasker.
So Claude Hopkins worked for Albert Lasker. Claude,er thought the book was so good, he stored it in a vault.
He wouldn't let any, he's like, he built. Because it was like the secrets of the industry, right? Like, don't publish this because we don't want this getting out.
I've learned that because in Ogilvy and Advertising at the very end of the book, David's like, here, these are the six giants that I learned from. So I was like, oh, okay, well then I'm going to Google search.
Who's like, I'm going to read the book. This is not rocket science again.
So then he's like, oh, Albert Lasker made more money than anybody else in the history of the advertising business. I was like, hold up.
What? How? Also, none of us know this guy's name. Yeah.
And so then you realize it's like, he says in the book, he's like, his estate outside of Chicago was so big, he had 40 full-time employees. I'm like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, make these words make sense in my mind.
That doesn't make any sense to me. So you read Albert Lasker, and then he tells you about Claude Hopkins.
He's like, yeah, the information was so good that, like, I stored that in my vault for 20 years. And then once he sold his advertising, or I think he gave it away, like, a token, like $100,000, you know, to the people working there.
And then they released it, and Claude went off on his own and everything else. These are not like...

Okay, so you were doing the 30

minute hard cut off when we...

It's so unsatisfying. It's like

I'm going to listen to 30 minutes of this episode and then

I'd have to get...

Someone's asking me to pay for the rest.

The conversion rates were higher, but you guys

said this is where... You were at a local

maximum. This is where you were very helpful

like, David, first of all, and you guys are nice. This is not the language you use.
You're like, you idiot. Like, but you guys are so nice.
It's like, dude, you're doing it wrong. Listen, for every one person, I think it was Ben that said this, for every one person that would buy a podcast, there's 1,000 or 100 that would listen to them for free.
It's about 100. Yeah, probably even more than that, you know? And so then you guys would like, you open the kimono.
You're like, this is, these are our downloads. This is who we advertise with.
This is what we charge for advertising. You just like.
Well, the other, the other really key insight is, uh, so after spending a bunch of time with originally Kimberlite, then Glow, which is called Ellipson and still what powers the acquired LP program, uh, an interesting learning is most podcasts should generate about 50% of their revenue from direct monetization, some kind of membership program or paywalling their feed, and about half from advertising. And the math should sort of work out where that's going to be the case.
For the type of podcast that we are, where you have lots of founders and CEOs and hedge fund managers and these sorts of people listening, you could never ask someone to pay you in membership what they are worth to the most valuable advertiser for that slot. And so the way it sort of works out is like you're massively hamstringing your monetization potential if you make it membership only, because you'd have to be like, yes, please pay $2,000 to $5,000 a year in order to get access to this private thing versus if you were to take that same piece of content and open it up to advertisers.
You made the good point earlier, and we can elaborate on that, right? Why you're so psychotic about this sentence needs to get out of here, like these two sentences, let's remove it. Because if you could factor in the average hourly rate of the people in your audience, it is unbelievable.
So even I think if you make what, a million dollars a year, and we know people obviously in our audiences make a lot more than that, but I think a million dollars a year is about 500 bucks an hour or something like that. I don't know the math.
I'm not a good math person. But like, so you're asking if they listen to an hour long podcast of founders, it's like, that's $500.
Like you cannot waste these people's time. So I never answer your question when you're like, hey, how do you guys think about this? Do you re-edit or do you cut them out? I use Descript as well.
I actually think the way I listen to founders is obviously listening to it and listening and reading. Like the superpower of podcasts is you can listen to it when you're doing something else.
But when you're editing. But I think I'm going to put all my podcasts up on YouTube.
I don't have any video, but I think I'm going to use Descript. So some people have success just putting up the audio on a static picture, and you can listen to it on YouTube.
But I also think, well, if I'm going to do that, I might as well just have this, and that's kind of cool if you want to use it but don't have to. We did not find success doing that.
Like, this episode will be the first episode this year that's on YouTube because we basically said, if there's not interesting video, then it's not a video podcast and you can go find it in a podcast player. I it's, I'm using it just for search and I would use it.
I'm not, I'm never going to, I don't think I'm ever going to do video anything. Cause it's just like, it's so much simpler to do literally what I'm saying is like, I'm going to upload the MP3 to YouTube.
Like I'm not making a video just because it is, they're eventually going to have, they're not stupid, they're eventually going to have, like, the podcast player inside of YouTube.

Like, did you, they released this, like, 40-page document I read on their podcast goals on YouTube. Did I send it to you guys? No.
I'll send it to you guys. So, right now I have YouTube Premium, so you can listen to them in the background like a podcast player.
Which is great. But they need to have podcast functionality.
It's still, like, a video. Yeah.
So anyways, the way I do do it is like yes i'm very aware that uh who's listening i'm not ever going to waste a lot of their time and what i've found with the more practice i have for the podcast is i'm able to edit on the fly like i don't have a script right so like i'll go through the book i highlight then write down whatever pops my mind i don't like just am i first of all the highlights like am i excited about that oh that's interesting highlight just go off instinct right and then write down whatever pops in my mind. I don't, like, just, am I, first of all, the highlights, like, am I excited about that? Oh, that's interesting.
Highlight. Just go off instinct, right? Yeah.
And then write down, like, something that, oh, that's like this, or that made me think of this, and I just write it down, right? Then I'll reread all these highlights the night before I record, so it's, like, the second time. You're doing this in physical books, right? Physical books, yeah.
But you're putting your notes into readwise that happens

after okay that happens after so the fifth time every single book i do i think i read the highlights

five times and the fifth time is me actually taking pictures of the physical book and putting

in a readwise so jeff i was thinking about this yesterday because um i'm also slightly obsessed

with jeff bezos and he's slightly obsessed with a lot of founders that's why we were like you're

like we're sitting in chairs like dude i'm gonna be forward yeah we were setting up the camera angles before because you know what i love like um we're like i we gotta move david's chair back here a little bit do you ever have you ever watched the old jeff bezos interviews when he's like first starting amazon he's like skinny and bald like one that's like in that field outside the conference yes i think this is the one he's like sitting like you see grasping on him i don't I don't know if he's in a field. So, but he like skinny and bald.
It's amazing. The one that's like in that field outside the conference.
Yes. I think this is the one.
He's like sitting. Like you see grasping on him.
I don't know if he's in a field. But he like leans forward.
And he's like, we're going to be the most customer obsessed company ever. It's like.
And he's got that look on his face. That's how I am about founders.
I'm like. You're like, that dude's a psycho.
But Jeff says something that. He is.
But Jeff says something in Invent and Wander, which is an excellent book. Because it's all of his shareholder letters and yeah transcripts of the speeches Walter Isaacson did that right yep and all of his transcripts of the speeches and he goes do you really want to to live in a world or to compete against somebody that's that's as good as you like I certainly would certainly wouldn't that's what his he states and he's like his if you read his shareholder letters and listen he's like, he's constantly looking for unfair advantages.
And I think part of the fact that I have now over 20,000 highlights from hundreds of books, and I still have like 50 or 60 or maybe 80 books I haven't put in there yet that are in my library. So it's like, that's my Readwise account is an unfair advantage.
Because anytime somebody's talking, it's like, I can immediately, oh, you said something? I search for that term and it pulls up. And it's like, oh i see my highlight and i see my note it takes so long yeah like so long to do that but it's worth the extra five and that's integrated into your process of making that's because i'm reading something i remember no i know i've seen this before i can't remember it type in that term and it pulls up every single instant wow instance it's an unfair advantage yeah that i have with me all the time.
And what I'll do is whenever I'm waiting for an Uber today, just pull up Readwise. And Readwise has the highlights feed.
And I'll show you guys what it looks like. It looks a lot like a Twitter feed, right? Completely random.
So I'm not choosing this. And instead of me reading Twitter all day, which is not a good use of your time, it's this highlight from the Dodge Brothers.
I haven't read that book. That was like episode, probably in like the 115s.
Billy Durant, who's the founder of GM. Sam Colt.
And so are these ones that other people have liked a lot? No. So therefore...
No, it's just repopulating your own. Yes.
Oh, that's awesome. So it's got so let me give you a example a healthy twitter there on your phone so is that what like how how many times a day like how often are you just pulling up readwise and almost every day and if i'm not doing it on readwise i'll go to like my bookshelves so what will happen is um you can pull a book off my shelf and I'm thinking about this for like my kids.
Long after I'm gone, my kids can like, what was my dad into, you know? And they can go back and see, oh, and when he was 35 or 38, this is the podcast he made. Let me go find that book.
And then they pull off the shelf like, oh, this is the line he thought was interesting. Oh, wow.
You see dad's handwriting here. And like, so I use this for myself where I can pick up a book and quote unquote read it, reread it in 30 minutes by rereading my highlights and notes.
And now I'm like, it's back in, back like in front of mine. And then what happens is like, you can do this anytime.
Like people are like, oh, I'm running late for lunch. Like I'll just do this or I'll answer DMs or I'll, I always have stuff to do with me, but I use it as a form of practice.
The reason I said this is like, it sounds stupid. People think it's maybe, maybe they think it't know but i read this book uh it's episode 212 founders it's called michael jordan the life it's a 600 page biography and in that book you just have like this encyclopedia knowledge too of the numbers of your episodes which i'm so impressed by i don't it's only because i reference that all the time so when if you look up something over and over again yeah yeah yeah it's repetition everything in life is repetition sam walton's career is repetition.'s career is repetition.
It's like, I just think you're trying to, this is what I asked Charlie. One of the most interesting things he said, he's like, one of the best things that ever happened to me is I got rich later in life.
He saw the time and how difficult it was. He was talking about, imagine you being super famous or rich when you're 21 or 25 and how dis disorienting.
He's like I was a full-grown man like with life experiences with a wife and kids. He had a child who died.
Yeah, I did not mention that. Yeah.
But like he had all – you know, full life experience and therefore also the main problem that happens is people don't know. They're like I was the son of a poor man.
Now i'm rich and my kids live an unbelievable amount of wealth and privilege how do i deal with that that comes up in the books for hundreds of years the answer is no one knows right and so with charlie though the benefit is he didn't have a famous last name or a lot of wealth his kids were like grown right they wouldn't have to deal with that when you're five or seven or ten he also gave me some some advice that was fascinating. You do that.
You got to pay that bill eventually, though. Like, his grandkids have to.
Well, so how do you deal with this, though, right? Like, he's a multibillionaire. Like, that's an insane.
Right. This is a five-generation problem.
Not only is he a multibillionaire, he's like, people like us talk for hours about him. He's like a celebrity.
So I just read this fantastic book. I like reading obscure books because go back to what jeff bezos said differentiation is survival so like i'll find like weird books like me and sam were in this weird i was searching for books for you guys i couldn't find any i will order them and bring them to you because i always bring books and i was really we went to three different bookstores i'm not kidding like i brought energy drinks yeah but no we like bless sam and his patience with me and like drove me all around menlo park and palo alto yesterday going to bookstores like i was literally looking for you guys what like you had specific books oh my god no no i like going to use bookstores and then like i think of how i my my interpretation of you guys in my mind and i i just know if this book is good for that person like the charlie monger or the henry flagler book i knew that was good for charlieunger because of what he said.
So I don't know what's going to happen.

Now, I do have two books picked out for you guys, which I'll send you, but they're like

newer books.

But anyways.

That sounds like a great day, driving around with Sam Pinky and going to bookstores.

Like what better day could you spend?

Also, the peninsula is like beautiful.

So like.

Yeah.

And like, you know, Sam's unbelievably intelligent and like she's got a weird alien brain.

As I always tell him, our mutual friend Mitchell Baldrige, that all three of us know, says

I'm sorry. Yeah, and Sam's unbelievably intelligent, and he's got a weird alien brain.
I always tell him, our mutual friend Mitchell Baldrige, that all three of us know, says Sam has a gigabrain. I think it's what he said, his description of it.
But I like obscure books. I read this book that's very hard to find.
It's like 300 books. It's called The Invisible Billionaire Daniel Ludwig.
It was the richest person in the world in the 80s, and no one knew who he was. He paid a public relations firm to keep his name out of the papers.
Do what your competitors don't. Yeah, so he was just like, I don't want to be known.
And a lot of his was like shipping and oil and refining and mining and all that other stuff. But the author made us the point in the book how different a million and a billion is, going back to Charlie Munger, right? And he goes, a stack of, a million dollars in a stack of $100 bills is like 40 inches, you know? A billion dollars in a stack of $100 bills would be three times taller than the Empire State Building.
Yeah. And so like for us, it's like, oh, that guy's kind of rich.
It's like, no, the billionaire and millionaires are not in the same category. so disorienting.
I, this is also a thing where like the English language has done us a disservice by naming two things that are a thousand times different, very similar words. It sounds similar.
Yeah. So they're not similar at all.
Well, it was a lot of people are asking, like think about all the wealthy people that, that Charlie talks to. Um, and they're asked, what do I do with, like, this wealth with my kids? And it's like, you know, if you give your kids a bunch of money, is it going to demotivate them? And Charlie goes, of course it's going to.
So he's like, but he's like, you know, it's like, again, like, this should be obvious to you. So he says, hey, don't try to steer his kids or his grandkids into what they should do for a living, which is Charlie Munger's, one of his best piece advice that i took to heart is like follow your natural drift yeah like how i pick books there's been like 15 or 20 that i've read completely or half and it's like i don't like this book i'm not making an episode about it i i go to my bookshelf and i have like probably 80 or 100 books i haven't read yet most come from the audience and i was like what am i most excited to learn about now and that's how i pick it right so following natural drift which is also also more or less how we pick episodes too we have a little bit more planning because now like there's such long lead times but it's kind of like what's interesting to us right now 100 so he's like you know don't try to steer them too much and he's like he definitely feels that they're some of them are going to be less motivated because they're born rich but he said this this was the most surprising thing.
But he goes, you have to give them the money anyways,

or they're going to hate you for it.

And I was like, that's like, because my answer before this,

I've read so many like family dynasty stories.

And I'm not saying I'm trying to put a dynasty.

Where they decide we're not going to give the money.

Or no, they did, and it ruined them.

Like, did you guys, you guys haven't done an episode on TCI, John Malone.

