10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

10:17Ben Gilbert:We bonded over Ben Thompson originally.

10:19David Rosenthal:And I think, you can tell me if this is mutual, but I looked up to you because you were doing a thing that was mysterious to me, which was venture capital. I was a software engineer, and I got hired to work at a venture firm to do some incubation work, but I didn't know anything about the real job of venture capital. And here's David, someone who's just a few years older than me, like doing that thing but kind of in my like peer age group. And I could like lean over and be like, what are they talking about?

10:48Ben Gilbert:I kind of felt like a fraud in a lot of ways. Like I repressed this deep down. But if I'm honest with myself, I think I felt like a fraud as a VC because I never – I went to Princeton. I was a French literature major. I worked on Wall Street. I worked briefly at the Wall Street Journal and then I became a venture capitalist. I had no qualification to – Have you ever coded or you ever done anything? I mean, I took some CS classes in college, but I'd never built anything. And so I was like, Ben had built all these things. You built the this for that website. You built so many products. You had products that millions of people used.

11:22Ben Gilbert:And I was like, I'm just masquerading here. So you could see that Ben knew stuff. It was exciting for you to know about. Yes. Did you feel that David knew stuff?

11:33David Rosenthal:Absolutely. What kind of stuff? Business. Really? It wasn't French literature. No, no, no. I only found out years into doing Acquired, he was a French Lit major. Oh. But that's important, that background. It ended up becoming YouTube. This kind of broad curiosity about things other than business and technology, I hear it in your program. I hear it in your podcast. So what I'm thinking of in my head is Kahneman and Tversky. I wrote a book called The Undoing Projects. And you could see two people. And then it got me thinking about collaboration. And I've had exciting collaborations with people. And the feeling I get is this person is bringing out a better version of me, which is why I asked if your spouses were threatened.

12:18Because Kahneman and Tversky's spouses were threatened is too strong a word, but they were very aware that the relationship that was most important in their lives was with, not with their spouse, but with.

12:30Ben Gilbert:I got the sense from the Undoing Project that Kahneman and Tversky's relationship was very intense. I don't know that I would describe our relationship as... You know, it was. It was argumentative. Yes, it was. And competitive. It was not competitive. Danny Kahneman felt, was always felt at risk of being dismissed, thought of the lesser partner. There was a status difference between the two of them. Right going into it. Everyone in the world thought Amos was the smartest person they'd ever met. You two didn't ever have any of that. Not for me. But you said you felt like a fraud. I think I felt less.

13:09David Rosenthal:There were a lot of things when we started doing Acquired where we were doing this business analysis podcast, but I didn't know finance.

13:16Ben Gilbert:Which is because you've become more the keeper of the analysis on Acquired, and I'm more the keeper of the story.

13:23David Rosenthal:It's different, though, than a difference in status. I don't feel that you or I have ever felt we had a difference in status. And the number of fights we've had or real tension we've had is like two, three ever in 10 years. I mean, it's weirdly none. Let's come back to those.

13:39Ben Gilbert:And let's get to the lessons. What have you learned? We started thinking about what have we learned from the companies we've covered that we've then applied to Acquired.

13:48David Rosenthal:All right. In particular, Acquired has clearly worked. why and does that why have something to do with the fact that we study the world's best companies? Like is there some osmosis that happens from the subject matter bleeding into the property itself? And? So that's our frame. Okay, let's go with that frame. Yes.

14:10Ben Gilbert:So the one I was going to start with is the NFL. The product is scarce. 162 baseball games a year. It's called America's Pastime. You pass a lot of time with it. But with the NFL, because the product is scarce, and then they have very smartly cultivated that and engineered it to be more scarce, more of an event-driven sport, that's made all the difference. And to me, what we do is insane for the podcasting industry. It's completely insane. We release, for the last three years, we've released 12 episodes. The next year we're going to do eight. Eight episodes for the whole year. No, as a hobbyist podcaster, what I get told is you have to be on all the time.

14:54Yep. And I can't do it, and so I'm not going to do it.

14:58Ben Gilbert:Podcasting is like your second or third thing that you do, right? And you make more episodes, I think, per year than we do. That's correct. But they're just, you know, except for the scripted ones, which I do throw myself into, it really is, I do no preparation, and it is a conversation. And I don't do very much of those. The scripted ones, I do put time into. But it's a different sort of thing than what you're doing. It tends to be a very narrow little story that I'm telling. You didn't start out, though. We used to make 26 episodes a year. They were 40 minutes long to an hour 20. And so how do you go from that to realizing, and did you really learn it from the NFL, or did you just do it?

15:36Ben Gilbert:We were starting to do it, and then we covered the NFL, and we were like, aha, this is what we're doing.

15:40David Rosenthal:Most of these things are actually, I think, our confirmation bias. We get some inkling that we should continue to go in this direction. In calling out Hermes, it's because I think quality and scarcity have become an important part of Acquired. And in some ways, we learned that from Hermes, but we covered Hermes last year. I think we found our way to that probably four-ish years ago, maybe five years ago, where we used to feel like we were bad at podcasting because we couldn't make very many and because we didn't have a whole production team and we didn't have professional ad salespeople. and we didn't have...

16:15David Rosenthal:We weren't full-time for a long time. Yeah, and at some point we kind of looked at each other and we were like, maybe if we just admit that we are heavily constrained and then try to just lean into that constraint in the way that Hermes leans into every single Birkin bag must be handmade by one artisan and we're going to build a business model around that. And it turns out to be a great business. We sort of thought every episode is going to be entirely handcrafted by us, all the research, all the recording. We work with this amazing audio engineer, Steven, who does the literal waveform editing.

16:50David Rosenthal:But we go in and in a transcript highlight 1 ,000 cuts per episode. It's this made-with-love product. And it turned out we could actually build a big platform and a good business out of something heavily constrained. But that's not where you start. No. No, no. So let's just for people who don't know. Where you start is you're two guys who've met each other and got a crush on each other. You love being with each other. And you get this idea that, oh, it would be really cool to do a podcast on corporate acquisitions that worked. Yeah. That worked. Bad idea. Well, it is an idea. It was a starting space.

17:29You could easily have started the opposite, the corporate acquisitions that didn't.

17:32David Rosenthal:And you'd have done much more material. Which is what most press at the time was. Right. It was, let's talk about how crappy this acquisition was. So it's interesting to me that your first step right from the start is positive. It's like what worked. Not what didn't work. It's what worked. That's because we were VCs and I was trying to build companies. I mean, the goal was create things that have enough value to get bought or go public. And when people buy things, it's because they're working. So let's try to reverse engineer what works.

18:01Ben Gilbert:Understand why things worked. Right. So that's a different starting spot from almost all journalism. Yeah. In fact, if most journalists started there, they'd be accused of hagiography of that. But because of where you're coming from and because you're thinking of this in very practical terms, like why did this work, you do get away with it. It's just that first episode, you're almost like different people. But I'm going to hold back on what I think you learned because I want to see if you get to it. So what's the third episode that you have learned a lesson from?

18:36David Rosenthal:I think Berkshire we learned so many things from. We did this three-part saga on Berkshire Hathaway. God, I have not listened to it, and I am a big investor in Berkshire Hathaway. Good for you. Congratulations. Since when? I bought it right in the middle of the financial crisis. Because I thought, I mean, I had done a take, I mean, it's putting a little strongly, but oddly, I had written a takedown of Warren Buffett on the cover of the New Republic magazine called The Temptation of St. Warren. You can probably dig it off of the way back machine. What was the thesis? The thesis was that he may have started out being who he says he is, but that he's become this very different thing in the marketplace.

19:18His money's not like other people's money. That's true. And you don't have a couple of things Warren Buffett has. And his money is valued differently. But secondly, he was willing to do deals that at the time bothered the hell out of me. And what had happened was - Like the Goldman deal? It was a Solomon Brothers deal. It bothered the hell out of me. He kept a CEO in place who I thought should not have been allowed. Were you there? I was there. Yeah, you lived through it. No, I was through it. This is a huge part of our birthday series. It turned me briefly, only briefly actually, cynical about Warren Buffett.

19:48And then I came out of it and fell in love with him all over again. But I had written this thing and pissed him off entirely. I mean, it would clearly upset him. And then kind of started watching him for longer. And I thought, you know, I just liked him, just liked him. You couldn't help but like him. So I started to soften. And when we get to the financial crisis, I thought, well, his money is going to be so valuable here. What is needed is credit. And I think if he stays alive long enough, it might happen again soon. So you invested in Berkshire before the legendary deals coming out of the financial crisis.

20:23Yeah. And so I bought a chunk of the A shares, and I've just sat on them. And let me tell you, can I tell you a Warren Buffett story? Yeah. I mean, this is talking a little bit out of school, but I've never met him. I know he was really irritated with me. And then I actually look back at that. It's the only time I've ever looked back at a piece I wrote, and I thought, I overdid that. I went right back to the New Republic and wrote another 5 ,000-word thing about Warren Buffett, in which I basically apologized for the first piece. I bought these shares in 2008. When I was working on Going Infinite, I was working on the Sam Bankman-Fried book.

20:56and I was talking to a publicist, completely unrelated to Warren Buffett. And she said, you know, I also represent Warren. And she said, and I told Warren that I've been talking to you. And he said, he has a question for you. And I said, what? She says, is he the Michael Lewis who bought shares back in the mansion? No, no, no. I swear to God. I swear to God. So this tells you something more about Warren Buffett than me. and he said he bought it like, the book value to that thing, that ratio, he bought it as cheap as it's ever been. And he says, but he - You made the best trade in the Berkshire Stock Exchange.

21:34Then he says, so he's the Michael Lewis who sold some Berkshire Hathaway two years ago and four years ago. And he was like, why did he sell? So he's tracking. I'm not a huge shareholder. Yeah, I can't imagine you're like - He's tracking. You're not like Vanguard here. No, no, no. And I said, well, actually, I actually just gave him the charity is what I'd done. I would give him the money away. That's unbelievable. And she said, he'll be relieved to hear that kind of thing. It's like, so can you imagine, can you imagine that Warren Buffett is taking the time to watch who is coming in and out of the A shares and thinking about it?

22:13I mean, I just thought he and Munger had that whole thing about don't put your money in an index fund. Put your money in a big bundle of stocks. Put it in a few stocks and watch those stocks like a hawk. It's like they watch that thing in a way that like just in history has anybody ever done anything like that.

22:29Ben Gilbert:I mean, all these people are the maniacs. You don't build something like this if you're not a maniac. That's exactly right. So anyway, sorry I just digressed here. What did you learn from your three episodes of Berkshire Hathaway?

22:40David Rosenthal:Well, as it applies to acquired, we got really obsessed with the circle of competence that it's okay to have a giant too hard pile. There's a bunch of things that like, I'm not intelligently saying no to. We used to say this all the time.

22:54Ben Gilbert:We'd be like, too hard pile, too hard pile. Every phone call we'd have would be like, what is the expression you use? So Warren and Charlie had this thing. There was the yes pile, the no pile, and then the too hard pile. The too hard pile, I see, okay. And it's okay to just like... It's too hard means no. All of technology was a too hard pile. Yeah, it was just all... There might be something in here, but I'm just too hard.

23:17David Rosenthal:It's basically admitting that our opportunity cost is so high, the things that we say yes to are so awesome, that it's okay to say too hard to just a giant amount of things. Yep. And that was really freeing once we started just like... I mean, truly on most of our phone calls. So what's an example of something that you... I'm surprised you say this. What's too hard for you?

23:37Ben Gilbert:The reason that, one of the reasons, besides just wanting to meet you, because you've been an inspiration to us forever, that I wanted to meet you a few months ago was Hollywood. We've had lots of opportunities to work with Hollywood. It keeps being tomorrow. To this point, they have thus always invariably ended up in the too hard pile. Are you talking about doing episodes in Hollywood? No, no, no, no, no. Or to become a movie star? Creating TV shows, creating documentaries, adapting these stories into films.

24:08David Rosenthal:They all sound good until we start digging in and then we're like, the time it would take us to think through all the implications of this. We should just make another episode.

24:18Ben Gilbert:The answer almost always is we should just make another episode. That's a really intelligent place to land. because what they will do is woo you with their enthusiasm and then take you down a rabbit hole where you will spend years of your life and have nothing to show for. Well, this is one of the reasons I want to talk to. Michael's a very smart guy. You've been very successful. I've gone down the rabbit holes. Yeah, but you love writing books. I've gone down the rabbit holes knowing that I didn't have a whole lot else better to do at the time. It's like between books. It's a palate cleanser.

24:46You don't have a between books, period. You know that you're going to. We need to, yeah. Yeah, I don't have that. I don't have the machine you have. You've got an assembly line going. And it's a compounding asset.

24:56David Rosenthal:I mean, this is the craziest, craziest thing about podcasting. And like a giant amount of why this has worked for us is we do a lot of work that looks a lot like the research and the writing of a book. But when we make our book and we release it to the world, people click subscribe. And so when we release the next one, those same people go listen. Like it's almost guaranteed.

25:17Ben Gilbert:We're always growing our base.

25:18David Rosenthal:Podcasting, being an author, there's loose compounding elements to it, but there's not a literal subscriber base. Not nearly what I thought when I got into the business of writing books. I thought about this a little bit. So you're right. You've probably done it better than any other. You're one of the few people who probably does have such a brand. I'm going to move around America to the various arenas of ambition. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, movie business, sports, the various things. and I'll naturally attract the audience that is interested in that arena. Yep. And then I'll drag them along to the others.

25:54And it hasn't really happened that way. Even for you? Not really. Not really. The books have a kind of market and it's a big market, biggish market, but I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.

26:17Ben Gilbert:Now that's - Moneyball audience is not necessarily coming to Fifth Risk. Exactly. And that the audiences end up just being different. So it's just the way it is. But that's not true with yours. That's not true for acquired. So every time, if you were to take time off to go do something in Hollywood, you'd be abandoning this glorious network.

26:37David Rosenthal:The opportunity cost is so high of spending a month not making an acquired episode because when we publish an episode of Acquired, the base does come with us. I mean, not all of it, but like, you know, we make epic systems about healthcare and all the people who listen to LVMH are now learning how doctor's office IT works. So podcasts are unique in that it does have that true subscriber base, but unlike anything else where you click subscribe, there's not an algorithmic platform that disintermediates you. I mean, you think YouTube or Twitter or any of these. when someone clicks follow or subscribe, it's like signal in the algorithm, but it's not guaranteed.

27:15David Rosenthal:But you subscribe in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and those people are actually subscribed and they're going to get the next episode. Right. And they learn to trust you. They learn to trust you that if you're interested, they'll be interested. In fact, what they're buying into is not the subject, but your interest in the subject. Yes. And I am terrified of betraying that trust. Anytime we make an episode, I think of it as a churn opportunity. If we put this in the feed, if we don't live up to the expectations that our listeners have, we will burn them and they will leave us forever.

27:45Ben Gilbert:In the why does acquired work framework, there's a strong element of terror of why it works. We're constantly terrified every time we make an episode.

27:55David Rosenthal:Every minute is a turn opportunity.

27:56Ben Gilbert:Are we letting people down?

27:59David Rosenthal:All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Legora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

28:12Ben Gilbert:Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Legora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

28:28David Rosenthal:So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

28:44Ben Gilbert:And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lagora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

29:07David Rosenthal:And they recently launched Legora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

29:26Ben Gilbert:And Legora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Legora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70 % of the time. Legora now has over 100 ,000 lawyers on the platform from 1 ,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

29:57David Rosenthal:truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at lagora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Are you more terrified than you were two years ago? Yes. So the terror is growing. The terror is growing. At some point, it's not going to be a good thing.

30:29It's good to be a little on edge. Yes, yeah, yeah. But you don't want to get yourself in a situation where you feel like I had to do the same thing over and over again. Because eventually it will get old. We'll come back. This is where we're going to get to the bull in the bear case at the end. Okay, great, great, great, great, great. But it's, this is, so back to your, the lesson that you gleaned from Munger and Buffett, it's okay to have a too hard pile. And you said, and the too hard pile is like doing things in Hollywood. But when I asked the question, did you ever run across this? Have you run across this?

30:56Have you ever had a subject where you thought, ah, this is just too hard to do?

31:00David Rosenthal:Yeah. Oh, yeah. What would be an example of that? We got pretty far down the line on doing an episode on the Fed. Yeah. And walked away from it. Yep. So you walked away from it. Yeah. We might come back, but it's been like three years since we - It'll be a moment to come back to it. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad we didn't do it in the past. Yeah, no, it should be better than it. Although it's going to violate your rule about doing newsy things.

