The Acquired Podcast Hosts: How They Started and Grew a Multimillion Dollar Podcast

what could you get for it you think i would not be interested in having any conversations for you know less than hey on the order of like what you got like the hustle or morning brew or you know stuff like that tens of millions yeah yeah yeah i mean i just think like the value of what we've built both as a business and revenue and our audience and our durability is you know is is in that category alright what's up we got a crossover episode call tim hard we got the guys from acquired yeah you like that you like that on that's good that's good fly maybe yeah the that's for the the five percent of of listeners who who know about basketball so so we got the guys from acquired are here we're doing kind of a joint episode a the old alabama wedding as i like to call it you know just we're just getting we're getting cousins together here because you guys got a podcast that is pretty awesome i remember when i was working at a at our previous startup a guy came to me i like there's a podcast you're gonna love it's called acquired and i go what is it he it goes it's like the back stories of these like i've all great tech acquisitions like how it all went down they go into like all the nerdy details and then i binge you guys for like six days straight and so that was that's how i kinda first got into it a couple years ago so welcome to the show david and ben thank you we did a super fun crossover over with you a couple of years ago now but it was just with sean sam you were off traveling in the world doing amazing things when i what said he was like you're probably do something maze was like probably just like a doctor's appointment or something too big it's probably yeah you guys have totally come up since then the i mean you were big back then but that was like within the first couple months i think of you starting this and it's just been awesome to a watch how far you've come yeah that was kind of an our even though it was year four or five for us that was kind of our early days too because sean you're right that we were mostly about acquisitions at that point and we talked about the be acquisition right as part of the episode and now we do these like three four hour entire you know history and strategy of a company regardless of whether there was a transaction but yeah that that feels like i don't know the funny thing about exponential growth is it feels like a lifetime ago all the time i was thinking think about that like when you pick a niche and then you kind of are gonna run out but the niche can get you somewhere so for example i thinking about this with coffees and the youtube guy who exposes people's scams and i'm like and then he did well the other day that was like he dm to celebrity to promote some n thing like hey we'll pay you to promote the n thing and like the white paper said like this shit to scam or whatever but he didn't read it obviously he was promoted it he's like scammer and i'm like but you cut that's kind of in ent like you create you're running out of people to like to to cover here you had to down create scammers like i don't think that's like back of the day exactly but like that wasn't his original stick but i was yeah you're not gonna like you're trying to be on this youtube once a week treadmill and there's not once a week gonna be a giant logan paul like celebrity name did this bad thing and i'm gonna be the exposure it's like what are you gonna do next tuesday because there's not like this isn't that that current but you guys did a good job of of switching up people said that to us sean and like you're gonna round ideas and i was like yeah we might but then it just kinda like morph into like us saying a lot of like it's like people are when i i someone yesterday said was like what's your podcast about was like well the name pretty bad it's definitely a lot about business but we also make a lot of horrible jokes too so people kind of like it for that reason yeah i've been thinking about this a lot your niche earns you the right to exist but it's in in media but it's your you're sort of demeanor and you're the way that you look at the world that then gives you license to expand from there so like a david my friend it's just we go i think if david and i had started with like we're a podcast that talks about businesses it's like cool right next but if you like pitch people on really specifically what their what you've like the job to be done of your show and their life is then you can sorta of like expand and explore from there right like ben ben should the ben producer ben should have been like you know you know mormons taking over the world started with the mormon community then expanded it from there i remember talking to the guys from wait but why that great blog yeah yeah and this guy wait guys this is there a team it's it's not just tim it's tim and then it's just childhood friend andrew who does like the back end all the business stuff they have a really interesting business they like acquire companies that are completely unrelated to wipe and why like that's how they make their money and then they just wait why fun like that's kind of the the this the model but i was asking about content because i was like you know i admire wife but why so tell me about this and i was you know i'm trying to figure this out i kinda like to talk about this and i kinda like to talk about this and he's like you need your like your flagship franchise and you do your franchise and then people will love that franchise but they'll also love you and they'll you'll earn the right to talk to them about like you wanna talk about like mindset stuff cool but unless you think mindset is the right place to start wait earn the the trust on the business side and then say by the way here's my mindset stuff and then you'll get some percentage of the people to cross over and then a new audience there too you just keep launching new franchises after that love it it's so it's also like the we even you guys you know you you started several years after us but like i think you still when did you guys start three years ago night twenty september of twenty nineteen i think or oh wow yeah yeah earlier than not yet we were twenty fifteen but even in twenty ninth like it was still kinda earliest enough days in podcasting that like the medium was the mainstream portion of podcasting meeting was still early enough that people were looking for new stuff right and like that i think has changed now in a pretty way the way that it started was basically like i was in austin or somewhere as was living in san francisco time and sean texted me he was like hey i have an idea for a podcast here's the pilot do you guys wanna does hustle wanna be the publisher and i listened to it and i like i just listened to the intro and i was like yep we're in let's just air this exact one next week and we'll start by way that that was a little bit of a f i i basically told you i was like hey you know why i was like why don't you do and sam i was like like i gotta hire somebody to do i don't know we we was focused on this email i was like well i got a podcast i'm gonna do a podcast will you be the publishers he's like and i was like i'm i already i knew that took sealed the deal i needed to send him a file but i hadn't recorded it yet i go i already needed did the first episode you want like take a listen to it and then i like just goes to them on messenger for twenty four hours so i could go record the episode then came back was like oh my bad here's the file so there really wasn't up episode first messaged you but i was like i got the vibe that if this is good if i get like a good first thirty five seconds this is done and so that's what i went and did yeah and we were like we're in and then he did it his way it was called my first million because it was like first million users revenue whatever and it was great it was great as it was but like there there was one time like three months in where a guest didn't show up and he was like i booked the space you just wanna come in like talk and i was like i guess and we did that and then it kinda like did well but like our the first episode he did by himself it got sixty five thousand downloads and we were like do podcasting podcasting easy this is gonna be awesome and then over the next twelve months it basically went down to like as low as like maybe ten or fifteen thousand and then since then it's basically just been a slow grind now we're anywhere from a hundred to two hundred thousand per per episode if you include the youtube our youtube is is pretty weak it's like twenty to fifty thousand twenty to a hundred thousand and then the rs feed which is like itunes and all that stuff that's maybe a hundred or something like that what where are you guys at because like no one talks about this stuff like whenever you google i remember we are googling like how do we get to a hundred thousand downloads but everyone out there was like here's how you get your thousand first ten thousand i was like okay but like how do we get bigger we're we're almost the exact same scale with a very different journey i mean every journey is you unique on this stuff so our episodes get about two hundred thousand downloads listens whatever you wanna call it which is interesting because spotify has become so much more of the market now per episode but unlike you guys we do like one episode a month you know one to two episodes a month and they're really really long so we have with a few exceptions that we can talk about we've never had like kinda of big spike viral you know breakout moments it's been a you know eight year journey from like zero up to that we don't really have spikes like there's spiky stuff but it's not like a true like morality moment and interesting you guys so one thing that's interesting about content and media is everybody measures the number nobody measures the quality because the quality is way harder to yep understand yeah but clearly there's a difference between two hundred thousand people listening to an episode of acquired versus two hundred thousand views on a tiktok okay we get that because kinda short versus long but even if it was a podcast about sports versus a podcast about business acquisitions the type of people that are gonna listen to your thing are just inherently more valuable yeah have you guys thought about that seeing that do you guys i feel i mean that's the whole that is the whole business not that we started or do this for the business side although it's become a great business that is the whole business side and and also on the content side too like we made we started doing this for us to learn and then we're like well who you know would also wanna learn