That will happen this year for sure so you know why um that was one of the books that was recommended the most they're like you gotta do cable cowboy you gotta do cable cowboy you gotta do we both have read the book it's awesome it's excellent and there's so you know the story i'm about to tell you where the crazy thing is like i'm always thinking about i didn't understand this before studying dedicating my life to studying history right where it's like oh wow the decisions i'm making now can can reverberate through the generations that's a crazy thing where bob magnus which is the founder of tci this you know um he doesn't have any monies and rural texas wants to do this jump into this new industry cable right full of cowboys like little cowboys and he doesn't have money So his dad gives him a $2,500 loan. So Bob takes that $2,500 loan.
And then let's say 40 years later, Bob dies and he's got to pass on his money, right? That was created from the company he created to his two kids. And he winds up giving them, I think, I don't know the numbers.
I want to say like 200200 million each. Two sons.
So think about that one decision. I think I talked about it in the episode.
And if I didn't, it's a big mess up on my part. And I stopped in that part.
I'm pretty sure you did. I was like, hold on.
Think about that. Like, what if his dad didn't give him the $2,500? Yeah, you're talking about that.
Yeah, so his $2,500 turns into $400 million, let's say $200 million each for his grandsons. Changed his grandson's lives.
Right. See, that means, rule of thumb, you take like, I don't know, you probably have three more generations after that of wealth guaranteed.
That wealth is gone because I think it went up their nose. Like, that was a...
That's pretty hard in one generation to... But I don't know.
Like, the point was, it's like, that wasn't good for them because they were not motivated. They did a bunch of drugs think they went to jail like that kind of stuff and you see that so much so my thought was like oh like get them a little bit but not enough that they don't have to work or whatever and charlie's like they're gonna hate you yeah and like what's the point such a good insight he's just like human nature this is my biggest takeaway from charlie and i think the biggest benefit that people thaters and Acquired and then hopefully read a bunch of the books and do studying on their own are going to realize.
This is like Charlie. I said it at the top of my notes.
And this is the first thing. It's like it's comforting.
The conversation with Charlie was comforting the same way that people tell me listening to Founders is comforting. It's like Charlie has an almost complete indifference to problems.
Troubles from time to time should be expected. This is inescapable, so why would you let it bother you? And the difference, and if you think about, that's the main takeaway from this three-hour dinner I had with him, right? And if you think about how does he avoid this, he avoids it by great things have less problems.
You're never going to escape problems. But if you're around great people, they're not going to throw up, just like a great business doesn't throw up big problem after big problem after big problem.
Your wife, your kids, your friends, your co-workers, his whole thing is aim for the highest quality you can get. And then that's going to solve 99% of your problems.
And then when you have the problem, the inevitable problems are going to come, okay, just deal with it. He talked about when he lost the money on Alibaba, he brought that up, that people try to make fun of him for or whatever.
It's like, you guys are missing the point. You're not going to come okay just deal with it yeah he talked about like when he lost the money on alibaba he brought that up you know that people try to make fun of him for or whatever it's like you guys are missing the point like you're not going to escape get through life without making mistakes the founder of ikea has this great quote where he says uh um making mistakes is the privilege of the active only those asleep make no mistakes it's a version of the man in the marine uh man in the arena yeah Yeah, the Idea.
Yeah. So, okay.
So what do you think is the ideal way to handle it if at 35 someone becomes very wealthy and so when their kid's memory starts around age three, so for their entire kid's memorable lifetime, they've grown up in wealth and privilege. Like how does one handle that? I have no idea.
I have no idea. Like no idea like i don't the the me even giving you an answer to that is like uh there's this guy named charles ketering or kettering i don't know how to pronounce his name uh i read his biography i think it's episode 127 or something like that so he invented the electric uh starter he founded ac delco that gets acquired by gm right he is the head of research and development at gm when gm is the most valuable company and most like the cutting edge of technology company in the world at the time there's a story from his wife and his daughter in that book uh saying hey when he dies there's only one there's only gonna be three words on his um on his tombstone i don't know because that's what he would say over and over and over again and one there's a he's having this conversation same thing he was the son of a poor man he is now a rich man his kids are rich he's talking to other people that have the same experience his peers like what do you do and the answer what they came up with i don't know yeah because it's so dependent on who the person is like maybe you give them money that going to bob magnus's grandsons maybe they're like Warren Buffett's kids where they run foundations and they want to give the money away.
And I don't think they're coke addicts. I don't know.
But it's just dependent on the person. If there was a correct answer, I think some of these guys would have figured it out.
Well, that's the thing about humans, right? Every person is different. so it's i have no idea um it really and that's the biggest thing where i think um this is one of the lessons i learned from the podcast where you know you mentioned this at the beginning ben where most of these people are just so they're like best in class in this one dimension in the world and of course to get that they had to to be poured they had to they couldn't optimize all other areas of the life at the at what they did for like their work right you know sam walton is one of the rare guys where he gets to the end he knows he's dying because he's got cancer all over his body when he's writing that book yeah and he's like listen if i could do everything again he's like yeah i missed some of my kids childhood they worked in the stores and he took them with him but he's like i'd do it again i again.
I had to do this. I had to get after it.
I had to improve. A lot of them, you know, get to the end of their life and like, oh, I regret.
The founder of IKEA has the best words on this. He said, you know, I had three sons growing up.
He started IKEA when he was like 17, worked on it until he was like 80 something. And he's like, I sacrificed my three sons' childhoods.
I regret it. He goes, anybody that has kids knows that childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered.
And so, like, we were hanging out today. We were going to do a recording, go to dinner, and I was, my plan was, I want to see my son.
He's like, and my daughter. It's like, I'm going to take the red eye.
And then I realized, like, yeah, but I want to spend time with David and Ben, so I'm leaving early tomorrow morning. But it's like, I'm doing this as fast as possible.
And if I had to, I'd, like, fly back i'd like fly back and forth because like your kids are think about like the relationship you guys have with your parents are they still alive yep yep okay so you get to talk to them see them but you have your whole life right when your kids are small there's like this tiny window when they're like two to five to six where you're everything to them oh yeah even I have talked about it. I absolutely feel this way.

Even my 10-year-old daughter,

like right now, she wants to spend time with me.

It was the cutest thing ever.

I was leaving, going to LA to see Charlie

and then coming up to San Francisco to see you guys.

And she texts me.

She goes, I'm wearing your sweater

because it makes me feel close to you

while you're gone.

You know what I mean?

But if you ask her,

do you want to spend movie night with dad and mom or do you want to go roblox with your friends everything they're friends and she loves me don't get me wrong but like their their friends are way they're really important to them yeah where like every day i miss my son's about to turn three it's like i'm not gonna get back that day and there's only like a thousand of those days yeah and my wife won't have any more kids even though i even though I was like, I don't want a bunch of kids. Like, what's that? Like, Charlie.
I was like, I want a bunch. And she's like, no way.
I was like, hey, I don't have to get pregnant, so that's fine. Something that Buffett and Munger did with the Graham group that like was way ahead of its time that now anybody can do is they formed their social networks outside of geographic barriers.
Yeah. And they found their, like, most compatible, most like-minded,

highest level of talent, you know, peers.

And then they just, like, got on planes and got to go see them.

You know, and, like, that was really hard to do back in the day.

And now anybody can do it.

It's kind of like the Bill Gurley, you know,

you have no excuse not to do that.

You also, but here's the thing.

What people get wrong is they're like, oh, I want to meet this guy guy you have to do the work necessary to make them worth your time right which is like the unfair advantage that the three people sitting in this room have is that it doesn't matter that's why like in the last six weeks i've gone to lunch or dinner with multiple billionaires this is like and the people that like you get to talk to and also stuff this is like this dude is crazy he's read 300 biographies of entrepreneurs there's no way i'm gonna have dinner with him and not pick up one idea yeah like and then now i've built this machine where like oh that's an interesting idea i'll just plug it into this business and like it's not a financial transaction by any means but there's no the reason it's not that like charlie was the first person i met that i was actually nervous about and it's the reason i'm not nervous because i know i've done the work like you can't put me in a room with anybody on the planet and I'm not gonna be able to tell them at least one interesting thing. It doesn't mean I'll be the most, the best dinner they've ever had in their life.
That's not what I'm saying. It's just like, they're gonna hear something that's like, oh, that's interesting and that goes through their own brain.
And it's only because I've spent six years and same with you guys. It's like, oh, you should feel comfortable.
Like you guys mentioned earlier, it's like your audience feels like, you know, you know two football fields and like oh it's a little bit of like uh not you didn't use the word insecurity but like you know a little like nervousness i want these people to like like me it's like oh yeah it's like it's like a fear pushing you from behind but you know like you've most likely read you're you're you know more about the subject than they do sure i do but i need to make something worthy of, that is an admirable, you know. It's like, who cares? I could spend all the time in the world and fail to synthesize the narrative and the takeaways, and all of a sudden then I've just, you know, then I've failed them.
Regardless of how much work I did, the product wasn't good. So that's the thing.
It's hard to not have the product be good because you did the work, I guess is my point. Yeah, I think we now have a process that means that when you and I put in the work, the product is good, but it took a long time to arrive at that.
It's almost like, you know, this is another Sam Hickey thing. Trust the process.
um i guess the point i was making there though is um like because you guys do so much preparation and like it's now your life's work like it's just so much it's it's gonna be so hard not to add value to the people in your life whether it's like friends that never show up on a podcast or friends that you don't have a business relationship with. You're just going to add value because what you do is so rare.
Naval Ravikant, he's influenced my thinking a lot too. He has this thing in the Almanac Naval by our friend Eric Jorgensen.
He's just like, if you read an hour a day, that puts you in the .0001% of humans. And I'm like, that can't be true.
No, that's the dirty secret of acquired and founders is that people don't read books. So if you just read them and then tell people what's in the books, you're going to 100x the market for books.
And I couldn't believe that. I was having dinner with the same friend that was telling me, like I told him, I was like, oh, I'll try to build a business around my reading.
This is like like a couple months ago and he's like you vastly overestimate how much people read he goes how much do you how many books a year do you think the average person reads i was like i don't know it's one it's like 0.5 zero i remember asking a book publisher he said america reads a book a year they well he quoted some other study i said 12 he's like no not 12 he's like it's zero they average is zero yeah it's crazy yeah to your point um i've become friends with a bunch of uh writers some of them i met through the podcast and they've been telling me like teaching me about the publishing industry and just breaking down like 98 of books ever published sell less than 5 000 copies It's parallel. The book business is the venture business,

which is so interesting to me

how the advance model works.

It's quite similar to a seed financing.

I mean, they put out $50,000

for an advance on your book,

which covers your cost of living

while you're writing it.

And they kind of don't care about recouping it

because the whole business is about, did I sign up James Clear this year? Yeah. And you know when you have Michelle Obama on your hands and you have to pay for it, but you don't know when you have a James Clear on your hands.
Yeah. And when that becomes the book that America reads this year, you better make sure it's in your publishing house and not one of the other three big or four big, whatever it is, publishing houses.

Seed funding is better because their advances are recoupable.

Right.

So it's like,

I was having this long conversation.

It's the most preferred stock.

Yeah, we were talking before.

It's participating preferred.

We were talking before we started recording.

I was like, man,

Jimmy Sony would be great

to do a sessions with

just because he's got

this historical knowledge of PayPal,

PayPal being so important

to like Silicon Valley history.

And he, we were talking about this and he's like, no, like I have to pay that back through sales. I'm like, oh, because the thing is, um, going back to like, um, you guys listen to Gamecraft, Blake Robbins.
Oh yeah. Every episode.
Yep. So excellent.
Like unbelievably good. And what I loved about is how they focused on the business model innovations and how one decision by some random group of programmers in the 1980s affected a business model decision 10 years later or whatever.
And I was talking to Jimmy about this as I go, the books are fantastic. They're the best products in the world.
There's a great quote in Poor Charlie's Almanac, which says that there's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. For Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, that is literally true, right? And what I don't understand is like, you guys have such a high value product and you haven't innovated on the business model at all yeah and so I was telling um Jimmy I was like do you know the deal like like you just you think about this like an entrepreneur like you're not a writer you're an entrepreneur and your product just happens to be a book but you can make money off that any kind of way you want like you can just get creative I go people think it's crazy where I'm like I'm trying to be the Jay-Z of podcasts and And people are like, what the hell is wrong with you? And I did like that episode.
Have you done episodes on Jay-Z? That episode I did on Jay-Z's autobiography is one of my most popular. People listen to it two, three, four, five times.
I love Jay-Z and I love you. So I can't believe I haven't listened to that episode.
Jay-Z has the founder mentality and he had it since he was a kid. 100%.
And you just see everything, his whole career. And people look at him and be like, oh, this is another thing about intelligence manifests itself in vastly different ways.'s not always like credentialed in many cases it's not right but like jay-z is a straight-up genius if you listen to him and what he did and he looked at he's like yeah he says it from the get-go he's like i thought i told you characters i'm not a rapper he's like i'm a businessman and rap just happens to be my product and so i'm going to think about it like that i go jimmy you should do that i go why don't why don't you just find a deal like Jay-Z did with Samsung? He's like, what are you talking about? Well, that's like true founders, entrepreneurs, whatever, you know, founders in your case is the title you want to put them.
They care about ownership. Like they own their work.
And you realize that the business model matters, which is why I brought up GameCraft. So what Jay-Z did, this is years ago.
This is his Magna Carter, Holy Grail, probably came out in 2013. So he goes, he goes, you know, I could record this album and then I could sell like normal, you know, stream it and then sell it for $10.
You want the physical copy, et cetera, et cetera. He goes, what if I just want my money guaranteed? So he goes to Samsung and says, Samsung, you're launching this new app, this new phone, and you have your own app on it.
I'm going to sell you, I will sell you a million copies, $5 each. You give me $5 million guaranteed for my album.
I'm still going to own it. So he gets the streaming lights.
He goes, and so what I'll do is like, you pay me $5 million. The first million people that get access to my album are going to be Samsung to have whatever phone was coming out.
You download it for free if you have this device. And so it's advertising to the Samsung and it's guaranteed money to him.
I go, dude, you're writing about technology founders. It was like, there's these venture capital funds that have $80 billion of assets under management.
It's like, hey, will you pay me a million dollars to write this book? And then you say, hey, this book is now presented by whatever firm. This is why me and you have, us here have talked about this privately.
You guys already know this was like, there's been like something like 15 acquisition or investment offers for founders i said no to every single one a lot of them are like this where it's like oh well you have the attention of people that are valuable you just said the worst thing that happened to a venture firm is they miss the the hit of that so they have to expand like they have to make sure they catch that right yeah so it's like hey we'll we'll pay for founders or whatever give you x amount of money pay you to do it you do exactly what you do the only difference is essentially you're trying to buy up our inventory forever it's like hey founders is presented by x company if you're going to raise money email here you know and the the response i have when these i get these pitches is like if i did that that means i'm not actually learning the lessons in the books right right which is like you never give up control it's like no that's interesting let's dive into it like a deal structure on that so like

what if they weren't what if you weren't giving up control and what if you weren't giving up

economics forever you're just doing a period of time buyout of your all your ad inventory

this is the intelligent thing this is what tigus is doing with invest like the best and this is

why like it's crazy to me when i talk to people and they don't understand this i had a conversation

in the intelligent thing. This is what Tegas is doing with Invest Like The Best.
And this is why, like, it's crazy to me when I talk to people and they don't understand this. I had a conversation with a founder and he's like, it's really weird.
I'm not going to say who it was. He's like, it's really weird that this company is running ads on that podcast every single episode forever.
And I'm like, not at all. And I go, oh, see.
Moving parade, not standing at me. I go, David Ogrevy ran the same exact ad in the same magazine for 30 years and it was still effective and so I went I was like I go what do you think Coca-Cola's been doing for a hundred this is not new ideas either Coca-Cola is really dumb or exactly and I don't think they're dumb and I talked to Apple has the prime billboard in every major city in America to advertise whatever the latest iPhone is forever.
So I talked to Michael Elnick, who's the co-founder of Tegas. And he's an – oh, yeah, we all know each other.
Great team. And we talked about this.
And this is another example because this somewhat affects our business because when there's like a decline in overall economics, like ad markets usually shrink a little bit and ad rates come down. And it's like, oh, you're doing exactly what investors do.
Like what do Charlie and Buffett do when there's a crash? They don't deploy, deploy. You read Izzy Sharp's fantastic autobiography, the founder of Four Seasons, right? And he says this, he goes, he's building what didn't exist at the time, the only chain of five-star hotels at the time.
And he says, I grow. And this is every founder does.
It's Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Kelly Frick.
When they have recessions, that's when they grow. So what he would do is his competitors would pull back on advertising.
He would spend more. And he says he claims, I think in the book, he increases market share by like 25% or 28% using this over and over again.
Because human nature is, oh, crap, things are small. And they cut.
This cut this is what ogilvy said ogilvy's like if you need advertising to sell your product it's not a marketing expense it's a production cost it's a it's a it's actual uh cost of manufacturing your product and so what what tigus michael elnick did that was such a genius move was first of all he knew something, right? And he scaled up through podcast ads.

And he knew it was effective.

And then he's like, oh, okay, well, now you have all these people in the tech industry.

Their stock's creating.

Everybody's running a retreat.

What does he do?

He goes like, oh.

