YouSaid · the spoken record

Franklin Foer

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59
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2017-12-12
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2017-12-12
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  1. “Published a series of articles that were alleged to have been fabricated by an author, and it was an author who was a soldier in Iraq and said to have embellished them. And it was in the middle of the Iraq war and advertisers were kind of really coming down hard on us. And it felt like everything was going to go to shit. And I had a friend who was actually going to, he'd worked with me and he was taking over another job and he spent a week just kind of helping me on his own going full time crazy long days like trying to help me get through this crisis where he's kind of embedded with me and that was it was just such a beautiful act of friendship.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I've been like to have friends who've crises, every life has its share of crises, and I think that the extent to which your friends kind of are selfless in the face of crises, it's always, because when you're in the middle of a crisis, you feel alone, right? And you get into this moment of existential fear and like the sense that you screw up at work and like you're going to lose your job and use the livelihood. Your brain starts to make all these connections about the worst that can happen. And then when you have friends who are able in that moment of crisis to come in and behave selflessly to you, that's the most extraordinary thing. I had one crisis at work where I was editor and we published”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, it takes over our lives. And the same should be true for these tools and these technologies. We should be able to enjoy the fruits of them without exercising mind control.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “No, it is. But it's like with food and drink, those things are addictive too. But we are taught moderation. We learn how we can enjoy food. We can enjoy wine, but we don't abuse it in a way that kind of like.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I've turned off notifications on my phone so that only a human being has the ability to grab my attention. I don't let my apps do that or newspapers or whatever. I took Facebook off of my phone so that if I want to use it, I have to self-consciously seek it out on my laptop so that I'm not just in a zombulic state getting trapped in there endless scroll. I mean that's kind of, I mean with so.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So there's a guy called Tristan Harris. If you come across him, he was a philosopher of computer scientist who went to work for, he had a startup called Aperture that got bought by Google. And Google gave him a position. He was like their ethicist in chief, and he was embedded in their product teams helping to build Google products to be more respectful of human beings. And he ended up leaving because he felt like these technologies were even more addictive and manipulative than people understood. And he created an organization called Time Well Spent that offers suggestions about how we can create space between us and technology. And so there's part of this that I've integrated into my own life that I used to sleep with my cell phone, but I don't do that anymore because I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night and get trapped in an endless scroll, which happens, or be on the receiving end of all the anxiety that your phone is a portal to.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “As human beings, we have so little ability to affect it that technology comes. And it's like, I think a lot of us think we have no ability to shape the future of technology. It's just going to happen in this unstoppable sort of way. Or climate change is like this unstoppable sort of phenomenon. And so really we need to restore a sense of agency, a sense that as human beings we can affect the world. And starting with our ability to affect ourselves, that we can always, as human beings, we can always grow to be more ethical, to be more learned, to be more curious.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Think the key word in that question is cultivate. And I have a riff in the book where the term culture comes from the Latin root colare and this idea of cultivation, which is an agricultural term, right? This idea that you can kind of grow and nurture. And the idea of culture itself grew out of this metaphor with farming, that in order to The mind needs to be tended to in the same sort of way that we tend to our fields. And that means that you can't be passive in the course of that. You can't just rely on the weather and seeds getting blown in the wind to kind of guarantee a harvest every year. And so I think this idea of self-improvement is really profoundly important. There's so much about the world right now that seems like”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So I think that so much of my book is actually about the idea of contemplation and about the necessity of contemplation and how we can achieve states of contemplation. And so I've read a lot of books about that, including Hannah Arendt, who is the famous German than American political theorist and thinker, gave a series of lectures about the life of mind and kind of what is it, this question of what does it mean to think and how is thinking different than our pursuit of knowledge? And how is thinking different than science? And to what extent is thinking kind of inherent to being a human being? To what extent is thinking necessary for us to live in a functioning democracy? And I don't know, I find these questions to be extremely Primary, and that to me is kind of the ball game.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I'm not sure. But I know that if you go to a place like Stanford right now, where it's like almost half the kids are computer science majors now, which is incredible. I mean, it's just this shift. I think universities are going to, you know, they need to take a leadership role in remaking curriculum. I think that there's just going to be, I think the changes are so profound that elites, leaders, people across all sectors are going to start to awaken to the problem and realize that we need to rethink a lot of aspects of our educational system as well as our value system in order to get to the other side of these changes in a way where we feel like we're still recognizably human, where a lot of our values are able to survive these transitions.