for the video people like us and that's kinda who we make it for like so we struggle with youtube with tiktok with twitter like we're not good on any of those other platforms even though we do optimize content and do it now because like we don't this just not kinda how are we designed to the show and to to to ground it forty percent of acquired listeners our c level or vp level executives twenty three percent are currently founders twelve percent were previously founders and if you break down by job seventeen percent or engineers fifteen percent are actively ceos today and twelve percent are product managers right and so like the whole business for us and to david's point it didn't start as a business but where we are today is like i don't really want millions of listeners i want acquired to like kinda slow its growth but saturate the niche that we're in because i think it's the most valuable audience in the world right and i don't know exactly what that leads to but like all the conversations david and i get to have with our listeners because of who they are are like super fascinating well what will it lead to so like you know you do you you can probably make a great living off of just the advertising but i'm looking at your site you don't sell anything what's it gonna lead to well we do have merch that hoodie you're aware of right now it's pretty dope does that merch all i this is marquez hoodie yeah which david ml who's on marquez team is a become a good friend and his acquired listener and he hooked me up with this this this hoodie rocks yeah i i sent the picture to our from a merch person i screenshot and i had that moment where i was like you know that thing we were on a zoom call i don't know if you guys do this but screenshot and it's like makes the really loud ass sound of like a screenshot has been taken and then you gotta like address it like it was a fart during the during the call i'm was really worried that when i take here were doing that thing on every slide of my deck this is total discretion and we'll come back to it but fourth wall makes there so marquez is an investor fourth wall walker williams the founder he was the founder of tees spring awesome guy we've gotten to know him we're we're talking to them now i think yeah march yeah they're they are great and they made this fully custom for marquez and it's it's being what's his name brown is that a same k d yeah the the you i mean i you said first name like he's oprah like you know i was like guy i about oh it's that guy well he has like twenty million youtube subscription i mean i know him as like the guy who it reviews a tech but he also like has interviewed test eel elon and all these like great guys i mean he's unless they've come on this podcast they're i don't know them that there's this podcast might agenda shrinks you in my mind he's also the craziest thing is like as if it wasn't enough to operate this like pretty large scale tv production studio at this point as a as a youtuber he's also like one of the best ultimate frisbee players in the world oh really yeah he's a best an ultimate frisbee player as see that i can see that that's a that's a very obvious crossover do you have a so like when we'll just talk real insider base off for a second and then we'll move on but with podcasting a lot of people ask us how to start it and stuff like that and i'm like i don't know how to grow it it's quite challenging but what i've really enjoyed getting to know is like andrew hub man i i'm you know acquaintances but not friends friends with him really but like well chat every once in a while and he's like i like on spy each other was shirts off but we i mean i wouldn't call each other friends but i show we saw it together this is a say be like oh i was probably at a doctor's appointment for like your life is just like i listen to you guys and like wow no bro i like he was he was on our but he was on our pod so like i know i'm like an hour plus like five text messages in exchange so like that's the extent that i know him but he i think there if you look at spotify when he releases an episode it's typically the most popular on the charts and i think they're in the million mark million per episode which is how we like them measure it is there anyone else in the business category that's in the two hundred five i mean all ins is probably four hundred maybe five hundred thousand do you know like how big do you have to beat to be some of the biggest of course there's dave ramsey he's he's in a whole different category yeah it's funny it depends because like business kinda gets lumped in with all these other like personal finance type categories but i think in r il yeah they should make a like the bad category and move dave ramsey ass over there yeah yeah out you know and it's all into like has been an amazing breakout they've become more of a mainstream news and political show i mean still talk tech in business but that i think is a lot of their audience they're huge now but yeah our category i would say like invest like the best probably is most directly comparable in terms of size and audience makeup also founders and david sandra who's and he's part of the colossus network with patrick who else jason's other show this weekend in start that we go on all the time but logan bartlett has a much smaller audience because he's much newer but like a plus guess and really i mean he's i think he's he's got the the most valuable niche of niche in terms of the people who listen to his show why because of vcs it's like silicon valley insiders for lack of a better i mean it's vcs it's founders but i think like his interviews i always feel like he pulls out most valuable jeez of small boy stuff right there let me sam let me ask you a different question that i've actually never so so you so david said something a second ago which is kinda like the para phrase would be we made the podcast for people like us or we made the podcast that we would wanna listen to right is that fair to kind of summarize your your position david hundred percent and i feel like that with this podcast i started the mill road that way but it quickly transformed into like crypto news which is actually not what i i actually people know this that i've said this i don't read or consume the news so it's was really funny that we made a news like thing it got big and then sold it but like truthfully it didn't end up becoming the thing that like i hate this for me for people like me out there sam you subscribed to that like i guess like in theory you could say the best thing to do is to scratch your own itch to build the product you want be the you know make it for people like you then you're not guessing but then in practice sometimes you know the mass market is not where you're at and you go for that so sam what's your take on that i think we it it started m m started that way and it is mostly that way every once a while you know sean will be like we need more views let's like get this guest and sometimes we give into it sometimes we don't the hustle started out because i liked the news and then about a two years in i was like i don't care about the news anymore but this is my job so i'm gonna keep doing it i don't i don't i listened to zero business podcast now i basically only listened to like crime and fiction and things like that and so i don't listen to a business podcast anymore but i think this podcast has mostly stayed of which just like who what do i wanna do what does sean what do we wanna talk it's yeah it's mostly stayed that way but we we do like i have to fight like i was messaging sean like this this last night and i was like dude we need to be stricter about our guests because we've had like a bunch of people like who asked to come on and we're like yeah they're huge and i'm like wait i don't give a shit about this person i don't like i don't i wanna have like if this person invited me over again dinner i wouldn't be excited and so we definitely fight that i i would assume either this is we're realizing that it's the case for us although it's different because we tell stories but for you guys owed like the reason your audience is here is for you right like it's not for your guess right yeah i think sometimes though the the guests you know i i basically told him i said there's three to three three or four types of guess four the here's the four that i think exists there's the people that are like us and they're just bringing a different like flavor new fresh ideas so like for example when you guys first came on you guys you got the stick you knew what we do on this podcast i remember you guys came with a bunch of business ideas you're like oh this airbnb wifi network that's like you know oh my god you remember even the the idea because that's saw your face that idea came back to me right i got like the some people have photographic memory i have idea memory i can remember any idea so that was like you guys got the sc so you came on you brought ideas which is great because donny loves that steph smith is a great example of this she comes on she brings ideas people like her even though she's not the big name you know famous o ceo of x she's amazing job so that's like number one number two is basically like they are the big name so somebody who a bunch of people are gonna click on and might bring new audience like you're legit famous in some way yep you had pom on recently well how he would be three which is internet famous like legit famous like you know they're they've that kind of like outside pairs hilton or something yeah like they don't have a podcast so they don't have a newsletter they don't have like an internet community they're just like famous famous then there's your internet famous and the last one is personal like we wanna nerd out with them and so that would be like like ariel h hawaii yeah we we have hawaiian like a i don't know how much of our audience cared about that but i cared i wanted to have that conversation and we've you know sam was like oh like i can write out as awesome he's like this fifty year old like marathon record breaker guy like i just wanna talk to and it's like great let's do that so it's kinda like we are gonna be so into the conversation and we are sure that the person is interesting to us it'll be interesting to some portion of the audience and so it's like to us those are the four and i think the one you get tripped up on the most is just the the legit famous person because they they don't actually listen pod they may not bring bring the juice and it's almost like the expectations are high and you almost disappoint because it's like oh alright well that was kind of a lame conversation with that person and they don't have any of their own distribution the nice thing about internet famous