Ben Gilbert

All right.

So we are definitely a scale economies business.

The fact that there's a large number of listeners to amortize all the inputs across makes it so that we can do an unreasonable amount of things for each episode.

I mean, if you were going to try to compete with Acquired today, you couldn't do all the stuff that we do.

Right.

And you could do it for one or two or three episodes.

But if it didn't grow quickly, at some point, you'd be like, it's not even about the money.

It's about like, why am I doing all this work when no one is listening to it?

And it would feel like that.

So there was this path-dependent thing of we always had the right product for the current amount of value that it created in the world, which you can use a listener base as a proxy for.

And now, because the listener base is large...

we can afford to do things other people can't, which is sort of the definition of scale economies.

Counter-positioning everywhere.

Southwest Airlines launches, they only use 737s.

Everyone else who already has fleets of other planes can't do all the streamlined operations that Southwest is going to do because they have all these other sunk costs in this diversified fleet.

Yes.

To your benefit.

We also don't have shareholders, so we can do all these non-economic things because the thing we're solving for, the quotient, is actually our lives.

Time to hang it up.

Here's the rule.