This Week in Startups - Acquired.FM’s Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal on Berkshire vs. Bitcoin, Amazon acquires James Bond IP, and more! | E1222

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal of Acquired join Jason to talk about Bitcoin's recent price action (5:55), the cognitive dissonance of liking both Bitcoin and Berkshire (14:27), Amazon's acquisition of MGM (39:34), and more!

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This is the moment where you click in your podcast player. And yes, the boys are with us back again. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal from Acquired FM. The other podcast you love so much, we're going to chop up the news and right up top. I guess the big news of the day is that Bitcoin has plunded 50% over the the last two weeks or so. I guess primarily because there is going to be some sort of a crackdown, maybe over environmental

concerns or communism. We've heard this saber rattling before. China's made an announcement about banning crypto again and proposing new penalties for crypto mining in their inner Mongolia region. China's quest to outlawed crypto started, I guess, back in 2017. actually went back to 2013 when they started making some of these laws. There's been a ton of these. So gentlemen, what are our thoughts here?

More saber rattling coming at the worst possible time. China is shaking everything up so they can buy the dip. What is going on here? Okay, wait, Jason, before we get into crypto. We got to talk about Taylor. Taylor. Lorenz on the pond, new pesting. Yeah, I thought that would be.

I thought she did okay. Yeah, yeah. thought I would play it straight. She was on the pod. And, you know, she's a culture reporter. I, you know, I think part of the reason she's so misunderstood or maybe controversial is because people look at her as something more than a culture reporter. If you read the style section, you know, in the New York Times, maybe that's not the same

as reading the business section. Although in today's world, maybe it's very analogous. I don't know. What was your take on her performance? I thought she was great. I loved her. I thought you guys had a great rapport. I thought she had super great points to that being one of them. Like, she's a cultural reporter. And she focuses on creators. And that's like, those are her people. That's her constituency. I also thought she had such a great point that like, look, I am not the New York Times. I'm Taylor. And these are two separate things. Yeah. Did you get to listen to it, Ben? Any thoughts on it? I haven't. But I was definitely following Taylor's thread. around like, hey everyone, like, I'm an employee with bosses. Like, I am not the CEO of this company.

And the thing that has struck me as the most ironic about this whole, you know, the whole kerfuffle that she's been in with many people in the tech ecosystem, is that, like, tech and entrepreneurial folks should understand that better than everyone. Like, of course she's very public because she's a journalist, she's opinionated, She has very interesting content. But like, she works at a company. So if you're mad at the company, it is so strange to go take it out on an employee. Anyway, that's kind of my take on that angle.

Yeah, my take on the other side of it is, you know, she incorrectly said that Mark and Trison used the R word, misattributed that. She covertly has, you know, infiltrated clubhouse rooms and has railed against the venture industrial complex. So she kind of is antagonized, I think, the entire industry and then falling back on. I'm just a culture writer. And so, you know, she's full contact on social media. She's whatever, Gen Z.

And, you know, she knows how to. She's actually not. She's a millennial. I'm sure. I think we're 36. I put them more in the Gen Z bucket just based on behavior. I'm now judging people on behavior. I'm a boomer, not Gen X.

You guys are Gen X because you're too ambitious. You're not millennials. And she's going down to Gen Z. You guys are also very seem very emo to me. For Ben and me. I don't know about Ben, but we are, we're geriatric millennials,

which is like, you know, we're probably, we're somewhere in between Gen X and millennial, like we're ambitious. We didn't, we remember life before the internet. Like I remember pre-internet life.

So Bida is more of, I'm referring to you as a collective now. So Bita is more of, uh, an either very old millennials or very young, Jan Xers. I think David is that I'm David, I'm four years younger, five years younger.

I'm squarely in the middle of the I'm going to ask you. What do you think of the smashing pumpkins? Dad music. Dad music. Oh my God. Yeah. Wow. Okay. We are different. There you go. Okay. You just, that's it. We're done. We're done. If one of you, if one of you likes the smashing pumpkins, you're gen X and if the other one thinks it's dad music, you're obviously a millennial. The end. Let's talk about crypto.

Boom. Let's do it. we think about Bitcoin's crash, is this something, what does this have most to do with? China? China? My take is everything that you just said in the intro teeing up China and climate and all these things are noise. Okay. Watch the tape. This is the, as the paradigm folks sort of coined this term, bubbles as a go-to-market it every time that Bitcoin will always have a run-up, it will always have a crash down. And so far,

it has been very effective at using that run-up to bring more people into the ecosystem. It doesn't crash down below the level that it was at before the run-up. It is, you know, the crypto community, whether intentionally or not, is very effective at using hype to increase the surface area of the ecosystem. It is unpredictable to me what the future sort of bubble bursts, what, will cause those, what really caused this one, what caused previous ones, all we know is I think this will keep happening. And David? Yeah, I think I mostly agree with Ben. I think the one thing that is I should have been thinking about before this was kind of in the back of my mind, but this particular cycle has brought my mind to is the benefit.

of Bitcoin versus everything else in crypto is it doesn't change, right? But it also doesn't change. And so much is changing in the world. And it has got me thinking about... What do you mean it doesn't change? Well, it's locked. You know, like, there's... There's a finite number of them.

Oh, sorry. I'm more than that. Just like the whole ecosystem. Like, Satoshi's gone. Like, there is no development. There's no changing. There's no innovation in Bitcoin. It is what it is.