There's probably available inventory. And so he goes, hey, Colossus Network, I'd like to buy up every single ad inventory for 2023 on every single one of your shows.
That's how you know that likelihood that guy is going to win. Like, I don't know the details of his business.
It's private and everything else. It's like, that's the right decision.
The same decision. That's what Ogilvie would have done.
That's what Buffett and Munger do when they put money in. Like, that is, that's what Coca-Cola does.
It doesn't matter the economic climate. You ever can see to see less Apple billboards.
You're going to see less Coca-Cola. No.
It's interesting to think about this in the venture business, which obviously, as we record this here in mid-March 2023, there's a lot going on in the venture business. It's so dynamic right now that I feel like we don't know the last two iterations of what have happened because we've been recording and I haven't checked my phone.
Like that's how fast the world is moving right now. Things are happening very quickly as we speak.
But I think a consequence of that, to your point about like you should advertise heavier during recessions, I think customer differentiation among venture firms is just declining rapidly, Right? Like, what is- Well, no. It was until interest rates went up.
But now that capital is scarce again. I think both the up and the down cycle is both, I think, are commoditizing.
I totally disagree with this. I think when capital was a commodity and money was free, it was extremely hard to differentiate yourself as a venture firm or any financial firm, but like it, it should be easier than ever to differentiate yourself because the thing.
Okay. So how do you differentiate yourself right now? You guys are doing it.
You can, I mean, well, one of them, like let's, let's's abstract away like speaking to the acquired audience as as one of them or as a gigantic means of differentiation your xyz average venture firm out there having money and writing the checks right but but yes having money right but like a year from now it's like six to twelve months from now that's going to. All right, listeners, it is time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.
It's funny, David, Statsig has gone from this little startup when we first started working with them a couple of years ago to this total powerhouse now. I know, it's wild.
I was looking it up and they have added all these customers since we started working together. OpenAI, Figma, Atlassian, Vercel, Notion, tons more.
At this point, if there's a growth stage tech company out there, there's pretty good chance they're using Statsig. Yep.
So listeners, if you are unfamiliar with Statsig, they basically took what was the standard product infrastructure at every big tech company, and they built it as a standalone company. This includes advanced experimentation

tools, A-B testing, feature flags, product analytics, session replays, and more. So if

you're building the next great software company, this sort of infrastructure is essential because

it allows your product and engineering teams to release things quickly, measure the impact of

them, and track progress over time. Totally.
So, I mean, as we've talked about on the show

forever at companies like Facebook or Netflix, data was just a part of how everything was built, which contributed to all the crazy bottoms up organic growth that they had. Now with Statsig, you can get that from day one at your startup.
And today they're not only trusted by startups, but also by more mature enterprises like Bloomberg and Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Turns out that a single system for data-driven product decisions is useful at any scale.
Yeah. And by the way, the scale they're operating at is completely insane.
They process over 2 trillion events per day now. By the way, David, this is updated.
The last I checked, it was 1 trillion. And then this morning I pulled it up 2 trillion.
And they handle releases to billions of end users. If you're listening to this podcast and you've used software in the last few years, there is a very good chance you've been a part of many experiments orchestrated by Statsig.
Yeah, it's just awesome. And as they've gone upmarket, they've also started to offer some interesting deployment models, like being able to run the whole thing natively inside your existing data warehouse or just using Statsig's fully hosted solution.
If you want to leverage Statsig to grow your business, there are a bunch of great ways to get started. Statsig has a very generous free tier for small companies, a startup program with a billion free events that's $50,000 in value, and significant discounts for enterprise customers.
To get started, go to Statsig.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Um, but when you guys were talking a little bit about like your business and like your venture game in general is I just think of like what, um, one of my favorite things that I heard, uh, Jeff Bezos say is, you know, for years people were like, Hey, when are you going to do physical retail? When are you gonna do physical retail? When are you gonna do physical retail? And he said something that was crazy.
He's like, physical retailing is an ancient business. And I love that term.
He's like, it's an ancient business. So I'm not going to do it until I know like I can, it's so hard to improve on an ancient business and i love that term it's like it's an ancient business so i'm not going to do it until i know like i can it's so hard to improve on an ancient industry has to be completely differentiated you mentioned i heard you on one of your podcasts where you're like you went to the amazon go store just as like uh like pure curiosity it's like not like you needed something and so you guys have probably read that story too where it's like at one time they were going to do like book like meat and like all this other stuff that you'd have to like talk to somebody.
He's like, no, you have to redo this. This doesn't make sense.
The key, the differentiation here is that you walk in, you walk out. Not walk in, talk to some guy.
He's like cutting salami for you. Like you got to get that out of there.
And so I've had this thought because I've read a bunch of biographies on investors too. And like is an ancient business like yep and and we're just doing it in different ways now and so uh

i was like well if you if you wanted to invest right uh let's say you wanted to invest in private

companies which people have been doing forever um i always think of like like where did jp morgan

get his deal flow and you know like you've read through the history it's like people like oh that

was jp morgan bank like no no there's no retail bank. You're not going in there.
There's no ad, like a sign on the door. It's like, here's J.P.
Morgan Company. It was a relationship-based.
It's like, you got in if you knew somebody, right? I read this biography that's incredible. I highly recommend people read it.
It's episode 103 of Founders. It is The Richest Woman in America, Hedy Green.
I can't remember the subtitle. I love how he denies that he knows every number of every episode and then busts out three more.
It's only because I reference this all the time. So Hedy Green, right? It's only because you reference every episode all the time.
One day it's just going to be a recording of just all the episode numbers. You are an algorithm.
You are your Readwise app. That's how I get it.
So, get it so um the hetty green though was so wealthy that she bailed out the city of new york like that book has unbelievable stories this is i've never heard this person's name and they bailed out the city of new york her family so the richest when she was alive the richest uh city in the world per capita was like new bedford massachusetts willy yeah well so her family made so much whaling and the way they looked at the family fortune is i am a steward of this money my job is to make it grow so that the next generation has more and then she's like the third generation of these whaling and then whaling decimated like it it died out i think the generation before her so they had to figure out how to make money the The technology stocks of her day, railroads, like she made a ton of money in railroads and then she'd buy land, like real estate in New York and everything else. But anyways, my point being, and I had this conversation with Patrick one day.
I was like, think about it. Like that was an ancient, investing is an ancient business.
So like you wouldn't do what Hedy Green did. Like where did she get her deal from? People knew her.
They knew she was wealthy. They knew that she was the first person to go to in financial panics.
They called financial panics what we call recessions and depressions now. And it was like, you know, every three years back then.
And so what she would do is she had a desk in Chemical Bank in Manhattan. So the advantage there is geography, physical location.
You're at the center of finance in America. You need to be here.
You build a reputation. So literally there are stories in the book where there'd be a line of people in financial crashes waiting for at her desk it's like okay i'll sell you my rose stocks pennies on the dollar corneas vanderbilt did the same thing she invested with him and a bunch of other people right and i was like but what would you do today like you're an eight you're you want an edge everything we're talking about is like you need an edge right you can't play.
Ed Thorpe has the great quote in his book. He's like, I've been a money manager for 50 years.
One thing I know is the surest way to get rich is only play games and make investments where you have an edge. Right.
Right? Which is another way of saying, do something your competitors don't, aren't, or can't. Or Edwin Land.
So Edwin Land plays a huge role in my life, founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs Hero, because he said, I have a personal model. It may not fit anybody else.
Don't do anything somebody else can do. And so I was like, OK, I don't think anybody else could do founders the way I do it.
So I'm just going to do this, right? So my point being is like, how would you do it today? Well, you would, it would look very much like what I think you guys are building. And I'm not an investor, so I don't know anything about your world.
But it's just like, I'd spend my time reading and learning about business history. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett did that.
Every single investor you guys have probably read about does that all the time. They read constantly, right? I would share what I know.
That's going to build my network of other people. Those people are eventually going to sell my deals.
Then I have this huge advantage that you couldn't even do 10 years ago or 15 years ago because there's no such thing as a podcast, right? It's like, now I can record all the stuff I'm learning, right?

Which we should say, like, there have been iterations of this.

Like, this is how Union Square Ventures became Union Square Ventures.

Our Foundry Group became Foundry Group.

Blogging.

Yeah, blogging.

And then Brad and Jason writing the book on venture deals.

I mean, it's like-

Venture Hacks with Naval and Rivie.

Totally.

I have two other examples.

It's not even venture.

Like, what is the most successful content marketing of all time? Michelin? No, Berkshire shareholder letters. Totally, of course.
Berkshire shareholder letters. Of course.
Because this is how you know he's a genius. It is the greatest act of salesmanship because you never even see the sale happening.
It's like, hey, and they spend, you guys have probably done this research, how much time they spend on those letters. It's like half a year, seven, eight months for every letter.
This is not like, oh, I just jotted down what I learned this year. And the crazy thing is like he's.
Old Uncle Warren. How many people have.
This is something Charlie taught. Oh, so this is a great, great thing that this came up here.
Did you talk about the letters with him? No, I asked him about like. So I was explaining to him.
I was like, Charlie, I'm literally in the middle of like reading about you when you were like around my age. So every time I read a book, I'm like, okay, I, first of all, I know what year they're, they're born.
So every time as I go through the books, I'm like, how old are they? And I write down, okay, he's 24 here. He started, I want to know what they were doing in and around my age.
And so I was like, Charlie, I'm thinking about you guys. Like you just started, like your fund starts when he's like 41 or something like that.
I don't remember what it was. Right.
And, um, and I was like, then like 50, like you start out, you're trying to figure things out. You could see them kind of figuring out, making the mistakes.
You guys did an excellent job on your episode, like talking about what they learned from getting to like, get away from the Ben Graham, like get to one excellence. Great businesses are rare.
We should be in there. And then there's let time do all the work.
And I i was like and now like you guys put up the greatest

investment record the world's ever seen it's like are you surprised he goes of course he's like of course i'm surprised like how could you not be like we want to be successful and we were like had we were ambitious and driven but there's no way you could say hey i'm gonna wait worth what's berkshire's market cap right now i don't know like um 500 billion yeah whatever it is but he said um but uh the the

the reason that popped my mind um when like when i was asking him uh like these these questions let

me actually get the exact notes i don't want to mess up um the way he said it because his lines

were just excellent um and so he goes you're surprised how successful him and warren turned

out but how could you not be surprised and then he said something was fascinating he goes i think we get too much credit and i was like whoa that's interesting like why do you think that charlie and he's like uh it's very he goes it's he i find it odd to be so wealthy and loved that's not these are not exact words these are my interpretation of his words let me just be clear here i find it so odd that to be wealthy and loved that's not a usual human reaction and then my note tied to why i think the berkshire letters are the greatest content marketing of all time he goes and i go i wonder if this is because they spent so much time teaching others so what is when you listen to choir you guys are teaching right berkshire i'm gonna go to paul graham too berkshire they're teaching like you could just not read a book and just read Berkshire's letters and you're going to get a fantastic education. And then in there it's like, oh, by the way, we'd like to be the buyers of choice.
So if you happen to know this business, this business that you want to get your hands on and you care about it and he does this excellent product differentiation, call me. What is, like, how much money do they make off of that?

And obviously.

And I think this is probably,

I don't even know if it's on the list of things

that they care about,

but, like, it's also marketing for their businesses.

Totally.

I have Geico car insurance

because it's a Berkshire Hathaway company.

This is how we talked.

I'm drinking these.

I feel an extra kinship for Brooks running shoes.

Absolutely.

I'm wearing Brooks right now.

Okay, so.

I'm wearing our arena show shoes. There you go.
I changed out. I was in a polo hoodie right before I came over.
I watched a documentary on Ralph Lauren. I just did a podcast.
I just listened to your episode. Yeah, I think it's episode 288.
I wonder if I'm right. It is good.
Let's see if I'm right, though. Let's see if I'm right.
I could be wrong. I could be full of crap.
It's 288. Okay.
But before that, I had watched a documentary on him like years ago and I found out that he did the, I always go to Ben for the proper pronunciation. Like we'll do the same podcast.
I will, I say like Akio Morita and then he's like Akio Morita. I'm like, all right, I go with Ben.
I go with Ben. I will give you the correct American pronunciation.
It's unclear if it's actually right or not. So he did the same thing that Akio did, you know, like they were struggling in the early days of Sony.
They get this huge order. They're like, we're going to take 100,000 units or whatever it is, but take off Sony and put on our name.
And Akio's like, we have no money. But he refused to do that because I'm not building your company, I'm building mine.
I love that entrepreneurial, like bullheaded tendency. Same thing with Ralph.
Ralph was broke. Him and his wife are living in a house, our apartment with a train running over on top of them.
They're sleeping on a mattress and he's making ties. And Bloomingdale's like, well, take them.
We love them. Take that name off.
You're going to be our house brand. And he packs up his ties.
He's like, I'm not here to build your brand. I'm here to build mine.
Like that. So the.
Which is funny because later in life, like he would make so much money on just licensing out his brand. He's like, I don't even make any of the products.
I literally just licensed the brand. Hearing that made me buy more polo clothes.
Hearing your affinity for Geico makes you buy Geico. The advertisers you haven't acquired because they love you.
Your audience, if you, I know you guys vet them and like you have a ton of people that want to advertise that you don't let. It's like, that goodwill that you're building up, the goodwill that Buffett built up.
Another, the second maybe most, and by the way, there's a litmus test for that. It's, does the acquired, like I want to only work with sponsors that I want to so full-throatedly endorse that I feel the acquired brand gets stronger by working with them.
And like, if you can actually just keep doing that durably, I think that is like an amazing way to build a brand. And, you know, we try, it doesn't always work.
And sometimes we just don't sell ad slots because we're like, well, the bar's here. It's long-term.
Like, okay, I miss a week on advertising. It doesn't matter.
I'm'm doing this for... When we get on the phone, the first time we ever talked, do you guys love podcasting? I love podcasting.
You're going to do it forever? We're going to do it forever. We say the same thing.
Yeah, right, right, right. It's like one week in a...
We could do this for another 40 years. So the same thing.
It's like the same goodwill that you're talking about. It's why I'm drinking.
I don't even drink energy drinks, right? But like the format for founders... You showed up with five Jocko Go is this is uh the only energy drink i found and i only found it because um the i was driving home on thanksgiving and all the coffee shops were closed and i heard jaco's podcast and i know he has this and he says he's in wawas and i was like wait there's a wawa on the turnpike i was like i can just go there like they're there and i bought them and then i was wired for the whole drive home i was like oh they work man this is fantastic but the uh the point there is like it's not like when i went to the energy drink aisle i was like oh maybe i'll do rockstar or monsters like no they didn't make a podcast that i love right jaco made a podcast i love you were not evaluating energy drinks at that point in your the format for our founders i got from jaco i found his podcast because he was on tim ferris's his podcast at the very beginning was just him reading books for an hour, hour and a half saying, oh, I like this section.
Yeah, and he does it for autobiographies for military people. I was like, oh, I should do this for autobiographies of founders and everything else.
So it's a combination of ideas. The second best version, and you guys know this more than me because it's your world and I don't know anything, I had spent three weeks reading Paul Graham's essays.
Paul Graham's essays changed my life. Also, content marketing.
It totally changed my life. So we're going to get there.
The full, the reason to finally jump and dedicate my life to founders came. My wife was sleeping in bed next to me.
I'm up late at night. I read Paul Graham's essay, How to Do What You Love.
I talk about this on episode 275, 76, and 77. Those are right.
I know that for sure. Are the three Paul Graham episodes I did.
I talk about this snap, how he changed my, that episode changed my life or that essay changed my life in 275. So then I'm re, so I spent three weeks going through every single one of his essays.
So something his new essays lack that they had before, it used to have this bright orange box at the top. It says, do you want to start a startup? Apply to Y Combinator.
Apply to Y Combinator. And so I was like, think about, so again, it's not like you went, I thought about this, like, what is the founder's version of Y Combinator? What is the acquired version of Y Combinator? You have to be very careful who you partner with and what you're doing.
So I was like, what is the orange box? It's not like you go to Paul Graham's and he's got 10 banner ads. He's just like, no.
Yeah, he worked for Yahoo. He knows that doesn't work.
Your attention is here. And it's like, he didn't know that starting Y Combinator, you can go back and read his essays about it, watch his interviews.
They had no clue. Just like Charlie told me.
He's like, no, I did not expect to build one of those valuable companies. It was called the Summer Founders Program.
Yeah. It wasn't even...
That's the best thing about learning about the company and founder history. It's like they didn't...
There's no way when you could interview Sam Walton when his shoes, the bottom of his shoes has watermelon and donkey crap. He's not going to be like, hey guys, I'm going to be the richest man in the world.
Yeah. And so I love this idea of, hey, all of these discussions about the business benefit all comes from, it's the byproduct of educating people, sharing people.
That's why people love Charlie and Warren, why all three of us love them. How much have us three learned from them? Right.
So much. Yeah.
To the point where like, It's such a good point. I wanted to cry when I met him.
Because of their content marketing. I mean, it sounds trite, but like- His lessons changed my life.
They're going to change the trajectory of my kids' lives. Yeah.
Like that is, and you know, he probably hears that a million times a day, but it doesn't matter. It's like, I got a chance to tell him that.
That's it. It is crazy.
He educated America on investing while still managing to do it better than anyone else. There were some funny things about that, too, where he says something like, well, you know, they're completely...
He says you both, in your episode, you talk about Snowball. Snowball has that quote from Buffett in there.
He talks about it's really important to have an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard. Inner score is his dad it's like i'm doing this because i know it's good outer scorecard is like i'm doing this what are the people gonna think about me newsflash no one's thinking about you they think about themselves so outer scorecard people cannot have like it's almost really hard to have a uh a happy life having an outer scorecard i like charlie's description of that better he says like he uh i think it was andrew that asked him the question.
Maybe Chris asked him the question. It's like, were you driven to succeed, like, to impress your dad or your mom? It was a great question.
And he goes, no. He goes, I had an inner clock.
And I've always had. He goes, I have an inner clock, and I always had an inner clock.
I did this because I wanted to do it. And, like, that's.
And he goes. And they're like, do you think Buffett's like that? He goes, Buffett has an inner clock too.
Yep. And it's just like this idea where they did it their way regardless.
They don't care what other people think. He said this about the fact that they keep some of their wholly owned businesses.
And like, oh, the profits are less. Or they kind of just let them run out.
And like, they'll just keep the cash. And then people are like, oh, you should invest the cash.
And he's just like, no, because we're opportunists. We're individual opportunity driven is the line that he has about that.

