[S5E10] Season 5 Finale

Nine Amazing books, five Fantastic Authors Season five of Business Books and Company had it all. We went to the depths of hell and Doom Guy with John Romero to the heights of Apple success in Apple the first 50 years with David Pogue. From author interviews to deep analysis, we read through some insightful, cinematic and powerful books. Join us as we look back at the last season of Business Books and Company. 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 more adept entrepreneur. Today, we're looking back at season five. In season five, we read nine great business books and interviewed five amazing authors. And you were there with us. Whether you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube. Thank you for being part of our audience. We're excited to discuss the best and yes, the worst parts of season five. And at the end of the episode, we'll tell you a little bit about what we're planning for season six. But before we get into the discussion, let's introduce ourselves.

I am David Short. I'm a product manager.

I'm Kevin Hudak, Chief Research Officer at a Washington D.C. based commercial real estate research and advisory firm.

And I'm David Kopec. I'm an associate professor of computer science at a teaching college. There's only been nine episodes of season five, so maybe I'll just quickly recap what books we read so the audience is aware. We kicked it off with an interview with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on his book the Juggling act, talking about balancing family, faith and a very successful career. Then we went to Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the book that has really changed people's vision of how the brain works and where you think about how do you make decisions and what different elements System one versus System two thinking go into it. We had an amazing memoir with Doom Guy with John Romero thinking about how John Romero and the team at ID Software built some of the most classic games of all time and the entrepreneurial story that brought those to the world. Then we got into the Early Life of Bill Gates with Source Code, another memoir, talking about his life as a child all the way up to founding Microsoft with Paul Allen and the first years of their business journey. Then we heard about what Apple's been doing in the country of China. With Apple in China, where we interviewed author Patrick McGee. His book has really changed the narrative of about Apple's influence on the country of China. Thinking about China not just as something that Apple used, but actually that Apple changed. Then we got into high end hedge funds with the man who Solved the Market, a book about how one particular technology based hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, has beaten the market unexpectedly for more than two decades. Then we read a real classic Influence by Robert Cialdini, talking about the different levers that you have in your life to change people's opinions around you and get people to kind of go your way. A lot of great tips in that book. Then we hit the current world of AI. We interviewed a friend of ours, James Wang, and the author of what yout need to Know about AI a book that has a lot of insights about the limits and the possibilities of this current moment in artificial intelligence. And we ended the season with an interview with best selling author, Emmy Award winning TV host David Pogue about his new book the First 50 Years, which I would really call the definitive history of Apple. So an incredible set of nine books, five really powerful author interviews and I wanted to start out by asking the two of you how you felt season five compared to prior seasons of, of business, books and company. What were the highlights for the two of you?

Well, Kopeck, I just wanted to say how impressed I was at that breakdown of our season's books just for listeners. He did that without any script and summarize, gave us a little abstract of each book in his FM late night radio DJ voice. As our past guest Christopher Voss would say. I thought this was a fantastic season. It was very tech focused which was great, you know, starting with Pat Gelsinger as Kopeck mentioned and the intel story, moving through Doom Guy and the. We really took a AI and Apple focus as well. So I thought it was really cool seeing these business stories, these narratives, some that were very personal like in Doom Guy and in the Pat Gelsinger book and then going to some just absolute epics when we were talking about Apple in China and apple the first 50 years. So I thought it was great. I thought having this many author interviews also spiced things up a bit. We got to hear directly from the writers themselves and, and really enjoyed it. I hope our listeners did as well.

I really think it was our best season yet. I really love the books that we read. I think the interviews went really well. I think we were well prepared. I think the authors appreciated the depth that we go into with the books that we're not just you know, reading their PR notes, we're really reading through it and, and finding our own like genuine questions. I think. Well, Kopeck you covered every one of the books, so I can't give any. Give away anything in terms of what the highlights were, but the John Romero Dune interview was really one of my favorites. I played those games as a kid, as I mentioned on the episode, and it was just like a real highlight for me. And then I'm sure we'll talk about it a bunch. But the David Pogue interview at the end of the season was a highlight for my wife. So I don't know if I just mentioned that to Pogue before we started recording, but it's the one episode where she was really excited about it. We watched CBS Sunday Morning regularly, and so it was. It was a real highlight for her.

Well, remember, wives figure prominently. It was what his. It came to the. David Pogue's wife had a dream about him writing that book. Right. And it influenced his. His authorship there.

That's right. And you know, my wife was most excited about that episode too. What's crazy is we've been doing this show for seven years. We've interviewed some of the top business authors in the world, but it took David Pogue to actually get our wives excited about the show. But for me, that was one of the highlights. I mean, I've been reading David Pogue since I was a kid, and it was just an amazing episode. He gave us some exclusive information during the interview, so if you missed it, go back and check it out. It really added a lot of color to not only the text of the book, but also the development process of the book and what goes into writing a definitive history book like that. And I also, I have to agree with both of you. I love the John Romero interview. It was so personal. It was so balanced between great storytelling and a lot of great insight about what it was like to be an entrepreneur in the early 1990s in the video game industry. And I think a lot of people, when they think John Romero, they think, oh, you know, great game developer, one of the most talented game developers of all time. But they don't always think, amazing entrepreneur. But what he did with the other folks on the ID Software team was really an amazing entrepreneurial journey. Okay, you have to pick, though. We always ask this question at the end of the season. What was the best book of season five?

