Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, 100%. They're learning machines. You get to Charlie's time to go back to this. You get to Charlie's bookshelf and it's just biographies I've never even heard of, and I do this for a living. I do it for a living. It's like, what is this book? I start looking at it, it's like, I'm just taking pictures, pictures, pictures. I'm ordering every single one. We're talking about this idea that the way to get the truth is to weave together the tapestry of all of history's stories of things that are adjacent to understand how this opportunity to start some business came to be. All history is revisionist and all history is biased. I think one of the hardest things about making an Acquired episode is figuring out when we're looking at a source like someone giving an industry talk who works at a company, or a biographer, who chose to dedicate two years of their life to writing this book after working at Newsweek and covering the sector forever, is trying to mentally account for and discount from whatever bias and perspective they're coming in with to create whatever the source material is that we're using to then incorporate into our version of here's how this thing happened. I think it's the hardest part about what we do. I'm curious if you ever think about that. 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.…

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