Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal - The Obsessive Craftsmanship Behind Acquired - [Glue Guys, EP.52]

A thing that has been true all of acquired. It's doubled every year since we started 10 years ago, and all the growth has been organic.

Would you invest, Ravi, the thing.

I mean, listen, why do you think they're on this podcast right now? I mean, you know, wait till we go to the end and be like, all right, like, here's the term sheet.

Live pitch.

Live pitch. Great.

All I will say is we have podcast royalty with us today. Alex, you know, these are the most. I don't know, I think that they're the only podcasters that I know that have been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal saying something like, all the important people in the world listen to them. And so this is, to me, a little bit like Kobe going and playing at Rucker park or something with a bunch of amateurs. And so we appreciate you guys. Thank you for joining our pickup game. You know, we hope that we get, you know, some of the reflection from the acquired listener base. You know, today is how deep, you know, very humbling with.

Honestly, we love it. The stakes have gotten so freaking high with every acquired podcast that it's amazing to play some pickup. Like, yeah, we get to be creative again. We get to, you know, experiment.

Yeah. The higher the stakes get, the more fun stuff like this gets.

Well, Alex and I were talking before, and there's a ton of things actually, we want to talk to you guys about, so we hope we get to everything. But a bunch of stuff you just said actually is included in our topics that we hope to hit on. One, you guys do have a lot of fun on the episode, and it's interesting. And then also the other thing is, all jokes aside, it has gotten so popular, but it wasn't always that way, you know, and so we want to talk about that. But one thing I guess. I guess just to jump into it that I am genuinely curious about is on the stories you guys tell. You guys do sound like you're having a lot of fun, and there sounds like there's real moments of, like, delight and surprise. Like, I was listening to the Re. Listening to the Costco one the other day, which is just the best, right? I don't know what your best one is, but it's in the discussion. Costco's in the discussion. It's so good. But there was this moment where I think, David, you are like, do you know who ran the all hands after Saul Price got kicked out or something? And Ben's like, no, I don't. And then you're like, it's Jim Sinegal. And there's genuine surprise from you, Ben, on, like, you know that it was Jim. And so how does that happen? Like, when you guys are doing the episodes and you have these moments of genuine surprise with each other, like, how do those come about?

So we are not good actors. So those are genuine surprise moments. And we realized it's part of what makes the show great. So we have architected our research and prep process to keep things from each other so that we get to have those. And that's why when we come together for recording day, that's. That's the only take we get because we can't fake those moments by redoing it later.

Yeah. So tell us. Tell us about the research process then. Like, how do you actually architect it? What do you do? I think we like getting into details from people that are excellent. And I genuinely believe it's like one of the aspects of the show that make it so cool and interesting and kind of makes it. You're enthusiastic to listen for hours because there are moments like that if it was just you guys narrating, it would be less interesting and, you know, less durable. So how did you architect the research process?

Well, we can totally talk about the research process, but the other thing on the fun. I'm so glad you picked up, like, it genuinely is fun. No matter how crazy everything gets, how big the stakes get. Like every time we get in the studio and we record, like, it's just like, it's like the first time, you know, it's like, it's genuinely like, we love it. Like, it's so fun. We could be. I could be so stressed out in the research process. Like, oh, my God, I don't know. We're going to land the play bubble. And then we just get in the studio and we're like, this is genuinely really fun.

Right. We picked doing this. This was a hobby before it was the thing we do. But yeah, David, start with your side of research because you tell the story. I mean, you're the one who writes a 70 page, effectively script that guides the story.

Oh, wow.

Well, I mean, it's evolved so much and it constantly evolves. So I mean, when we started it was like yolo. I mean, we were basically picking a topic like hours beforehand. That's true.

So we worked at Madrona at the time and we would say, let's record at 6:30. And at 5 we would pop down our computers.

Yeah.

Stop our day jobs, start researching for the episode and be like, all right, I feel like I have A pretty good sense of why Facebook bought Instagram. Got some good facts.

This is how we ended up grading the YouTube acquisition as a C minus, maybe originally.

Yeah. Everything we're about to say has been this very iterative thing that has never changed that much from episode to episode. But is, you know, a ship of Theseus. It's unrecognizable from the way it started.

My end. And then Ben should tell his end too, because it really is separate. I mean, we live in separate cities. We talk every day, multiple times a day, but we don't talk about, like, the beyond, the basic scaffolding. We don't talk about what we are researching and what we're going to say in the episode. So it really is like a whole month of independent research from each of us. We spend a whole month doing it. I usually. I like to start with books. So usually the companies we're covering, there's anywhere from one to, you know, 20 books about them. So I used to be. I made a mistake a couple years ago, especially on the Nike episode where I was like, I got to read every book together.

We read 12 books about Nike.

Yeah. That was too much.

Are there any separately. Are there. If there are books about Nike other than Shoe Dog that are worth reading in addition to listening to your episode, I would love to do that because I love Nike. But like, separate conversation. Yeah.

Rob Strasser's book for sure.

Yeah.

It's a totally different perspective.

Awesome.

He's the. I can't remember if he's the villain in Air or just the one of the other characters. Yeah, Air is great. Not entirely historically accurate, but Rob has a very different perspective that's worth reading. Anyway, since dialed it back and realized that, like, you know, when you read 12 books, it's just. You're overwhelmed. It's like you prep too much for the test. Yes. So now it's like, spend a little bit of time figuring out what are the one to three, like, books to read. Like in the Nike case, I should have read Shoe Dog and Strasser's book.

Yep.

That have the best primary source account of what happened by the people who are really in the room.

Yep. Yep. And there were a few years there. Nike episode around that era, you know, probably 2020 to 2023, early 2024, where that was it. Like, read the books, take a lot of notes. I read physical books, hard copies with a pencil. I'm underlining, I'm making notes, go through, read them, and then enter into, like, note and script writing. Mode where I'm going back through all my notes, translating that into like, okay, what's the story I want to tell? What's the narrative I want to weave? What are the beats? How is this going to flow? What sets up what. That used to be it now, though, that's like, I don't know. What would you say, Ben? Half of what we do, Maybe less. We're doing so much primary source research now.

There ends up being about 50 sources per episode. And we put all those in a link in the episode and.

50 sources. Do you mean like interviews with, you.

Know, so that doesn't count the interviews. Yeah, I'm doing about 10 to 20 primary source interviews in addition to the few books that we read. And then, you know, sources 4 through 50 are like articles that were important at the time, but people have long forgotten. I think this is a huge key to research is how were people describing in the press when Facebook launched the newsfeed? Describe totally different than the way people talk about it now. And that's part of what makes the episode great, is David speaks in present tense as he goes and he says, okay, so it's now 2004, Facebook is launching the newsfeed. People are saying, and I think that that's a. I don't want present tense.

Sauce, but secret sauce.

Yeah, yeah. By getting to go and read all that day of primary source reporting, we can, like, feel in our guts as we almost transport ourselves there.

And you find stuff. Like in our Alphabet episode, we just did Q4, 2005, earnings for Alphabet. First year the company was public for Google then. First year the company was public. Revenue's growing like a rocket ship and profitability is down. Earnings are flat because they're investing in all these new products. Stock drops 27%. There are all these press articles about, like, what is Google doing? These guys are messing it up. Like, this is awful. Like, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Like, now nobody remembers, but like, that actually sets the stage for it, you.

Know, so anyway, and now if you look at a stock chart, it's. It's, you know, it all rounds to zero. So it's not like you can even tell if you're trying to examine the data from today.

So, yeah, then there's the primary source, the interviews we do. I mean, yeah, the Google series has been probably 30, 40 people we've talked to of, you know, from the highest levels all the way down to, like, engineers who are actually building the stuff quickly.

To go back to the very. Take you back, let's go back to the very first episode. What was the year was 2015? 2015. Okay. What was the genesis of this for you, too? Was it literally a passion? Like a hot. I mean, I know you said hobby, but was there. Was there a problem you guys were, like, trying to solve?

Alex, just before the answer, when was the first time you listened to a podcast? What year?

I have no idea.

I mean, well, after 2015, right? Like, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, if you ask me what a podcast was in 2015, I don't think I would know. And so this is why it's so crazy. I want to hear this, but, like, if you made me guess, it might be, like, 2020 was the first time I listened to it. Like, literally first time I listened to a podcast was five years later. Probably didn't know they existed till 2018 or 2019. And so it's so crazy to think about 2015. Please. Yeah.

The total addressable market when for podcasts, advertising, because that was the only revenue stream for podcasts then. The year we started was $40 million for zero with an M. Million dollars.

Yeah.

