Acquired's Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal on 10 years of business storytelling, going to 8 episodes a year, and the Google series

Didn't Didn't Tai Lopez try that? He did. He did. And it got him in a little bit of hot water. It's not the best. Anyway, we we we have some inerson guests coming on to the show. Should we bring them in? Do you have another post you want to run? Yeah, we can. We can bring them in. Are they ready? Let's bring them over.

We got Ben and David from the acquired. Looking sharp. Great to see you. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the stream. We are live in the TVP Ultra Dome. Grab a seat. Welcome to the Ultradome. How you doing? Look at us. Opposite ends opposite ends of the barbell. Yes. And so much to talk about.

I was hoping to get the Zuck treatment while I was walking on and get like a ramp. I I I just dripped a a read in there, but we can throw another one in there. I'm sure we'll do ad reads in the middle of this interview. I've done so uh so great to have you guys here uh on your on your offsite, you said, right?

Team offsite. This is the got the whole company together. the whole company doesn't happen every day. Yeah. What what is the state of the company? Just uh kind of contextualize things for us. How long how long you've been doing it? We were just doing performance reviews on the drive down.

So yeah, I mean last night we were giving each other like real good criticism. Long walk. Is it year eight now? Uh year 10. Year 10. We just hit our 10th year. 10 year anniversary 15th. We just hit our one year anniversary. Let's go. Hey. Yeah. Do we need a gong? You should. Uh, no. It's too direct of a copy.

You need to be inspired. Oh, well, we'll we'll send you we'll send you guys one just just to have handy. I don't think my wife would like that. We don't we don't we record in our homes, you know, not in I would imagine it develops into like a library of all all the books that you've sourced and all the photos and stuff.

I actually do have a question about that. Um, but first I mean we should I want to start with like the story of the research process for the very first episode and then I want to hear about the most recent research process because I imagine it's very different.

But take me through uh was it a Google doc that you were just throwing notes in? Were you I mean LLM didn't exist. One of our secrets is we we've never shared Okay.

uh our research process like you know people ask us like sounds like you guys get on the show and like you're like you must be really good actors because you're pretending like you don't know what each other's gonna say with each other. We genuinely don't know what each other is going to say.

And was it like that at the very first episode? The first episode 10 years ago we were both working out of Madrona's office in Seattle cuz it's where we worked at the time. Side project and we got together after work and we were like all right we're going to record the Pixar episode. and Instagram. Pixar.

Well, Instagram was the pilot and then Pixar was the first one we released. Those are both like huge stories. That's not something you just walk into and hey, let's just freestyle 37 minutes. We did. So, we were like, "Okay, we're going to record. " What do you think? Like, start in an hour.

And so then we both like went and scrolled the internet for a while. We were like, "All right, are you ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. " And now, but I don't think we had a like one Google do. I think we had our own Yeah.

Like I think we've always had separate, you know, it's not like we have one document that we're both putting stuff into. Cool. Cool. And I think by the end of year one, we had about 400 listeners. Wow. Let's go. Hit that gong again. I think people don't realize how how John dropped the Yeah, that was how we felt, too.

Um uh yeah, I think uh yeah, we we were kind of talking about this offline. It's interesting. uh how the the kind of scale advantages that you have at acquired now being in a position as a business where it's to compete with you guys.

You would effectively somebody needs to have two hosts that can spend weeks researching weeks researching just you know a single topic which is which is not something that's super economical in the early stages of a show.

And so the advantages of just stay starting you know uh 10 years ago are just become more and more and more extreme or at least starting with a much narrower and hypothesis than we have now where you actually can do a little bit of work to make the episode and then just sort of like letting it expand over time.

Whenever people ask me like how do I start today? I I always think like figure out the most unique thing you can do and scope it to like just that and then over time see if you can grow and and actually warrant all the investment that it takes to make something big.

We looked at we it wasn't uh it wasn't strategic but we lucked into playing multiple compounding games and that's how we got here. I mean AirPods came out the year after we started.

Oh, so like the the concept of wandering around in the world listening to a podcast wasn't really a thing and suddenly you think really you think AirPods specifically were a catalyst for AirPods Co was horrible at first but then great for podcast.

