YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Newman

lines on the record: 63
first: 2021-01-25
most recent: 2021-01-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“As you said, I needed to redeem myself somehow. But it was just as much an exploration of all the ways in which you could do good stuff in the world. And I remember I wrote the entire book on these long yellow legal pads at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. And I would sit in that library day after day doing research and really exploring looking at the world of socially responsible investing, looking what was happening in the world of human rights, looking at what was happening from an environmental perspective. And the book was really a compendium of all the good things one could do on a full-time or a part-time basis to help make the world a better place.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An investor, yeah, he was an investor in the business, and it was the first time in my life where I felt like I had finally met with his approval, having dropped out of college, he was very upset about. He often would say to me, you're going to be so embarrassed when you go to a job interview and they ask you where you went to college and you're going to have to say, I never graduated. And of course, my response was, I don't ever plan on going on a job interview. And I never did. But he was really proud of that. But I didn't last long as an employee of Warner Communications.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they did. They offered us a price that we couldn't refuse. They basically looked at the rights that we owned and controlled and valued the business on our rights portfolio and came up with a number that just totally blew my mind millions of dollars. And we decided to sell the business. And I remember my dad got a big check, I don't know, maybe a million dollars or so.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And finally, we were out looking to make a distribution deal and we were meeting with Warner Publishing. And they basically said, gee, we love this business. We think it's fantastic, but we don't want to distribute the products. We want to buy the business.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this was taught by a woman named Joanna Stichen, who was Edward Stigen's wife, the famous photographer. Her claim to fame was that she had married money because he was a pretty wealthy photographer. And she would give you all kinds of tips. And I mean, literally, we had auditoriums of four to five hundred people Taking this class every other week, and we did go on the Phil Donahue show together, and we had a horrible, horrible reception from the crowd. The crowd thought that this was a terrible, immoral thing to do. We were teaching people terrible values. And I was really heartbroken after the show. I felt that, oh my God, what have I done with my life? I've gone from being a sort of principled, politically responsive, concerned adult to someone who's teaching values that are pretty abhorrent”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New York Sunday Times, they were inserted in the certain zip codes of the New York Sunday Times. And it was like magic. I mean, we would put hundreds of thousands of these in the Sunday Times. And the next week, the checks would just roll in. It was pretty amazing.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my dad thought it was really stupid to start a nonprofit. You can't really make much money. So he said, start a for-profit. And I took that to heart in more ways than one. And instead of teaching an introduction to Marxism, we were teaching how to marry money and we were teaching the art of flirting, how to get invited to the right parties.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Canada. And I had a pretty high profile because of this successful startup. And one day the Royal Mountains showed up in the office, handcuffed me and threw me in jail because I was an illegal alien. I was working in Canada without working papers.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was sort of anything, it was photography, it was cooking, but it was introduction to Marxism, it was alternative healthcare therapies. And they were very affordable. The classes were 15, 25 bucks. They were cheap. There were no tests. There were no quizzes. It was people engaged in the pure joy of learning because they had a passion to do so.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Printed up this little catalog with all these short courses. They lasted a night to four weeks. And I loved finding the teachers and I loved writing up the course descriptions. And the thing was incredibly successful. And we had a little newspaper that we put in what was sort of similar to the village voice in New York. We stuck tens of thousands of these little course catalogs in this newspaper. And lo and behold, people sent in checks and registered for courses. I think the second year we had 30,000 people register for these courses. So it was wildly successful.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I read an amazing book by Ivan Illich, who's an educational philosopher called Deschooling Society. And Ivan Illich's philosophy was that formal education in universities constrain the flow of knowledge more than facilitate it. Those who are affluent who can afford it get access to it, those who aren't don't. And so he said, you know, what we really need to do is we just need to find bright people and let them teach other people in their homes and their offices. And so I started the skills exchange of Toronto totally modeled on a chapter of the book that I had read, never having had any business experience or never having studied business. I was 19, 20 years old.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, you know, my dad was obsessed with working. He was a tense, tightly wound guy who wasn't a lot of fun to be around. My mother was an artist and my parents didn't get along. They didn't really like each other very much. I also felt fundamentally uncomfortable in the very affluent environment that I grew up in. I mean, I remember like I grew up on Park Avenue, which is a very fancy street in Manhattan. And I felt that that sort of elite part of society was not something that I wanted to be associated with.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were working with a tissue paper manufacturer out in Wisconsin that made all the paper products. They thought we were crazy, by the way, because we were selling unbleached 100% recycled fiber bathroom tissue, which was the scratchy stuff that you found in a gas station.”
2021-01-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT