[S6E1] The New New Thing by Michael Lewis

The New New Thing by blockbuster author Michael Lewis captures the culture of the 1990s dot-com bubble in a self-aware way that few contemporary books did. Ostensibly the story of Jim Clark, a talented technologist and entrepreneur, it's also a deep dive into the types of personalities and schemes that propelled the internet stocks to ridiculous highs in those heady days of the late 1990s. Welcome to Business Books and Company. Every month we read great business books and explore how they can help us navigate our careers. Read along with us so you can become a stronger leader within your company or a more adept entrepreneur. This month we read The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis. It's the story of Jim Clark, the heady days of the 1990s dot-com bubble, and the companies he started, namely Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healththeon. Written in 1999, it captures a particular era in Silicon Valley very well, including the unbridled enthusiasm of venture capitalists and startup stock-compensated software engineers thinking they can change the world at every turn. In this episode, we'll discuss the book, the time, the place, And the man, Jim Clark. But before we get to the book, let's introduce ourselves.

Hi, I'm David Short. I'm a product manager.

I'm Kevin Hudak, a chief research officer at a Washington, DC-based commercial real estate research and advisory firm. And I just got back from a fantastic trip to Italy with my wife, and I may be a bit jet-lagged and have some brain fog here, but did I hear you say technology books and company, Kopech? Is there a name change here?

What's the deal?

Well, we're so excited to be starting a new feed for the technology books that we read together, Technology Books and Company. This is going to be an opportunity for our listeners who are more interested in the technology side than the business side to do deep dives with us on specific technology books, as well as some books that are pure technology plays, not books that feature business at all, but talk about technological concepts. So there'll be some business technology books, and some more pure-play technology books as well. We're going to be continuing with where a lot of people discovered us, Business Books and Company, but Technology Books and Company, we hope, is going to be a way to engage on a whole new level with folks interested in that sphere.

Well, excellent, Kopech. That's exciting news, and I'm looking forward to reading many more technology books with y'all.

And I should introduce myself. I'm David Kopech. I'm an associate professor of computer science at a teaching college. So this month we read The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis. And I thought we could start by finding out a little bit about the main subject of the book, the gentleman Jim Clark, who many people might not have heard of, but actually was a big name in the 1990s when the book was written. We'll talk a little bit about him, then we'll talk about the companies he started, and then we'll talk about the, the many themes of the book and how they come together around Jim Clark. But let's start with him himself. So can you tell us a little bit about Jim Clark, David, and why he was worthy of having a whole book written about him by Michael Lewis?

Yeah, I had never heard of Jim Clark until I read these— this book, although I read this book a while ago, so I have known about him for a while. So James Henry Clark was born and raised in Plainview, Texas, which is a small town between Lubbock and Amarillo. He dropped out of high school and joined the Navy, and it was there that he got exposed to technology and engineering, ultimately studying at Tulane in night school while he was still in the Navy. And then I think he got his degrees from the University of New Orleans and then ultimately a master's in physics and a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. So he ended up having a number of academic roles. And so he didn't really get his sort of startup experience until he was in his late 30s, you know, some, uh, about, about our age. Uh, he ultimately founded first Silicon Graphics with some technology that he had developed as a professor, the Geometry Engine. That technology, uh, inspired a lot of the early graphical computers. And so, you know, sort of the way that Hollywood made Jurassic Park, for instance, was on these Silicon Graphics workstations. From there, he went on to work with Marc Andreessen on founding Netscape and then Healththeon, which merged into WebMD. And so he was the first person to found 3 multibillion-dollar companies, which I think Elon Musk has certainly done that subsequently. I'm not sure if there have been others that have done it. It's a, it's a really impressive thing to have managed to like not just strike it rich once, but, but really 3 times. He's been married 4 times and he has 4 children.

Thanks for that overall summary. And I think we can see why he's worthy of having a book written about him by a very famous author, I might add. For those that are not familiar with Michael Lewis, you might have seen the movie Moneyball. That's a Michael Lewis book originally. So is the movie The Big Short, which was also originally a Michael Lewis book. So one of the prominent nonfiction authors of our time decided Jim Clark was a worthy subject. But let's go back to the really early days of Jim Clark. You gave us a good summary of his overall picture, David, but Kevin, can you tell us about what his early life was like leading up to founding these companies.

So Short gave a fantastic introduction to why we were reading a book about Jim Clark, but one thing he missed about Plainview, Texas, which Michael Lewis picked up on, it was the setting. Imagine where Jim Clark grew up. It was such a, a Dust Bowl environment seemingly that it was the setting for the great 1992 Steve Martin film Leap of Faith, Which Lewis mentions at the very end of the book. It is one of my favorite Steve Martin movies as well. It's about a conman faith healer who shows up. It was supposed to be in Kansas, but it was filmed in Plainview. Spoiler alert, he ends up finding his faith through some of the actions of the community and his colleagues there. But as Michael Lewis points out, they actually painted the water tower in Plainview to say Rustwater, which is Rustwater, Kansas, where the movie reportedly takes place. But imagine this is, you know, very much a depressed West Texas town. Jim Clark is growing up in poverty there. His childhood is well covered in the final chapter of the book. At one point, you know, his mother said just before they received their Netscape shares, they were ready to kill and cook the cat for food. You know, that's how bad his early life was there. Unsurprisingly, he was clever. He was a high school prankster. He ultimately dropped out of school after getting suspended for setting off a smoke bomb on a bus. And then he had a bit of a military turnaround, right? So he enlisted in the Navy at 17. On his first aptitude test, he wasn't familiar with multiple choice tests, so he, he selected every bubble for every question asked, and that actually fooled the Scantron machine into thinking that he got 100% on it. The Navy thought that he was cheating though. And so as a result, he was assigned to the most menial labor, you know, basically cleaning the latrines. It sounds like he was hazed by some of his, you know, higher level Folks he was reporting to. But later the Navy discovered his mathematical aptitude and he went on to get his high school equivalency. He went on to an undergraduate degree and ultimately he got a PhD in computer science, which allowed him to then become a computer science professor at Stanford. And this is where his life really takes a turn and he starts heading in this direction of the 3 multibillion-dollar companies. At Stanford, he created basically a cabal of the sharpest computer science students where he explored and innovated the geometric engine for rendering graphics in 3D, right? He always thought that would be incredible if we could get to a point where computers rendered in 3D, not 2D. It was groundbreaking. It was sort of his first new, new thing, which ultimately led to Silicon Graphics. You know, ultimately Michael Lewis paints him as a boy and a man who has a chip on his shoulder, right? His early childhood, His culminating experiences in the Navy and then at Stanford gives him a chip on his shoulder. He has a near pathological, even a physiological, the way that he puckers his lips, you know, need to prove his doubters wrong, whether that's the establishment capitalists, the establishment in general, you know, his childhood town. He would buzz, you know, his childhood town when he was arriving in his private jet, the establishment at Stanford, or even later his own board members and funders, starting with Silicon Graphics.

