YouSaid · the spoken record

Eugene Wei

lines on the record: 98
first: 2019-01-22
most recent: 2019-01-22
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

“Pinned over her desk. And if I hadn't gone to Amazon, I really don't know. I mean, think of how different my life would be. That was my business school. That was my education. And that was my entree into tech and all of that. So that's something that comes to mind.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I obviously didn't qualify. But I wrote a three page cover letter outlining my passion for the company why I wanted to work there. And a random recruiter at Amazon got my cover letter and she read it and she was like, well, this guy's clearly not qualified for this position. However, I really like his cover letter. I'm going to pin it over my desk. And at some point, if something comes along, I'm going to call this person. So I got one of those thanks. We'll put you on file postcards. I didn't hear for six months. And I was like, okay, like move on. And she actually then found a position that she thought I qualified for. She called me six months later. I was like in London on a case. And she was like, hey, I'd like to have you come in. I was like, oh, okay. And when I went, you know, like, is this one of those weird things where she didn't have to really do that? She was getting tons of letters and she really just showed me that she had it.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll mention one thing, which actually I always think of as sort of having changed my life, and this was when I wanted to go work in the internet space. I was out of undergrad. I had deferred law school because I just was like, I don't know if I really want to go to law school. I was working a consulting job just to pay off my loans. And this was like 96-ish. And I was like, wow, this internet thing, I just love, I just want to be in that space. But I had like very little work experience, very little qualifications. And I really want to go work at Amazon because I loved books and I was buying all these books from Amazon. I was like, oh, this is perfect. I looked at their website and all the job listings were like requires 10 years of computer science or 10 years of experience or a master's. I ultimately applied for VP of business development, which is laughable. I mean, undergrad at college is like 10 years of experience.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, like genuinely ask something that isn't something that a computer would just autocomplete for you in a conversation.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super boring. And so these hypotheticals were crazy questions that were like, I don't know that they are necessarily the answer to this problem, but they would be like a wizard walks up to you in the street. The wizard says, I have the power to increase your beauty in some correlation based on the amount of money you're going to give me right now. How much money would you give this wizard? You know, like there are questions like that. There's another one I remember just like, your friend is going to die unless you just walk up to your friend. And it's like either like, But you can never tell your friend why you did it. Like, would you do it? Like, it's also like weird questions like that. And like, I think they're sort of like fun party conversation starters, but it's more the idea that.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At parties, you go up to people and you're like, Oh, what do you do? How's the weather? It's like, oh my gosh, like a computer could do all of this”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, I do. So there's a mathematical measure. It's called conversational entropy, which is how predictable is the next word that you're going to type or the next letter, right? If it's highly predictable, your conversational entropy is low. And if it's very unpredictable, then it's high. And so with Google's exposing to all of us is that most of us have low email conversational entropy. And what I find is that high conversational entropy is correlated with interestingness as a human being. And so this book is all about this person's goal to win the most human-human war. And he studies all these people. There's this set of cards. I think they're called hypotheticals or something like that. They were like cue cards of questions that you should ask people in the next conversation. And it's sort of a gimmick. They're like sold as a box. But I bought this because I was like, hey, am I like a boring conversationalist? And I realized, you know, going back to all these like exchanges I would have with people.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it that makes a human in conversation and interesting? This is exacerbated by the Google Autocomplete Sentences and the new Gmail where you're like, oh my gosh, this robot can tell exactly what I'm to write.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But probably a simple place to start is just by listening well and reading. In a conversation, the other person is kind of your audience in a way. So the ability to sort of read that other person and draw on something that you think is interesting about them. I went so far as to actually, there's this great book called The Most Human Human, which was about a person who entered the Turing contest. So the Turing contest is computers trying to impersonate people in a typed exchange, conversational exchange. The most human human is an award given. So there's five computers and then there are five human judges that you interact with. And at the end, the contestants rate all the people that they chatted with from most computer-like to most human. And the human that is ranked the most human wins. And so what that book got me thinking about is, well, what is...”