31:20Ben Gilbert:We always try and find things. Timelessness is like a must. Everything we do must be timeless, the company we're covering. Nothing's timeless. So what do you mean by that? It must be that if you listen to an episode that we make five years after we made it, it's 80 % as relevant. It will still be an important institution in the world. Right.

31:44David Rosenthal:But like a CNBC article is worth 2 % of its original value within a month. Right. And we want to be worth 80 % of our original value five years from now on any given piece of content. So does that mean you're picking institutions that you think will survive? Yes. Yes. Okay, so that's like baseline, bedrock. Because you're in such a volatile – so much of your stuff is tech and finance where there's so much churn. Well, yes. This didn't used to be true. You look at anything pre-2020, 2021, we had not yet discovered this principle.

32:15Ben Gilbert:But our real bangers are timeless and timely. Doing Google this year was timeless and timely. Right. Having that, however you do it, you're getting to something that I try to get to when I'm picking subjects, but you're doing it in a slightly different way. What I like, when my socks start to go up and down about a subject, is when I'm really interested in it and nobody else is. that there isn't that there aren't people it's not hot and i found with i think it's true of basically all my books a couple maybe a couple exceptions but a lot of the books that if i'm at a dinner party and someone asks me what i'm what are you working on and after about 60 seconds i can see their eyes glaze over like why is he interested in that you know it's just not

33:03David Rosenthal:registering with them in any way yeah and i've learned just to not even talk about it because it kills my interest to watch it kill their interest. But I know why I'm interested and why it's important. And I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important. That's a really good sign. This is a difference between what you do and what we do. Because I feel like when I think through all your books, they're almost always a story of obscurity that once it becomes a Michael Lewis book, then it becomes a well-known phenomenon. Moneyball. Like You are discovering these things that kind of nobody's talking about.

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

33:54Ben Gilbert:Right. People love it, but they don't really understand it. Yeah, there's a secret hiding in plain sight. A secret hiding in plain sight. People didn't understand Trader Joe's, or people didn't understand Google, we thought. Right.

34:04David Rosenthal:There's three things that make a great Acquired episode. One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that takes a hero's journey where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity. How it starts is this thing that nobody cares about, and then it becomes the most important thing in the world. Two is there's a secret hiding in plain sight, like Costco. I think when the ordinary consumer sees Costco, they're like, oh, I love Costco. But when someone who's listened to the acquired episode on Costco thinks about Costco, they see all the gears turning of the machine. There has to be some way that we can expose something.

34:36David Rosenthal:And then our third criteria is it has to be important in the world. And I think that's something we picked up later. I mean, we used to do these little$10 million acquisitions. And now when we're going to go spend two months of our life researching and making that the acquired episode, it has to be something worthy of the acquired stage. When did that happen? I'm a little unclear. where, again, getting back to this first episode you did and where you are now and the difference between them, what sort of compelled you or propelled you into the current form of acquired? The decision to make it a business and the decision to actually live off of what you earned from your podcast.

35:15So it had to work commercially. So then you started to make these adjustments. Is that how it works?

35:21Ben Gilbert:Yes and no. You're on the right track. I like the Berkshire. I thought you were going to say partnership as a lesson from it. So we did a series on Sequoia Capital, the venture firm. Yep. I went full-time on Acquired in 2020. Five years in, Ben didn't go full-time until January 24, right? Correct. End of 23, beginning of 24.

35:45David Rosenthal:You remained equal partners. Yes. Oh, it wasn't a business when we started. It was just like, I mean, we didn't make money until our third year. But those three years while you were full-time and you were part-time, it was an equal partnership. Yes. David never once raised the issue. I'm depending on this for my livelihood, and it's my only thing, so I should own more or get a greater share that never once came up. That's great. It never crossed my mind. There we go. That's an important point.

36:12Ben Gilbert:I guess I'm glossing over it because it didn't even cross my mind now. Acquired has always been the two of us. Equal. It would be profane for it to be anything other than that.

36:23David Rosenthal:It would actually break it if we ever started trying to figure out little carve-outs or pieces of the pie for, well, I did this, therefore I should get. It's true collaboration. You don't recognize there's no boundary where you start. This is where I'm going with the story. It's funny you bring up Sequoia because it's actually benchmark-y in that way. Well, it's the quote. It's Leonie's quote.

36:41Ben Gilbert:Okay. So end of 22, FTX happens. interest rates go up podcast advertising market falls off a cliff our revenue dropped 40 % so we went from this wasn't a business I went full time we made it a business it worked amazingly well from 20 to 21 into 22 and then our revenue dropped 40 % overnight and that was the moment when we changed everything so how many episodes Those are you making in 2021? A lot. Oh, I see. Okay. But it's no longer just corporate acquisitions.

37:23David Rosenthal:We started broadening with the Tesla episode in like 2019, maybe 18. And why did you broaden? It was David's idea. And he said, I have this thesis that the audience doesn't listen to us because they want to hear if a tech acquisition worked or not. They want to hear the story and strategy of the most important technology companies. There you go. We would get all this feedback. You kind of foul hooked your audience. Yes. They were listening. What's a foul hook? When you go fishing and you catch the fish by the belly rather than the mouth. The hook gets in some weird way. Yes. You didn't actually catch the fish in an honest way.

38:00Yes.

38:00Ben Gilbert:But we get all these emails. Every time we meet people and they talk about the show, I love the story. You guys are just gifted storytellers. That's what we hear over and over and over again. Eventually, we're like, well, we should believe that. So at that moment, I'm going to interject what I noticed. Because in that first episode, you were so unsure of yourselves. You were so choked, both of you. And you have a background in theater. You were a kid. We both did, yeah. So you did not come across as people who'd been on stage. It was kind of an effectless performance. There's a flatness to it.

38:43You were afraid to, whether you knew it or not, exhibit a lot of emotion. You didn't realize that one of your secret sauces is emotion. It's the way you respond to each other when you're presenting material is helping the audience understand how they should feel about it. You're giving them sometimes very dry facts like, I don't know, their revenues doubled every year for 100 years straight. And the audience may not know that that's an incredible thing. And the way you respond, even sophisticated listeners are helped. Oh, pay attention now. That's an important thing. I should get excited about that.

39:28Ben Gilbert:We used to share our research such that we were doing research in the early days. I think we only had a single Google Doc that we worked out. We were just dumping everything into the same shared document. So by the time we would actually go to record the episode, it was stale. Yeah, there's no surprise. There's no disagreement. You can't pretend to be surprised. Yeah, we can't pretend. Or you would be pretending to be surprised. Neither of us are good actors. When did we? We did a little cold intro. So this is really important. So you added an improvisational component. Yes. There's another way of putting that.

39:57You're added risk. You're taking risks when you don't know what's going to happen when you come on. 100 % agree.

40:04David Rosenthal:Every episode now going into recording day feels like a high wire act because we haven't fully scripted it out. I'm like, I think this is going to come together. But we had to add this thing called a production meeting. About six months ago, one week before recording, we are required to get together and share, agree on an episode structure, but not share any details. Because we got so into this like improvisation thing that some of our episodes would sort of end and you're like, that had no flow to it. Like you guys had two completely different ideas for the episode. You're not taking risk if it doesn't work sometimes.

40:36Yeah. Right? But it's the difference between, I mean, do you know how your heart sinks when someone gets up at a podium with a script, with a speech, and they're going to read their speech? The audience is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing's going to happen. Like, whatever's on that page, that's what's going to happen. It's like pre-announcing the score to the Super Bowl. It's exactly right. And that if you get up and you just start talking, the audience also knows, oh, my God, this could be a disaster. They don't know where it's going. Just having just some of that has a huge effect on the way the audience responds to the performance.

41:12And so that is not in the beginning. Do you remember when we started doing that?

41:19David Rosenthal:Well, I think in the first 10 episodes, first five episodes, we got feedback saying, you guys need to disagree more. But I don't think we quite realized that we should reveal surprises for each other until five years ago, four years ago.

41:31Ben Gilbert:But at some point, we made it an unwritten rule of like, we have separate documents, we prepare separately. We try to do separate research calls. That was five years ago, you say? So we start with the corporate acquisitions in 2015. And you two knowing everything that you're going to say when you get on, basically. And it's short. And it's 40 minutes.

41:54David Rosenthal:And we're not confident. What you're hearing too is like, I'm supposed to be doing financial analysis as someone who's never been taught how to read a financial statement. Right. And so you're also hearing a little bit of like - Imposter syndrome. I'm trying, I can't get over enthusiastic because I'm afraid David's going to catch me and be like, you don't know what you're talking about. Okay. So plus there's an uncertainty about your own abilities. All right. So first thing that happens is you move off the corporate acquisitions? We went from acquisitions to IPOs. Right. Which was unbelievable timing in 2017, 18, when Uber, Pinterest, Slack, there's like eight IPOs in a row of tech companies that everyone had been following.

42:35David Rosenthal:And then it went really for two years and kind of culminated at the end of 2020 with DoorDash and Airbnb, which we recorded and released one day apart. Because we wanted to be there on IPO day. Once again, you're constraining yourself unnecessarily. Yeah, exactly. Eventually you get to, we're just going to do stories. Big success stories, basically. So it was acquisitions, IPOs, then it was broad histories and strategies of tech companies, and then broad histories and strategies of companies, period. All companies, yeah. And people. And people. And people. Yeah, we frame them as companies. In a funny way, you're still constraining yourself.

43:11You feel like you need this frame. Yeah. And you actually, you're not really living in a frame anymore.

43:16David Rosenthal:Yeah, but constraints are good. Like format, forcing yourself into a format. Sure, but at some point you're going to wake up and say, you know, we should be doing more biography. We should be doing more people. And if that person is not naturally a huge corporation, you may still—I have a feeling there's an evolution to come. There might be. You haven't reached the end point of this. So at what point do you start to feel confident? Like, we know what we're doing.

43:47Ben Gilbert:Well, when the crash, you know, crash, when the reset happened in 2022, 2023. So pretty recently. Crypto bubble, tech stocks plummet. Podcast advertising.

43:58David Rosenthal:Advertising budgets kind of dry up end of 2022.

44:02Ben Gilbert:Ben and I looked at each other and it was like, it wasn't even like really a conversation. We just knew what we had to do. We watched a lot of other people go for easy, secure money now. Try and keep the music playing. Right. And we were just like, party's over. We need to get to work. We need to focus on only what is enduring and make great, great, great work and stop doing everything else. Up until that point, we used to do these things called specials. We would just do not totally random, but essentially random interviews. Undifferentiated. Undifferentiated topics. And we said, we need to start making stuff that is only out of one.

44:44Ben Gilbert:Only we can do will only be great. We need to stop doing everything else.

44:48David Rosenthal:And we did it on the commercial side too. We said, let's go cut deals with our favorite partners. Get rid of most of our sponsors. And try to just figure out when we come out the other side of this that we have the best companies to work with commercially as well as the most durable stories and brands associated with us because of the editorial side of the house. the JP Morgan's of the world. Did they join before you proved that this new way of doing it? No, we did a year.

45:14Ben Gilbert:2023 was the first year of this. And what were those episodes? That was LVMH. That was the NFL. Okay. That was Porsche. It's deep dives. That was the beginning of what we were really - These long episodes. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's when we started to build the confidence of like, oh, we can do something that - Isn't it interesting that you grabbed this kind of commercial attention only after you went really long. Yes. And so then J.P. Morgan came in in the January 24th. So we had done a year of kind of building this out.

45:47David Rosenthal:You're right. It was only after we had sort of leaned into Acquired as a brand about durability, about compounding over decades and centuries. And I don't think I appreciated that as a person in the early days of Acquired, and it certainly wasn't what the show was about. Yeah. Anyway, so I got us a little off track. Your lesson number three was Berkshire Hathaway and don't be afraid to have a too hard pile. Pick another.

46:14Ben Gilbert:Okay, so then my frame for all this story was Sequoia. So this story is very different than Sequoia. But we interviewed Doug Leone, who was one of the, I guess, two stewards ago of Sequoia. And he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there after the bubble popped were taking mulligan funds. They went to their LPs and they said, you know, there's nothing we can do on this one. We're going to be more disciplined next time. We said, absolutely not. We will never lose money for our investors, ever. We will do everything we can possibly do to make this fund in the black.

47:00Ben Gilbert:And he said, I think the best line anyone's ever said on Acquired, he said, we looked at each other and you could burn cigarettes on our arms and we wouldn't flinch. And they spent the next like five years, they didn't raise another fund. They just like went to work with the portfolio.

47:14David Rosenthal:I think they stopped taking fees for a while until they were back in.

47:16Ben Gilbert:Yeah, and got it back, and it ended up being a positive returning fund. This is how you get a reputation. Exactly. And that was that moment for us. And easy to lose one, too. And so they were really sensitive to reputation. Yeah.

47:33David Rosenthal:We'd studied enough businesses by that point where we saw what led to durability, and I think we already were awake to the idea that all that matters is the late years of compounding. like in any given year you look at a mag 7 company and their profits from the last year are greater than the first 20 years combined or whatever and i think realizing that being around and being respected on the other side of this you know economic chasm is like the key to everything who cares about making money this year it's about 5 10 20 years from now and we have to like have the brand that people want to be a part of then.

48:14Right. But you don't know that you are a mag seven podcast. It's kind of ridiculous to compare. When you make this decision, you don't know that there's going to be great riches 10 years out or five years out or three years out.

48:30Ben Gilbert:Yeah. But really, I think we both so believe, it was like the burn cigarettes on our arm. I think we just both so believed that that was the right thing to do. Something has happened. So something had happened before that. And you would figure it out how to do this. You'd figure it out how to study a business in a way that was really interesting. The first episode's not that interesting. There's just not that much I didn't know and thought of. Yeah. You know, whatever. I don't know much about Pixar, but tell a story. And it's 30 minutes or whatever it is. Now, in that first episode, I think there are more ads than there are you two speaking.

49:05David Rosenthal:And now we pride ourselves on having the lowest ad percent in the entire industry. So let's pause here before we get to number four. How do you study a business? Like what have you learned about how to study a business that's different from when you started out? Explain to the audience what you do to prepare, what you do to learn about a business. Great.

49:27David Rosenthal:He'll read everything ever about them. So, yep, you do what I do. Yeah. You go, whatever's out there. Right. So you do what AI. That's just the AI part of it. Who started with canonical? Who's done great canonical work in the past? And then what ideas do you have from reading the previous canonical work? And you then say, I wonder if I can find this old YouTube video. And then those YouTube videos mention something else. And the spider web always starts with the pre-existing canonical work. And at what point do you pick up the phone and start calling people who maybe have information that isn't on the worldwide web?

50:01David Rosenthal:Zero ever until about 2023. And now that is the most important way that we can research.

50:06Ben Gilbert:But probably about 50%, for me at least, about 50 % of the way through they'll start to get your arms around, then start calling. Right. You don't call uninformed. No. You call knowing as much as there is to know, and then you start picking the brains of people who might know more and have not said. There's the obvious people to talk to. For Google, we talk to Sundar or Demis or obvious. Then there's the slightly less obvious. You just say that so casually. Who gets to pick up the phone and talk to the CEO? This is part of the compounding effect. Talk to the CEO of Google about Google. I mean, nobody.

50:39We're in a scale economy business. We're in a compounding business. Right? So the fact that you, when do you first realize that you can pick up the phone. That's a good question. And call Tim. You know, you're on this first name basis with all these people. When does that start?

50:55Ben Gilbert:I think it was our Microsoft series when we talked to Steve. Steve. Yeah. Steve.

51:01David Rosenthal:Past acquired guest. Past acquired guest. Steve Bomber. I love name-dropping in your world. It's so different from the name-dropping in like Hollywood. None of your names mean anything in Hollywood. Yeah, it does. But they mean everything here. And the arenas are so funny because like these people aren't, most of them aren't famous. And they're 1 ,000 to 10 ,000 times wealthier than these Hollywood stars. Yes. It's just different yardsticks.

51:24Ben Gilbert:Well, what's funny with Microsoft, so we had some access. Ben used to work at Microsoft before. Which got a zero access. Well, no, no, no. But you knew some people. Here's, in my mind, what sort of happened with this as I'm trying to think about how to answer Michael's question. Because we had started in Seattle, and you still live in Seattle, and you had worked at Microsoft, when we started our Microsoft journey, we knew some people. Yeah, that's true. And we were like, well, let's see if we can talk to Steve. And so then we talked to Steve, and we got his perspective on things. And it completely changed how we were.

