Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Sometimes I think we save ourselves from ourselves here, but I'm glad that we didn't cut these. We'll get to the stats in a second, but clearly they have ended up being something special. But the cool thing about the core thing that we do, our season episodes, is that the natural byproduct. It's not like we need to go carve-out time to do 100 hours of work to go interview Jensen or Charlie. It's like, no, no, we've already just done that. It's the core thing that we do. To throw out the opportunity to continue doing those would have been really silly. You might be wondering, Charlie Munger was by far our biggest episode ever. Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode. Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what our season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them. We figured out, there is a style and a type of person where the episodes behave as N of 1 episodes. The decay curves look similarly over time of people seeking them out in an evergreen way. We have seen just as many people 92 days later, which is what today is, referencing the Jensen interview that we would see referencing the Nike episode 92 days later. These things, if we do them right, stay just as evergreen. We want to stay as precious as possible about them. What does that mean? How can we change Acquired's business to make it so that the answer is we don't do interviews on the main show, unless of course it's an interview that we need to do on the main show? After some early conversations we've had with some of the sponsors for next year, we just sell them differently. I think that was a key insight for us. We used to do, in a season, six main episodes and six specials. We would sell them both and say, here's what you'll get in this period of time. That's still how we sell the sponsorships for the season. You know that it's going to happen over six months, you know it's going to be about once a month, we'll give you a heads up as soon as we know a topic that we're going to be covering, and we would try to do the same thing with specials. That drove us to create specials, which is entirely the wrong thing to do. It was broken. It was slot-filling. Again, not to take away from our guests. We had incredible guests, but the conversations themselves were slot-filled. We had slots that we needed to fill. That works for us with the season episodes because we're going to make an episode once a month that's in our control. But with interviews, you can't slot-fill if you want them to be special. If you're sitting around waiting serendipitously for a Charlie Munger or a Jensen interview to happen, which is basically what we've decided the strategy is for guests. You can't have pre-sold a commitment to your partners that you're going to do six of those every six months.…

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