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have over the past year spent a lot of time just pinging random people from Twitter that I found interesting and saying, hey, let's meet up in real life. And one of the advantages of conversation over, let's say, a linear medium like text or reading someone's text is just the ability to adjust mid course, the give and take of it. Obviously body language and voice are very expressive in their own ways. But I think the biggest thing for me is the ability to just sort of double click on anything quickly and jump into this or that, which you get with conversation with someone interesting, which you won't get if you're just trying to read a body of their work. Not everybody's a great conversationalist. I'm not sure even that I am, and I'm not sure witness necessarily goes into being a great conversationalist. So that's something that I'm continuing to sort of just like study and examine. You know, you can go talk with some people who are great conversationalists.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interface of Google Maps today on a phone is optimized for helping you go somewhere and get directions. But if you took that underlying data and all that and said, all right, many people want to do a search to buy something or they're trying to find their friends to interact with them around different things. Location can be an important component in all of that. And Google has a ton of amazing data in there. What interface into Google Maps would optimize for that type of thing? And I think as VR gets big, you know, the ability to 3D map the world in a way will become this hugely important base of information off of which virtual worlds are built and the way we navigate the world. So I'm sort of intrigued right now by Google Maps. I think it has a lot of hidden potential and value.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the ratio that really matters. You know, in terms of products, it's always hard for me to, I should just come up with a list of things that, you know, so I can think of them off the top of my head. But I will say that during my travels, I thought a lot about Google Maps because I used it a lot. I just think, and I had written about this briefly, that I think Google Maps is the most interesting Google products because there is so much underlying information that forms a sort of structure that could be reoriented for many different uses. So when Google looks at its portfolio, I'm sure it's very concerned about making headway in some areas where it's not as strong. Commerce, social, you name it. And I actually think Google Maps is potentially the most useful approach for them to take to attacking a lot of these markets. But again, you're trying to balance information and how much is in the interface.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think people confuse sometimes minimalism for elegance. Elegance is minimalism is one approach to achieve that elegance. But remember, it's maximum information communication.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elegance is the maximum amount of information communicated in the minimum way. And so I think that's my sort of general guiding product philosophy is it's a language where you're trying to achieve that balance of elegance. If you are too minimalist or anything and no one has to use your product, then there's information being lost, which is terrible because ultimately you're trying to serve a need for the customer. If you're overly legible, you probably are too noisy. You've communicated a lot of information to the user, but you've created all this noise that's distracting and it's unpleasant to use. And so there is something into, and maybe it's because I just got back from Japan, you know, this idea of the Zen simplicity.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to be there to explain it. And so there's just always a level of Communication and legibility in the product that has to be built in. And so a lot of, I think, product development is trying to decide how much legibility has to be built into the product while retaining some sort of elegance. And I like the idea of elegance, which is I've heard this definition once. I think it's in Steve Grant's creation where”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at a meta level over the years, I guess my product thinking is always evolving a little bit. I've worked on lots of products. Some have succeeded the way I wanted them to. Some haven't. You're always learning a little bit. And the way I've come to think of it, especially when building software products is that it is a form of sort of like indirect communication. The software interface is a form of language, just like film is a form of language. Film, you're making the film on set, doing all these things with the actors and your cameras and your lighting and the script and all of that. But you know at some later date, you are not going to be there to guide the viewer through that experience. The work has to speak for itself. Products that have software interfaces are like that. Once I've built the product and someone's using it somewhere in the world on their phone, on a browser,”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's when he warms up to her for a moment. At that point, when the camera crosses that 180 line, and it's like such a powerful, visible move, you're like, why does the camera move like that? It is foreshadowing the fact that Robert De Niro has now violated the rule that he tells everybody in that film is never going to get attached to anything, that you can't drop in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat coming around the corner. And you see that later in the film. He violates his rules and that leads to his downfall at the end of the film. So there are all sorts of things like this, which I think if you, once you learn them, every time you're watching a film, you will start to understand how it works on you. And I think understanding how something works doesn't have to remove the magic of it.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over his head because they don't want him to see where he's going. He's going to interview somebody. And when the bag is taken off over his head, he's having this conversation with the person. The camera suddenly goes from behind his right shoulder to his left shoulder. It's because it's a pivotal point in the movie where something changed and the filmmaker wants you to know this. And Michael Mann does this quite a bit. There's also a famous move like that where he crosses the 180.