Acquired the Podcast

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John“a group chat suggested that I listen, that me and everybody else in the group chat listen to a podcast he had recently come across called Acquired by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, and in particular an episode about Mars Incorporated, the candy company. Um, and I thought, well, I don't know, I need something to listen to. And I don't know, he was very enthusiastic about it, so I went and looked it up in Overcast, and the episode is It's like 4 and a half hours long. I was like, what the hell is Jaukit talking about? I'm not listening to a 4 and a half hour episode of a podcast. And I thought, well, I trust Daniel. He was so enthusiastic. So I start playing and it's really good. It is so freaking good. And it is, it's not really 4 and a half hours of two guys riffing. It is pretty scripted, but it is actually— and I would love to talk about it more— it is an incredibly innovative format where it is sort of like a documentary film with research and, uh, a lot of research and a script, but it is also like a regular podcast, like Dithering, like with two hosts who are very familiar with each other having a conversation, and they clearly don't know everything that the other host knows about the topic, even though they've done some research and clearly have an outline of how they're going to tell it. And I'm listening and Of course I did not listen in one fell swoop. It is this, you know, 4.5 hours is sort of, you know, and I can't really knock long podcasts. The talk show is often over 2 hours. And my thinking, and the way I know people listen to it is they listen to it like reading a book. You read until you run out of time and then you put a bookmark, you pause your podcast and you come back to it. I kept, I just could, I was like making excuses to go run errands so I could go back to listening. To this episode about Mars. And I thought, Ben, maybe Ben knows about these guys, I don't know, but he would love this one. And for sure, this is right up Ben's— I cannot wait to tell Ben about this. And I almost texted you and shot my mouth off and said, you've got to listen to this, I think you would really like this podcast. But I thought, you know what, I want to find another one from their archive to listen to. And I start— now this is where you probably know where I'm going. I do. I start scrolling through their back catalog of podcasts until I get to an episode from 2022 where the entire episode is in an interview with Stratechery founder, uh, Ben Thompson. BenNow the Acquired guys, it's actually amazing. You're totally right. It's, it's a really incredible like concept and business that's really blown up the last few years. Uh, they, they started out doing mostly like ages ago, ages and ages ago. I think they actually started trying to mimic us. And doing like a subscription sort of thing. And they quickly realized actually what we're really good at is these historical type of podcasts. They did, I think, a lot of tech companies originally to start, and they got pretty big in the tech area, but now they do companies of all sorts. They have like these super premium sponsors. They have like seasons where they do like, uh, I think it's 6 per season and they do 2 seasons a year or something like that, or might be 4 per season and 2 per year. But they do like one podcast a month. But when you listen to one, you understand why it takes them so long to do a podcast. And like, actually, I feel like I got lucky to be on in 2022 because like the quality of like the companies that they cover and like the, their sponsors and all sort of thing has like exploded since then. I'm like, I feel like I snuck in.”