It was horrible at first just because the first like what everyone's habits changed so everyone who was used to listening while they commuted we had like two or three months of numbers falling off a and we were like oh this is the end for us but then everyone finds new habits. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then and then it grew. Yeah. Before co I think people didn't really listen as much while like working out or you know going for a walk or doing the dishes. That was all co behaviors that then stuck. Yeah. Uh on the more modern production workflow, uh I feel like it's changed a lot.

Now you have access to the companies. You're also really good at digging up. I I saw you just shared the original Whimo rig and like it feels like you're getting photos that don't exist on the internet anymore and you're actually surfacing new images which I think are super cool.

I feel like that might be your gong when you build the the library to you know history, right? Uh but but but walk me through a little bit more about what what happens now because people will pick up the phone and talk to you.

You can do an interview on background even though of course you can do a proper AQ2 ACQ2 interview but uh that's not always part of the process.

How do you think about like how much do you want to spend with the actual company with people that might have left the company with just the books the third party research every like how do you blend that because you have to pay we're basically writing a book every month now like for the our Google series that we just wrapped up we probably talked to 30 plus people.

Yeah. You know, those are all hourlong research calls where, you know, the sometimes people are like, "Oh, is this gonna be recorded? " We're like, "No, no, no. This isn't for the show. This is just it's like we're writing a book. " Which is a little bit I'm always worried of coming across as cocky.

Like, this is a person that most people would happily have on as a podcast. I'm like, "No, no, you're helping me do research. " Yeah.

But actually, I think they like it because Well, again, that's part of the scale advantages of like if 10 years ago you called up some of these people and you said, "Talk to me for just give me alpha for an hour.

" Like the history, they'd be like, "Sorry, like probably get way more like that you can anonymize if you need to. If there's drama, you can contextualize it. It's not like we're a hedge fund calling them up and being like, "Yo, I'm looking for a trade.

" It's like, "No, no, we want to tell your story and we want to get it right. " That's always how we start the research calls is the the number one question is what's the most commonly mispersceived thing about your company? And two is what did the traditional press get wrong over the last several years?

And if we had to like tell the canonical story of your company, tell us how to write the wrong. And then of course we go do research after that.

We're like, okay, well, what are the, you know, how often how often do does like the the the leading book about a company end up uh getting getting kind of the the narrative just completely wrong?

Like how often are you not completely wrong, not completely wrong, but even but even like you know somebody at a company getting a lot of credit for a specific product when when you talk to a handful of people you realize oh it was actually this guy who ended up leaving right before the launch.

Sometimes it's the guy that wrote the book that gets all the credit and they leave and they're like how I grew this company and everyone's like you were writing the book literally the entire time you were here. You didn't do anything.

I think you usually it's not like giant uh division leader gets the credit and it was the other giant division leader.

It's like you sort of roll up the work of the team and we all take it as convention that like Jeff Dean did this amazing thing and it's like well Jeff Dean led a team at Google that did this amazing thing.

I was also thinking with the we were at Meta Connect and and they have the the neural band and that's that was an acquisition from control labs and as the startup guy I'm like give 100% of credit to the control founders and I'm like well really like they did a lot and they should get some of the credit but then there's probably a ton more money and ton more research and completely new people who never worked at control that came on and stepped and advanced that control that those founders did a lot of the workition yeah after the acquisition too but then there's still more people on the team more resources Yes, it's like are we given 30% of the credit, 70% of the credit somewhere in there?

Probably right.

The the more common thing books get wrong is they get the core story right in like half the book, but then there's something controversial about the company or that it was at the time they were writing the book controversial shots that yeah that you're reading this book and you're like why is there 80 pages on this this one event on Cambridge Analytica on there are so many things where you're like this is actually not a part of the company's canonical story what it felt like in the moment.

I mean this is happening with Facebook right now. I I think the next social network is going to be entirely about Cambridge Analytica or something which like everyone's kind of moved on from and we're like well did they overspend on the metaverse? What what's going on with the AI bats?

Like like the we were we were doing a like a joke table read of a fake version of the social network too. We were focusing it entirely on building like the AI talent wars because we live very in the moment. I'm sure like Yan Lun is not going to be in the social network too at all. Right. Alex Wang is not.

Nat Friedman's not. But I would love the social network. Yeah, the social network 3 will be all about that. I think that's it. Like the same thing for us, I'm sure you guys get this all the time, too, is like we're not journalists. So, usually the people that are writing the books, they're approaching it as journalists.