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the moment he decides to turn states informant. And so just a subtle thing like that. These are the types of things you may hear in a commentary. There's another famous move in film. There's a rule in film. It's called the 180 rule. And so if I were to film this conversation between you and I, I draw a line between the two of us. And that splits the world in half. And all the camera shots should be on the same side of that line in order to not disorient the viewer. And you'll see this in every movie you go to, you'll just see if there's a two-way conversation. They'll shoot over my right shoulder and they'll shoot over your left shoulder. They'll never do my right shoulder and your right shoulder because then the world flips and it's confusing to the viewer. But if you know a rule like that, then you know when it's violated by a filmmaker that something is happening. So there's a shot in the insider by Michael Mann where in the beginning Alfaccino has been kidnapped and they have a bad”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is what his adversary is that it's real and that it's a big problem. In vertical, they do a shot of the falling down in the tower, which famously just creates, that was creating a sense of disorientation that he felt because he had vertical and he was scared of heights in Goodfellas, one of my favorite films, there's a very famous Zolli shot where Rayleigh Oda goes to meet with Robert De Niro in a diner near the end. And he's trying to decide Rayleighota's trying to decide if he's going to flip and become an informant in exchange for a lighter sentence from the government. And he goes to meet De Niro and De Niro's like, hey, I've got this job for you. I need you to go to this place and take care of this one thing. And in that moment, there's a subtle Zolly shot on that because that's the moment that Rayleigh Oda realizes. And he says this in the voiceover. I knew I would never come back from this job. That's the moment he realizes De Nero wants to get him killed.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find a movie that you love that has a director's commentary, turn it on and rewatch the movie with commentary and listen to a little bit about that. Or there are a bunch of books that are all about film visual grammar, and some of them are pretty light. Having one book like that and just flipping through it and understanding a little bit about why a shot works a certain way on you is great. For example, there's a famous shot in jaws. It's called a Zolli shot. And it was first used in Vertigo. But what it is, it's called a Zolli because it's a combination Zoom and Dolly shot. You zoom one way in the shot, like you zoom in, but you dolly the camera away. So it changes the perspective. It's when he first spots the shark and they do the very famous Zolly shot on his face. And what a Zolli indicates is that someone's worldview has changed significantly in that moment, right? When he sees the shark, he really...”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like all types of movies, so I'm generally not prescriptive on, I think you should find the types of movies that you enjoy. But I think that one way to heighten your appreciation of anything like film is to just better understand how it works on you. Like, why does a good film work in a certain way? And why does a bad film work in another way? Just like with sports, if you played a sport growing up, you will have a much deeper appreciation when you watch it of what's happening moment to moment. I don't have as deep an appreciation for soccer because I didn't play it as a youth, but recently, you know, and watching soccer with some people who did play it growing up, they were able to give me a lot of pointers on, hey, what's happening here and there? Why is this little exchange very extraordinary? So with film, and one thing you can do with a lot of DVDs is to listen with the commentary on.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Japan many years ago, where they were like, hey, we don't want these trash cans in public where someone could hide something like that. Whereas in Taipei, it was a totally different situation that explained that. So that's my meta travel recommendation.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day lives that help you to understand actually their worldview. Ask them what they find bewildering about American culture and what they find appealing about it. Ask them in their daily lives, you know, like what media they consume. And all these things I find have made travel just much more interesting for me. There's so much hidden knowledge that's not in guidebooks that's in the minds of the people who live there. You know, the whole Taipei Alley investigation really just came from me asking a local there. I'm like, what's the deal with all of that? And when I was just in Japan, I also noticed the same thing that triggered my conversation in Taipei, which was like, hey, there are no public trash cans. I was walking around with this empty plastic cup. And I was like, I have nowhere to throw this out. So I carried it with me for the whole day. I was like, why are there no public trash cans in Japan? And, you know, someone had told me that it came from the sarin gas attacks.