So, yeah, the way it started was I was a big Apple nerd. I was a software developer, and I'd been building iPhone apps, and podcasting Serial, I think, had just come out. But before that, podcasting was kind of a thing people did who were tech nerds. There was MacBreak weekly and the Leo Laporte world, Jon Gruber and Daring Fireball. Marco Arment, who was an iOS developer, wrote. He did build and analyze. I mean, it was nerds talking about nerd stuff. And.

And it was deeply tied with the Apple ecosystem. Because podcast is the ipod. Yep.

The funny thing is that was actually 10 years into podcasting in 2015. Podcasts actually first appeared in itunes all the way back in 2005. And so David and I were co workers. Ish. I worked at Madrona in the Labs group. He was a proper investor. We were friendly, but not super close friends, but we just knew we liked spending time together. And I was just rattling off my list of here's a bunch of different projects that sound interesting. Some were apps, some were, like, ideas for blog posts, Some were podcast ideas. And David just leapt at this one and was like, not only do I think this acquired idea is a good one, if you want to do it, I will do it with you. And we recorded a pilot shortly thereafter.

Really? Okay, so then you start. Keep going. Because I think, again, like, one of the things we talk about a lot Is like, I mean, this. It's so funny to say this to you guys because you tell stories of incredible companies. But, like, one thing for us is like, if you go to our people, it feels sometimes like people that appear successful from the outside, like, you guys certainly do. It was so inevitable and it was so obvious. And it was like, that does not seem like the story of a choir. Even the name right is not. We're too misnomer. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, take us. Go deeper. There's 20.

I mean, you know, it's not like what happened. You know, you guys are. I mean, at least Alex, for you, like, you grew up playing football. It's like people know football's a thing. Like, nobody had probably questioned why you were playing football. Like, we got questioned for a long time. Why the hell are we doing this? What is this? What is a podcast? This is a distraction. This is worthless. This is, you know, like, what are you doing?

Yeah. So it wasn't a business. I don't think we made money. In our. Maybe year three, we got our first check. I can't remember exactly. I think it was $5,500. Yeah, maybe it's 25, 10 episodes, something like that. So it wasn't about making money. It wasn't a business. It was purely. I think this would be fun. The format was incredibly structured. It was take a deal, a very good tech acquisition and analyze why it was incredibly value creative for the acquirer and then grade it. And it actually wasn't as much about story as it was about the analysis and the grade. You know, basically comparing everything to the Instagram deal to the extent that we.

Had a motive beyond just like the primary motive was hanging out. The secondary motive such that it existed was we were VCs and like, oh, I guess like, you know, we. We should try and invest in companies that get acquired for a lot of money. So let's study how that happens.

This is. This is crazy.

Yeah, this is crazy.

And by the way, Ravi tries to sell us on the. That it's just time to hang out. You know, this is, you know, regardless of anything, which it's been effective so far. But I mean, again, like, on this whole, like, not obvious thing, right? Like you're in a. You're in a.

You're.

You guys are dabbling in a field that is nascent, right? Like it's. It's not even what it's going to become. Did you guys have an idea that it was going to become something? And then for three years, like there is this concept of, like, are we just, like, you know, like, talking into the void? Right? Like, I mean, is this there. Did you guys. There had to be.

We got feedback from, like, our immediate social circle, saying, oh, I listened. It was cool. I agree with you. You said this. So even though the numbers weren't big, you get enough, like, passing comments at a.

We did start getting fans, too, that we didn't know. I mean, it was small, but, like, we could tell it was working.

People really, like, this is it kind of like the, you know, the Paul Graham, like, you know, 100 or a thousand people that really love it, you know, type, whatever the numbers are. But the idea of, like, there's real passion from a small group of, like, we're onto something.

A thing that has been true all of acquired, which. This is crazy. It's doubled every year since we started 10 years ago, and all the growth has been organic, like, truly growth for a decade.

Would you invest, Ravi, the thing.

I mean, listen, why do you think they're on this podcast right now? I mean, you know, wait till we go to the end and be like, all right, like, here is the term sheet.

Live pitch. The thing. The thing that's been true the entire time is people don't listen because they're interested in a topic. There's people interested. People listen because they're interested in the show. And there's something about the concept, the format, David and I, our chemistry, whatever it is, the. When you tie a bow on that package, it's a thing where a huge amount of people just listen to whatever we say rather than saying, oh, I like healthcare. I'll listen to Novo Nordisk.

Well, okay, on that note, though, you even said, like, obviously the. The early parameters of the show are not even close to what they are now. Right. Like, from the research, the storytelling. When was there an unlock at some point, like, when did it happen? Did you guys got to this? Was it. Was there an episode? Like, did you guys even have your own, like, acquired moment? Does that make sense? Like, what? I don't know. I'm just asking. Or was it, like, there probably were.

Some moments we can think of. But I think also, like, the industry just kind of birthed around us.

AirPods came out.

Yeah.

It became acceptable to just, like, listen to other people talk in your ears while you're wandering around the world, which wasn't true in 2015.

Yeah.

And then we started, you know, meeting all these other shows and just being in the ecosystem, and we started realizing, like, crap, this might be a lot Bigger than we, than we thought or the potential might be bigger. I mean, Patrick o', Shaughnessy, you guys know, we got to know him, we went on his show, he came on our show. This is what, 20, 20, 21 somewhere in there. Yeah, somewhere. 2020, 2021. And we were chatting with him about, you know, what his show's like, the amount of numbers he was doing on listeners and revenue. And we were like, geez, maybe we could do that too.

He was 2 to 3x invest, like the best was 2 to 3x acquired in listenership, but like 25x or something in monetization.

And this is what year?

2020, I think.

Okay, so right around that time that.

You were like podcasts were becoming a thing. You were, you know, and so at.

This point, when did you guys make this your full time jobs?

The funny thing is I didn't go full time till last year.

What?

Oh, really?

Isn't that nuts?

It's pretty nuts.

Wait, no, that. Ben, that cannot be true. Sorry, like, say that again. Give me some more details on this.

It's fine. I can hear my wife talking in the other room if you ask her. I basically have just always worked two jobs since we met. We met and acquired started the same week.

Oh, wow. Okay.

And so basically, like, it's just always been a normal thing in my life that I had a job and then I also spent another 40 plus hours doing acquired.

That is the best partner ever because you just genuinely love working.

What was your guys cadence early on?

Yeah, recording.

We used to make a lot more episodes, but they were a lot shorter and they were a lot less researched. Yeah, early on. I mean, gosh, we were doing probably a show every two weeks. Does that sound right, Ben?

Yeah, that's about right.

Yeah, yeah.

And for many years that way.

Okay, so David, when did you go full time?

2020.

Okay, so full time 2020.

You're 20 is when the business. After that conversation with Patrick and we were like, oh, wow, we should just stop doing everything else. And like this is like, this is the thing.

The insight was we're not a podcast the way that True Crime podcast is where we're selling mattress ads for the same prices of mattress ads. What we've done is create a trusted relationship with the most valuable subset of people in the world who want to study business history and the lessons you can learn.

Yes.

So we should completely divorce ourselves from like, oh, we're selling ad slots, and instead think about, okay, what's the right price package, type of relationship, Durable partnership With companies that. That. So we completely rebuilt the revenue model.

Is that from. Because a little bit that I, you know, from the. Patrick, you know, you think about Patrick o' Shaughnessy's audience, like, his listenership. Like, it's not. To your point, that's not the same people that are listening to, like, fantasy football podcasts.

Well, there probably are people who are listening to both, but not everybody who listens to fantasy football.

Right. Like, there's a different value.

Alex, you got to be careful. I think the fantasy football listener is part of your demo, which, you know, we got to. We like people that listen to fantasy football podcast.

Okay, listen.

I play.

I play. I'm just saying, you're not being sold. Bud Light.

Just saying.

And we actually have a, you know, sort of quasi policy to the extent we have policies at all of, like, we don't do consumer brands. We only do B2B. We only do super high LTV B2B. Like, if you're. If your product that you're selling is targeted at SMBs or not A, you know, big enough annual contract value, it's. It's just not going to make sense. Like, most of our sponsors are landing, you know, million dollar, tens of million dollar type deals at a pop, and that's what we're great at.

Okay. But we're hiding the ball on some of this inflection point stuff. There's business inflection points, which is what we talked about there and we talked with Patrick and. But there's also these content inflection points, most of which came from David. David, you've come to me a number of times saying, I think we have more latitude from the audience than we think. And first that came in the form of what if it wasn't just acquisitions? What if it could be IPOs? So we did. Was it the Facebook idea?

Facebook was the first one. Yep. That we recorded the evening of the 2016 election.

Oh, wow.

Before.

Before, like when everybody thought Hillary was gonna win. Totally.

I mean, until like 10:30pm I mean, I, I think if that night, I think it was when Wisconsin flipped. There's basically like a moment late in the evening where it's like, oh, this is going to go differently than most people thought. Okay. You know, anyway.

