Ben Gilbert

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

We got pretty far down the line on doing an episode on the Fed.

And walked away from it.

We might come back, but it's been like three years.

is worth 2% of its original value within a month.

And we want to be worth 80% of our original value five years from now on any given piece of content.

You look at anything pre-2020, 2021, we had not yet discovered this principle.

This is a difference between what you do and what we do.

Because I feel like when I think through all your books, they're almost always a story of obscurity that once it becomes a Michael Lewis book, then it becomes a well-known phenomenon.

Moneyball.

Like you are discovering these things that kind of nobody's talking about.

Whereas when we do something like Trader Joe's, someone says, what are you working on?

And we're like, Trader Joe's.

They're like, I love Trader Joe's.

There's three things that make a great Acquired episode.

One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that takes a hero's journey, where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity.

How it starts is this thing that nobody cares about, and then it becomes the most important thing in the world.

Two is there's a secret hiding in plain sight.

Costco.