And that's attractive. Like, you know the rules aren't going to change. but Ethereum and all the other protocols out there and everything happening in Defi, like there is so much innovation happening so fast in crypto that I do wonder if that is actually a better part of the ecosystem to be in relatively versus Bitcoin. I have to agree with you there. I've always said, I think if Bitcoin does get replaced as the most attractive crypto, it would be because the other cryptos have a much better use case.

people become more engaged with the better use case. And like gold bouillon or silver certificates or whatever came before it, you just have more energy in the, in Ethereum. You have more energy in some doge coin. There's more going on and it's more excitement and people just sort of lean towards what's more excitement. Are you seeing this? Like I'm definitely seeing all the, especially like younger, Gen Z, not, not Gen X like

like me, folks, ambitious founders, people who want to go work. companies, they are all going into crypto, defy, that is number one destination right now. I think there's a, I don't think it's the number one destination. There's a lot of energy there. And you may have this like first generation of believers who were kind of in the, let's call them, anarchist slash, you know, societal outcasts, people who were libertarians, maybe didn't like, financial crisis. Yeah, fight against the machine kind of Wall Street, Occupy,

Wall Street folks, I think they are giving way to a generation of finance savvy millennials and Gen Ziers, who I would describe more as the Robin Hood crypto, like the Robin Hood Coinbase generation that they're so sophisticated about this stuff that they're doing puts and calls and leveraging themselves up. I mean, a hundred times leverage on your Bitcoin. I think a lot of what happened this time around for this dip has to do with leverage. And I don't know if we can statistically prove that because everything is so opaque, even though it's supposed to not be okay. I think that's why you saw the whole crypto asset class get whacked because people are getting

margin calls. Yes. Whatever set this off, I think was probably you're right, mostly in Bitcoin. In the past, selling your business was a miserable task. Months of negotiation, legal fees, and sometimes you'd have to watch the new owners trash the business that you spent so much time and money building. I have been through this before. Oh my God, I sold weblogs Inc to AOL, and it was wonderful. And then, oh, years later, they shut down half the blogs, then another 30% of them.

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See, this is the thing. Like, I don't even, I can't even, I mean, I have a margin line, I suppose that one of my bank, my brokerages that I don't tap. Actually, I have it at two of my brokerages. Now I think about it. I don't really tap it, but it's there, I guess, but I would never want to live like that. Who wants to live like that being? Yeah, I have, I have enough other things causing me stress in my life that that doesn't feel worth it to me. Yeah. So, I mean, but just think about it. What if when we were 22 years old, we had leverage on our $10,000 worth of savings pushing us to put $50,000 into markets? Like there's a lot of young people who are living with that.

Now, even if they have the risk of ruin, what's the risk of ruin? 10K and maybe they go into debt for 10K? I don't know. Like, is it the end of the world? You know, the Robin Hood suicide tragedy was, was this. Well, I would be careful attributing any, putting that specific case aside, anytime you have over a million people using a service, you will have suicides occur. So it might be not a Robin Hood suicide. It could be a suicide that occurred where, you know, trading might have been involved in a person's decision.

But, you know, a healthy normal person is not going to kill themselves overusing cryptocurrency or whatever. They might have the grounding for it. I think it's really hard with that attribution theory. But anyway, so can I, so one interesting thing that I've been ruminating on in crypto. And it's interesting as we start to talk about margin being available. Like, Jason, as you know, David and I have spent the last month and a half, like hundreds of hours. deep in Berkshire Hathaway research. Yeah.

And while I have become increasingly excited about the future of crypto, in particular, defy, it is this crazy mental thrashing to go back and forth between being a relative crypto bull and saying like bubbles as a go-to-market strategy, you know, we'll continue to see this over and over again, it kind of keeps going up. And also having Warren Buffett in the back of my head and, of course, Charlie saying, these things have no intrinsic value. What do you mean by the dip? The dip should only exist relative to some intrinsic value of something and the only intrinsic value of, especially Bitcoin, but you could argue all cryptocurrencies is what you believe that other people will believe

that it should be in the future. It doesn't have a set of underlying profits. It doesn't have a set of underlying cash flows. I think Ethereum and Defi is different because it is truly a distributed computer. You can sort of build interesting applications on top of it. But the wild rashing that has been happening, at least for me, David, I don't know if you feel the same way of buy the dip versus no intrinsic value is like a total war in my head. David, how's your cognitive distance going from talking, basically marinating your brain for a couple of days in Warren Buffett's value investing and then taking that marinated brain and searing it. on the grill that is cryptocurrency.

How's your brain? Well, one of my wife's favorite quotes that she's much, much smarter than I am, she's a PhD, she's wonderful and does not work in tech. It thinks all of this is ridiculous. Not a high benchmark, but continue. Yeah, not a high benchmark. One of her favorite quotes is the true hallmark of intelligence is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time.

Okay. I just, you know, I've been having that drill. into me for about 15 years now. Which part of Warren Buffett's argument do you think is strongest, Charlie Munger's argument is strongest and that you take away from that side of the argument. And then we'll go to which side do we think they're most wrong on. Their arguments against crypto or parts of their philosophy in general that I like? Yes.

Yes. Both of those things. Their general worldview, let's take their worldview, which includes crypto and value investing. Let's take their entire worldview and where you think they're right and where you think they might have a blind spot, if any. Oh, great. Well, we just wrapped up recording our finale part three last night. So I'm very, okay, so Warren's whole thing that you hear him say over and over and over again all the time, never bet against America. You know, America's feature great. And for his life, that was the case. He was born in 1930 right after the stock market crash and, you know, just like his

life has been America up into the right. And he has been a master at taking the long view on that. Whatever is going to happen in any given year, any given cycle. It's just like we saw a crypto here. You know, like it's all noise in the long run. And you believe that. I believe that view. I'm not sure it's necessarily America is the domain that it applies to anymore. It may, it may not. I don't have a view one way or the other. In that the market is bigger than America, but American Exceptionalism will continue. Do you believe it will continue through our lifetime? I think it applies to the internet, obviously.

