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Apple exec says this podcast is so good, he's stayed in his car listening even after getting home: ‘It's hard to stop'

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

There's a podcast that Apple executive Eddy Cue finds so irresistible, he sometimes stays in his car listening even after he gets home.

The show that has him glued to his driver's seat is called "Acquired," Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, recently told the Wall Street Journal. The show "tells the stories and strategies of great companies," according to its website.

Founded by co-hosts David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert in 2015, "Acquired" dives into the history of today's biggest companies, from genesis to present day. Each episode involves hundreds of hours of research, causing some episodes to be at least three hours long, the pair told the Journal.

Gilbert and Rosenthal both have venture capital backgrounds. They started the podcast as a "passion project" nearly a decade ago, Gilbert wrote on social media platform X earlier this month. Today, some of the business leaders from the very companies they research are avid listeners.

"It's hard to stop once you start listening," Cue said.

"I'm probably in for 80 hours," LinkedIn COO Daniel Shapero added, in a testimonial on Acquired's website.

The podcast has more than 600,000 monthly listeners, some of whom pay a $10 monthly subscription, according to its website. Sponsorships and other deals help Rosenthal and Gilbert bring in millions of dollars per year in revenue, they told the Journal.

Last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sat down with the duo to discuss the origins of his multibillion-dollar tech company. He gave listeners some advice on a common topic: business books.

"In the last 30 years I've read my fair share of business books ... You're supposed to, first of all enjoy it, be inspired by it — but not to adopt it," Huang said. "That's not the whole point of these books. The whole point of these books is to share their experiences."

"You're supposed to ask, what does it mean to me in my world, and what does it mean to me in the context of what I'm going through," Huang added.

Longtime Berkshire Hathaway investor Charlie Munger also spoke with the co-hosts in October 2023, a month before his death. In that episode, he shared his favorite piece of advice to give young people, which was — perhaps surprisingly — no advice at all.

"I don't give advice to just any young people," Munger said. "It's getting hard out there."

Munger had the perfect recipe for success in the 1960s, he said: timing, intelligence, hard work and luck. It's a concoction that his admirers today can't replicate exactly, so he didn't want to make himself "more of a guru than I already am," he added.

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