John Gruber

I stumbled, a friend of mine recommended the Mars episode, the Mars Incorporated episode.

So that's the one.

And a friend said, you've got to listen to this.

And I'd heard of Acquired, you know, but it's like, I don't know, if you listen to every podcast somebody says you should listen to, you would spend 24 hours a day listening to podcasts.

So I go there and it's four and a half hours.

And I'm like, you've got to be fucking kidding me.

And I'm like, all right, I'll listen to it.

And it's, of course, fantastic.

And it's amazing.

But the Mars one, it just sucked me in.

So that's the one I would recommend.

And it is a 100-year-old candy company that the business decisions that, not the founder, but the founder's son, Forrest Mars, who's the one who took it from sort of a mom and pop thing to a big one, the decisions he made

in like the 1920s and 30s are exactly like the world of business today in the 2020s and 30s.

It was like he came from today's world, time traveled 100 years into the past, and applied today's knowledge of branding and scale to that world.

And there's just these other crazy bits that I had no idea.

Like the fact that Hershey, who was the bigger company at the time, supplied all the chocolate to all the companies, including Mars.

And they just were like, sure, we don't care.

And it was sort of like a heads they win if you buy a Hershey bar and tails they don't lose because you're buying a Snickers bar that was covered in Hershey's chocolate.

Until the day Forrest Mars called them up and said, yeah, we're gonna cancel our chocolate contract.

And they're like, what are you, crazy?