This is the Rosenthal Doctrine. It's not never bet against America, but never bet against the internet. Exactly. Oh, I like that. I like that. I would agree with both of those statements. Ben, when you look at Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's worldview, life philosophy, as you have marinated in it for three episodes, what is your key takeaway that you think is

absolutely spot-on, inspiringly correct, and you cannot get out of your head. It's like built into your sort of operating system now, has infected your brain. Well, let me bring it into a poker analogy. So they do investing as an expected value calculation where the there's the probability something will happen and then the payoff if it does happen. Their style of investing index is about as aggressively as you can toward certainty. And so the payoff is muted, but we're pretty certain that that will continue to happen for many years in the future. Somewhere in the middle, you have tech investing. And if you have early stage tech investing, it skews a little bit more towards speculating, really, than investing. You've got great people, you got a great trend, but there's no business to analyze really yet. And then if you keep going all the way on the other side of the spectrum, you've got crypto. And so you have to be comfortable making the complete opposite investment philosophy. And it may be a, speculation philosophy where you're saying the probability of that something happens might be really low, but the payoff will be really, really high. So it is just like, it's that one simple

EV equation and then just weighting the different factors in dramatic ways. Yet, your chosen profession is not to run a mutual fund and put money into Disney and IBM and Starbucks. Jason, you got to have fun in life. So since you don't like sugar. Look at that shirt. You're wearing Ben. Yeah, Ben's getting a little wild over here. So, Ben, since you don't care about coffee, Disney, and cigarettes, and you don't pour your money into those things, you're basically saying their safe philosophy is not for Ben, Gilbert. You prefer to be a wild, man.

Yeah. See, I think that's actually a reasonable decision. At your age, 23, this is a better decision for you right now. 22. What are you? What are you? That is actually, 31. 31.

You're 31. 31. So you want to hit your 1000X. You want that possibility. You're not going to get that possibility buying Disney or Starbucks or Apple stock. It's not possible. And frankly,

to bring us back to cryptocurrencies, I am sympathetic to the argument that you can sort of look at Bitcoin as it could grow into steel gold's market cap and that the idea that there's still a 10, 15X left in Bitcoin, I, it's not investment advice. I don't know if this is going to happen,

but I'm sympathetic to that belief and it makes sense to me. It's not crazy. It's not crazy. There are other things. You look at Uniswap or some of these other salonauter work. Could still be a thousand X. Explain those too.

To the audience. Uniswap and Slo. Can I kick this to David? He's deeper than I am. I'm deep. Okay, David. Well, we, uh, since we're bringing up thousand X's.

I can't let that one just fall on the cuttering floor. And of course, like, you've got to do the expected value thing. Like, you have to assign your own very low probability versus Bitcoin's much more sort of muted, reasonable probability. Right. The idea that all of the people who have taken on Bitcoin as religion and as a store of value would all in some short period of time say, you know what, I do, I no longer believe what I believe for the last 10 years, five years, three years with a 10% bet of my net worth. the fact that they would all unravel that would be hard to believe. Yeah.

They would go down kicking and screaming. I think it's so often in investing. The right answer is you don't know what the future holds. It's uncertain. And so you should do both. Right. But yeah, no, Uniswap and Solano, too, different examples of, I think,

where a lot of the innovation is happening right now. So Uniswap is a automated market maker liquidity pool that allows you. So like when you trade like up, I just experienced this the couple weeks ago. I sold some, I sold some stock in my brokerage at Vanguard because I wanted to, I was transferring over to my 401k doing the SEP IRA plan. So I was just liquidating some stock for my brokerage account, wanted to get it into my IRA account. It took five days from the time I put the sell order into my brokerage account to that I could buy in my SEP IRA account.

even though all at Vanguard, same securities, I don't want, all I want to do is transfer ownership. That's ridiculous. And that happens because you've got to have counter parties on the other side of your trade. And then it takes three days for the trades to settle. You know all this from, you know, Robin Hood and whatnot. Uniswap is an automated liquidity pool, market maker. All just happens instantaneously.

All decentralized. You know, there are no counterparties. I mean, it's all within the pool, all done through smart contracts on Ethereum. Awesome. So let's explain that in plain English. You own a Bitcoin. It's worth $38,000. You say, you know what?

I don't want to be in Bitcoin anymore. I want to have more risk and fun owning Doge and Ethereum. So I want to swap my Bitcoin for 50% Doge and 50% Ethereum. My normal course of events would be to sell my Bitcoin on my Coinbase account or whatever you use. Robin Hood, etc. Pay a bunch of fees, which would be not de minimis, wait, and then go buy Doge and Ethereum at whatever the market rate is and pay another fee, correct? Meanwhile, there are market makers in what you described,

there are market makers on the other sides of those transactions that are profiting off of your, you know, your order flow assented, order flow, whatever. Like, it's a service that they're providing to the market. With Uniswap, swap and other decentralized market. market makers, they're just liquidity pools. And then anybody, you, me, no matter how much of any one token we have, we could have a lot, we could have a little whatever, we can put our tokens into the liquidity pool and then we can get paid for it, just like whoever's providing liquidity and the markets are getting paid. And it all happened instantaneously,

and it's all decentralized. So I put my one Bitcoin into Uniswap. They now take ownership of that. have custodian of my one Bitcoin, and then other people get to do what with it? That's a good question. I don't know. I'm not deep enough to know whether custodial ownership actually transfers or not. I would assume to some rights do. But yeah, like if you're like, yeah, I'm going to hold this Bitcoin. I'm not going to do anything with it.