Right. You were going somewhere, David, earlier with the discussion of being a professional investor and how it's less differentiated than it's ever been before.
Well, where I was going with it was, I bet.

Look at the reaction on Twitter and elsewhere, and I think in much of the country, to what's happened with the Silicon Valley Bank situation. Not that this is a current events podcast, but like...
It's also, by the time this comes out, going to be two weeks. Going to be old news, right? Hopefully things will just be calm and settled down, and there'll be no more impending crises.
Yeah, right. But another one's coming eventually.
Right. Just like Charlie says, you're going to have another unintended problem a year from now.
Yep. I think you are right, Ben, that just having capital to invest will be differentiating going forward.
However, I think the aggregate brand and reputation of the venture industry has taken a massive hit. Yeah, Massive hit over the last several years.
And you're not holding up SVB. And it just keeps going down.
SVB is revealing to how other people think of Silicon Valley. What I'm specifically referring to is VC's behavior and reactions on Twitter over the past week.
But that's just emblematic of the direction things have been going for years now. And part of it's related to tech in general, but I think there's a specific, maybe hatred is strong, but brand decline of the venture capital industry.
Yeah, I agree with that. Tie it to differentiation among venture firms.
So yes, while as uh, as the market goes down, having capital will be differentiating and like the number of participants will go down in the industry and whatnot. But how do you stand out in this market as like, like if in aggregate, your industry is thought less of, and people don't want to work with you, right? How do you turn that tide? Right.
Yeah. If the next Sam Walton has the opportunity to raise venture capital dollars and he's like, you know what? I think I would rather just figure it out another way and not build in that ecosystem.
I think there are a lot of people out there right now who want to start businesses and are like, I'm not going to raise venture capital because F that. And I don't need to.
And it was a lie that I needed to. Right.
Can I tell you from the founder's perspective, because I talked to a ton of founders. I'm going to go down, I think, well, we'll see, talking to more founders than any non-VC, right? I get offers all the time.
Like, hey, you want to invest in my company? I've said no to all of them. Just because I'm just, I was like, dude, dude i'm focused on founders like i don't care about anything about my podcast and so we have these conversations and it's just like what vcs don't understand it's like how much founders hate them yeah yeah they like yes they hate them and it's not they hate the good ones they love the good ones right like i'm not going to say some of the brands that i've heard about they're like oh no like money from a bunch of people.
They're good. They don't mess with us.
But if we ask a question or we need something, they jump on it, you know? And the problem is, this is not like, it's a natural distribution of any industry. Like there's going to be crappy founders and great founders.
There's going to be crappy investors and great investors. And so I really think it ties back to the the the principle that

buffett and munger built their business on is like only associating themselves with the best people on the best companies and that solves so much other problems so yeah the my issue is like there's a lot of vcs in my audience too and they're nice people don't get me wrong right um some of them i've talked to i was just like who gave you money to invest like what is going on here But what I don't like is like the best ones, like this is what I like about Patrick, right? If you talk to the people that Patrick has invested in, he doesn't like, here's a list of 10 things I took two minutes to think about. He's asking questions.
He does exactly what he does on his show. He asks questions.
And if you need something, like I'll do whatever I can because he's got a good network and help him out. But he's certainly not.
He's like, if I have to tell the founder what to do, then why do I invest in it?

That doesn't make any sense.

So what happens is I'll get these emails.

I love your show, et cetera, et cetera.

Here's 10 ideas for you.

And it's just like you read them.

It's like you hired an assistant or a researcher.

Maybe you wrote this yourself.

You thought about this for 30 minutes.

I think about this all day, every day.

I've thought about this every day for years, man.

That's not helpful. What are you doing? You're just making i have a lower opinion of you because like this is a dumb idea um and the only way about that is like do you know who bryce roberts is of uh yeah okay so he has this is again i've never raised venture capital i've never made a venture capital investment but i talked to a, and he has the greatest description.
He's like, what is the product that founders are buying from VCs? It's not money. Because everybody's got money.
Well, you used to have money. Yeah, I guess you used.
But still, the VC you're good, though, there's still a lot of people that are going to be. There's still going to be investments made in markets.
Compared to venture in the 70s, yes. He said two words, improved odds.
That is the best, from a founder's perspective, that is the best description. It's like, if I take investment from you as opposed to this other guy over here, this other girl over there, like who is going to meet founders? All they care about is, can you help my company succeed? Is it more likely that my company succeeds? I'm dedicating my life to this, man.
This is not a game. Like, can you make my company succeed? And sometimes you can do the money.
Sometimes you can network. There's other people sitting right across from me that could probably help with distribution that is actually a value-add.
That is the difference. If I was going to be a venture capitalist, and God knows I would not be, right? I would just start a podcast, and then I would do it for six years, and I would get really valuable, and then my inbox is full of people.
I don't have deal flow. This is what Patrick is doing.
Yeah, it comes inbound. I have a friend, Chris Powers.
He syndicates real estate investment. You know, rich people like to invest in real estate.
There's all these tax benefits. And he says, David, even with like this guy's done like I think he's got either a billion or $2 billion of industrial class real estate under management right now.
And he's like, even he's like, David, I just was interviewing and doing my podcast. Again, same thing, educational, interviewing people operating in the real estate industry and interviewing founders.
And just doing it because he liked to do it when he talked to other people, happened to press record, put it out there, never really promoted it. He's like, even with my small audience, he goes, I've raised, he goes, it changes the dynamic from, hey, I'm Chris, I'm sitting on outbound.
Hey, I'm Chris. This is what I do.
This is like, can we talk? Can we set up a meeting to, oh, Chris, love your podcast. How can I get 5 million in your fund? It reverses it because they get to know you as a person.
This is what I don't like also. It shortcuts the relationship.
But it's, you just said, it's a relationship, right? Which I think there's too much of this like calendar, like Tetris that, no offense, that venture capitals play. Cause they try to do it with me, where our founders do this too, where they're like, Hey, love your show.
Love to get to talk to you. Uh, can we talk? And I reply back, yeah, let's set something up.
Then I get like, then there's like, I'm like routed to an assistant. And then it's like, oh, you know.
How about six weeks from now on Thursday? You know, Joe Smough has 30 minutes, three weeks from now. And I've done this like once or twice.
And now my response is, that's no way to build a relationship. Here's my phone number.
Just text or call me when you're free. I'm not a 30-minute block in your calendar.
And dude, we have the inbound that get, it's like, I I'm already almost hitting a limit to how many deep relationships I can build. So I'd rather, instead of talking to a million people, I'm not a fester, instead of talking to a million people for 15 minutes, I'd rather talk to five or 10 people over and over and over and over again.
That's what Charlie, Charlie talked a lot about this and like, you've rubbed off on me a lot on this. Like I have changed my, my mindset and my daily behavior hugely because of our conversations.

Charlie and Warren.

This is like,

they built relationships.

They found people they like,

admired and trust.

They repeat,

like,

admire and trust over and over again in the letters and their talks.

And then they just did business with them forever.

Yep.

It's not this wide,

but shallow.

And that's where you get the bad behavior.

And anybody that's high quality can see through it and it's not going to work with you.

And you're only going to succeed.

Like you guys,

if your business is parallel,

All right. And if you think about, like, if you buy the premise that the aggregate opinion of the venture capital industry has declined a lot, it may continue to decline, whether it does or doesn't.
It's meaningfully worse than it used to be. What have Warren and Charlie done? And to your point about the best content marketing ever, what is what they do? It's a combination of a hedge fund and a private equity firm.
What is the aggregate opinion, public opinion of hedge funds, managers, and private equity firms over the last 50 years? Nothing but down. What is the aggregate opinion of Berkshire? Nothing but up.
It's amazing. This is one advantage that I have, the fact that I'm not an investor.
So I don't have to keep up on like, to some degree, venture capitalists have to know what's going on. And I close myself off.
I was having dinner with Sam and his wife, and his wife was asking me, hey, do you know about this person? No, do you know about this? And Sam's like, he's got a very limited, he said it to me. He's like, you can ask about books, but this dude's not watching TV.
He's not doing any other stuff, right? We keep him in a hut out back. And the good thing about that, though, is somebody actually um so essentially the way i use like twitter or any social media is like i put out little uh snippets from my podcast you put out a lot on twitter in text though form right yeah yep um which has been really working for you i was like i'm gonna read something that has a million over a million views in 24 hours because everything's going on and because i just had dinner with charlie yeah so i'm gonna read this and then I'll go back to the benefit.
This is an amazing tweet by the way. So I go, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature.
Now I didn't put this because of the bank run. Like I was just thinking, I was like, oh, this is, I was reading my highlights.
You didn't post this like with regards to the bank run? No, no. I remember I reread my highlights every day.
And so when I reread my highlights, what my Twitter is, is like when I reread highlights, like, oh, that's a good one. I just put it on Twitter.
Oh my God. Then you have like just the greatest timing in history.
Yeah, exactly. Well, like it wasn't intentionally, I knew it was going on, but it never said, oh, let me, I need an SVB tweet.
Like, I don't have any money in SVB, like whatever. So it goes, Charlie Munger tells a story about human nature.
And then this is all Charlie speaking. One of my favorite stories is about the little boy in Texas.
The teacher asked the class, if there are nine sheep in a pen and one jumps out, how many are left? And everybody got the answer right, meaning eight, right? Except this little boy who said, none of them are left. And the teacher said, you don't understand arithmetic.
And the little boy said, no teacher, you don't understand sheep. And so- So effing good.
Okay. When you were in the room with Charlie for several hours, how did, like, in natural conversation, are they just pulling out these, like, parables and these fables? Like, you know.
Let me, I'm going to answer that question. The best response to this tweet, I didn't even, I missed it myself.
He goes, was the child Charlie himself? And I'm like, oh my God, that's exactly what he would have done. He would have been the kid.
He would have been the kid. So the reason I think it's so powerful, like the storytelling ability you guys have, how I try to break down things to aphorisms, you ask like, why is this guy on my phone? I only think in stories, I think people only learn through stories and then one-liners.
That's why Charlie, David Ogilvie, that idea, it's like, he says it in a creative way and then you remember fur. Charlie Munger says, hey, if you don't learn probability, you're going to go through life as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
So good. So you laugh, and then you think about it.
I know. It's like, oh, I'm going to get my ass kicked.
So that's the way. This is here because it's Ernest Shackleton.
His family motto was, by endurance, we conquer. So we're in the podcast business.
People are like, you can't do podcasts. There's like 2 million of them.
It's like, dude, there's like 70 or 80% of them that have quit. 98% have three episodes or less.
In the business podcast right now. Me and Patrick were just talking about this.
I just saw him in person in Miami. And we were talking and I showed him this.
I was like, dude, for podcasts like me and Patrick's and yours, business categorized in business, have at least 10 episodes, and I think release at least once a week. You guys, I think, are release schedules less than that, right? Two weeks? Every two or three.
So those three categories is like— But in terms of minutes of content per week, we're the same as everybody else. But that was one thing.
They release once a week, right? 18,000. And the business category is the second most popular podcast, like the second most populated podcast category.
Behind. And I go.
Do you know the first? Spirituality. Faith.
Yeah. Oh, true crime has fallen off then.
Yeah. Thankfully.
So this is, I'm going to start. So there's a thing about that where I heard somebody said, they're like is like church for entrepreneurs and i might start dropping podcasts on sunday and no no i'm not kidding and if i do video i i swear to god i went and looked i looked at pulpits i was like i'm not gonna get i swear to god i swear to god you wait crucifix shopping i'm not gonna get a desk like think about i my mom was like fundamentals Christian and stuff.
And I had to go to church my whole life. And it's just like, this is pretty crazy.
Not in a bad way. I don't mean that to the majority.
It was like, they're learning from the same book every week over and over again. The stories you could tell are limitless.
It's one book. I can do the same thing.
I have access to all the books in the world. I can do that.
So I do think there's an element totally five years from now people are going to be like this is the moment where david started the cult it's right here on video we're documenting cults are the best businesses 100 if you listen to my episode in and out episode 244 oh yeah there's no way i got that right by the way um oh now we gotta know i did that um you keep talking i'll look up if you got this right i did that episode because um it's 244 of course is it oh my god i read that book because the best businesses in the world are colts that's what traded the founder of trader joe's he wrote his autobiography he said that trader joe's was a cult for the over-educated and underpaid right and it's not to say that like like cults are amazing businesses that's not what you're saying you're saying the the very best businesses are cheerful develop in and out in and out calls them they they use this terminology in their business cheerful cult it's a positive cult I'm not talking about Jonestown let's get together and freaking drink mass suicide no no I'm saying things that hopefully you're building a product that's good for the world we had Gary Tan on back in the day and he was talking about Palantir at the very beginning and he was like, oh, Palantir was a cult. That's why it worked.
Well, this idea also influenced me. Zero to One, Peter Thiel's book, it's like, you know, he says that.
It's like the best businesses, like startups look like cults. You have to inspire emotion in people.
Otherwise, like you just, you can't stand in the world. And you certainly can't have repeat behavior and in a sea of choices for someone to keep choosing you over and over and over again.
It's like how founders have to be weird. Nothing interesting was created by ordinary people.
But I have to be intentional about this. I'm glad you said, oh, this is where we get in on camera and on recording that David started as cold.
It's like podcast. No, I go crazy.
Like people start talking about me. I, a bunch of them say, David's too obsessed with podcasts.
And I'm like, I'm glad they say that because like, even now there's like, thank you. That's a compliment.
No, it's like, I see an opportunity that other people don't, which is the same thing in the book. So I think podcasts in general are just fun to make, and I'm obsessed with it, but they're also going to be wonderful businesses because they're prone to be cheerful cults.
And how do you know that you have a cult? You just Google and see if the people have tattooed themselves with the brand. How many people are walking in with a Joe Rogan face tattoo on their skin? A ton of them.
Really? Yes. How many people have tattoos of the Apple logo? A ton of them.
There's an insane number with Mario. We learned this in the Nintendo research.
Mario, Tesla, In-N-Out. There's a ton of...
Dude, I like... Cheeseburgers are my favorite meal.
I'm not tattooing an In-N-Out logo on my arm, dude. You take another level.
And you see this over and over and over again. And so when I analyze businesses, I'm not just doing this...
it's not a game to me it's like oh can i use these ideas in building my business and like warren buffett says the greatest thing and this is i think speaks to why you guys are so like hey we know how big our audience is and we're going to take this seriously seriously warren goes all a brand is a promise that's the best description of a brand it's just like i talked about the fact that i i stayed in a uh this hotel brand i'm not gonna say what it is in austin i loved it i stayed in santa monica i loved it i found out they had one in san francisco yeah i didn't check the reviews you came here and they broke their promise i told you to stay with us yes and that's the biggest thing a brand was a promise i love i know this is gonna be excellent the hotel's fine it is in like it's in the tenderloin it's like not a place you want to stay no i like if i wasn't traveling alone there's no way i'd let my wife this is the major misconception about san francisco every meeting people who don't live here think that it's you know an absolute hellhole and wasteland a specific part of it is yeah but like there are other and unfortunately that part is mostly where the hotels are yeah which is not good for the city because i'm like i'm not ever staying i'm staying with you or i'd stay in uh like i stay out in silicon valley like i stayed at the rosewood which is really nice yeah but that is not the tenderloin most expensive hotel which is good i didn't pay for it so no one ever does i didn't that's the whole business model i didn't know how much it was. It was really nice, though.
Thank you. I got to thank that person.

