10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal mark ten years of Acquired with a Fall 2025 season finale that breaks from their past holiday specials. Listeners had asked for years for an episode on Acquired itself, covering why the show worked. Ben's framing is that it worked "when 99% of podcasts do not." He admits it felt strange to analyze their own company, and that they had always avoided doing it. For the tenth year they decided to pause and reflect, and they brought in an outside interviewer: Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, Liar's Poker, The Blind Side, The Undoing Project and Going Infinite, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

David had the venue planned without telling Ben. They recorded in the garage that David calls Google's first office, which Google opened to them for the day. Ben says this closes a year that included their three-part Google series, in the place where a company worth nearly $4 trillion began. The hosts give some of the history. Susan Wojcicki had just bought the house and wanted to sublet part of it. A notice posted on the Stanford campus advertised the space. Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up their first desks there after leaving Stanford's offices. Ben believes the door-on-sawhorses desk in the room is the original, because Google brought it out of storage for them. Lewis is a little skeptical of the origin myth: "I'm not sure exactly what happened in the Google garage. It's a nice idea."

The anniversary gift ties back to David's education. At Princeton, which Lewis also attended, David majored in French literature. He says he wrote his senior thesis on the history of Dom Perignon and the marketing history of Shakespeare. About 12 to 13 years later the show made its LVMH episode, which David calls a big moment for Acquired. Moet & Chandon had just released the 2015 vintage of Dom Perignon, and 2015 is the year the show started.

Lewis reads the thesis link more broadly. He says the episodes feel like the work of someone who has built up to a thesis, with "thesis-like immersion in the subject." David jokes that the episodes are better than his actual thesis. Ben agrees with the comparison and describes recording day as feeling like "Cramming for finals the night before."

Lewis says up front that he is a recent listener. He found the show in July, when a prominent CEO at Google Camp asked whether he had listened to Acquired. He thinks his first episode may have been the Morris Chang episode. He says he had "about eight different reactions to it, all positive." Since July he has heard maybe 10 episodes, which Ben notes adds up to many hours of listening.

I could not believe you were getting away with a four-hour podcast. I couldn't believe it even after four hours. I was still looking for even more.

Lewis compares the effect to what he tries to do in his books. The show grabs listeners the way he tries to grab readers, puts them in a state where "they'll let you take them anywhere," and teaches them things "they don't even know they want to learn about." He limits his own authority: he has not heard everything and is "hardly the world's authority" on the show. His only preparation besides listening was to go back to the very first episode for comparison. He calls the difference shocking. He also says he has one big conclusion about what changed, and he holds it back to see whether the hosts reach it themselves. His blunt verdict on the debut: "There's no way that first thing you did was ever going to become a hit."

Asked what has been there from the beginning, David names "the magic between me and Ben." Lewis recounts the background: they met at a Passover Seder and became colleagues at a venture capital firm. Ben says they simply "wanted to spend more time together." Lewis jokingly asks if the relationship is romantic. Both say they are straight and married. David describes each of them as having two spouses, their actual partners and each other. Ben adds that he and David shared a bank account before he and his wife did.

Neither spouse feels threatened, the hosts say, though Ben admits the time demands are real. David says his wife likes the arrangement because she was not interested when he used to talk at her about Acquired topics. Ben's wife hears rough drafts. She skips the published episodes because she has already heard about four worse versions, and Ben credits her feedback with improving the version listeners get.

Lewis asks them to explain the chemistry. Ben says they both followed Apple rumors in real time and read the latest Stratechery posts. David says they first bonded over Ben Thompson. Each also saw something to learn from the other. Ben was a software engineer hired by a venture firm for incubation work and did not understand the actual job of venture capital. David was a peer a few years older who did that job, so Ben could ask him what people were talking about. David says he privately felt like a fraud as a VC. His path ran through Princeton French literature, Wall Street and a short stint at the Wall Street Journal, and he had taken CS classes but never built anything. Ben, by contrast, had built products that millions of people use. Asked what David knew, Ben says "Business." He only learned years into Acquired that David had majored in French literature.

Lewis brings in his book The Undoing Project about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. He says good collaborations give him the feeling that the other person is "bringing out a better version of me." He says that is why he asked about the spouses. Kahneman's and Tversky's spouses knew that the most important relationship in their partners' lives was not with them, though Lewis says "threatened" is too strong a word. David pushes back on the comparison and says he would not call his and Ben's relationship intense. Lewis confirms the Kahneman-Tversky relationship was intense, and Ben adds that it was competitive. Lewis says it had a built-in status gap: Kahneman always felt at risk of being seen as the lesser partner, and everyone thought Amos was the smartest person they had met.

The hosts' answers here are not quite uniform. David says he never felt a status difference. Ben says, "I think I felt lesser," because he did not know finance when they started a business-analysis podcast. David notes the irony that Ben has since become "the keeper of the analysis" while David is "the keeper of the story." Ben separates feeling less knowledgeable from a status difference, which he says neither of them has felt. He puts their real fights or tensions at "two or three ever in 10 years." Lewis says he wants to return to those, but the conversation moves on before he does.

The hosts propose a structure for the retrospective. They will look at what they have learned from the companies they covered and then applied to Acquired. Ben asks whether the show's success comes partly from studying the world's best companies, through "some osmosis" from the subject matter into the show itself. Lewis accepts the frame.

David's first lesson comes from the NFL. Baseball plays 162 games a year and is called America's pastime because fans spend so much time with it. The NFL's product is scarce, and the league has deliberately made it scarcer and more event-driven, which David says "made all the difference." He then applies this to Acquired and calls the result "completely insane" by podcasting norms. The show has released 12 episodes a year for the last three years and plans eight for next year. Earlier it made 26 episodes a year, which Ben says ran from 40 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes.

