My cousin’s wife is a CPA and recently turned me on the “Acquired” podcast: www.acquired.fm

Got four hours to listen to the story of Coca-Cola? Trader Joes? Amazon? If you’re driving across the US and back as I just did, you do. But even if you’re not driving for 60 hours, the content is fascinating. The hosts do a deep dive on successful companies from the history and business perspectives.

You learn fascinating details: Coke started in the wave of patent-medicine companies right after the Civil War. It had cocaine in part to give badly injured Civil War vets an an alternative to the “Army disease”, morphine addiction. Where did the distinctive bottle shape come from, what was the “Pepsi Challenge”?, “New Coke”?, the “secret formula”?.

As someone who spent the last 40 years working in tech, a short time at AWS and my last company being a Silicon Valley startup that was then acquired by a bigger player I was fascinated by the stories of the big tech companies: Amazon, Google, etc. I lived a lot of it and knew some of the players.

Like it or not, big successful companies shape the world we live in. The podcast is very well done and helps you understand both the history and present state of companies such as Coca-Cola, Trader Joe’s, Google: The AI Company, Google: The Origin of Search, Microsoft, Mars (chocolate), ARM (chips, not chocolate), TSMC (chips, also not chocolate), Duolingo, Meta, etc.

Find 4 hours. Give it a listen.