Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Podcasts. I already mentioned Resonant Arc, my favorite video game podcast. I got All In. Resonant Arc and All In are my go-to must-listen every episode. Two shout outs, though, that I discovered this year and have become friends, David Senra and the Founders Podcast. Of course. wonderful show. We've become close with David. When you hear David on the show, he is exactly that same way in real life, too. It's so great. He's come out to California. We've hung out a bunch. I love him. The other one, I have been a huge MKBHD fan on YouTube, as I know you have been, too. The Waveform podcast that they do is great. I've started regularly listening, I really like it. Our buddy, David Imel, who's on the MKBHD team, is regularly a co-host there. They rotate through the team on the Waveform podcast. It's in the same vein as The Verge podcast. It's all about the products of tech, but it's really well done. I have become an increasingly large fan of The Verge. I don't know how I slept on it. In my head, it was like, oh, another one of these Engadget, Gizmodo type things, but that was wrong. It is my—this is embarrassing to say—new favorite publication. Nilay is so smart. I'll basically go listen to Nilay talk wherever he is. That is a way to, for sure, get me to go listen to an episode of whatever the podcast is. Over Covid, I think I'll listen to Nilay in any situation. With The Verge redesign, I don't think I realized how unbelievably thoughtful the team there is and how strategic they are. They're one of the few publications that thinks about the fact that they're a business, too, and thinks about the way to marry their business with their editorial, and how they can uniquely show up in the world based on what they do differently than other people. I think the new Verge redesign is genius. I don't know if it'll work or not, but I love the attempt. They're also one of the few news sites in the world that actually gets a ton of direct traffic. That's a huge thing that plays to their advantage that then they can do interesting things with. There are people that come to them to solve a problem in their life or to fill a need. It's so true. Even me. You're way deeper in the product side as a fan of the product side of tech than I am, but anytime there's a new Apple device or there are a couple places I will go directly, I will go to MKBHD and all the various properties that he had they have now, and I'll go to The Verge. I might consume some other stuff that comes to me on social media, but I'll directly go to those two properties. My impression of Nilay is that he is world class on the product side of tech, but he also gets the business side.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.