I'll just stick it into this liquidity pool. And then you're going to get a yield on that. Huh. This new world of remote work is here to stay. So are all of the HR and IT headaches? Like how do you register your startup with dozens of state tax agencies or comply with the gazillion different labor laws? How about managing remote employees' computers?

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and it saves us time I suddenly feel like Michael Chei and like Colin Jost asking what asking Elon what doge is and it's like it's a grift because like I'm kind of like so

who owns the pool did you write that joke by the way that is so freaky no no no no let's not I don't want to talk about the SNL thing at all I don't want to talk about it but you got to be love in life, the pandemic is essentially over.

Yes. At least you are traveling. You're seeing, you must be. I am living my best life. You are out of your cage. I am out. The tiger has left the building. Like, I literally was like this tiger and like, I push the gate with my nose by accident and

it kind of creaked open. And then I put my paw out and I was like touching the ground. Like, wait a second. I'm out. Is somebody going to hit me with the electric prod? And then I'm like, I run back in and then I came back out a little bit more. And then I was like, oh shit. I'm, I'm running.

and I just bolted the heck out of the cage and I am going I'm literally in New York, went to the Knicks game Sunday, went to the Nets game last night going to the Knicks game, Fifth Row tonight, going to Raoul's Monday night, having the steak op-wav, you know, full contact on,

you know, full contact on Twitter, just walking over the Brooklyn Bridge of Manhattan Bridge multiple times, drinking iced coffee, just living my best life, going back to Austin, hitting Miami. I am done.

with the pandemic 100% like I am done how are you guys doing with your post-pandemic lives I'm curious now that we're catching up I'm feeling similarly I mean you're vacs obviously yeah yeah I'm a month in or something um and you know there's still risk but it's I think this has really opened my eyes to relative risk in a way that I don't think I used to think enough about like not doing stuff has a downside too. And that downside might be way, way higher than the idea of, okay, so I don't know if these percentages are right. But let's say the percentage of me going out in the world, including indoor dining, and let's even take an extreme example, like an indoor cycling class, the probability of me getting, you know, life altering or serious COVID at this point

has to be similar to me like driving my car to work every day for some period of time. Certainly less. Certainly less. You know, like certainly less. Right. So if I'm willing to take those risks in my life to date, shouldn't I be willing to take this risk of living my life? And what is the risk of not living my life at this point? That has an immensely high. Depression, suffering, anxiety, doom scrolling at 4 a.m. and being a caged tiger. Tigers are meant to be in the jungle. Absolutely. And thus your shirt today. And you are a tiger in the juggle. Look at Ben Church.

He's gone Buckwild. I mean, are you going to dye your hair, Ben? What's going on? I mean, it's already close to Rosenthal length. So, I mean, it's, uh, but are you going to dye it? Let me ask you this. Have you considered, I considered dyeing my hair blue coming out of the pandemic.

I've always wanted to have blue hair. And I was like, I'm kind of thinking about it. No better time, my friend. I'm kind of thinking about it. I think it would be ridiculous. That would be, and I think what do you, if you were going to die your hair, what color would you go, Ben? so I was one of those kids in middle school that did blonde tips like the frosted

I had the wave in the front that just the wave was blonde for a little bit wow I was frosted flakes I never thought to do it to my hair though keep going so anything that I do I would have to make sure resembled nothing like that ever can we get a photo of that can we get a photo of you with highlights I'll see what I can do all right so now back to the Warren Buffett philosophy. I really like what you guys have taken from them. Now, the criticism from the crypto side is these people are old and whatever lessons they learned are wrong. Is there anything, is there

anything David? I mean, it's correct that they're very old. But do you think... Even Warren would agree with you there. I mean, there's, I mean, collectively are they 180? I mean, Charlie's 97, Warren is 91. Okay, so if you add those two numbers app, you're minusing 13, they're 187 combined? I mean, dang, we should all be so lucky. So I wonder, David, do you think their historical perspective, you know, to the crypto people saying don't listen to oldsters? knowing what you know now,

do you think that that criticism of their wisdom is not applicable going forward? Are you more convinced of that? Or you more convinced that it's applicable? More convinced it's not applicable of two takes on this. Wow. I could be wrong, but like I've listened to them talk about it.

I don't think they've actually dug into anything in crypto. Like, you know, there are arguments against Bitcoin. You know, like you could take it or leave it. I don't personally agree with it. Like, I don't think Bitcoin is valuable. like, et cetera. But like, they haven't dug into anything beyond that. Like, they just don't engage. So I think it's hard to take their criticism seriously when you're like, dude, you guys haven't done the way. Okay. Now, what about their philosophical advice? The philosophical thing. So,

and their outlook on value investing. Our buddy, Andrew Marks, uh, at TQ Ventures, who's awesome. We talked about this in the episode. He, uh, he's known Warren and Charlie like most, most of his whole life. His dad's Howard Marks, the, um, you know, uh, and studied. him. He's great. And his take on this is like, look, Warren is and was the world's greatest, he calls it status quo investor. As long as the future is mostly going to look like the present, nobody is better than Warren at handicapping, probabilities, valuations, making investments, etc, etc. And track record shows that. Which it did until like 1995. Honestly, like you look from 1950 to 1995, a lot of stuff changed, but nowhere needs.

the rate that the world reorganizes itself on a five-year and one-year basis now. Yeah. And there's this great moment in 97 at the Sun Valley, the Allen & Company conference. Yeah, sure. So this panel on stage with the Robert Roberto Goizetta, the CEO of Coke, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. Yeah. And on this panel, Gates is like he mortally offends Roberto. Roberto never talks to him again for the rest of his life. He basically says, like, Coca-Cola could be run by a ham sandwich, which is a Warren line that he borrows.

