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Your ears rang. We took notes. You're welcome.

Friday · 6 min read · Lightly edited by a human who definitely didn't listen at 2.5x speed (lie)

Good morning, capo. This week was about the things everyone underestimates until they can't. A guest on Invest Like the Best argued that we are all, even now, undersizing the AI market by a wide margin. Acquired spent hours on how Disney went from a near-dead animation studio in the eighties to a privately-owned government inside the state of Florida. And David Senra, five weeks running, told the story of Claude Shannon, a man who spent his life on gloriously useless problems and accidentally invented the entire digital age. The theme is simple: the small, ignored, unglamorous thing is usually the empire in disguise. Also, a business where a single monkey costs fifty thousand dollars. Let's go count someone else's money, especially the money nobody is counting yet.

Acquired — "Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire" (listen)

4h+ → 90 seconds

Acquired's whole point is that you do not actually grasp the scale of what Disney became, and they prove it by just listing it: "Disney is so much more than you think. It's Mickey and Ariel and Elsa and Woody and all the Pixar characters, and of course the Avengers and Luke Skywalker and Winnie the Pooh and the parks and the cruises, but now it's also the Simpsons and Avatar and National Geographic, plus the entire studio of 20th Century Fox, a privately owned government inside the state of Florida, and a private island in the Bahamas." All of it grew from a company that was nearly a takeover carcass in the mid-eighties.

The turnaround engine was a philosophy that resolves the fake war between art and commerce, and every founder should sit with it: "We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement." Greatness was not the opposite of the business plan. Greatness was the business plan.

And the most Pod-Capo detail is that the empire's real profit engine was the thing nobody saw coming: "Unexpectedly, a giant amount of the profits of the whole company come from ESPN. Nobody would have told you when the ABC deal was made that ESPN was going to turn out to be the weightlifter of the group." They bought a network for the network and got a sports monopoly they barely noticed at the time.

Takeaway for operators: the asset that carries your company is often not the one on the pitch deck. Disney chased the mouse and the movies and got quietly rich off cable sports. Audit your own business for the ESPN, the unglamorous line item quietly doing the heaviest lifting, and then go feed it.

My First Million — "How to Find Businesses With Almost Zero Competition" (listen)

1h+ → one idea you can steal

The entire method is one word: noticing. The hosts argue the best businesses are hiding in niches so specific and unglamorous that nobody is even looking, and their flagship example is unforgettable: "Monkeys used to be two grand a monkey. When COVID happened, prices shot up because they needed to test medicines and vaccines. It got to 20,000, 50,000 per monkey." There is a person whose entire wildly-profitable company is supplying primates to drug trials, and you have never once thought about them.

The reason these gaps stay open is that serving them requires the unsexy, manual work everyone avoids: "If you get all the way out there, you notice you have to step over these gaps that exist. People don't know how to do this. You have to do it manually yourself. Nobody does it for you." Competition disappears exactly where the work gets tedious and specific.

And the meta-skill underneath it is the most quietly useful line of the week: "Noticing is such a superpower. Everybody knows enthusiasm is a positive attribute, but it's something that smart people feel stupid doing." The edge is being willing to be nakedly curious about boring things while everyone cooler stays too detached to look.

Takeaway for operators: stop hunting for the big obvious market where you will be competitor number four hundred. Go far enough into a specific, tedious, unglamorous corner that you hit the gap nobody serves, then do the manual work they will not. The monkeys are worth fifty grand each because somebody was paying attention.

Founders — "How Claude Shannon Invented the Future" (listen)

1h+ → three quotes and a vibe

Senra's fifth week running, and he found the ultimate proof of this issue's thesis: Claude Shannon, whose "useless" mathematics quietly became the foundation of every digital thing you own. His theory of himself is a gift to anyone who feels guilty for being obsessed with the wrong things: "A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated." Not tortured, not driven. Irritated by a problem, usefully.

He was gloriously unbothered by relevance, which is precisely why he changed everything: "I've always pursued my interests without much regard to financial value or value to the world. I spent lots of time on totally useless things. Usefulness is not my main goal. I keep asking myself, is it possible to make a machine to do this? Can I prove this theorem?" The man who made the entire internet possible did it by refusing to ask whether it would be useful.

And a rebuke to the age of hyperspecialization, from a juggling, unicycle-riding polymath: "In these days when there's a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once both broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin." One more underestimated detail, because of course: over 30 years, Shannon's own stock portfolio returned 28% a year. The man who chased useless problems also quietly out-invested Wall Street. The play was never a waste.

Invest Like the Best — Everyone Is Still Undersizing the AI Market (listen): The mindset-breaking line of the week, from an investor watching hypergrowth up close: "Every single day that you are hitting your plan, you are destroying equity value. Our whole careers we learned you lay out a plan and execute violently and hit it. Now, every day you hit that plan, you're messing up." In a market expanding this fast, a plan you can comfortably hit is proof you aimed too low. His one real fear is physical: "Models translate compute into intelligence. What's the demand for intelligence? A lot. So we'll continue to have more and more demand on compute. I am worried about energy." Same story every issue: it comes back to power.

20VC — Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating the US (listen): A blunt scoreboard from someone routing traffic across every model: "In July we launched 70 models, about one every 10 hours. America is very, very behind still." And a founder philosophy that applies far beyond AI: "A lot of companies are making routers because it's fashionable. But that immediately puts you in the mindset of copying instead of winning. You're playing to play, or playing to exist, rather than playing to win." The open-weight world is moving at a cadence the US frontier labs are not matching.

All-In — And Then There Were Two (listen): The AI race quietly narrowed while everyone argued about a selloff: "A year ago we had five major companies in the hunt to be the leading frontier lab. Now we're really down to two." Meanwhile the usage that supposedly is not materializing keeps exploding: "Grok tripled its tokens in the month of July. Cursor was already on a path from 3 billion to 10 billion by year-end." Consolidation at the top, detonation at the bottom, and a market that still cannot decide if it is a bubble or a beginning.

What everyone underestimated this week, by airtime:

The theme this week was scale you cannot see yet. The AI market that every model is still too small for. The near-dead studio that became a government. The abstract math that became the internet. The tedious niche that became a fortune. Over and over, the thing that mattered most was the thing that looked smallest at the time. The lesson is not that everything ignored becomes an empire. It is that empires almost always start out looking ignorable. We remain, as ever, long the useless problem and the fifty-thousand-dollar monkey.

If you only listen to one episode this week, make it Claude Shannon on Founders. It is permission, backed by one of the most consequential minds of the century, to go be nakedly, uselessly obsessed with the thing you cannot stop thinking about. That is not a detour from the work. It frequently is the work.

If you only have 20 minutes, the zero-competition episode on MFM. You will walk away scanning the world for fifty-thousand-dollar monkeys, which is to say, for the boring, specific gaps that everyone cooler than you is too detached to notice.

Senra has now surfaced five weeks in a row. Thiel, the merchant bankers, Nolan, Plank, and now Shannon. We are no longer covering a podcast. We are covering a man building a canon in real time, one obsessive biography a week, and we would not have it any other way.

Forward this to someone chasing the big obvious market. Point them at the monkeys. We're a newsletter, not a guilt trip. (Okay, a little guilt trip.)

— The Capo 🎙️🤌

Made with coffee, too many podcast apps, and the firm belief that nobody has time to listen to 15 hours of content per week. That's our job now.