What Ted's Thinking: The Sydney Sweeney Interview

I wanted to give you this hot take on a recent interview I came across that's a wonderful example of a really poor interview. So just as a quick reminder in our interviewing module it talked about how the purpose of an interview is to gather information and learn and that's going to help us make better investment decisions. Part of that is if we're trying to gather information and learn and we're really trying to listen, what we're not trying to do is prove to somebody else how smart we are or to get someone else to agree with our point of view.

So, I'm going to break this down and highlight three important techniques that we talked about. Open-ended questions, short questions, which I actually don't think I talked about in the module, but it's important, and pregnant pauses. And here's the setup.

A few months ago, American Eagle launched an ad campaign with Sydney Sweeney that was titled Sydney Sweeney has great jeans and it was a pun Jeans the blue jeans with a J and jeans her genetic code with a G as someone who's a very beautiful actress. Now that campaign was very commercially successful, but it also sparked a bunch of controversy from people who inferred that the mixed metaphor had an undertone of white supremacy. Last week, a journalist at GQ interviewed Sydney about it.

Here's a clip of the interview. The criticism of the content, which was basically that maybe specifically in this political climate, like white people shouldn't joke about genetic superiority. Like that was kind of like the criticism broadly seeking.

And since you were talking about this, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that specifically. I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.