And obviously that event changed Facebook's, you know, and Mark Zuckerberg fortunes. Hugely.

Yes.

We didn't. We actually didn't rerecord the episode. We sort of released it as is with some tongue in cheeky comments in there, which we, we probably wouldn't do. Today. Then in 2019, David came to me again and said, what if it's not about grading transactions? What if, you know, we've leaned so much into story in addition to analysis. What if. What if we just tell the story of Tesla as a company without a transaction? It's not about the ipo, it's just about Tesla. And that was our biggest episode ever when we did that. And then the same thing you came and said, you were talking to your wife and she said, I feel like you guys could do Taylor Swift. Like, why? Why? She's not a C corp. Or there might be a C corp in there somewhere. But the story is Taylor as a person. Could you do a person? And then Taylor Swift was one of our biggest episodes ever. So I think there's a. It turned out that this format of conversational storytelling, us telling a story, not through narration, but through dialogue, and then having some analysis baked in and after, applies to a much broader set of things than an acquisition.

So. Okay, so, awesome. This is exactly what I was hoping to, like, learn. And so, okay, so when you, David, when you decide to go full time, right. Are there people that, like, you love in your life being like, what are you doing? Like, dude, you're like an investor at, like, a super legit venture capital firm.

Right?

Right. Podcasting is still not. It's like, it's on the up. Okay. But it's not obvious that it is going to be as. As career. It's. It's not pos. It's not as obvious that it could be a career the way it is now, like, in a super awesome career. And so was it hard? Were there people that, you know, you cared about that were like, dude, like, let me sit you down and have an intervention right now. Like, your partner's not even going full time, you know?

Yes. Okay. And so how did you get everybody.

Everybody. Okay, cool.

Well, part of it was circumstantial in that it was you just sort of, you know how fun cycles work. And it was just sort of the right time to be like, all right, am I going to be an investor for the rest of my life or am I going to do something else? And this was just what I loved. And I was like, you know, it's funny as the more we did acquired for me, I don't know if you had experienced this, Ben. I used to think that being a VC was like my dream in life for 15 years. If you met me, I would say, all I want to do is be a great venture capitalist. I'm so obsessed.

Oh, wow, okay, fascinating.

Before you were in the industry, I mean this is. You were like an investment banker at UBS saying that living in New York, never even being on the west coast.

From the time I was a senior in College until 2020, it was all I wanted to do.

I was dreaming.

Dreaming about Sandhill Road.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. That was my, like, that was my NFL, you know.

You had a needlepoint pillow with a Michael Moritz quote what my wife got.

Me for my birthday one year. The quote was focus on your winners.

Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

That is how obsessed I was. I was so obsessed. But then we started the show and I swear to God, like, as the show went on, my interest and desire to be a VC just started slowly going down. And my interest and desire to do the show started slowing going up. And at a certain point, earlier than 2020, probably 2018, 2019, that Byford that intersected. And now today we still do plenty of investing, but totally the last thing in the world I want to do is like be an actual day to day. No, no offense to you, Robbie.

Like, I.

Listen, I want, I want, we want the truth. You know, that's.

Yeah, yeah. It just became like I realized I was wrong about what I was sort of born to do in this world. And it's like I just want to tell stories.

That moment when you finally like told yourself, like it, I. This is what I want to go do. This, this 15 year dream and journey that I've been on, like, that's a big moment in life, right? Like to have the courage to go do that. Like, what was that process like? And then the freedom, I'm assuming afterward to like again go deep on this thing, that you made this decision. Right? Like, I don't know. I admire that so much.

Me too.

It was, it was, yeah, very, very, very stressful as you could probably imagine, you know, on all fronts. Family, friends, professional. You know, pretty much everybody thought it was crazy.

You set a six month clock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean even my wife Jenny, who is the most supportive, you know, she's great, she's got her own great career. We've been together since we were. She was 19, I was 21 when we got together. We've been together.

David and I bonded on this because we both met our wonderful wives when we were in college, you know, so.

And even she was like, you know, okay, like, you know, I support you, but like, we gotta have a plan here. Like, you know, what's the, you know, when's the money going to run out? Like what, you know, what's the clock? How long do you have for this to work? And so we settled on.

It was six months.

I think it was.

No, I think it was more like eight months. I think it was kind of like the rest of. If by the beginning of 2021 we hadn't. This, this was a few months into 2020 when I was sort of like kind of coming to this realization. So then I was like, okay, all right, I got the rest of the year. Let's prove that we can like actually make this into a real business. Ben, what did we do?

2020?

No, 2019.

2019, we did 70,000 in revenue.

Yeah. Total to the business. 70,000. And we were VCs. You know, we weren't like, you know, partners, but like we were making hundreds of thousands of dollars in our day jobs.

And then in 2020 when David made this basically ultimatum because to me it was like, oh my God, if you have to go like get a new job and like become a high performer at this new job, you're not going to have time to do a totally.

Yes.

Existential for the whole franchise. That.

Yes.

We build a business out of it such that David gets to keep it. We.

You were right there with me the whole time. I mean you were doing two full time jobs, but like.

Right.

I mean this is the greatest thing anyone's ever done for me is you were like, hell yeah, let's go.

And then in 2020 we made around somewhere between 200 and 250,000. So it was like, still, I think the run rate was higher. Obviously we signed deals, but yeah. And then we had line of sight to 2021 when it had a huge multiple of that where that's when we had the conversation with Patrick, realized we're thinking about this completely wrong. Completely changed the sponsorship model.

And then 2021 it became a multimillion dollar business.

And it's one of these crazy things where like in 2020, at the beginning it seemed like there's no chance this could support us. But by late 2020 we were like, oh, maybe, maybe it could be equivalent to our day jobs. And then within 12 months we were like, this is a non problem.

Well, can I, can I, can I do the thing now, like, of just like two takeaways for me that are like bumping around in my head as you guys are talking. One dude, like I, I have you so much admiration for this idea of you like leaving some room for serendipity in Your life rather than just like being committed to one path come hell or high water. Like, dude, like, I was talking to actually like a family member there, a young family member. Like, you know, and he was, he's just started college and he was like, man, like, you know, should I join this business thing? And, and I was like, hey, man, like, listen, like, you don't need to know what you want to do yet. It's okay. Like, you, you, you just like, be good and you'll figure stuff out. And it's so easy as like the old guy to say that. But I think that like, dude, you got a needle point pillow with a Mike Moritz quote and you have a vent venture capital job. It'd be really easy to just be like, this is what I meant to do. This is what I said I was going to do. But I like, give you so much credit for the, like, no, man, like, let's see, let's see what I actually love. And so I think that's, like, amazing. And then I think the second thing is, like, by making yourself desperate, you know, it kind of like changes the trajectory of the thing, like, totally. Right? Like, that's so cool. Like the burn the boats. Like, okay, like, let's do it. And I think there's, there's a thousand reasons not to do it or, I don't know, however much money we're making, that many reasons not to do it. And it's really cool, dude, Just like.

There are a couple hundred thousand reasons not to do it.

Yeah, like, not to do it. And it's like, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it anyway. Like, and Ben, that's super cool on your side that you, like, were there with him, but also still on your side of like, look, I'm not ready to leave my job yet and that, but I'm still gonna get desperate with you. Like, I don't know, it's like there was so much team stuff in there as well as, like, being who you are. Like, I give you guys a lot of credit for when hearing that.

Have you guys ever done, I know you've covered, obviously, the NFL and NBA. Have you guys ever done one on an athlete? Oh, and if you, if you. Have you ever thought about that and, or an acquisition, Taylor Swift.

And then Michael Jordan's obviously a big part of the Nike story. And we, we had initially thought we were like, oh, we want to do the, the Jordan brand. And they were like, well, you can't really extricate this from like, it Is Nike.

Yeah, I'd say a big. A big chunk of the Nike episode is the history of the Jordan brand. But yeah, on an athlete, I mean, that would be really interesting. And especially, you know, you know, not Michael Jordan, but Michael Jordan, Inc. And figuring out who the candidates are. Who. Who are the five.

Tiger Woods, Tom Brady.

It's not crazy that you could do LeBron. I mean, you could do.

We could go back to the original thesis of the show and the New England Patriots acquiring Bill Belichick.

Alex, I bet you also internationally, like, I don't know, like, they could be like an F1 driver or something. Like, I think I read one time, like, was it Michael Schumacher or somebody? Like, the. The highest paid people sometimes are, you know, in, like, they're not, you know, necessarily like us athletes. And so, I don't know, like, I. That would be interesting. Taylor Swift is like a phenomenon, though. And so, I don't know, you gotta think about whether there's a story that's worth telling that's as good.

The most impressive thing about Taylor is that we thought that was true in 2020, maybe 20.