Usually they've been covering the company at, you know, a publication and then they write the book and but they're not practitioners. You know, Ben and I are no longer practitioners, but we come from that world. We've worked at companies, you know, we've been VCs. Like, we just have a totally different perspective.

Senra, I I I I was always just saying like I don't mind the phrase creator or influencer, whatever. Uh newscaster, I guess is broadcaster. Uh David Senra used the phrase enthusiast. He says, "I'm not he tells CEOs, I'm not I'm not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast.

" Well, anybody who knows Senra knows that is that is the best word, an enthusiast. And I wonder if it will grow. I wonder if I should adopt that phrase. I wonder if it fits me. It it certainly feels nobody can be as much of an enthusiast as I would want to compete with him on that.

But I think you guys should like adopt a really tongue-in-cheek moniker that like that's like so obviously old timey like television host. Yeah, we do that right now. We're just hosts. We're just hosts or podcasters. Yeah. Um Jordy, where should we go?

I think uh I wanted to get uh were you always planning for this all to be live? Like how I mean it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you te it up to journey. I'll do this is live. Throw it back. We'll throw it back to you guys. No, so it was very natural progression.

We started out with a weekly show as many two technology brothers get together. They say we should start a podcast. John's idea for the initial format of of no guests and just focused on uh a high velocity of topics. It ultimately the show ended up reflecting the timeline, right?

and algorithms were doing a really good job sorting what was interesting. And we went, we recorded the first couple shows. We pretty much only sent it to Senra. I think he was the only person that actually listened. He was like, "This is good. " We enjoyed it a lot.

Then we did another, you know, we started doing like a couple a week and realized that every time we would turn uh and this was just pre-record. Yeah. Every time we would go off the air, we'd open our phones and realize like, "Oh, this one more deal we wanted. We got to wait 48 hours to talk about this.

" And so we just started adding days. I think we got to three days or four days by the end of the year. And then we knew going into January that we wanted to go uh to 5 days a week. And then we uh ultimately made sense to do live for a bunch of reasons.

Like one, it just allows us to be highly reactive to what's happening. Oftent times during the three hours that we're live, stuff is stuff is happening. And so it it's also a lot more efficient. We can uh we're not spending, you know, hours and hours editing the show afterwards.

We're also efficient on the air where you'll notice like there's very little dead air like maybe once a show there's like oh what should we talk about and then we quickly you know figure it out guest here to be able extreme extreme end of just pushing as far down the barbell away from you guys right so you're doing like once a month and then we're like we're like we'll do it five times a week and then daily and then the episode comes out two hours after we record 1 hour after we record live and do and you can't get liveer than live do you ever edit anything like are your clips We don't even have the option to I mean I I what we will do is we have a 5minute countdown at the start of the show uh for the live feed to let people come in and know that the show's about to start and we clip that out for the podcast.

So we make a thousand cuts per episode. We make one. So there you go. We make one. But you probably make a thousand times more episodes than we do. So yeah, I mean we we've done a thousand interviews this year. You'll do eight next year 250. Yeah. and only and only like well you'll do also the interview show as well.

Yeah. I don't think we're differentiated there. Our interview show is is not uh we just do it when it comes when it's special. But that's the main show like two of our eight. So this is like the most acquired thing ever. Uh this year we did 12 episodes.

Next year we're doing eight and they're going to be better than ever. And I was about to mention that but I wasn't sure if you were leaking it yet, but I'm glad that you announced it. Uh yeah, I think I think breaking news card breaking news acquired acquired is making fewer episodes.

I think this is this is major news in the tech world.

Yeah, I think uh one thing we realized early on was that a lot of people were listening to interview podcasts for news and that's actually not a great experience because have you ever in your life thought, you know what, I really want to know what CNBC was talking about 4 days ago, right?

exact inspirations like anybody like this is quite innovative like you know you're doing it live we were working out at at this gym and Pat McAfee would on would be on in the background and we started looking at what Pat was doing in the sense that he was started as a podcast recorded and then eventually wound up doing basically live TV for three hours every day and so once we kind of were halfway there we started looking more to Pat McAfee as an example of kind of what new media could do in a live space.

Did he go live before the ESPN deal? I think so. I think he was live for a while, but it started as a podcast. He grew the show, had more podcast and then eventually was doing, you know, multiple guests per show.

It's you don't even think about it as a guest show, but he'll still do the LeBron conversation with LeBron like once when that happens. It's special. So funny.