51:58David Rosenthal:Is that a cold email?

51:59Ben Gilbert:I think it might have. Is that the first time you do that? First time we reached that high. Okay.

52:03David Rosenthal:Yeah. And you know what? This is where reputation matters. Steve didn't get back to us for a day. And then we heard back and he said, I don't listen to podcasts. I haven't listened to your podcasts. I talked to some people. But I talked to some people that I trust and they say you're great. So let's hop on a call. And we wouldn't have gotten the response back if...

52:21Ben Gilbert:And he gave us probably three hours, four hours in research for... He did. Yeah. And you learned a lot. Yeah. Before we even interviewed him, that was later. Right. But just in research. I see. And we learned a lot. Did you all have a moment where you thought, oh my God, let's keep doing that.

52:37David Rosenthal:That worked. Yes.

52:37Ben Gilbert:Well, yeah. So then we were like, that worked great.

52:39David Rosenthal:Because it kind of worked with Jensen too. So originally when we had the idea in 2021 to do NVIDIA, we thought we were like an interview show then. We thought the interviews would be better than our core storytelling episodes because we hadn't discovered that the Ben and David storytelling is our N of 1 product. It is the thing that we uniquely can do that no one else can do. and we thought getting these big gets would be the key to success, which is funny because usually they underperform our standard format. And so in 2021, we emailed NVIDIA through the warmest connection we could find and said, can we interview Jensen?

53:10David Rosenthal:We're planning to cover the company.

53:11Ben Gilbert:Can we interview Jensen?

53:12David Rosenthal:And they said, they gave us a nice party line back. He's very busy. And then in 2022, we did our NVIDIA part one. We did our standard research process. And I think we did our part two. We did part two. And then we got a note from NVIDIA saying, Jensen has listened. and wants to know who your inside sources are because it's the most correct telling of NVIDIA's story ever. And we were like, oh, this was all just public information. And if you're good at spidering the internet and just like digesting it and thinking about why he would have said something at this point in time to this audience in these various random university talks and stuff, you can kind of piece together the story.

53:49And so that sort of like -

53:50David Rosenthal:But you're still flying by radar a bit. Yeah, oh, we were totally flying by radar.

53:53Ben Gilbert:Yeah, yeah.

53:54David Rosenthal:But that landed us, they were like, that started the relationship and eventually then they're like alright he wants to meet you and then do you want to do an interview and follow up on your episodes but you did an interview episode with him but it doesn't do as well as your own NVIDIA episode that one may have been like at some particular peak of NVIDIA buzziness so it was probably our then largest episode well here's what happens with interviews but everything makes it look small

54:17Ben Gilbert:they spike faster yeah and then they go and those listeners

54:21David Rosenthal:don't retain the way that

54:23Ben Gilbert:whereas if you look at our Costco episode, which is now two and a half years old, or LVMH, Hermes, Rolex, they just keep going. I'm sure your books are like this. They just keep going. Every time I bring out a new book, it has the same effect on the old books that a new podcast has on old podcasts. It sells all the backlist. So yes. I was asking you how you studied a business. You told me you read everything else. You must find And when you go and read everything there is, you're very polite and you're very generous about citing your sources and all that. But you must find— My wife is an academic.

55:05Ben Gilbert:My wife has a PhD. She was trained as an academic. And she was like, you guys got to cite your sources. Like, what are you doing? Well, yeah. But it's also—are you ever surprised by the weakness of the source material? Yes.

55:20David Rosenthal:In fact, literally today— We are no longer surprised. We got an email from a company that we recently covered saying, you said a factually incorrect story in the episode, and we know the book that you got it from because it was factually incorrect in that book. We told the author that it was factually incorrect, and it went out anyway. Right. And now you're repeating the incorrect story. And we have now an errata section where we publish to our email list. And I bet you're mainly correcting other people's errors that you just repeated. I mean, sometimes they're ours. Sometimes they're ours. Yeah.

55:50David Rosenthal:Sometimes we make a financial calculation error or something like that. Right. So we read all source material. Yeah. And then we start to make phone calls in 2023. And now the phone calls have become extremely important. And you're making 25 of them in episodes. Google was 40 probably across the series. And do you find that when you're reaching out by phone to all of these people that they always want to talk to you? No. No. Sometimes they don't. It makes, yeah. But usually when you approach it with a spirit of— I'm just trying to understand it's on background. Yes. We are going to tell a narrative here.

56:20David Rosenthal:Our biggest question to you is, what is most misunderstood? And what incorrect stories are out there where we can set the record straight? And you get lots of great information after that. It's a very good way to go about it. I do the same thing. When I'm researching something, I don't know what the story is for the longest time. And I'm holding everything very loosely. And almost all the relationships I have with people I'm interviewing is, hey, this is all on background. I just want to try to understand this. Can I hop on a call with you? and they're usually pretty open to it. And like, I just want to be educated kind of thing.

56:54And it's a great way to say like, what's the stupid thing people say? Because everybody has an opinion.

57:00David Rosenthal:But it's not a trick. Like this isn't, here's one cool trick to get people to talk to you. I think you mean it earnestly and we mean it earnestly of like, I want to make something. That's good. Everybody has different beliefs about the truth, but I want to make the story that most correctly approximates the average truth that exists from all these different truthy sources. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't think of it quite that way. But I do think it's like, I want to give you something that's good and pure and true and is like the thing that will, once it's said, there's nothing else to say. It's like done.

57:33Ben Gilbert:Yeah. I got to imagine for your subjects, and I think a big part of us too, is like there's the truthy aspect, which is very, very important. But there's also the like, this is going to be great. Like this is going to be really fun. This is going to be entertaining to read. and people are going to consume it. That's, I think, a huge motivation for our sources. So when you're working on one of these episodes... So are you aware of how much fun you're having learning? And have you ever shut something down just because, oh, this isn't that much fun? The Fed. That's kind of why we killed the Fed. We've definitely killed other episodes.

58:06If you can find fun in the Fed, man, you can find fun in the Fed. You were doing, yeah. We can generate all that enthusiasm for each other's insights about the Fed.

58:15David Rosenthal:We killed Bell Labs because we couldn't find a through line. There were so many different stories and so many different characters. I know. We might come back to it. Bell Labs, that's one that if I saw it, I'd say, yes, I want to listen to it.

58:27Ben Gilbert:It feels like a Michael Lewis book.

58:29David Rosenthal:You could kind of do it as the history of the transistor, but then you miss all these other things like radar and - Yeah, there's so much stuff that came out of Bell Labs. Did you do Xerox PARC? No. No, no, but similar. That's a good, yeah. It's another one. Right. Yeah. I guess Google still has this spirit where they're doing lots of stuff that maybe you can't identify instantly. Quantum computing. Yeah, the payoff that's right around the corner is kind of like, let's just fiddle around, see what we find stuff. But corporate America, I think, just generally does less of that than it used to do a long time ago.

59:03But the big tech companies are - Yeah.

59:05David Rosenthal:No, I'm trying to think. That's an interesting - So I'm stealing this idea from our friend Hamilton Helmer. But he brought up this idea in conversation with us that there is a positive benefit to monopolies because they create the cash flows that fund these sorts of boondoggle basic research. And a lot of the most important technologies that move society forward come out of these - You need fat. Yes. And like, boy, does Google have that. I mean, their last quarter was their first$100 billion quarter ever. Astonishing. I know. And that's how they fund the next Gemini. Yeah, all this. Right. And Waymo.

59:48So actually, you just bring up your friend Hamilton Helmer, who I'd never heard of until I listened to your podcast and you do that thing at the Seven Powers. Seven Powers, yeah. Let's just briefly, since we're here, how you study a business. That has been a useful analytical framework for you, whatever these seven powers are. And I'll never remember any of them. but it's like network effects and all that yeah yeah uh what what is about hamilton like where did you find him and why is it you making him so famous there's a lot of good

1:00:18David Rosenthal:frameworks out there for analyzing business strategy and this one just clicked i just read and i was like that is actually the complete list when did you read it you found the book i think it was 2020 uh he was i read the list and it was all gobbledygook to me there were these i I mean, the words did not mean things. You have to know what they mean. If I asked you in plain English, can you brainstorm all the ways in which a industry-leading company gets away with being more profitable than their competitor and gets to keep being more profitable? That's the list you would come up with. You might find other words.

1:00:55David Rosenthal:What creates the moat? Yes. Right. So why did you decide you even needed that framework? work. We... Oh, it goes hand in hand with the durability. Yeah. If you're trying to study why is a business durable, the cause is the power.

1:01:12Ben Gilbert:We'd always been searching for a way to land the plane on the episodes. Like, we tell this story. Yep. And we finish the story, but that felt unsatisfying. What's the takeaway? Yeah. And so we've had all various permutations of analysis at the end. Buy or sell or hold. Yeah, yeah. We used to have grading. Bull and bear and grading and blah, blah, blah. Once we shifted to like, hey, we're studying these great companies, these durable businesses, power felt like a really good part of that like, so what? Why? For me, a critical, critical part of process, it goes back to writing a senior thesis at Princeton.

1:01:50Ben Gilbert:Everything needs to pass through multiple cycles of source material, through my brain, through my fingers onto a keyboard and recycle back through about three times. And so I don't use AI note-taking. I do write physical notes in hard copy books. If I'm not doing that, I feel like it's not going to work. His annotated books are. So I have exactly the same issue. I discovered I wanted to be a writer writing my senior thesis and no ambition to do it before then. And then all of a sudden I thought, oh, my God, I love this. And what I loved was just that, was the constant recycling of the thought.

1:02:28And so what I do, the process, I don't want to get too far away from your podcast. So here I'm sitting with my notepad. So this is a filter. Like if I'm talking to you, it takes effort to put it down on the page. I don't record anything. I've filtered it. It's interesting enough to me that it belongs on the page. Then I go home and I write the notes up quickly. And that's another filter. If what's on the page interests me enough to put it in a Word document, then I've got it's filtered again. And I keep those notes while I'm working on a book, and the file will be 500 pages long. It may be longer by the time.

1:03:06And it's just stuff. And then I start thinking about how do you frame this story? What is this story? But that's months usually down the road. And there are times when I get into something and I am months into it and I realize, oop, there's nothing here. With Sam Beckman-Fried, I was a year into it. And I did not know what I was going to do with it until it blew up. And then I thought, oh, my God, I had the story. When it blew up, you had been sitting there for a year watching it.

1:03:37Ben Gilbert:Do you think you would have not published the book if it hadn't? Oh, no. Wow. You would have killed the book. Well, I might have found a way to do it. I might have found a way to do it, but I hadn't found a way to do it. And it was always the same conversation with my editor. It was, I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is. When I don't know what the end is, I don't know what the beginning is. And it's that simple. And it wasn't that, oh, I smelled fraud or anything like that. It was just, it didn't have shape to it. It was picaresque experience after picaresque experience.

1:04:08It was like Don Quixote, but the first chapter over and over and over and over. And so there was material there, which is why I kept coming back. It was fun. There were endless scenes. There were, you know, but there was just like, I don't know. Yeah, but scenes don't make a play. They're necessary but insufficient.

1:04:26Ben Gilbert:Yeah. But the bigger point, I don't want to be talking about me. We'll be talking about you. But this process, you are doing, I smell this from your work. You're doing something that rhymes with what I do. You are gathering before you make judgments. You're open to learning things. is you're trying to be the world's best student. You want people to want to teach you. And then if people want to teach you, they will teach you. And then you can take what you learn and you can present it in the best way you can present it.

1:04:59David Rosenthal:I basically take a note in two scenarios. One is, oh, I just figured out how that works and that is so cool. Like when I learned how a mechanical watch works. You're the master of the like,

1:05:12Ben Gilbert:this is such a cool thing.

1:05:14David Rosenthal:It was like, you got excited. This is in some ways irrelevant to the business success of Rolex, but I, it will, it will make my year to explain on air how a mechanical watch works and how an escapement is a thing. And my excitement around that is, or the Costco ballet or like, yeah. Yeah. So there's the, I just figured out how something worked. And then there's the, I just made a connection. And I, it's like, I'll be on a run. I'll be listening to an audio book. It'll be the third audio book that I've listened to about a certain subject. And I'll hear something and think, oh, that's why. And I'll stop and I'll write my little Apple note.

1:05:54David Rosenthal:This timestamp in this book, you know, just realized why, I can't think of an example right now, this happened. And then later I go and I look it up in the Kindle book and I figure out like how I want to explain the connection that I just learned on air. But it has to come from the, I have to like remember and bottle up my excitement of learning it in that moment to share that enthusiasm with the listener. Yeah. Yep. That's, that's all very familiar to me. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture.

1:06:29David Rosenthal:It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF. Then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

1:06:39Ben Gilbert:Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70 % of companies have this quote-unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all.

1:07:00David Rosenthal:Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half!

1:07:23Ben Gilbert:Which is exactly why more than 16 ,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment.

1:07:40David Rosenthal:And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get$1 ,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for$1 ,000 off. And just tell them that Ben and David sent you. So give me a fourth example of a lesson learned from an episode. This we learned, I feel like I learned from Ben Thompson, which is...

1:08:16David Rosenthal:Tell the audience who Ben Thompson is. Ben Thompson is the author of Stratechery. Proprietor of Stratechery. Proprietor, founder of Stratechery.

1:08:22Ben Gilbert:We did an episode on him and with him a few years ago.

1:08:26David Rosenthal:But his writing is sort of the thing that we bonded over when we met. He's a great strategy technology writer. A, the internet niches are way bigger than you think they are. So if you think you're writing about a niche topic, the internet being a global community of four-ish billion people means that any little niche, there might be six people in your geography that care about it in your local town, but there's millions of people online. Right. And the internet is your way to reach them. So no matter how niche you are, it's actually way, way bigger. And the corollary to that is in the media business, in podcasting, you can grow your audience and thus your revenue and thus your importance in the world.

1:09:09David Rosenthal:All outputs can scale completely independently of your inputs. David and I effectively do the same thing that we did not 10 years ago, but two years ago to make an episode, but the audience has grown so much that every output from the business is dramatically different, even though all the inputs are the same. And so we really took to heart the niche of smart people who care about how these businesses work and why the world is arranged in this way is large, and we don't have to scale our operation to reach them. We just have to keep making the highest quality stuff and giving people reason to share it.

1:09:46David Rosenthal:What is your operation? I mean, we're in here with a large group of large men. Thanks, guys. This is a bigger operation. But this isn't your normal operation. What is your operation? I have a basement studio. You know, it's an office that we happen to have some lights and a camera in.

1:10:02Ben Gilbert:I built a studio in my backyard. So that's the YouTube. You mentioned that you send your stuff to an editor without naming the editor. His name's Steven. Steven is a part of what we do.

1:10:13David Rosenthal:He does. I'm not sure he'd want us to share on air. So Steven. So the mysterious Steven. He's an independent contractor. We're his only client. And he works only for you. Yes. And he's the best. He's the best. So he's clearly good at his job.

1:10:24Ben Gilbert:Steven is as maniacal about creating the best audio products. And video when we do it. Yeah, no assistance. We do everything. You don't have an ad sales. We do all the selling. We love doing the ad sales ourselves. We love doing the business. You do it right. We love doing the business equally as much as we love making the sales.

1:10:46David Rosenthal:And I love the alignment. The business and the content are equally important, and they're married. Yeah, it's funny. You're preparing for this.

1:10:53Ben Gilbert:We're always tempted to just talk about the business because we love the business as much as the show, but we never talk about the business. So let's just stop here for a moment because I want to talk about this. First, before we move on from Steven, so Steven is in this rare position of basically being the only person who helps you create this thing. Yeah. How different is the... We hired a wonderful production crew because we wanted to have a great video for today. Right. So how different... is what you give, what comes out of Stephen from what you give him. Eight, nine hours of raw audio with dozens of retakes, sometimes hundreds of retakes.

1:11:29David Rosenthal:We produce each other as we go. Hundreds of retakes? Yeah. David will say a paragraph and I'll be like - Wait, wait. I want to do that in an acquired tone. Wow, that's amazing. Hundreds of retakes? You do hundreds? That's incredible. I would have guessed like if you just asked me five. Hundreds.

1:11:46Ben Gilbert:You sound like a millennial. I just want to be appropriately amazed.

1:11:52David Rosenthal:You can't do hundreds of retakes. Literalies that we cut. We need to cut literally all the time. Literally. I see. Totally. The retakes, though, are a different thing. The retakes are.