January 22nd. Yeah.

Okay. When we did the episode. And the impressive thing is her staying power as a phenomenon. I mean, she is a multiple of her prior phenomenon now with eras tour with the merger with the NFL with these album drops. It's.

It's really impressive on the athletes, though. I mean, think about Travis Kelsey. There's no way to know for sure, for us to know for sure how he's done. But I get the sense that athletes today, the top athletes, are making decisions about their careers through a much wider lens than just like, what is my contract with my team?

For sure.

Whatever, you know, where I. Where you're playing, how what your narrative is, like, feels like way more important.

Well, you guys just did this. You guys just did the episode on Alphabet, right? And like, the YouTube thing is unbelievable. And even our journey into podcasting, like, I assumed everybody just listened to podcasts on. On their Apple or maybe Spotify, you know, and you realize this, like, YouTube is this monster, like, behemoth.

Yeah.

They just bought into the NFL, right. They had the Sunday ticket. They have games this year. But to that point, like, sports as a media property is the only thing in this country that brings people together at the same time. Yeah, right. Like, you no longer tune in Thursday night to watch Seinfeld. Right. Like, those days are top done.

100 broadcasts worse.

For they're all football.

Football, and most of them the NFL. Yeah.

They're all football. And so I do think there's been this empowerment. Right. Like, Travis is, is a great example of this. Like again, my former teammate, but like, there's so much power in his ability to create content. Right. Like, obviously his own podcast is a monster.

He's making way, way more money from new heights than he is from the Chiefs.

Yes. So I think there is this. There has been an unlock, especially in the last, I think five years for athletes and their power obviously off the field to in different ways to create, I think generate income. And certainly YouTube, I think being a.

Part of this, especially interesting for the NFL. I mean, you know, we did episodes in the NBA and the NFL and one of the key differences when we did these a couple years ago that we thought between the leagues was that in the NBA, players, you know, you're not wearing helmets. So, you know, the, the fans see your face. So like, you're much more able to build your brand and have a voice and have influence off the court. And that in football, it seemed like both culturally within the NFL and then just kind of elements of the game, it's so much a bigger team, et cetera, et cetera. That was less true, but now it feels like that's converging.

Yeah.

I also think, you know, I was listening actually to Patrick's episode with the Skims founder.

Yeah.

You know, Jens, I think his name is, and he was talking about how. Why he went into business with Kim Kardashian. He basically was like, look, if you want to start like a tequila brand tomorrow, okay? And he's like, and you just want to start from scratch. He's like, you could spend like $2 billion on performance marketing and on billboards and all this stuff. I'm like, I don't know if it gets off the ground. Like, knows. He's like, if you start one with the Rock, like, it will sell. Like there. There is a set of stuff that will happen that is equivalent to some very high amount of marketing dollars. And he's like. And like, even though the Rock has a great brand, I bet you he undervalues it in terms of like the fact that it is certain to get off the ground. There is something there. And I think that that same point that you guys are making on the athletes side, like, Ben, the thing you said about the broadcast, that's all true. And that's like, without some of the gambling stuff that's now coming in as hard, like, there's another factor that's going to make simultaneous watching even more pronounced right? And I think that a lot of the people that are associated with the NBA, NFL, etc, I think they still believe that, like, many athletes are dramatically undervaluing their brands because, like, the fact that you watch what the NBA players wear when they walk into the stadium, like, I don't know, is there. What is that analogous to? Like, there is, like, real stuff that, like, is not fully monetized yet from these folks and there's still like, NFL.

NBA players buying their own outfits that they're walking in, or are they. There's no way are they sponsored. Like, I should be.

David, I bought my own outfit.

You know, you were telling the story.

I loved it of. Was it. Who was it Jim Harbaugh who said, like, now we're traveling in, in the shirts and sweats that wouldn't fly today, right? Because, like, everybody needs their fit for the social media.

What do you think it's worth to a Gucci if they get that week's Joe Burrow? Yeah, Joe Burrow walk in photo.

Totally.

No, that's.

Oh, a lot more than the cost of the suit, that's for sure.

To your guys's point, the other thing is, like, I don't know. I saw. I was watching it on, on, on. On quarterback, right? Burrow, like, going to like, the. The rack of, like, figure. He has got, like, a stylist, like, what am I wearing today? But then the thing that was cool was the juxtaposition. Like, this dude, I think Joe Burrow is from Ohio, if I'm not mistaken. Like, his family, like, hanging out in the box afterwards. He's wearing some, like, leather shirt with a zipper that's like half open. And like, his mom or somebody comes up and is effectively like, what the.

Fuck are you doing?

You know, And. But it's just great because, like, you can kind of see the full thing. Like, I guarantee you, if Alex, like, having met, like, your parents, like, if you at some point had decided to go more in the, like, fashion side, you know, like, I mean, how much would you be taking from the people around you, like your sister? I'm.

I'm the complete opposite. Like, I actually have this history, unfortunately, drafted in an era where it was like, still the Carmelo Anthony, like, draft day suit. Oh, the big.

The big suits, yeah.

Seven buttons and baggy. And so, like, no, no, my Robbie, my history is like the exact opposite. Like, these pictures from my journey. It's like, what the fuck were you wearing? Like, what were you thinking?

Right?

Like, this is not. This is not even remotely close to Style. Like, I didn't put any thought into this. Like, this is all part of that same storytelling again, the power of these athletes. Like, yeah, Joe is like, this is a. You know, I think it's a moment that a ton of people look for pregame, every game. What's he wearing?

Alex, did you wear a pink shirt on draft day?

Draft day? I wore a pink suit then. It's embarrassing. It was so big.

I had these long sides up on the video.

Sideburns, because it's like the only facial hair.

You did it to look older, right?

That was very.

I was a baby.

I was 20. I was trying to look older. Projecting. Projecting.

No. Okay, this is. This is good. What was your. What was your mindset going into that day? Like, what are you. Did. Did you know you were going to be number one?

I knew that week I was going to be number one.

From the time that you found out you were going to be number one until the actual moment.

It was like, holy. How long until they find out they made a mistake? Like, you know, like, how long until. I mean, it was. It was insane. Surreal. How did I get here? Like, I mean, I grew up watching the draft. And you're like, all of a sudden you're backstage in New York City. I got this ridiculous suit on that someone gave me.

Was it at Radio City?

I was not Radio City. It was the Javits center that year.

Okay.

And so you're backstage. I got all my family. I got. I have an agent. Right. Like, all of a sudden you're sitting at this table. I mean, the commissioner, all these people I've grown up watching are, like, around. I mean, it is this insane.

And you were only 20 years old.

I was 20. Yeah. It was this insane media frenzy, right? And then, yeah, the commissioner walks up and I'll never forget, like, there's this. There's a phone in the middle of, like, the table, right? And you're like, how did this phone get here? And then it ran. Then all of a sudden, I'm talking to the Niners and, you know, commissioner walks out and announces your name. And it's just like, I.

Literally.

An out of body experience.

Were they doing back then? I mean, now there's so much content captured around draft day. Were they doing that then?

We did a full, like two days in New York. Me and Aaron Rodgers are like, traveling over. Around New York City, going to different sites and there's cameras with us.

It's like NFL Films.

And we're like, we go visit monuments and we're like throwing footballs around in our suits. And it was like, not nothing like today, but they tried.

Yeah. NFL films, by the way, sidebar. Greatest gift to, like, America.

Unbelievable.

So great.

Yes, Unbelievable.

Totally.

The thing that I was going to tell you guys, Ben and David, that one of the things that I am grateful for, for Acquired is I think that, like, it filled a hole I didn't even know that I had of, like, there these stories of the business people. Like, if you really think about it, the stories we generally get told are of athletes. I love sports. I love finding out their stories. But there's this other place for, like, other people to become. Not brands necessarily, but, like, Saul Price, you know, Sam Walton. Like, it's.

It's an arena of greatness in the same way that sports.

Yes, yes. And then to go deep and like, to hear people talk about them, it. It. It feels very much to me when I'm listening to Acquired. Like, I'm like, I, like, found my people. Meaning, like, you guys are my people, you know, when you're talking about it. But then it's like a conversation that you just feel very lucky to get to hear because it's like, man, my people have done so much work to, like, learn about these other people that I want to hear about. And then the other thing that's cool is it gives you something to talk about with your family and with your, like, one of the things when you have kids is, like, you don't want to just talk about one thing that they might be interested in. You want to talk about other things, and you want to know, like, hey, there's stories of grit and stories of resilience and stories of risk and stories of, you know, all these other things that exist in arenas outside of athletics. Like, when you have skinny Indian children, like we do, it's not 100% obvious that their destiny is to be in the NFL, you know, and so the idea of, like, hey, there's other stories that can get told that you can write and have written about you and have people talk about that involve things that are different and frankly, that they're in media, too. Like, it's not. These stories can get told on podcasts. Like, it's just really cool. It's really. It's awesome. It genuinely is helpful to, like, parents and nerds all around.

