Ben Gilbert

This is a difference between what you do and what we do.

Because I feel like when I think through all your books, they're almost always a story of obscurity that once it becomes a Michael Lewis book, then it becomes a well-known phenomenon.

Moneyball.

Like you are discovering these things that kind of nobody's talking about.

Whereas when we do something like Trader Joe's, someone says, what are you working on?

And we're like, Trader Joe's.

They're like, I love Trader Joe's.

There's three things that make a great Acquired episode.

One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that takes a hero's journey, where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity.

How it starts is this thing that nobody cares about, and then it becomes the most important thing in the world.

Two is there's a secret hiding in plain sight.

Costco.

I think when the ordinary consumer sees Costco, they're like, oh, I love Costco.

But when someone who's listened to the Acquired episode on Costco thinks about Costco, they see all the gears turning of the machine.

There has to be some way that we can expose something.

And then our third criteria is it has to be important in the world.

And I think that's something we picked up later.

I mean, we used to do these little $10 million acquisitions.

And now when we're going to go spend...

two months of our life researching and making that like the Acquired episode.