One of my business school classmates played with him on the Colts and uh you know it was a couple years after we graduated and like we had started a choir and he was and he just text me.

He's like you know I've got this this friend back from when you know I played on the Colts like he's he's doing a doing a show like you know like oh yeah good for you know here's a funny story.

I I would sponsor uh Pat McAfee back in the day because I used to help a bunch of companies with uh like podcast advertising and then ended up focusing more on YouTube. Uh, and at the time I was thinking what like, wow, he had this sort of like short career in the NFL. Then he became a podcaster.

I didn't realize at the time that uh how fun it was to have your job be just talking about the thing that he loved, right? And so we ended up we were in the like I think what what's important about Pat's coverage is that he was in the league, right? And that informs his coverage.

That's part of what makes it interesting. And John and I in the same way like podcasting is generally low status in tech, right?

It's like people have used it used to it used to be I think it's changing a little bit but it's still like you a lot of people want to be you know a founder or an investor uh and podcasts are are usually this like content marketing for the main thing that they're doing and so uh we realized early on it's like hey we were in the league now we realize like talking about the league is a lot that's such a key insight we had the we had the same thing 10 years ago where we were like if this is content marketing it'll work you know it's got to be the main thing if it's not the main thing you're never going to be you know and we were professional venture capitalists in various flavors for eight years after starting the podcast and never once were tempted by should acquired be the XYZ firm podcast like that that'll kill the whole thing people it's hard because you you can't if you're an active investor and you have you know 40 portfolio companies can you actually give accurate coverage on a market right if you're talking about a category and You have a horse in the race.

You can provide a little cap. Well, I mean to be fair, we have a horse in the race. We certainly have a horse in the race. Wait, you got to tell uh I uh So we we have uh uh capex. They're ramping. A lot of people would It's not that much. Some people are buying GPUs. You guys are buying horses. Yeah.

No, people people would say that a lot of uh they would they would critique journalists for being horse people. And we came to their defense, right? We said uh horses should be celebrated. They're incredible uh animals. And so this is a in some ways a monument to technology.

A lot of the early brand was just like what's the opposite of tech branding? Well, it's like old money equestrian. You're like 70s Miami. Exactly. So we is a lifestyle. Yeah, exactly. It's a lifestyle brand and the horse is like a perfect example of that. So we had fun.

Uh what what do you do you think that venture capital firms will eventually advertise on podcasts significantly? I already do. We've had in the past we've had them advertised with us. Yeah.

And I think that's a I think it's a an an of can could often times be a much better use of resources than saying like okay we're going to hire a podcast producer and a podcast editor and then we're going to take the GP's time away from investing and all these things and you can just buy you can create the Red Bull of the F1 where everyone else is sponsoring.

You really are the Red Bull adventure. Yeah, maybe that's the right the right strategy is just be really smart and interesting and then just go do a bunch of free media on other podcasts. But there but I but I have investor friends that are smart and interesting and just don't like talking about podcast talk.

They don't like doing a bunch of public interviews, right? For those people, they should just buy sponsorship. How do you think about the interplay between the different episodes?

Obviously, if you were locked in a if you were locked in a room for like a year and then you published one episode, it wouldn't be as good as bouncing between seeing a connection between Costco and Google, for example.

Uh, have you do you do you ever call back to someone you interviewed for the Google episode if you were talking about Microsoft and and have you ever thought about do you do you ever think about clipping in an actual segment of Vulmer? you're making a thousand.

That was literally the first time we thought about clipping in developers developers developers basketball or or or or something from your library because you have an exclusive interview with him and you could take a clip from your conversation with Balmer and put that in the next time you visit the story of Microsoft or another story.

This is one of the areas where we have a way of doing things and it's not clear to me that us sticking to the way that we do things is like part of what makes acquired special or if it's like we are just stuck in our ways and every time we've thought about doing that we're like well we haven't done it so far and doing that makes it more similar to the way that other types of content work.

So is the fact that we don't do that and we're actually not the production value where we would insert the clip does that lead to our differentiation. We came up, so we started 2015 and we came up right as like indie podcasts had been a thing forever, but like podcasts were mostly the NPR.

You know, when you thought podcast in 2014, 2015, you thought NPR, 15 person team, well-crafted stories. Yes. Yeah. Highly produced in the sense of like they would splice in clips and there would be transition music in there. You might not even remember who the host was. You weren't developing a relationship.

