The smartest people in the room are all listening to the same podcast

livemint.com:

It’s a wonky podcast about business history and strategy with four-hour episodes that drop once a month. And people from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are completely obsessed with it. Acquired is the unlikely hit show hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, whose ability to understand companies deeply enough to describe them simply makes listeners want to spend time with them.

Lots and lots of time. By turning case studies into cinematic spectacles, they have built the business world’s favorite podcast. Acquired’s hosts treat Taylor Swift and TSMC with equally nerdy enthusiasm.

And no topic is too esoteric for them. The geekier, the better. They did three hours on Costco, seven hours on Nvidia and nine hours on Berkshire Hathaway in a three-part series as long as the “Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

To get a sense of the show’s range, just look at the last five episodes: Visa, Novo Nordisk, Hermès, Renaissance Technologies and Microsoft. The only thing that companies making credit cards, Ozempic, scarves, algorithmic trades and enterprise software have in common is that two earnest hosts wanted to know every nuance, complexity and nitty-gritty detail of how they do it. When I asked Gilbert and Rosenthal how they do it—that is, how the Acquired hosts would tell the story of Acquired—they referenced the motto of the Jeff Bezos space company Blue Origin.

“Step by step, ferociously," Gilbert says. “Every episode took the best things from the previous one and tried to build on them." The origin story of Acquired begins a decade ago when Gilbert, now 34, and Rosenthal, 39, met at a mutual friend’s Passover in Seattle and kept in touch. Over lunch in January 2015, Gilbert mentioned an idea for a podcast that would analyze one