is at least they can help distribute the content but real regular famous people it's like unless they're getting put in people magazine or cast in the latest movie they actually have no way to reach an audience directly yeah you know who does that for us is da the founder of hubspot every time he comes on he get it get his episodes get really popular and he's always doing he is popular and his content is great and also he always does some internet marketing stuff where he he's kills it he tells him for us every time that's that's the best kind of guest that'll come on and for promote right and he pays the bills too so he's the sponsor that raised the guest he green he drives the grill yeah at all done domestic come on acquired the crazy thing we noticed about guests recently just looking at our analytics and the the the two things and both of them are true one hundred percent of the time without fail one every single time we set a new episode record it is an episode that is like just david and i doing nintendo l berkshire hathaway like our canon canonical three hour format and two every single time we have a guest on it is less listened to than our previous episode yeah interesting saying just last question is how do you guys prepare for that you just like both read the same book and take notes and then just tell story we mostly read different stuff but we've kinda architect i mean this is our like our differentiation as a show which is so anti all the rules of podcasting but i is what makes us special is we have carved out that like we can take a month in our lives and do you know it's kinda like if you're were reading a term paper in college like we can do the research independently each of us on a company on a topic and then we come together and it's like i don't know it's like a thesis defense or something that we do the goal is like between the two of us to have basically consumed every piece of content on the company like every other podcast that's ever been done all the big books that have been written all the talks given by the founder try and find a bunch of weird stuff like talks given at industry conferences that have low view counts on youtube obviously read all the sources of all of wikipedia page for the companies it's basically like no one should be able to dm us after the episode and be like oh did you make did did you see this this important piece of information on the company we we wanna always be like defensive no we have consumed everything about this company i think like i think the magic is that like if we if the output of that were a term paper it would be really boring and nobody would read it but because the output of that is ben and i is really good friends like talking about it like that kinda makes right magical yeah the the phrase we've been n on is conversational audiobooks oh that's cool to describe what it is are there any odd commonalities that you've seen amongst like the savages that you've done stories on so for example ben wilson has you know he does how to think over the world and it's historical figures and he's like you know it's weird john rockefeller edison and napoleon a bunch of these other people they ate really lightly like they didn't eat a ton of food because they said that when they over ate they felt brain fog and about for a bunch of different reasons are there any strange commonalities that you've you've found amongst like these conqueror of the world well we talk more about companies than we do about people like ben and david center over at found or or companies yeah or or companies i mean it's the classic like being contra and right and you have to be both contra and right but the people that were studying in the companies that we're studying are such extreme outliers like there's such the they're they're forced standard deviations from the mean in terms of like how did a company do and so they were they're sort of like an n of one like there's one ts in the world there's one l who owns all the most valuable luxury brands except her as and it sort of happens in a unique way every time and so i guess the the biggest takeaway for me is like it usually is the founder doing something that like literally everybody else had left for dead and and and when i say that i mean bernard no going and buying christian dior from the french government out of bankruptcy in when was that the eighties david eighties yep or at like literally no one else was bidding on this like dead asset or the the example for starting ts c is like zero other people thought that you should be starting a foundry when you have no chip ip to make other people's chip designs like that was there was zero on the people i thought that would big like there is no there is no formula every story is unique but a big big category is like something that has been left for dead for like sometimes it's inventing something new whole cloth but like really big category is like oh this thing is over dollar david nintendo yeah my nintendo google goal video game crash of of nineteen eighty three like the market for video games in the united states went from three billion dollars to a hundred million dollars over the course of two years everybody was running screaming from the industry and they thought video games were a fad and it's over and then you have nintendo that comes in launches the nes and then within five years has ninety five percent market share and has grown the industry back to a three billion dollar industry it seems like nut job bets has that has that like given you guys any confidence to succeed you think like because sean and i talked to all these awesome people and like we'll talk to there there are a handful of people and i i said this a bunch there's a handful of people who we talk to and we say oh you're definitely like significantly smarter than we are or you're you're significant you have this part that's more significant than us and then there's other people who will talk to that are worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and it's like well you're not like twenty times smarter than us even though you're twenty times richer but like you might be a little bit or sometimes a little bit less and that's given us confidence at least me for sure because i'm like oh you definitely are insecure you questioned yourself you doubt yourself but you still went through with it it's a good question like i know how to be contra i'm not sure i know how to be right yet like we're halfway there baby yeah yeah exactly like i i i i you know we know how to make everyone tells you should make short podcasts that release every single week and you should have guests on to help build your audience and we do basically none of those things and everything that has worked for us is doing the exact opposite of those and so does that mean keep doing the opposite of every piece of advice everyone gives you because that's the path of success i don't think so but if we over fit to the data that we've observed so far that is what it would look like and so i i'm hesitant to like keep being contra for the sense of being contra but but i think that the important part that comes with this is like having a feedback loop with your customers or in our case with our listeners to understand like what makes you love this and how do we lean harder into that and and sort of shut out general advice and pay more attention to like the the the things our customers are expressing by way i picked up a little poker tell on people who on contra contract how do you tell a real contra versus a i wannabe be contra and this is a little tell i picked up over time which is yeah yeah in the tech world i think because of peter t there's just like kind of like real sex appeal to should be contrary and you put it your twitter bio you're probably not it yeah exactly same with poly yeah poly matt's another one of them as being more visionary as being been as being and sam have have joked about like or like if you're an engineer being like slightly on the spectrum i'm like yeah that's a another indicator of success it's like here we go the one that is i think a tell when it comes to being contra is how excited are you that you have this country an idea because that shows people who are country for the sake of being country meaning like they're really excited to tell you how the i think everybody else thinks a but it's actually b whereas the real people i've seen that are contra they just see a and they're almost like i'm confused why people don't think a a is clearly right they're they don't spend time trying to like convince the whole world of it like you know if if they're asked they tell the truth and then when people reacted a big way like oh man i can't believe you think that they're like i can't believe you don't think that it just seems like the truth to them and so that's what i've noticed is like if you if you watch old videos of like you know peter t talking like i think biology is is somebody who's like this today they they they're happy to explain their point of view and they explain it like this is just what's gonna happen or this is what i i believe to be true but they don't get high on the idea of of being is a subtle difference as a bunch of people i've met in real life that that i kind of of noticed this on it's hard to explain but you'll see next time you kind of run to somebody who's who's over eager and over excited about the fact that they have this contra opinion it's they're kinda just performing social versus they actually believe that it reminds me a lot of it's like we all know this guy or girl who likes the idea of a relationship more than they like their current relationship and they're they're very excited to like have this particular lifestyle and you can sort of tell you're into that new lifestyle you have more than the person you're actually with right so right did you want a boyfriend or did you want ben right like do actually want here yeah let me tell a story it interesting though like oh god i was just gonna tell one on the thing sam you talked about like what are the interesting success patterns it reminded me of an experience i had well while back i went to china when i was maybe twenty one years old and got to go to the alibaba like alibaba flew out a bunch of entrepreneurs to go like meet with it was supposed to be jack m but we ended up meeting with this guy david way who's like there jack mo right hand man he was the guy who was running alibaba at the time and i i didn't even know what alibaba was like i think alibaba was a big deal like now i'm mean now i'm like now i would've have taken that really seriously i i had no idea who they were at the time and we get there and somebody asked him this question they raise her hand they go what do you