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Acquired

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. Again. Euro Disney turned into a money pit. Boardroom and executive infighting ran rampant. Animation descended into a dumpster fire. (Remember Chicken Little? Us neither.) Comcast — Comcast!! — tried to steal the company via a hostile takeover. Out of the chaos, a new generation of Disney management emerged under Bob Iger to stage yet another epic comeback with Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, creating the defining media empire of the 21st century…until the tech companies came along. Tune in for the ultimate Acquired thrill ride: Disney, Part II.
Sponsors:
Many thanks to our fantastic Fall '26 Season partners:

Sierra
Sentry
WorkOS
Anthropic

Links:

Sign up for email updates, get our takeaways and research photos from each episode, and vote on future topics!
The Official Acquired Meetup on Sept 17th with our friends at Sentry. Join us!
The Acquired Disney Part II Companion PDF
The Acquired Disney Part II Artifacts visual hub
Our Disney Part II column in WSJ
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Disney Study
All episode sources

Carve Outs:

Warby Parker Transitions Extra Active
Michael Arndt's Toy Story 3 Story Presentation
The Golden State Valkyries

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00:00:00 Start
00:00:50 Intro
00:05:07 Disney in Chaos (1984)
00:11:33 Eisner, Wells, Katzenberg Arrive (1984)
00:24:30 Animation Renaissance & CAPS Tech (1989)
00:37:33 Flywheel Extensions: Home Video, Retail & Broadway
00:54:32 Challenges & ABC/ESPN Acquisition (1994-1995)
01:05:55 ESPN: Disney's Accidental Goldmine
01:21:26 Eisner's Decline & Save Disney Campaign (2001-2004)
01:34:53 Comcast Hostile Takeover Bid (2004)
01:41:58 Bob Iger's Vision & Pixar Acquisition (2005-2006)
01:52:17 Pixar: From Lucasfilm to Steve Jobs (1979-1995)
02:03:11 Toy Story, IPO & Eisner Conflict (1995)
02:34:30 Disney Acquires Pixar (2006)
02:46:37 Marvel & Lucasfilm Acquisitions (2009-2012)
02:58:01 Streaming Pivot: Cord Cutting & BAMTech (2015)
03:06:30 The Disney+ Strategy & FOX Acquisition (2017-2019)
03:19:01 The Disney+ Launch, COVID, & Chapek's Tenure (2019-2022)
03:42:15 Iger's Return, Challenges & Parks Revival (2022-2026)
03:50:54 The Business Today: Parks & Streaming Focus
03:59:22 Analysis: Disney+ Strategy & The New Media Landscape
04:10:01 Analysis: Bull/Bear Cases
04:21:20 Quintessence
04:24:39 Carve-Outs + Outro
‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire

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 trains (spoiler: Disneyland). Walt’s relentless ambition to bet the company over and over again not only created some of the most monumental artistic achievements of the 20th century (Snow White, Fantasia, Disney Imagineering), but also resulted in the accidental invention of the modern “flywheel” business model. In this episode, we tell the story of the ultimate marriage of art, commerce, and engineering — The Walt Disney Company: Walt's Era.
Sponsors:
Many thanks to our fantastic Spring '26 Season partners:

J.P. Morgan
WeAreDevelopers event

Vercel
ServiceNow
Statsig

Links:

Sign up for email updates, get our takeaways and research photos from each episode, and vote on future topics!
The Acquired Disney Companion PDF
Our Disney column in WSJ
The original 1958 WSJ “Flywheel” article
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler
The Animated Man by Michael Barrier
Walt Disney: An American Original by Bob Thomas
Building a Company: Roy O. Disney and the Creation of an Entertainment Empires by Bob Thomas
The Disney Version by Richard Schickel
PBS American Experience: Walt Disney
Disneyland Handcrafted
Walt's 1966 EPCOT pitch video
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Disney Study
The Walt Disney Family Museum
All episode sources

Carve Outs:

Brooks Vanguard sneakers
Defunctland YouTube Channel
Animagraffs YouTube Channel
Volvo EX30
The San Francisco Symphony

More Acquired:

