Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
72 published records
01 / recommendation
“The best thing, and this relates to what all we do for a living now which I could have never predicted, is there was a guy that—Charlie Munger says, you should read if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business, read Les Schwab's autobiography, which I did because Charlie told me to.”
02 / recommendation
“He has this excellent book that I've read three times called Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs might be the subtitle.”
03 / recommendation
“Then 28 minutes, and then they're telling me about the books they love. They're like, oh, I like Harry Potter, I like this, I like travel.”
04 / recommendation
“I used to listen to Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Do you ever listen to this?”
05 / recommendation
“I own the hardcover, the Kindle, and the audiobook. That should tell you that it's worth it.”
06 / recommendation
“If I press play on an Acquired episode, this is why I like Dan Carlin, if I read one book an episode.”
07 / recommendation
“I got to listen to it. I love Jay Z and I love you. I can't believe I haven't listened to that episode.”
08 / belief
“A TikToker has 10 million followers, yet they can't even get 3000 people to show up somewhere. I think that is the way to think about it.”
09 / belief
“Once he sold his advertising, I think he gave away a token of $100,000 to the people working there, and then they released it.”
10 / belief
“The reason that popped in my mind when I was asking him these questions—let me actually get the exact note because I don't want to mess up the way he said it, because his lines were just excellent.”
11 / belief
“Being a nut job and completely crazy is, I think, makes you harder to compete with.”
12 / commitment
“Maybe we'll become so successful someday that I will regret my words on this, but I got to imagine having a yacht is actually not additive to your life.”
13 / commitment
“I will literally get on calls with media company founders who are selling ads or building companies.”
14 / belief
“I think one of the reasons why we find ourselves so attracted to episodes that highlight craft is because that's how we think about Acquired.”
15 / belief
“Like you'll say, okay, this is what he said in inflation, and then you see what year he said it. That's where I found that.”
16 / belief
“I think the game tape analysis of that is helpful to realize that a lot of this stuff is impossible to plan in advance.”
17 / belief
“You talk to a microphone yourself every week. Not that I think you're crazy. You are, but in a good way.”
18 / belief
“If the next Sam Walton has the opportunity to raise venture capital dollars, and he's like, you know what, I think I would rather just figure it out another way and not build in that ecosystem.”
19 / belief
“I think when capital was a commodity and money was free, it was extremely hard to differentiate yourself as a venture firm or any financial firm.”
20 / belief
“I think about this in the venture business, which obviously, as we record this here in mid March, 2023, there's a lot going on in the venture business.”
21 / belief
“The truth is it is always the case that the clean narrative is grafted onto a fact pattern. It's like, okay, well, what I care about is the lessons I can learn from the clean narrative.”
22 / belief
“What I realized is all my heroes, what they have in common is the unbelievable clarity of thought like Steve Jobs, Charlie Munger.”
23 / belief
“Part of it's related to tech in general, but I think there's a specific brand decline of the venture capital industry.”
24 / belief
“I think he says the video game industry is bigger than music, movies, and books combined, or whatever.”
25 / belief
“I think in the book, he increases market share by 25% or 28% using this over and over again because human nature is, oh, crap, things are small.”
26 / belief
“Where I was going with it was, look at the reaction on Twitter and elsewhere, and I think in much of the country to what's happening with the Silicon Valley Bank situation, not that this is a current events podcast.”
27 / belief
“I think the most interesting thing is that I think we've talked about this concept before on air, that if someone's going to advise you on starting a podcast, they would say, do a 30 to 40-minute episode, do it weekly, and you release it at the same time all the time.”
28 / uncertainty
“I will give you the correct American pronunciation. It's unclear if it's actually right or not.”
29 / belief
“A lot of these stories are just incredible stories too that I think are worth telling just for the sake of the story.”
30 / belief
“However, I think the aggregate brand and reputation of the venture industry has taken a massive hit over the last several years.”
31 / belief
“I think, probably all three of us have an unintended impact on college entrepreneurship programs.”
32 / belief
“There are some cases where it's not true, but I think most truly iconic world-changing businesses and founders stand on the shoulders of giants, but they have one or multiple things that are novel that they come up with.”
33 / uncertainty
“I was watching this video. I don't know if it's true, but Jeff Bezos' private jet has its own private jet.”
34 / belief
“One of the most interesting ideas I've heard, and it comes from our mutual friend Jeremy, who I think we mentioned earlier in the podcast, hopefully we did give him credit, I actually was talking to him and David Purow.”
35 / belief
“For everyone who is listening, founders are more about, hey, I just read this book, and I want to tell you what I learned from this book.”
36 / belief
“I think as a consequence of that, to your point that you should advertise heavier during recessions, I think customer differentiation among venture firms is just declining rapidly.”
37 / belief
“I think the intro to Snowball, I think the scene that opened the vignette that opens it is Sun Valley right before the tech bubble burst.”
38 / observation
“The problem is you don't make the announcement to everybody. It's like, hey, tomorrow we're leaving on a raft because you'll get caught, imprisoned, killed, or whatever the case is.”