think is the most important things for success for the success of a company alibaba is a multi billion dollar company you know what what made it successful and he goes he goes models for success are misleading they cannot be copied due to the like unique combination of luck timing all these other things but he goes but what you can ask me is a better question which is what are the common keys to failure and he goes they're always the same and he goes we study the the things that lead to failure and just tried to avoid those so he goes you know i leaned in i was like please blow my mind sir go ahead yeah and he's like he goes there's three things that lead to failure money plans of technology he goes so our plan was no money no plans no i go what and and like this is crazy because like a tech company worth like forty billion dollars like what are you talking about and he goes hey so i he goes alright we go money money makes people stupid and when problems come up their first thing instinct becomes throw money at it rather than attacking it with creativity so basically way back when google was google was like dominating with adwords and so they're the people at alibaba like we need to make our version of adwords and he goes you know this is no order it's like you know building this type of ad network is not like super simple he goes so jack mark kinda check for two hundred fifty thousand dollars to build this project and lat team like laugh like you're you're missing three zeros on the back of this like are you talking about two hundred fifty k and he goes that's how much money it took me to start alibaba like i i i had less than that starting the whole company so if you need more than that for a feature we're doing it wrong he's like they're like well how are we supposed to do this he goes do exactly what i did with alibaba he's like so he moved nineteen people into his apartment where he had started out music that office yep you're gonna work there he's like you need servers to run the ad servers cool go find some like go get some used junk servers and like re rig them get them ref them and make them work and they go but there's no redundancy he goes if you're building within where you need redundancy like we've we've done this wrong right like you know this is you need to build build this so that it works without redundancy first and and so he he did that for that that the no money then he's like no technology he's like everybody wants to call us a tech company no we are a service company we're here to serve our users if you don't think of yourself like you're in the service industry you're in the wrong industry and then his last one was planned and like alright well dude how'd did you do this like why no plans why our plans is bad he goes you he goes well you know you guys are fifty young entrepreneurs who got flown out here to do this i i assume in america you guys have done something good otherwise why would we have picked you he goes how many of you are doing what you initially planned to do and like nobody's hand went up and here's is like exactly it he goes plan is plans are fine but they always change that's the only thing we know about plans the mission never waivers sometimes you'll need a plan to get others to believe but remember you should not believe that plan you should follow your gut and adapt constantly to the circumstances don't follow the plan you wrote when you started follow your mission follow your vision follow the why if you do that you will be successful and i was like dang did you did you write all this down yeah you reading notes so so maybe years ago after that after that event i wrote i tried to write a book in like two weeks and i wrote half of it and so this was one of my chapters in that book and i just found the pdf on my computer when you were talking about awesome that's all hilarious that's amazing that you did that because that was years ago what a great story it's so applicable i loved that that's applicable to alibaba just as much as like i'm thinking about you guys and us and like how we started the conversation like yeah we had no money we had i guess we had technology in that like podcasting in the internet is inherent level it like we're building a tech company or we're building pride it was like no it's like expecting something no plan yeah like it's funny like i we see a lot i'm sure you guys do too people come to us like how do i start a podcast i sorry successful podcast we see like big companies come the like offline celebrities that wanna start podcasts and it's like they come with money technology and a play at and they're like it's not how it's gotta work that it's good sense you guys probably see this with your episodes like how many of them started doing what they're doing like i i don't know i haven't listened to all the recent ones but like i don't was nintendo what we think of nintendo today or did it nintendo was making wait wait real quick do either of you know the origin story of nintendo or or have a guess at how old nintendo is i think it's really i remember reading it once i don't i don't remember off top of my head but it was is it like sony where they were like selling rice or something and then now they're who they are it's even better yeah it's a hundred and thirty year old company yeah started in eighteen ninety nineteen eighty nine i think yeah and their original business was making hanna cards which is the japanese version of us playing cards but us playing cards were illegal to import like because people from the us could were it was not legal to be in the country and david i think you at this point they literally would execute you yeah came in well intend to start spread after this but before the mate restoration like japan went through this multi hundred year period of strict isolation ism where like you would be executed if you were a foreigner and you entered the country likewise if you were a japanese person and you left the country and came back you would also be executed sense but like playing cards are this thing that like has product market fits they're like out like playing cards universal human need so it literally started making hana cards and their distribution channel was through the yakuza to illegal casinos yeah yakuza being like the mafia the japanese mafia yeah yeah they started making these playing cards in like a very small part of the market was like oh you have a pack of playing cards in your house but just like everywhere else in the world the market is casinos because you use a fresh deck for each right hand so that there's no cheating yeah so nintendo is like deeply embedded with the yakuza and for like sixty years this was their business before they started making toys wow and then what some like visionary within the company was like hey this there's this new things cool crazy family like really tragedy of like this cycle of death and like terrible parenting in the passed down to four generations generations generations of the same family and but actually not the same family because they had no sons and they needed sons so they were marrying their daughters off to people who could take over the the business yeah exactly and one of these guys was basically just like so pissed off at like the family legacy that this is roche yam who started the modern nintendo he was like i wanted to first diversify the business i wanna get out of this and he did a partnership with disney in nineteen fifty nine yeah nineteen fifty nine he nintendo brought disney and disney ip into japan post world war two turns out i literally have the cards toys somewhere acquired fans sent them to me oh wow started words yeah and then they brought toys and then they started making their own toys because they had like lock on the retail distributors yeah wow so started his cards and they were like then they went said to all these retailers they were like oh you want the disney products you're gonna take our products it was that jimin many cricket as the joker jimin cricket as the joker and making now a golfing on this old school card deck that's amazing that's like you gotta wear that with you gotta wear gloves if you're gonna that or something that's like a a seriously h ancient artifact this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully into integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hot spot girl adam can i ask you guys a a couple rapid fire questions yeah about some of the companies that you've you've discussed number one which company of all of everyone that you've went over would you want to own like what which what's what's the one that you envy well that way those are two different questions which would you want to like own the stock of and which do you want or which do you wanna like oh be an investor in or or actually own the company yeah yeah the second actually own and which one do you envy most actually own i think is the nfl yeah i think that has the most like durable franchise and own is always a funny question because what's your entry price like do i to buy stuff at today's prices or if i think about sort of like durability of the asset and i sort of ignore where things are training and what market values today the nfl is seven layers of entrenched in our society and to be an american at this point means to have the nfl in your life and they also david you pointed this out on our episode everyone thinks it's really cute to like stack rank all the the media franchises marvel's worth this and you know all the way at the top of the charts pokemon worth this but like the nfl is worth so much more than any of those the nfl tv contract alone is twelve billion dollars a year the most recent set of rights they parcel up was like isn't it now it's like eighteen or nineteen billion a year i think something insane but and they recently signed a ten year deal so it's like a hundred and fifty billion dollar like for the nfl has all the franchises but is there basically like this like top level hold c that owns like the media rights and the franchise this capitalism they all own it together but the nfl unlike any of the other leagues out there is this is they're starting to be a few little cracks in this but like they negotiate with the tv contracts and now all the streaming and everything unified as a league so there's no like like how the yankee have the guest network like their own tv network it's none of that in the nfl it's all together and it's all equal revenue have you guys done an episode on ml am yeah way we with me what's that actually the first investment before the acquisition these you guys can tell you the this the full version of their accurate version i'll give you the the dumb version which is the major league baseball had created a tech like a tech