Thank you for that, Kevin. So I think we have a good understanding now of where Jim Clark came from, and we're going to talk more about some of the themes of his life later in the episode. But I thought we could go and do a quick summary of these billion-dollar companies that he founded. So let's start with Silicon Graphics. David, can you tell us a little bit about Silicon Graphics?

Yeah, so Clark founded Silicon Graphics coming out of Stanford, as Kevin kind of mentioned earlier. This was in 1981 in Mountain View, and the core business really was the geometry engine. So, you know, 3D rendering and graphics and ultimately workstations was really the big thing that they had had real commercial success with initially, although they really expanded into a lot of different areas within the, you know, 3D graphics space. So as I mentioned earlier, you know, Hollywood was a really big customer for them. Jurassic Park, Toy Story, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Even The Matrix used technology from SGI and Silicon Graphics in order to create those really iconic CGI that we all, you know, remember. The firm ultimately went bankrupt in 2009, actually was acquired by Rackable, which did actually take on the SGI name. And then that entity was actually acquired by HP in 2016. So the technology is still out there, although the company is no longer with us.

Okay. And then after Silicon Graphics, he becomes one of the main founders of Netscape. And for those of you that are over 35, you probably know what Netscape is, but for those that aren't, let me give you a quick overview. So Netscape was the first successful web browser that was commercially developed. There had been some web browsers before that were used, but they weren't really taking off the way that Netscape did. Netscape in the mid-1990s had like a 90% market share. It was developed by a team that included Marc Andreessen, who's a famous venture capitalist today, and he had actually previously worked on a web browser while he was still in college called NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic was developed at the University of Urbana-Champaign in Illinois, and it was actually the first web browser to have inline graphics. So not just text, but pictures included interspersed with the text. It really took off. Everyone was using Mosaic. And then there was this idea, well, why isn't he making money out of Mosaic? Right? Because the university was controlling it. So actually, Marc Andreessen goes out to Silicon Valley. He ends up starting Netscape with Jim Clark, and he brings over some of the other folks who had worked on it from the university. And together they do a clean room implementation of a web browser. So supposedly not using any of the source code from Mosaic, even though they're the ones who had also developed Mosaic, and Netscape becomes wildly successful. Of course, this doesn't go on forever because Microsoft enters the scene with Internet Explorer and the 2 browsers duke it out in the late 1990s. But Netscape was a seminal internet company for a couple years. It was basically synonymous with the World Wide Web and the Netscape web browser, I think I mentioned earlier, obtained like 90% market share. So everyone was using Netscape to browse the web. They never really figured out a great business model though to capitalize on that.

And now I finally understand after reading this book why Netscape Navigator, one of those icons that I saw early on in life being above 35, Kopech, it had the steering wheel of a ship, right? I believe there's probably a different nautical term for the steering wheel of a ship, the helm, but it had the steering wheel with the stars in the sky. And now that I've read about Jim Clark and how he was obsessed with yachting, right, it makes sense that that was their logo. But, but Kopech, tell us a little bit about what company he founded next, Healthion.

Right. So Netscape made him fabulously wealthy because Netscape's IPO was kind of the seminal IPO that kicked off the dot-com boom, the dot-com bubble, if you will, throughout the 1990s. So Jim Clark, already having been successful with Silicon Graphics and Netscape, thinks he can do it again. And even while he's still kind of working on Netscape, he's formulating a way of fixing the US healthcare system, which later became known as Healthion, but started out as Healthscape, kind of like Netscape. And then they were like, it sounds too similar. So it became Healthion. Well, Healthion was trying to be the center connector between all the different entities in the healthcare industry. So between doctors and patients and insurance companies and pharmaceuticals, connecting them all as a central point. that would provide the computing infrastructure to make transactions seamless and get rid of a lot of the bureaucracy and inefficiency. Remember, in the 1990s, people are still doing everything on paper and faxing everything around. There isn't really an internet way of connecting healthcare records. That was the vision. It never quite got there, but they did have some real customers by the late 1990s. But before we really saw it evolve to whatever it might have become, They eventually merged with WebMD, and WebMD actually still exists today, but it's nothing like what Healththeon was trying to become. But in the meantime, it did actually IPO and become another billion-dollar IPO for Jim Clark. Kevin, actually back to you. Can you tell us about yet another company started by Jim Clark in the book My CFO?

I would just add that the ambition of Jim Clark was unending, right? To find this new, new thing. At that point, healthcare was a $1.5 trillion industry in, you know, the United States. And at that point, President Bill Clinton and the government had tried to tackle this and couldn't find a solution or agree on a solution. So here comes Jim Clark saying, I'm going to draw this magic diamond and I'm going to put myself and Healththeon at the middle of it. So it was very ambitious. Again, it was another billion-dollar, multi-billion-dollar company, but then My CFO came along. So after Jim Clark had had these 3 big successes, he was looking around Silicon Valley. He realized that the new, new thing might actually be helping the 170,000+ deca-millionaires at the time manage their finances. He also detested, like I mentioned before, the capital establishment, the bank establishment. Michael Lewis goes into this, you know, cool, very adaptable to a movie scene where Jim Clark is going to a Swiss banker only to gain retribution on one of the Swiss bank's clients who was refusing to pay him. And so he hates bankers. The Swiss banker episode just proves that he liked cutting them out and the idea that he could sit over their data and sit over their clients. And so in 1999, as the dot-com bubble was peaking, he, you know, found, you know, managing his own fortune to be a burden. He envisioned an easier way to do it. My CFO was going to be an online high-end virtual, like family office as they exist today. The idea being to commoditize and automate the typical functions of your top-tier wealth manager using the internet. And so just as you could check on your sailboat or your home from the internet, as Jim Clark imagined it, you could also check a sleek dashboard that had all of your financial information there. While it attracted billions in assets under management from these tech executives, it really struggled as an automated platform because when you think about it, something like this is typically pretty high touch. It's not something that you just want to outsource into a tech platform for the snazziness of a dashboard. And so ultimately it was sold to Harris Bank in 2002, and it, I don't know if it still exists, but at that point they rebranded it to Harris My CFO.