39 / commitment
“There is voting going on right now for our next episode, which LPS all have input on. For every new LP that joins, we will shoot you an email to your inbox.”
40 / belief
“I think, David, that represents only like 5%-10% of those of you out there who listen every month.”
41 / uncertainty
“I don't pay attention to the venture industry. I don't know anything about it. I just have a bunch of founder friends.”
42 / uncertainty
“Let's see if I'm right. I could be wrong, I could be full of crap. It's 288. Before that, I had watched a documentary on him years ago.”
43 / belief
“The NFL episode is what I meant if it's a crazy story, but even there is like a lesson, where I texted this to you. It totally changed the way I think about things, or maybe we were talking on Zoom about this.”
44 / uncertainty
“Yeah, but I went in thinking like, I want to do business and tech, but I don't know what that means.”
45 / belief
“I think that that is a thing that you did really well and we accidentally did well. But I realized over time, why that makes both of the things we've built as durable as they are, a lot of people play characters on the internet and play really well.”
46 / belief
“I think there are a lot of people out there right now who want to start businesses and are like, I'm not going to raise venture capital because F that, I don't need to, and it was a lie that I needed to.”
47 / belief
“I think what you're doing here with the sessions is you can't increase the amount of episodes that you can do because they take so much work to do.”
48 / belief
“I think we now have a process that means that when you and I put in the work, the product is good, but it took a long time to arrive at that.”
49 / uncertainty
“I don't know how you feel that I'm proud of, but at the time, we didn't know that was going to be a super popular episode.”
50 / belief
“When I sat down, the first thing me and Sam Zell talked about and I think helped bond us to the point where at the end, he said he liked my energy and everything.”
51 / belief
“I think you're getting to a good point. It's like because the business model didn't support that.”
52 / uncertainty
“Their follow up question is going to be why. Eventually, you're going to get to a level where like, I don't know.”
53 / uncertainty
“You see he's grasping and I don't know if he's going to feel, but he leans forward.”
54 / belief
“My interpretation of that on the podcast, what I said is, if you feel your product can improve people's lives, I think you guys already know, because you get thousands of messages just like I do, that yes, listening to Acquired, listening to Founders will improve people's lives and work, then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing.”
55 / belief
“I think that has dramatically contributed to episode quality because by the time we ship it, neither of us feel that there are extraneous sentences.”
56 / commitment
“The same thing is you're going to have to compete on my level, or else I will literally destroy you.”
57 / belief
“Now with podcasting, I don't ever look at analytics, but I think the last time I looked was 50% of my audience was in the United States, but then everywhere.”
58 / belief
“I think that's what we're listening to Acquired and founders is, is you're watching game tape of history's great entrepreneurs.”
59 / belief
“I was like, I just want you to amplify my audience and then connect me with first rate advertisers because I think Acquired is a luxury podcast.”
60 / belief
“We covered a ton of ground, including that I think two nights before we recorded, David was just coming up from LA, where he had dinner with Charlie Munger.”
61 / belief
“I think part of the fact that I have now over 20,000 highlights from hundreds of books, and I still have 50, 60, or maybe 80 books I haven't put in there yet that are in my library—my Readwise account is an unfair advantage because anytime somebody is talking, it's like, oh, you said something, I search for that term, and it pulls up.”
62 / belief
“I've learned that because in Ogilvy and advertising at the very end of the book, David's like, here, these are the six giants that I learned from.”
63 / belief
“For what we do, I think on Acquired more, especially because you will do multiple episodes of different books on the same people.”
64 / evaluation
“Those people who are eventually going to make deals, and then I have this huge advantage that you couldn't even do 10 years ago or 15 years ago because there's no such thing as a podcast.”
65 / preference
“I identify a lot with what Charlie Munger says because he essentially observes by behavior and then tries to do the opposite.”
66 / evaluation
“I think one of the hardest things about making an Acquired episode is figuring out when we're looking at a source like someone giving an industry talk who works at a company, or a biographer, who chose to dedicate two years of their life to writing this book after working at Newsweek and covering the sector forever, is trying to mentally account for and discount from whatever bias and perspective they're coming in with to create whatever the source material is that we're using to then incorporate into our version of here's how this thing happened.”
67 / preference
“I like reading obscure books because go back to what Jeff Bezos said, differentiation is survival.”
68 / prediction
“If I focus on this seven days a week, I'll figure out the business model. I don't think I'll ever get rich from it, but I will at least pay my bills.”
69 / preference
“I like going to these bookstores, I think of my interpretation of you guys in my mind, and I just know if this book is good for that person.”
70 / commitment
“I bought him this special edition, the Centennial edition version of Henry Flagler's biography.”
71 / commitment
“Totally, aside, but we have no agenda here. That is I think both an advantage that we have, all three of us and a secret that we have, which is that we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon.”
72 / recommendation
“I used to listen to Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Do you ever listen to this? It's when all the other radio programming expires, then you enter the 1:00 AM radio stuff, and it was aliens and tons of paranormal stuff.”