team based it's a tech company inside of med baseball c owned by like the the teams and the good job was like hey like people are trying to listen to this on the radio we need to like do digital streaming et each because when et came over from japan they needed to distribute remember were that guy him suzuki the guy who played on the mariner yeah it was like a phenomenon and so people in japan wanted to watch or and watch even an option i think was listened to the games so they needed internet streaming audio and so they built this thing they started offering it and then each team would use it so i was like oh each team c funded it so they would like cut a check and then that developed technology for all of but then they ended up spinning it out as a multi billion dollar company because they're the best at video streaming now like they stream if you wanna watch a game of thrones it's ml video tech that streams game of thrones so that win yep whatever ten million people click play as soon as the episode drops that like the thing doesn't crash which is kinda kind of an a you know just an amazing thing and so that like spin out oh like who would have ever thought like one of the big tech companies you know unicorn tech companies came out of like this baseball coop up c funded thing it's like kind of an the insane story and it was in like two thousand and four or something that they started working on it they had a five year head start on having the insight that this infrastructure was gonna be important over netflix like everyone thinks like oh netflix you know is in with the isp isps and it's the best in the world that this like bam tech was doing that five years earlier yep and then ended getting acquired by disney and like is a huge part of espn streaming like all the espn plus plus disney plus like it's it's crazy history is there is there a certain founder ceo leader who you would rank as the the person you'd least want to compete against mh whether they're whether historical or modern here here's another one phrasing that that i heard that like there's somebody signed with the nfl draft and there's was like four qb that were competing and they're like wow this guy's got good arm this guy's get it running this guy's great leader right up blah blah and then this guy asked this question i love to let's say they all went on vacation and they rented a car and they're walking out to the to the jeep who who do they throw the keys to to drive this car like who's the leader who's the alpha alpha it wants these qb so so who's that in the ceo i think we gotta say jensen jensen long from nvidia like he's such a badass ass so like i don't know anything about nvidia because i just know it's a killer stock so nvidia makes the chips that are in computers and and and does it involves display like you get like a nvidia yeah is is that right yeah so nvidia is is in their sort of third major as a company yeah third but loosely defined as like they popularized the idea of a gpu in addition to the cpu and originally the use case was for video games in the nineties and you know i think everyone who ever built pcs remembers is like oh man i gotta get this hot new gpu to slide in the card because it's better than integrated graphics thing from intel and so that was sort of their market for a while and it it was all about gaming pcs but then like again five six seven years before the rest of the market jensen basically made this bet where he saw researchers using the the gpus the gaming graphics really going to best buy and buying a bunch of nvidia graphics cards to do ai research and he was like i think we should lean really heavily into this and so he spent billions of of dollars and thousands of head count for five years to build up this like whole software stack called cuda that if ai and ml was gonna become a thing then people were going to use cuda to develop exclusively on nvidia hardware and so by the time it did become a thing like five years ago nvidia had this enormous moat around it as being the platform to develop ai on and it just so happened that the technology this like super heavy parallel processing matrix math technology that makes gaming graphics chips work is the very same math that powers what ml is all based on but other than so nvidia if i listen it's i just looked it up it's a six hundred fifty billion dollar companies so one that i don't know top twenty thirty biggest business in the world but other than him being correct what makes this person like a savage or or they that they're just like there's so many points in his julie he is nineteen wives let me well he actually he's a total family man he's been married to the same person he met in college of have two kids like he's but like he's got a giant tattoo of the company's logo on his shoulder he wears leather jackets he drives really fast cars he's like he's basically got like elon accepts not like like right like and he's accept right and like leads with kindness and but like he i mean they're at like in each phase of the company the absolute rational thing to do was like basically shut it down and like you know like talk about being left for dead like this company was left for dead multiple times and he's built like just single handedly this dude created the ai revolution that we are in today like nvidia and cuda is essentially like you can think about it as like the android plus ios of ai like no nvidia and no cuda no decision by jensen to do this we are not living in the world we're living in today with them i'll give you a different answer for the thing you're actually looking for which is like who is the most savage person to compete against that answer is bernard ar no from l so rich is in the world today and he got there not by being the founder of a business that happened to have product market fit and appreciated wildly it's because of his deal prowess and the way that he was able to effectively out smart the rest of the market to hoover up seventy of the the history's most important and trusted brands into one umbrella and then find leverage in every single thing he does to expand the empire is there anyone who you think is overrated who's on a pedestal and you think i don't think that that great i think it worked out when i think they're overrated it's a very una acquired question if and i are nice people we are we don't well we're pick that one one that i like to i like to talk about damn person or you could pick anyone but somebody was like no i think one that i likes to talk about here is i don't know the overrated it is right but like i i think a lot about investing about there's this great buffett quote not one of his most well known ones but it's something like you wanna own a business that you know even an idiot could run because someday someone will you know and i think about to me what that means is like you wanna own a business you wanna invest in a business that like literally you cannot kill it there's nothing you can do to stop this juggernaut and to me that's airbnb and we talked about this a lot on the opposite episode we did on airbnb but like it's just like the most amazing global network effect of all time and literally like i don't you know this is my opinion but i don't think there's anything that any manager could do to change the like to in inflict the trajectory of that ship you know so my i i like there's a a long story don't feel like telling it but i had a job airbnb when i was like twenty two and i dropped school moved out and then i got denied whatever and so i didn't end up working there but i the interview with the founders and then years later my wife ended up working there and during work from home for covid brian would give these talks every thursday and we lived in a small apartment so i like inevitably would hear it i think that i agree with you it's a once you have a marketplace that's working it's hard to screw it up ebay is doing a good job though but i you know if it works like it's it's a good it's a great thing it's a quite durable but i would listen to brian chess get these thirty minute like thursday talks that guy is bad to the bone i read a little bit i i read the walsh the walt disney biography and he reminded me exactly of him he is a you know like i think someone said there's a difference between a missionary and mercenary mercenaries are hired guns who are ruthless but missionaries they they really care about what they're doing i i sense that with him that guy i think is is is a bit killer i think that he's people think of him as this nice guy of which i think he is i think he's way way more of a killer than people give him credit for and he's very wise that he's a really good leader but that's cool i i like airbnb and i think and i think it's cool that i i agree it probably would be hard to kill and last question which person who you covered would you would kick your ass physically and you'd at least wanna have a physical confrontation with i mean actually jensen yeah you think he you think you think so well he's getting in age but like yeah no he like he lifts he's just like such a character well i certainly i mean we're coming right off of nintendo but like har yam backed in the day not because he was physically intimidating but like literally like the man was a bed with the yakuza like you know oh they oh i got across him oh doug yeah like lisa sat david and i walked in to interview doug leon it's a great story and doug is the founder of sequoia yeah now the founder managing partner yep got it one one bit head hon show at one point of of one of the best venture apple firms ever through google and you know the the the true heyday of of sequoia which or you could argue that was recently but amazing era of sequoia and so we a lot of times like with guests we'll get to like spend some time beforehand and get to know them and go out to dinner afterwards and build real relationship and we like email or text and he guys know the drill and so with with doug we we didn't communicate with him at all beforehand it was all with what some some other lovely people at sequoia and we walk in and we set up and someone walks in the room and then they go okay are you are you ready and we were like yep and they were like great we'll go get doug doug walks in he sits down he says hello are we starting and we're were like yeah so we hit record and we feel like so we did a whole episode make me a laugh finish right we just recording dogg goes doug just goes great thank you so much and he walk gets up and leaves the room so every word that i've ever spoken with with doug on like two or three is on the record in the episode that you can listen to in our podcast feed and later his z did come in and say hey doug wanted to know if you guys had any feedback he's