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the mode of travel that I find, this is general, this is not applying to any specific place now, you know, when I was younger, I think, and I was visiting so many places for the first time, I would go off of guidebooks and things, which usually have a list of sites, iconic sites that you have to go see. And in the age of Instagram and everything, you know, it becomes sort of like this checklist scavenger hunt. You're running around. You're like, I have to go see the Sagrada familia in Barcelona. I have to go see the bridge in Prague or whatever. And it's a little bit exhausting. And this idea of understanding the path dependence of culture and everything means that now what I mostly like to do is it's fine if you want to hit some of those big sites on your first day there, but mostly I want to embed myself with some people who've grown up in that place and spend enough time with them, you know, eat a couple meals, take them out, like have them walk around and ask them questions about their every”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think the number one scarcity we all have is that we're all going to die someday. So that's maybe the master scarcity that should govern everything about how we spend our time and everything.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To structure your time and align your incentives into a very rigid sort of path. And the same way with you with habits. Knowing what to do. A goal just aligns all your loops and everything.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. But one thing that I find is very common among all successful people is they have lots of goals. They set goals. To me, goals are just a hack. And it works, actually. The time that I set a goal to run a marathon, I ran a lot that summer. And a goal is just gamifying your own life. It's like you said, it's making the habit drive towards something. So like, for example, this month, I have a goal of doing 2,000 push-ups. And I just randomly set that and started it. But as soon as I started that little Google spreadsheet every day before I go to bed, I remember, oh my God, I got to do my, you know, whatever, like 100 or 50 or however many it is. And I keep up with it. And so that's such a simple hack that I always tell people to just set even arbitrary goals all the time. Just have a whole bunch of goals and you will just automatically align because a goal really is just a way.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in writing school, famously, they teach you that the idea of the muse is inverted. It's this idea I write when the muse visits me. And it's like, how does the muse visit you? The muse visits you when you write. And so this idea of just showing up continually. I'm fascinated. Like if you look at interviews with successful people, you're always like, hey, you know, what's the secret to someone's success? And you hope that there's some magical thing that you can adopt.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seven years making rice and sushi or whatever. Jiro dreams of sushi, right? It's the canonical one that people are familiar with here. And a lot of that was based on an apprenticeship model where you would go server master and study them and learn your craft. And in a way, in our modern world where everything's like short tenure, everything that doesn't happen. And so besides tightening your feedback loops, I think we have to get used to this idea that everybody has to take responsibility for their own learning in a way. We've actually never had more resources available to everybody for learning, YouTube and all these free resources online. But the discipline to take advantage of that is still super rare. So I think I have still have much to learn on many, many dimensions. And I've tried to sort of adopt those things, tighten my feedback loops, and then taking responsibility for my own continued development.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just not worth it. They're going to take that training and go to some other company, maybe one of your competitors. And so the problem is that if you look at the business world, you have all these employees enter companies. It's like, hey, when you start doing this job, and then they're responsible for their own learning. There's not really great education or anything like that. Companies don't optimize for educating. Like I think it would have been different in the age where people worked at one job for life. Then it really behooves you economically to train that person to be the best employee possible, but we're not in that age anymore. You know, I just go back from Japan where the Japanese are famous for you'd have these like craftspeople who become the best.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short. It's like two years or something at startups. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why that happened. The economic models of stock options, the way that companies were like, oh, for all a number of reasons, that is the case. One of the problems is that if you as a company look at an employee that's only going to stay for two years, how much are you going to invest in training?”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And lose five pounds. You bet I would be jogging every day. But the thing is, you have to jog over and over for like, you know, weeks on end before you start to feel your pants loosen up. And you know that'll happen. It's just, and it's the same thing with eating, right? I eat these 10 French fries today. I don't pay an immediate penalty and they taste really great because the feedback loop on taste is much faster than the feedback loop on your nutritional loops. And so that's the thing with Invisible Asymptotes is a lot of them are just caused by very slow feedback loops. And so a simple thing that most people can do is just increase the number of feedback loops. Like for me, myself, it's having those friends or peers or things that will give me honest feedback on where I need to develop. One of the problems is, you know, the average tenure of employees at companies and tech now is”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feedback loops in general. You know, why is it so hard to exercise and eat well? Well, the problem is the feedback loop is too slow. Like if I could go out for a job for three miles.