For me, it really was Doom Guy. I really enjoyed the book. I thought the whole narrative, like, was just compelling. Frankly, John Romero's story, like, should be, like, not even just a movie. Like, I feel like it needs to be, like a full season of something. Like, he really just led a fascinating life. I didn't know any of his background and so, yeah, it was just something where I'd played the games and I think like Kopeck, you maybe like knew his history and stuff like that a little bit more perhaps coming in. For me, like reading that book was, was very eye opening and it was just a really compelling story. So for me, that was like the best of it. I learned a lot about a business, learned a lot about the history and the details. His almost photographic memory is just incredible for, for all the details he was able to provide to us. And yeah, getting to meet him and talk to him was, was, was really great. But yeah, I do think it was the, it was the best book for me.

Yeah, for me I thought that his was the best story, but not necessarily the best book. So I'm ranking his personal story, that personal narrative, even beyond that of David Pogue and what he talked about in Apple the first 50 years. So I kind of look at it from three different rubrics. Right. There's rubric one is the interesting, very personal narrative, cinematic and scope, like what Short said. And for that I would go with Doom Guy by John Romero. If we're looking at a rubric of changing the conversation. Right. I would say that the best book was Apple in china by Patrick McGee. You know, I thought that that was a real subversion of the typical Apple narrative and I really enjoyed seeing that. You know, we've talked about how I'm not necessarily as tech focused as Copec and Short, but for someone who's been an outside observer of Apple, I found that really interesting. But then I'd also say Best Book in terms of well researched, most comprehensive, most authoritative. I really just thought David Pogue with Apple the first 50 years was superior to any of the other books that we read.

For me personally, in terms of enjoyment, I would have to say Doom Guy with John Romero in terms of how it impacted me. However, if we're going to talk about changing the conversation, I think we got to bring thinking fast and slow into that because I think so many everyday phrases have come from that book and so much about how we think about thinking has changed as a result of that book and of course the research that he did as a scientist before he wrote the book. But I think that book was a huge part of changing the conversation. But I agree with you that Apple and China also really changed the narrative in a way that other books haven't. I think David Pogue is just a great writer and Apple the first 50 years is a really good book. If you want to know the history of Apple, this is the book to read.

Well, I'm thinking of changing the conversations though, Kopak, between the three of us. I think the conversation changes quite a bit when we go from author interviews to the three of us just sort of spitballing and sharing what we've learned from a book. And to that end, I actually really enjoyed the Thinking Fast and Slow episode that we did just because it was amongst us three. You know, we had Kopeck sharing a lot about his father and Chess. We had Kopeck sharing about his physical therapy appointments where apparently he debates and talks with his physical therapist or trainer about some of the concepts in Thinking Fast and Slow. And so from an episode perspective, that was one of my favorites. I know, we'll get into that later.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. But I have to ask you a tough question, which is what was the worst book of the season?

So I'll start this one. Since Short started off the best, I'm happy to go out and say that Influence by Robert Cialdini was. It's not the worst book in general, but of these all stars that we had in this most recent season, you know, I believe I said in the transcript for a book about Influence, its structure and length were not very influential in terms of its structure and the way that he presented his ideas, great ideas as they are, I just didn't really see it as that influential a book. I enjoyed it. I can't remember if I recommended it or not, or recommended to a subset of our listeners, but compared to some of these heavy hitters that we had, like Thinking Fast and Slow, thinking about how to win friends and influence people, and even James Clear's Atomic Habits, we just had some better self help, emotional iq, business IQ books than the Cialdini book.

So I had that as mine as well. So I. But I'll. I'll say another one. So let me quickly say, I think it is actually a very influential book. I think it is actually very important. I think we've just read so many of the books that had sort of borrowed a lot from Cialdini that by the time I got to it, it just wasn't a very useful book for me because literally I don't think there was much of it that I hadn't already learned somewhere else. So it's not to say that it isn't great or influential, it's just that it wasn't the right book for me to read at this time in my Life. I'd already read too many other things about similar topics, but in terms of the worst book, I actually think I'm glad that Kevin said it said Cialdini, so I feel obligated to say another one. The man who Solved the Market just didn't seem to be a book that gave what it promised. And for me, that is, like, pretty important. And so it was. It wasn't a terrible book, but it just wasn't the book that it was kind of claiming to be. It was interesting to learn the history of Jim Simons and everything, but it didn't explain at all how he solved the market or if he did. It raised a bunch of questions for me rather than answering questions like how the man who solved the market seems like I'm going to learn, like, how did the market get solved? It's like, oh, well, a black box. Like, okay, great, thank you.