always looking to get better and and sort of like came in and chatted with us but i was like wow that is it does exactly wanted to say she you or he waste so wing so i his and the assistant is just punched in the arm and gave you a rad said that's from doug he also had i he has i think still to this day the best quote acquired yes that was not uttered by ben me quoting somebody else from history but the best live quote acquired he was talking about after the dot com crash when sequoia was like kinda made this vow at no lp would lose money like they wouldn't take a mu fund they would like work the portfolio companies they don't take salaries make sure that they have positive returns as they said he's like mike mori and i linked arms alright i wasn't i think it was linked our you said mike and i decided that like we would stand there and we wouldn't flinch and you could burn cigarettes on our arms and we would like if we wouldn't take a mu on these funds they're like damn he also has kind of an accent right like he's doesn't he's got this italian five yeah that's cool are there are are are there any more of these like tough guys or tough women like that are out there now i mean when i hear that it's i always like like oh that was a different generation they like nowadays yeah like he like yeah well elon he ate like tough tough like travis free i think is still like this yeah yeah and he it's a giant breed though like we he's like yeah frank my my badge is not working to get into the office he's still got teeth don't you he's like you know that's like a when you read that guy's book you're like alright yeah this would be a pretty hardcore boss to work under yeah it's totally a lost start though like yeah i don't i don't think they make them like that anymore unfortunately yeah that's crazy before we go do you guys have have any half baked business ideas you wanted to share with the the my first million audience because that's what they love yeah would love to do so i have one that i was we're actually kicking around together benjamin me for a while but that we're not gonna do which is i think you could actually start a corporate podcast agency so an agency for companies to make their own podcast podcasts or external either one and my thesis on this is that for companies there's is tremendous value to having a podcast even if nobody listens if people listen like upside but even basically you should just assume no one will listen because we have like there's so many great options why would i listen to a a company's podcast right but it is an excuse to have relationship building conversations with customers and process sales biz dev basically yeah and it's it's sales enable it like once you have a conversation you ever recorded you publish it publicly even if there's no organic audience you can still link to that and you can send it to customers as like a lead nurturing thing of oh somebody else was in this position too and they talked about why our product made their life better right right yeah like what is salesforce should have its own it's on own podcast yep yeah what do they charge for that what do people charge for that i know ben ben r ben ben wilson used to look work at is it mission dot org ben or no it was cas cas studios i think they do that for like right like how does this idea of work or not like what what's the verdict on this one yes it works yes the customers are extremely price insensitive so it's good the margins are super high we actually like combining the two things we just talked about we made yeah snowflakes podcast and frank loop was on it all the time oh yeah perfect so it it's it's a really good business the one bad thing about it that's coming into effect right now is when recessions hit it's the first thing to go right it's just like the the margins are super good when times are good but then when times are not know you're being like hey could you send me the last thirty day downloads numbers and you're like delete don't leave the whole podcast guys it they're they're asking the question it's exactly like that yes yep what else you got what else interests you at the moment ben you got or at least what deals are you seeing because you guys are investing are there any interesting deals that you're seeing or categories that you're seeing that you really like that don't start with the word ai i mean actually no like at and and i think that's the i think that is correct like i am one of these people that believes that you saying ai we invest in ai is a little bit of a silly thing these days because it's the same thing as twenty years ago saying we invest in software as a vc it's like yeah no shit like i i i think it's just gonna be so quickly ubiquitous that like if companies aren't using ai in some capacity or starting to get a little bit like what's a cool ai use case or company that you've that you've seen and invested in or wanna invest in whatever well and by the way i think sean met with james carrier we and i think it was james on twitter or maybe j sean hughes told us you go i've been pitched by two hundred ai companies in the last quarter and i've invested in none because they're all weak or something like that i i it's interesting i haven't invested in any year or i haven't invested i'm lots of companies i've invested and have added ai stuff to their products but i haven't invested in some like net new ai company in part because i don't think ai is going to be the differentiation and i don't think it's gonna be def for the vast majority of companies i think the the value is gonna come from and the moat is gonna come from the same thing that always creates value and moat which is like network effects with your customers or like a a data mode where someone's already fully locked into your thing and so they don't wanna migrate because that would suck and they have processes around using your thing and so i sort of like i i believe that an enormous amount of the value from ai will accrue to these foundational models but you actually do have to be using the foundational models in your thing in order to be like table stakes in in the next few years because everybody's going to expect all software to just behave magically right do you think and this will be last question for me do you think that there's a world where you're gonna sell acquired or do one of these spotify deals or anything like that have you been approached good question yes but not not in like a not in not recently and not in a way that like not since we've become a real business what could you get for it you think like criminal danny i think we try to give him five million bucks what they said no it got qui oh wow i even we we we would say no that we would for sure say go to that i don't like if we could talk about like i i don't i would not be interested in having any conversations for you know less than yeah on the order of like what you got like the hustle or morning brew or you know stuff like that tens of millions yeah yeah yeah but i just think like the value of what we've built both as a business and revenue and our audience and our durability is you know it's is in that category i think it's very much an open question like it's gotten so much bigger than we ever imagined how much farther can it go right i'm curious how things for would would we trust our own underwriting more than una acquire underwriting because what has happened for us is it has doubled every single year for eight years basically no matter what we do like we can't make it grow faster or slower than that already the business here it's still don't perfectly right yeah it's it's cash generative well have you guys built in businesses off the back of it so that's that week well oh you could glow david no i'm thinking kindergarten so i don't have a i have a fund on angel i manage about thirty million dollars of capital on angel list between two funds and four or five sp and while i used to be a professional vc before going full time when acquired and that certainly helps all of that's because of acquired like and do you so so you did that you did that fund anything else that you guys have done you've launched off the back of it because what we found was that a podcast like you said it's very hard to make and grow faster than it's kinda like natural word viral in in in interest and like kind of the tam of that that market like the andrew he are rare normally it's the grind yeah yeah and and even him i don't think you can make a grow much faster or slower just like good execution is obviously the only thing you control but like a lot of people can do good execution and their growth rate will be is you know somewhat linear you know it's not gonna like get we get much fat the slope doesn't change that much do you but the thing that i think what we found was that you could build businesses off the back of this audience whether it's a fund or other other products or services that can be more valuable than the ad revenue of the business of the podcast itself do you guys do that or think about that like sean will sean mentioned a company and they're like oh just did a million in revenue so and it's like oh well like i i gave it a company a plug that i invested in i was like hey i use it for this reason i you know an ad basically but it wasn't meant to be i was just explaining how i use this thing and they booked a million dollars of arr off of off of that which was like pretty crazy yep so so that happens to us all the time which is why all of our sponsors deals are these like six figure very meaningful and long term we do these six month sponsorships and most of my sponsors are now you know three four or five seasons and like it works and so the question is is it more is the right mode for us to operate in keep doing these big deep sponsorship deals with companies for cash or do we try to start companies or find some company that's at an inflection point and say you know let's trade equity or i think we're pretty early in the thinking there because we're like you know we would have to it would have to be really the right type of company that is a high lt tv b to b saas business that's reaching founders and and you know ceos and technical founders and that would have to be the audience like i don't think we're gonna launch an energy drink brand and have that makes have that kind of pencil but i don't know we're we're open the possibility i think this also for us i'm i'm curious how you guys think about it because you are getting into this game i at least i don't know to speak for ben i don't want to run a company i wanna make tell stories and invest so i don't really wanna build products or manage teams so i think it's likely that we'll continue going that route i don't know ben has experience actually