You'd cut to the reporter in the field who's out getting tape talking to the person. And for better or worse, we just continue have continued to thrive. You look at some of the top I I forget one of the top grossing networks, but it's like a horror show. Wondery was acquired.

Yeah, there was one that was putting up like four 45 million in eBay. Yeah, I remember that on just making like horror show content. So horror, it's funny that you're smashing two amazing things together.

podcasting, which can, if you want it to be a extremely high operating margin business, like much better than traditional entertainment, much better than Hollywood. I know where you're going with this.

Uh, and horror is like the way to make money in movies cuz you the crazy thing, uh, we got a buddy in entertainment who was telling us that the cool thing about horror, if if you're a capitalist, is you don't need A-list cuz people are willing to go see horror movies without caring who's in them.

You don't need to go to multiple planets. You can be like, "Oh, the whole plot. We're locked in the basement of this room. " And it's like you're filming in one sound entire time and it's terrifying. Like $60 million topline, which is nothing compared to the big movies, but it costs like $8 million to make. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting to see where it goes. Give us a give us a trailer for the most recent episode. I don't want to give too much away. Like you're on a book tour and you tell the whole plot of the book and then nobody needs to buy the book, but it's a 4-hour episode, so don't worry.

We won't give too much away. Google in two minutes, please. Well, the the I guess the biggest hook is the history of Google is actually the history of the entire AI landscape. Everyone almost everyone doing interesting things in foundational model companies at at the leadership level.

You can trace a lineage back to Google and almost all of them were there 2015 2016. Yeah. You shared that picture of Ilia on the Alexet team. Yeah. And it's not just Ilia like Daario from Anthropic and like I mean everybody Jeff Hinton who basically invented the field like they're all there.

Sebastian Thrron Andrew like everybody carpathy Jeff Dean you know every single major leader in AI that you know of no matter what company they are at with the one exception of Yan Lun at Facebook he's the only one who like didn't come from Google and I'll give you the they created their own worst nightmare. Yes. Yeah.

And then they published it. The transformer paper, but it might be the thing that saved them from getting broken up. Like the judge in the antitrust case cited there's so much competition in AI from all these former Googlers. Broken up, but at what cost? Right. That's amazing. Yeah.

I mean, we we've always come back to like the the founding, you know, mission of the company is like to organize the world's information. And it feels like all like they did their job to create the thing that does that better than anything we've seen as humans, right?

Everybody enjoys firing up, you know, like the the results you get back from Gemini or Groc or ChatgBT or any of these different LLMs is much more enjoyable to to to just read through and understand the world than traditional search.

The other thing about the Google story that like uh I don't think anybody understood I certainly didn't understand till we did our whole you know three episode series on it. It's always been all about Microsoft.

Microsoft has always been at first the existential threat and then the goal of like we're going to become the next Microsoft. We're going to dominate them. We're going to create Gmail and docs, maps and like everything Microsoft does we're going to do.

Because remember search they built this ridiculously you know the the most profitable business of all time um on you know they were except for oil except for Saudi Aramco they were tenants on Microsoft's property on internet explorer it was all on internet explorer which all was on Windows Internet Explorer had 70% market share and Windows had like 90% market share and so at any given point if Microsoft wanted to destabilize Google's ridiculous cash printing machine there was a few years where they really could have That's Chromebooks, that's Android, that's all about that.

And then now Open AI, Micros, like it's always all about Microsoft. So when Open AI went in after Elon went into the arms of Microsoft, Google is like, you've got to be kidding me. We just spent the first 20 years of our company getting out from under their thumb and now here's Microsoft coming back in. Yeah.

Wait, when you said, did you mean OpenAI and Sam went into Yeah. Yeah.

you know, after after Elon left and pulled his funding and open AAI needed a capital partner in the warm who again Google's enemy you know at the at the worst moment for Google when chat GPT came out Microsoft owned 49% of open AAI so they're like holy you know like yeah the monster in the house it's their own horror film film I how are you thinking about the the seven powers these days I remember a lot of the episodes end with analysis from seven powers.

Do you think there's do you think any any of that framework needs an update?

Do you think there's a a new book that is on a trajectory to have that level of influence in terms of strategic thinking that would be kind of like the MBA level way to think about tech companies or businesses broadly or is that kind of the end of history in your mind? I guess it depends if I haven't thought about this.