Yeah, so, again, I don't mean it in like a – but I am very intentional of like, hey, I'm not going to break my promise.

I want you to know, and you guys do the same thing. It's like if I press play on an acquired episode, this is why I like Dan Carlin is – I read one book an episode.

He reads like 30.

He only does two a year or one a year.

Maybe one a year.

But like I know there's no way I'm going to press play. It's going to be good.
And he didn't do reads like 30. Yeah.
He only does two a year or one in a year. Maybe one a year.
But like,

I know there's no way

I'm going to press play.

It's going to be good.

And he didn't do

the work necessary.

Yeah.

That's what we feel.

We all feel.

I mean,

in our own ways,

we all definitely feel that

about what we're doing.

Can I get some feedback?

Like,

how can we make Acquired better?

Or have you ever had moments

where you like paused an episode

and were like,

oh,

I want to like talk to Ben and David

about this right now because like, I have some feedback. No.
You'd probably just text us if you did. No, but I would, first of all— Or the model, not necessarily just the content.
No, what you guys said on your Benchmark Dinner episode, I think was, you know— There's a few podcasters—I was having a conversation with Sam yesterday like there's a few podcasters that like they know what they're doing and you they know by like what their position in the market is like how they're thinking about it and i'm not gonna say who but like you guys hit it like what makes you special it's the edwin land thing don't do anything somebody else can do right where you says like your marquee thing is these super in depth like blake made the funny um blake robbins said the funny thing on twitter i saw i loved it he's like only a choir could say all right let's bring this home and so an hour and a half left that's your brand people know totally yeah and i think what you're doing here with like the sessions is like a way to also it's like there's no you can't increase your the amount of episodes that you can do because they take so much work to do but you also have a way to surface all this information that you guys have that's valuable to other people in different formats we were talking about this a little bit before which i hate saying we're talking about this before we were recording why didn't we just record but um you you're also thinking about potentially doing something similar yeah and there's like not now like years from now Yeah, but for the core episodes, we spend so much time preparing. But then for stuff like this, we don't prepare at all because our whole career is preparing.
Does this make sense? What is the right number and format of sessions? Because this is the second session. We're still figuring sessions out.
In your dream world as an acquired listener, what do sessions look like? I mean, your sessions should be replace your interviews. Anything that's a non-acquired, long, deep time, just make them a session.
There's enough people interviewing founders and investors. But we need more conversations.
So if I ever did, people are like, if you ever do an interview show, I was like, first of all, I wouldn't do an interview show because like you interview is a skill it looks easy like i always tell i tell patrick patrick you're world class at this dude like you have you wield because you've done it every week and now twice a week for eight nine years and he's just it's for i like to read he likes to ask questions so therefore our formats match the personality right yeah and so what i tell him is like i've been on the other side of it it, you can tell it's not, he doesn't have a list of questions in front of him because you can help. His good question just came off of response of what, like a lot of people like, and it's fine, but like the Tyler Cowen thing where he just like, he has his questions and you just said something interesting.
He's not going to follow up and he's going to go on the next question. It feels very odd because you're like, are you guys not having a conversation? No, they're not.
That guy left you an opening. And how did you not take that opening? They're not.
But Tyler, you have to do, let's tie this to Jay-Z and J. Cole and answer your question also about like, I'm glad you guys are so much nicer.
We're like, do you have any feedback? Because like, I can't stand feedback. We're like, not in the sense of, like, I told you, I texted you guys this one time.
We're like, one was like, hey, I don't like that you reference, like, the superpower of the show is that I tie, it's not like, the episode on Ralph Lauren is going to tell you how Ralph thinks, like, Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller and Bezos. And it's like.
You literally know all your episode numbers by heart. And, like, so, to me, it's just one large conversation on History of Greatest Entrepreneurs.
That's how it is to me. It just happens to be separated.
And so I text you, and this guy's like, could you save that at the end and just do it like a carve out like acquired? And I was like, don't listen to acquired. No, I'm not going to.
I have a singular vision for how this is going to go. And that's why I own and control and operate the entire thing.
It's even further than that. It's like, I'm not putting on a show.
lot i loved anthony bourdain when he was alive i read his books he had a huge influence on me like anytime i traveled to a place that he went to i'd go and have you done an episode on yeah 219 there's no way that's right there's no way there's no way there's no way that's right fact checkers uh oral it's called uh the oral biography it's that format should be done more where his assistant um had interviewed an assistant friend had interviewed a bunch of people actually knew tony and were there in his last days and then she used to organize that interview into uh this biography called uh bourdain the definitive oral biography i think um and is it 219 it's 219 and so um and so like where was i going went on a digression. But, oh, so there's a line in the book that I love.
It says the line between Tony and his show is non-existent. Yeah.
Right? That's why people, like, I hear a lot of people talk about podcasting. It's like, oh, you don't actually know what the superpower of podcasting is.
Right? Where it's like, to me, one of the superpowers of podcasting is it's authenticity scaled. Right? Yes.
When I meet with founders that listen founders, and we have a three-hour dinner, they all say the same thing. They're like, this is like a three-hour episode of Founders.
It's like the same person there. And I think that is a thing that you did really well, and we sort of accidentally did well.
But I realized over time why that makes both of the things we've built as durable as they are a lot of people play characters on the internet and which in other mediums plays really is uh an easy trap to fall into and like it's a way to catapult growth if you adopt a polarizing character you can get a bunch of followers yeah there's there's like a there's a lot of dividends that pay to it. But it's exhausting to maintain over time.
And it has a conflict where when people meet you in real life, they're like, oh, weird. And so when you actually are just yourself, it's going to probably grow more slowly because I'm not as polarizing.
It would be horrifying to live as a polarizing character that you play on the internet in real life also. And so you have this more like slow organic growth path.
But like it is, there is this cool byproduct now where like I sit down with someone and they're like, yep, exactly the same as I expected. This is why I said have Blake Robbins on here because he gave me the dynamic, that spectrum that he talks about.
a super smart person in general but he's like the way you think about this is there's a spectrum this is not my idea this is Blake's spectrum because on one end of the spectrum it's like how much time do people spend with you right he's like on one end of the spectrum you have these like 30 second tiktokers that dance right and then all the way on the other end of the spectrum as you move down they spend more time with you all the way down the spectrum you have the twitch streamers right which he helped incubate um 100 thieves 40 thieves 100 thieves where they're spending like 40 hours or 50 hours a week with you right he goes david you're like one you're not they don't spend 40 hours with you but you're one click one click to the left yeah and they're gonna wind up spending 10 20 100 200 hours with you and keep moving down and like, let's say you do 10 minute YouTube videos, you know, it's like the deeper you go down there, it's why when I think the guy's name is Nadeshot, when like 100 Thieves has a new product and he announces it, you'll see a line down the block because hundreds of thousands of people have spent all their time with them. And so it's like, oh, Nadeshot has something to all come down here.
And. And you see this over and over again.
And then Blake says you could have a TikTok that has 10 million followers, yet they can't even get 3,000 people to show up somewhere. And so I think that is the way to think about it.
That's algorithmic throttling, too. TikTok, it is almost a zero signal if somebody follows you.
It doesn't actually matter. Or YouTube.
matter or youtube it's like oh they subscribe to your channel like maybe that'll come up in one of the top eight videos that shows up at the top of the screen of like what they should watch next but like maybe not so my point in all that is if they're spending a lot of time with you and i love this is my flip of what charlie munger says that you need to learn the big ideas in the main domains, like physics, psychology, because they carry the most freight. I flip that to time carries the most weight.
As long as what we're doing, you said we're not playing characters. We are passionately interested in this.
We're not going to quit. Then we do this over a long period of time.
You'll get what you deserve. You'll get the audience you deserve.
You'll get the business opportunities and everything else. It's like time carries the most most weight i know i'm not going to quit you're going to have to pry the microphone from my cold dead hand and i'm just going to let the chips fall where they are and that doesn't mean i'm like lollygagging here like i'm on it seven days a week i'm i'm going to try to put work myself in a position so it's something i learned from um from um steve jobs when he came back to apple right and he's like people hear that that that speech he gives which.
He's like wearing shorts. And he's like, and it's like, I don't even know if he's in the turtleneck yet, but he mentions like what they're going to do.
And everybody focused on the fact that he's like, we're going to, you know, there's no sex in the products anymore. And we're going to do the four quadrant thing.
A lot of people in the technology industry, particularly know that speech and like, yeah, let's cut the fat and like put all of our A players, fire the and c players put all of our a players in these four products that we're going to make right but they miss desktop laptop high-end yep consumer and pro for both laptop and desktop those are four categories right they miss what he said earlier when he talks about nike he's just like marketing he's like apple sucks at marketing we have to be a great marketing company and so he said something where i read the quote and then my reinterpretation of this right and people don't know that it's in ken's uh no it's in this book called insanely simple i think that guy's name is ken siegel and he's like he was an ad guy at a company for apple and he's like twbha t wbha chiat day it was the ad agency so he goes and every wednesday actions express priority. So there's another maxim, right? He's like, I don't care what people say.
I care what they do. So when people ask me, like, first people, you talk to the founders, like, hey, what would you do about this? I never answer.
I was like, well, David Senra would do this. I'd say, hey, well, Charlie Munger would tell you this, or Steve Jobs would do this, or like, hey, I heard a story about here.
Because like my opinion is useless. It's you know my opinion on business building

and how I build my business.

It doesn't matter what I say.

It's like, how is he approaching founders?

Like, why is he making decisions?

That's the important part, right?

And so Steve told you

that marketing was important to his actions

because every Wednesday at like three o'clock

or I forgot the time,

they had like a three hour meeting.

He would approve,

have to approve every single piece

of advertising marketing that went out for Apple.

There's not a billboard in Kentucky

that went out without him saying,

yes, it's going to go out, right?

And so in that speech, when you're, if you actually listen to what he's saying, he's like, listen, I feel that the products we're making in Apple make people's lives better. I want, he says this line, he goes, I want everybody in the world to own an Apple device.
We know that it's not going to happen because it's so expensive, but he goes, and to do that, we have to get really good at marketing. So my interpretation of that on the podcast, what I said is like, if you feel your product can improve people's lives, I think you guys already know, because you get thousands of messages, just like I do, that yes, listening to acquire, listening to founders will improve people's lives and work, right? Then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing.
All that means is not get good at marketing so our ad rates can go up or that we can be celebrities or anything like that. It's no.
So these messages for all these of history's greatest entrepreneurs that are dead, that these ideas don't die with them. And then therefore, acquired and founders can gather these ideas and push them down the generations.
So that's why I mean, it's like, I'm not dilly-dallying. Yes, I'm going to let time carry all the weight, but I'm going to do everything I can so more people at least know.
And if you try a founder, you say, oh, this sucks or whatever, whatever. I'm cool with that.
But I just want you to have the opportunity to know it exists. And me and you have had these, us three have had these conversations where it's like, guys, I'm telling you right now, I've said this to you, there's millions of people that would benefit from listening to Acquired.
They just don't know it exists yet. So we got to come up and find ways to make sure that people know it exists because they will love it and it will make their lives better.
Amen. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to introduce a new friend of the show who many of you will be familiar with, Claude.
Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic, and it's quickly become an essential tool for us in creating Acquired and the go-to AI for millions of people and businesses around the world. Yep.
We're excited to be partnering with them because Claude represents exactly the kind of step change technology that we love covering here on Acquired. It's a powerful tool that fundamentally changes how people work.
I know, Ben, you have used Claude for some acquired work recently. Yes.
So listeners, I used to take four plus hours the day before recording to take all the dates for my raw notes and put them in a table at the top of my script for recording day. On the Rolex episode, I actually fed my raw notes into Claude and asked it if it could do that for me, which was amazing.
I just got my most important hundred dates for the episode done in like 20 seconds. You texted me this table.
It was awesome. Yeah, that freed up an extra half day that I used instead to focus on explaining how a mechanical watch works, which I'm so glad I got to spend the time doing that instead of making the table.
Totally. So cool.
I was actually just chatting with Claude to brainstorm ideas for something big that you and I are working on for later this summer, and it was insanely helpful. Listeners, stay tuned to hear all about that.
Yes. So listeners, by using Claude as your personal or business AI assistant, you'll be in great company.
Organizations like Salesforce, Figma, GitLab, Intercom, and Coinbase all use Claude in their products. So whether you are brainstorming alone or you're building with a team of thousands, Claude is here to help.
And if you, your company, or your portfolio companies want to use Claude, head on over to claude.com, that's C-L-A-U-D-E.com, or click the link in the show notes. This may an area i'm curious what you what you think about this uh where our shows and approaches are a little different i'm also curious what you've been thinking about this a lot of these stories are just incredible stories too that are just like worth i think worth telling just for the sake of the story yeah it's it's interesting how sometimes i'm like i'm not sure that we came up with a lesson that i would advise a founder to follow but i know this was very entertaining and as true as we possibly can make it yeah and so like every single episode i've listened to there's lessons in there oh yeah i'm not saying there's not lessons of course there are but like sometimes we'll do an episode like i always feel this way about the most recent episode but we just finished making the nintendo episode i'm just like can i like if you put the best fiction writers in the world that's true together and you said come up with the best like corporate ish story that you could imagine you couldn couldn't write something this good.
I guess the thing I was referring to is a little bit the survivorship bias, where someone did something that I would not recommend anyone do, and it still worked. But it made for a great story.
It's like Morris Chang in TSMC. It's like he invented the notion of a fabulous semiconductor company before there was any demand for that and then it turned out that his timing was exactly right that like within a couple of years a whole ton of you know fabulous companies spun up and wanted to use his foundry but like he created a solution in search of a problem and like no founder should do that but my god did he pull a rabbit out of a hat and so there's a good number of acquired episodes where i'm like we should be crisper i think about pointing out where like i don't this was inadvisable but amazing that it worked i think that goes back to the game tape analysis where we talked about kobe bryant uh jordan did this too where it's like uh i've read this like 600 page biography of kobe and in the biography they interview his high school girlfriend school girlfriend and they're like what was it like to date Kobe Bryant in high school I'm surprised he had a girlfriend right well not for very long it's like uh it's like what's it like to date Kobe Bryant high school she's like well our dates consisted of me going to his house and watching tapes of Michael Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson it's just like we're not leaving I'm not, we're not leaving.
I'm not taking you out to dinner. We're literally going to watch this thing.
And so I think the game tape analysis of that is just like, it is helpful to realize that a lot of this stuff, it's impossible to plan in advance. It's one of the great, I mean, Steve Jobs has a ton of great quotes.
Oh, the Stanford speech. He's like, it's impossible.
You're only going to connect the dots looking backwards. So you have to put something, faith in something.
You can call it karma, religion, God, intuition, but you have to do something. I just did a re-read Ray Kroc's autobiography, the guy from McDonald's.
Again, and it hit me, I've been thinking about the Steve Jobs quote too. And this is why it's so valuable to re-read your past highlights.
You mentioned this in the McDonald's episode. If you think about this, he's a perfect illustration of what Steve observed 50 years after Ray dies, for God's sake.
He goes to selling paper cups. Paper cups leads him to selling multi-mixers, which are like make milkshakes.
Multi-mixers goes, like, why the hell are you have eight? Why do these McDonald brothers out in San Bernardino have eight of my machines? Like, people, he'd had a hard time selling one. That goes to the franchise system, which he didn't even do well.
And then he meets Harry Sombor. And then Harry Sombor is like, dummy.
Real estate. You don't even know the business you're in.
You're not going to. He's like, you don't build an empire off a 1.4% cut of a 15 cent hamburger.
You build an empire by owning the land upon which that hamburger is cooked. Those five things.
There's no. He's selling.
He's selling... From paper cups to real estate.
He sold paper cups for 17 years. Yeah.
But he's just like, hey, I have to go in my gut to the point where he got divorced over this. His wife was like, you can't do this, Harry.
And he's like, you have to trust my instincts. That's one thing.
To what Ben said way back in the beginning of the conversation that you're really good at highlighting... Ray Kroc...
Like, he terrible person. And he, he didn't try to hide it.
Most people in autobiographies are trying to hide it. Yeah.
He's literally like, thank you very much, uh, June Martino, uh, my first employee, uh, for missing every single one of your kids' birthdays. Uh, you're going to get some stock at McDonald's.
It's going to get you rich. But 20 years later, I'm going to fire you.
Yeah. And you didn't have to put that story in there.
He chose to put that. That's crazy, dude.
I said on the podcast, I was like, listen, it's interesting. I'm glad he persisted.
Interesting ideas for business. But not only do I never want to do business with this guy, I wouldn't even want to be his friend.
I wouldn't want to do business with Steve Jobs, but I want to be his friend. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. He'd be a very interesting person to be friends with.
Oh, I feel like the opposite. What's that? Like, I'd want to do business with Steve because you could create incredible things together, but I'm not sure you'd want to be friends.
I think the difference is from, like, a founder's perspective, like, there is no working with Steve Jobs. It's working for.
You hear the stories of how he even treated, like, his subcontractor or not, like, the owners owners of the companies that contracted it's like yeah these guys are empire builders like they're literally building worlds they're not used to being like they're charlie was talking about this um because you know he he loves like uh lilu the new guy the byd guy do one oh yeah i don't know his name. Something.
Yeah, yeah. Those guys.
He loves Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore. Yep.
And what you realize is it's like these are founder types, but you can't be – like founders are benevolent dictators, or in some cases they're dictators of their own company. And like some people call Lee Kuan Yew a dictator.
It's like, oh, you can't do that in America even if that would be beneficial. But all of them, there's no working with them.
They're going to be in complete control of the situation, even being in the room with them. I'm not saying they'd be rude or mean, but you're a subordinate to them.
Because everything is in... Ray Kroc, everything is...
He says in the book, perfection is difficult. I'm demanding perfection at McDonald's.