building things so he may feel differently but this this lets us benefit from the upside of companies using acquired as channel without us have to be involved in the mu of building that company yeah and maybe at some point that our desire will change there but how do you you guys have built companies you guys are building products like how do you think about this i've thought about it both ways like i i'm like you a little bit where my i have the most fun but i get to just tell you know tell stories nerd out about stuff go learn new things and then come back with like go i wanna go down rabbit holes and then take that most interesting you know one percent of things that i found and shared it on this podcast or my newsletter and that's that's what i like to do that's the the sort of a biased enjoyment but i also love money and so i'm like okay cool and i also like the thing i study is about how people make money in business and create wealth and so i can't help myself but like apply some of the things that i learned right like it's it's very hard to resist the urge to apply the things that you know once you know them yep and yep but then you gotta go recruit to tea basically played with every form you could do so i invest both in startups as well as like cash flowing businesses like go buy you know twenty thirty percent of a cash flowing business that i think i can help through the audience or or just through like you know being a entrepreneur for fifteen years and like learning a bunch of stuff the second thing would be starting a business so i started the milk road off of the podcast that i think the podcast helped us get the ball rolling there and then you know i've launched the courses or things like that that just a a ways to to take the curiosity say oh i learned a bunch of stuff could i teach it and then and and i also thought thought about you know you know so buying businesses investing in startups doing building a startup own or not doing any of them not being operational at all like i've played with kind of all of them over the past three years in different ways like we sold the milk road in part because okay that business is working and we got a great offer but the the best part of the offer was oh i don't have to operate any business anymore if i do this yeah that's appealing to me whereas sam just launched hampton last week or well i think it was last week we saw congratulations congratulations and thank you i feel like you don't have to do sales for the next year based off of like you know the the the blitz that you were able to to to drum up across pod twitter ever everywhere that you tried to do right like i mean you could talk a little more about that but seems like yeah so you crushed your demand side yeah so basically in two thousand twenty two and twenty one i was inspired by sean alright fine i'll invest a little while and so i gave it like a six to twelve month try and i was like i hate investing i totally dislike it i think maybe i could be pretty good at it but i i it's not for me like i don't like taking a minority interest in things that's i personally like owning all of something and i think of myself a little bit as an artist sometimes with these companies like it's like my i like to be creative and that's kinda of how i like to express myself so i prefer that with and so that's why i launched hampton was because i was like this fits my interest there i have a competitive advantage here and so when i announced it on the pod we now have five thousand people who applied and we're like and it that's it's cost eighty five hundred dollars a year to join and we're being very meticulous and very slow about who we're adding but that's very likely gonna be a very very large company i think we have a ceo jordan who's amazing but like we're not taking any outside capital and i prefer sean likes to do lots of things and i know a lot of people like to do that lots of things and know a lot of people who succeed really nicely with that me personally i prefer focus and just doing one thing at a time because i i don't just my brain it's really challenging for me to jump from thing to think a thing like an investor needs to and so i prefer like spending five ten years on something and so i i intend to start company start a company maybe another one in in a handful of years i'm not sure rather than investing i actually think that sean's way of like doing cash flow businesses and owning a portion of them that's actually the easier way i think to make wealth i i i just don't find enjoyment on it i'm a dopamine feat and like seeing sales come in and like making decisions i get like it's it's my alcohol i like it drunk off of that how do how do you think about the business of the pod of my first million so the podcast is owned by hubspot and we get paid to we get paid strictly a performance fee and so when it kicks ass which it has we get paid good money as if we have had advertisers yep and so but hubspot been great like not one time have they ever censored us or said hey you made a bad joke don't say that and so it's been pretty good it it is there's definitely i wouldn't say complicated but it it's a new relationship that we're definitely trying to figure out of like what to do because frankly hubs spots an awesome partner but at the same time if sean and i bounce they they don't have shit right so right i think we're both both sides of that of that are trying to understand what we can do and how far we can push things and and what start figuring that out there are you have some and they're probably you're potentially more monetization options for the pod right like how does that revenue get split out like youtube ads we just don't we we turned off youtube ads we can like if somebody wants to sponsor it we don't right so like we leave a lot of money on the table in that regard but you get other benefits right so you gotta like kinda write those out over time and be like right so yeah like the the benefit the benefits that we have are basically we don't do any of the work so we record and then it goes on the internet that's a pro and a account because if we don't like how it's done then it's like shit we don't like that let's fix it but as long as it's working well it's awesome we get paid without having to have any expenses but then the flip flipside is shit we have all these this advertiser interest and we know it works really well let's take more deals and so i think there's a there's a world where we do con kinda actually come to a compromise and we have more ads but that's like a it's a it's a conversation yeah yep is there is there attention at all with you guys wanting to use the pod to do stuff that generates value for yourself that doesn't accrue back to the m pod like you launching businesses off it or is that they're they're they're they're they're great with that and any revenue outside of the pod is one hundred percent hours events right search whatever but great person let's say that they're like we're hiring a producer now because ben gonna go full time on on his new thing whoa let's say let's yeah congratulations ben let's say that they're moving slow it's like hey guys hubspot hurry the hell up you know you're going way too slow i got five friends right now who get hire and so like there's tension there for things like that yeah yep well probably all all the business active all the stuff you guys are launching outside of the pod just brings attention back to the pod right so like it also brings credibility there's how many yeah people do you see on youtube or tiktok or twitter wherever that are like you know basically these bit like business guru or like you know get advice guys right and you're hear the advice guys so you like click their bio and you're like so what are you doing what do you do oh your career is giving advice okay but how where do you get that first firsthand knowledge do you have any battle scars like oh no you're you know you're the bald barber oh great like you know i'm not sure that i want the sure that i want that right so so i think that's also helpful right because if like bald barber by the way chef's kiss thank you good job i'm flashes my my improv on the fly i decided to take a pure more risk of like oh bitch tee up that i'm gonna make the joke and see if my brain in that point five seconds come up with something and if i if i fall flat you know two out of three times that's okay that's still one one that i got even a even a blind squirrel finds it not have frank doing great exactly so yeah i basically i i think it gives credibility right like during the pod you know i built the mill road and sold it during like while the pod was live so that adds some credibility during the pod sam launch is hampton it's clearly gonna be successful or already already off to to a successful start it gives the pod credibility and i think that's why like why does oli work really well like obviously the could banter enter they have good thing to say well i think a big part of it is like they bring a certain gravity to the room right they're participating in the story yes it's unfair like the way i explained know is all in is billionaires talking about billionaire shit and my first millionaire if my first billionaire is millionaires is talking about billionaire shit and like and i've heard of people like college kids come about be like we're we're broke guys talking about broke guys shit that's like alright i that yeah like that's that's the way to go but i think it adds credibility because there's a lot of people out there who will create content tell you about the next big thing but they don't invest i don't have skin in the game they don't know actually what's going on they'll tell you you know how to be successful and they're you know broken depressed and it's like you you gotta be careful with who you listen to like i'd rather listen to somebody who's done it before than somebody who hasn't it's just as simple as that yep yep which that i think is the whole unlock of podcasting that like is a problem with the traditional media industry like one of the it wasn't explicitly in my our minds when we started acquired but like i gone to business school i went to stanford to did my mba there was great experience but like the classroom experience like the professors not the guess who would come in who had done stuff but like the professors who are full time academics and then the cases that we would do just be like you guys did do this shit like why are you telling me about this like i wanna hear from the people who did it or journalists that cover the tech industry it's like how many people going from being successful founders to entering the journalism industry and writing for a paper like like michael michael mo by the way michael