David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think that's so important. The second people smell sales—it has a stench. I never want to fall into that trap. It will remain driven by what's interesting to us, not what we think other people want to hear or not some backdoor into a business outcome that we're trying to achieve. Are there moments you remember from the last four years either something happened to a particular show, a particular guest that moved the needle in a big way, or where you were like holy crap. This is bigger than I realized. I tried to not check the metrics too often because when I wrote a book, I was pretty young. I wrote a book when I was in my mid- to late-20s. When it came out on Amazon, I remember checking this stupid Amazon ranking so many times a day. It's like crack for authors. I hated that. I was like, you know what, I'm not going to do that this time. After an amazing episode that I just knew was awesome, I would check just out of curiosity. For sure there was a steady organic growth rate with step-function changes. I actually called this the Mauboussin bounce because I've had Michael on I think four or five times now. Every time I do, there's a 10% audience increase that then doesn't disintegrate. He's my growth hack, along with a few others. I tried to stay away from all that because, again, that's one of those feedback loops where I would feel like the lessons were driving my thinking on what to do next versus just my curiosity. I've really tried to stay away from that as much as I can, especially recently as the numbers have gotten very big, and just ignore it. Trust that if I'm curious it will come across, if I'm doing something by a route that will come across because the audience is so smart, so just don't do that.…

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