It did a lot, but nothing at all almost. Right. Like, it had that personal narrative that I like. It had the financial and.

And.

And micro and macroeconomic, you know, influences there, but it just didn't do any of that well.

Well, you know, it's different whether a book does a lot and whether it answers its title right, and it's not doing what it says on the tin. I agree with David 100%. I read that book. I don't know how he solved the market. Right. And I understand that Jim Simons is the man who solved the market, but how did he solve the market? Right. So, yeah, I definitely, for me, worst book of the season, the man who Solved the Market. I didn't get a lot out of the individual vignettes. I got a general sense of what these kind of characters are who work at these, like, highly algorithmic hedge funds. But none of them really, like, resonated with me in a way that I was like, wow, that was a special story. Okay, different from favorite book is favorite episode. So not the best book, but the best episode. What was the episode of the show this season that really made a big impact for you?

I'll tackle this one and I'm sure we'll go back and forth. And I think we loved a lot of these episodes, but for me, the Pat Gelsinger, our first episode of the season, was really my favorite, and I think it was one. It was a very different story than what I was expecting coming into it. It was really about him more so than it was about, like, the businesses that he'd led. We learned a lot about intel and everything, but it really was like a deep insight into Pat himself. And, I mean, it's. The book was called the Juggling Act. He did deliver on what he was. What he was talking about. I just kind of didn't expect that it would be so focused on the family life and things like that. It really. It really did go deep on that in a way that I wasn't expecting, even though it is in the title. And then he told us some stuff in that episode that I was just, like, really shocked to hear. He was very open about some things that, frankly, I thought we would get some. Some news about some of it. Like, some of it was, like, potentially crimes that were being committed by, you know, board members of some of the companies that he was working for. So, yeah, go back and listen to it. I think there's some really interesting vignettes from. From Pat, and I think we caught him at a. At a really interesting time and got a lot of interesting information from him. So that was. That was my favorite episode of the season.

So we're trading back and forth short. So I was going to say the Juggling act as well, because I got married back in October. I've been going through a lot of major life changes, and I thought that the personal humanity of Pat coming into that book and into that interview was really effective. You know, I will say, and I might agree with. With Kopeck here on this one. I would also say a favorite episode was obviously David Pogue and Apple at 50. And I just think that it was very cool for us. He broke some news on our show as well. Right. When he went back and he had. The night before we recorded, or that week, he had spoken with somebody who was correcting the chronology of the kind of foundational conversations around the development of the iPad. And he was mentioning that he was going to go back and actually make some corrections, or he had already recorded some corrections to the audiobook. He also broke the news that he was the anonymous reviewer who called the MacBook Air a spatula when it first came out. Right. So that was just fascinating to kind of see him right after the book release, as he's in the middle of the book tour, going on many other podcasts, and sort of enhancing and correcting the record live in front of us. I thought that was very cool.

Yeah, my favorite episode was the David Pogue episode, and it was just, for me personally, a big deal, because I'd been reading David Pogue since I was a kid. I subscribed to Macworld magazine, and I used to read his column every month. So it's just. I wouldn't quite say he's a hero of mine, but I'm definitely a fan of. And so it's really cool when you get to meet a celebrity. He is a celebrity who you've been following for a really, really long time. And he delivered on what you. Sometimes people are. We get to know these authors a little bit. We talk to them before the show, a little bit after the show. We exchanged some emails with them and you can tell when somebody's genuine and when they're not. And David Pogue is somebody who, what you see on tv, he really is that kind of nice, affable, really engaged guy who. Who cares about the people who engage with his work. So that really came across.

Well, that certainly sounds like Davak actually fakes that. So he comes across affably on this episode, but in reality just a terrible curmudgeon. But no, David Hogue was great. David Kopeck is also. And no, it was. It was really fun to see you interviewing him.

I love the book.

I've been a fan of him also. But like, you kind of wove in the whole history of having read as his was. It was Macworld. The Mac World.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, I. I've heard of Macworld, but I never had a subscription. You know, maybe I bought it one time or something. So it was. It was really great to. To see you engage with him and really have that, like, depth of knowledge. And frankly, like, I think you are, you know, an amateur Apple historian and so you knew a lot of the details and things like that. That it was just really great to see you two interacting.

I think the most inauthentic thing you said is he's not one of your heroes, Kopeck. So I will also correct the record. I would say that, you know, Pogue was just very open to some of the suggestions you made off, you know, off the air.

Kopeck.

And I thought that was really wonderful of him. And yeah, just overall, great episode.

