The Wisdom Wall

5 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.

Everyone Sam Lessin (326)Dave Morin (93)Jessica Lessin (31)Brit Morin (17)Elad Gil (11)Guillermo Rauch (8)Adrian Aoun (7)Julia Hartz (6)Aaron Levie (6)Vinod Khosla (5)Casey Neistat (5)Ben Smith (5)Mike Brown (4)Anatoly Yakovenko (4) Best Newest Oldest

“So the, my, my thesis about Pulitzers is that when a new media company wins a Pulitzer, you can just set the clock on layoffs.”

Ben Smith, Mar 28, 2025

“also, right, I thought for two seconds, oh yeah, we should charge this as a product. And it's like, well, actually, if I built this in four hours, that's like not defensible. That is the least defensible thing in the world.”

Ben Smith, Mar 28, 2025

“In journalism, there's sort of, at one end is gathering facts that are not on the internet, and putting them on the internet, and, and, and then there's a lot of other things, writing and producing in the middle, and at the other end is connecting with, is a human being who you trust connecting with another human…”

Ben Smith, Mar 28, 2025

“this is actually like a common Silicon Valley misconception that we are like obsessed with clicks as opposed to interested in information.”

Ben Smith, Mar 28, 2025

“Don't you think, though, that as a reporter, there's something like, like, there's a kind of news, my only real superstition, that there's a kind of news luck, and some people have it. That was that I had it. Like, sometimes you just wind up in a room. Somebody invites you to a thing. Who knows? I think, Jessica, you…”

Ben Smith, Mar 28, 2025
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 150 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.