Episode notes
Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermarkets. Their parking lots are famously terrible and they're constantly out of your favorite items. Shoppers brave long lines and cramped aisles while overly-friendly employees in Hawaiian shirts try to chat them up. Everything about the Trader Joe's experience seems designed to drive modern consumers away. And yet they generate $2,000+ per square foot in sales — double their nearest competitor in…
Acquired
by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal · English · Tech & Science
Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.
More from Acquired
-
S19 · 27 Jan 2026 · 4 hr 8 min
The NFL
The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence. It generates the most revenue of any sports league globally and sets new records for team valuations each year. But it wasn’t always this way. The history of the NFL mirrors America’s own development: scrappy small-town teams rode the successive growth waves of the automobile, TV, the Internet and social media to grow larger…
-
S18 · E4 · 15 Dec 2025 · 2 hr 38 min
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)
Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the standard-issue playbook for podcasting success! And yet well over a million smart, curious and exceedingly busy humans share their (your!) valuable time with us every month. Why? This is the exact paradox that has been rolling around in the head of Michael Lewis (yes, that Michael Lewis) since he found the show earlier this year. So we asked Michael to be our guest "interlocutor" and share what he…
-
S18 · E3 · 24 Nov 2025 · 3 hr 54 min
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogrified a beverage into emotion in all of our collective psyches, and ALSO built one of the most incredible scale economy businesses of all-time. And oh yeah, there’s also cocaine, WW2, Mad Men, Warren Buffett, James Dean, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Michael Ovitz, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, McDonald’s and Monsanto. So cozy up to the fire with your favorite images of Santa Claus and Polar Bears and enjoy an ice-cold…
-
S18 · E1 · 6 Oct 2025 · 3 hr 56 min
Google Part III: The AI Company
Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei — more or less everyone who leads modern AI worked at Google circa 2014. They built the best dedicated AI infrastructure (TPUs!) and deployed AI at massive scale years before anyone else. And yet... the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 caught them completely flat-footed. How on earth did the…
-
S18 · 1 Oct 2025 · 1 min
Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)
It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, Barry Diller, and cameos from around the Acquired Cinematic Universe including Christina Cacioppo, Ben Clymer, and Howard Schultz. To watch the full production on any device, please head over to Spotify where you’ll find it available for free in the Acquired feed right alongside all our other episodes:…
-
S17 · E4 · 26 Aug 2025 · 4 hr 2 min
Google Part II: Alphabet
In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2011, Google built seven (!) more billion+ user products: Gmail, Maps, Drive and Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and Photos — all either started from scratch internally or acquired as startups that were still in their infancy. This six-year period of wild innovation STILL stands unmatched in technology history… no other tech company counts more than four billion+ user products in its portfolio…
-
S20 · E2 · 14 Sep 2026 · 3 hr 35 min
The Home Depot
The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous hardware chain at ages 48 and 35, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank took the words of their New York banker Ken Langone (who had also just accidentally caused their firings) to heart: they'd just been "kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe.” They proceeded to author the greatest compounding story in American retail history, helped by some legendary cameos along the way from Sol…
-
S20 · E1 · 10 Aug 2026 · 4 hr 33 min
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire
In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over offers to sell off the film library to MGM and offload the parks to hotel operators. But what followed instead was the greatest turnaround in media history under Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King. Broadway. Bringing the Disney Vault home on VHS and DVD. And the greatest media acquisition of all time — ESPN. And then... it all almost fell apart.…
-
S19 · E4 · 22 Jun 2026 · 4 hr 31 min
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of billions of people (including, likely, all of you) and is a reliable, predictable profitable business. But it didn’t start that way. During Walt’s era, Disney operated like an unhinged moonshot factory, blowing its finances on one seemingly crazy project after another, like the very first feature-length animated film or a theme park inspired by Walt's fascination with model…
-
S19 · E3 · 18 May 2026 · 3 hr 48 min
Vanguard
Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist organization — it has no shareholders, makes no profits, and operates more like REI than Fidelity. If you own a Vanguard fund, you own a piece of the firm itself. Any excess margin instead gets returned to clients in the form of lower fees, which since 1975 have added up to roughly…
Take it with you
The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.