Okay, so we did a lot of author interviews this season. You know, I think it's more than we ever did in season three and four. We did, I think, four interviews, maybe three interviews in season three. Four in season four. We did five this season. So more than half of the books we did were author interviews. We had some really big names on the show. I mean, John Romero is probably the most famous game developer of all time, potentially. Right. He's up there. He's definitely up there. And David Pogue obviously is a very well known public figure, and we had a former Fortune 500 CEO on the show with Pat Gelsinger. So thinking about these author interviews that we did, how did you feel that they changed the tone of the show? Do you feel they. What kind of direction do you feel they took the show in this season, having all of these powerful figures on as guests? And what did you get out of them? What additional insight do you get? And this is for our listeners, right? Our listeners read a book, they don't get to talk to the author usually. Right. So what does it bring to the experience of reading the book, getting to interview the author that you don't get from reading the book alone?

Well, I think they bring their own kind of personal flair and spin to the interview. You know, with David Pogue, for example, his objective was clearly to dispel some of the myths that exist out there around Apple. He brought that tone to the show with Patrick McGee. Right. Like, even his appearance and, you know, his tone on the show was one who is turning what could have been conspiracy theories and factually backing them up. You know, his famous line from that episode was, you know, Apple is essentially sleepwalking its operations to a geopolitical superpower.

Right.

And so we had a bit of that subversion of expectations, conspiratorial tone in that episode. Juggling act with Pat Gelsinger. He brought that humanity. And I think talking to him face to face gave us even more of a. A picture of the man that went beyond the pages. And then Doom guy, that was just so much fun talking with him, with him, his personal energy, that memory. You know, he showed us how those small, obsessed teams working in unconventional ways can really change the world. And I think the authors themselves really made real for us this idea of tech teams and business teams working at their lowest and with the odds stacked against them, to tech teams succeeding and what that looks like. And then with Patrick McGee, what happens when some of these tech teams are sort of outsourcing everything and sort of sleepwalking into a strategy? And so I thought having the author's faces opposite us, having their voices included, just made the content that much more powerful.

Having the opportunity to talk to the author is always like, hugely a blessing. Like, I really appreciate it, them taking the time to talk to us. They are very busy, they are often very scheduled. It takes us a little bit of time to get these and. And Kopeck, you do a lot of the outreach and really appreciate all the effort you put into finding these authors and getting us the time to make this happen. I really appreciate seeing the diversity of opinions on Apple in this season. No, I'm just kidding. No, but it was, it was fun to like David Pogue and Patrick McGee have like, I would say almost polar opposite, like sort of approaches to Apple in a lot of ways. Right. Like on the one hand, Pogue has been a, you know, admitted fan for decades. Patrick McGee was clearly coming from a, you know, very different background, managed to get incredible insight into like the details of their operations that had not existed outside of, you know, the work that he did. And so, you know, seeing different people approach the same topic was, was really exciting and interesting and getting to talk to both of them about it this time around was, was fun for me. But every time I have the chance to talk to the author, understand a little bit more about, you know, how did they approach the process, how did they think about what they were actually trying to achieve with the book and to find some nuance and get a little bit more detail about something that might not have made it into the final cutting room or may have fell on the cutting room floor, didn't make it into the final version of the book was really exciting. And I guess for me, each time we managed to have some kind of a, you know, news or whatever kind of thing, that was the part that was just like really exciting. So, you know, Pat Gelsinger gave us some insights that certainly weren't in the book. And Pogue definitely gave us, you know, sort of cutting room floor or whatever, still, still in the editing bay, information about what's going to come out in, in future editions of the book. So, yeah, that was really exciting for

me by virtue of having the authors on. I also think that we changed the episode structure a bit. And so for Pogue, for example, we knew that he would be probably getting a lot of questions around Steve Jobs and what was it like to interview Steve Jobs, focusing on that, as you guys recall, and this is a little bit inside baseball, we deliberately made the choice to really focus on the five CEOs who many folks who, who don't follow Apple may have never heard of, like myself. And in doing so, I think we had an even richer conversation that he noticed about those non jobs Apple CEOs. And so if we didn't have him on, I wonder if we would have been focusing a little bit more on Steve Jobs and on that more compelling story. Not necessarily more compelling, but the kind of easy, the easy quick win as opposed to digging in on the other CEOs.

Yeah, I think as A listener to the show. What you need to understand is that having these authors on is actually kind of a two way street in that yes, we're the number one by keyword business books podcast on Spotify, but in the world of podcasts, we are relatively medium to small size podcast. And so when they come on the show, we need to be offering something that is unique for them. Obviously, it's our engaged listenership of people interested in business books that's the main draw, but it's also that we're offering them a different kind of conversation. We're offering these authors a conversation with folks who are coming from a different perspective than the typical journalist that they're doing promotional tours with. And we're maybe going into subjects that they're interested to talk about that those mainline interviews don't get to. And that might actually be part of the draw for the authors themselves.

Yeah, we are not the just the questions that the PR firm passed along LLM version of the podcast. The three of us actually read the book, we actually took notes, we actually had questions that we wanted to talk about. And we try to get into the details on things that are not just what you would have gotten if you'd read a Wikipedia about the same topic.

Well, at the moment I was moving two homes into one as I was reading the David Pogue book. And as a longer book, you know, that was. That was quite a rush to finish, but I wanted to make sure that we had gotten that done and it actually really made the whole process better, having having that book to look back on.

