Adam Delehanty has been a Knicks fan since he was zero years old. What struck him about last season's run was that when OG tips the ball in, there is no debate about what just happened. Then he goes back to his own work, and the work of most of the people watching, and it's Google Docs and strategy decks and products nobody may ever see.
Brennan sits down with him as the founder and CEO of Ghost, a content agency that writes books and culture documents for some of the biggest names in tech. His argument to founders is uncomfortable: stop writing about your company. Your job is to build something so extraordinary that other people write about it anyway, and then spend your own words on everything else.
They get into the parts nobody says out loud. Why the agency model of a charismatic CEO winning the business and handing the work to a 23-year-old feels icky in every sense. Why he shrank his own company on purpose. The executive coach he turned down after one AI-written proposal. And why he thinks the internet makes tech look further to the right than it actually is.
In this episode:
• The Knicks scoreboard problem: how a knowledge worker knows whether anything they did mattered
• His four steps to original output: unusual inputs, an unusual life, leaning into your weird, and authenticity
• Going to primary sources, and the friend posting Eisenhower footage his generation has never seen
• Borrowed audience versus bought audience, and the third category he calls squad media
• Why attaching your company to something bigger than itself is the whole game
• The party test: how long you'd last talking to someone who only riffs about their product
• Why he shrank his agency instead of scaling it, and what talent plus AI replaces
• Human, Claude, human: where he actually uses AI and where he refuses to
• Proof of work for creatives, and wanting to see the sweat coming off the saxophone
• Why he thinks centrist and center-left voices in tech stay quiet
Subscribe for new episodes every week.
Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Find Adam Delehanty on LinkedIn and X.