1:12:01Ben Gilbert:We didn't say that clearly enough. We didn't land the point.

1:12:04David Rosenthal:I made a point where I wasn't paying enough attention to what David was saying because I was like looking over at my notes. And then I make the same point. And he's like, oh, I think you missed it. I just said that. Can you just say the last thing as an acknowledgement of mine? Just give me an uh-huh, and then we'll move on. Or I explain something in twice the amount of time, and David's getting bored. And he's like, that was a real monologue. I think we got to keep the story moving. And I'm like, I agree. When I wrote it in my notes, I was really excited about it. But now that we're in the moment, I can feel that it's slowing down the energy.

1:12:36David Rosenthal:So let me take two minutes. Let me retype some stuff, and let me figure out if there's a condensed way to say that so that it can flow seamlessly in the energy of the story. Right. But that is all in the eight, nine hours that we delivered him. So he's cutting it in half. Yeah. Yeah. And when it comes back to you from him.

1:12:54Ben Gilbert:So he turns eight, nine hours of that into an intelligible. Into like five-ish? I think it's probably appropriate to call it like release candidate one to use like a software analogy. All right.

1:13:05David Rosenthal:And then we make 500 to 800 additional cuts to cut another hour off of it. And that stuff we're cutting. Are you doing it on the page? Are you doing it by listening? On the page.

1:13:15Ben Gilbert:We use a tool called Descript, which we sort of use it not. But you're not listening to it. You're reading it.

1:13:22David Rosenthal:We are listening to it and we are watching. Yeah, yeah. Watching it. And how long does that take?

1:13:26Ben Gilbert:Days. Three days. Three days to edit. Yeah. Because we usually do two cycles of that. And then do you send it back to him after you've done that? Yeah. And then we do it again. And then you do it again.

1:13:34David Rosenthal:I listen at 1X and you have to feel where you get bored or feel where you're just like, I don't care. You have to get so sick of the material where you're just cutting the bone.

1:13:44Ben Gilbert:You're the hero on this. I can't bring myself to do it. I listen on 2.5X. You're the hero for doing that. You don't actually listen to it at normal speed? Ah, it's so... Ben really jumps on the grenade for this. Almost always. You can cut the beginning of almost everything. that there's always throat clear. Our beginnings always drag. Yeah, wind up. You don't need it. You just go right to it. Yeah. And then once I start to feel it get taught, I just love it. I love it. I love it. The hardest thing is getting the stuff out in the first place. And then once it's out on the page, then you could start, ah, each time it gets better.

1:14:22I find there's no despair associated with it.

1:14:25David Rosenthal:And there's stuff in the original draft that is a remnant of the point you thought you were going to make. And by the time you get to the end, you're like, that's actually not the important thing here. I no longer need that whole setup or that aside. Or it's in there in all kinds of other ways. Yes. Yeah. But it's important that you had the idea, but it's buried in the story some which way. David will often highlight something and go, at Ben, okay to cut, belaboring. So the minute you're there, you know it's got to be cut. Yeah. Mostly, right? Yeah. If one of us wants to cut, it's cut. Yeah. And so you get five hours down to whatever it is, It's three and a half, four.

1:15:02Ben Gilbert:Three and a half is the sweet spot. And how do you know when you're done? We run out of time. Yeah. So deadlines. Yeah, yeah, deadlines. It isn't like you're done. We operate on deadlines.

1:15:10David Rosenthal:You're never really done. I would love one more edit. We'd always, there's always more.

1:15:14Ben Gilbert:Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have both the gift and the curse of deadline and next episode coming, whereas, like, you have an infinite timeline, right? No, no, no. I mean, I owe a book on June the 1st that will come out September the 29th that I will start writing on January the 5th, and I will write it in five chunks and each chunk will be delivered at the end of the month and I won't be able to go back. So, wait, wait, wait, wait. What happens if you get to June and you're like, I'm not, I'm not. Can't, can't. Okay, so it's a hard deadline. It's a drop dead. Yeah, but I always find once I establish that deadline, which is a reasonable deadline because I've done all, spent a year doing the work.

1:15:50I have the material. By the way, it's very polite of you to ask me questions about myself. Are you kidding me? It's like this great. No, but that, That it's somehow if you take your deadlines seriously, that's the key. You take the deadlines deadly seriously and you just refuse to violate them. Then you're serious when you establish them and your mind just finishes when it needs to finish. And I'm always like a couple of days ahead of it. So I would talk a little bit about the business side because this is something that I certainly don't know anything about in your lives. But you turn this into a very lucrative franchise.

1:16:28And you go out, and unlike most podcasts, you're not subcontracting the sale of ads to some other company. And you're not just promiscuous in who you have as advertisers. So you have two or three, four, whatever it is, major advertisers. Four every season. And some stability there. when you go, walk me through, pretend Michael Lewis Inc. is your target, that you want me to be the anchor tenant in your building. And you're coming in to tell me why I should do this. Give me a sense of it, what that sounds like.

1:17:08David Rosenthal:I'll let David give you the sales pitch. The philosophy of the whole thing comes from we want to create a durable business on our side and a great listener experience on the listener side. And I always feel as a listener, so disrespected when there is this content of the podcast that is diamond quality and then they are running McDonald's ads in the middle.

1:17:31Ben Gilbert:Usually not read by the host, usually with some jingle playing underneath. It bothers the hell out of me too. And I haven't been able to do anything about it. I agree. And it's the biggest complaint I get about my podcast. It's like, I've got to listen to these ads.

1:17:47David Rosenthal:The very first ad we ever sold, we said, what sponsor could we get that would make people perceive acquired to be a higher quality brand? So we could have our cake and eat it too. We'll get revenue. I tried this. I had a thought about this on mine. No one ever took me up on it. Really? Just find the things I actually use, and it will be fun to talk about them. I want to tell the whole world about ex-officio underpants, and I can't get ex-officio to return my calls. I mean, that kind of thing. Foolish. I just—

1:18:18Ben Gilbert:Wait, so literally, you're telling me that Michael Lewis calls ex-officio, and they don't return your calls. I didn't. I just gave them a list of things that I really love, just love. Oh, you've got to call them. That's the problem. Well, that probably is the problem. That's the problem, yeah. Or my podcast company does not actually sell the ads. Another company sells the ads. Right. And so it's just that I thought that was the way to make it seamless is actually what's integral to my life will be the things that we're talking about.

1:18:47David Rosenthal:So that is a structural blocker to creating the best experience. Right. And everything has a trade-off. The trade-off for us is we spend an enormous amount of time engaging with our sponsors. We write a custom read for every single sponsor, every single episode. We try to write it as if we're almost like talking about what we think is interesting about the business. We're doing this like mini two-minute analysis. And, you know, there's some horse trading there of we have to make these points, okay. But like for the most part, and the best sponsor relationships are the ones where they say like, yeah, your listeners are going to respond the best.

1:19:21David Rosenthal:To what you have to say. Yeah.

1:19:23Ben Gilbert:So if you're Michael Lewis Inc., we want you to be a sponsor, I would say we're not coming to pitch you. we're deciding a year in advance. Now two. When we're now two years in advance, what do we want our slate of partners to look like? So we start, Michael Lewis Inc., we think is going to be super strategic for us in 2027, 2028. We start planning, like, okay, how are we going to make this happen? How are we going to make sure that we really, you, Michael Lewis Inc., is as good as we think it could be. How are we going to make sure that we're going to work really well together, that you're going to see massive ROI from us?

1:19:58At any point, do you sit there worrying that you're compromising the shows because of the relationship you're about to have with an advertiser? No.

1:20:07David Rosenthal:There's been companies that don't feel Switzerland enough that come to us that want to sponsor, and we just like the idea of not picking a venture capital firm to say, we think this is the best venture capital firm. It's too much of a picking teams thing. I've never heard anybody say that. They don't feel Switzerland enough. Is this a cliche in the VC business? No, I think I just— That's a lovely line. So you're looking for Switzerland's. Yes. And what do you mean by that? Companies that we think are great where we don't have to take a side in like a big contentious current thing conversation.

1:20:44David Rosenthal:Yeah. Would you take Coca-Cola? We don't really deal with consumer companies. We don't. Okay, number one. Okay, here we go.

1:20:50Ben Gilbert:B2B companies with high, very high LTV products. So not ex-officio underwear. Basically, we want companies that are doing a significant number of multi-million dollar annual deals with customers. Because we want to feel like we can deliver a couple incremental of those for you. So you can charge lots of money. Yeah, and then it's just a no-brainer.

1:21:12David Rosenthal:Many of our sponsors have been ROI positive on signing one large customer who heard about them on Acquired. That is awesome. And often it's not even just heard about on Acquired.

1:21:22Ben Gilbert:It's events are a big part of this. So we do events with almost all of our sponsors. So there's the funnel of like heard about and acquired that helps. But then like we're doing an event together with them. We're sitting next to their best prospects. So I'm thinking about hiring you. What kind of event will you do for me?

1:21:39David Rosenthal:We're happy to join for a customer dinner. We're happy to speak at your big annual customer conference. We've given this pitch.

1:21:47Ben Gilbert:We're happy to go to a sporting event with you with your top clients. We're happy to... At that sporting event where you do like some... Fireside chat. Yeah, fireside chat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interview your CEO. Interview a legend from the sport. How many hours of your time am I going to get? A couple days. A couple days. We're there. And while we're there with you, it's like, hey, how can you maximize using us? You promise to be my friend? Yeah, of course. You'll be my friend too in the bargain? We're great friends with a whole bunch of... Okay, so then it gets even better. Let me tell you more.

1:22:18Ben Gilbert:Tell me more. I'm getting interested.

1:22:20David Rosenthal:I'm at the edge of my seat here. The reason this whole thing works is the people who listen to Acquired are the most valuable audience in the world. And so if you want to market your B2B software or financial product or whatever to them.

1:22:33Ben Gilbert:Founders are executive decision makers. Right. But really, I'm going to take a step back. I think the whole business side, and a lot of the content too, but the whole business side of Acquired starts with we were venture capitalists. We're not media people. So we have just always taken an approach. You're aspiring to be a great partner. to them. You're going to help recruit employees. You're going to help with whatever. And so we just like, great, that's how we approach our partners. Right. Why do you think, maybe you've just answered the question, why do you think no other podcast has approached their business in the way you approach your business?

1:23:05Ben Gilbert:I think we just came at it from this totally different space. You think everybody was coming at it from a kind of media space, and the media space was kind of bad business.

1:23:12David Rosenthal:Okay, here's a take. The media business model of splitting the commercial activity from the editorial is a societal benefit that we all benefit from, from publications like the New York Times. It was started for journalism. It is really good for journalism that exists. The rest of media seems to have adopted it and everyone doesn't need to. If we're the host of Acquired, it's kind of great if you're going and learning about your sponsor's business and working with them and trying to build partnerships with them, it was almost like we had the luxury of getting to rethink what our operational model looks like.

1:23:52Ben Gilbert:So then the thing that brought it full circle a couple of years ago is we added an investment fund. So not our public company sponsors, but almost all of our private company sponsors, we invested them. So it came full circle. You created an investment fund. You two are the ones who are making the investments. Yes. Is it how you do it? It's quite full circle.

1:24:10David Rosenthal:We're only a year in, but we've invested in five of our sponsors, and several of them are more valuable than when we've invested.

1:24:17Ben Gilbert:Yeah. We asked ourselves, we're like, how do we do this? The focus is the show. If we're a venture capital firm with a podcast, it doesn't work. We need to be a podcast for the venture capital firm. The way we make this work is we just invest in our sponsors. We put all this work into finding the best partners for our sponsors in every category that we think are great. Why wouldn't we just invest in them? We don't do any incremental work.

1:24:38David Rosenthal:Do you invest in all of your sponsors? No, but a lot of the time, we'll just get a call that, hey, we're raising an up round. We want to talk about it in the next ad read. And we say, oh, that's cool. Can we invest a couple million dollars? And they're like, the round's like 300 million. So no one on the cap table is going to care. And we love that you're more aligned with us now. So we'll make room. So you're only really accepting as sponsors companies that you would like to invest in. That's essentially the frame we put on the whole thing. It's not a perfect overlap. No, J.T. Morgan is not an example.

1:25:06David Rosenthal:Right, right.

1:25:06Ben Gilbert:We like having a couple public companies, JP Morgan, Shopify, ServiceNow. And how deep is this market? How many acquireds could be created on the back of this business model?

1:25:17David Rosenthal:Oh, I think a lot. The question that I'm always wondering is why aren't there more acquireds out there? I'm asking that question now. The format. Like why? Here's the ingredients. Two hosts that independently go do research and through storytelling, like narrative storytelling and analysis, create a conversational audio book. Could be about businesses. could be about sports teams, could be about - Hollywood, movies. Political parties, could be about any - Any arena of ambition,

1:25:43Ben Gilbert:as you would say.

1:25:45David Rosenthal:There should be an acquired in all these other verticals. In fact, the business vertical could be 10 more. Because there's a lot more money in business. Yes. In tech and finance.

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

1:26:23David Rosenthal:Acquired was path dependent on us having day jobs. For sure. Right. And day jobs in the industry that you're going to cover. Right. Yeah. We built half the relationships and all the know-how and all the shorthand from being in the industry before. So I asked you how many acquires could be created in just your space. What percentage of the advertising revenues do you think you're hoovering up in the way you're hoovering them up? In business podcasts? The B2B, the kind of people you will accept as your sponsors. How many times over?

1:27:00Ben Gilbert:Well, fortunately, there are a lot more people who want to sponsor Acquired than... That's what I mean. Like, how many more are there?

1:27:08David Rosenthal:A lot. We're probably three or four X oversubscribed on, like, people who really could convert on becoming sponsors if we said, sure, we'll take you. How come you don't spawn an extra Acquired or two? Why don't you create the next yous? Then we're not Acquired. Then we're not us. I see. Do less.

1:27:31Ben Gilbert:Then we become CEOs. Right. We do not want to build a company. Yeah, so no, it's funny. There's a line that you don't have bosses. Yeah. You have incentives. Yeah. But you don't have bosses.

1:27:45David Rosenthal:And we're not other people's bosses. That's like my life too. I have a lot of incentives. I have no bosses. When you're in any kind of creative thing, there is this benefit to not just following the financial incentives and not trying to kind of like milk every last penny out of it. And to creating scarcity, not just for the sake of the scarcity, but for the sake of the quality. Yeah. And only do it if it's great. If you only do it, it's a long-term strategy. I mean, it's not that I think all my books are great. I don't write them, though, unless I think they're going to be great. Yeah. I just don't.

1:28:20David Rosenthal:Well, why would you allocate it? Let's say you have a portfolio of however many more years you think you're going to write, 20, 30. Why would you allocate, I don't know how long. A year. A year and a half. Why would you blow a slot on a bad book? That's a gaping hole. I give you a reason why some people might. A publisher offers me a gazillion dollars to write a book about X. I know the book's going to suck because it's not actually a good idea for a book. And it's not going to be fun to do because all the fun is and it may be great. Is there any chance any of those dollars make your life better?

1:28:51at this point. No, zero. So this is the thing people miss. What is Lane Kiffin going to get out of an extra couple of million dollars going to LSU from Ole Miss? Yeah. The average athlete is taking a few million dollars more to move his wife and kids from one family, one city that loves him and that he loves to some strange place where everybody's going to be unhappy. People do this all the time.

1:29:12David Rosenthal:All dollars do not have equivalent value. No. The marginal dollars have way smaller value than the early dollars. Sometimes they end up having kind of negative value. And you become a person who that's what you're about. It's like you're saying, I'm going to be the person who just follows the financial incentives rather than I'm going to control the – I'm going to let these incentives do – they could be useful. They get you out of bed in the morning for a while. But you have to kind of control them. So I love that you're not milking the market.

1:29:39Ben Gilbert:I think there's two different things that we're talking about here. One is milking the market, yes or no. The other one is do you want to build an enterprise or do you want to stay a boutique? So to your question for us, why don't we create more acquires? We don't want to manage other shows, podcast hosts.

1:29:56David Rosenthal:People often tell us, oh, you're building this business. You guys are sort of foolish because there's all this key man risk. You're building this great business, but if either of you leave, unfortunately, your business has low enterprise value. And we're like, but if we sold this business, then we would just go start acquired. We're already doing the thing to think. Yeah, the dream is what we're doing. All right, so I took us off on a sidetrack. We've only gotten through four. I want to hear the fifth. We've gotten like five or six or seven. We've got a bunch of these. I want to hear what's the fifth lesson you've learned.