Yeah. And so I think that's really something special that we offer and I think that comes across with the authors. I think they, you know, the conversation gets more in dep because they feel comfortable with us, because they can tell that we did the legwork for a genuine conversation that goes beyond the headlines about their books.

The other thing that is just funny about the Pogue book, I think it's the only book that I have ever bought in physical copy, digital copy, and audio book. And each one gives like a different little taste to it. So I would recommend all three. It's a little bit ridiculous, but let's, you know, support David's family. And he literally sings. He sings Mac Maker in the audio version. The physical book is just beautiful. And the way it's laid out and the images and everything are great. And the digital book is in between. It has all of the text. It doesn't have the audio, it doesn't have the beauty of some of the images and so, yeah, anyway, but I have it at my fingertips, so all of them were really useful.

Thank you to our friends at Audible for sponsoring today's episode. You can check out great books over@AudibleTrial.com biz that's AudibleTrial.com biz. If you go over there, you'll get a 30 day free trial of Audible as well as credits towards your first book purchase. So check out that link. We'll put it in the show notes audibletrial.com biz go there today and start your journey with Audible. Okay, so we always do a little bit of inside baseball that we fill our listeners in on. What do you think was the most most popular episode of season five? So if we go on our analytics and we look at what got the most listens, what do you think it was?

So I still have a dark horse candidate of David Pogue, but my guess is going to be thinking fast and slow. I think it's just like, you know, the big name of the, the books that we've had. So that's, that's my guess. Yeah.

And I also think that we always have a decision to make about the books that we select and we're always open to suggestions from our listeners. So make sure to reach out to us if you have a book that you want us to cover. But I will go with my heart here and agree with Short that Thinking Fast and Slow was the most popular one. And I would note that it came from a listener survey response that we actually read that book. Correct.

I forgot about that. That's a great point. Yeah. Our listeners drove us to our most successful episode of the season so far, I guess. Or actually, let's find out. Given the two of us guessed. Were we right?

It was. Yeah. Our number one episode was Thinking Fast and Slow. What I think is interesting about that is it was actually not one of our author interviews. And that's not to put down our author interviews in any way because they were amazing. It's just that sometimes a book really resonates with our audience. And I think the three of us had an amazing discussion about it. I'm sure it got shared around. People were like, wow, these guys really like, you know, not only summarized but gave real insights from the book in a way that was applicable to my life and shared the episode on social media. So thanks to our listeners for making that episode so successful.

Also a longer book that folks may not have the time to really truly read and consume in depth. And if we offer sort of an enhanced cliffsnote version, plus some rigorous conversation about how an older book can apply to modern times and modern business and careers, then I think that provides a lot of value. But I'll get off my soapbox.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think, I hope some people who are subscribed to the show are many tens of thousands of followers. I hope some of them are thinking like, what are Dave, Dave and Kevin gonna be thinking about this book when they see it pop up on their feed? There's a long one I never got around to reading. These guys can give me some good insight on it. Okay, other side of the equation, what episode do you think flew under the radar more than it should have? So an episode that deserved more attention, that didn't really do as well as it could have.

So I. I don't actually know if this is accurate, but I'm going to guess the one that I said was my favorite, the Pat Gelsinger the juggling act. It just seems unlikely to me that it would, like, trigger the algos or whatever. I personally actually tried putting out some clips of the content and got very few likes, retweets or engagement. So I'm going to guess that the Pat Gelsinger one flew under the radar and maybe some of our listeners haven't tuned in yet.

I'm actually going to guess Apple in China by Patrick McGee, and I've been sort of singing its praises, that episode's praises from the start. I really love how he shows that Apple is more of an operations company than a design company in its current iteration. You know, it went from 400 billion to 4 trillion under Tim Cook, who has also been in the news recently and built on the foundation of that Steve Jobsian and Jony Ives design genius. But it really seems like they're all about operations now. You know, I loved in that episode when he brought up that Apple was investing $55 billion into what amounts to Chinese technological dominance every year, which was four chips acts or the equivalent of two Marshall Plans every year. It was very cinematic. I love the narrative, you know, when they have Ford's adventures setting up the first Apple stores in China. I thought that was great. But I think for someone like me who doesn't necessarily follow Apple except when we're together, it's going there's the basic Apple stories, there's the Jobs biographies, there's the David Pogue book and Apple in China. And Patrick McGee just seems like such a deep layer of peeling that onion off that I don't think it probably had as much listenership as our other ones, but definitely deserves it.

You're right, David. The one that performed the worst in terms of listens over time is the juggling act with Pat Gelsinger. And it is undeservedly so low. It was a great interview. We might actually re release the video on our YouTube channel. By the way, it's linked in the show notes if you want to follow us on YouTube. We have a small but growing presence on YouTube and so folks can re enjoy that episode in video form after we have the edited version out there. Kevin Apple in China did not perform as well as I thought it would. I also think it's a little bit under the radar. We also may release the video of that interview in the Future on YouTube to kind of give it a second life.