I will constantly keep expanding this empire till I die.

If you get in my way, I will run you over.

He's like, he says in the movie, he's like, if my competitor was drowning, I'd walk over and put a hose in his mouth.

And he goes, and he was on the other end of the call as McDonald's brothers because they're fighting over this.

He goes, would you do the same?

And the stated thing is, it's like, you're going to have to compete on my level or else I will literally destroy you. Yeah.
So, Warren and Charlie are so interesting. I'm trying to decide if they are the complete opposite of that or if they actually are like that just in their own ways.
Every single person some kind of like their public persona is for that level right it's not like a podcast where they're going to listen to joe rogan for 1600 episodes like you know who joe is you can't hot he's doing three hour shows three days a week for 15 years you have probably a good idea who he is you see flashes of like you know imperfection like we all have i don't think you just you don't get to that level without having he's got sharp they all got sharp elbows like you ever heard read stories about how warren uh negotiates it's like 12 50 bid what about 14 12 50 bid what about 13 12 50 bid because he's he's already he spent 10 years analyzing your business and he knows exactly the price that he's gonna buy it for and so now he's telling you the price he's's going to buy it for yeah this wasn't like a new consideration that popped up and he's like oh look at this a business it's like no at the scale he's operating at like he knows all the businesses yeah and in this this is from the jim clayton's autobiography um where he buys um clayton homes right and he even said like he he wanted to sell buffett he idolized buffett and he talks about like he wasn't insulting him by any means but he's like warren wants the microphone and if you're in an area where warren doesn't have the microphone he is not interested and i've heard that about warren a lot you know so it's like they're you they're world builders like he runs everything you think you're gonna go from being poor to having 200 billion dollars and not distort your perception of the world yeah Yeah. It's impossible.
Say more about Warren wanting the microphone. What does that mean? Like, literally in person.
Like, they would do, I think they were doing, Jim Clayton was at either, like, an event to talk to the employees or whatever the case was. Like, he, like, Jim wanted to have input.
And he's like, Warren would not allow it. Like, he monopolized this.
And I've heard that about Warren. Like, same thing.
We're like, Warren. Same thing.
There's got to be an element of him that loves the shareholder meetings. Of course.
But he didn't need to do that. He didn't need to do that.
He created an event around how he loves it. He loves having a million people come.
Yeah, you know how he loves it because he's still doing it. Right, right.
He doesn't have to do anything in the world that he doesn't want to do. Right.
And that's how you know he loves it. Like, they're beyond.
I told you, we talked about earlier how, like, just how disorienting it must be to, like, have. And I would love to know this feeling.
Don't get me wrong. Like, have a $200 billion net worth.
It's like, you're living life on, like, God mode. Like, it's insane.
Like, I was watching this video. I don't know if it's true.
But it's like, Jeff bezos's private jet has its own private jet like his new yacht has a chase yacht yeah i think it's like a guest yacht like i think it's so that i mean he is he now owns the biggest yacht in the world and there's a yacht that will sail behind it i've said this may be uh i don't maybe will become so successful someday that i will regret my words on but I got to imagine having a yacht is actually not like additive to your life. Oh, so this is a fun Ralph Lauren thing.
I think that's more problems than... Yeah.
So I think it was Ralph Lauren sold his yacht and is now a charter yacht because he was like, this thing was more work than any of the businesses I've ever run. One of the most interesting ideas I've heard, and it comes from our mutual friend Jeremy, who I think we mentioned earlier in the podcast, hopefully we did, give him credit.
I actually was talking to him and David Perreault. And I'm pretty sure Jeremy said this, not David.
But he's like, I would actually make the argument. Because everybody's like, oh, what does Charlie talk about, call the Berkshire Jet, the indefensible? The indefensible there a second one indefensible too before they bought net jets and now it's like we should be on it so you look you look at um you look at like there was like how could you possibly spend like you know these yachts cost 25 000 an hour to operate in fuel or some crazy number that planes are the same like you know how expensive they are and jeremy makes the point jeremy knows because he's been buying businesses forever and he's exposed to like great wealth uh people you know unbelievable amount of wealth he goes he makes the argument that they're actually underpriced assets and i was like oh tell me wow he's like that's that's not what i would expect to hear yeah don't i'm going to tell you this book that just proved his point i actually got to text him and tell him this um so he's's like, they use it not for, you're not like yachting, sitting there sunbathing, right? He's like, they're using it for like customers and invest in potential.
And so I had heard this, I'll tell you about how this relates to Invisible Billionaire. So I had heard this, because again, I've never raised money.
I don't pay attention to the venture industry. I don't know anything about it.
I just have a bunch of founder friends and founders tell founders everything and so i'll have these discussions where they're like they describe the courting process that they get from some of these well known super famous people and it's like well you the process you just described to me sounds like the old rich dude that like wants to sleep with like a young woman yeah what would you do right and there's uh we actually put it in the episode but there's a bunch of this in Nintendo history. Because Warner Brothers bought Atari.
And so Warner Brothers was running Atari as Nintendo was kind of like... And this is how they courted Nolan.
That's how they courted... Yeah, so that's how Warner Brothers courted Atari and Nolan.
And then how they tried to court Nintendo was the private jets, the... What was it? It was Clint Eastwood.
They put Clint Eastwood on the private jet with Atari flying coast to coast.

So what does it tell you?

History doesn't repeat.

Human nature does.

These founder dudes are running technology companies now, and they're like, yeah, oh,

yeah, I'm not going to name who.

They're like, oh, yeah, he gave us, he picked us up in Manhattan in his private helicopter,

and we landed at his Hampton State.

Do you think he got the deal? He got the deal.

This guy said, hey,

what are you doing? It's Friday night.

What are you doing Saturday morning? Okay,

come on my private jet. I'm going to take you to California

with me. Here, you want to stay

with your girlfriend at this mansion that I'm not using

in XYZ.

Jeremy was explaining this. It's like the equivalent

of a luxury suite at a

sports arena. It's for

getting deals done. But they're operating at a different

level where it's like, oh, these influence

Thank you. It's like the equivalent of a luxury suite at a sports arena.
It's for getting deals done. But they're operating at a different level where it's like, oh, these influence.
And some founders, the smart ones, don't let Sam Walton. He's like, don't give me a freaking gift.
That's why everything in Bentonville is like, you can't come in here and woo me. Because they know it works.
If you give a Walmart salesperson like a bottle of gin or something it's going to influence them where he's just like I want your price you guys did a great job in your episodes like tell me your lowest price and then I'm going to go to your it better be your low price because I'm going to this guy and if you tell me a dollar he sells me 98 cents don't waste my time I'm going I'm not you're not going to hear from me again I have an obligation to the customer to do this to, to find the lowest price for them. Yeah.
Because everything, his entire thing, the low cost structure thing, that's, that's not, that's a Walton thing. That's a sole price thing.
That's a Jeff Bezos thing. That's a Rockefeller thing.
That's a, that's the most common theme in the history of entrepreneurship. Every single thing, Jeff is like, we're going to have the lowest cost structure.
We're going to have a low cost structure. We're going to be efficient.
We're going to be efficient. Somewhere along the line, 25 years later, now the startup, the technology startups, it's like, we can just spread money all the time because there's no interest like there's just money coming back he built amazon at a pretty different time than founders today the business laws of physics were different where there were interest rates yeah versus when there weren't like he started when there were none that's true and then and then the environment changed as he was building it yep but like you know that while it would have been stupid for amazon to spend a hundred million dollars on something on like crazy marketing activities in 1997 like you could imagine that in 2018 if all of your competitors had raised a billion dollars and were you know uh trying to chase market share as fast as possible, you either have to exit that market because you're going to lose or play that game on the field.
Or find, even better, find a different way. Be more resourceful.
But be more resourceful. It's easy to say, but when all your competitors are hiring all the best engineers by throwing a million dollars a year at them.
Like you're just not going to be able to build a good product if you don't try to play that game also. Yeah, for sure.
But like the whole thing, like when Peter Thiel says this in his book, Paul Graham says it. It's just like startups don't have the advantage, right? You're not going to outspend Microsoft or Netflix.
So you got to find underdeveloped talent, right? You've got to find these people that if they were the credentialed or if they were the well-knowns, then they're going to go take – you're going to work for me $80,000 in some stock options or go make a million dollars a year in Netflix. That's the whole thing.
You're not going to win unless you are capable of finding underdeveloped talent. Silicon Valley used to be able to build high-growth and profitable startups.
The rule used to be you couldn't go public until you had over $100 million in revenue and you were profitable. If you didn't check both of those boxes, you weren't going to IPO.
And in 2021, of all the companies that went public, it had to be single digit percentage that were profitable. Were any of them? Yeah, I don't know.
It's crazy. The game just changes.
Well, to your point, if you have free money,

the money supply grass expands, it's raining down,

that's going to build.

Did you listen to Doug Leone on,

I know you guys had him on your show,

but did you hear him on Invest Like the Best?

Yeah, he was great.

He said he was telling crazy stories.

I loved everything about that guy. I loved him when I heard him on your podcast too.

It was like that tough love.

This is what I'm into, right?

He still has, I think maybe my favorite quote of all favorite quote uh said live on an acquired podcast of you could burn cigarettes in our arms and we wouldn't flinch the great and then he has a great line he's like i want you to know we were killed we weren't killers to make the most money we were killers to get the job done but his he made the point and you know very few people probably know more about the venture industry than that guy right one one i would imagine he's up there um and he's like of course like you have money raining down eating news that words he's like it's just creates bad habits yeah it is crazy how many things in my life i falsely attributed to something that were not just interest rates like so many things the answer is just like oh it is that way because we live in a zero interest rate environment. And the human brain likes to tell stories.
And at the end of the day, it's like things are the way they are because of mean reversion and what the current interest rate climate is. I wish I'm going to pull up something.
Like, this is what I mean. Goes back to Buffett.
Like, if you just we should. I wish i knew this i had read this i didn't remember it though this is warren buffett on interest rates right he says oh is this from laws of gravity the log in snowball no this is from his uh uh shareholder letters and he said in 84 88 i think i think the intro to snowball i think the scene that opened the vignette that opens it is Sun Valley right before the tech bubble burst.
Oh, no. This is like a decade and a half before.
Oh, okay. Okay.
Great, great, great. This is why it's like, God.
You could have made such better decisions. I could have made such better decisions if you had just known this.
And he had known it for 40 years before it happened. I posted this on Twitter, and I opened up the next day.

I'm like, why does this have

two and a half million views?

It's like, Elon replied.

He goes, yep.

I was like, oh, okay.

I was like, what the, like, what the,

like, damn, you people really like interest rates.

I read it, read it.

Just call a grand replies on steroids.

So I go, Warren Buffett on interest rates,

and the headline is,

they power everything in the economic universe.

So that was what Elon was responding up to. And this is Warren writing in the 80s.
The value of every, to your, exactly what you're saying, the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the writing in the 80s. The value of every, to your, exactly what you're saying, the value of every business, the value of a farm, an apartment house, or any other economic asset is 100% sensitive to interest rates.
That's because all you're doing when you're investing is transferring money to someone now in exchange for a stream of money, which you expect to come back in the future. And the higher the interest rates are, the less that present value will be.
This is fantastic. Interest rates are to asset prices, sort of like gravity is to an apple.
When interest rates are low, there is little gravitational pull on asset prices. We just lived through this, right? When interest rates are low, there's little gravitational pull on asset prices.
Interest rates power everything in the economic universe. Because I found that because all this, remember this inflation went crazy like a year or two ago, whatever.
And I was like, okay, every time that happens, all I do is I have, you can buy the Kindle version of Buffett shareholder letters for like two bucks. I know.
It's crazy. And I search it for like interest rates, inflation.
And I just go and I read, okay, this is what- You made a billion dollars off that $2 purchase. There you go.
And so like you'll say, okay, this is what he said in inflation. And then you see what year he said it.
And it's just like, and that's where I found that. I go, what do you say about interest rates? Boom, 1980, whatever.
And he just laid out- It's so funny because what he also did right there is for every college finance sophomore that's having to go through a class to do dcfs and they're like i don't understand this this is complicated like he just explained conceptually a discounted cash flow model there in a way that was like unbelievably digestible he's so good at that the clarity of thought because he wants the microphone but now but also like he just educated you in a way that makes more sense and is interesting and you're entertained by and you might build a business off that and then you might want to sell one day or whatever the case is like the this is where i'm spending a lot more time of like really trying to work on storytelling ability and concision right yeah um the the value is in the compression and the distillation right if you could listen to like an audiobook for 25 hours but if i can give you the best idea or one idea that changes your life and i can do it you know every week or whatever like in a couple minutes like that is going that some of that value is going to be brought back to me and all that comes from is what i realize is all my heroes have like what they have in common is like the unbelievable clarity of thought. Like Steve Jobs, Charlie, like you're not going to be like, oh, what does that mean? They take unbelievably complex things like you're not advertising to a standing army, advertising to a moving parade, make it in a memorable way.
And then you carry that maxim with you forever. How do you get better at that? You said you're working on it.
Reps. Just straight up reps.
Like thinking about it and then hearing yourself back. So the advantage I have that I edit is you can say something and like, oh, that was so good.
And then you hear it back. And sometimes it's even better or many times it's worse.
It's like, oh, I lost it. I know what I'm saying.
Yeah. But you miss this part that doesn't make any sense.
And so normally I have to cut it. I don't think I've ever re...
I don't think I've ever re-recorded something. We only did that for one episode ever.
It's really hard to do. What, re-record? Yeah.
Do you know which episode we did it for? No. It was recent.
NFL. David and I got on and re-recorded 40 minutes of material over maybe 15 different parts of the episode.
The original recording of that episode was really rough. The NFL episode was too long when we started.
It took way too long to get to the interesting part, the Pete Rozelle era. And so we had this massively bloated beginning.
And then we had a story arc that didn't cleanly resolve. And we had a bunch of concepts where we didn't nail the explanation and so we went in we cut like half of the first epoch of the story we recorded new bits to like create nice rising action and resolution on the roselle era and then we recorded another like like 10 areas where we were just like this wasn't said super tight and i'm i'm really curious if people noticed because we had to like we basically had a voice act like we had to listen to the way that we sort of came into that segment get that in our head this was your your theater background yeah coming in and then like pick it up from there but yeah your editing is so good we've talked about like back catalog sponsorship and you told me what you're doing was like zoom info and i've listened to your back catalog and it's like dude it's like it sounds like it was there the day you did it it is perfect and i know because we talk about this that that ad was not there but it sounds like it's there that's the goal the nfl episode is what i meant i'm like it's a crazy story but even there is like a lesson where like you guys i texted you like totally changed the way i think about things or maybe we were talking on zoom about this where it's like i never thought of that the nfl is like the largest media company yeah i hadn't either and the funny thing is that's like that was a david rosenthal insight that like the nfl is the single largest media property by value and the funny thing is if you go look at the because we did this for the nintendo episode you go look at the largest media properties, they list Mario, they list