So all these companies we need to talk about the time spans of, because Silicon Graphics, Jim Clark is involved with for over dozen years. But Netscape, Healthion, my CFO, he starts all 3 of them within about half a decade. So he's kind of done his Silicon Graphics time. There's some bitterness after the end of it. He doesn't really have control. He's more of kind of this founder who's a visionary, but not somebody who's running the day-to-day operations. His title is chairman while he's in his latter years at Silicon Graphics, and he decides Okay, I was right about Silicon Graphics. I'm the guy who can figure out the vision of the next thing. But he can also convince venture capitalists that he's the guy that can figure out the vision of the next thing. And he does that repeatedly with each of these 3 companies while not taking full control of them. So he is kind of starting Netscape, starting Healththeon, starting MyCFO, but not acting as the CEO. A lot of books we read are about entrepreneurial founders who also are the early managers of the companies. But that's not the case with Jim Clark. He has the vision for the company but never handles the day-to-day operations. And the book makes clear that's actually what he wants. He seems to, at least initially, not want control, but sometimes when he disagrees, it seems like he kind of wants to, from the sidelines, exert some control. But he's ultimately not an operator. He's a founder, but not an operator, which is interesting and different from a lot of the classic Silicon Valley stories. Kevin, let's talk about how these companies did longer term because today there is no Netscape, right? All of them actually don't exist today. Is there something about the way that they were launched by him, kind of with the vision but without the operations, that you think ties together why they didn't endure?

Well, one, he was always looking for the next Money grab almost, right? I think that one reviewer I saw about Michael Lewis said that the book is comedic in some ways. It is skeptical, but it's never cynical, right? But the way that Michael Lewis presents him in each of these phases in his life is, you know, when he started Silicon Graphics, he just wanted to make, what was it, $100,000, right? When he started Netscape, he wanted to make the $100 million. When it came to Healthion, he wanted to make the billion-plus dollars. When he saw the boat Juliet, you know, docked in San Francisco Bay, he wanted a boat that was bigger and had a higher mast, right? So some of this, you know, when you ask about the unifying threads here, some of it's money, some of it's always this kind of boredom and his restlessness that drove him to do these things. But when it comes to how he designed these companies, how he conceptualized them, he rightly recognized that speed to market was everything in this new internet age. So he really built those companies and those ideas with no thought towards the business plans, the management structures, you know, and the long-term operating model. He was restless. He was a creator. He was an innovator. His genius was in conceptualizing the initial disruption, capturing the public's imagination. He was great with the press. He knew exactly what to leak to the press and how much, you know, not all of the plan, not all of the new, new thing, but just enough to whet their appetites. And then he also raised capital at never-before-seen valuations versus what the revenue or what the profit of that company is or could be. You know, once in a long-ago time before this, a company required actual revenue and profit to be considered in that old Graham and Dodd value investing model. What he instead brought to it was modeling the valuation of the company based on possibility. Right? Once a company that had been formed by Jim Clark required that long-term business model and a serious American executive. So everywhere in the book, Lewis capitalizes serious American executive. Once those 2 things were established and there were metrics, Clark got bored. He checked out. He was irritated by the behavior of the people who reported to him and who he reported to, and he then moved on to the next new thing. And I think it was really Interesting because both Lewis and Clark at different points, Lewis and Clark in the book, they point out that in Silicon Valley, in this new internet age, the new by rule will always eat the old, right? The young will always eat the old because Clark built those companies that were designed to disrupt. They lacked the institutional stability to survive the next wave of disruption, right? So Netscape ended up getting crushed and consumed by Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer. Right? Healthion ended up getting consumed, although the book paints it as Healthion almost acquiring WebMD. When you actually read some of the facts, it was more of a kind of an integration or even WebMD just inevitably consuming Healthion. And I, when I was reading this, I admired Jim Clark's ability to say, we have to find the underbelly and we have to cannibalize our own product. And that's what he wanted to do with Silicon Graphics almost. And that's what he wanted to do when they were talking about the internet TV. Imagine if, you know, Kodak or Blockbuster recognized that in order to succeed, we have to cannibalize our own business. And Jim Clark, that was one of his new, new things. He recognized that you have to sometimes cannibalize your own business with the next disruptive thing, or else someone's going to cannibalize it or eat it in general.

I'm glad you brought up the internet TV because that was a big diversion in the book. He got a bunch of engineers involved at Silicon Graphics on, can we deliver video on demand basically to people's televisions? And we, of course, that is what TV became. But the book being written in 1999 calls the project a failure. But it again was Jim Clark having the right idea. He was ahead of his time. He was ahead of his time with a lot of these companies. He really did have great vision. But the fact that the companies didn't endure, I think, speaks to how important it is to have strong management as well as great vision.

And he didn't view it as a fault that some of these companies didn't endure either, right? Like in his world, That was just the natural way of Silicon Valley in the new internet age at that point. So I'm not saying that he wanted them to fail, but at some point he was just done with them. It was the natural cycle of life and he went on to the next thing.

I think what we often see is founders kind of imprinting a certain culture onto a company in a lot of the entrepreneurial books that we read. And I don't get that sense here. I get the sense that he was bringing in people who were excited about the idea, maybe excited about making money, but there wasn't a specific way of running the company or the company's culture being that he was trying to insist on existing at any of these companies that he started other than moving quickly and, you know, trying to get the MVP built and out to market as efficiently as possible.

Since I always talk through the culture stuff too, it seems like the culture he built was all about like following like and talent following talent. Like, remember with, I can't remember their names exactly, but the, the 2 Indian engineers and developers who worked on ITV, but then also—

Avan and Kitu.

Yeah.

And they then followed him onto Healthion. And when they said we were going to follow Jim Clark, a lot of the Silicon Graphics team members were faxing letters and resumes. When he started My CFO, he basically just had to hire a few high-end accountants who knew this industry well, and then others followed. So, you know, in Jim Clark's world, culture is like follows like and talent follows talent. That's really what it boils down to.