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, it's human nature to not be good at taking feedback. Some of the most interesting arbitrage opportunities in the world, you always hear this. It's such simple advice. And yet it's shocking that it's not standard behavior. But if you're a CEO or an executive, almost everyone tells you to get a coach. Get an executive coach. Atul Gawande wrote this great piece years ago in the New Yorker about he's a world-class surgeon. And yet he asked a peer of his to observe one of his surgeries and give him feedback. And he was like, oh my gosh, I got all these notes on things that I missed. And the thing is, we're just terrible at looking at ourselves. We will always be the most biased observer of ourselves. And so it's human nature if you become successful over time to just feel like you don't need, like you know it all, right? Like you don't need any coaching. You don't need any feedback. And, you know, I have this core thought that almost everything in the world could be fixed by tightening.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hurdle, which is And I'm guilty of this. I take a lot of photos of her on the phone. And she's always like, let me see. As soon as I take it, right? I'm training her to be an entertainer from a very early age, right? When she grows up, she's going to be way ahead of me in understanding that. The reason I don't send snaps or things like that to message my friends is I didn't grow up with that behavior. But yeah, the world has changed.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old white men who probably don't understand how to use Instagram or what it's all about, and all of that. And so the fact that you now are doing podcasts is just a reflection of the fact that part of your business has to be entertaining. It didn't used to be. Now it has to be. And so I think everyone now has to figure out with their content how to compete with every other form of entertainment. That's a sort of invisible asymptote or an invisible competitor that many businesses just can't see. If you were a video company, you're not looking at what's going on probably in e-games or what's going on on Instagram or something like that. But every person now has a choice at any moment in time for how to entertain themselves and they are going to go to the best option because it's one tap away on their phone. And that means the bar has been lifted. The game has been lifted. There's a sort of entertainment.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that at any point in time, you are competing with what's on a person's smartphone. And that means that formally different lines of business and different industries now compete head to head. You may not feel it entirely, but Fortnite is just as important a competitor to the film industry as the next studio over. And because of the way the mediums are structured, everything is becoming entertainment. Politics became entertainment long ago. You don't have to look at our current president to say, oh, okay, like politics is a form of entertainment, like this former reality star. If you look at, for example, what Ocasio Cortez is doing right now, amazing, right? Because she sort of understands, whoa, in this different age with different distribution channels, the game has changed. And she just happens to be young and she understands these mediums natively, whereas most senators and congressmen are these really old.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I so wish you were alive to write about this current internet age. But essentially, one of the core ideas from his book, which is so important and even more relevant than ever today, is that everything has become entertainment because of the mediums through which it's transmitted. And the idea I'd add on top of that, which is really important now, is that we now live in what I like to call the Big Bang of Content. This is the age where content went to infinity, effectively. It's not infinite, but effectively. That is such a difference from the age of scarcity that we used to live through. And what it means is that formerly you could sort of stay in your lanes, like you could be a research facility and just write white papers and just like, look, I mean, what else are people in my space going to do? They have to read my white paper because that's essential. That's like the only type of content in my business. But what changes in our age today with a smartphone?”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I'd be curious to hear your opinions on this, but Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is this amazing book.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you listen to audiobook, you're like, oh, nine hours. That's like one commute over a week, and then I'm done with the book. It's like amazing. And then yet a book will sit on your nightstand for like months. You're like, I can't get through it. And so there are all sorts of these like weird arbitrage opportunities between mediums, which I just think haven't been explored.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into your brain, right? But if you're jogging like five miles and you're like, yeah, this audiobook, it's sort of has my intention. The thing is, it keeps going, right? This is almost the crazy thing. When you read an audiobook, you're like, whoa, because when you look at a book, you know, it can be like hundreds of pages. It looks like this forbidding thing”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By its very nature, it's not going to reach a lot of the audience that wants it. Just the fact that you and I are doing this podcast, right? Like the advent of audiobooks was nothing more than arbitraging one medium into another. It was like, hey, why are audiobooks so appealing to some people? Well, you can drive and listen to these books. You can be jogging outside. You can listen to these books. By the way, the human voice is super expressive. So the book may be more interesting when read by an actor who can give different voices of the different characters. And most importantly to these mediums like film and podcasts and audiobooks, if you don't do anything, they keep going. A book won't read itself. If you're just like, I don't want to read this book right now. The book is not going to.