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00:00 Start
01:10 Intro
06:03 Walt's Early Life & Artistic Calling (1901-1919)
12:22 From Commercial Art to Laugh-o-grams (1919-1923)
23:05 Hollywood, The Alice Comedies & Oswald's Loss (1923-1928)
43:27 Mickey Mouse & The Synchronized Sound Breakthrough (1928)
01:01:21 The IP Flywheel & Mickey Merch Explosion (1929-1933)
01:09:57 Flywheel Terminology Unpacked
01:18:53 Snow White: Walt's $1.5M Folly (1934-1937)
01:52:01 The Burbank Studio, Debt & Strike (1938-1941)
02:04:28 The Animators' Strike & Walt's Disillusionment (1941)
02:15:43 WWII, The Vault & Creative Slump (1941-1950)
02:24:27 Post-War Slump to Cinderella's Comeback (1945-1950)
02:33:48 Walt's Obsession: Model Trains to Disneyland (1950-1952)
02:38:44 Financing Disneyland: ABC, SRI & Davy Crockett (1953-1955)
03:17:05 Disneyland's Grand Opening & The Evolving Flywheel (1955-1958)
03:41:55 The Florida Project & Walt's Last Dream (1961-1966)
03:54:26 Walt's Untimely Death & Roy's Legacy (1966-1971)
03:57:57 Roy Finishes Walt Disney World (1966-1971)
04:01:09 The Post-Walt Slump & Corporate Raiders (1970s-1984)
04:09:44 Analysis: Why No Other Disney Flywheels?
04:17:15 7 Powers
04:20:45 Quintessence
04:23:50 Carve-Outs + Outro
‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

The Walt Disney Company

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 five hundred billion dollars transferred out of Wall Street managers’ pockets and into retail investors’ savings accounts. And oh yeah, it all started as a cockamamie revenge plot by a guy who’d just been fired by his partners. Today we tell the story of communist capitalism at its finest — Vanguard.
Sponsors:
Many thanks to our fantastic Spring '26 Season partners:

J.P. Morgan
WeAreDevelopers event

ServiceNow
Vercel
Statsig

Links:

This episode's PDF companion
Sign up for email updates, get our takeaways and research photos from each episode, and vote on future topics!
Our Vanguard "episode preview" in WSJ
Stay the Course: The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution by John C. Bogle
The Bogle Effect by Eric Balchunas
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Vanguard Study
Worldly Partners' Article Generational Investing: The Discipline Behind 100+x Outcomes
All episode sources

Carve Outs:

Our WSJ pieces on Ferrari and Vanguard
MacBook Pro M5 Max
Michael MacKelvie on YouTube
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Brooks Vanguard sneakers

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00:00:00 Start
00:00:41 Intro
00:05:30 Jack Bogle's Early Life & Family Ruin (1929)
00:12:34 Princeton Thesis & Mutual Funds Emerge (1949-1951)
00:27:20 Joining Wellington Management (1951)
00:30:38 The Go-Go Years & Fidelity's Ascent (1958-1965)
00:40:36 Jack Takes the Reins & The Ivest Merger (1965)
00:46:04 The Go-Go Bust & Jack's Crisis of Conscience (1970-1973)
00:53:28 Jack is Fired: The Genesis of Vanguard (1974)
01:13:03 The Journal Article That Inspired It All (1974-1976)
01:35:02 Building the Fund & Early Struggles (1976-1981)
01:44:32 The Rise of Indexing & Vanguard's Growth (1988-1992)
01:49:06 Jack's Health & The CEO Transition (1995-1996)
02:00:06 The ETF Debate & Jack's Second Firing (1999)
02:24:18 The 2008 Financial Crisis: Vanguard's Moment
02:30:46 The Warren Buffett Bet (2008-2019)
02:41:28 Fidelity & BlackRock's Resurgence (Post-2008)
02:52:04 Salim Ramji: Vanguard's First Outside CEO
03:04:43 Wellington's Comeback & Mutual Ownership
03:08:23 Analysis
03:30:58 Quintessence
03:39:35 Carve-Outs + Outro
‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Vanguard

Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months. And yet this ultimate luxury product also lives under the same roof with a widely beloved professional sports team… one with 400 million rabid fans from all walks of life who live and die by the Scuderia’s performance every F1 race weekend! How is it possible that these two seemingly contradictory customer bases can coexist within the same company? And far from destroying each other’s value, only reinforce it? The answer, it turns out, is a beautiful, bloody, tragic and romantic opera that spans two families and three generations — and just might be one of the best tales we’ve ever told on Acquired. Buckle up for the story of Ferrari. 
Sponsors:
Many thanks to our fantastic Spring '26 Season partners:

J.P. Morgan Payments
Vercel
ServiceNow
Statsig

Links:

Sign up for email updates, get out takeaways and research photos from each episode, and vote on future topics!
Our Ferrari "episode preview" in WSJ
Enzo Ferrari by Luca Dal Monte
Seeing Red on IMDb
Go Like Hell by A.J. Baime
Stephen Wilmot's great WSJ piece on Ferrari
Ferrari factory tour
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Ferrari Study
All episode sources

Carve Outs:

Ford v Ferrari
Maison Wheat sweaters
Craighill scissors
Amazon grocery service
Travelpro Altitude backpack

More Acquired:

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00:00:00 Start
00:01:08 Intro
00:06:11 Enzo Ferrari's Early Life & Tragedies (1898-1919)
00:12:39 Scuderia Ferrari: Enzo's Racing Dream (1920-1933)
00:25:08 The Prancing Horse & Ferrari's Branding
00:35:41 First Ferrari Road Cars & Le Mans Victory (1947-1949)
00:51:31 F1 & The Tragedies of Enzo's Life (1950s)
01:14:03 Ford vs. Ferrari: The Le Mans Rivalry (1963-1966)
01:21:24 Enzo Sells 50% to Fiat (1969)
01:29:10 Luca di Montezemolo's Return to F1 Glory (1971-1976)
01:52:40 Ferrari's "Pepsi Challenge" and how Luca rescued the company (1991)
02:27:41 Post-IPO Ferrari: New Models & Growth (2015-Present)
02:48:24 The FUV Purosangue & Model Range
03:07:16 Ferrari Luce: The EV Future with Jony Ive
03:12:37 Ferrari Today by the Numbers
03:29:39 Analysis
03:50:04 Carve-Outs + Thank Yous
‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Ferrari

Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history! Their products are comparable to a Hermès Birkin bag in price, luxury status and waitlist times… yet they produce over 1m units / year (roughly 10x annual Birkin production). They make the most universally recognized and desired Swiss watches… yet their founder wasn’t Swiss and didn’t start the company in Switzerland! If Rolex were publicly traded, they’d almost certainly be among the top 50 market cap companies in the world… yet they’re 100% owned by a charitable foundation in Geneva that (among other things) literally just gives away money to local people in the city.
Tune in for one of the most fascinating and admirable companies we’ve ever covered on Acquired. We had an absolute blast making the episode, and hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
This episode was released on February 23, 2025.

Sponsors:

Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

Links:

The Renaissance of the Swiss Watch Industry - Marc Bridge
HODINKEE - Inside All Four Rolex Manufacturing Facilities
“If you were…” campaign
Worldly Partners’ Multi-Decade Rolex Study
Episode sources

Carve Outs:

Bluey
Acquired on Armchair Expert
Eleven Reader


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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC

‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Rolex

Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company value. For instance: Costco has the cheapest prices of any major retailer in America — and also the wealthiest customer base. They pay their hourly workers 30% above the industry norm (and give them excellent healthcare + 401k benefits) — and are almost 3x more profitable on labor than Walmart. Speaking of Walmart, Costco stocks 40x fewer SKUs than their Bentonville-based rivals — yet sells an average of 15x more volume of each. And oh yeah, practically all of Costco’s C-Suite started their careers as baggers and checkout clerks! Tune in for a mind-bending exploration of one of the world’s most iconic — and iconically unique — companies.
This episode was released on August 20, 2023.
Links:

The Science of Hitting
Warren Buffett’s Costco joke
Episode sources

Carve Outs:

Tifosi sunglasses
Dwells “take off everything”
Jeremy Giffon on Invest Like the Best
Dogpatch
David Lidsky’s great piece on Acquired in Fast Company