And it might be a great way to raise money and get something started, but it's not necessarily a great way to actually run a business. Netscape never had a successful business model, and I don't think you could say Healththeon or MyCFO were successful either. Silicon Graphics was the most successful long-term. It existed for over 20 years. But actually the person who brought it from like a single-digit million-dollar revenue company to a single-digit billion-dollar revenue company was the kind of traditional manager, Ed McCracken, who throughout the book, it's alluded to how much Jim Clark hates. Actually, it's pretty explicit that Jim Clark really doesn't like him, but he's kind of the adult supervision that comes in and actually manages the company to a successful business model. And as much as Jim Clark criticizes him, none of his other companies had a successful business model. So Jim Clark seems great at starting things, great at having the vision of something that should be built and attracting money to that vision, but not necessarily great at actually executing on it or putting, even putting the people in place to execute on it. The people that were forced on him, the Ed McCracken and some other folks, were actually the ones who could actually get things done, not the people who he picked.

And even like in some of the adults in the room, like James Barksdale, who was the CEO of Netscape during the Microsoft antitrust trial, and then Mike Long at Healthion, it seemed like some of the adults, even the adults who sort of learned from the Jim Clark school and started using some of those tactics, ended up getting screwed over a bit in the end too. Like, remember the book details how Barksdale was testifying in court And the, I guess the defense for Microsoft put up a screenshot of an email completely contravening his testimony that Jim Clark had sent to Microsoft just before Barksdale had started. Mike Long with that roadshow, I've never seen investor roadshows gone into in so much detail. And that was something really cool about this book. Long sort of adapted some of that Jim Clark, not showmanship, but those big ideas. and it ended up biting him in the butt on that investor roadshow, and they had to cancel their IPO. So it's kind of a, you know, it's, there's a no-win situation here. The only winner seemed to be, you know, Jim Clark and some of his select few developer engineers who he really admired and brought with him from company to company.

And this book is not just about Jim Clark. It's also about the people around him and the culture around him in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. And again, for those that are maybe less Well, that was the era of the dot-com bubble. It was this huge run-up in stocks to the point of insanity where they were way overvalued for what they really were delivering. It wasn't that the internet was wrong or that a lot of those companies couldn't eventually deliver value. It was that there was just too much being invested in them from the public markets given where their actual profits were at the time. And so it led to this ginormous bubble that eventually popped shortly after this book came out, actually, and led to a lot of people losing their hats and a lot of the companies going out of business. There were survivors like Amazon.com or eBay, but there were also many, many, many more stories of tragedy. So David, what does the book kind of tell us about that era and that culture in Silicon Valley in the 1990s?

I think this is maybe where this book excels the most actually, is in like providing this insight into the dot-com era. So I think there's a couple of different vignettes that I'd share that like, I think really like helped, helped like paint a picture for me that I don't think I've seen anywhere else. And frankly, I don't think I appreciated when I first read this book, you know, maybe 15 years ago, because I was a little, it was a little closer to the time. So one, the scene it portrays of the actual Healthion IPO, is just really incredible. And I genuinely believe Michael Lewis was there because like just the way he's told the story and everything, like, I think he was, I think he was in the room at Healthion on the day that this happened and watched as Pawan is getting the call from Morgan Stanley and updating the room as it has one of the craziest blockbuster IPOs that like ever happened. I think it went up 400% on the IPO day. And so, you know, the people in that room were now worth, I think they said $300 million. And actually, maybe that was like early on and then it kept going up from there. So that was fascinating. You've— I've sort of seen it portrayed in movies a little bit, but to like really think about, you know, being in the room of a startup where like everyone around you has options and like this like number that has been fake for all this time and you've, you know, not seen your families and been working 24 hours a day and all this for this, you know, 18-month period, not, not that long actually, but You know, significant, you know, piece of their life that they've put into it to then like see it become like realized. And then they go through, you know, ultimately the stock does go up a whole lot more from there, but also comes down. And then with— it's actually only a few months later that they merge with WebMD. So it's kind of fascinating, like how quickly all of that played out sort of right after Michael Lewis left the picture, I presume, given his lack of detail into any of the WebMD stuff. The other part that I found really fascinating was Jim's engagement with VCs over time. And I thought that really painted a picture of like the change, uh, through that period. And so when Jim first found Silicon Graphics, he gives, I think it was 40% of the company for like $700,000 or something like that. And they then blew through that in like 7 months. And so he had to go back to the VC. Give more of the equity. And so while Silicon Graphics becomes a, you know, many billions of dollar company, Jim Clark becomes a wealthy man, but he does not become like an obscenely rich man. I think he only earns like on the order of $10 million, something like that from, from Silicon Graphics, despite it having like obscene success for his VCs who earned, you know, many hundreds of millions of dollars. And so he was very upset about that. He felt like he'd really gotten screwed over in the deal. He felt like his engineers had gotten screwed over. Even though all of them, you know, ultimately were, were successful, they had, you know, and, and, and he ultimately had the opportunity to then with Netscape really turn the tables on the VCs. And so he self-funds the company initially, he puts in his own money and he tells Kleiner Perkins, your money is worth, uh, 1/3 of what mine is. So like I put in the same amount of money, you're going to get 1/3 of the equity that, that I did for the same investment that you're going to put in. And he really turned the tables and I'm not sure, like they painted as sort of the first time that this had happened. I don't know that that's true exactly. But I think it was quite rare for the engineers to have really like sort of taken the reins and to really hold on to the equity. And obviously this, you know, ultimately like Facebook becomes like the, you know, the extreme example of this where, you know, Zuck creates different shares of equity so that he's able to, you know, maintain ownership and is able to really hold on to large shares of equity as the founder. But this was pretty unique for Jim. And then with Healthion, it like goes Even beyond that, where like he basically doesn't even do anything. He gets the VCs to fund the whole thing. He, he doesn't really put money in initially. He does later on, like as it struggles, he puts up money. He uses his money as a cudgel to keep the VCs coming along. That was also really fascinating. I think was, uh, they, they tell a couple different vignettes where, uh, Healthion is looking for additional investment. The VCs are like, ah, you know, you haven't proven anything. You haven't made any money. Like, we'll, we'll go find someone else to put the money in, they're not succeeding. And then Jim just says, I'll put the money up. Like, I believe in this company. I'll, but you know, you're going to give me your equity then. Like, I'm, you know, you're not, you're not getting in on this round. We're going to dilute you, the VCs. And they didn't want to look bad, so they didn't want to get egg on their face. So, so he only put up whatever it was, a third of the money instead of all of it. He does still, you know, put his, put his money up to, to keep those businesses going. But I thought, I thought those, those areas were really interesting, but I'm curious what else y'all thought about the culture of Silicon Valley that we saw from it. Well, sure.