1:30:28David Rosenthal:Founder control was a huge one. Is this from Google? I think we, again, this is one of these things that we learned early, but then got reinforced through episodes. Meta, Rolex, Trader Joe's. Ikea. Yeah. Like stay private, be family owned. You don't even have to say,

1:30:46Ben Gilbert:Meta's a public company, but founder control. I mean, Google too. Google's founder control.

1:30:51David Rosenthal:The important things in the world probably should be big publicly traded corporations. But there's these amazing, wonderful things you can create by being boutique and maintaining control. I think there's an argument to be made that in any industry where they're both private and public companies, the private companies end up being much better run. Mostly bad things happen when companies go public. And it's certainly less pleasant. So public or private, your point is founder control.

1:31:15Ben Gilbert:But there's also just like a personal choice element. Last year, we had an existential crisis. It's way too dramatic. But I think something that was on our minds was like, are we being wussies? We're not doing Hollywood. We're not adding more shows. We're not building an enterprise.

1:31:33David Rosenthal:What triggered this? Are we being wussies? We were currently researching Bell Labs. And I think I felt like we were chasing this esoteric-ness.

1:31:44Ben Gilbert:So we sought some advice. and we went to one of the best investors ever who we've gotten to know who's a fan of the show, somebody everybody would know. And we asked him to dinner and we just sort of, hey, we've got this, we could do all these things. We're not like Hollywood, et cetera.

1:32:02David Rosenthal:And we sort of expected his comment to be like,

1:32:04Ben Gilbert:dream bigger, like, you know, go for it. Like, you know, you guys are being wussies. And he sort of sat there and he thought a minute and he said, I have seen so many founders become trapped in prisons of their own making in their own companies. And they're successful prisons. Yeah, yeah. You guys have avoided that fate. Don't go down that road. But what is, I'm missing actually the connection. Oh. Why if you were less wussy-ish, would you have created a - Hire people, take on a business project, start a second show. Oh, I see. Go make a Hollywood movie. Yeah, business wussies. I thought you were saying you were avoiding the controversy.

1:32:45Oh, yeah.

1:32:45Ben Gilbert:That's a whole separate wussies. But no, no. We asked ourselves, are we being business wussies? I see.

1:32:50David Rosenthal:But they sort of go hand in hand. Cheap growth is covering the current thing. I've been toying with this idea of stored potential energy, that great businesses have a stored potential energy that you can't see in the current financials. Great people have that, too. Great people have that, too. They have these reserves that come out when they need them. And they're not presented in the obvious markers. Yes, they aren't sparkling there in front of your eyes in a way. And I think we're trying to store up as much potential energy and acquire it as we can rather than any time there's a way to make it show up on the financial statements, sort of like letting out the pressure and being like, yep, second show.

1:33:36David Rosenthal:Yep, more ads. Yup, dynamic ads from an ad network. You can say yes to all these things and you can sugar high the current profits. Right. Or you can try to figure out how to store up as much potential energy as you can. Right. And I think once you kind of hit the point in life where money won't make you any happier, then there's actually not a point to letting any of that potential energy out. It just creates goodwill for everyone, most principally, selfishly, yourself, to keep it. Bottled. Right. All right. So how do we get on that? I don't know how we get on that from the founder control. That was founder control.

1:34:15That was founder control. So that was number five. Number six.

1:34:18Ben Gilbert:Okay. I've got one from, this is a non-obvious one. Also, can I just say like sometimes we do some stuff like this.

1:34:27David Rosenthal:We are not like saints. We're capitalists. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we're running a capitalist enterprise here.

1:34:32Ben Gilbert:Sometimes we hire a production crew.

1:34:34David Rosenthal:Sometimes we, last year we added a fourth ad slot. We always had three. Last year we looked at ourselves and we said, there's four hour podcast episodes. We're currently at like 2%, 3 % ad load. Everyone else is at 15%. God forbid we go to 4.5 % of time. So like we indulge occasionally. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

1:35:07Ben Gilbert:Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks are real.

1:35:21David Rosenthal:Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI control tower. Yep.

1:35:32Ben Gilbert:AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent visible and secure in one place.

1:35:49David Rosenthal:And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security.

1:36:05Ben Gilbert:ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than 85 % of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.

1:36:22David Rosenthal:And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

1:36:31Ben Gilbert:So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, so sometimes we make episodes that either we think are going to be great or we're just really interested in them and they like, numbers-wise, they don't… Perform. They don't… The great thing about podcasting is it's always within a 20%, 30 % range. Right. So it's not like it's a total flop. But give me an example of the podcast, the extreme version of the one you all were most excited about that didn't resonate with your audience in the same way.

1:37:09Ben Gilbert:Okay, so the lesson here is going to be, yeah, Nintendo. We thought Nintendo was going to be a big, such a great, it's an incredible history, incredible story, incredible company, N of one company, durable over 100 years plus, has been through so many iterations. People love it. You know, 20 % underperformed our benchmark at the time. We were like, oh, yeah.

1:37:35David Rosenthal:And then we did a part two to really dig ourselves deeper. Yeah, just like. You know what people don't love is part twos. Yeah. They really don't love part twos when they didn't love part one. Let me tell that joke again. It's so funny that you like it even better the second time. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's a necessary subset. You never tune into something called part two without part one. And so the dumbest thing you can do if you're focused on growth is have an underperforming part one followed by a part two. Right. Yeah. But we did it and you liked it.

1:38:07Ben Gilbert:We had a great time. Nintendo, it's like one of the most interesting companies ever. It started as a Yakuza company. Like, it's crazy. How did it start? It was playing cards. So gambling was illegal in Japan after the Meiji Restoration. And so they made Hanafuda cards, which are cards in Japan. And the Yakuza was the main customer. And then they got into toys.

1:38:29David Rosenthal:And then they way later found their way into video games. The Japanese Mafia was the main customer.

1:38:33Ben Gilbert:Yes. That's funny. Yeah, this is an amazing, amazing story. in that they have this philosophy called lateral thinking with withered technology, which is, if you look at Nintendo systems, even go way, way, way back, it's not bleeding edge technology. It's like a couple generations back technology. How can we take withered technology and think outside the box with it? So like the Wii is the best example of this. The Game Boy was the original example of this. The Game Boy is basically a calculator. But like, it didn't have a color screen, it had two buttons, like, you know, but it was this incredible success.

1:39:05Ben Gilbert:You can see the passion.

1:39:07David Rosenthal:I feel like I'm about to get you into part three.

1:39:09Ben Gilbert:Yeah, exactly. We're going to do part three. Okay, okay. But here's the lesson. Another episode that was totally like this, Indian Premier League cricket. Underperformed. Love that show. Incredible story.

1:39:20David Rosenthal:Incredible story. You either really loved it or didn't listen at all. Yeah, this is the lesson. It's the first of your shows I listened to. You started with IPL. You know why? You are making the point here. This is why we did IPL. This is the point. It's all worth it if we just got Michael. I'm a partial owner of the Rajasthan Royals. You are not. I have a Royals jersey. You and Minaj is the majority owner, right? Yes, that's right. He's a majority owner. So it's a very tiny slice. But I haven't been over. I still can't explain the game. But the league. Wait, wait, wait. How did you become a minority owner?

1:39:50Two friends. I leave their names out of it. But you know who they both were. OK. Call and said, there's this guy who's got this cricket team. He wants to make it the money ball of. Oh, they're the Oakland A's of the IPL. Yeah, exactly. I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he'd be open to having you invest. And they were both good filters. Like, if they were interested, it was already smart. And I also thought it was small enough that if it went wrong, it would be an amazing story. And even if it goes right, even if it goes right.

1:40:24Ben Gilbert:Have you met Lalit? Modi? No. No, no. I haven't met anybody but Manoj. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. No, I know. There's a whole— Have we got a subject for you? I don't want to redo your podcast. It's just like there may be some way down. So that was the other thing I was thinking. Like a number of, this could work out a number of ways. So anyway, that was the first one I listened to. And you, that was a, that was an, it's an unbelievable story. Oh, it's unbelievable. Everybody in the world should listen to this thing. And it underperformed. And yet it underperformed. Okay, but here's the lesson.

1:40:57Both Nintendo and IPL, we got, they were the first listening experiences

1:41:03Ben Gilbert:for some incredibly influential people who have changed the direction you've acquired.

1:41:08David Rosenthal:Actually, here, I think we can share the whole story.

1:41:09Ben Gilbert:Yeah. Nintendo was specifically listened to by one person on the meta-executive team who found it, thought it was amazing, sent it to the entire meta-executive team, right? And then they all listened, right?

1:41:19David Rosenthal:We built a relationship with them, and then when J.P. Morgan called us and said... We've got Chase Center. Yeah, and they were like, well, what would you do? And we asked this person, like, hey, do you think Mark would want to do it? and he said, I don't know, but I'm going to ask him right now. Right. And so without the Nintendo episode.

1:41:37Ben Gilbert:Without the Nintendo episode, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't join us in Jason. No 6 ,000 person. And we have some similar stories with IPL. The point is that doing episodes that we, one or both of us is just like insanely passionate about. Where'd you learn this from? From doing these episodes and like underperforming.

1:41:57David Rosenthal:No, we learned it from LVMH. I pitched that like three times and you were like, okay. VMH was a banger. It performed great. Which is why we learned the lesson that if one of us feels passionate about something. Go for it.

1:42:07Ben Gilbert:Oh, no, no, but I'm making a different point, which is that if one of us feels passionate about something, even if the episode is a relative dud, it's still worth doing because invariably somebody latches onto that passion. This is exactly right. If you don't feel anything, there's a chance nobody's going to feel anything. But if you feel a lot, someone's going to feel it. Someone's going to feel something. Yes, that's right. Yeah. That's right. So trust that feeling. Yeah. Yeah.

1:42:28David Rosenthal:It's about the magnitude of the way a small number of people feel about episodes, often more than the spread. Yeah. I think that's right.

1:42:37Ben Gilbert:Yeah. Yeah. Now, sometimes we're passionate about something and it becomes a banger. That's the ideal. Rentec, Renaissance Technologies. That was amazing. That was an incredible episode. That's one of the episodes I've listened to. I loved it too. So great. It's one of the two great mysteries on Wall Street. How they do what they do. And who is Satoshi. Yeah, those are the two. Those are the two.

1:42:59David Rosenthal:I kind of like the take that they invented machine learning a decade or two before and kept it secret that resembles LLMs and that they were able to find signal that existed only in really weak ways in a predictable alpha generating. But that nobody else found it too so that it all went away because they hid it at the same time that they found it. Yes. that's mind-blowing if true that that could still be going on and with i mean you can see why it worked through the 90s yeah yeah yeah it's really hard with like jane street and citadel and all these other places looking for every bit of signal in the marketplace it is an amazing story and that

1:43:41Ben Gilbert:is of the books i didn't write that i wished i'd written did you consider doing oh i so jim simon's son had a kid in my oldest child's class in high school. And I tried, I said, look, I can't do it unless you want me to do it. There's no point. And he said like, dad, this like, no, no, no. This whole business of kind of doing it by radar completely from the outside, you know, you're going to get so many things wrong. And it's like, and embarrass yourself that you need to be so inside so that you don't, so that the person you're writing by doesn't read and say like, that's just completely wrong and uh and that i could have done that book but why you know that that that didn't appeal to me what appealed to me was he was at the end of his career i didn't need all the secrets but i needed some of the secrets and uh and i and i would need him and i but that's one that's on my oh that's too bad that one got away yeah if a butterfly had flapped its wings differently and he collaborated it would have been fabulous yeah It would have been a fabulous book.

1:44:46David Rosenthal:All right, number seven. There's a different twist on the NFL, but we definitely learned it from the NFL. Create spectacle. All right. Our live event strategy. Yeah, there's twofold. One, we now have stopped thinking about acquired as a habit for people. Most podcasts, your dream is to create a habit. And ours, we've thrown that out the window and said - You don't do enough of them. Right. So we need to create events. It needs to be the current thing when we release an episode for whatever your group of friends or acquaintances is. It has to be the water-cooled conversation. It has to be Monday Night Football.

1:45:21David Rosenthal:And then once a year, we have to have a Super Bowl. And doing the Chase Center show and then the Radio City show, very small amount of people in the audience. 6 ,000? So it's, yeah, great. It's the world's largest indoor theater. It's 6 ,000 people in this incredible venue in New York City. Relative to the number of people who listen to our episodes, It would still be. It's 0.4 % of the audience. It's a very small. It's a tiny percentage. But the amount of heat and light created from the idea that you did that show is more impactful to building the franchise of Acquired than any given episode, maybe even than a whole season of episodes.

1:46:03What's the first spectacle you created?

1:46:07Ben Gilbert:Well, Tate Center was the first. Spectacle. We had been stepping. That was. 18 months. So you just started doing it. September 24th. Yeah. This is a new thing. We had been, we did a show in Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, but it was one section.

1:46:20David Rosenthal:But actually, by being able to say we did an arena show, even though it was only a thousand people, we talked about it on air as the Acquired Arena show. And that had some...

1:46:30Ben Gilbert:We were able to say to J.P. Morgan, to Chase Center, to the Warriors, like, we have done this before. I'm going to ask a couple of rude questions. Your Radio City Music Hall event was with Jamie Dimon. 6 ,000 people.

1:46:43David Rosenthal:And Meredith Copet-Levian, New York Times CEO, and Barry Diller. Okay, so the three. How many people are there for them and how many people are there for you? We did not announce the guests.

1:46:52Ben Gilbert:Oh. So they were all there for acquired.

1:46:55David Rosenthal:Mostly because I wanted to give this answer when people asked. We knew Michael at the end of the year was going to ask this question. So all I knew was it was going to be acquired with the guest. Was it sold out before you announced the guest? We never announced the guest. So the guest is a surprise. Yeah. Oh. It hurt in my soul when we did Chase Center. Afterwards, reflecting on it, there was this little thing of like, did all those people show up because it said Mark Zuckerberg on the poster? Yeah. Well, now you know. So now we know. So now you know. So this is your form of spectacle is these big public shows.

1:47:29Yeah. Any other forms of spectacle on the horizon?

1:47:31Ben Gilbert:Well, we are doing the actual Super Bowl. So this is coming. What are you doing? We basically manifested this. Are you the halftime show? I wish. Yeah, we're collabing with. Us and Bad Buddy, we're going to be on set. I would love the reaction of the NFL fan base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they were told that it's not going to be music this year. Ben and David are coming out. It's just going to be an acquired episode. Yes. Yes, with Peyton and Eli Manning. The NFL. That would actually be. That would be so good.

1:47:54David Rosenthal:Manning cast is the only way I watch Monday Night Football now. Oh, that's good. We're doing the Innovation Summit. So the NFL is launching.

1:48:00Ben Gilbert:Launching an Innovation Summit the Friday before the Super Bowl. Because the Super Bowl is here in San Francisco this year. So they're launching an Innovation Summit Friday before the Super Bowl. with all the big partners in the NFL, with Roger Goodell. It'll be in the city in San Francisco, and we're going to emcee it. Okay. So do you know who your guests are going to be? We do. They haven't been announced yet, but it'll be on par with our past. Where are you doing this? SF Moma. SF Moma. Oh, okay. It's not going to be open to the public. It'll be streamed. So it'll be a different style of event than it's not ticketed.

1:48:37Ben Gilbert:It'll be VIPs from the Super Bowl. It's for the NFL's partners. Right. But yeah, it's going to be incredible. All right. Let's go to, I think we're at number nine. All right. Home starts. So we made Costco in the back half of 2023. It was one or two episodes after we made Nike. Nike, I think, ended up being a fine episode, but I tried way too hard, like way too much pressure on myself. I want to speak for you on the Nike episode. And it came out flat.

1:49:11David Rosenthal:We read nine books between us to prepare. I think it was 11.

1:49:14Ben Gilbert:It was just too much for all sorts of reasons. And so we were like burnt out. We were not happy. We decided to do Costco. I said, like, I just got to take a different approach here. I got to play loose on this one. Like, I can't play tight to use the sports analogy. And I said, like, let's find the one book, like the right book. Right. helped that there was only really one book. Read that book, Saul Price's Autobiography. Read that. Use that as the main source. You got maybe one of the best primary source interviews ever. The CFO of Costco gave you a one-on-one presentation.

1:49:51David Rosenthal:Come over to the office and I'll sit you down and give you the entire whiteboard and PowerPoint on how the Costco business model works. And we spent the whole afternoon together and it was unbelievable.