Pokemon. look at the because we did this for the nintendo episode you go look at the largest media properties uh they list mario they list pokemon and they and then and i think if you sort the the list includes like video games and movies and so there's like the mcu in there and there's star wars in there but like they don't think the nfl is way bigger than all of those yeah but it's not on the list because people don't think of it as a media property the way they do with the others.
I love looking for stuff like that, both to do episodes on and for investing, too. What is something that is just so in the air that people don't even realize what it is? Or what's a comparison we can make that is super eye-opening, but people haven't thought to compare those two things before? Yep.
Which is why I tie things in to past, because it's like, oh, this... Episode 244.
No, but the idea behind this is like, we've seen this before. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I reread the show notes on the Johnny Ive episode I did. Johnny said something that was great.
And he said, he goes, one of Steve's talents was identifying markets full of second-rate products. Yeah.
And so he was like, oh, there's the opportunity here. And we're all podcast addicts, right? And the reason that we get along is because- And it's a market full of second-rate products.
And because you know how hard it is to do. Yeah.
And when you go and listen to other business podcasts, and I had a friend, his friend has a podcast. and he's like, hey, these three guys, they have large social media followings, but it does not translate to episodes, which people don't understand.
Yeah, rarely will. Yeah.
And they're like, would you listen to their episode and give it feedback? Right. And we went like, so I was like, yeah, listen to it.
And I go, it's three guys sitting around talking, whatever happens to pop to their mind. What did you expect to happen? Which is kind of what's happening here.
I was thinking the same thing. I was like, oh, we need some self-aware.
To all listeners, we apologize. No, no, no.
This episode lacks craft. There's zero chance that people aren't, people interested in entrepreneurship and investing are not finding this interesting.
Because the prep for this is not three guys that have a million other things to do. It's three guys that do this all the time over and over again that's going to cop up naturally in a conversation that you can like, oh, I didn't know about this.
Maybe there's a bunch of people probably like, I didn't know who Evan Land was. I didn't know Ogilvy.
I never thought about the NFL as a large media company. But their problem thing is there's no value proposition.
This is actually something that ties into much of what we've talked about over the last couple hours. People are going to do what they want to do.
And if people can do what they want to do and are given unfettered freedom to run at it, they can do great things. If people are forced to do things that they don't want to do, they're not going to make great things.
Or either forced to or choose, put themselves in a situation for whatever reason where they're doing something they don't want to be doing, they're not going to be very good at it. I think that's one of the reasons why we find ourselves so attracted to episodes that highlight craft is because that's sort of like how we think about acquired.
Like if LVMH benchmark Benchmark, it's like people who do few things but do them exceptionally well are just so entrancing to study. I think this goes back to what you were just saying.
And I want to go into the craft thing. It's like Charlie, again, has these simple ideas.
Like most of the problems are that you're just not intensely interested in what you're working on. Yeah.
And he's like, I don't care how smart you are. And Charlie's smarter than almost everybody else, he goes, I was not successful until I moved myself into a position where I worked on something I was intentionally interested in.
That just these like small rules carry most of the weight. It's like, how bad do you actually want it? And if you're not willing to do those things, then there's nothing wrong with that.
Like entrepreneurship is for a very small percentage. I'm not one of these people who think everybody can be an entrepreneur.
I would like to see more of them, but there's no safety net. It's like no one's telling you what to do.
No one had to tell you guys, hey, you should buy microphones and do a bunch of research. But we didn't buy microphones to start.
I think the most interesting thing is that I think we've talked about this concept before on air, is that if someone's going to advise you on starting a podcast, they would say, do a 30 to 40 minute episode and like do it weekly, you know, so there's, and you release it at the same time all the time, have a guest. So that way that person promotes it too.
And we're like, okay, well we do the opposite of all of those things. And I think it's like my, the conclusion I've come to is advice is an average.
And reality is a distribution. And averages suck because they hide the distribution.
You kind of want to know the shape of the distribution. And you kind of want to know things that apply to your specific data point, not the average thing.
And I think advice is always an average that hides the the distribution and if you know that you're actually an outlier in some way then you have to sort of like selectively follow advice because it may not apply to you charlie told me a fantastic story about this where he's just like he was singing the praises of byd that they're kicking ass like he told me like not just me i'm with a group of people um they make batteries for cars yeah but he started out like like uh doing like knockoff cell phones in korea or something and then like he he i forgot the guy's founder's name and i apologize but like he was telling me the life story but he was saying that the founder that charlie and lilu lilu gave the founder advice and he ignored it

and he was right he's like don't go in electric cars or whatever it was that he did he's like

and he you know selling i think he said like two billion car like i forgot what two million cars

no way he sold two billion cars in a year so like he's like sold two million cars in china

yeah so he's just like and he did it uh and uh he gets all the credit because lee and me told him

Thank you. year so like he's like sold two million cars in china yeah so he's just like and he did it uh and uh he gets all the credit because lee and me told him not to do it and he's just like same to your point it's game tape it's just like when kobe is watching this particular particular play of michael jordan that may never appear in his life yeah and maybe that the move he did wasn't the right move for what kobe did but maybe it influences his other thing it's just like the life is complex and messy and like you can think you're really smart and until you have a two and a half year old and they ask you why is that the way and you answer the question and then their follow-up question is going to be why and eventually you're going to get to 11 we're like i don't know yeah like i don't know why everything ends and i don't know it's like i don't know and so like of course there's no certainty like that's why if you have to if you crave certainty you've got to get a job but i there wasn't even facebook when i was in college because i had to work full time i went at night but um my college did not have facebook it was just coming out so we had myspace and my myspace uh you could put a quote right like at the header that's right yeah and i've always thought like this for my entire life it was like there's no security in life only opportunity and i think that's what we did so investors and entrepreneurs are are going for opportunity at the expense of security and if you need security you can get a job but we see like everybody said go into tech go into tech go into tech look you get all this money i think this is a super mispriced thing i think people who crave crave security, which all humans crave some level of security, sort of misprice security because no jobs are as secure as we think they are, but they definitely cap your upside.
And people, it's like, is founding a company or going into business for yourself as an entrepreneur extremely risky? Yes, it is.

But is it actually that much riskier than a job where you could get laid off,

where the sector could go through a downfall?

There are a lot of things about having a job that are not nearly as secure as people think they are.

Steve Wozniak and Jobs.

They're like, worst case scenario, this doesn't work.

Let's go get jobs.

We're broke anyways.

Let's just try. And he sells his van for like $1, sells his van for like 1500 dollars like oh i'm just all in on apple like that's that to me that's like again i think a lot of this is like people are asked it's like it's entrepreneurship like innate it can it be taught can there be a school of entrepreneurship and i was like well ask charlie munger if he taught uh a business class what what did he say he's like i would just teach the history of what you guys do.
He's like, I teach the history of 100 companies, and I would talk about what went right and what went wrong. There's no security.
He's not saying, yeah, take my class, and on the other end, you get this degree that guarantees business success. That doesn't exist.
Well, that's what's cool. They have been teaching entrepreneurship for the last 50 years.
So I went to UCF, which is this diploma mill, essentially. And I was in the pilot entrepreneurship program, right? The very first year.
And it's a two-year program. Take us back to that.
Yeah. Were you thinking about...
What was your relationship to entrepreneurship before starting the Founders Podcast? So like, I've never been on a job review. I've only had two jobs in my life.
Like I was, but I was like, there was no entrepreneurship, there was no entrepreneurship, like community. There was no entrepreneurship industry.
Right. So like my first business was, this is a long story, but like, um, I had been accustomed to, I was talking about this yesterday.
By the time I was 17, I had been accustomed to working full-time and going to school. People were like, oh, you work a lot on Founders.
I don't have to go to school. I can do this all the time.
You work at halftime as far as you're concerned. There's a long story here that would take me 30 minutes.
My dad sat me down when I was 15. He's like, listen, you don't have to pay rent, but like, I don't have any money for you.
So like, if you want something, you gotta go get it, right? And the good thing about my dad, he's a Cuban immigrant, not educated, but like, the best piece of advice that he ever gave me and my brother was a maxim. He's like, don't half-ass things, right? So he does it in like a blue collar.
He's a truck driver, like, you know, that kind of thing where he's like he he prides himself on the fact that like uh like he'll work 72 hours straight right but he never made a lot of money and never had an education like his mom wasn't good whatever and they had escaped castro's cuba my dad was born in cuba wow so it's like imagine like i talked about this on um because you know patrick's at the end of invest like every invest episode he says episode with him yeah he's like thing he's like uh what's the nicest thing everybody ever did to you or for you did to you uh for you and i was like man like something that it was a decision that happened way before i was born and like my grandfather is in cuba in 1959 um 1958 and he again not an educated man. He worked as a butcher and worked in a factory that made shoes.
He's married and he's got a baby. That baby is my dad.
And Castro comes to power. And he doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't speak English.
And yet he had some kind of insight that I need to get out of here. Right.
And he goes to a country, picks up, loses everything. Not that you had a lot anyways.
Goes to country, knows nobody, doesn't speak the language. When I sat down, the first thing me and Sam Zell talked about, and I think helped bond us to the point where at the end he said he liked my energy and everything.
But so hopefully he liked me. I don't know.
Was in his story, I was like, because I had obviously read his autobiography. And one of the first things me and Sam talked about was, Sam, I understand and empathize with your story.
Because Sam's story is his dad being Jewish, getting the last train out of Poland before the Nazis bomb it. Literally the last train out.
18 members of his family, his dad went around to saying, we got to get out of here. This is not good.
They're like, no, we're going to stay. They're all dead.
Sam's dad and his mom have a daughter. They get to America.
His mom's pregnant. Sam was born in America.
And so in that book, Sam's dad's always telling him, you don't understand how lucky you are to be born here. And I was like, and so in that book Sam's dad's always telling him you don't understand

how lucky you are

to be born here

and I was like

I understand that mentality

because I grew up

meeting

Cubans have this thing

called Nocho Bueno

which is

they don't celebrate

my wife's Colombian

so they

I married into a Colombian family

they do this too

they don't celebrate Christmas

on Christmas Day

they do it the night before

it's like Christmas Eve

and so I grew up

you know

for as long as I can remember

I was like

8, 7, 10

10 years old

Thank you. They don't celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day.
They do it the night before. It's like Christmas Eve.
And so I grew up, you know, for as long as I can remember, I was like eight, seven, ten, ten years old, meeting people that came over on rafts. And you would see these things.
I've seen these in person. All right? It's just like.
The rafts. Think about how bad it has to be.
It's like 50 miles, right? 90 miles, right? I'm going to go over to the study of the University of Miami you just did on this. 90 miles, you're a parent.
Hopefully you might be a parent one day. You love your kids way more than you love yourself.
There's people that came, hundreds of thousands of people went to the edge of the island and put their kids on a raft just in hopes that they get to America. And so the problem is, it's like you don't make the announcement to everybody.
It's like, hey, tomorrow we're leaving on a raft because you get caught, you know, imprisoned or killed or whatever the case is. And so the University of Miami did this study.
It was like, well, how many people did this? We know hundreds of thousands survived. And they estimate that like half, at least I think something like half a million people perish, never got there's a conversation with um there's this ufc fighter named jorge masvidal who lives in miami he's a cuban guy and his dad was one of the ones that escaped he went on a their raft was a made out of a like a truck tire like you know like think of like a size of like a bulldozer tire right wow it Wow.
It's his uncle and two 14-year-old boys.

They get off path, right?

They run out of, their water wind up being like contaminated.

So you can't drink, you'll die. How do they propel it anyway?

Like, how do you make sure it gets to Florida?

You have like, some have oars and some have like,

like, see that blanket over there?

Like, you try to make a...

A sail.

A sail out of like a blanket or something. Some of these are unbelievably in in like the level of ingenuity is like yeah for uneducated they don't have the internet like they don't it's an unbelievable and so they're in his case they i know they had oars i think they had a um a sail they get close enough to the bahamas they they haven't drank water for like three or four days some a pigeon lands on the oar they wind up killing the pigeon opening it apart and drinking the blood that's the only thing that's saved and so now his so he gets to america eventually gets to go from the bahamas to america now his son is like you know makes millions and millions of dollars like as a professional fighter and a celebrity and and and all this other stuff so anyways long story short uh the one thing like i my dad's still alive i told you my mom passed away um but like i really think like my dad were just like he did not baby me at all he's just like you gotta like figure out how to get it yeah and so i worked at um back then this this is something that paul graham made the point of right he's like dude when, when I was a kid, the only jobs available were you, like, you had a scoop of ice cream or something.
And, like, you've probably met them. I met some 17-year-old founders, a bunch of founders.
You talk to them, and they're on their second company. I'm like, what? They're like, oh, yeah, when I was, like, ninth grade, I, like, did this, like, Gmail plug-in.
Yeah, right, yeah. I had this SaaS tool.
Yeah, I made $40,000 a month. And, like, I'm making so much money.
My parents let me drop out of high school so I can do this business. I'm like, I worked at a car wash, dude.
I made $4.65 an hour, you know? So anyways, long story short, I would go to school year round, right? Because I had figured this out where it's like, oh, if you, most people went to summer school, they were they were forced to i went to public school in my whole life right yep and so like people would go to public school they would be forced to because you failed something else but if you elected to do that in six weeks you get a full semester's credit and there's two six week yeah like mini masters so i always even when i was in college i did this i would go to school year round right and so in high school i went to school so much that by the time i got to my last two years of high school i was in this program called ojt which is on the job training so instead of having six periods you leave after the fourth period and you'd have to have a job and you would get two your other credits um through your employer so your employer would have to like fill out paperwork like is david you know cleaning cars and like oh there's a baby that came in and threw up he did a good job with that it was disgusting but the benefit of that was being able to work full time oh full time yeah um make enough money where i could like buy i bought like a new car with my own money like all that other stuff um and so like then i realized like oh like i think i was making like 400 or 500 a week in high school which is freaking really good this is like late 90s early 2000s um and then i was got promoted to being a detailer and that's like you have client list and then you start developing relationships it's like every other business like right and they're like hey i love what you do would you do this at my house or would you do it on my boat that you don't do or like whatever and so my first business was just detailing cars and boats and taking all this other stuff where it's like okay i spent an hour waxing this guy's car i might make 20 bucks i do it at his house i make 150 dollars and so like i've always just had that like and again there's not like this is a story you guys read in the books and the history stories it's like, there's no master plan here. It's like, hey, I need to make money.
All of my other friends were working at McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, where you just said something like, they cap. I never had a capped upside.
And then so I did all these other businesses. I started in college because I thought I was going to be a lawyer.
And this is so silly because everybody, all my friends that are lawyers hate it. Right.
I dodged a bullet there. Well, this is, that's the dream.
Like the immigrant dream is for like the kids to become lawyers and doctors. Well, my parents, not my parents.
So my parents never said the word college to me once. Not one time because they're both high school dropouts.
So like they they never like i was one of the only kids in high school never have a uh a curfew like my parents knew i was independent and left me they gave that's the best thing they did it's like oh david can take care of himself yeah they thought my mom told me she's like i just thought you were a lot smarter than everybody else in our family so like we trusted you to make the right decision well also driven too. But she, because you have to understand, like being smart in this family is not like being, like the bar is low in the sense that like they're both coming from multiple generations of people that did not prioritize education or self-improvement.
So that's why I'm so like ferocious in this because I didn't see that, you know? And this this demonstrated when my mom was dying of cancer um so like you know hippo has this thing where like they're not going to share paperwork or information unless like it gets permission from the person and like my mom could choose whoever she wanted to she could have chose her husband right they had a bad relationship they should have got they got divorced and then remarried they should have stayed divorced but whatever and she you see that with actions we said actions express priority she's like we're in there and she's like who do you want the paperwork like who do you want us to communicate she's like david not her other kids not her husband not her sister not and she trusted me implicitly um and so i i essentially like they never met in college so i just kept this routine i was like people are oh, they're like, what do you want to do for a living? And, like, I remember watching TV when I was younger. I was like, well, I want to be rich.
And you think when you're younger, you don't know anything. Like, who's rich on TV? Like, I liked Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
I was like, you could be a judge or a doctor. And I was like, oh, I can't see blood.
Like, that freaks me out. So now you're going to be an attorney.
So I went to school, and I worked full time, and I was trying to hustle, anything I could do. And so the idea was like, okay, I'm just going to go undergrad for business because I'm interested in business anyways.
But I'm only doing that until I go to law school, right? And the point of the story was not to go on this deviation, but I was in the entrepreneurship program, the pilot one, right?