And I loved what you just finished with because, you know, I, it was like weaponizing the fear of missing out, right? Once he put his own money in, the VCs all said, we don't want to miss out on another new, new thing that our truffle-sniffing dog, our new, new thing-sniffing dog has found, right? And, and that was really startling to me. Just the head fakes that he would throw out there, his, you know, manipulation of the press in some ways, like I mentioned before, and really just forcing the VCs to accept his terms. And that's like what you referenced. It changed startup equity structures forever, right? Particularly like with John Doerr. And it's funny that one of my, in my first season with this show, we read OKRs and John Doerr talked through all that. It was funny to see him through the lens of Michael Lewis in this book.

Yeah. And I think it also speaks to just this era of funny money. Like, it's almost like the dollars and cents stop mattering and it's just about the ideas. And it's like, of course there's money for the ideas as long as the ideas seem plausible and seem like the right person with the right vision is leading them. He was like a money magnet. Once his successes just kept rolling, as long as he was at the center of it, people trusted it. And he was able to explain the vision in a way that attracted both the people who wanted to work with him and the money people. There's a quote here from page 320. To woo investors enamored of the new and thus keep your stock price rising, you had to remain in a state of pure possibility. Pure possibility, meaning you're always thinking, well, what it could be. It doesn't really matter what it is right now. It's what it could be. That's the possibility. And you have to keep people's eyes focused on that, what it could be. And he was never wrong about any of them, by the way. He was right about 3D graphics. He was right about the World Wide Web. He was right that the healthcare industry would need to embrace the internet. And he was right that there's a better way of managing money. We see things like Wealthfront today. So everything that he was envisioning came about, but there just wasn't a real business there. But he was convinced yet there wasn't a real business there yet, always. But he was able to convince people about that pure possibility. And you needed somebody who was trustworthy, and he was trustworthy because he had the prior successes, and he was also trustworthy because he was a real academic coming into it. And I think if his first company hadn't been founded on kind of his research and his academic credentials, he wouldn't have had that in that then gave him the legitimacy to do the next one. Netscape also being ultimately a software company, right? And Silicon Graphics being a hardware software company. So I think he had the legitimacy, I think he had the vision, and I think he was able to capture that sense of pure possibility that could attract both the engineers and the money folks and the general public, as you said earlier, Kevin, with being just a great PR master. So I want to shift gears to talk more specifically about the book. The book spends a lot of time on Clark developing a computer-controlled sailing ship. I think it was called the Hyperion, and the book kind of starts with it. A lot of the middle is about it, and it ends with it as well. It's a ship that he ultimately wants to sail across the Atlantic, and we get some of that in the book. Why is the book so focused on this sailing ship, on the construction of it, on Clark programming it, which seemed to take a lot of his time? Was it some kind of metaphor? Why the ship being— basically the, the most enduring theme of the book.

Yeah, I think it's a really visceral metaphor for everything that we learn about Clark throughout it, which is that he has this vision for something that seems potentially possible but also maybe not, and he's willing to throw money and whatever at it. And it really shows us how Clark approaches things. And I think what Michael Lewis likes so much about it is the tangibility of the ship. Michael Lewis got to actually sit on the ship and see the bugs in the software very tangibly as this ship, you know, throws— the engine shuts down unexpectedly. The galley is, you know, breaking into itself when, you know, the TV screen is supposed to be turned on. And so I think for Michael Lewis, this was his window into like a Jim Clark startup. So sure, he got to see Healthion a little bit. But with the ship, he got to really see tangibly what happens when, you know, you just throw out some big idea and say you're gonna use software to fix it. But now your life is literally on the line in the middle of the ocean as you're trusting this software that Jim Clark and 2 other guys have just been writing somewhat haphazardly with seemingly limited test coverage from, from the way they describe what it is that they're doing. So I think it was really what made clear to Michael what it's like to be in a startup to some degree. And I think it is actually a really good metaphor for a lot of it. And it, and it just is like an interesting, like exciting story. It's, you know, it's crazy that he spent, you know, all this money. And actually probably the wildest thing about it is that Lewis makes very clear that he believes that the only reason Netscape IPO'd so rapidly was because Jim Clark wanted to buy the ship. That's, it was literally a financial liquidity reason. Uh, rather than like, you know, what I hope is true that like he thought he was going to, you know, needed to, you know, sort of have a land grab to, to have money to be able to, you know, compete against Microsoft. But yeah, Michael, Michael, uh, seems to, seems to believe that genuinely the reason for the Netscape IPO was to, uh, finance the Hyperion.

And I think the Hyperion was also, I mean, it's Jim Clark's management style, right? He has this great idea and then he doesn't want to be at all involved at all in the human element of it, right? The human, management and day-to-day operations of it. And he sorts of outsources it to the software, basically. Then another thing I thought was interesting was, you know, despite being this enormous ship, the mast always seems like it's about to break. And there was this like 1-foot rubber piece at the bottom of the mast that I imagine was meant to give it some flexibility as well, because you just can't have it be a rigid structure. And throughout, I just kept waiting for that mast to break. I mean, it did, during the North Sea trials they were doing. And then really what plagued the ship was all the software bugs while they were doing their, their Atlantic crossing as well. And so I thought that it was a good metaphor for, like you said, short, that startup mentality and just being in Clark world. And it's always very tenuous. I also thought it was interesting that just like he always loved his engineers that worked with him and he wanted to turn the tables on the VCs by enriching the engineers and the developers and the coders who really deserved it, Everyone on that boat was invested in Clark World in some way, down to the chef. And I thought it was a really cool part when, you know, the captain, the chef, some of the deckhands were all, you know, using the satellite phones to check in on their portfolios as, you know, as they were doing the Atlantic crossing. And so, yes, Clark World is dangerous, but everyone is on the boat until you're off the boat, right? He got rid of the captain at the very end. So it was a good metaphor.

It was a real insight into the dot-com bubble also, like the, the captain who was just invested across like every single stock. And that was actually one weird thing at the very end where, uh, Lewis says that like the captain had like $1,062,000 worth of, uh, Healthion while the other 2 only had a million. Anyway, it was, it was, it was very interesting. Uh, and the, yeah, the cap— the, the captain and his like obsession with like tech stocks while he was completely uninterested in the actual technology itself and would only like, you know, want to operate the boat based off of like the traditional methods was very interesting.