Lewis offers the conventional view as a counterpoint. As a hobbyist podcaster, he has been told "you have to be on all the time," and since he cannot do that, he does not try. He confirms he releases more episodes a year than Acquired. He says he does almost no preparation for most of them, but he puts real time into the scripted ones, which tell narrow stories and are, in his words, a different thing from what Acquired does.

Lewis asks whether they really learned this from the NFL. David says they had already started moving that way, and covering the NFL confirmed it. Ben goes further and calls most of these lessons "confirmation bias": the show gets a hint of a direction and the coverage reinforces it. The same goes for Hermes. They covered it last year, but Ben says they found their way to quality and scarcity four or five years ago. Before that, they felt bad at podcasting because they could not make many episodes. They had no production team and no professional ad salespeople, and for a long time they were not full-time.

Ben describes the change as accepting the constraint and leaning into it. He compares it to Hermes requiring that every Birkin bag be handmade by one artisan and building a business model around that. Every Acquired episode is handcrafted by the two hosts, including the research and recording. An audio engineer, Steven, does the waveform editing, while the hosts mark "a thousand cuts per episode" in a transcript. Ben calls it a "made-with-love product" and says a heavily constrained process turned out to support a big platform and a good business. David confirms this is not where they started.

Lewis sums up the original idea as two friends deciding to do a podcast about corporate acquisitions that worked. David calls it a "Bad idea." Lewis points out they could easily have gone the other way and covered failed acquisitions, which offered much more material. Ben notes that failed deals were what most of the press covered at the time. Lewis says the positive starting point stands out to him.

Ben traces this to their jobs as a VC and a company builder. The goal was to create things valuable enough to be bought or go public, and companies get bought because they work, so the show set out to "reverse engineer what works." Lewis says this differs from almost all journalism. Most journalists who started there "would be accused of hagiography," but he thinks the hosts get away with it because their question is practical: why did this work? He again holds back his own view of what they have learned and says the first episode sounds like it was made by almost different people.

When Ben brings up Acquired's three-part Berkshire Hathaway series, Lewis says he has not heard it but is a big Berkshire investor. He says he bought in the middle of the financial crisis, and later dates the purchase to 2008. He also tells the backstory. He had written a takedown of Warren Buffett, "The Temptation of St. Warren," for the cover of the New Republic, though he says "takedown" puts it a little strongly. His thesis was that Buffett may have started out as who he says he is but became something different in the market, because "His money's not like other people's money." His second complaint was about the Salomon Brothers deal: Buffett kept a CEO in place whom Lewis thought should not have been allowed to stay. Lewis says he was there, though his answer about whether he lived through it is garbled in the transcript.

Lewis says the piece made him cynical about Buffett only briefly. As he kept watching Buffett, he found he liked him. He calls that article the only piece he ever looked back on and thought he had overdone. He wrote another 5,000-word piece for the New Republic that "basically apologized" for the first. He describes his investment logic in the crisis: Buffett's money would be especially valuable then, and if Buffett lived long enough, that might happen again. He bought a chunk of A shares and has held them.

His Buffett story, which he admits is a little out of school, comes from his work on Going Infinite, his Sam Bankman-Fried book. Lewis has never met Buffett. A publicist who also represented Buffett told Lewis that Buffett had a question for him. Buffett wanted to know whether he was the Michael Lewis who sold some Berkshire shares two years ago and four years ago, and why. Lewis says he had actually given those shares to charity. The publicist said Buffett would be relieved. Part of the exchange is garbled in the transcript, but Lewis's point is clear: Buffett was personally tracking who moved in and out of the A shares. He links this to Buffett and Munger's advice to put money in a few stocks and "watch those stocks like a hawk" rather than in an index fund. David's takeaway: "You don't build something like this if you're not a maniac." Lewis agrees.

The lesson Ben takes from Berkshire for Acquired is the circle of competence, and the idea that "it's okay to have a giant too hard pile." David explains that Buffett and Charlie Munger sorted ideas into a yes pile, a no pile and a too hard pile, and that the third pile effectively means no. Lewis adds that all technology used to sit in that pile. The hosts say "too hard pile" became a constant refrain on their own calls. Ben ties it to opportunity cost: the projects they say yes to are so good that turning down a huge number of others is freeing.

Lewis asks what they consider too hard. David names Hollywood and says it was one reason he wanted to meet Lewis months earlier. They have had many chances to make other Acquired media, including TV shows, documentaries and film adaptations of their stories. Ben says these all sound good until they dig into how long it would take to think through the implications. David says the answer is almost always the same: "we should just make another episode."

Lewis supports the decision and warns that Hollywood will "woo you with their enthusiasm" and then lead you into a rabbit hole where you may spend years with nothing to show for it. He says he has gone down those rabbit holes himself, but only when he had nothing better to do, between books, as "a pallet cleanser." He says Acquired has no between-books period and has an assembly line he lacks.

Ben calls the show "a compounding asset" and says this explains a large part of why it worked. The research and writing resemble work on a book. But when an episode comes out, people subscribe, and when the next one comes out, those same people listen, which he calls "almost guaranteed." David says the base keeps growing. Ben says book authorship has "loose compounding elements" but no literal subscriber base. The hosts suggest Lewis may be an exception with a brand of his own.

Lewis says that, even for him, the compounding has been far less than he expected. He planned to move through America's "arenas of ambition," such as Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, the movie business and sports. He thought each book would bring in readers interested in that arena, who would then follow him to the next. He says it has not worked that way. His books have a "big-ish market," but he sees "no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me." Each book feels "like another startup," almost as if he had never written one. When David suggests the Moneyball audience did not necessarily follow him to a later book, Lewis agrees that the audiences end up different. He says that is not true of Acquired.