I do think seven powers is still like the applicable way to analyze a business and figure out if it will be durably profitable versus its competitors. The one new thing is AI models have because of scaling laws have much stronger data network effects and data modes than we've ever seen in the past.

Flywheel you see this with midjourney just more more data is better and that continues unabated.

I mean the reason Google had an edict that all teams need to stop using these bespoke models and start using Gemini is we got to feed Gemini as much data as we can from not only every Google surface but then every Google cloud customer surface like ultimate scale economies in models because you you like any fragmentation you have in your work with your models across your company like you need to centralize that and feed it all into one.

So if anything that feels like a a reason to double down on the seven powers. Yes, I I think it's still applicable, but it's these model companies have just really really somebody doing understanding of business, they're like none of these words appear in seven powers.

But I will say we've gotten to know Hamilton uh and and his firm Strategy Capital really really well.

Um I'm on his advisory board for uh at his fund strategy capital and uh you know they're he's always looking and working and like he's you know uh they're not he doesn't believe that seven powers is the be all end all they're looking and working for you know the next things. So uh I'm sure there will be more. Yeah.

What uh points throughout tech history stand out where people got over their skis uh on with uh leverage? Uh because it feels like we're potentially moving. Are you taking us to Oracle? Yeah, Oracle.

But it feels like, you know, we were just reading something from uh Doug Laughlin at at semi analysis and he really feels like the next step is going, you know, negative free cash flow for the hyperscalers and really, you know, levering up in order to just win, right?

everybody just wants to win and so yeah I was just curious at any kind of point obviously the telecom was very debt fueled and we saw what happened there uh but it doesn't feel like in the modern era we've you know the hyperscalers have ever said let's really lever up our well and there's there's uh the event that we were at this week together uh you guys missed it yesterday there was more discussion there's you could define leverage more broadly like leverage isn't necessarily just debt capital like there's a lot of leverage in the system.

If you look at the contracts and company like look at opening I Microsoft right like you know or or any of these deal like how much of the capital whether it's I mean a lot of these contracts literally live on the balance sheet as liabilities totally you've got the hyperscalers you got you got like the money is all just going around and around in a circle that builds leverage in the system the XAI deal is an SPV that I think is led by XAI but they're doing like 8.

5 billion of cash and then like 12 and a half of of GPUs of no of debt but it's happening at the basically happening at the SPV level which I thought was I mean I think is somewhat notable because but yeah how how uh h like how far I think there's more leverage in the system than the balance sheets would would show how much range are you looking for in terms of uh how far back you go in history is Dutch East India company interesting comes up all the time yeah yeah because there's debate like what was their real what was their market cap in in in dollars today are is everyone loves to go to 1999 right now but there are so many other examples and you guys are like the the like the key leaders of tech history in my mind and so I would imagine that there's there's more to it and you've seen in the data LVMH performed like I think of you as a tech history podcast and then LVMH just does incredibly well like was that something you predicted is there something there so the best episodes are the ones that have these three key ingredients.

And I always thought when we started over at tech podcast, we cover tech companies.

Uh then we were in this middle phase before we sort of became more mainstream which was uh educating a tech audience about non- tech phenomena like no tech companies are good at brand and so when we started studying the luxury companies it's like blowing the minds of all these tech people like whoa that's why this is valuable which included myself like I learned during the research and I'm like hey audience I I got to share this with you guess what I just figured out and so the three key ingredients this thing is more than a hunk of metal on your wrist you know like the three things are uh one you need a hero protagonist that has a great story where we can really hang all the lessons on this amazing hero's journey.

People care about people. Yes. They don't just want to read a a fact sheet of press releases. Otherwise, uh sellside analysts would be great podcasters and they're mostly not. Yep. Um two is you need a secret hiding in plain sight. We need to be able to find something very clever.

Costco's low skew count and how it leads to uh basically inventory uh uh turnover supplers. So like all the all the amazing benefits of Costco. Yeah, I almost launched into the whole Costco count. How uh how one of these things is this like um secret lurking in plain sight 95% of their stuff by hand? Yes.

Um, and then three is uh I've given the stump speech before, but I forgot what three is. You usually give the speech. I know. Well, I usually like remember what the third is. I'm saying relevant to today. Is that the secret? Is there something just an important company? People need to know to click on Airmes.