It's a freaking true. Wow. And he's like versus Microsoft, like, it's dynamic. Things are changing. Like, I'm going to have to retire because by the time I'm sixth, I'm your age, I'm not going to be able to run Microsoft because things change too fast. Wow. And that's the world we live in today.

Well, actually, though, in fairness, Coca-Cola. and the drinking of soda, it might have taken three decades, has gotten absolutely pummeled. And like, they're in the water. I mean, they're still in the liquid business, I guess. Arguably liquid in bottles is still their business. But, you know, it's definitely not soda. I'm not excited to buy Coke stock. Yeah.

Coke stock was a really high performer. Yeah. I guess you have to roll with the punches. Okay, Ben, just wrapping up here. Anything in their philosophy that sticks with you in a deep way. I'm listening to a walk down Wall Street. Um, right now. Random walk down Wall Street.

A random walk down Wall Street right now. And I'm just, I am so enamored with these fraud moments. It's just like Zik cleaners and all of these different like chicken stands going public. It's literally like the worst of spacks combined with the worst of crypto, combined with Theranos. And you're like, this happened in the 60s. They added chronics to a name of a company. And it went from four times, you know, uh, an EBITA multiple to 16. and I'm like, hmm, where have I heard that before?

Oh, yeah, adding dot com. Oh, no, adding crypto. It's like, it's the same movie over and over again. Some trend happens. The charlatans come in. It's a real trend and they just take suckers money from it. Ben, anything you want to close with there? Yeah, I think the biggest thing that's left an impact on me,

and of course the world has changed, and I believe that you need a different style of investing today to deal with the fact that the world completely changed five, ten years from now underneath your feet. But their notion of intense preparation to be ready when the moment comes to move quickly, I don't think I fully understood and appreciated that before. The way that they were able to take some of these really big positions in companies that just, you know, knock their socks off was because they spent years understanding the sector, understanding that business.

and they said, if it ever got to this price, like let's say someone tried to buy them and then backed out and then the stock pummeled, they were always there and could make a decision in an hour because of how prepared they were. Wow. And I think it's that level of sort of preparation and sort of itemizing opportunities

if at the right price they ever came along to be able to move quickly. That's a powerful concept. And of course, the epic moment was 2008 when they bought $5 billion worth of preferred shares seeing Goldman Sachs during the during the for thing. They did way better on their B of A deal than on Goldman. Well, the Goldman, I think, it, they redeem them earning three point seven.

They got about $8 billion back on the $5 billion invested. Oh, wow. And they made $3 billion in profit. I mean, it's incredible, $3.7 billion. I mean, you know, here's the thing. You know, when we talk, we talk about multiples because we're investing at such small, you know, implied. We're betting against long odds, small bets. and we need 100x.

But when you're putting a big number to work and you get a big number back, even if it's not 2x, it's still a lot of capital in a short period of time. That was fixed income. That was not common equity. It was a preferred. It was essentially debt. So it was low risk, high return. That was a great move.

All right. Before we move on to James Bond, I'll leave you with this incredible quote, which I love from Warren Buffett. I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. because sooner or later one well this is the ham sandwich idea it's the ham sandwich idea

well I mean I have I have been thinking about this myself and if I could take like I would love for there to be a vehicle and somebody please email me if this exists in the world as I liquidate and get tech stocks is there a way

I know there are these like ways to transfer shares almost like this uniswap like into pools and exchange trades I just want somebody to create a way for me to just take a percentage of my net worth and just hit a dial and put it into Disney and Amazon or whatever. You know, like, just these are three things that I believe will exist and be bigger when my kids grow up. I just want to move a percentage of my net worth every year into a Disney stock. Just do, do, do, um, you should just do that. I guess.

The problem is, like, I'm struggling with this concept of paying all this capital gains and then buying another share versus keeping tech stocks that are high growth. You know, like if you own square like an Uber and Robin Hood and Com or whatever. Shopify, like, okay, this is a great run. It's going to keep going. But I would really like to own some Disney too. Yeah. How do I want to be Sequoia that sold Apple and made $3 million on their investment total or $6 million. you know, stay in that one.

Well, this is not investment advice, but couldn't you borrow against your stock and then do it that way? I don't think you're, I mean, I think borrowing against stock and then buying other stock is the big no-no. I think they give you like a huge warning. Like, I'm sure people do it, but I think there's like a big warning like, if you're taking margin against stock, please don't buy stock. It's time for another R crowd deal of the week. Right now, you. can join our crowd's investment in CITO Reason.

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Again, the R Crowd account is free. Just go to OURCR-O-WD.com slash twist. That URL again, R-Crowd.com slash. T-W-I-S-T. All right. James Bond has been acquired by Jeff Bezos. I mean, this is the no-brainer acquisition. Isn't it $9 billion or so?

James Bond has made like $10 billion historically. It's just the no-brainer that they would buy this. Shocking that those geniuses at Amazon negotiated a really nice M&A deal. I mean, I've never heard of them having a very favorable terms acquisitions. before. This is brand new news. Of course, it's not. They are notoriously unbelievable negotiators, and they definitely found a way to, I believe, get this asset on super opportunistic terms. It's amazing it hadn't been picked up yet. MGM has been around the block so many times. Back when I was a media investment banker in New York right after, right out of undergrad.

And this was in 2007, 2008, MGM was getting chopped around all the time. Then, I can't believe a major media company hadn't picked it up yet. Well, I mean, a huge move for Amazon. 8.45 billion is the official price. And if you just look at James Bond, I was thinking about this and I just did some Google searches, 27 films over 58 years. Okay.

