10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Happy 10 years.

**David Rosenthal** (0:01)
Happy 10 year anniversary, Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:03)
It's crazy it's been 10 years.

**David Rosenthal** (0:04)
I know. Here we are. Brought you down here to Silicon Valley to record our 10 year anniversary holiday special here. I wanted a special place.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:13)
Yeah, what are we doing? You keep like teeing up. Oh, just come down. Oh, we'll just record it here. And like, clearly, we're not at your house.

**David Rosenthal** (0:21)
I was actually thinking we should try and find the Silicon Valley house. Or like Bachmann, Aviato.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:27)
It's Aviato, David.

**David Rosenthal** (0:28)
Aviato, Aviato. Now, the reason I brought you down here is I booked us a very special place to record. It's actually right over here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:39)
It's a house. Is this the Google House?

**David Rosenthal** (0:43)
It's the house.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:44)
The, where they had their first office in the garage?

**David Rosenthal** (0:46)
This is Google's first office right here. They gave it to us for the day.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:50)
Like we can do our holiday special in it?

**David Rosenthal** (0:52)
Come on in.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:19)
Welcome to the Fall 2025 Season Finale of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, I'm David Rosenthal, and we are your hosts. Well, listeners, today we're going to do something very different than our holiday specials of years past. We've received a bunch of requests over the years to do an Acquired episode on Acquired itself, and to unpack why Acquired worked when 99% of podcasts do not. But it's always felt a little bit strange to me, and we've always shied away from analyzing our own company.

**David Rosenthal** (1:54)
Yep. But then this year, we turned 10 years old and thought, well, maybe it's time for something. At least a sort of a pause and reflection to shout out the Coca-Cola episode on our journey to this point and why Acquired has worked.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:10)
And so we thought, well, if we're going to do something, we should bring someone in to do it with us. And we'd want someone who is great at dissecting the mechanics behind teams or companies. Someone who distills complexity into simplicity. Someone who himself knows how to tell a great story.

**David Rosenthal** (2:27)
And there was really only one choice, Michael Lewis. Author of Moneyball, Liar's Poker, The Blindside, The Undoing Project, Going Infinite, and on and on and on. And of course, host of his own podcast, Against the Rules. And Ben, you and I have looked up to Michael forever. So this was really special.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:46)
Yes. And then of course, there's the venue. We thought it'd be a fitting way to cap off the year of our three-part Google series to record in the literal garage where that nearly four trillion dollar company got started.

**David Rosenthal** (2:58)
Yes, indeed. Well, listeners, if you want to know every time an episode drops, vote on future episode topics and get corrections on past episodes, check out our email list at acquired.fm slash email.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:09)
And that email list just got a whole lot better with our first overhaul in five years. So you'll now get episode summaries, our big takeaways and exclusive photos from our research process. That's acquired.fm slash email. Chat about this episode with us and the whole acquired community in Slack, acquired.fm slash Slack. And if you want more acquired, check out our interview show, ACQ2. Our last episode was with Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of the New York Times Deal Book, host of CNBC's Squawk Box and author of 1929 That's ACQ2 and any podcast player. And before we dive in, we want to briefly thank our presenting partner, JPMorgan Payments.

**David Rosenthal** (3:50)
Yes, just like how we say every company has a story, every company's story is powered by payments and JPMorgan Payments is a part of so many of their journeys from seed to IPO and beyond.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:00)
So with that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

**David Rosenthal** (4:08)
With that, on to our conversation with Michael Lewis. Well, Michael, thank you for joining us.

**Michael Lewis** (4:13)
Total pleasure.

**David Rosenthal** (4:14)
We have all something since this is our 10 year anniversary that we're celebrating, that we need to do before we start.

**Michael Lewis** (4:21)
Okay.

**David Rosenthal** (4:21)
So you went to Princeton, I went to Princeton.

**Michael Lewis** (4:24)
Yep.

**David Rosenthal** (4:25)