Sponsors:

Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26


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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC

‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Costco

Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard of it.
Today we tell the story of how a chaotic, deadly, and gloriously dysfunctional European racing series became one of the greatest business stories in sports. For decades, brilliant engineers and daredevil drivers dedicated their lives (and too often lost them) to a league controlled for 45 years by a single man: a former London car dealer named Bernie Ecclestone, who centralized power and extracted billions, while also undeniably single-handedly making the sport successful. Then, in a move no one saw coming, the American company Liberty Media bought the whole thing in 2017, installed a team of Fox Sports and ESPN veterans, and did what Bernie never would — professionalized it. All of a sudden famously money-losing F1 teams turned into real businesses, with the average team valuation today clocking in at an astounding $3.6 billion. Buckle up for one of our most-requested episodes: the wild story of Formula 1.

Sponsors:

Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

Links:

Sign up for email updates and vote on future episodes!
The Formula by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg
Drive to Survive on Netflix
F1 The Movie on Apple TV
Adrian Newey, How to Build a Car
Senna documentary
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Formula One Study
All episode sources

Carve Outs:

Cirque du Soleil Echo
Super Bowl LX Mic'd Up
Tonal
Princess Peach: Showtime! on Nintendo Switch
Daloopa for historical financial data


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00:00:00 Start
00:00:37 Intro
00:05:52 Origins of F1: Britain, Italy, and Monaco
00:30:43 Bernie's Entrance
00:37:42 Bernie Consolidates Power
00:50:33 F1 as a Global TV Sport (Except America)
01:08:08 F1's Incredible Engineering Achievements
01:19:34 Senna's Crash and a New Era for Safety
01:33:18 The Many Owners of F1, and Bernie's Liquidity Drama
01:57:48 FOTA: The attempted breakaway series
02:05:07 RedBull, Mercedes, and Reinventing the Sport
02:42:33 Liberty Media buys F1 and Brings it to the Modern Era
03:05:03 Drive to Survive
03:26:45 Apple, TV Rights, and Success in America
03:41:52 F1: The Business Today
03:56:23 Analysis: Why Did F1 Work… and Was Bernie Necessary?
04:05:40 7 Powers
04:08:23 Bear vs. Bull Cases
04:16:32 Quintessence
04:20:08 Carve-Outs + Outro
‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Formula 1

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 than the even the founders’ wildest dreams. Whether you watch football or not, the NFL is one incredible business story, and one that we’ve taken more lessons from over the years for Acquired itself than perhaps any other episode we’ve made.
Note: This is a remastered release of our original January 2023 episode, updated to today's Acquired production standards. It also features a full hour+ followup section at the end covering the seismic shifts in the NFL’s business since the original episode’s release. Much has happened in those three years: Taylor Swift entered the league (via merger 🙂), streaming went mainstream (and took over Thanksgiving and Christmas), sports gambling exploded from 46 million to 76 million bettors, and — in perhaps the most surprising development — private equity finally stormed the gates of the NFL. Oh, and average franchise valuations grew by 60% from $4.5 billion to over $7 billion. Communist capitalism is alive and well!

Sponsors:

Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

Links:

Innovation Summit details and all Super Bowl LX Week events in San Francisco (note content from the Innovation Summit will be posted publicly the week after the Super Bowl — we’ll update this page with links when available)
America’s Game
Sports Illustrated’s oral history of the famous Joe Namath “pool photo”
All episode sources

Carve Outs:

The Menu
Peyton’s Places


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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC

00:00:00 Start
00:00:37 Intro - Welcome to the Remastered NFL Episode
00:06:05 Origins of Football & the Forward Pass (1869-1905)
00:14:34 The Founding of the NFL (1920)
00:41:52 Bert Bell's "Any Given Sunday" Philosophy (1946)
01:03:28 Pete Rozelle Transforms the League (1960)
01:56:34 The Creation of the Super Bowl (1966)
02:09:47 Monday Night Football Invents Modern Sports TV (1970)
02:37:19 The NFL's Business Model Explained
02:39:28 CTE & the Kaepernick Controversy (2016)
02:48:36 Analysis: Playbook & 7 Powers Analysis
03:21:04 2026 UPDATE: Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Streaming, T-Swift, Gambling & New TV Deals
03:57:11 Private Equity Enters the NFL (2024)
04:14:08 Conclusion & Thank Yous 
‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