And I wonder with Pat Gelsinger if the faith focus maybe turned off some folks. And I would just urge everyone to revisit that episode because one, in our interview we do talk about faith and how his spirituality really informed his, you know, organizational leadership. But you know, for those of you who might be turned off otherwise by a discussion around faith, it really wasn't that much of a focal point of the book itself and that you can still find a lot of value there.

And it's also kind of interesting even if you're not a faithful person yourself. How he navigated having pressure from his board to actually be less public about his faith. How did he navigate having really strong convictions even though some of his employees did not? And he felt really strongly from a moral perspective he had to do certain actions or express himself in a certain way. And that wasn't always popular with either the folks below him or above him.

Yeah, I'm just going to go into a little detail here because I'd alluded to it earlier, but he, he says that when he was the CEO of VMware that one of the board members told him that the hardest thing to talk about was his faith. That, that everyone knew that they were, you know, he was completely qualified. But their concern was to have a avowed Christian as a Silicon Valley CEO, which I'd kind of said, like, I don't know, that sounds like a little bit of a crime potentially. But anyway, it was a, it was a real, like, I don't think it should be, but I think, I think like judging someone purely on their religion, you know. So anyway, I really found that really fascinating. I think it's true that story that wasn't a focus of our interview or anything like that, but it was really interesting.

So we did have an amazing season. But if you could do it over again, is there anything you would change about season five? Is there something, a mistake that we made along the way? Is there an interview we could have done differently? Is there a book we shouldn't have done? What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, looking back, I think there weren't really any unforced errors that we committed. I think that we had a pretty clean, great season. I think it's my favorite season of the three that I've been involved with. So thank you for that, guys. You know, one thing that I would notice is that we really only had two sort of self help books or books about emotional intelligence, books about kind of navigating your career. We read about how other great luminaries and companies did that. But really Thinking Fast and Slow and Influence were the only two sort of career help self help books that we did. And of those, I thought Influence didn't really stand up just for the reasons that we discussed earlier. So I think, you know, in addition to some of these great, you know, tech books and, you know, business epics, you know, I think having some practical skills in there for our listeners is one of my goals for next season.

So I've said it the last couple years, but I'm going to say it again. Consistency is the thing that I worry about for us. I just want to try and be better about. I think maybe we all just focus on picking some books in advance. Like, I think a lot of what we struggle with is just we, we all start reading something, we're like, ah, it's not that great. And then, then we take a little bit longer than we would love to. And so just finding ways for us to be a little bit more consistent, I think let's, we'll take a little bit of a break, we'll do some refreshing and maybe find a way to try and be, you know, monthly more consistently.

Yeah, that was the biggest problem is we did have a big gap here, especially beginning of the new year here, between two episodes and it was longer than we typically do. We had a lot going on. Congratulations to both of you. Both got married in the last couple years, so there's been a lot of personal changes going on. So, you know, we've had a lot going on in our other lives, but we have a successful podcast and we need to keep it successful by being more consistent. You're absolutely right, David.

And all of our listeners should know that Kopeck labeled January and February. It's the equivalent of Queen Elizabeth's annus horribilis, that it was a very stressful moment for him when we were not being as consistent. So, dear listeners, we will do our best, especially for Kopeck.

Well, we had this great interview with James Wang in January, which flew under the radar in our discussion today, by the way. That was a really great interview. James had a lot of great insight about this current moment in AI, but we had this great interview with him and then we had this amazing interview also with David Pogue. But it was like a three month gap between the two and that's just too long for what's supposed to be a monthly podcast. Right. But to be fair, you know, it does take a while to arrange these kind of high level interviews. And so there's a little bit of that too, you know.

But I don't want to forget also James Wang, because you're right, Kopeck, that we haven't really touched on his book. I thought it was great. It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, how the COVID says don't panic. And for those of you who are worried about AI replacing your jobs, I would go back and read that James Wang book, what to Know About AI because, and listen to the episode as well, because he did a really good job of explaining what AI is and what AI isn't in its current iteration. And it actually gave me a lot of encouragement. Right. The idea being that AI still needs human oracles. Right. And that we can be those oracles. And here's one of the questions we directly asked him was what does it take to be one of these oracles? What are some of those not studies, study skills, but career skills and competencies that you should be looking at as you sort of navigate this new AI driven world. And so I thought that was a fantastic book. And thank you to James for joining us, one of our college buddies.

And I'm curious for you personally, Kevin, was there something from having that experience with James and also, of course reading his book that actually affected your career since. Because it's now been like four months since we read the book. Right. Has there, there were there any insights about it that changed the way that you use LLMs or changed your thinking about the technology stack or technology future of your company?