Because I was already interested

in trying to make money in any way possible.

And this is how bad the entrepreneurship was.

And this is why I'm kind of jealous of these young kids

where now you actually have an entrepreneurship industry

and there's stuff you can learn from.

The head, the main, what is it called?

Like the main subject, Entrepreneurship 101, right? The curriculum. Yeah, but there's all these other classes but entrepreneurship 101 is run the teacher right what is her credentials her dad started a um an ac company in florida you're gonna make a lot of money yeah and he died on the job because he got electrocuted to death okay and she inherited the company and then she ran it and so she's the teacher and so like the curriculum was terrible it was terrible the best thing and this relates to what all we do for a living now which i could have never predicted is there was a guy that um this is this kind of like charlie charlie munger says you should read if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business read les schwabab's autobiography, which I did because Charlie told me to.
He did it an episode a long time ago. And he's like, this guy made a ton of money in a really hard business, which is like tires and oil changes and stuff like that.
And so the guy was coming into the class. He was going to donate like $3 or $5 million to have a building name after him.
And he had one prerequisite. He goes, I want to talk to your entrepreneurship students before I give you you this money and i learned more in one hour from that dude than i did in two years on entrepreneurship because he would talk for like 20 minutes and he's like open up your questions yeah and i lit him up with question after question after question and i remember to this day just like the simple way this is like you know he was building his business in the probably the 80s and 90s and he's like um how did you know where to expand and he's like we would pull the car registration data from the dmvs right and we would know how many car owners there were in this specific radius and we'd have to hit like let's say we need 40 000 car owners in a three mile radius there's are there any other stores put a store right there and they did that over and over and over and over again awesome yeah and so like he had ideas like that and just like again you learn through experience like that guy could teach us way more because he actually did this compared to yeah i think probably all three of us have a like unintended uh impact of college entrepreneurship programs on us i mean you definitely.
I have a minor in entrepreneurship. Yeah.
Really? Yeah, from Ohio State. Similarly, only ever went to public school.
Yeah. I was a little different.
I was really into computers. When I was 10, my dad and I found a PC on the side of the road, and he was like, do you want to install Linux? And I was like, what's Linux? And taught me to use a terminal.
I was really lucky to have a dad as an engineer. And so I went to college for computer science.
Wait, wait, wait. Back up.
You found a PC on the side of the road? 100%. And you were like, let's install Linux.
And my dad's like, I'm willing to bet that thing is just old. He's like, because we're looking at the that at that point you could open computers so we're like looking at it he kind of like puts it apart looks inside he's like got all the pieces like this is just an old computer throwing away that's amazing all right keep going so you majored in computer science yeah but i i like went in thinking like i want to have some kind of like i want to do business and tech but i didn't know't know what that meant.
And so I found my way to a club called the Business Builders Club. And they were like, oh, there's like a real, like an actual minor that you can take.
And so sort of like through student organizations, found my way to actually doing something in the College of Business, which like I go back and forth on whether undergraduate business stuff is useful. Because on the one hand...

But it got you plugged into your network.

All your buddies are like, you guys have all done amazing things.

We just came back from my bachelor party,

and half the crew is the Business Builders Club,

Ohio State friends that I made there.

The content sucks, but the relationships are everything.

But the relationship, that's what...

And it's not...

The stuff you're learning is actually super important,

but you don't have the context for why yet.

It's like you're working on a DCF model and you're like, I don't, this is useless to me. Or you're like learning about depreciation and amortization.
You're like, this is awful. Cause I have nothing.
Whereas my physics classes were awesome. Like there's labs, like I can touch and feel the things and understand a mechanical advantage and how the free body diagram works.
But in these business concepts, they're like super abstract and they weren't useful to me then. But like I went and took a Coursera class last year, two years ago on accounting because I was just like, okay, like I want to actually understand accounting in part because we talk about it on Acquired all the time and David understands the stuff more than I do and I hate it.
But it is so much more useful when you understand where the rubber meets the road in the real world. It would just be beneficial to just go out and try to sell something.
You know what I mean? Get real world experience. What did Charlie...
I just reread. Have you guys read The Tao of Charlie Munger? No.
I've heard it's good. I can't remember if I looked at it for the episode or not i might have i own the hardcover the kindle and the audiobook that should tell you like it's worth it um by the way i own the audiobook and the kindle of almost every book that i own i uh including the hardcover too no i don't know you're not a hardcover person oh because you can also switch yeah that's the whisper sync or whatever it's called.
And all the time, I actually hate that they sync. Because my common workflow in doing acquired research is I listen to the book.
And then I'll take some notes in Apple Notes of half quotes where I'm like, I've got to look this up later. And then I go back in the Kindle and I search for the actual quote and pull out the data to be able to use it in the episodes um i think listening to the audiobook before reading the book is very helpful it gives you a basic overview it's almost like reading a wikipedia page before you read the biography it's not enough detail but like you have okay you have like watching a movie for the second or third time you know how it ends and it gives you pick up on things you missed the first time yep um in the tale of charlie munger though charlie was talking about this where he's just like, I learned about business at the Buffett grocery store, right?

From the cash register.

It's like, because that money is the lifeblood of all,

I think the quote in the book is like,

money's the lifeblood of all businesses and that's where the cash, that's where the money was

at this point.

And it's like, you just learn, and he says,

like you learn the importance of like showing up on time,

how to work with people you don't like,

like how to service, like take care of your customers.

Like these are things that are all like universally applicable yep that there there's it's another form of education like that's the biggest the key of experience and why it's so important it's the most valuable uh form of education because it's education of life yep yeah like i love to read like more than almost anybody else like you guys obviously love to read there's there's just so much things you can learn from books. So it's just like, it's not enough.
David, what was your college entrepreneurship? Well, it's funny. It's more thematic than an actual impact, but I can't remember if I've talked about this before.
Princeton had then just one entrepreneurship class. It was like one class in the Department of Electrical Engineering.
I was not an electrical engineer, but people knew about this because I was like, oh, this is cool. And so senior year, I had already, the recruiting happened in the fall.
So I was already like had my job, investment banking job that I was going to go do. A whole nother kit of worms.
But I was like, oh, you know, I'll take this class. It's supposed to be good.
I'm going to go work on Wall Street. I should learn about high-tech entrepreneurship was the name of the class.
And it was like all guest lecture. It was case method.
And Ed Schau, the professor, would have guests come in. One of the guests, either the last or the second to the last class, was Tim Ferriss.
What? Right before he published the four-hour work week. No way.
Yes. He asked Buffett a question at the annual meeting.
I'm a guest lecturer at Princeton. You're in the class.
Oh, he totally hustled this. He traded on that name for years before he made it as Tim Ferriss.
Because he just went in for one class. It was one class.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one day of one course.
And that was this case study study class and i think he had taken the class when he was at princeton and ed the professor like liked him and kind of took a shine to him so you and i are then our guest lecturers at columbia oh yeah totally yeah oh yeah we're just like everywhere so he came in and and so he was working on the book but it was like done but like was about to get published and so he he came in and the whole class was basically telling his story and then showing the book. I remember in my notes for the class, I titled them.
I have them still somewhere on an old computer. The title was Supplement Guy.
Do what you love. Yeah.
That is the world of the story. Oh, my God.
And then, oh then oh man afterwards uh talking about missed opportunities he uh he was he's like he's older than me but he's not that much older so he only been out for a couple years so class ends and he was like hey guys anybody want to hang out like i'm gonna go you know i'm gonna go like hang at terrace like if you want to come at the princeton has eating clubs instead of they do have fraternities but like yeah one of them is terrace and Jenny was actually in Terrace. Princeton has eating clubs.
They do have fraternities, but one of them is Terrace. Jenny was actually in Terrace.
Basically, I'm going to go hang out and have a good time with anybody who wants to come along. I was like, nah.
Now I'll see you on the podcast circuit later. I love how this just was uncovered in random conversation.
It was just like computer science, investment banking, law. Yeah.
No, but like. No common denominator.
No, and look where. I use theater more than I use computer science.
Like that was what, yeah. Like the idea for like from venture capitalists and podcasters, right? I went and my daughter asked me to go speak at Career Day.
Oh, hell yeah. And this was last year, so she would have been.
That's like the greatest thing ever. She would have been in fourth grade, right? I can't wait.
And so she's like, well, Daddy, you have a weird job. You have a weird job.
Yeah, she's like, will you come in and give a talk? And so you mentioned earlier, like, entrepreneurs are like odd ducks and like crazy people. They don't like, they see rules.
It's like, oh, that's just words written down on paper. Like, I'll just do my own thing.
So I show up. I'll say, yeah, I'll do anything for you.
Like, whatever you want. And so I show up and there's two, each class at the school she has has two teachers, right? And so they're like, oh, well, we didn't, hi, Mr.
Center. We didn't get your email.
Did you get like, did you bring like a thumb drive? I'm like, what was I supposed to email? And a thumb drive and they're like you're a powerpoint presentation and i go have you ever made a powerpoint presentation in your life and i go no but this is right i go they're nine why would i make a powerpoint presentation and so i go there and i was like i was like listen i'm fine like i'll ring like i got this like they're like you're gonna wing it they didn't use the word wing it but I forgot what it was. You're like, no, really.
I got this. I show up, right? And they're all sitting on the floor.
And there's like 39-year-olds. Are you like, stand up? No, no, no.
No, never. I want to see some energy.
And I was like, I talk for two minutes, right? I have a 30-minute slot. I go, I talk for two minutes.
I was like, listen, don to your parents don't listen don't listen to your teachers i go follow whatever you're intensely i just gave charlie munger's advice i go what are you interested in keep following that even if it doesn't you know there's not an obvious career path it's and i used a word i go it's highly likely that the job that you're gonna have has not yet been invented i was like there was no such thing as a podcaster like i couldn't go to school they're all going to be prompt engineers or whatever or whatever and like so that was like the two minute summary and i said a little bit more than that i go okay now what questions do you have for me and so i spent the next 28 minutes i told him the importance of reading i was like listen your friends are all going to be in these stupid apps i was like you're going to have no attention span learn how to read and read whatever you're interested in um meanwhile your daughter's probably like oh my god so i'll tell you the funny thing so then 28 minutes and then they're telling me about books they love they're like oh i like harry potter and i like this and i like travel and we had like the greatest time right so i come back i see there's like nine in the morning i leave um and i my daughter gets out, you know, later on in the day. And she goes, Daddy, thank you very much.
My friends thought your talk was the best. I was like, oh, that's like interesting.
Like, I'm glad they liked it. I go, well, let me ask you a question.
Who came after me? And they're like, oh, it was, you know, John's mom or something. I was like, oh, what does John's mom do? She's like, I go, well, first of all, did she do a PowerPoint? She goes, yes, everybody did a PowerPoint.
And I go, what does John's mom do? She goes like oh what does john's mom do she's like uh i go well first of course you do a powerpoint she goes yes everybody did a powerpoint and i go what does john's mom do she goes oh she's a corporate attorney i'm like yeah so you like they're nine years old and also that's like the alternate future for you yeah like it was like yeah you would have had a powerpoint it was like bizarro david going after you it'd be interesting like what you would uh yeah, but then again, I was living in Florida and like the law there is not a lot – like you'd have to move to like D.C. Like the law there is like insurance.
Like so I'm at the San Francisco airport, right, which is way nicer than Miami International Airport, by the way. It's like – I've never been to Miami International Airport.
Oh, it's like third world, man. Really? It's like the ceilings are low.
They have the the new they built like this new part but it says SFO was way nicer than mine and I see this billboard of it says the world's are the America's largest personal injury attorney that guy was in Orlando I was going to school in Orlando at the time his name is John Morgan he was famous back then and now he has so like that I probably work for him like I'm like chasing ambulances or whatever no no disrespect like whatever you got to pay your bills like I have no problem with that but yeah I just thought it was funny I was like you also have to think independently if they're 9 years old like they don't want to sit through I don't even want to sit through a powerpoint nobody wants to sit through a powerpoint no you should try to like I would have just brought a video game console or something I was like that's my video games you know maybe you can decide that's aake and mitch blake robbins and mitch laski made the point in uh one of their gamecraft episodes i never even thought of they're like you know how hard it is how few pure software companies are that that do over that sell over a billion dollars a year in software and how many game companies they said on the podcast like there's so many video game companies that make so much money. Yeah.
I think they say this is bigger than, the video game industry is bigger than music, movies, and books combined or whatever. And it has been since the 90s.
Yeah, that was the interesting thing we uncovered on the Nintendo episode is that stat gets bandied around, bantered? Bandied? Bandied, yeah. Bandied around a lot right now, which is is it's very interesting because like the video game market has done this but uh the video game market has basically always been larger than tv and movies combined but has never gotten attention or like been thought of it's one of those secrets that's been out there for 30 years that people haven't paid attention to yeah all right All right.
I'm afraid of these memory cards filling up. This has been wonderful.
Yep. Thanks for having me, guys.
Listeners, thank you. We almost never say this, but I think we got to do this again.
Let's do it again. I'll be here next week.
Thanks, guys. We'll see you next time.
All right. Bye.
Well, listeners, thank you for going on the journey with us with David. We would love your feedback on the session's format as we sort of continue to refine it.
It's obviously very different than our LVMH Nintendo-style episodes, and getting your thoughts on how we can continue to improve it would be hugely helpful. Also, go check out the Founders podcast.
Search Founders in any podcast player. Also, if you want to go deeper, you can become an acquired LP to come

closer into the acquired kitchen. We have bi-monthly Zoom calls, and we just announced

that we will be asking our LPs to help us pick future episodes. So you can join at acquired.fm

slash LP. You should subscribe to our second show, ACQ2, formerly the LP show, for expert

interviews with founders and investors. Just search ACQ all one word in any podcast player also join us in the slack discuss this episode and all the others there's now over 15 000 smart thoughtful kind members at acquired.fm slash slack it's pretty cool i think david that represents only like five to ten percent of those of you out there who listen every month.
It's funny. I literally texted Ben yesterday and I was listening to the Nintendo episode that we just released.
And I was like, the way we talk about the acquired Slack, it kind of makes it sound like only 15,000 people listen to acquired. No, that is 5% of the people that listen to acquired.
Yeah. All the rest of rest of you, come join us in the Slack, Acquired.fm

slash Slack. I don't know.
It's just a great way

for us to get a better pulse on

all of you, who you are, and what you like

or don't like, or want us to improve about the show.

So that's all we got.

Listeners, thank you so much. We'll see you

next time. We'll see you next time.

Who got the truth?

Is it you?

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