So this is a six-decade franchise. Star Wars was 77. So you had the 70s, 80s, 90s, aughts, 2010. So that also is, I guess, about to hit. Were you telling us when you went on our pod that you would like pirated the Empire Stakes Back or something. Yeah, that was my original business was Jason's Hot Tapes. I had started a, my first business was Jason's hot tapes, and I literally had a bootleg

copy, The Empire Strikes Back, and I just kept bootlegging it worse and worse. You could barely watch it. But, you know, some guy owed my dad money who lost in poker or backgammon, and in exchange, these guys that, like, one of the theaters in Bensonhurst would set up 10 VHS tapes, and they would start the movie, and they would literally run and hit the record button right. down the line and then take the tapes out, run the movie again, do do do do and they would just make, you know, in one day because they had stolen, they literally stole off a truck, a copy of Empire Strikes Back.

Nobody knows where that tape was. And there were all kinds of scams like this. I mean, the other one we were doing was I had met a guy from one of my friends in fifth grade, sixth grade, and then he wanted copies of like chess master. and then when we were like an eighth or ninth grade, we started pirating chessmaster for PC, and he would give us like a dollar. So we would go steal floppy disk,

which costs $3 from like a store. We'd literally steal them. And then we would make copies of this, and we take the five finger discount, and then actually we negotiated more like $5 because I think chess minutes was 50. So we would give it to five. He would sell it for 10. And we would just sit there,

and every time the disc would come out of the machine, you know, in 20 minutes of copying it, we'd be like, well, there's five bucks. Well, there's five bucks. Well, there's five bucks. It was like we're counting out five and a quarter of floppies. But enough of my life of crime, which will be in the book. Slang and Doge on Twitter.

I mean, I literally could have been Lex Luther. If I had pursued that path. Thank the Lord, the internet happened. And I had a place to put this. But worldwide box office, if you adjusted for inflation, $14 billion, the last four films with Daniel Craig, who I think is kind of the best bond ever. Well, we'll rate bonds in a second. $2.9 billion.

in box office. And it's currently the fourth highest grossing franchise worldwide. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, $22 billion. Go ahead. Skyfall alone did over a billion one in revenue, and it only cost $150 million to make. I mean, these are cash cows. I mean, and I don't know how they,

I mean, Daniel Craig is like, I'm getting old. And they just like, 150 million? 300. I think he's getting, unless my research is to look it up, but I thought he got $150 million for the last two films or $300 million. And I can't remember who was, for some reason, the number 150, and he was like, I am out. I hate this role. And when I say him to say that publicly, I'm like, he's good for two more.

Like, that's the move on the way out. He's negotiating up. That's what he's doing. Yes. When you say, I am done with this, I hate this character. That means you got two left, right? Because you're poisoning the well, but, you know, you're kind of like, there is a number. You're open to getting paid.

Exactly. Like, you know, like when Robert Downey Jr. says, I hate Iron Man, he's doing four more. Yeah. That's basically how it goes. Marvel Cinematic Universe has done $22 billion across like 8,000 movies at this point. Star Wars 10 billion. Harry Potter, sadly, I know you guys love this, you millennials, but that piece of garbage made mine. You know, did she?

I mean, I don't know. Oh, God, David. I haven't been this. Okay, we can't go there. Do we want to get into women fighting for women's rights against trans people? Hmm, three white guys. Should we go there? Okay, yeah, let's not go there.

Okay, let's not go there. Let's stay in our lane. Don't want to talk about feminism and trans rights. Okay, great. Stick on bond, something we know. Who's the best bond? Let's just start there. Give me your number one.

How on earth could anybody not say Sean? Daniel, quite close to, but Sean, come on. Okay, I respect that. David? I agree. I've got such a soft spot for Pierce Brosnan for two reasons, though, just because that's what I grew up with. And two, he did like two of them, right?

Golden I-64 is the number one bond-related media property in history. I put so many thousands of hours into that game. So literally your bond decision is based upon the guy who they blocked from doing the role, and he did like one great video game. One of the best video games of all time. Okay. The quality of that video game, I would argue, is infinitely higher than any individual Bond movie.

What? Wow. You're out of your mind. You're so out of your mind. Also, because Brosnan is definitively the worst bond. No doubt. It's all my old. 964.

Okay, everybody, there it is. The Acquired podcast has ended. The breaking news, they've broken up. I'm going to take one of them for, one of them's going to the all-in pot as an alternate and one of them's going to co-host this week and start-ups. That's the end of the podcast. You're all getting refunds on your pro accounts.

All right. Let me correct you guys. Now, when I was growing up, My first bond was Roger Moore. So I believed, like Lauren Michael says, from S&L, whichever cast you grew up on is your favorite cast, just like whatever album you grew up on or period of music is the best music ever. I grew up on Roger Moore and I have a soft spot for him.

But when I look back on it historically, he was suave, but he wasn't dark. And then I look at Sean Connery and he was suave and I think more masculine and stronger as a bond. Oh, and he could fight. And he could fight. And he was a scounder. And he was a scoundrel, so you had a little bit more of that.

But he wasn't dark. He wasn't super dark. And then you have Daniel. He's definitely a badass. He's a badass. He's a badass. But with a smile, right? Like he would push you into a pool of sharks and wing.