Well, if my two business partners are listening, I hope that they would also know that we are looking into integrating more AI into our real estate research and advisory practice. So one of the things that we're doing is working to get our full data set sort of into a, you know, a model so that we can have our users actually interrogate the data on the their own without sort of going through the biases of the pre made charts and outputs that we generate. So that's one thing we've been doing. And just after that James Wang interview, I signed up for a few AI subscriptions. I've been learning how to prompt better, whether in Gemini or Claude, and I've actually been turning to it as a reviewer of some of the questions that I'm coming up with, the survey drafts that I'm putting out there to ensure that I'm not missing anything. So I think that the James Wang episode kind of opened my eyes to AI as well and allowed me to experiment more than I was doing at the time.

I would just call out that I think James again actually said something that I don't think is in the book that I thought was incredibly valuable to me, which is if AI is not in a bubble, then it will be at some point because it's such an important technology that it's just an inherent kind of thing that like when you have these really important technologies, it's just naturally going to lead to a boom in a way that like will probably lead to a bust for some of the players. And it doesn't mean that everyone who's booming right now is going to end up busting. But if it's as important as people think it's going to be, there's, there's going to be a bust because people are going to overinvest in it because it seems so important. So that has been actually like really helpful for me personally and like thinking about the space. So really appreciate it.

James joining okay, so let's do something that's not related necessarily to business books. It could be a business book, but can you recommend a book that you have read over the past year that we did not cover on the show or over the past season, so past 18 months that you think other folks should check out.

So I've got two that I would recommend. One is New York by Edward Rutherford. It is very long, but it is a novel that goes back to literally the founding of Manhattan as Manhattan. So it literally starts with, you know, Dutch colonists and then, you know, the British arrive and the takeover happens and there's, you know, interactions with Native Americans at the beginning and these families sort of stay in New York over time and the Dutch and the English, you know, merge and it's just I, you know, I'm moving out of, you know, New York City to the, to the suburbs. And it's been very interesting to like, sort of read this whole polemic. And the author does a whole series of these. So like his whole career has basically been these very long frame novels about a place. So he's got one about London, he's got one about Paris, etc. So anyway, really enjoyed that. And then another one has become a major motion picture. But Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir was another one that I really enjoyed. So if you saw the movie, I think it, the movie's great. The book is great as well. I think you could read the book after having watched the movie or vice versa and you'd really enjoy it. But just a, you know, fun scientific novel.

What about you, Kevin? Thanks for that, David. What's a book pick from you?

Yeah, so as folks will remember from my multiple mentions, I'm a really big fan of kind of sci fi and horror and fantasy books. I always mention World War Z by Max Brooks. And I actually apply some of the, you know, vignettes from that story to some of the conversations that we've had. One that I've really enjoyed and I read in the past year was it's basically, it's called the End of the World as We Know. It's. It's new tales from Stephen King's the Stand universe. And it's actually written by a series of different authors in anthology style. And it's all. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Stand, but it involves Captain Trips, which is a superflu that wipes out basically 99% of the world's population. And it's all about the survivors in this post apocalyptic world. But the anthology, the short stories go from contemporaneous with Stephen King's the Stand to immediately after to the far future. And they even have one chapter where it's a novelist and fiction writer who writes the short story from the perspective of African painted dogs who were trapped in a zoo. But then it's a story of how they adapt to having no more human caretakers. And it's written from their pov, which was really cool. But as a horror fan, I really enjoyed the End of the World as We Know it.

Thanks for that, Kevin. Of course, the best book I read of the last year was my new book, Computer Science from Scratch by David Kopeck. Please buy it. It's not doing very well, but if I could ask one for a general audience, it would be Grateful Geek by Jean Louis Guessi actually We heard about him in the apple the Last 50 Years book by David Pogue. He was one of the product leaders at Apple in the late 1980s, and he went on to found a company called BE that Apple almost purchased, but they ended up purchasing next from Steve Jobs instead. But he wrote a memoir, basically, and it's a pretty good memoir. Not only does it give some interesting insight about the tech industry, but he's a very colorful character. He has a little bit of an outsider's perspective on Silicon Valley, originally being from France. And so I enjoyed the way that he kind of positioned himself as a technologist in that book, but also as kind of an outsider coming into the Silicon Valley milieu. So I can recommend that memoir, Grateful Geek by Jean Louis Gassy.

Oh wow, that one sounds interesting. Maybe we can try and get him on next season. Kopeck.

And I love the vocabulary word milieu. That was fantastic.

Well, I can work on it. We'll see. He is an older gentleman, but we can certainly try. Give us a little bit of a preview about what the three of us are thinking for season six. We're not going to be that long from season six. I know we're planning to not have a super long kind of interregnum between our two seasons, but what, what, what are your plans for where you want to take the podcast and what are. Give us some inside baseball. What. What are we planning to do next season?

Two words. Chip War. So that is some inside baseball. But I have recommended that book and we have decided not to do it multiple times. But that was more of a joke. But in terms of looking forward to the next season, we mentioned before, you know, wanting to continue covering some great business books. But we also, and one thing I noticed and that we've spoken about was our, you know, more coverage on technology and its intersections with business and enterprise. And so I think it's super exciting that we really framed this season around technology and business. And I think that there is an a latent audience out there who wants to hear even more about that. Do you guys agree?

