Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, and multiple episodes in the same book. We're doing a narrative weave. We're shooting the moon a little bit more in this respect. For everyone who is listening, founders are more about, hey, I just read this book, and I want to tell you what I learned from this book. It's always a biography. Sometimes you'll do five different biographies on Edwin Land. If Acquired was going to do Polaroid, we would do Polaroid. The episode would be Polaroid. Maybe it would be Polaroid part one and part two, or maybe at some point, we'd have someone on to talk about the story in addition to our one canonical episode, but we would be shooting the moon and let's make sure that we get the Polaroid story right. It's almost like, how do we find the correct average of all of the other stories to create the canonical version? I wasn't expecting to quote Bill Gurley two times early so far. The fantastic talk he gave, which to me is the best talk for entrepreneurs and investors on YouTube is called Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love. He says, listen, in the age of the internet, you don't have to be the smartest person. Charlie Munger, after talking to him, whatever mind that dude has, I don't have that and I'm cool with that. I could not imagine trying to compete against that guy 40 years ago. He would destroy me. He's got a super mind that I don't have. What Bill says is like, you don't have to be the smartest person, but you can collect the most information. He holds you to a high standard in that talk. Bill's like, listen, in the age of the internet, all the information you possibly need is right at your fingertips, you have no excuse not to do this. He gives the example of if you want to be a domain expert in whatever you're doing, within two years of intense study, if you're doing that and you're focused on it, you're going to get to the point where you know more than maybe anybody else. That's my whole thing. You've never met a founder entrepreneur that's kind of into entrepreneurship. It's like, no, it's our lives. Of course, the reason why so many of them listen to both of our shows is because they're building machines, where they literally can turn knowledge into profit. I became close friends with the guy through the podcast. He's a young kid. I don't mean to call him a kid, he's not a kid, but he's a lot younger than I am. He's 28 years old. We were on the phone the other day because he had a very serious offer for a company he owns 95% of, and they were going to give him $100 million. He wasn't saying no to it. But the point is, when you talk to him—he's listened to all the episodes, read 60 of the books. He'll text me a picture of like, do you want to talk about the book? I'm like, I'm pretty sure I read that. Yeah, it's from this episode. It's like, oh, why? What if he finds one idea in a book, one idea in a podcast, and it gives a 10% improvement on his company? It's a $10 million idea.…

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