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll have cinematic language and production values, and we'll open up education to the masses in a way that we've never seen before from texts. I just think if your best ideas in the history of the world are locked away in some dense textbook,”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, just from a simple arbitrage perspective, I certainly think there's a lot of great ideas locked away in books today that are very forbidding and not appealing to the masses, which could be turned into educational content using video. And that would reach many more people. I think what it takes is, you know, we have these MOOCs now, which essentially every new medium kind of recreates the old way, the first TV shows were just kind of like radio, right? You know, like you see that pattern repeated. We kind of saw that with the first wave of MOOCs, which wasn't that exciting to me, where, well, let's just film the lecture, but the lecture is doing exactly the same thing. They're reading off some slides or they're just talking to the camera. It's like super boring. When you look at what video is strong at, communicating visually, it's not that. And so I think we will see the next generation of educational content be much more appealing visually.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stay relevant in the world and you have Disney, which will probably do fine because they have a bunch of incredible IP. And all the other studios are being absorbed or will just die off. So that's wave one. When I think of what I want to do next, it's really, I think, to think about wave two of that level of disruption, which isn't just like replacing the studios, but doing kind of exactly the same thing as the studios is to think about how does that business change when we incorporate tech in a deeper way into the artistic process and what does that look like? And I don't know what that is yet. I'm still thinking about it, but I certainly don't think we're at the end of how Silicon Valley will change that entire world.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's to say we have more money than you, and we can actually just go straight to the talent. I always say that Hollywood is such a well-tuned structure that essentially you could treat it like an API. And this is the API. Put money in, get a TV show or movie out of it. It's very abstracted like that. And that's a lot of what the tech companies do now, right? Apple, Amazon, Netflix. They're like, oh, this is great. I write a check for $100 million. Next week, I get back like 10 episodes of premium video and like no questions asked. It's perfect. And I plug it into my awesome business model where I can make a whole bunch of money from it. And by the way, my business has other revenue sources that Hollywood studios don't. So I actually make more profit off this per unit. Well, that is why now we're essentially down to two studios left in Hollywood. There's Warner, which is trying to launch its own streaming service.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started trying to do all these things to innovate on how films were made and everything. But over time, as they were like basically getting robbed by licensing, these old TV shows for huge amounts of money. They immediately got data back, right? They're like, how many people are watching this stuff? And once you get data, you know, you know the ground truth. And what all the tech companies realized was that, oh, look at all these Hollywood studios. Look at how much cash they have. They are barely profitable. Meanwhile, we are these massive companies that are just churning out cash. Why don't we just cut these studios out of the process and just, you know, for Netflix? It's like, why don't I just write a check to David Fincher? Why would I wait for him to make something for a new line and then license it years later for too much money when no one's watching it anymore? Why don't I just go to David Fincher and say, I'll give you 100 million bucks if you make house of cards for me? And so this is essentially wave one of Silicon Valley disrupting Hollywood.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The scripts, they shot the films, and they put them into movie theaters. And so these companies had a lot of know-how and unique process knowledge inside their four walls. Well, there was a Supreme Court case where they were like, you know what, you can't own your movie theaters anymore because that's anti-competitive because you can just shove your movies down on the viewer's throat. And then the talent was like, hey, you know what? We don't want to work for you anymore. We're going independent. So, you know, now you have the actor skills or all these unions, right? They're all free agents. And studios then became public companies. They got bought by large companies. And what you had was a formally vertically integrated institution become now just a thin horizontal slice. And what is that slice? It's largely financing and marketing. That's what they do for films. And you had tech companies who came along and initially they thought was, Hollywood doesn't know what they're doing and let's try to shake up the business.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work to the end customer was valuable. You had seen with Napster and things sort of the adversarial approach, which is just like, hey, let's just reform the industry from outside. Just blow it up. And that also didn't work out that well. And I do think artists should be compensated more fairly for their work because I enjoy seeing the work and I want to see it continue to be made. So that's a big part of the reason for me going to Hulu and trying to reform that industry from the inside. And we're starting to see what I now see as the first phase of Silicon Valley disrupting Hollywood. And if you look at the history of Hollywood, you'll see how this happened. Way back in the day, movie studios were vertically integrated. They owned the talent. Like if you were Tom Cruise, you would actually work for like an MGM, like you were an employee. They owned the movie theaters. They owned everything.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source