But, you know, he wasn't going to shoot you in the back or the stomach and watch you bleed out. And that's why I have come to the conclusion that the. best bond, the most accurate bond, is Daniel Craig, because he is troubled, he is dark. In the same way I look at Batman's today, where I felt for a period of time that,

you know, like in terms of casting, you've got to think the Dark Knight is the best Batman of the series, but when you look back on the Batman that, oh, what's his name? Gosh, why is it not coming to me? That was the one I grew up. Michael Keaton. Michael Keaton is an

infant, is just an incredible actor. Incredible actor. And his Batman could have been the best Batman, I believe, if they had made the series darker. But when they made it sort of comic bookie with Jack Nicholson... It was campy. It was a little too campy. So I have to go with, obviously, the Dark Night series. It's so weird. You're not even talking about Ben Affleck? Actually, you know, did you guys see the Snyder cut?

Yeah, it was even worse than the original cut. No, you're crazy. Oh, my God. No, the 4x3 thing really bothered me. That was weird. That I couldn't shake. That was very weird. The story was better, though.

You're right. The story was so much better. The character development was so much better. The Flash was so much better. Cyborg was so much better. It just goes to show. It's like founder authority versus a hired gun CEO. Like, you really felt that kind of switch.

So for Amazon, this is just another awesome acquisition in the mold of their whole foods. Like, how did somebody else not get this? how did somebody else not get it it's old IP right I was looking at the names of a lot of these films it's Bond it's Raging Bull it's Silenced the Lambs yeah yeah like none of this is new so it is effectively I think it's two things it's one hey we finally have a bat catalog in Amazon Prime video that's not our originals that we own outright that we're not borrowing and competing every year to license and fighting Netflix that sort of thing but

And it's also, we are going to, and I know this was a sticking point in the deal, so I'm curious to see where it lands. We are going to do what Disney did with Marvel on Disney Plus and do a zillion shows. We are going to start repurposing the Bond IP, the, you know, all of this different historically classic IP, Rocky, and figure out things to do in, like, brand new things to do with that IP in Amazon. Absolutely. If you look, they own Stargate and Robocop. And if you think about those two franchises, those would be amazing series. to do a Stargate series again, because Stargate was a great movie and a great series.

Robocop, incredible IP. Just think about the world building you could do in Robocop alone. That would be an amazing vehicle for a series. And I just want to give a shout out here to Dread. I don't know if you guys saw the Dread film from, I think it was 2009 or something. D-R-E-D-D. This film is such a good dark science fiction film.

And they've been talking about the 2020 film Dread with Carl Urbane because, a series. Did you either of you happen to see this Dread? No. Watch this dread. Is this a great side? It is.

So the Judge Dred was comic bookie. This is the Dark Night version of Dread. In other words, the poster even looks like the Dark Night. When you see this film, it is so good. It has the woman, Lillian, what's her name from

Lena Hedy from Game of Thrones in it as the villain. It is amazing. It is like dark science fiction. Thank me, to the audience. There's such an easy win here. Those are like the next wins that Amazon can,

I'm sure, capable of doing. The easy win here is like the operations of the Bond franchise have been so screwed up. Like these movies come out so slowly. Amazon's going to be able to clean that up, pump out a movie every two, two and a half years. Yeah. Easy win.

Also, just think about it got 10 out of Craig on Amazon's schedule. Well, Also, think about, you know, with an unlimited budget and you think about that world, you know, we know 007, but they've never really told the stories of any of the other bonds. And I know this would be sacrilegious, I guess. But, you know, they've been talking about this controversy of, oh, what if bond was a different, wasn't a white guy, right, basically. Like, well, why not tell the story of five or six different agents, you know? 007 will not be a white guy in this upcoming movie. Oh, and the new one? Do they, did they, did they, can? that yet or no? Yeah, so Daniel Craig is still James Bond, but there is a 007 who is not. Oh, right. So they are already preparing the audience

because he's retired or something and she's now taken off. Ah, I know I were talking about that. I don't remember. I read the story like six months ago. Yeah, so anyway, they've been talking about 007 being played by a woman or a different person, a different, you know, whatever. a non-white English male. And so I think that's like a... It was going to be Idgeselba for years and years and years.

But why not... That would have been so awesome. Yeah. I mean, why not tell the story of the other double-O agents? Like, if you think about world building, you know, you think about Lord of the Rings. You think about what they did with Game of Thrones. Like, it need not be about 007.

You could create a whole world here of the other agents and other jobs they were doing. The MI6. Right. You could do MI6 and you could do a serious MI6 that then dovetails and it explains and builds fabric between all the movies. So imagine between Moonraker and Skyfall and all these things, they could go back and forth to the 80s to the 70s and do fan service between all the different bonds.

Yeah, that would be such a interesting dance because unlike a Marvel cinematic universe or a Star Wars, where they really do have an answer for everything. of it's very hand wavy in bond where they're like, oh, well, it's always in the present. And that's why the technology always sort of evolves. And like, you know, actually all the bonds, all these different actors, they're the same person. And they've always been the same age. And, and like, there's conflicts all over the place. And I, it, it would be an interesting job to be the person who is in charge of figuring out how to make this to do a proper universe and create continuity with all the handwaving that they've done in the past.

interesting so there is a term for this is it recon or re-retcon retroactively convert conforming or something like that retcon now a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events

typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency revise an aspect of fictional work retrospectively typically to introduce a new of information that opposed to a different interpretation. Right. Like, actually, I think that there was, like, some retcony.

Disney did this with Star Wars. They decided that they named a certain set of art as canon, and there was non-canon, and, like, if you were non-canon, then it's not part of the story. Well, and remember, the criticism of Star Wars was like, oh, they built the Death Star, and they left a hole in it that could blow up the whole thing. Like, that's the stupidest thing ever. These are the smartest engineers. They can make a planet-sized web.

in and they left a hole in it's like no an engineer who was being who was secretly built this flaw and gave it to his daughter so that whole thing with um what's the movie road one road one is literally the best retcon ever yeah yeah they literally retconed the one floor in star wars such a good movie congratulations to the star war i mean i think of of my favorite star wars movies is that's got to be up there for me i mean mean, just the Darth Vader scene at the end? Oh my God. So good.

