Brian Lam founded product review site Wirecutter, which was acquired by The New York Times in October 2016. Guy Raz asked about the reported $30 million price tag.
Opinion
Brian Lam calls digital advertising one of the world's great evils
“I think advertising is one of the great evils of the world, because it gets in your brain no matter what, and the metrics they use are basically what has made media what it is today, like really shallow, fast cadence”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gawker ended traffic bonuses after Brian Lam rapidly earned 1% equity
“Within a couple months, certainly less than four or five months, they shut the program down because I had exceeded the traffic so much. That I ended up owning in two months, like over one percent of the company.”
Disclosure
Gizmodo pre-planned its legal defense before publishing the iPhone 4 leak
“Yeah, we went to our lawyer in-house and said, can you look this up? What would happen? How we can do this safely, legally? And we discovered these laws about returning stolen property. You can't get in trouble for it, basically, and the person who claims the …”
Assertion Partly supported
Wired and Engadget hesitated and passed on the iPhone 4 scoop
“I know he contacted Wired, and he contacted another publication, maybe Engadget, and they all started just kind of like, not sure what to do. They didn't have a plan, and they were slow.”
Insight
Brian Lam argues the highest quality creative work cannot scale capitalistically
“The best podcast, the best books, the best everything is not capitalistic at scale. It still needs to be capitalistic. People need to afford their way of life and their tools, but that scale is something I'm really allergic to now.”
Insight
Brian Lam: Perfect objects represent how you wish the world was
“It always pushed me to like this perfect object, which is like a little, it's like perfect objects are like examples of how you wish the world was and how wish you were in a way.”