Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I do this all the time, where I'll go back and listen to old episodes because people are like, this is weird, you listen to other podcasts. It's like, no, this is a tool. We didn't even try to get better. I was like, oh, I haven't read the book in two years, I'll just do some episodes on it. It's a tool for me. That's how I know it's good for other people. I'll listen to them like, oh, wow, I forgot that I need to keep that idea in my mind. I'll hear myself like, oh, you said that in two paragraphs. That could be one paragraph, cut that part, that doesn't make sense. I understand the improvement. What I'm saying is your quality is already super high. It can increase and get better. Don't get me wrong, but you're never going to be embarrassed. You're just like, oh, I could probably do 20%, 30% better, which is still excellent from the level you're at. The way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass, and he's unbelievably good. We're so lucky to have him. He sends us a rough cut, I upload it to Descript, and then we listen and read while we're listening word for word, sentence for sentence, and try to cut every unnecessary sentence. We ended up pulling out 20-ish minutes of just fluff. It's just like, okay, we could have been tighter in that point, is there a way to get tighter on it without re-recording it? I think that has dramatically contributed to episode quality because by the time we ship it, neither of us feel that there are extraneous sentences. I don't know if I'm like that.…

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