I'd literally rewatch that. I think that was the most emotional I felt that year. Absolutely. Well, I mean, you're a, you're a, you're kind of, I was thinking about this the other day. I don't want to say you have Asperger's bad, but you don't have a big emotional rain. If Darth Vader was your biggest emotional moment for the year. He's like, it's actually that one. I'll back that up.

This is great. David, my biggest, David, what was your biggest emotional moment of the year? Was it like a SpongeBob SquarePants moment? Or was it like, what was it for you? Oh, I have to think about that. I don't know. But the emotion I was feeling the other day was just, I'm so sad and disappointed at how bad episode nine was. Are you guys with me on this?

Garbage. Garbage. You guys want to know the best tweet of my life, best Twitter moment in 11 years on the platform or whatever 15 years. I said they should retcon the entire post trilogy, get rid of 7,8,9. and redo it with Mark Hamill and show the story of the building of the Jedi Temple and give people what they want and Mark Hamill liked it.

Oh, wow. I am not kidding. You're making a case for a career transition into the content business. Absolutely. I was born to be a studio head. Absolutely get me a scumador with cigars in it. I will throw people out of my office.

Amazon might be looking for somebody to run MGM. I'll throw a MacBook out the window. I'll do whatever. I'll drive my car up on the sidewalk on a bush and park it there. I don't care. I'll be a studio head. Yeah, let's go. These things all happen in Entourage. I think so, yeah. I would be a great studio head. I would make absolutely flippant decisions and take credit for other people's work into the like Silicon Valley version of entourage. Oh my God. With the besties. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. How good would that be? Okay, yeah, calling HBO. If they want a reccom.

They want to create a series based on my insane life and punch it up three levels. You're the Ari Emanuel go out into Darry gold character. But, uh,

so imagine that though. See, I think that that's actually what's happening. If you remember at the end of the Mandalorian, you had Luke Skywalker show up and take Grogu, spoiler alert. And did you notice he was a fast Jedi at that point?

Do you notice the speed he had was similar to Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan? in the prequels, he was a fast Jedi, right? So the Jedi and Star Wars were all slow, because they were old. And they had, you know, Darth Vader was missing three limbs and was on life support. Obi-Wan was 80 years old. They were slow Jedi and Luke was a new Jedi. So he barely knew how to use his lightsaber. So you watch those lightsaber battles and it looks ridiculous. But when you go to the prequels, you remember how fast they are and they're fighting drones that are show? It's like 16 times to make one saber strike. Then you have the new. new series and all of a sudden they're fast again. That's because Luke Skywalker became fast. Luke Skywalker becomes like a real fast Jedi, gets Grogu, and then Princess Leia becomes a Jedi and then you just create an entirely new story and throw away 7, 8, 9.

I'm with you just because 9 was so bad. I liked 8 though. What did you think of 8? You know, I tried to like it. I tried to like it. I just don't like when people are trying to do something other than telegram. great story with great characters and aesthetics and dialogue and performance in movies. When they try to lecture you through the story, it breaks me out of the story.

I'm like, please don't lecture me about being woke in the middle of Star Wars. Like, I get that all day long on Twitter. I'm not at the movies for you to scream at me like hysterical libs on Twitter or troll me like the right, right? Like, that's what they did with that movie. They're like, by the way, here's some other characters who haven't been represented before and I'm like, I get it. Yes, I understand Star Wars was made at a time when it was like only white people.

I got it. Now you're making it. And it's just like a little bit tedious. I did. I really like. And the direction they took the story in because of that made no sense. Like the entire 25 minute segment on the Vegas planet. Yeah.

To just show that those wealthy people were financing the war. You're like, eh. I get it. Yes. You could have done that in a one or two. passing lines. The thing, though, for me that I really liked about it, though, was the Ray is Nobody thing.

Like, I thought that was great. Yeah. The only thing I don't like about Ray as nobody is that they had faked us into thinking she's Obi-Wan's child, she's Luke's child, she's the emperor's child, she's a clone. I mean, they didn't actually know. Right. I mean, this shows the dysfunction that was going on in the organization at that point.

My beef with the final trilogy is that it didn't have one single director. I actually would have been fine if it was JJ all the way through. The film I didn't like was eight. I actually liked nine because if you're going to do seven and nine in that style, you're basically saying we're doing kind of a fun fan service reboot of Star Wars with great modern technology. It's going to feel a lot like the original. There's going to be, you know, it's not going to feel groundbreaking. Ryan Johnson is a groundbreaking director.

He's artistic. Yes. He is daring. Yeah. Yeah. And so having that sandwiched in between JJ movies that were really trying to just preserve what George had created, created this like just ugly discontinuity. And I wish they had had just committed to someone early on. Yeah.

Interesting. All right. Listen, this has been this week in film. Great job, boys. Acquired FM is a podcast. Acquired FM has a proverse. You pay 100 bucks for it. David, investing companies.

Ben has a fund. Anything else, boys? You're getting good at this. That's great. Ben, the merch that you're wearing today is available. How much is the signature Ben Gilbert's shirt going for? Well, with acquired embroidered on the inside, it's a $20,000 limited edition t-shirt.

Got it. Is there an NFT version available? Are you wearing an NFT right now? Is this? I am not. That'd be so great. If we were all virtual reality right now and that was an NFT. and somebody buys it from you and then all of a sudden you're topless like boom somebody bought the shirt right off your back and it's like boom

we haven't paid money for that absolutely uh all right we'll see you all next time bye bye