Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…This year. It was brands, luxury, and retailers. It'll be this other thing hopefully next year, but we look around the corner and there's a whole new category of companies to cover. We're pumped for that. Ben, you have already spilled the beans that another luxury brand is in the works. Absolutely. What else we got cooking? We'll hit some big tech, we have to. It feels like an obligatory nod. We'll hit something in the entertainment, gaming, and streaming world. We could keep naming categories, but one listener question that we got that I think is worth chatting about here is, how do we handle current events? There are lots of episodes that would be very appealing to do. For example, the dozens of requests we got two or three weeks ago for OpenAI after the boardroom drama. We very much have moved away from current events. I think that is, in part, because of what we talked about earlier that we want to create N of 1 content. The way to create the most possible commodity content is to try to cover the current news cycle that literally everyone else is covering concurrently. I think that's a way to get completely drowned out in the noise, create something that's not special, and create something that even if you blow it out of the water has a shelf life in this world of about eight hours. We have decided to move as far away from that as possible. The other reason I think is a little bit our disposition where David, when you and I are looking at something brand new that's unfolding in real time, I think we've really started trusting our gut that there's probably more here than there seems to appear on the surface. Years ago, I don't think we felt that. I think we thought Uber is going public, cover Uber. Even three years ago, Airbnb was going public, cover Airbnb. There was an Acquired way to do it, where most of the episode could actually focus on the last 10 years, and only a little bit at the end was focused on the last few months. But the more current an event is, the less evergreen value that it will have, and the more likely it is that you could really blow it. I feel super self conscious that we interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, and we're not investigative journalists. We weren't going to spend the time trying to unfold and dig up, hey, is this all legit? It's like Sequoia had just invested a huge amount of money. Everyone and all the possible signals had validated this person in this company. It was seemingly enormously free cash flow positive. And yet, yeah, we regret doing it.…

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