Do some oil and gas company that no one's ever heard of. It's just going to be harder to get over the hump. It's not necessarily people haven't heard of. We discard a lot of companies we're considering covering because they're not currently like at the top of their field.

They're not currently super, you know, they're not currently impacting our world today. Yeah. So like a Fairchild semiconductor would be a lot less relevant than Intel. Yeah. Amazing history. Amazing history. You could even do Intel. We're going to do TSMC. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Uh favorite history book of all time.

What you got? I know you're gonna say seven powers if I ask for Brooks. It's hard to argue a shoe dog. Shoe dog. Shoe dog is so compelling. Dog is really well. Made in America or um made in Japan and made in America. Uh Ako Marita's Sony and then um Sam Walton's Walmart book.

It's one of the just really really excellent ones we've read. Yeah, Shoe Dog is a fantastic book. It's so readable too. I don't know. It's just like I feel like every every founder at that level should want a Shoe Dog. And like I think the guy the ghost writer who wrote Shoe Dog wrote uh magazine open. Yeah.

I absolute paid. It's good. Open is incredible. I I I guess I skipped it because it's not so much about business. Uh but I feel like if you're made me a tennis fan, if you're hundred billion dollar CEO, like you need to call him up and get your version of Shoe Dog, but maybe you don't have as much of a compelling story.

Or if you're Prince Harry. Yeah. Yeah. Prince Harry did it too, right? That's funny. Still a lot of great ones out there. What about uh what what about uh daily routine? Is there anything special that goes into having a great recording? I mean, you do a lot of research, but then the big day comes.

Is there like a a good luck diet or exercise routine that happens? Because you're on the mic for eight hours.

You cut it down to This is one of the things that like we've realized I think we're actually very different than one of the other dimensions we're very different than most shows is we're only doing this a couple times a year. So, like it's every one is a big day. So, eight times a year. Yeah. Eight times a year.

Yeah, you're like, "Oh, that's 24/7. " Yeah.

What are you not telling me the So, yeah, the I don't work out on recording days, which is like a weird I wake up and I like feel I try to work out every morning and I feel like a sloth for sort of not but I'm about to stand for eight hours and I'm about to be like using so much glucose in my brain that like I I don't want to be like low energy because I just went on a long run we're recording.

Yeah. Uh but most of the research for we have different styles but most of my research happens while working out and I try to get things into audio format and I'm constantly just like pausing taking notes.

It's like a you know look nobody would mistake us for Olympic athletes but it feels like we are trying to peak for race day you know or we're trying to peak for game day like the the whole month leading up to it is like a a process so that when we hit the recording studio it's like you know it's like an NFL Sunday that we think about it like an like an NFL Monday night or a Super Bowl.

like we are fired up. Well, if you if you expand out, if you go from 12 to 8 and eventually get down to one, the acquired launch will be the Super Bowl of technology. That'd be amazing. It's just like the whole world just waiting. You're just seeing like like all productivity statistics are are dipping.

There's no charges on RAM cards. Like no joke. You can notice it on every GitHub chart. It's just like, oh, why was no one committing code that day? Absolutely.

We we used to say this thing as like a joke like oh the you know what would be the Super Bowl of acquired and like this year we're collaborating with the Super Bowl which was a wild phone call the Super Bowl of acquired is the Super Bowl. That's amazing. What do you guys have have you uh can you share?

We don't have an agenda yet but uh the Friday before the game show in San Francisco. It's actually a Bad Bunny interview. He's not performing. We're sitting down with Bad Buddy. He's opening. Just do a Yeah, like a like a director's watch along with the Costco episode.

That would be great for the full and then you have like it's a three-hour halftime show where it's sort of a game within a game.

So, so on this show, we don't do a lot of primary research, but we do a lot of reactions to posts obviously, but there are times when we'll read through a strategy article or Doggo Laughlin over at semi analysis and we'll kind of uh read a little bit, contextualize and go back and forth and that works because most of those pieces if you read them just from top to bottom, it takes 10 minutes.

Uh we could probably never do that with an acquired episode because it would take us a week to get through. Okay, pause it. Let's react. It doesn't make any sense. Um but uh do you think that there will ever be a CEO who releases their own podcast reacting to how you told the story Allah Larry Ellison uh which is great.