So here's. Here's the thing I've been. First of all, thank you. Here's the thing I've been wondering about, and maybe you can help us come up with an answer. This Formula where, you know, David and I each go off, do 100 hours of work. So 200 man hours. And we ship four hours to you. That is the four. We did all the work so you don't have to. That's.

Oh, yeah, we didn't talk about the. The editing, the winnowing process.

Oh, my God, that's the biggest. We'll come back to that. And then combine that distillation with the conversational style, telling story through dialogue, which again, doesn't seem to happen very often. In an arena of greatness of which we've chosen business, that's a super transferable format. But you go look around at podcasts, most of them are either scripted drama, like a true crime type thing. A couple guys chopping it up for the week, doing, having done no research, but like, hey, we're back on the pod, checking in again. It's been another seven days, so you owe you content, that sort of thing. Or three, an interview show where, you know, there's some prep but not the same amount of prep, and most of the content is coming from the guest. Almost all shows fall into those three buckets. Why is there not acquired for X for 20 more X's?

Oh, dude, I truly. I think so. I 1000% agree. I actually. One of the things. So there's two, three reactions. One, you guys talk about arenas of greatness. We had Michael Lewis on and we asked, like, what he writes about the best. His language was arenas of American ambition. And it's the exact same thing kind of as you're talking about, which I thought was just such a cool phrasing. The second thing is I. When I talked to Alex and Shane, I'd always thought that there should be a podcast on, like, kind of weird professions. Like, basically, like, there's this guy who lives in our community who everyone thinks he works in construction. Okay. And, like, he doesn't work in construction. His name is Judd Weiss. He's an amazing guy. What he does is like an investor in obscure construction equipment. And it's just fascinating. You go deep on what Judd and his dad do to go find equipment. They buy like two pieces a year maybe, but they're like so weird, like, the places they'll go, but they buy them for like 5 cents on the dollar, and then they sell them for like 200 cents on the dollar. And so he's like a distressed investor, but it's crazy, like, and so you just go deep and it's like, holy shit. And so I think that everything is fascinating. If you Go deep enough. And I think that the thing that you guys are doing and I. This is why I agree. Your podcast idea, you know, for like, the franchising of acquired or whatever you're suggesting here, is basically, I don't think.

We'Re gonna franchise Acquired, by the way, but other people should do it.

Yeah, but quality is everywhere, and what people want is quality. Like, what you guys bring is depth. It's a hundred hours of work that is painfully curated to, like, because you care about the people you're serving. If somebody did that on another topic, it would be popular, you know, And I could not agree more that, like, the thing you're selling is quality and chemistry. It's even more abstract than, like, they like the show. It's that they. They like the care you've put in. We like the care you've put into the episode. And I think if anybody did that on another topic, it would work.

I think you guys are. Ben, I think I understand the point you're making, but I think you're absolutely underselling a ton of things. One year Journey, right? Like, just think about, like, what we've discussed and like, the commitment and choices to make to be where you guys are today, making this, like, one of a kind podcast, right? Like, the commitment, the sacrifice, the risk to, like, do it.

The.

The. The stickiness, like, you guys, the grit to kind of be doing this for 10 years now at this point, right? Like, especially early on when you said for three years. Like, I mean, there's zero income, right? Like, that's.

We.

We learned about this. Like, what's the average lifespan of a podcast?

It's like three episodes.

Okay, there you go. You guys did it for three years, right? Like, out of pure passion. And that's not easy. I also think you're underselling. Like, again, you talk about the magic, right? Like your secret sauce and how long it took you to guys to find that. And it's not just the 100 hours of research, right? It's not just the formula that you guys put in place. Like, it is you guys, right? And like, your chemistry with each other. And like, that takes time and work. Like, it's. It's special, right? And again, it's why it's like, such an honor to have you guys on and talk to you guys about it. What do you guys, though on that note, right? Like, you guys, journey is crazy, but, like, okay, as we stand here today and you think about acquired on this exact same note, like, what do you. What. What's next what do you guys think?

You guys are going, we're not gonna franchise.

Right. Our least favorite question I clearly not franchising. But like, how do you guys think about that? You know, like literally from growth and, you know, monetization and what content, style, what do you guys want?

You know, So I always think about business strategy as a puzzle. It's like you pick the thing that you're gonna be obsessed with and then you have to think through all the implications that fall out of that and then lean into the trade offs that that forces you into. It's like you can't have your cake and eat it too. And so if we're going to be obsessed with quality, okay, that either means big team that knows how to work together really, really well, or it means small team that we know works together really well that knows how to handcraft this thing, but not a lot of content and not a lot of other stuff. And so there's this, this accidental scarcity that has become a part of acquired not because we're trying to create a luxury brand and we're creating synthetic scarcity, but because we just can't actually make anything.

It's the original version of. I was just about to say this stuff is handmade.

Exactly.

Humans can only make this so fast.

You know, was that, when did that become clear to you guys?

Part of it was studying the luxury industry and doing LVMH and Hermes.

Yeah. That reinforced a convenient thing that you already wanted to be true is you wanted to make less but better episodes. And you're all, every year it was always, can we do less? Our seasons used to be 12 episodes. Our seasons right now are four episodes. This is the David Rosenthal effect debates.

Where the, you know, we started dialing down the number of episodes. And we used to be like, well, Ben and I were these discussions, like, are we a podcast? Like if we're a podcast, like we're extremely lazy. Like, you know, making very, very few episodes. And I'd be like, no, what we're doing is closer to writing a book. We're actually being like the most productive authors in the world, publishing 12 books a year.

I don't know, it's almost like you're documentary filmmakers in one way. Right. You know, which is like the promise. Listen, here's what I can tell you. Like if you did an episode and it wasn't good, I'd be really pissed. And it's like a weird thing, right?

That's the stakes, that's the pressure.

Yeah, this, this is like a thing that has, like, hit me like a truck. That is what I tell new podcasters all the time, whenever people ask for advice. If you want to start a blog, that's great. You should. You should just start blogging. You'll get better as you go. The first stuff can be bad because the risk, the investment that someone is taking to read your blog post, they load the page, they look at the title, they read the first four or five sentences, they bounce. No harm, no foul. If someone presses play on your podcast, they're making an investment. They're committing a chunk of their life. And if they're bad, if it's bad, they're gone forever. And they might have loved you for 20 episodes. And if it's bad and they get two bad ones in a row, they're done.

Yeah, like, I can. I, like, be real with you guys on, like, the risk to me, unlike Acquired, it's like. It's like the risk to me on Acquired, which I think will never happen, but the risk would be like, it's like a television show where the characters become caricatures of themselves, right. Rather than, like, their real versions. You know, it's like when you watch a TV show that's, you know, in its eighth year, and the character kind of makes the same. It's just like an extreme version of them rather than, like, no, the authentic thing that you actually liked. And so to me, the thing that's so great is, like, even the most recent episodes are just you guys being. You guys having done a shitload of work and actually enjoying each other's company. And that's why I think the scarcity is really important, because I think if it's like, the, you know, Ben Gilbert brand, the David Rosenthal brand, and it's more like, not you guys, but, like an extreme version of it, like, it just will be less fun. It's like, right now, it is listening to friends talk about something, you know, and it's just different.

And we have to keep evolving the show in subtle but appropriate ways. Otherwise, it does get stagnant, and you and you say the same things over and over. I even felt that way. We did these. There's so many. I learned that I love big private companies because they are so much more pure, in a way.

The Rolex, ikea, Mars.

Yeah, and we hit, like, five or six of these in a row. Novo Nordisk, Hermes, Public, but found sometimes controlled by the family. And I realized by the fifth one we did, I was saying the same stuff, and I was like, are we the podcast for people who want to glorify hundred billion dollar private companies and talk about how family owned dynamics let you make trade offs that public companies can't. Or do we want to like reinvent ourselves? And I feel like we have to keep subtly doing reinvention.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

There's a Satya Nadella quote in his most recent letter to Microsoft. And I'm like, full Satya fanboy. I just think he's incredible.

Amazing. Yep.

But he writes this thing and remember, like, Microsoft's like the poster child of this. He's like, success is not longevity. Success is success in our industry is not longevity. It's relevance. And there's something of like, he's like, we're gonna have existential threats all the time. It's just that we want to still be the one who's having an existential threat against us with a different existential threat company every two or three years. And he talks about, like, when he started, like, Novell was the existential threat.

Yes.

