Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I suspect most stories involving leverage end in the blow-up, not in the great success. Right. The most interesting thing is a story like LVMH is the story of compounded. He was 1 of 10 that survived the first chapter, and then he was 1 of 10 that survived the second chapter. Suddenly, he's an outlier-ish, 1 in a 7 billion case of a person who managed to turn a very small amount of money into the most money in the world. Of course, we're going to tell that story, but someone was going to accomplish that story. It was going to happen to someone. I think about this a lot on Acquired where we're like, wow, yet another very, very unlikely set of circumstances. It's like, should we learn from the lessons? Or was this going to happen to someone, so you make up at survivorship bias? Make up the fact that, well, if you did all these things that they did, you too can become like that? For sure, there's a lot of survivorship bias here. I suspect that Bernard did have a view that almost nobody else had, which was that both those luxury brands, and particularly, Louis Vuitton and leather good luxury brands could get bigger than anyone imagined, and he was right on that. I think he also had a view that the Lindy effect of these brands is bigger than anyone realizes. Even when a brand falls on hard times, if it has enough heritage and provenance, you can bring it back. Let's do this as a thought exercise. Could you permanently destroy the Hermes brand, the Louis Vuitton brand, or the Tiffany's brand? You could certainly temporarily destroy it. We told a few of those stories in this episode, but could you permanently forever wipe it from the face of the earth?…

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