The NFL

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 thinks is going on here, while we share ten lessons we've stolen (graciously) from companies we've studied and brought into Acquired itself. He takes us through the entire Acquired journey: how we started, why we've never hired anyone or raised money, how we pick episodes, what our business model actually is, why we focus on quality and enjoyment over maximizing enterprise value, and ultimately why we’re all — you, him, us — kindred spirits together. Oh, and just for fun, we recorded this episode where another special journey began — the garage where Google was founded.
Thank you for an incredible decade together… here's to the next one!



Sponsors:

Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26



Thank-yous:

First, to Google for loaning us the garage. The sawhorse table desk, PC and CRT monitor on display in the background were all Google originals courtesy of the Google Founders Collection at the Computer History Museum. So cool!
Second, to our friends at Shep Films for helping us seriously up our game on production quality this episode!

Our Favorite Michael Lewis Books:

Home Game
Moneyball
Liar’s Poker
The Blind Side
The Undoing Project (as referenced by Michael in the beginning, about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky)


Carve Outs:

Books: 
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Science, the Endless Frontier by Vannevar Bush
Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald
The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel
Emperors of Chocolate by Joel Glenn Brenner
Morris Chang's Autobiography

Podcasts: 
Against the Rules
Revisionist History
SmartLess
The Daily
The Bill Simmons Podcast
Graham Duncan on Invest Like the Best
Glue Guys

Video: 
Jay Kelly
The Rehearsal
Doug DeMuro
Tires
F1 The Movie
Andor
Fallout
Severance
Silo

Video Games: 
Sea of Stars
Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Products: 
ARTEZA Rollerball Pen 0.7mm Fine
Rotring 800 Mechanical Pencil
Fujifilm X100VI
Uniqlo Socks!
On Running Shoes
Rimowa Luggage

Parenting: 
Guided Access on iPad
Toy Story
SlumberPod
Bluey Experience in NYC



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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC


‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

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 episode of Acquired — always delicious, always refreshing.

Sponsors:

Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

Links:

Sign up for email updates and vote on future episodes!
The Hilltop ad / Mad Men finale
Pepsi Challenge commercials
Pepsi’s Michael Jackson commercials
Coke’s Bill Cosby commercials
Two liter bottles inflating
Worldly Partners’ Multi-Decade Coca-Cola Study
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola
Secret Formula
All episode sources

Carve Outs:

SkiErg
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Claude
Nike Vomero Plus
Hermanos Gutiérrez


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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC

(00:00) - Start
(00:41) - Intro
(05:52) - Patent Medicines & the Birth of an Industry
(12:13) - Dr. John Pemberton & the "Miracle Drug" Cocaine
(16:40) - Creating the Secret Formula (1886)
(22:14) - Frank Robinson's Genius & the First Coupon
(30:39) - Asa Candler & Building a National Brand (1890s)
(39:49) - The $1 Bottling Deal: A Fortuitous Mistake
(52:21) - Protecting the "Real Thing": Lawsuits & the Contour Bottle
(01:03:24) - Robert Woodruff: The Boss Takes Over (1923)
(01:12:06) - Creating Lifestyle Advertising & Santa Claus
(01:23:58) - Standardization, Gas Stations & Early Global Growth
(01:32:39) - Pepsi: The First Real Competitor Emerges
(01:40:41) - World War II: The Greatest Sampling Program in History
(01:49:25) - The Cola Wars Begin & the McDonald's Partnership (1950s)
(02:16:10) - The Pepsi Challenge (1975)
(02:32:03) - New Coke: The Worst Marketing Blunder Ever (1985)
(02:59:06) - Buffett's Investment & the "Total Beverage Company"
(03:27:56) - Analysis: Why Did Coca-Cola Work?
(03:33:24) - 7 Powers
(03:40:15) - Quintessence
(03:48:21) - Carve-Outs + Outro

‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.