And then Eric Smith, now, whatever you say, it is, right? It is some AI company that is not Novell. It's not Novell. And I think for you guys, I totally agree on like, reinvention while staying true to some principles because, you know, it needs to be different. And I agree with you that, like, it would be boring if it was the same topic over and over again. But it has to be you guys with real curiosity and real chemistry, you know, and real work.

You know, the other thing we've discovered too, that I fully believe in. I think you do too, Ben, is people still don't appreciate how big a medium this is and what it, what you can do with it. Even, like beyond the podcast. Like, we do very, very little beyond the podcast because the podcast is the main thing. But we realized, like, when we can do stuff, we can do stuff like play Radio City.

Yeah. Who the hell would have thought that.

We'D be playing Radio City and sell out the freaking theater like, you know, without telling anybody what was gonna happen?

Like.

And I think the cool thing too is, by the way, I mean, you guys making these evergreen episodes again, like these documentaries, you know, I, I, they live forever, right? Like someone discovers acquired. All of a sudden it's like this, it is this amazing gift to go, you know, to go.

I totally agree with that.

Other than the original YouTube episode. But, you know, you guys have, you guys have rectified that situation.

We should put a disclaimer on that that you need to go listen to the current episode if you don't mind.

Can we jump back? Know you guys were like, I am so fascinated on how you record a four hour episode.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You do it all at once.

Then the editing, like, because again too, I r and I were talking about this. I do think part of the magic that makes you guys so amazing is how authentic you are. It is not like, it is like the perfect amount of production and not overproduced. Right. Like, again, these moments of like, real surprise that you guys keep these things from each other. Like, I just think it makes it. You can connect to it so much because you guys are just like in the moment and you're being off, you know, you're being so real. But again, I was like, are you guys doing this over multiple days? Is this just like one big well?

And before you answer that, the another anecdote that I think supports that is in the meta episode. Ben, you guys are talking.

That episode almost killed us. That was. We were.

You could tell you guys were like, this is too long. But I just can't take anything out. Like, it was, it was awesome. But Ben, there's a moment in the meta episode where you guys are describing how good meta is at like, ML and AI. And then you are caught looking at the people, you know, like, you know, like, like, you know, whatever, like, merry go round. And you're like, sorry, I wasn't paying attention for a second because I realized that there's these people I know. And I'm like, that's like a meta thing in the meta episode. It's crazy. And like, it was clear that you, like, weren't scripted. You know, you're like, oh, sorry. I, you know, I just friended these three people and I'm like, I remember that.

That was awesome.

It was awesome. It was like such a good moment, you know? So sorry.

And that was real. Totally. I like, you know, the brain is not good at paying attention. The language center of your brain can only be used for two things at once. So you can listen to podcasts while you're on a run, but you can't listen to podcasts while you're reading an article. I couldn't listen to David while I was looking for this feature on Facebook because it was like engaging the language center of my brain.

But yeah, take it like all the other stuff that goes into making a show.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, we treat it like game day. That's probably the best way to think about it. I eat different, I wear special shoes. I.

To be clear, we have no Idea what an actual NFL game day is like. But we think about it like that.

Everybody has their game day.

Here's a crazy thing. The. I can't start my final prep too early because I know that I need to have a lot of this stuff in short term memory. And so if I wrote my. My notion doc, that's what I use for. I use sort of Apple notes with all my raw stuff and then notion for the final. For recording. If I start that notion too early, it's bad because I won't have it retained in short term memory. So within like, a day and a half of recording is when I need to start making the final notion. So I remember where everything is and where it's all laid out and have that, like, quick recall. I mean, the.

We also realized a couple years ago that. Yeah. That, like, our mental, physical, and emotional health is just as important as the preparation. Yeah.

Big dinner the night before, you wake up. You don't work out in the morning, so you don't want to get tired. You do your final prep for, like, two or three hours. Sometimes it takes like five hours before we actually start because Dave and I keep texting each other. 15 more minutes. 15 more minutes. And then we start and we're standing. We both stand the entire time for like, this is serious. This is like a performance. This is, you know, you can't get. It's like, why you stand at stand up. We also want to, like, get through the material. There are mantras. Like, before we start, we have things that we say to each other. Mostly to remind myself. Like, I have a. It says at the top of every notion. Have fun, laugh. You're good at this.

Oh, I love it.

I love it.

And then you.

And then Ben will say that to me before we start. And it's kind of like. It's like a thing.

Alex, I love this afterwards. And tell you about the Tom Brady notes.

Yeah, I. I listen to that episode, you guys, when you're talking about that. Okay.

Crazy.

Come back. Yeah.

Okay.

When I first read this, it was insane because, like, again, I've, like, talked about my own, you know, with, like, doubt and losing confidence. And, like, it's Tom Brady and this is like year 16 for him. He's won, I think, four or five Super Bowls at this point. He's had, like, two hall of Fame careers. And he's talking about how in the front of his playbook. Right. Just like you're saying Ben, he would write notes, like, affirmations that he would see every day. And it's like, you're the man. Like, you got, you got this, right? And you're like, what the fuck?

Yes. Crazy.

Yes.

You know, I'm like trying to pretend, but this the. You know, and like I said, I don't know. It's interesting. It's no different than like, I, I cannot get out of my head. We just had Steve Kuron. He is statistically the greatest three point shooter of all time in NBA history. The man had to write Fi on his shoes. On his shoes to get there, right? It like, I don't know, we all need our thing.

I gotta tell you guys, I listened to that episode with Steve last week when we were preparing for our Alphabet episode. And I was thinking about Fi, like going into the. Actually there's a moment, the beginning of our Alphabet episode. I started the. With a quote from, from Russ Hanneman in Silicon Valley, the fictional character. And I swear to God, I did it because I listened to Steve on your show. Oh, I love it with Fi. And I was like, f. I, let's go. Gotta play loose. Like.

Yes, yes. Okay, so keep going. So notion dog. Have fun.

So we're good at this. We have to do it in one day. Because to me, that is important for a cohesive story. Like, it has to. In order to feel like a real conversation audience, it has to be one single conversation between David and I. Yeah.

And our voices change. The energy changes.

Voices change. Energy changes. But like, okay, I go upstairs, I start talking to my wife about it. That needs to have been in the podcast. Like, the authentic moments of reflection need to happen on air. So it all needs to be in like a continuous. Yeah, one continuous block. Which means for a four hour episode, we're recording for eight. Because there's a bunch of fluff that we cut. Like easy stuff like, hey, I'm gonna go to the bathroom. Okay, that's dead air. Okay, I'm gonna go get a sandwich upstairs. Or hey, I'm gonna retake that section. It wasn't. Those three minutes weren't super clear. I bet I can do it in one minute. But then there's really hard to cut stuff that. I'll tell you about our edit process in a second. But there's probably six hours of use, zippable stuff. And we, our goal is to ship only four of it. And so then we have a multi, you know, many days process of listening to the episode over and over and over, getting so sick of ourselves and just cutting all the stuff where you're like that. That's Extraneous. That's a tee up that we don't pay off later. So cut it so the audience isn't disappointed by a tee off that doesn't pay or a tee up that doesn't pay, or, you know, hey, David, you thought this was an A plus insight. It's an A minus insight. Like, we just got to cut it. Or David being like, ben, you took that section. You're not usually the storyteller. I'm usually the storyteller. You monologued it in a way that, like, it's just too much. So can you. Can you cut it from three minutes to one and figure out what sentences are like, too much, too extra? And it's like this, like, horrible. You almost, like, hate the work by the time you're done with it because you're so sick of it. And that's how you know you're ready to ship.

David, you know, you'll appreciate this because at one point you wanted to be a vc, right? But Mike Moritz told me one time when I first started, like, writing anything, I was like, do you have any advice? Because, like, I'm not a good writer and you're this beautiful writer. He's amazing.

And he was like, listen, Sir Michael Moritz.

Yeah, Sir. Sir, please. You know, tell me, by the way, one time we were in a shared Google Doc and I think. I don't think he usually uses Google Doc, so he didn't know I was like, in it while he was editing it. And it was like watching a painter. It was beautiful. Like, you know what I'm saying? Watching him, like, you know, delete and then rewrite something and then see the words come out. You're like, oh, my God. I truly couldn't believe I was like, getting to do it. It was amazing.

But anyway, I thought you were going to say his little avatar in Google Docs was a. Was a knight.

You know. But the thing he told me, which is so interesting, what you guys are saying is like, read it out loud. He's like, if you want to see if it's good writing, he's like, just read it out loud. Read it out loud over and over again. It will be so obvious to you what shouldn't be there. What is three sentences when it should be one. He's like, and it will. You will hate it. He's like, but just write it and then read it out loud. And what you guys are saying of, like, listening to it again and again, that's like, the discipline I think of, like, no, it's Going to be excellent. And, you know, I love that you guys are sick of it at the end because the audience, like, we feel it. You know, it's like everything's in here for a reason.

