Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I think about it all the time because people were like, oh, survivorship bias, revisionist history, and everything else. Here's the problem. Humans don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. We can have this super long conversation between the three of us right now, then go into another room, and write down what just occurred. Every single version is going to be different because it's viewed through all of our experience, the way we think, the words we use. What I'm looking at is when I'm reading about Sam Walton. The story we both had on all the podcasts because I've done a bunch of podcasts on Sam too, where the guy's pissed off, he's just driving to store to store, and he's like, mountain roads taking forever, so he buys the plane and he realizes, oh, this is a massive advantage because I'm doing something my competitors aren't. I'm flying over. You guys mentioned it too, which I thought was hilarious. He just lands it and he's like, who owns that? Let me land, and then he buys for action. He's like, we're going to negotiate right now, I want to buy it from you. My point is, okay, yes, that most likely occurred, but what is the idea behind that? You can have an advantage by doing something your competitors are not doing. What you just said is they all learn from somebody else. When we're reading these books and listening to these podcasts, it's like, what's the idea I can use in my life? We're not building the next Walmart. There's no way if we read Titan that we could tell, did this actually happen? I don't know, but I'm looking for the ideas behind it. I'm going to verify every single word in this book. That's ridiculous. The truth is it is always the case that the clean narrative is grafted onto a fact pattern. It's like, okay, well, what I care about is the lessons I can learn from the clean narrative. If you had all the facts in totality, did it necessarily mean that this was premeditated? It's like, whether it was premeditated or not, the facts are the facts. Maybe I can duplicate it in a different realm. For what we do, I think on Acquired more, especially because you will do multiple episodes of different books on the same people.…

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