mo you know doug leon partner yeah mu yeah i'm sorry mori he journalists turned billionaire yeah and like those be middle there yes yeah yeah yeah sorry those you know i remember journalists to vc once i went but the reverse pipeline doesn't exist so like yeah i always have to remind myself of this when i'm reading tech coverage i'm like okay the the very best ones of these people have immersed themselves in the operator founder communities to be able to like pick up the genes quo and read between the lines of what certain things mean and like dan p act is one of these types of people but you know a a a junior journalist coming out of journalism school writing and picking up this beat it's like it's hard to say that that's a better way to learn what's going on than listening to people who are industry participants talking about what's going on i remember once i went to a journalist somebody who worked at tech crunch i went to their apartment in san francisco and i just like walked in and i looked around and i was like this is the same apartment as like every buddy i know right out of college has and i was like and then they have this pen and then they write on tech crunch and then it looks like very different but like this is a person who's just a they're a normal person who this is kinda like their first gig and they're covering something that they barely like really true honestly they barely understand that doesn't mean they're not smart doesn't mean they're don't have good intentions but like it's that thing where i forget forgot the the name of it but it's like if you read an article about a topic you actually know about yeah in the newspaper you're like oh this is oh okay i see the limitations of how much stock i should put into this but when you read about topic you don't know you're like this is the truth oh the new york times is an expert and it's like there is probably an expert or like what when it's called but do do you guys remember a few years ago when one of the i think her name was jen or something like that one of the found of away travel like there's was all these headlines saying like take this woman that created a toxic workplace that's horrible you gotta get and i like oh this the juicy story let's dig in where's the fraud i love you read the you read the slack messages that they're publishing and this yeah what you said startup so someone like packed like she like opened up a package and it was horribly done and she said if this keep or what did she say she goes i'm just gonna have to pack these boxes myself because whoever's running this must be brain dead and i was like okay cool let's scroll where's the good stuff you know where's and they're like that's the thing she said that we're brain dead and i'm like that's the toxic working environment like come on give me a break breakdown that that that ain't nice but that's not new york times headline right give me a break like i wanna see so finally for that right like something like that she bounced because of that like that's it wasn't she's said it rained just the other woman not yeah i forget what her name was but like i read that artist on like there's no fraud like she didn't you know like there's no alcohol involved what's going on give me something good i want cocaine and hooker i don't want brain dead yeah you know what i'm saying at least like this is why there's so much value to like what you guys are doing that your building businesses and talking about them that like we're investing v full time vc i used to be like we know what's going on in a way that if you're just a journalist like you can't it's structurally impossible well podcast podcasts actually have more people from the field that come in and do it a podcast is easier you're talking you're not writing no barrier you don't have to like edit and like you know make a cool fancy tiktok then like you you you'd have to like layer in filters and stuff it's just you said no you talk that's why you see like re hoffman we'll do a straight audio medium just like straight audio because or even audio with the webcam like you know now i think that's getting a little bit easier but basically the podcast format i think there's a reason why you see somebody like x athletes do this or like you know the same like you have skip bayless who will just go say how this person is they don't have the clutch jean it's like brothers that's not a gene you know they they you and he'll just like a big fun of people and then you have j jj j red who's an player the threes so he's phenomenal at content his and his point of view is so much better then then and that's why his stock is going like his views are just going up into the right because he's good at this he pulls real guests when he pulls real guests they talk like they don't talk like they're talking to reporter because they played with jj i they played against him so they actually open up about stuff but he's also not trying to trap him in these gotcha questions so there's like some mutual trust there and then he'll just share like you know when you're a player on the road like you know this is the situation fans think you're practicing blah blah but actually here's what happens when you go and he's just saying what's what's really going on and so to me when you see that and again it's because podcasting is a lot easier if you told them hey i you to write like beautiful well written blog posts every other day it'd be very hard to do but for him to just oh something happened get on the mic from give my point of view they could do so like you get more credible experts in podcast podcasting and then i think on any other like medium this is probably actually a good use of ai is being able to turn the rambling of people who are industry participants you run that transcript through and you say write this as if it was a new york times article with a strong lead and you know this many words like it is amazing how i feel like i've transformed in my use of gp over the last month where i was using it to try to answer questions which it's fine at but of course that's the first thing you're gonna do with a prompt but my use case recently has been take lots of stuff and feed it in as the prompt and then ask it to make it better so like i wrote a linkedin post about our most recent acquired episode and i fed it i've just pasted the whole thing to chat gp i was like you make this like more exciting and can you make this more likely to go viral and like that literally all said you so you basically copy and paste it five hundred words you said here's a linkedin post i wrote make it more exciting let me see exactly what the prompt was so i don't b us on the pod here okay no one can check say can you please act as my editor and modify this to make it more likely to go viral as a linkedin post that's so funny in it indexed way in the other direct like it went it full of emoji you're like fuck out opening capital letters discover the secrets like a lot of like and so i had to tone it down but i totally use that to and and it helped me rephrase a lot of things where i had like awkward phrasing that didn't flow well it's a very good rewrite yeah that's awesome we agree i'm i'm gonna start doing that well guys you're awesome man thank you thank you for coming on if you're listening to arp pod go check out acquired if you're listening on acquired do that as we call it should we teach up the gentleman's agreement sam yeah go here with understand standing race i feel like the gentleman's agreement and the ladies understanding he's become like you know in wrestling when the rock would take the microphone he'd raised the people's eyebrow you know he's gonna hit him with like the expected but for some reason you get excited just to hear him i'm saying it sam hear it and again how i feel now with your this is your catch crazy go ahead this is the gentleman's agreement and so basically the way it works is look you're going to seven eleven you're gonna go buy gas whenever you are at the top when you're about to pay you see a little jar and it's for muscle dystrophy free and there's all that money in there and of course you don't take that money you leave a a dollar there nobody's one's gonna stop you by the way if you took that money but and that's basically what this podcast is this podcast is free us for we just dedicated hours of our of our day to do this but unlike every other podcast this one's not free just like that jar you gotta leave a dollar meaning you gotta go and subscribe to acquired podcast podcasts on spotify as well as itunes and do the same with my first million on our youtube page and click you click subscribe it's called the gentleman's agreement because we're not there alright we're just shaking our hands ladies what is it called the ladies understanding the gentleman's agreement we're not there to help you guys out it's just honesty so everyone's doing it don't be left out you have to do this that that's our that's our agreement we create the content you click subscribe i love it you guys are innovator and there's real value like that it's not you know for our audience if you go and subscribe to my first million you're gonna get smarter you're gonna get more ideas like this benefits you so it's not you know you're not just pulling money out of your wallet here you're you're doing something that's gonna make your life more fun and that's the gentleman's agreement and that's the ladies understanding david do you wanna you wanna take us home what we're saying oh i was gonna ask a i've i can keep jamming with you guys for another hour i was gonna ask you said spotify do you like where do you like people to subscribe spotify youtube anyway well you said earlier that spotify your main thing so once we start doing the gentleman's agreement our youtube channel went through the roof so we i so we went from like a hundred and fifty thousand subscribers close to two hundred in like a month or eight weeks or something like we should do a every pod giveaway of youtube premium to someone in the comments so go go to our youtube go to this episode on youtube and just and just type in premium and who we will pick somebody we will pay for your youtube premium so that you listen to this pod add add free in the background you can lock your phone and walk around and you can enjoy that sweet sweet fourteen ninety nine a month that we're gonna be paying for you for the year so one year of you can premium in every episode call it now oh i love it that is really a reminder to go comment because i am a youtube premium subscriber but i want you guys for the bill yep well thanks for doing this guys we appreciate you and we'll we'll have you back on and thank you for everything bye likewise see you guys catch you guys next time