Really excited about the idea. It just came up as we were sort of preparing for this episode, but I think we're going to launch Technology Books and Company. So I'm not sure if we'll have it ready in time for this release. Kopeck, that's going to be up to you and all of your wizardry in the background. But yeah, I think we're going to try and continue Business Books and Company. We love this feed, but try and Expand out and focus in on that area as well. So really excited about that.

Yeah, I'm super excited about it. Obviously it's in my wheelhouse as a computer science professor. I think I can add a lot of value to those episodes. And we have some exciting tech related books that we are in the pipeline of, some that we might do ourselves and several that we're going to invite some pretty prominent authors on and I think we'll continue on the success we've had this season. You know, again, this is a little inside stuff, but it kind of builds. Once you have a big name author on which we really achieved in season three, other big name authors are willing to then come on the show because you have that social proof, you've shown that you're a worthwhile venue for somebody of that regard, of that prominence in the authorial community to spend their time with. And so I think we can now take all of the success we've had with Business Books and company and leverage that to bring on some really exciting authors in a more technical sphere, but also on the crossover spear of books that are about business and tech. And I'm really excited about where we take that. So we'll be posting a special bonus episode when we launch Technology Books and Company on the Business Books and Company feed to kind of get you that link over to the other feedback. So look out for that in the next couple of months.

I'm excited to be the layman and the observer of this and commentator. So this is going to be a fun journey.

Let's say a couple thank yous. I want to first thank the two of you, David and Kevin. We had such an amazing time together this season. We, we really, I think, achieved something that it's not just about the listenership. It's not just about, you know, how many books we did. It's really about the quality that we put out there. And I know that the three of us have a certain great chemistry together, but also we have a real care about what we're doing. It's not just for us, you know, just, let's just put it out there. It's. Let's try to be perfectionists about it and really do it right. And so I really appreciate working with the two of you because you show that Karen, every episode that we do also want to thank our families, of course, who support us, our wives who have to put up with us putting the work into this show. So thank you to our wives and our families and our friends, of course, who listen to the show. But thank you most of all to our listeners. We wouldn't have a show if it wasn't for all the listeners, so thank you for subscribing. Please don't forget also to leave us a review if you enjoy the show. And one final thank you to our authors. Thank you to Pat Gelsinger, John Romero, Patrick McGee, James Wang and David Pogue for really making it such a special season by coming on the show and sharing your insights with our listeners. Okay, as we say goodbye this season, do you have any final words and is there anything you want to plug and how can our listeners get in touch with you?

I have to say some thank yous briefly after all of that effusive thanks. Thank you to Kopak. You have really, like driven this whole thing. You do a lot more work than the two of us do on the sideline. We all read the books, we all go into a lot of depth. We all really care. But you've really gone above and beyond and gotten us to get these great authors on and all of that. So really appreciate that. Thank you to Giacomo, our editor. You have done a phenomenal job this whole season and for the last. I think it's all. Is it all seven? I forget if you got them at the beginning, but I think Kopeck maybe did one or two before. But we really are indebted to you and all that you've done for us. And I will personally thank my wife, even though Kopeck included her. Thank you for the time you let me take away to work on this. I know there's a lot that we all have going on and we appreciate you. I'll throw it over to Kevin, just

echoing short thank you, Kopeck, for all the hard work that you do and Giacomo as well. He actually shared his. His favorite episode that we've done so far and what was it?

Kopeck, his favorite episode was the David Pogue episode, although he also really liked the John Romero episode as well. Yeah.

So it was fantastic. We have time to speak with him. And in fact some of the technology books and company Momentum is actually Giacomo, probably one of our most loyal listeners telling us that he loves those technology books. So I can't wait to jump into that. And thank you as well to my wife Allie. We just celebrated our six month anniversary and she is also one of our most loyal listeners. So if she's listening now, thank you so much.

And I forgot to thank Giacomo. Thank you, Giacomo. And we appreciate everything over the last seven years. Okay. Anything that you want to plug in. How can our listeners get in touch with the two of you?

You can follow me on Twitter at

davidg Short you can follow me on X at Hudak's basement. That's H u D a k s basement.

And you can follow me on X. I'm at Dave Kopeck D A V E K O P E C I'm going to put a link in our show notes to our YouTube channel. Our YouTube channel is growing. We would love to have you there. We post some video interviews on there that you don't get on the general feed, which is mostly audio only, although we may post video to the podcast feed in the future. You can right now go and check out some past video of author interviews on the YouTube channel. Also want to remind you to subscribe if this is your first time listening or you're kind of once in a while listener please go and hit that follow or that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode and also leave us a review. You know reviews actually help. They drive interest in the show. So if you enjoy the show, leave us a five star review. Thanks again for listening to season five of Business Books and Company. We'll be back soon with season six and we hope you have a great time reading some great books between now and then.