David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…One of the things that I think has been really interesting is that people have jumped over the fence from working for a publication to going independent, and then now have started to jump back. I couldn't do what they do. This is not a lack of respect for those people. My brain wouldn't work. If someone hired me to be like, you have to go be an investigative journalist, it wouldn't work. That's one part. I do have respect for that, particularly, where it's applied the right way. My problem is when it's applied to a one-year-old startup that maybe "overworks their employees" a little bit, as startups occasionally do and as a lot of companies occasionally do. When you apply the same rigor to that as Watergate, that's when I have a bit of an issue with it. So going back to the piece on people jumping over and back, there's a lot that goes into that. I think it's really hard to do that kind of journalism independently because you need lawyers who have your back, you need editors to make sure that you get everything right, and you need all the stuff to protect you when you're doing this really brave work that I think it's tougher to do on the independent side. So I 100% think that there's a place for that kind of journalism. It's just like, don't apply that to a startup that makes hotdogs and came in over budget one quarter that shows how stupid startups are. That kind of article is what really gets me. I think it also works the other way too, which is that it's hard to do what you're doing. The goal of this episode has been to tell your story. I think one of the takeaways that I'm not surprised by is your whole life and career led to this. So if you were an investigative journalist at XYZ Publication doing very much not this, and then you're like, oh, I'm just going to jump over and do what Packy does, you wouldn't be equipped in the same way that you are. You worked for six years at a startup from employee six through hundreds of people. And through failure, which helps.…

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