Acquired

Brad is wonderful past guest here of us on acquired.

The point of the crypt bun, other than I'm sure just to be hijinky and ironic was, Hey, let's take another shot at this.

Brad talks about this in the book.

We see this person likes wine. Rent your place to a wine lover.

Well, growth covers a lot of sins and the growth of this company was spectacular.

But Brad is the senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg. And before that, he covered tech in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years as a reporter at Bloomberg Newsweek and The New York Times. Most relevantly and fun for us, Brad is the author a few years back of the canonical history of Amazon, The Everything Store, which, as listeners know, we have discussed a lot on this show and has had a big impact on Ben and my thinking. It's just a great book that we can't recommend enough. And Brad actually has now a new book out called The Upstarts, which covers the histories thus far of the kind of new generation of defining Internet companies, Airbnb and Uber.

Ben and I both read it. It's great. We highly recommend it. We're going to be talking about a lot of the content within it on this show, but definitely go out and pick up a copy.

I just finished The Upstarts last night, and I loved it. I mean, it's truly - I talked a lot about The Everything Store on the episode with Tom Allberg, but really the spiritual successor to that Amazon book.

I like to use a definition that I came across in a book...And you can get really complicated. You can get really academic...About the definition of a game...But in my mind jesse puts it best...A game is simply something that you play

I like to use a definition that I came across in a book that is by the way the best on the topic The Art of Game Design by jesse shell

Westwood studios releases a title for the PC called Dune two, which is based on Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novels, the Dune series, which are awesome.

And that's the story. I never spoke to Sam Strom again. I've never mentioned his name publicly. I never mentioned his name in his book and I say it respectfully.

It's the whole crux of your book Onward.

I, uh, first of every rock I turned over was worse than I thought. There were a lot of unperforming stores that should have never been opened that we need to close. I think we closed a thousand stores and I had a company-wide meeting.

I mean, just think about, you know, we were on our trajectory for all this time and all of a sudden we not only hit a speed bump, but the world, the music was just stopping. The stock price, I think broke $6.

And I promise I'm do my best, but we're trying to save the company. And literally we were trying to save Starbucks.

I was inspired by Clay Christensen disruption theory.

But I will say, and this is an easy one to recommend, but the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari was a seminal for so many people.

Intel equaled memory in all of our minds.

Sooner or later something fundamental in your business world will change and so apt, apt for right now, and apt for Intel at this moment.

The Japanese memory producers appeared on the scene. Actually they had first shown up in the late 70s to fill the production shortages we had created when a recession pulled back our investments in production capacity.

Win with the 10% rule find AMD and Intel sockets I assume sockets being like where they were selling into quote 10% below their price if they re-quote go 10% again don't quit until you win

Looking back over my own career I have never made a tough change whether it involved resource shifts or personnel moves that I haven't wished I had made a year or so earlier.

Tom: Michael Lewis's latest book The Undoing Project, chronicling the Nobel Prize winning partnership between Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky in developing the field of behavioral economics

The books about Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Nobel prize winners for basically developing behavioral economics.

There's Michael Lewis's Liars poker.

You brought up Liars Poker before and Michael Lewis has just released for the first time an audio book, an unabridged audio book of Liars Poker. But he also put out a companion podcast and the companion podcast is spectacular.

It's in this great book called the Trust which chronicles the history of the times that I was reading to prepare, they call it a distinctly American city neither northern nor southern

Remember in X, I don't know if you watch Billions, so you know at some point, he was like, I'm going to go raise money.

So, there's just natural tension for acts like, What should it be? I like when I have other people's money because he seemed to perceive, I think he felt that he wasn't somebody in his ecosystem, in his community without managing outside capital.

They are so good as good or better than the movies and the movies are in my opinion some of the best of all time.

My quick one is the second book that I read on vacation which is Open by Andr Agassi his co-writer or ghost writer I don't know the right term but it's the same Pulitzer prize winning writer who helped fill night with Shoe Dog and it is written in that same page turning thriller style and Andr Agassi had an unbelievable career ups downs

But I will say, and this is an easy one to recommend, but the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari was a seminal for so many people. And he's got a new book out that I'm just starting but enjoying very much. Homo Deus, I think is how you pronounce it, A Brief History of Tomorrow, which is him kind of looking at the future and automation and the future of humanity. And I just find his writing to be mesmerizing.

it's this, uh, it's this cool book. It's a collection of sort of one to two pages each on really famous artists and thinkers from the last couple hundred years. And, um, just what their daily routine was like

there seemed to be no correlation between, uh, longevity and, and a degree of hard living, you know, people who were the most disciplined, like would die in their fifties. And people who, um, led the craziest lives would live into their nineties.

I started listening to, um, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, audio book, this week on audio book. And I finished it cause it's incredibly short, um, which I'd forgotten. I'd read it a long, long time ago. Oh, that's so appropriate for Snapchat.

Evan went out and he bought copies of The Art of War and he gave them to each one of his employees.

the best victory that you can achieve is, is a whole victory where you don't destroy the other side, you capture the other side.

By the way we know all this because we have to thank Greg Zuckerman author of The Man Who Solved the Market which is the only book out there that is solely dedicated to rentek and Jim Simon's and we actually got to talk to Greg in our research he helped us out about thank you Greg and help fact check a few of our assumptions of what happened after the book came out.

So that was Jim's parents but really a major influence on him growing up with his grandfather marshes dad there's already kind of echoes of the base of story here with the grandfather the mother's father and spending a bunch of time with him and rubbing off on young Jeff or young Jim in this case and base of course would get his start in his career at D Shaw.

As Greg puts it in the book Peter reveled in telling Jim and his cousins stories of the motherland involving wolves women caviar and vodka and he teaches young Jim when he's a child here in the factory to say Russian phrases like give me a cigarette and kiss my ass which I think he probably would say that thousands of times the rest of his life.

We look down on him when he did this like he had been corrupted and had sold his soul to the devil yeah I mean it was really viewed in the math community as anyone who's going to do investing is throwing away their talent.

I was doing one of the like sell-offs in the mid-twenty teens in the market where Jim calls the head of his family office is you know longer tired from rentek at this point calls the head of his family office and says what should we do with all the sell-off in the market it's like your gym assignments right your gym assignments what should we do what should we do yeah.