We. We adopted this mantra, which is, you don't have to ship every great minute.

Don't ship every good minute.

Yeah. You don't have to ship every good minute, but you need to ship only great minutes.

Yeah.

And so if you cut too deep, that's okay. That, that's fine. That's the side you should err on.

Yeah. You guys just had Brett and Clay on, you know, act two.

Right.

And Sierra. And one of their values of their company is craftsmanship, and it's awesome. It's like, that's, that's. That's what I hear when you guys are talking about this. Like, if you're gonna have real craftsmanship, that's the kind of commitment.

Well, this is the thing that. This is, like, directly related to what I was saying earlier about people, even people in the industry don't understand yet how big this is. We've now started to intersect with other parts of the media industry. As best as we can tell, this is the best part of the media industry. Just like business wise, almost, if not all other. You know, you look at Hollywood, you look at print media for sure. Like, these industries are not. Not in good times. And so it is a more attractive industry to be in. And yet all of the professionalism and like, editing and craft that exists to the nth degree and all those other industries mostly don't exist in podcasting. And so our kind of view is like, well, wait a minute. This is both, like, as big or bigger in terms of reach, as big or bigger in terms of business size. Why shouldn't we take this, like, as.

Seriously, Take it seriously. Be professionals. Act like the New York Times is going to send an editor over to my desk and look at something and be like, is this the best you can make it? Or is this. Are you sure this is true? Or that, you know, some great Hollywood director is going to say that this story is narrative and, like, think about that before you ship it.

That is awesome.

I cannot get this image out of my head. I do think this qualifies as a game day, Ben. I mean, the fact that you like big dinner night before I can just see you eating a big spaghetti dinner. Carb loading. We're carb loading for game day. Right? We're up early. We're cramming. Like, I. I did, like, every morning. You'd wake up. Like before games, I was like cramming my playbook. Like the first 15, all my last minute notes, right? Like the fact you guys stand for this long for 8 hours and record this, right? Like multiple meals, all in one day in a. It's just, this is Ravi. We have to step our game up.

Well, no, well, I actually, you know what, I was going to give a shout out to brother Badier who sadly couldn't be with us today. But you know, he told me this one time. So Shane, of course, I mean, the most intense game day routine that you could ever imagine because he's a fucking psycho, right? So, so. But like now he was here in San Jose to give like a speech at like a corporate event. And I was like, hey, cool, do you want to like your, your speech is like 12. You want to like have breakfast, you know, before like you're in town. You're like my brother, like, maybe we should hang out. He's like, I'm sorry I can't see you in the morning. I'm like, well, why not? You know? He's like, well, I have a routine and it's like game day. Like I got to take it really seriously. I work out, I do this thing. I'm like, bro, you do that for corporate speeches now, you know? And he's like, yeah, like I gotta give him, I gotta, I gotta go give him.

Feel bad for your family when you were playing? Yeah.

And I'm like, but like this commitment to excellence, this game day idea, like, it's so cool. It is like, it's just like a pride. And like I'm a professional.

Families are so. Oh my God. Like they, you know, our family gets a major tax on our families to do this stuff. And like they get it. So that's another one of the sort of like crazy things about like people thought I was like, why are you putting all this tax on your lives and your families to do this?

Do you guys have a debriefing kind of ritual at all? Like how often do you guys again? Because I just keep thinking about like how many game days are we going to have in a year, right? Like from your guys perspective, like we.

Should do that more formally. That's ad hoc. The prep meeting is formal. Seven days out. We have what we call the production meeting, which is where we align on the like high level points of the narrative and who's going to take what and that sort of thing. But we don't have a. We should have a post game where we look at all the data, we look at all the anecdotes, we get the feedback.

There is though a difference between, between a, you know, NFL game day or an NBA game day. And us though, is like we, we have the extended edit process. So that is sort of functions as our post game, but it, but it's not a post game. From the reception to it.

Yeah. And then the question is, to your point, it's sort of like, what. What data do you want from the reception to it? What is data that you care about and not right? Because I agree with you. You are doing like the game film by like analyzing, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting. But I, to me, I actually don't know what, what is the.

Right. There are all these questions. Like we did, we did Indian Premier League Cricket, an episode on that earlier this year. So much fun. I had a blast doing it. Ben, thank you for know, indulging me on it.

Of course. That's what we're here for. You indulged me on LVMH when that was a wacky new idea.

Relatively low performing episode relative to our other episodes. And so like we look at the data and we're like, oh, okay, like, should we not do stuff like that anymore? But then we get notes from like people you guys know who are like, yes, this was incredible.

Yes.

Or the Nintendo episode.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, Fi. There you go.

I have a strong sense of some of the people that might have written you on the Indian Premier League Cricket episode. And it's like, man, like those people are really busy, right? You know, and like they took all this time and they learned something and they felt honored and all this stuff, right?

So then the question is like, okay, well, is it the numbers that we care about or is it those sets of people who are going to engage? It's both.

And some, some anecdotes are so much like some individual data points are so much more meaningful to our business than like all the data combined.

Totally.

That you can say like that alone was worth it to do the episode. So here's a funny one. And at the risk of over oversharing Nintendo, you would think would be a big episode, it was a fine episode, especially part two. Way underperformed where we currently were in our sort of projections at that point. And Dave and I were looking at each other like, well, that's kind of a bummer. This seems like it would have been core to our audience, but whatever, I guess it just underperformed. We get Outreach two, like a year later, two C level folks At Meta that were both like, this is. This is amazing. I found your podcast because of this. I've been sharing it with my teams. We built a relationship with both of them. And then when we secured Chase center for our big thing with J.P. morgan, we were like, hey, can you ask Zuck if he wants to do the sort of big headline thing on stage? They go to him with a ringing endorsement, and that leads to us doing a live show with Mark Zuckerberg in a fricking basketball arena.

Because we did the Nintendo episodes that underperformed.

So, like, even if zero other people listened.

Right.

That actually still would have been worth it from a. What it did for the franchise.

Yeah. Well, the other thing I. I have a couple of, like, reactions to that. Three reactions. One, ironically enough, it's actually somewhat similar to, to me, a good lesson in Venture, which is like, you have to really pay attention to. To anecdotes that make you stop for a second. I'm like, sorry, what did you just say? Much more so than all of the cohorts. All this stuff, it's one thing that you're like, sorry, what? And just something you can't believe. And so there is some of the art, I think, is knowing what data, broadly defined data to trust and to lean into. So I think that's one thing that I think you guys are doing in spades. Right? Which is like, certain feedback is worth more than a whole bunch of numbers. Right? So I think that's 1, 2. I actually think that, like, for founders, which you guys are like, founders have acquired, there's like this like, longevity investment that you. You have to have fun. You have to. You have to do stuff. Like, why did Stripe do stripe press? You could, like, I don't know, like, there was like, plausibly today, some, like, rationale for stripe press that ties back to their business. But honestly, some of it's just like Patrick and John need to be interested and engaged and they wanted to do it and like, that helps them do that. And I totally agree with you on like, ipl, you know what I'm saying? On, like, you were fascinated by it. The curiosity comes through the third thing. Our feeling. And we're in a different set of numbers. But, like, when we do a one that we're really proud of that doesn't, you know, go out with crazy numbers, we honestly, our reaction is like, man, I hope. I kind of feel bad for people that didn't listen to that one. It was so good. Like, we know it was.

That's the way to think about it.

I really like on, like, we always bring this one up. Like the Wright Thompson episode. It was so good. He was so good. And people don't know who Wright Thompson is. And they didn't listen because he's not like an active athlete or whatever. And I'm like, I promise you, there are so much, like, amazing stuff in it. Like, I would do that a hundred times in a row because, like, we had so much fun and like, I don't know. So I, I, I'm fully in the camp of pro IPL and pro Nintendo episodes.

You got to be careful, though. You can't go do like, not all of them. There's a line, right?

It's like the Hollywood thing of like, one for them, one for you. You know, there's something in there.

And it's funny. We don't have a them, but, like, we want to make banger episodes.

Yeah, of course. We all have our own.

Yeah. It's the greatest feeling in the world when you're like, shit, this thing is gonna have like a couple million people that are gonna listen to it. Like, you know?

Yeah. So I have one idea for a company for you guys, if you would think about it. The Publix in Florida.

Yeah.

Grocery store chain.

Grocery store chain. And so can I give you like one or two things on them that just, I think are fascinating do.

The request line is open.

This is the hook for the episode.

Okay.