You should share what software so software is the book sort of the canonical biography on Larry Allison and Oracle and his condition for writing the book was that every single page he would get space allotted to him to like effectively rebuttal a yeah have a rebuttal and so you're reading the book and it's almost like two books in one where you get to see all Larry's footnotes so I want to see Eric Schmidt buy programmatic ads on YouTube against and in and in the Spotify feed.

So you're listening to the story of Google. It says, "Hey, I'm Eric Schmidt. Actually, they got this part wrong. " And he's dynamically inserting these ads into your product to rebut you. So th this is why we like to do interviews.

Mostly, we're not an interview show, and I I don't think our interviews are that differentiated unless we have done like a 4-hour deep dive on the company and can sit down with the protagonist and say, "Hey, Steve Balmer, let's pick apart the uh areas in which you thought we nailed it and the areas in which you disagree with us.

" And Steve like fought us on a few things. He was like, "I don't have prepared. " He made a PowerPoint deck. He literally the night before he emailed us a PowerPoint deck. I think he said like, "Sorry, we're getting this to you so late. " And you're like, we're like, "Why would you? This isn't a board.

This isn't a board meeting. " Thank you. The found the early employee still the board member still apologizing for late send Dax. That's very common. That's funny.

Um what do do uh uh uh do you do you feel like there's more reception from uh tech folks like Balmer to engage versus the luxury houses or the Costco CEO Hermes reached out right away immediately a different type of engagement like the uh uh what because I feel that is differentiated.

I feel like I feel like you interviewing the founder of of a luxury fashion house through the tech lens is maybe more differentiated than just doing another interview with Mark Zuckerberg who's already on a podcast circuit. Y unless you can do it in Chase Center. Yes. Exactly. Well, yeah.

I mean you you you got to bring something special to those and connect and that's certainly what we tried. But but but there is something different about that lens where that story where that that just bringing that interview to that audience is probably going to outperform um relative to to the the other ones.

But I don't know what your perceptions been. That's the hardest thing in media and I think like that's the thing that we try to spend all of our time on is in what way can we make our product unique in the marketplace of ideas. Totally.

And our general lazy answer has been well if you are a person who is being interviewed your incentive is to go and do as many interviews as possible. Therefore that is not a scarce commodity. Therefore you can't build a great business on it. Yep. Our format and just us is a scarce commodity.

But there's it's too the only thing you have a monopoly on is yourself. Not the production, not the distribution.

And so you but you can expand the aperture which is I I credit you with this which is like there is an acquired way to do a like uniquely acquired great interview and we're always looking and I'm sure you guys are too uh we interviewed Morris Chang earlier this year like we flew to Taiwan and we're like you know that's uh and and that performed very well like you know that that's a very unique thing like we're going to sit down for four hours with a 93y old uh which is it special.

We realized it actually was a unique commodity cuz like what other tech podcasters are going to fly to Taiwan for 48 hours and do this one. What other techers are going to be able to reach more? Well, David had a newborn. Yeah, cuz I've always just Yeah, I've always like I'd love to visit newborn trip.

You want to make sure you don't miss time, you know. Yeah, it was actually great. Taiwan was awesome. Yeah, I enjoyed it. We had a great time. Um, yeah, it's it's a very I didn't have any expectations going in, but it was it was like its own unique beast. I've been elsewhere in Asia and Taiwan is is a unique place.

So, very cool. Well, I'm excited for next year. Congratulations on the success. Thanks. Yeah, your guys' dedication to the craft is hugely inspiring. There's, again, we've talked about it. There's a few handful of podcasters that we really look up to. It's you guys, David Senra, Patrick Oanosy. Yeah. And, uh, yeah.

Thank you for keeping the we were we were driving here and I said to Ben, I was like, you know, it was fun talking to the TBPN guys because like I can tell that you guys are really in it together and like you're you know that's that's 90% of our magic is we're in it together and like it's cool to see that in you guys too.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot of stats like views and downloads and I'm sure there's a bunch of impressive stats that you could share but uh the number that I do think represents the progress more than anything else is just the years.

It's just the fact that you've been doing it 10 years and like all the other all the other metrics are completely downstream of that and just the fact that you've put in so many hours, so much time and like everything else score takes care of itself, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right.

10 years down at least hopefully another 100 to go. Thanks guys. This was fun. Thank you guys for coming by. Thanks so much. This is great. Absolute legends. Let's go back into We need a um we might have to do it another time. We got to get a signed gong from these guys for the for the podcaster uh hall of the Museum of