I'd be remiss not to mention that we recorded a previous episode on the book How the Internet Happened, where we interviewed the author of it, Brian McCullough, back season 4, episode 3. I'll put a link in the show notes. It also describes the dot-com era very, very well. So it's a nice kind of accompaniment to The New New Thing. Anyway, I want to go on to talk about the writing style of Michael Lewis. Now, I don't know if both of you have read some of his other books. Actually, I know David has. I've read a little bit of his other books, and The New New Thing is very representative of his writing style. It kind of meanders a little bit. It's not chronological necessarily, spends a lot of time on character vignettes. And is willing to take the time to really describe a scene without getting bogged down in facts. It includes the author in the story. The author is with Michael— Michael Lewis is with Jim Clark throughout many of the events of the book. So all of that style, I think at points in the book contributes quite a bit, and I think there's points where it detracts. I'll give you 2 examples that I noticed, and I'm curious to hear what the 2 of you thought. But in chapter 14, it was a chapter called Could Go Either Way. He spends a lot of time describing the trial between Microsoft and the Justice Department, the federal government basically suing them for antitrust. And Netscape is a major component of that because Microsoft is bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, and that's hurting Netscape's market share. But the chapter doesn't really spend a ton of time talking about the crux of the case or really helping you understand why the government has such a strong case. Instead, it spends a lot of time talking about one of Microsoft's lawyers who happens to be, you know, physically not in the best shape and seems to have a strong accent that isn't maybe the most erudite, and he, he's a well-educated guy working at a great New York City law firm. But Michael Lewis is just basically, he makes fun of him for the entire chapter. And actually he did a really good job doing it. I was laughing out loud while I was reading the chapter, but after I read the chapter, I was kind of like, wow, that was so funny. But there were maybe just a few sentences in there where I really learned a lot about the case. And I think that was, that was true throughout the book. There was a lot of time spent on character development, Which I enjoy a lot in the novel, but sometimes in nonfiction books, it sometimes can steer us away from really getting to the point and what we're trying to learn here, where there could have been a lot more exposition on that part of it. So I think chapter 14 was a great example of both how that style can work well and can also hurt the book a little bit. Another point though, where I think the style really helped was the last chapter, which was called The Past Outside the Box. Lewis goes back to Plainview, Texas, where Clark grew up, and he meets Clark's family, and he gets a sense of just what a disastrous childhood Clark had. And it was very, very poignant. And Lewis's writing style was perfect for it. And also his ability to place it at the end of the book really explains so much that we've learned about Clark throughout the rest of the book. And it puts just kind of a big exclamation point on it. And I just thought that was masterfully done by Lewis. So what did you two think of the writing style and was it similar for you that there were parts where it actually took away from the book for you like it did for me?

So I enjoy Michael's style and yeah, I've read almost every book that he's written, but his style, I have a lot of difficulty with him now. Because of his most recent book on Sam Bankman-Fried. He talks about something that I just know a lot about in a way that is so completely wrong that it makes me question his ability to judge scenes in general.

And it—

when I was— this is the second time that I was reading this book. I'd read this book a long time ago and just enjoyed it when I first read it. But every time I was reading it this time, I was really curious about—

Yeah.

What the reality was of these situations as opposed to what Jim Clark had told Michael Lewis. Because like, that's what I think we get in a lot of this is just, I don't think Michael Lewis did a lot of research for the most part. I think he, whatever, he had that, those, those boxes that like the one secretary had in a closet. But other than that, like, I don't get the sense that he interviewed all the other players in all of these scenes. Maybe he did some of them. I'm sure he did to some degree, but it doesn't, he doesn't give them voice really. Right. Like he, so if he did, he doesn't portray it that way. So we only really hear Jim's portrayal of, like, how these other people are. And so I just, you know, that, that was like something that jumped out to me in this is that, like, I, I will keep reading Michael Lewis books, I'm sure, but I read them with like a pound of salt now because I know that when he's tackling something that he doesn't understand, he's just— the way that he does his research seems to be he shows up someplace and he talks to people, like, in that particular place with the person that he wants to write about. And then he, and then he writes about whatever he learned from like spending, you know, a few months or a year or whatever it is with those people. But if those people are lying to him the whole time, like he just gets completely hoodwinked.

Well, you just made a tackling reference, but remember Michael Lewis's other adaptation is The Blind Side, right? And that ended up in a bit of a hoodwinking as well with regards to the facts and figures around the adoption of Michael Oher, all that stuff. I was just going to add with the USB Microsoft coverage in this book, You know, I almost think that Michael Lewis was biased a bit by Jim Clark, or maybe thought this himself, but I thought that the depiction of the trial, which was obviously still ongoing while the book was being written, was meant to convey that it was all kind of poppycock. It was all just performative as well. So it was almost like a veiled criticism at what was going on by Michael Lewis, by Jim Clark, in covering it the way they did and paying attention to the theatricality of what was going on. I mean, in the end, you guys know technology better than I do, but my recollection of events is that it ultimately had like a 5-year receivership almost, or some extra monitoring supervision. And then ultimately there was a $750 million settlement with AOL and Netscape once AOL had acquired them. So it really didn't lead to anything of substance. And it feels like even Jim Clark kind of gave up on caring about it too. And it seems like Michael Lewis gave up on caring about it. You know, as this was still being written.

Well, Kevin, you're forgetting that's because of the appeal. They were ordered to break up because of this lawsuit.

Into 2 nice companies, right?

Yeah.

And they were, yeah. So then the appeal happened. So that was, that's a good point, short. I'd also add too, as 3 Dartmouth gentlemen hosting this podcast, it was Bill Newcomb who was a Dartmouth trustee and a Dartmouth '64 who was the general counsel at the time. And he got interesting feedback and a, you know, and mixed reviews on the aggressive legal strategy they were, they were you know, putting forth that was seen in the book here. I think he ultimately had to step down from Microsoft and then went on to head up the American Bar Association and then bought the San Francisco Giants or was president of the San Francisco Giants. But Bill Newcomb was general counsel. The litigation attorney from Sullivan and Cromwell was the one who was seen in the book.

