Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…The legend, blue eyes, the chairman. This special, “The Main Event,” was produced by two legends at ABC. Jerry Weintraub and most importantly, Roone Arledge. Roone was involved, maybe because it was a boxing theme thing. I don’t know, but Roone was legendary. He was the head of ABC Sports. Now, Bob was working in ABC, what would become Entertainment, like the television shows, soap operas, game shows. He wasn’t working at sports. Sports was where the cool guys were at ABC. Right after this special, Bob gets into a big fight with his boss in Entertainment. His boss was embezzling from the company. It was not good and Bob realized he’s about to get fired. He calls up one of the sports guys that he worked with on this event and says, “Hey, do you have any openings over there? Can I transfer over there?” They’re in a completely different building in New York. He transfers over there and he starts working again from the bottom with then ABC Sports. What was Sports? They had Monday Night Football at the time, they had the Wide World of Sports which I remember was still a thing when I was growing up, like spanning the globe, bringing all of this seat of great content, all the stories from around the world, and most importantly, ABC at the time had the Olympics. They showed the Olympics in the US every year. What Roone had realized and built within ABC that will then get taken over to ESPN shortly and be a big part of their success, was that they weren’t showing sports, like just televising a football game, or the Olympics, or some random event that they did on the Wide World of Sports. Without a story, it was flat, it was boring. They were selling storytelling. They were selling entertainment. What were the narratives? Who were these people? Where did they come from? What adversity have they faced? What was the storyline of the game? All of that was really pioneered by ABC Sports and by Roone. David, we could probably save ourselves a lot of time if we had done this episode 3½ years ago because I feel like it took us 3 years to figure out the reason people like Acquired is not, “Let’s do an audio-discounted cash flow and figure out if that acquisition makes sense financially five years from now,” it’s the stories behind the deals. Exactly.…

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