1:50:00Ben Gilbert:And between those two things, the book and that time that you spent with Richard, And we didn't need to do more than that. When you went into it, did you know anything?

1:50:09David Rosenthal:Yes. What did you know?

1:50:11Ben Gilbert:When we went into starting work on Costco, we do nothing.

1:50:14David Rosenthal:Correct. But I knew a lot going into that meeting with Richard. I wanted to be able to hear the things he was saying that were different than common wisdom. There's a lot of think pieces out there about Costco. The Wall Street Journal loves to write about it. Investors love to write about the stock. So you can kind of read that stuff. It was Charlie Munger's favorite company.

1:50:33Ben Gilbert:There's lots of stuff out there.

1:50:35David Rosenthal:And I wanted to hear, this was actually one of the last pieces of research because I wanted to be really prepped. What did you know you were talking about when you're working on an episode and you're going for a run and you make some connection or some insight occurs to you and you stop and you write it down? Give me a few of the ones about Costco. Low skew count drives everything. Oh, all right.

1:51:00Ben Gilbert:That's the starting point.

1:51:02David Rosenthal:they have on the... Do you want the Charlie Munger talk? This is the... The number of things they have on the shelf. So unlike Walmart, there's billions of things on the shelf. Walmart has 100 to 200 ,000 schemes. You get what you get, you don't pitch a fit. Whatever's there is there. 4 ,000 things.

1:51:16Ben Gilbert:Walmart is 100 to 200 ,000.

1:51:18David Rosenthal:Yeah. And here's like all the knock-on effects of that. If you only sell 4 ,000 things, it doesn't take a lot of volume before very quickly you are a meaningful seller to every single one of those vendors. Suddenly, you become really important to that vendor. Your merchandisers, since you only have 4 ,000 - So your incentives start to align. Yes. The merchandisers have a very small portfolio. You're not dealing with 100 vendors.

1:51:46Ben Gilbert:If you're a Walmart buyer, you're dealing with hundreds of vendors.

1:51:49David Rosenthal:You're dealing with seven, and you would know the absolute crap out of their product line. If you sell chocolate, you monitor the price in the cocoa commodities markets. And if it takes someone who's managing a very small portfolio to stay that attuned to each one of the things, small skew count means that any given thing on the shelf flies off the shelf pretty quick. So there's not, yeah, so the turnover is faster, so there's more flow.

1:52:13Ben Gilbert:They're getting, in some cases, they're getting multiple turns of cash flow before they pay the first time.

1:52:19David Rosenthal:On average, it takes them 27 days to sell through their entire inventory, which means that's on net 30 terms, three days of grace where the inventory is actually financed by the vendors and then some.

1:52:34Ben Gilbert:I think on average it's 27. So some SKUs are selling in two days that they're turning. They're turning it 10 times a month.

1:52:41David Rosenthal:There's no working capital in this business other than building more Costco's. Right. Right. Low skew count for Costco is like low episode volume for you. Yeah, right, right. Yes. 100 % we like. Yes. Right. And low number of partners so we can put like all of our energy behind very few. You know, it's not really natural for a business to sell less of things. Sell fewer things when you could sell more things. And everybody – But actually doing that – and when you walk into – it is the odd experience when you walk into Costco is the absence of choice. Yeah. And in fact, consumers kind of like not having too much choice.

1:53:14This is the Trader Joe's insight. There's all this research showing that if you sell 30 different kinds of jams in the supermarket, you will sell less jam than if you sell three kinds of jam. Because the people just be paralyzed by the choice. Yes. And you feel like Costco. Someone has made all these decisions for me, and they're good decisions. Yes. It's curated.

1:53:34David Rosenthal:Yeah. You can't just run this strategy willy-nilly. If you're only going to sell very few things, you're only going to make very few episodes, it puts a lot of onus on making exceptional choices on the things that you do choose to carry. Right. So it's like a very high leveraged strategy. But you didn't know about any of this when you went into the episode.

1:53:51Ben Gilbert:No. The only reason we did the episode was it was Charlie Munger's favorite company. All right, give me another lesson. How are we doing out of time?

1:53:59David Rosenthal:Is this the last? This is acquired, Michael. I know, I know, I know.

1:54:04Ben Gilbert:You said you didn't have any plans tonight.

1:54:08David Rosenthal:We were sitting down with Morris Chang and he was talking about TSMC. Yep. And he told us that one of the ways that they aired was trying to exit the integrated circuit market or diversify from that market and go into solar. They went into memories. Memories. And there was one other thing too. And none of those were as good of a business. And the key insight was you're already in the best business. Integrated circuits are the future and will be for a long time, and you're already the best at them. So stop trying to do other things and just do that really well. Probably to a fault and with a bias, we believe that about acquired.

1:54:46David Rosenthal:Every time we look at anything else. We're already doing the thing we should be doing. We're already doing it, yes. Don't go do something that we're less good at or it's going to be less fun. We should always just make another good episode. You have decided to become venture capitalist again. So here's a question. I'm curious. What's the difference between what you do and what a normal Silicon Valley venture capitalist does before they put money in a company? Do you think you know more than they do?

1:55:12Ben Gilbert:Well, I think there's a top-level misconception about what the venture capital industry is. All right. I think a lot of people think it is an analytical industry. You're learning all about the company. You're doing diligence. It's not that you're not. You are doing that. But that's the commodity. It's an access business.

1:55:30David Rosenthal:Especially at the growth stage. Early stage, there's more picking involved.

1:55:35Ben Gilbert:But that picking is like a super art. Early stage picking is not understanding a company. It's a whole different thing.

1:55:46David Rosenthal:So the entire bet that we've made in this chapter of our venture capital careers is a bet that getting into the best companies is just an access thing. the growth stage private companies, you can tell what the good ones are. Most people can't get in. If you can, you should.

1:56:03Ben Gilbert:We do the work in choosing our sponsors. And then we're like, okay, great. That box checked. Our sponsors are not non-obvious companies that all growth stage investors don't want to get into. But the kind of work that you do to do a podcast episode about a company, does it bear any resemblance to the kind of work a VC does about a company before they invest in it?

1:56:29David Rosenthal:I don't think so. I wrote a lot of investment memos in my early stage career. They're all about how big could this thing be if it goes right. But you're almost always investing, at least I was, at the napkin stage. And so you're mostly making stuff up. You're dreaming what this market could look like when it materializes, but you don't know. You're really just making a founder bet, and then you're trying to support it with all this structural information that is very imprecise. You're acting like you know the third or fourth decimal place, when in reality, you barely know the first one. You answered my question was, are these two things similar?

1:57:07And you're saying basically not so much? No, they're not. So that means that being a venture capitalist in no way really prepared you to create these podcast episodes because they're very different things.

1:57:17Ben Gilbert:Well, I think it prepared us to create the business that we created, for sure. Okay. But what have you learned? I'll put a question another way. What have you learned about telling a story that you didn't know how to do when you started? Reading your books and being a liberal arts major at Princeton for me.

1:57:34David Rosenthal:Studying the businesses that we studied for Acquired helps me make Acquired far more than any investment memo I ever wrote. In fact, I remember in one of my last few years of being a venture capitalist, one of my partners asked me how I learned so much so quickly about different industry dynamics. And I was like, it's not because I'm talking to all these early stage companies, none of which know what the future looks like. It's studying these mature businesses and understanding what markets can look like at maturity. Acquired helped me be an investor much better than the other way around. Gotcha.

1:58:10What can you do now as storytellers that you couldn't do 10 years ago?

1:58:14Ben Gilbert:I think we think about narrative structure and acts and what a story is. Right. When we're reading books sometimes, a lot of books, especially corporate history books, are this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened. Yep. That's fine for cataloging history. It's not a story. That is not a story. And at a certain point, we realized like, You can't do, and this happened. Right. It's the why of it. It's the story flow. The queen died and then the king died is not a story. The queen died and then the king died of heartbreak is. Yeah. If someone just told you, if told me 10 years ago, that two guys, without any previous really literary podcasting, any kind of experience, we're going to create this four-hour conversation about an individual company.

1:59:02And people are going to be mesmerized by it. People are going to listen to the whole thing and want even more. I said that doesn't sound like very promising. I wouldn't put money into that.

1:59:12Ben Gilbert:Yeah, if you were an early stage BC. It's like why it works is a really good question because it's not obvious. It's counter to much of what's going on in the culture, like tension spans supposedly getting shorter, blah, blah, blah. But it does work. It clearly works. It works as a business, but it also works as just a creative thing. and the why of it is like, you must think about this all the time, the why of it.

1:59:37David Rosenthal:Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of different answers to this. One giant tailwind for us is a year after we started the podcast, AirPods came out and it became societally acceptable to just listen to stuff while you're moving about the world. While you're talking to your mother. Yes. So our brains all got two input channels. Like we used to only focus on one thing at a time everyone now focuses on two things at a time. You can't do the same thing. Like you can't read and listen at the same time, but you can drive and listen. You can run and listen. You can do the dishes and listen. And so we have this massive tailwind of people have like a large number of minutes throughout the day where they're doing stuff that they can also listen.

2:00:19Right, yeah.

2:00:20David Rosenthal:Which that's true for all podcasts, but like.

2:00:23Ben Gilbert:There are a couple of things that are true for all podcasts. One is AirPods. It's basically all the platform stuff that happened over the last 10 years. and we started at the right time to advance. So AirPods, Spotify. Spotify didn't enter podcasts until 2018 and now is, I think, over half of the market. Brought hundreds of millions of people into podcasting.

2:00:43David Rosenthal:Apple Podcasts not becoming YouTube was actually great for us. That it's a place to, when you get a listener, you really get a listener. And it's like this durable, incredibly valuable place to accumulate listeners. Spotify is too, but... YouTube in its own way too. But there are zillions of podcasts and not many are doing what you're doing. So they all have the best. Yeah, we're dodging the question. Corporate America becomes ever more important. Yeah, that's huge. That's completely right, right? It's like what is going on in the economy is mysterious to people. Yeah, the financial crisis. These companies, a lot of your episodes have been about these companies, about Tesla and NVIDIA and Microsoft and Google.

2:01:23People don't really get them explained to them. So that's a big part of it.

2:01:27David Rosenthal:If I had pitched you on Acquired in 2015, there's no way I would have said Acquired helps you understand why the world is arranged the way it is. But now I think that is absolutely the promise that we come through on.

2:01:40Ben Gilbert:Right. I think the biggest reason Acquired works is kind of how you started off the conversation. It's just our partnership. If just one of us were making Acquired, it would be a shadow of itself. The magic exists between us. and there's so many, there's a million times over the last 10 years where like if we hadn't just been, you know, that burn cigarettes on our arms aligned, that like it wasn't even a conversation. But like had our partnership been slightly different, like it would have fractured. That's why we're still here. So I know what I want you to do, I want to conclude this conversation because we don't want to go three hours.

2:02:18But I want to do it by doing the seven powers and apply it. I want you to apply. I want you to apply. It's one of our most requested seven powers per acquired. Apply it to acquired. Great. And then I can learn what these seven powers are.

2:02:31David Rosenthal:All right. So we are definitely a scale economies business. The fact that there's a large number of listeners to amortize all the inputs across makes it so that we can do an unreasonable amount of things for each episode. I mean, if you were going to try to compete with acquired today, you couldn't do all the stuff that we do. You don't start with a million listeners.

2:02:54Ben Gilbert:Right. Or the access.

2:02:55David Rosenthal:And you could do it for one or two or three episodes. But if it didn't grow quickly, at some point, you'd be like, it's not even about the money. It's about like, why am I doing all this work when no one is listening to it? And it would feel like that. So there was this path-dependent thing of we always had the right product for the current amount of value that it created in the world, which you can use a listener base as a proxy for. And now because the listener base is large, we can afford to do things other people can't, which is sort of the definition of scale economies.

2:03:25Ben Gilbert:Put this even much more simply. Let's say we and another podcast made the exact same episode. We've got a million and a half subscribers. They have zero. Our episode is a lot more valuable, even if we said the exact same words in the exact same way.

2:03:39David Rosenthal:Yep.

2:03:40Ben Gilbert:Yep. Okay. Scale economies, yes.

2:03:43David Rosenthal:Counterpositioning everywhere. Counterpositioning everywhere. Explore counterpositioning. Okay.

2:03:46Ben Gilbert:We're going to do a little meta thing and also explain these powers. Okay, explain these powers. Counterpositioning is when you do something that your competitors just cannot respond to. Give me an example outside of the podcasting world. Yeah, so what's a great example of this?

2:04:01David Rosenthal:Southwest Airlines launches. They only use 737s. Everyone else who already has fleets of other planes can't do all the streamlined operations that Southwest is going to do because they have all these other sunk costs in this diversified fleet.

2:04:17Ben Gilbert:Or counter-positioned. We're not volume-driven. Most podcasts sell their ads on a CPM basis, and they are incentivized to make as many episodes as possible with as many ad slots as possible. Our business is entirely structurally different. Yes.

2:04:31David Rosenthal:To your benefit. We also don't have shareholders, so we can do all these non-economic things because the thing we're solving for, the quotient, is actually like our lives. Right. That's why you do four episodes as opposed to six or eight or one. Yeah. Right. Right. It'd be cool if it ends up being just one episode a season. This is David's dream. No, no, no, no, no. It's going to be...

2:04:51Ben Gilbert:No, no, no, no, no. That's my nightmare is that we actually, we can't end up, if we end up at one episode a year or one episode a season, it's time to hang it up. Time to hang it up.

2:05:00David Rosenthal:Here's a rule. We don't work with agencies. If an agency reaches out and says, we want to place ads on your podcast, we write them a very nice note. If we're able to get to the email and say, oh, we don't work with agencies, but thank you so much for your interest. Can you imagine working at a podcast network where there's a revenue opportunity and you're saying, sorry, we just don't, you're a middleman in a transaction, and so therefore we won't take your dollars? Right, yeah. Counter-persisting, yeah, all of us. Counter-persisting is in the number of shows you do. So the kind of shows you can do.

2:05:29Ben Gilbert:That's how it expresses itself, but because our business is structurally different than most others, others can't do what we're doing. Right. Network economies, not really, but there's some water cooler effect of people talk about acquired episodes, especially within companies. Right. So we release an episode, it becomes a topic of discussion. Right. That's not really a network effect.

2:05:50David Rosenthal:This is a weak power, but it exists to a small extent. If you like acquired, more people liking acquired is valuable because you get to talk about it with more people. Right.

2:05:58Ben Gilbert:No switching costs. Switching costs is a power that's super easy to… Explain switching costs. Salesforce. Yes.

2:06:05David Rosenthal:You've got your CRM on Salesforce.

2:06:08Ben Gilbert:And to switch to another CRM is just a huge amount of cost associated with that.

2:06:13David Rosenthal:Even though, let's say, on a day-to-day basis, it's the same price or cheaper, it's just such a pain and an economic tax to do a new implementation of something. Right. Yep. There's none of that. People can... Another podcast is one click away. Listeners can switch. There's no cost of switching out of acquired into whatever might come along. No cost. Once you replace acquired.

2:06:37Ben Gilbert:Yep. Don't have that. Can I just also say this is so weird and uncomfortable for me.

2:06:43David Rosenthal:Because while I think we've created this beautiful gem and I love thinking about it and talking about it with you, it is terrifying to talk about it with everyone and also feel so self-aggrandizing to talk about what a great painting I've made. No, no, no. Oh, but it's very useful to think about this in this way. You've got a framework. Let's think about you and your framework. What's the next power?

2:07:07Ben Gilbert:Branding. Yes. Again, thought exercise, same product released by a different podcast, not called Acquired. People just acquired more. Right. Yep. And that's just growing. Yep. Yep. Cornered resource. The business owns us. Explain cornered resource. Give me an example. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.

2:07:28David Rosenthal:Intellectual property. Okay. Patents. Disney owns the likeness of Mickey Mouse. Okay. You don't get to build a business that benefits from the economic value driven by Mickey Mouse. Now, we're assuming - Hard to value Ben Gellman and David Rosenblum. We're assuming that you're a cornered resource, that the reasons that people are tuning in is that it's your lovely voices and the way you enthuse over this stuff. It could be that you've just actually found a thing - It could be. That everybody wants, and that if two other people came in, they'd do it even better. And there are people who create, it's early, they're small, but things that resemble acquired a lot.