What I'm hearing from both of you is Michael Lewis kind of is taking on the opinions of his subject matter. As he's going through the book, he's embedded with Jim Clark, and I think he likes Jim Clark. And, you know, I've heard it said before that biographers have to, on some level, like their subject. It doesn't mean that they think they're a good person. It doesn't mean, like, you know, obviously if you're writing a biography of Napoleon or Hitler or something, right, it doesn't mean you like Napoleon or Hitler, but there's something you find captivating about them. Otherwise, you couldn't push yourself to write a 400-page book about them. Now, another thing—

I don't think that he would've left in that final chapter if he truly liked him. I think there was a fair bit of skepticism that we were supposed to take away from the way that he treated Plainview, Texas and his family a little bit. Like if he, if it was a true like and idolatry here, I feel like he would've spun that a little differently. Sorry to interrupt you, Kopak.

That, that's not how I read that chapter at all. It's a good point of debate. I, I read it as, look what a terrible You know upbringing he had, how difficult his life was, and he had something to prove. It's just explaining the man. I didn't feel it was against him. I feel he had a chip on his shoulder because he had such a tough childhood, and he wanted to prove that. I think one of the last lines was like he he really showed Plainview, Texas, right? And it was something like that. And I think he did. I think you know he came from, and he actually was pretty negative about Plainview in the chapter. He says, "Look, it's kind of drab. Everything looks the same." People don't have a lot of imagination here. And look at this guy with amazing imagination, could envision the future. And he came out of there and he showed them, even though they didn't treat him well.

Certainly sounds like you have a pro-computer science professor bias.

That story about his dad was, was pretty weird too, because the way it finishes is that he stranded his mother and sister in the middle of nowhere. on the way to Amarillo, he'd like damaged the car. And then they said that he went off to find him. He came back crying, and then he left. And they never heard from the father again, as far as like, like what exactly happened. Like, it's kind of a wild, like, uh—

A strongly worded conversation.

It could be, you know. I think between a father and a son, you know, there's certain things a son can say that can totally shatter a father. And it's not clear. It's not, it's not explained whether they had a fight, whether it was just a conversation. But whatever it was, I mean, we didn't know till that chapter, which is at the very end of the book, just how bad his upbringing had been. And it was alluded to a little bit at the beginning, but it really explained the whole book to me because to me it was like, okay, why does this guy like always have something to prove? Why does he have to go build the next billion-dollar company and then the next one has to be bigger? And they had said earlier that he had told people around him, well, I want to be a billionaire. And then once he was a billionaire, it was like, I want to be richer than Larry Ellison. Right? And it always was upping the stakes because he had something to prove. He had something to prove. You know, those childhood wounds run deep and you go through your whole life trying to kind of, you know, either run away from them or overcome them. Right? And I think in this case, obviously he did overcome them, but it, I thought it explained a lot about his personality. And I thought the way Michael Lewis Embedded that was not negative on Jim Clark. It was just explaining who he is and where he came from. He could he have done that at the beginning? Yes, and that's what I also would say is kind of like with Michael Lewis's writing, right? Like the placement of facts is not necessarily where they're most useful to the reader; they're where they might have the most emotional impact. And by putting at the end, it had huge emotional impact, but it would have been probably useful to know that as I was thinking through the rest of the book. From the beginning. After the book ends, and the book is written at kind of the height of dot-com mania in 1999, of course, the dot-com bubble bursts. Kevin, can you tell us a little bit about what happened to Jim Clark after the bubble bursts? He's still alive today, actually. He's in his 80s now.

He has a wife and a new kid, so 4 kids welcomed. He has one with his new wife.

Yeah.

He has another 27 years of life up to today. So what happened in the 27 years?

Yeah. So at the end, as the end of the book suggests, he is a serial entrepreneur. He is looking at sketches of, as he arrives into San Francisco Bay, he's looking at sketches already of an even larger yacht, right? He can't stop. He's a serial entrepreneur. He's looking for the new, new thing. He goes on to be an early backer of Shutterfly, a company called DNA Sciences, and later the unicorn mobile app Ibotta, which went public in 2024. It provides cash back on everyday purchases like groceries, retail, and dining. I didn't know that it actually went public in 2024. I've definitely heard of it. I've never used it, but for a while there, it was definitely really high up there in the public zeitgeist. He shifted a massive amount of his wealth into not just the yachting, but also high-end real estate. So at one point he picked up a 22-acre Palm Beach, Florida estate for $94 million. And that was one of the largest transactions up to that point until he then sold it for $175 million to Oracle's Larry Ellison, right? So he was in the headlines a bit for that as well. I would say also, despite his early animosity towards Stanford and sort of poaching some of his, you know, cabal of sharp coders and developers, he ended up gifting $70 million to help the university set up a basically a department or an interdisciplinary life sciences and physics research department. And I would say to this day, and you guys, like I say, know this better than I do, but he seems to remain the modern model or the, at least the ultimate foundational blueprint for serial tech entrepreneurs, right? Particularly with that idea of having those 3 multibillion-dollar startups in a row that, you know, may now be surpassed by Elon, but still maintains very much Very much a force.

I did think that end with the new yacht was so perfect also, you know, again, just like extending the, the new, new thing metaphor. But on his Wikipedia, it says that he has actually been trying to sell his 2 yachts since 2012. They're still on the market. So if anyone's looking for—

It's like $115 million too, right? Short, like one of them. Yeah.

Yeah. If anyone's looking for a $115 million or a $30 million yacht, you could be part of the Jim Clark story.

Okay. So when we think about the book as a whole, is there anything we missed? Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to cover?

No, I thought, I think we were pretty comprehensive. I mean, there's so much. I mean, we're going to talk about recommendations for this book. I have a conditional recommendation, but One thing we missed was he's a helicopter pilot, a jet pilot, fast cars. I mean, it brought me back to when we were reading about Elon and, you know, when, when he was driving around, got into that accident. So it just continues some of those great Silicon Valley stereotypes of the fast cars, fast machines, and hardware.

That helicopter vignette at the beginning is, is pretty interesting. So I'll just throw that out there, given Kevin jogged my memory. So he, uh, I— it sounds like it's one of the first times he's meeting with, uh, with Clark. They, they go up in a helicopter, and it— from the way Lewis tells the story, it's the first time Clark is trying to fly a helicopter. So he'd been obsessed with, uh, model helicopters, but now has decided to, you know, graduate to the big boys. And so they're flying with a, uh, former police helicopter pilot, and, uh, Clark keeps, you know, wanting to be in control and sort of doesn't believe that the cop is actually letting him control it. And then the cop, you know, keeps his hands completely off of everything so Clark can know he's definitely controlling it. And, uh, the, the cop ends up spotting a crashed plane. And so, uh, anyway, they have to report it. It's, you know, uh, obviously it had just happened. I guess it's not obvious. I guess it's— yeah, they didn't actually mention if it was smoking or whatever, which I feel like it must have, and that must be why they knew that, like, needed to actually be investigated because there could potentially be someone, uh, someone there. But, but then the craziest part of that whole story is Lewis is, is talking to him about it later and describes like how, you know, how crazy it was to see the, uh, the plane, you know, poking out of the trees. And, and Clark says, oh, is that what it looked like? I never saw it. So he's, he's a guy who's, you know, flying a helicopter, has, has discovered a, a plane wreck and never even took time to look at the plane wreck because he was focused on learning how to fly a helicopter at the time. And so That was the only thing that he was obsessed with at the time. So a little peek into Clark's hyperfocus.