Ask anyone in Florida what their favorite grocery store is, and you're only going to get one answer. Publix. Now why is that? Because it's just a grocery store. What you'll find is it's actually like a 50 year old company that's been family owned, private the whole time and has a 247 open for buying its stock back from its employees, who are the only people that can hold it 247 right now. Let me get out of the hook for a second. But like, literally, like Publix, at one point, Publix led around an instacart many years ago. And when the guy who came up with the idea told me that they might do it, he was like, let's have Publix leaded him. Like, like a public company. Like, what do you mean? And he's like, no, no, the grocery store. And I'm like, how could they, like, lead our round? And he was like. He's like, they have $7 billion of cash on their balance sheet. I'm like, Publix has $7 billion. And today Publix might have $20 billion of cash in their balance sheet. Like truly something insane. And he's like, they're brilliant. Their stores are twice as profitable as like any other grocery store. Like, publix has like 8 or 9% margins as opposed to like 4% margins. Okay. And their NPS is crazy high. They're only in like seven states. Okay. And to this day, the only people that can hold stock in Publix are people that have worked at Publix, right. Either in an executive or like operating capacity or the family that started Publix, like, that's it. And they're I think publix, like a 50 plus billion dollar company now. And it's. Remember, dude, it's like a grocery store, you know, and this idea of the, the buyback, literally, if you're an employee of Publix, you can buy stock or sell it at any moment of the day, any day of the year from.

They have their own like, internal market making mechanism.

Every quarter. Every. Every quarter they do an independent valuation of the stock. And they want it to be that like, look, if you set the price.

It'S not like there's a dynamic price.

No, no, no. They set the price every quarter, but they'll buy it or sell it, you know, to the employee base.

They really believe that's the price.

100%. And like the guy, the CFO at the time, who I don't know if he's still the cfo, but he told me he was like, yeah, we're, you know, 9, 11. We're open. Like, our commitment to our employees is like, if you're here, we're going to take care. We really mean it. This is the price. And so there's just stuff like that. Like, I don't know if they would do it. I don't know if you could like get there certainly have not been that many books written on it. But I can tell you that company is one of the more fascinating private companies I've ever seen in my life. But Ben, I'm a little sensitive to your. Like, are we the company that. Are we the show that talks about private companies and the benefits of family?

It's fine if we took some time off. We just did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We just did a whole bunch anyway. Which honestly was a reaction to doing the meta episode where we were like, this was so, you know, big and like.

Yeah.

Uh, we were like, all right, we gotta go in a different direction.

Yeah. So public's incredible.

All right, I'll. It's a good. I'll add it to our. We have a spreadsheet of, like, all the ideas. I'll add this to the priority tab.

Oh, I love it. Thank you.

Related.

You know what we get tons of write in requests for all the time is Buc ee's. You guys know Buc ee's? No, I know it like truck stop, gas station, convenience store in the Southwest. Yeah.

It's like every region has something they absolutely love. Like there's Wegmans in, like the.

For sure. Yeah, yeah.

Northeast, you know, Eastern, Midwest. Then you've got.

We get surprisingly few in and out requests, I would think.

Surprisingly, yeah. Ohio has sheets. The Midwest has.

What is she Stations.

Sheets is like a gas station, but also a fast food joint. Like, you can get like melted cheesy sandwiches brought out to you at the gas pump. They have. They have like weirdly good food. But Bucky's is like that in Texas. On steroids.

Alex oscillates between saying he grew up in San Diego and saying he grew up in Tijuana. And so you guys can like think about if there's any suggestions that Alex has from either being like a surf kid in San Diego or like being a tough kid who grew up in Mexico. But like, I don't know. Alex, if there's anything that you add there.

Are you asking for a San Diego.

Company or Tijuana company, whichever one you decide to be.

We did Qualcomm.

Yeah.

Yeah, There you go. Boom.

Yeah. And we did. When we did Porsche, we did it with. With Doug. With Doug demuro in. In his garage in San Diego.

And originally Costco was a San Diego.

Right.

That was crazy. That was crazy.

Once a grocery man, always a grocery man, right?

Yeah. Dude, be who you are, you know? You know, but I'm telling you, when I. I just like David's reaction to. They led around and it's great. Yeah, they co led it. Sequoia and Publix co led the series D of Instacart.

It's like the big two, you know.

That'S pretty much how things go, you know, and then they're so private. They're like, you can't tell.

That must have been a highly. What year was that? Oh, yeah, that must have been a highly contentious round.

Look, the Instacart now is this great company and, you know, whatever.

But like, the series wasn't always that way though.

Yeah, it was not an easy round to raise. And so let me think about this. In January of 2017, so this is before Amazon bought Hold Whole Foods that's what it is. And so we still had the deal.

With Instacart at that point.

Yeah, yeah, Whole Foods still deal with instacart. It's like 40 plus percent of our volume. I think it's like 43% of our volume or something. When Amazon bought it, like truly like insane number. What has happened at this point is like, oh, we had raised at 2 billion in December of 20. Oh, it was January 2017. December 2015, we'd raised. In December 2014, we raised at $2 billion. We were losing all the money. Bad unit economics, whatever. What we'd basically done was we'd grown some, but we'd really like fixed the unit economics of the business between December 2014 and January 2017. But we're growing slower. We're still growing fast, but growing slower. But the real story is sort of like, hey, look, we have a real business now. It's not an easy story to tell. And On Demand goes in and out of favor, as you know. And so at this point, kind of have the usual suspects. Like, well, how exactly is this going to work? Who are we going to get? We're not sure where the lead's going to be. And our chief business officer, the guy who's like, responsible for like all the relationships with the groceries, amongst many other things.

He's awesome.

Neelam Ganetharan. He. He like has this idea of like, well, you know, maybe Publix will lead it. We're like, we're like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you like, what on earth are you talking about? And he's like, no, like, you know, like, they're interested, blah, blah, blah. And so we like go and like meet with them and how do you pitch a grocer on like, you know, leading around right to their credit are sort of like, look, like, what, what is the price for something like this? Like, we are like interested in owning equity in this company because we think it might work. But like, how do we set the price? So we kind of like, well, like, they're like, we need somebody else to like set the price. We need like a sophisticated investor who's going to put money in alongside of us. And so of course, Sequoia is our biggest investor and we're kind of like, well, like, what do you guys think? You've seen us up close. And they're like, yeah, like, well, here's what we think the price should be. And you know, it ended up being 3 billion pre.

Was Publix worried at all that it was Sequoia sort of had a blended cost basis.

So Publix very, as you can imagine, like a super high integrity company. And so a lot of it's just like, hey, like give it to us straight. Like, we want to understand this. We're going to talk to Mike. We want to talk to you guys. So a lot of it was them like getting to know us to make sure that they like trusted us, you know. And I think that. So Ben, yes, they were concerned, but the way they alleviated that concern was just like, look in your eyes, look in the whites of your eyes conversations. And it wasn't. I mean, Sequoia put in real money, you know, into this thing. And so, yeah, so like once Sequoia was like, this is the price, Publix. Okay. And so Publix and Sequoia co lead the round. So when we go to like all these various people to like fill out the round, we're like, well, Sequoia is leading and we have a Coley, but we can't tell you who it is.

But it's a giant amount of money.

Yeah.

And so people, meanwhile, everybody's probably imagining it's like, oh, you know, like, or.

Or if they think it's anybody, they think it's Whole Foods for sure. And we're like, well, we're not, we're not going to tell you. We're just not going to tell you who it is. And so, you know, we fill in the rest of the round and Publix is, you know, totally quiet. But I used to joke with the CTO Publix, this woman who's breathing, brilliant woman. I'm like, look, you're like a pretty good investor. Like the series D of Instacart did okay. You know.

Yeah.

And so anyway, yeah. So like really unique and incredible people who are willing to do different things. And so that's an amazing story. All right, well, Ben and David, we have now kept you guys for a long time away from your research, so we appreciate that. But we get to our traditional closing question, which is who are the glue guys, you know, for each of you. And it can be glue gals, glue people, you know. But, you know, who are those people in your life?

Well, of course they're all the standard people, family, you know, wife, children, parents. But it's. It's Ben. There's nobody else. Like, Ben and I are just so, you know, we've talked about this episode, but I really believe when we all along, even when we first started, like when we get together and we make an episode. It's just magic. And I. You know, I don't think it's recreatable. And we're. I think we're each other's glue guys.

Yeah. I mean, I have two spouses. I have a, like, romantic wife who I have children at a family, you know, with. And, like, David is a spouse. That checks, like, a lot of the boxes. I mean, when I'm, like, feeling anxious about something, I call because I need to talk it out with David. I. David and I shared a bank account before my wife and I shared a bank account. Yeah. Like, some people are lucky enough in life to have one person, and I have two people, and I think that that's. That's probably my answer.

This was incredible. You guys are so gracious. You guys have been good to us. We appreciate you very much. We find you guys fun, admirable, inspirational, and we're very grateful that you guys are our friends and we love, love, love, love, love what you guys are doing.