2:08:03David Rosenthal:The Step Change podcast by our friend Ben Idelson is one of them. Where like it's doing really well for a podcast that has three episodes because there's magic in the format even if it's not us. That is, if there is a corner resource that you, or your editor. Or your editor. Whose name you won't divulge. So suggesting that perhaps.

2:08:21Ben Gilbert:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, it could be a corner resource. Okay. And then the last one is process power.

2:08:26David Rosenthal:Which almost always businesses don't have.

2:08:29Ben Gilbert:We have in spades.

2:08:31David Rosenthal:We totally have. It's the same thing you have. Because we kind of fail to articulate how an episode comes together. We tried on this conversation three times. I don't think we could recreate it. And we didn't really explain to you exactly, mechanically, how an episode comes together. Except I can understand the iterations. You vomit out eight hours. Your editor decides what's the best five. It comes back to you and you cut. But what do I show up with on recording day? Oh, I see. So we should maybe do this a little bit here, process. Can I guess? Sure. Because I actually don't know what you show up with at recording.

2:09:04You both, I assume you each take a kind of part of the story, like either the history or current analysis of the business, and you're responsible for that, and you go learn about it. But there's got to be some improvisation here so that you don't tell each other exactly what you've learned.

2:09:23Ben Gilbert:More or less. I'm responsible for the story with we carve out one or multiple chunks that Ben will take, and then Ben is responsible for the analysis. Right. And then you probably have some lines you want to say that you know you want to say, but you want to say them naturally. So you kind of have them stored in the back of your head, and you wait for the moment where you can drop it where it sounds casual-like. But if that doesn't happen, you set it up. Ben's point, skew is everything in Costco. That kind of insight, you can reduce it to something you want to get across in a line or two. What's hard about improv is disposing of all the things you imagined that were going to happen in a conversation before they happen, and nobody does it perfectly.

2:10:10So there's this tension between the script and what's happening organically between the two of you.

2:10:15Ben Gilbert:The truth is it's both. It's both. So I write a script. I write 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 words. You do? In sentence form, word for word. Do you read it? No. Well, I mean, I read it. It doesn't come out of my mouth. It comes out as a natural conversation. So you write it, but then you put it to one side. I have three screens in front of it. You're kind of reading it. I'm kind of reading it. Yeah, yeah. Are you? But Ben interjects, and it doesn't come out exactly as I wrote it. It doesn't sound like a script. That's good. But part of my process is I need to write a script. To know what you think. Yeah.

2:10:46Ben Gilbert:Yeah, it makes complete sense. But also to have it as a crutch there when we're performing. Right. We can't keep all this in our heads. But the real crutch you have is you can go, you're going to do it for nine hours and it's only going to be four. So you can make any, you know, you don't have to be perfect. You can screw it up every which way.

2:11:02David Rosenthal:And you have a real-time feedback agent where I'm like, this is dragging. I don't care about any of this free history. Like cut, cut, cut, cut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, but yet all we hear, the audience hears is, that's amazing. Oh, that's so interesting. It's incredible. I never thought of it that way. You're the best. I love you. So we don't see any of the other stuff. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah. It's in there. It's in there somewhere. Yeah. Okay. All right. So take me further into the process. So you have a script and you don't, Ben, you don't have a script. I have a giant text edit document with just a whole bunch of mechanical points I want to get across.

2:11:44David Rosenthal:I have some story points in there that I know I want to interject in David's story, but I know the things that I'm going to bring to the episode that I really care deeply about are explaining how something works. So I have written out bullet point by bullet point by bullet point. And we've usually identified where that's going to enter in. Right. Yeah. But this thing works because it doesn't sound like you're reading anything. Yeah. But the reality is it's a hybrid. Okay. The reality is that this is a hybrid. Yeah. And there's all sorts of stuff in there that we are sort of looking at about six hours into recording.

2:12:17David Rosenthal:We're like, that's not going to make it in. And that's okay. That turned out it was not at a salient point.

2:12:23Ben Gilbert:Right. But the point of process power, we can describe all this. You could probably, I'm sure you have described in painstaking detail how you do. But that doesn't mean anybody else can write a Michael Lewis book. The process, but your point is you have the process power. But the point of process power is you can tell them it's uncopyable. Oh, I see. Oh, I see. Yeah. That's interesting. You have a process that can't be replicated even if you explain it somewhere. Even if we explain excruciating detail exactly what it is. What pops to my mind is that the magic, the pixie dust in a process is trust.

2:12:57That it's like something that you get when you trust a process. Hear it. Trust the process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Darrell Moore goes to Sam Hinckley, but the ownership of the Phyllis 76ers, they didn't trust the process. They wanted the process. They wanted to replicate what they had been doing in Houston, but they didn't trust it. Where does trust show up for you? I was just about to say that I think I trust my process. And it's self-trust, but that's a form of trust. And I know if I just told it to someone and they went and tried to do it, they'd be thinking, they'd wig out. I got to record the things.

2:13:36I got to do this. And so that, in fact, doing it my way would be a kind of weird handicap for them.

2:13:41Ben Gilbert:That's the process. If you were to copy-paste the process, it wouldn't have the same results, and it might in fact be a handicap. Right. But there's something emotional going on there. The difficulty in replicating it.

2:13:54David Rosenthal:I also think it's because when you describe your process, it is lossy compression. The way compression works in computing is you're taking a large amount of data and you're compressing it down into a smaller amount of data, a different file format. And if it's lossy, it means that you can never fully recreate the original work.

2:14:15Ben Gilbert:This is the MP3 Kodak. Okay. Or a JPEG.

2:14:18David Rosenthal:Okay. A JPEG doesn't actually contain all the RGB values from the original photo. But a human kind of can't tell most of the time, and so it's fine. Explaining a process is a lossy compression of the actual process. That's true. That's true. You're actually not giving them everything. And you're not doing it intentionally. No, it's just impossible. Language is a lossy compression of thought. Yeah, true. That's an interesting observation. Language is a lossy compression of thought. I'm trying to think of the reverse. It's also true for some people. And uncompressing information, it's so funny. When you and I are communicating, I had a thought.

2:14:50David Rosenthal:I compressed it into a very narrow bandwidth thing of speech. I told it to you. You uncompressed it into your brain. It might actually mean a pretty different thing to you than it means to me. That insight is at the bottom of my creative process. I assume when I write a book that what goes into people is something different than came out of me, that they are going to take it and reassemble it in a different way. And so I have to construct it in a way that there's a hole for the reader to go in and just do what they need to do with it. Like, the more I just let the story tell itself, the less I tried to, like, influence the way he thought about the story, the more the story landed.

2:15:30And then, of course, when you do that, you're giving people lots of options, you know, in how they see the story, how they understand the story. It's the risk you take. and but it is it's what makes it alive and it was and it's why and it's why you get this huge range of response to a given story but you that you've got to actually just accept that when you're saying something the other person gets to understand it however they want to understand it and if you don't do that what you get is something that's dead the next day it's like yeah yeah you made your point but i didn't hear it i don't want it it's so funny this is always

2:16:08Ben Gilbert:one of our key goals with every episode is no matter what you think about the company, you're going to enjoy this episode and you're going to learn something from it. And then you may come away thinking like this company is terrible. You may come away thinking this company is righteous.

2:16:26David Rosenthal:Sometimes we don't nail it.

2:16:27Ben Gilbert:We don't always nail it, but that's the goal. I think it's the creatively fun goal because that's the challenge. rather than just imposing your editorial view on the world. Present it in as elegant way as possible and let the reader make what they make of it. Once you realize that's the thing to do, it's so much more fun than trying to muscle people around. It's all of a sudden you're dancing with a reader instead of like hurling them all over the dance floor.

2:16:55David Rosenthal:It also requires you to learn something new while you're making the creative work. Like if you come in with a point of view and you come in, And let's say we tried it. I was so afraid when we were making Trader Joe's that we were going to remake the Costco episode. And I was like, this episode is going to suck because we're not going to have the original enthusiasm that we had. It's just like Costco but not as good.

2:17:14Ben Gilbert:Or it's Costco but it's for furniture.

2:17:16David Rosenthal:And then we get it and we're like, oh, this is totally different than Costco. You have to have new insights that delight you as you're researching it so that you can make something great. And I think the reasons acquired will eventually fail I don't think come from platform disruption. Like, oh, TikTok's going to make it so people want short form instead of acquired. Maybe, but the more likely reason that we eventually fail is we stop being delighted by new things we discover, so we have nothing new to deliver to listeners. Right. I agree with that. If you were going to ask me how you were going to fail, that's exactly the kind of thing I would say.

2:17:52You'd run out of gas or run out of material that made your socks go up and down.

2:17:58Ben Gilbert:All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

2:18:05David Rosenthal:Yes, long-time acquired partner. There is a reason why the best product teams at companies like OpenAI and Notion, Atlassian, Figma, Rippling, Brex, and more rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

2:18:23Ben Gilbert:Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next. Whether it's a feature tweak, a pricing change, a performance improvement, or an AI update like a model change or prompt adjustment, they're not relying on instinct. They're measuring what actually moved engagement, retention, and ultimately revenue. And as more teams build with AI, that learning loop becomes even more important.

2:19:02Ben Gilbert:Building with LLMs introduces non-determinism into your product experience. The same input doesn't always produce the same output. And behavior can shift in subtle ways in real-world use.

2:19:13David Rosenthal:So doing offline evals will give you part of the picture. But you can really only understand the impact once your product is live with real users. And then you can measure how their behavior actually changes. It's very different than the way that you would ship features in a pre-AI world where you knew exactly what the software was going to do in production. Yeah, exactly. So this is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

2:19:47David Rosenthal:The result is a tighter feedback loop and learning that compounds over time so you don't just ship more, you ship better.

2:19:54Ben Gilbert:So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. All right, how are we going to end this? This is your show. Carveouts? Carveouts, yeah, we got to do it. Why do you call them carveouts? What does this even mean? Okay, so you'll appreciate this. It was my wife's idea back towards the beginning of the show. She used to listen to Slate's, I think it was the Culture Gab Fest. Yes. And they do cocktail chatter at the end of episodes. And it's just like, hey, something unrelated.

2:20:33Ben Gilbert:And she was like, you guys should do that. That's fun. Well, I understand the idea of it. Why is it called a carve out? Well, okay, so then we were like, this was in a phase of Acquired where we wanted to brand everything around acquisitions. Okay, there we go. And so we thought, okay, what can we call this? We're not going to call it cocktail chatter. We came up with the idea of a carve out. Like in an M &A transaction, a carve-out is like this piece of the purchase price goes to this set of shareholders for special reasons, their employees or whatever.

2:20:59David Rosenthal:Okay. So these are the things we're carving out as things that delight us that have nothing to do with the rest of the episode. Yes, yes. But the name is just residual. It's just a residue of your former incarnation. Yeah.

2:21:10Ben Gilbert:We used to have a thing called the LP show because we had all these little branding cards.

2:21:15David Rosenthal:Playbook is sort of a remnant of the older version. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what are we going to do? We're going to carve-out. What are the specific things? We have some categories that we're going to throw out, and then you've got to tell us, and we'll tell you things this year that we loved in this category, typically pieces of media or products or something like that.

2:21:29Ben Gilbert:All right. We usually start with books.

2:21:32David Rosenthal:That's kind of funny. I mean, you hear. I mean, so many of your books have been our carve-outs over the years. Really? Absolutely. So it's books that I've read in the last year?

2:21:44Ben Gilbert:Yeah, books this year that, yeah. So I've got to confess, I've had a very weak reading year because I've been really deep in two projects where I've been working. And when I'm working, often all I'm reading is for work. But I can think of a couple, one at the beginning of the year and one I just put down. First one I read because my son was in high school at the time, had read it, and he was enthusing about this 800-page novel. And I thought that just didn't happen very often. And it's been out a long time. It's called The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. And it's a fantasy trilogy. He never got to the third book.

2:22:21And I don't know what's happened to him. He's, like, blocked. But I'm not found. It's like a George R. R. Martin situation. I'm hoping he's an acquired listener. And I would tell him, I can come help get you unblocked. I know how to unblock writers. I have a secret power here. And so. Do you have a secret life as a fiction ghost writer? No, I do not. That would be. But I do have a secret life as a coach to writers and other writers. and it's it this thing was it was so compelling i couldn't believe how good it was and i couldn't believe how good it was that he hasn't he's just gotten stalled but the name of the wind patrick roth was right at the beginning of the year very beginning of the year at the end of the thing i just finished it's not like it's a great book but i think it's like it's so short and it's of it's something that is speaking to our moment in our especially how i govern ourselves it's um i always

2:23:09Ben Gilbert:mispronounced his name is vannevar bush oh yeah yeah who essentially created the american science project and it's a little it's a basic i think he started as a memo to fdr then fdr died and it ended up being a memo to terry truman about what america could do if the government in the right way got behind science he was saying look what we did with manhattan project we can do with biology we can do we can do with the other hard sciences he was describing not a top-down approach not like the government is going to just decide. We're going to fund it and let the scientists figure out what they need to work on.

2:23:43That was the big insight. So those are two books. How about you? What books do you...

2:23:49David Rosenthal:Similar to you, it's been a research-heavy year. Yeah, we have young kids. So fun books are... Right. One great book I read for research was Last Man Standing to prep for the Jamie Diamond interview. That was really good. Total Page Turner made it. It was a great time. about him it's about yeah it's about the ascendancy of his okay yeah uh and then two is i just love reading morgan housel and his new book the art of spending money is is really fun i mean it's where i get most of my like latent ideas of hey hey dummy money's not going to make you any happier

2:24:22Ben Gilbert:he's a great explainer oh great explainer so good uh my two are um first one is a reach back to december of last year with the mars episode um emperors of chocolate by joel glenn brenner You ever read that? It's so good. I had a chocolate-related story, and I flipped through it, and I didn't ever have time to read the whole one. But yes, I know the book. It's the dual history of Hershey and Mars together. It's, I believe, the only big book she ever wrote. And it's just a masterpiece. It's so good. The other one, Morris Chang's autobiography that we got to read. It is currently only in Chinese, but we got to read an English version of it to prep.

2:25:06Ben Gilbert:It's so good. How did you do that? Who translated for you?

2:25:09David Rosenthal:This woman, Karina Bao, did a translation for us. Just for you.

2:25:14Ben Gilbert:Yeah. She was working on it as just a pet project anyway and accelerated it for us. Okay, books, podcasts, number two. Well, this is a layup. Your podcast is the big addition to my rotation this year. Well, thank you. It started in July, and I've listened to, I don't know, 10 of them or something. Well, thank you. But what is in your rotation besides Acquired? And against the rules, of course. Well, I don't listen to my own thing. I listen to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History. I listen to The Smartless Guys because I like them. Your interview on that was great, too. It was fun to do it. What else will I listen to The Daily some?

2:25:58every now and then I'll dip into a right wing thing just to hear it just no that that any any recommendations no uh not really and and then kind of you know random stuff like every now and then Bill Simmons will have something I want to hear I love Bill Simmons I just don't have time like he's prolific you have eaten my podcast you've eaten a lot of apologies to Bill no no and I can tell you where I was, like treadmill in Denmark when I listened to the Indian cricket thing. Isn't that the most fun thing about listening?

2:26:31David Rosenthal:You remember a place. You do remember a place. They're very place specific. No, the Acquired podcast is the new thing. How about you all? I listened to an episode of Invest Like the Best about a year ago, which was a really, really long interview with Graham Duncan.

2:26:51Ben Gilbert:Oh yeah, that was really good. That was originally, didn't Patrick do that as a private podcast? Yes.

2:26:56David Rosenthal:And then he did a shorter version. I didn't listen to the shorter version. I only listened to the super long one. But one of my biggest takeaways from that is about having the correct grip, that you don't want to have too tight of a grip on your work, but you don't want to have too loose of a grip. You need to play with an appropriate grip for whatever the task is that you're trying to do. And if you're gripping too tight, you're going to pull it or it's going to feel too mechanical, too unnatural. And if it's too loose, you're not minding the shop enough. You've got to get your head back in the game.

2:27:31I've been amazed my career at just how useful sports analogies are to writing. I'm sure to anything. These physical memories translate pretty neatly to what the mind is doing too. When I write a book, I'm on a pitcher's mound. It takes me back to pitching in high school. And I'm thinking of the reader as the hitter. Getting meaning across to a reader is tricky in the way that fooling a hitter is tricky. And it's just I can feel that connection. And so these physical analogies are really useful, even if they're sometimes a stretch.