Okay. And then the most important question we always ask at the end, do you recommend this book? And if you do, who should read it?

I do.

I really enjoyed reading it again. I would recommend it if you're interested in learning about Silicon Valley startups. I think if you're interested in like Healthion especially, that's probably the company that sees the most deep Uh, coverage in this. And that's, you know, really what, what Michael got to see, uh, you know, personally. Uh, if you're interested in Netscape, I probably wouldn't recommend this all that much. It's not really covered very much. Um, there's certainly like a little bit that I got out of it, but the most coverage of Netscape, I think, really is the, uh, the Microsoft lawsuit that we were just talking about. And so, yeah, it was kind of, uh, largely glossed over. So yeah, Silicon Graphics and Healthion got, uh, much deeper coverage than Netscape. And, uh, yeah, uh, I guess just Michael Lewis fans in general, I'm sure, would enjoy it as well. It is, I would say it's kind of an under-the-radar Michael Lewis book, frankly, like relative, relative to the others. And I think it is quite cinematic. I think they could make a movie out of this. Jim Clark would have to get involved, I guess.

I think they optioned it for a movie in like 2024. So it's considered in development, but you know, if you Google it, you really don't see anything from there. I mean, echoing Short, I would give it definitely a conditional recommendation based on what you're looking for. If you are coming to The New New Thing from our Business Books and Company podcast and you're looking for a definitive corporate blueprint, the secret sauce of startup operations, or some of those tech-heavy deep dives like we've seen in other books, you're going to leave disappointed, right? This is a Michael Lewis cinematic book. It's just not what this book is. If you treat it as that cinematic, entertaining, you know, sometimes even hilarious history, it's pretty enjoyable. You know, as were Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, which this kind of predates. And so like Short mentioned, you can almost see some of the early Michael Lewis recipe coming together. It's a really good study of his writing style and I enjoyed it. I would recommend it to anyone, we mentioned this before, that wants to understand the psychology of the dot-com era, right? It captures that perfectly and it captures them like Short or Kopech. You said it seems like Lewis was sitting at the table watching that Healthion IPO go through, And going back into the backgrounds of the 2 Indian, you know, coders and developers and engineers, I mean, it really captures the psychology of those investors, those developers and engineers. It captures the psychology of the boat crew as observers who were somewhat inside of it, right? The head chef, Tina, all them. It captures Clark's mother's reaction and Clark's family's reaction to the dot-com bubble. Even the town of Plainview, Texas's reaction to the dot-com bubble. It really has a sense of place, and in part that's all about Lewis's storytelling, right? But you shouldn't buy this expecting a career self-help manual. So I would recommend it with the condition that it's enjoyable, it's cinematic, and it's a great look into the psychology of the dot-com era.

Evan, you basically took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say something very, very similar to you. I agree with everything you said. I will add that if you do want to learn more about Netscape, that previous book we read, season 4, episode 3, How the Internet Happened with Brian McCullough, goes into detail about Netscape, goes into detail about the technologies behind the dot-com boom, and actually more about the business models of the individual companies. This is really a surface-level treatment of Netscape, even Silicon Graphics. I learned a lot more reading the Silicon Graphics Wikipedia page than I did actually about Silicon Graphics in the book. So as a whole, I can only recommend it as entertainment. And as you said, Kevin, about learning about the psychology of the dot-com era from an economic standpoint, how money gets attracted to ideas and how ideas sometimes push people beyond where they should go in kind of tulip mania. I think if you want to understand bubbles, this book has a lot to say about them. But as a book about Netscape or Silicon Graphics, no, it's not really there. And as a book about Jim Clark, it's not even really a traditional biography that gives you, you know, it gives you a good sense of who he is and why people were attracted to him, but it's not a chronological biography that's going to really give you his entire life story in detail. So it's really, if you're interested in that era and you're interested in kind The entertainment value that comes from a great Michael Lewis book.

And remember too, I believe it was like A Tale of Silicon Valley. What is the actual title? I feel embarrassed.

It's The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story.

Story. It reminded, it's like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, right? It's like a Hollywood fairy tale. This was almost, I, I got that sense, the, the, the placemaking and the vignettes he showed. It was like a Silicon Valley fairy tale. Once Upon a Time in Silicon Valley.

That's a great way of putting it. Okay. Next month we're going to be reading Steve Jobs in Exile by Jeffrey Cain, and we're going to be privileged to have Jeffrey on the podcast. So we're going to get to talk to him about those 12 years when Steve Jobs was not at Apple because he had kind of lost a boardroom battle. But before he came back to Apple to become the iCEO and launch the iMac and get the company's renaissance going, when he started NeXT, started Pixar, 2 companies that were very, very successful in their own ways. Pixar, of course, is what actually made Steve Jobs a billionaire, and NeXT eventually merged with Apple and built a lot of the technologies that eventually led to Apple's renaissance. So really looking forward to that next month and our interview with the author. Okay. Is there anything that either of you want to plug, and how can our listeners get in touch with you?

You can follow me on X @DavidGSchort.

You can follow me on X @HudaksBasement, H-U-D-A-K-S Basement. I'd also encourage everyone to check out our Facebook community that we've set up for Business Books and Company. It's available on Facebook, not to sound too redundant. And as well, given my spoiler on my Italy trip earlier with my wife, if anyone is looking for some Italian trip recommendations, we had a wonderful one. Please do get in touch.

That's so nice. And don't forget to check out our X account as well. I'll put a link to both our Facebook account and our X account in the show notes. My username on X is @DaveKopeck, D-A-V-E-K-O-P-E-C-K. I want to thank you with Kevin and David for listening so much. We love joining you every month talking about these great books. Don't forget to leave us a review. It really does help with the show. Leave us a 5-star review on your podcast player of choice. Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to hit that follow button. And we'll see you next month.