2:28:08Ben Gilbert:Speaking of sports, mine is the Glue Guys podcast, which I think we both went on this year. Yeah. Which actually was the origin of us meeting. Those guys are great. They are great. I think we told them on the episode. I tell them, you guys got some magic here. You got to keep doing this. You keep telling everybody that they run their podcast business in the wrong way. And you're right. And you depress everybody else. You figured out how to do it. Nobody else has. Well, they've got magic. They are taking it seriously and keeping doing it. But I think it's a really, really – they have the really rare dynamic of just the three of them together.

2:28:50Ben Gilbert:Regardless if they have a guest, don't have a guest. They're equally good. They're very different personalities.

2:28:55David Rosenthal:Yeah, it helps. Can I just – I'm so – like something inside me feels so crunchy. I don't think we've figured out a better way to do it. Like I don't think we figured out the way to do it and everybody else should just snap to our way. It's like we have an enormous amount of privilege that we can run a business in this way. And most people have constraints that prevent them from doing this. It's not that we're right and everybody else is wrong. It's that we have set up a particular system that works for us. But it is like you're right and I'm wrong. That it really is a way of running a business that we could have done with against the rules.

2:29:30And I'm going to go think about it. But anyway, so what's our next car? Okay, okay, okay.

2:29:35Ben Gilbert:Next category is... Videos slash movies slash TV. Videos, movies, TV shows. So I just saw a movie two days ago, two nights ago. We went to the theater. Whole family went to the theater. Wow. And Jay Kelly. It's new. Noah Baumbach's new movie. And it's George Clooney. I guess you'd say he's playing George Clooney with a midlife crisis. that he that it's it's it's a fame he's playing a famous actor who's trying to sort out uh the meaning of his life it's just magical it's a beautiful movie and and an ambitious really ambitious movie and that i was i've been thinking about it kind of since i saw it like what exactly it was getting across and what it's getting across i think being famous like a movie star is puts you at a certain distance to the world around you and that distance has a price and it was sort of taking the measure of that price.

2:30:29And what makes that more general is that I think everybody has to make some decisions about the distance that they keep the world at. And this was a way of having that conversation and entertaining what that distance should be.

2:30:47David Rosenthal:Gotta see it. I have so many, but there's one that's like - You're a TV guy. I love movies and I love television. the um like i have no video games to recommend but i have lots of these the one that's just head and shoulders back to everything else and is the greatest performance art i've ever seen in my entire life is the rehearsal season two all right nathan fielder and eric natarnicola who we actually got to work with uh eric and a24 films shot the sort of concert film part of our radio City show and collaborating with Eric was unbelievable. But before any of that, I saw the rehearsal season two and my jaw is just on the floor with the level of ambition.

2:31:28David Rosenthal:You were talking about this for months. Ambition. Nathan's a complete psycho and it's the highest commitment to the bit I've ever seen in any form of media. I mean, I don't want to spoil anything, but have you seen it? I have not seen it. I will now go see it. It is, I was shaking. Okay. All right.

2:31:49Ben Gilbert:I'm a lighter video guy. I'm a YouTube guy mostly. My YouTube for the year is one I've recommended before, a past collab. Doug DeMuro is still, like, killing it. I just, like, I think Doug is probably my favorite YouTuber. Like, he's just... What does he do? Because I don't know. He's the biggest car reviewer. Like, I'm not really that into cars, but he's just delightful. Well, the car guys did this first. They got everybody interested in cars who weren't interested in cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and Doug does these delightful reviews of like, I just love watching mid-range SUV reviews that I'm never going to buy.

2:32:22Ben Gilbert:I just love them.

2:32:23David Rosenthal:So listeners will like this. David falls asleep to this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You watch Doug in other things too, but Doug is your...

2:32:29Ben Gilbert:Yeah, yeah, he'll release a new review and I'll watch it as I fall asleep over five nights. Is this what you watch before you go to bed? Totally. So how does it affect your dreams? That's a good question. Do you dream? Do you have Lightning McQueen dreams? What do you have? No, no, no. The beauty of Doug, his key insight was all the other car YouTubers are making videos for car enthusiasts. Right. He makes videos for people who need to buy a family SUV. Oh, I see. Gotcha. I mean, he also reviews supercars and et cetera, et cetera. But most of his content is about the Honda app. No, seriously, I thought you would spend half your dreams in automobiles.

2:33:07No, no, no. No, it's not.

2:33:08David Rosenthal:I want to list a bunch. I'm not going to give commentary on them just because a lot of people are watching stuff over the holidays. and here's a bunch of things I've loved in the last year. Tires, the TV show, so funny. F1, the movie, I thought was very entertaining. I gotta watch it. Beautiful production quality.

2:33:22Ben Gilbert:My favorite tribute, Expensify paid$40 million for the...

2:33:26David Rosenthal:Rumored.

2:33:27Ben Gilbert:Rumored$40 million for the sponsorship of the fake team in the movie. That's right. That's so great.

2:33:33David Rosenthal:Andor, some of the best thing, if not the best thing in the modern Star Wars franchise, available on Disney+. Plus the show Fallout, so good. And season two is about to come back. I think that's Jonah Noland and Lisa Joy, again, artists. Like I was saying about Nathan Fielder. Severance was amazing. Silo has a new season coming out that I can't wait. The books are really good. Yes. I like the books. Yeah, those are my TV recommendations.

2:33:59Ben Gilbert:Nice. Next category, which might just be me, is video games. Just you. Just me, yeah. So one of the greatest moments in my parenting journey, thus far my older daughter is four is i got her into video games we play video games together now every night and it's just like it's the best like this is what i have been waiting for but i need to give a shout out again to sea of stars which is an indie throwback rpg which i bought just for me on my steam deck and we were on vacation in santa barbara and she was like dad what are you doing and that like that was it like i wasn't trying it was like she came up to me as i'm playing this indie RPG.

2:34:38Ben Gilbert:And she started playing it. I never would have guessed that this was my daughter's entry into video games. And then two, Kirby and the Forgotten Land on the Switch is perfect. We can play it together. It's co-op. It's great for me. It's great for her. It's awesome. So your daughter is in an age where she'll do anything you want to do. No. Because she wants to be with you. No. No, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know my daughter.

2:35:04David Rosenthal:she is extremely independent it's anomalous and awesome yes yes this is a rare occurrence okay

2:35:09Ben Gilbert:all right she runs the house like yeah no no uh so this is this is like so much joy for me great

2:35:15David Rosenthal:products what are some products that you have come to own in the last year that you have just thought are awesome or improved a new life i found a new pen i got it here let's see and it's just like i needed a pen that had just the right sort of fine fine point and then it that it's kind of generous with the ink, but it doesn't explode on an airplane. And doesn't smear, I imagine. It doesn't smear it. I'm looking at it now. The Ars Teca Rollerball Pen, 0.7 fine. And I just ordered a whole case of them because it's finally got a pen I just love. Listeners, if you want to write like Michael Lewis, we have the answer.

2:35:50David Rosenthal:This is an example of explaining someone's process. So that pen is a thing.

2:35:57Ben Gilbert:What else? Other products this year?

2:35:58David Rosenthal:The Fujifilm X100VI, I previously specifically did not carve it out and carved out a different camera. I've started carrying the Fujifilm and now love it. It's amazing. I've got a two-year-old, and it's just so nice to have more than just smartphone pictures of family. It's awesome. Nice. I'm just looking at what I have on. So...

2:36:19Ben Gilbert:Ex officio. No, no. So we're not going to talk about those. That wasn't this year. We're only talking about if they sponsor me. Not until they sponsor me. But anyway, that wasn't this year. But this year, actually, on my feet, these are things. These socks, I ran out of white socks in London. I went over to, is it Uniqlo? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they didn't have any. I was just looking for athletic socks, right? And they have these other things instead. They've turned out to be so much better than the athletic socks. And they come in different colors. So you can, like a light gray. You can wear them as dress socks.

2:36:51You can wear them as athletic socks. and they like, whenever I, I don't know about you, whenever I find something I love, what's about to happen is it's about to be discontinued. So you need to buy all of them. You need to buy all of them. Yes. Right, so I didn't get quite all of them because I was flying, I got them in London, I was going to have to fly back with them. But I bought basically what was in the store at the moment. And these shoes. Those Ons? These are Ons. Nice. And oddly, I spent a couple days with Roger Federer this summer and I just discovered them. So we had the on conversation and it made me kind of like acceptable to him.

2:37:28But I think these ons, I was a Hoka guy.

2:37:31David Rosenthal:Also great. Also great. Nike basically blew it, right? 100%. They got rid of their stores. They thought it's all going to be online and on and Hoka roll in. And I'm a little torn, but not that torn. These ons are just like, they're, and I don't know what it is. it's especially the white ones. I'm getting criticized for it because I started wearing them instead of even dress shoes and like on, I went on the Colbert with these and like I got eight calls saying you can't do that again. Really? Yeah. Like it looks.

2:38:05Ben Gilbert:I see people wearing ons all the time. Yeah, they just don't look good on TV or whatever. So, but I've been over wearing both the Uniqlo socks and the ons. But that's a sign of enthusiasm.

2:38:15David Rosenthal:That's right. There you go. And isn't the Federer-On deal like one of the best endorsement deals by an athlete ever. Measured by how? How much money he gets paid? Didn't he do like an equity deal early? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I think that might be right. He only aligns with companies whose products he really likes. Rolex. Rolex, yeah. It's an amazing... It's amazing how easy it is, right? Also, he's Roger Federer.

2:38:35Ben Gilbert:He's also Roger Federer. Right, right, right. It's similar, but I bought a Ramo a suitcase this year, and I love it. It's just a suitcase, but I love it. I got... What's it called? you uh ramoa uh lvmh bought this uh it's a suitcase company they make the the like aluminum shell

2:38:54David Rosenthal:yeah you got a little cap in your step every time you show up yeah well i got the um it's exciting to find new luggage it totally i mean i don't know why it is so exciting but it's hard to find new luggage well my whole life i've just been middle-aged men sitting around talking about you know where you find the new bag you know your life is gonna be different i've always been a

2:39:13Ben Gilbert:Minimal packing, like backpack only, like just maximum efficiency. You assume you're going to be washing your clothes wherever you go? Yeah, yeah. But this is the first time I've just been like, you know what? I'm just going to get a nice piece of luggage. And like it's not the most efficient way to put it. But like I just like it. It makes me happy. That's great. Parenting? Parenting, yeah. Let's go to parenting. Feel free to decline on this. You both have really little kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:39:39David Rosenthal:Two and four and one. Four and 18 months.

2:39:43Ben Gilbert:Yeah. Yeah.

2:39:44David Rosenthal:So the first is discovering guided access on the iPad. It's an accessibility setting where you can make it so none of the buttons do anything and it doesn't respond to taps. So on an airplane, they can't mess with Miss Rachel. Yeah, that's going to last about six months for you. And then he's going to be like,

2:39:57Ben Gilbert:F you, dad. Make it work. So these are products for parenting. These are products.

2:40:02David Rosenthal:If you are a parent of kids' age, the last one is the movie Toy Story. It's the first movie we introduced him to. It was my favorite movie growing up. And it's been really fun. He took to it? He took to it. He loves Mr. Potato Head. He calls it Tapo Head. And so he always runs into the room and says, Tapo Head TV. And that means I want to watch Toy Story.

2:40:22Ben Gilbert:So as I alluded to, my older daughter is an independent woman, shall we say. We bought this when she was younger and she completely rejected it. The Slumber Pod. Do you have fun of these? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So this is a blackout tent. We have two of these. We left one of my mom's house. That you put over a portable crib. So when you're traveling, you basically just put your baby in a sensory deprivation chamber.

2:40:45David Rosenthal:Oh, you set up the noise machine right next to it, too?

2:40:47Ben Gilbert:You really isolate them. And for most kids, I remember hearing about this from people that it's a miracle. I tried it with our older daughter, and she was just like, absolute nuclear, no way is this going to work. And so I shied away from it. And then we went on a trip recently, and I brought it back for my younger daughter because I was like, all right, we'll give it a shot. It worked like a charm. Can I just interrupt here for a moment? Yeah. Is it a kind of end zone dance you're doing of your business model that you're just at the end of this offer-free endorsements of consumer products? Yes, yes, yes.

2:41:19Without actually nobody having to pay you for anything? No, no, no. You just do it. You do this with a flick of the wrist because we don't even need the advertising revenues.

2:41:27Ben Gilbert:No, we just started because it was fun. These are things we like. That's good. It's good. Yeah, yeah. That's good. And then my last one, this is fun because it's a tie-in with our Radio City show. brought the whole family to New York for Radio City. Bluey, we got to do a Bluey episode someday. It's this incredible phenomenon. I don't know if it's crossed your radar. No, what is it? Bluey is the greatest kid's show ever made, bar none. That's a big claim. It's this guy in Australia, in Brisbane, and he made it. He was, I think, an animator for Peppa Pig, and then made this.

2:42:05David Rosenthal:But the claim isn't that crazy.

2:42:07Ben Gilbert:I love Bluey. Like, it's just so...

2:42:08David Rosenthal:Disney agrees with David.

2:42:10Ben Gilbert:Yeah. Disney has been trying to buy Bluey for years. Oh. For ever-escalating amounts of money.

2:42:16David Rosenthal:And they just did a deal, which I think is the first of its kind, to use Bluey IP in the Disney universe without owning it.

2:42:25Ben Gilbert:I think news just came out today that Bluey is coming to Animal Kingdom in Disney World in 2026. It's basically like, it's the Pixar. Who owns Bluey? Think of it as Pixar of this generation. Is Bluey owned by his creator? Yeah, yeah. Who is this? Joe Brum. This is Guy. It's like the Muppets. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's like Jim Henson in the Muppets. So in New York, in New York City, you can buy tickets. You get like a 45-minute window. You can take your family. You can take your kids to Bluey's house, a recreation of Bluey's house inside a building in Union Square. That's like great. If you've got kids into Bluey, go to New York.

2:42:59Take them to Bluey at the camp.

2:43:00David Rosenthal:My kids would find that a little strange. Okay. It's true. We keep saying kids. Kids of, you know, eight and under. Yeah, yeah.

2:43:07Ben Gilbert:But yeah. All right. All right. That's what I got for Carbats.

2:43:11David Rosenthal:That's all we got too.

2:43:13Ben Gilbert:Michael, anything else? Oh, pleasure. Thank you so much. This is so much fun. What a joy. Thank you for giving us your evening. This is the longest I've spoken to anyone in the last 40 years. Thank you for doing this with us. My pleasure. Anytime. I'll see you at your 20th. Great. We'll see you in 10 years.

2:43:31David Rosenthal:All right, listeners. Thank you so much for listening and being on this journey with us. David, very fun way to try to unpack why Acquired worked there with Michael.

2:43:43Ben Gilbert:If you had told us 10 years ago when we made the Pixar episode that we'd be sitting down with Michael Lewis to analyze ourselves.

2:43:52David Rosenthal:And trade notes? Oh, this is how my creative process works. Unbelievable.

2:43:58Ben Gilbert:Unbelievable. Thank you, Michael, for doing this with us. So good.

2:44:02David Rosenthal:We have another thank you to Shep Films. This is the crew that made this one look so good. You'll notice that this was not just David and I setting up a few cameras like we've done with Steve Ballmer or Morris Chang. This was actually produced. And so we have a giant thank you to the Shep Films, S-H-E-P Films Company. They do amazing work. They've made like full two-hour movies with Pedro Pascal and, you know, make sci-fi movies. And they do stuff like this. And so we're just delighted to have worked with them. listeners if you like this episode go check out our episodes on tsmc hermes costco the nfl berkshire or any other episode that we talked about there with michael after this episode check out acq2 we had andrew ross sorkin on and it was awesome speaking of trading notes on the creative process very different job that he does but uh you know rhymes with acquired in some ways so you can search acq2 in any podcast player come talk about this with us in the slack or if you don't want the slack but you do want email, we just did a huge, huge overhaul to our email system.

2:45:06David Rosenthal:It's no longer just going to notify you when a new episode comes out. There's all sorts of goodies in that notification email, like our takeaways from the episodes and behind the scenes photos, corrections from past episodes. It's the place to be. So you can join that at acquired.fm slash email.

2:45:23Ben Gilbert:It really is beautiful. And we might have some more upgrades to all the, what do you call it, like the Chrome around Acquired. Yes. Coming in 2026. So stay tuned.

2:45:34David Rosenthal:That's a great way to put it. Well, with that, listeners, we'll see you next time.

2:45:38Ben Gilbert:We'll see you next time. Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now?

2:46:01Thank you.