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Engineering as a mindset is all about designing systems to be efficient and systems that work on their own terms. But we need engineers and computer scientists who are also humanists, who are able to understand the ethical and political consequences of the systems that they build, to understand that human beings, actual human beings are part of the systems, not just piles of data.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Libertarians, but really should be part of a much broader understanding of the world. And secondly, just going out and talking to, I've interacted a lot with college kids and people who've lived their lives on the internet. And I find that they have, in a way, more self-awareness about the problem than anybody else right now. And that I've talked to a lot of computer science students who are kind of desperate to change computer science. And I think this is actually, of all the things we can do, maybe the most realistic and the most necessary, which is that everything in the world is computer science now. Everything in the world is the Internet. And that means that computer science has become too precious to leave just in the hands of the people who are currently attracted to computer science.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So I'm really excited by two things. One is I think that our political system is shifting in a way that's very interesting, that Donald Trump is a giant disruption to the system and that it's forced people to kind of reconsider a lot of truisms and to rethink things. And so the idea that our political system is moving to an analysis of power potentially that's very different than the one that's dominated and that actually will have truck in both the left and the right and that there's a worry about concentration of power. I think that that's an interesting sort of development. And kind of attached to that, there's kind of, I think there'll be ideas about liberty and freedom that grow out of that and kind of a celebration of certain parts of individualism and individuality that I think are both beautiful and underrated and in some degree kind of captured by”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And part of a system. And then the other kind of myth is the one of collaboration, which is something that Silicon Valley is deeply into. And our society is on a whole really into right now, this idea that all ideas”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Again, there are two visions for creativity. One vision comes from the romantic poets like William Wardsworth, and it was this cult of the individual as a genius. And we know that that's not entirely true, that every so-called genius is actually borrowing stuff from here and there.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Independence of thought because your attention is being reverse engineered, materials being reverse engineered in this sort of way to kind of addict you to whatever is getting thrown at you by the machine and by the platform, then you no longer have the space for contemplation. It becomes harder and harder to muster independent thought. And so I do think it's a spiritual crisis. And if religion was smart, it would find some sort of way to To leverage this opportunity to kind of defend itself”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think that that's almost inevitable. And here's something that just occurs to me. I think you could have, in a way, almost two competing spiritual and religious visions. One is that as we move into a world of virtual reality and possibly a world where there's not jobs, you can imagine a lot of people kind of sitting around all day on their couches living in virtual realities, playing video games or whatever. And you could see that almost being a religion unto itself. Like it almost has to become a religion at some point to kind of supply people's lives with the meaning that they no longer have in work. They can no longer find in work. On the other side, I think that the distraction is actually a fundamental threat to us as spiritual beings. I think it's actually the biggest, it's a spiritual crisis. If you kind of lose the possibility for”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Are is disconnected, that there's nobody watching over your shoulder as you read, you're not umbilically connected to a corporate store, you're not being notified by your book or distracted by your book constantly. You're able to engage in kind of a deep commitment to text. And so I think the fact that we've been able to sustain that is actually a fairly encouraging thing.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Here's one counterintuitive thing, which is that when the Kindle was invented in 2008, everybody said that paper books were going to disappear forever and ever. Nicholas Negroponte, who headed the MIT Media Lab, said, by the year 2015, paper books will cease to be published. And lo and behold, we passed that date, and paper books continue to get published. Ebooks have kind of plateaued, paperbook sales tick up every year maybe 1% or 2%, but they're headed in an upward direction. And I think that that's kind of an incredible thing because I think it shows, first of all, book publishers have managed to defend the underlying economic value of the product that they produce. That's pretty cool encounter intuitive. And then secondly, I think for the culture more broadly, it's encouraging to me because one thing that paper books”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, it's somewhere between 30% and a half. In some places, it's much, much higher. Like at BuzzFeed, it's probably, I think I've seen it's like 70 or 80 percent or something like that. And so they've made this decision to switch to video. Video is what will keep their users engaged for the longest period of time. Fine. But what's happening right now, so that means that Facebook is becoming a television to your television set. That's what I think that their ambition is at this moment. And so everybody in media is now switching to video. And so they're trying to produce videos. And Facebook is going about now commissioning video. They're actually paying people to produce for Facebook. And so isn't it in Facebook's interest to make the stuff that they invest in appear first in their platform? And so Facebook is inevitably going to start to favor Facebook's own content.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Is restaurants. So a couple years ago, you wanted to type in a restaurant name, the first thing that came up was a Yelp result. Now Google saw that and they're like, oh, this is an important service and a good business. And so what do they do? Well, they hardwired into Google Yelp. And so Google was no longer a neutral platform. Google was privileging its own service. And so to me, that's kind of the mega danger here. It's the thing that's got the European Union most freaked out. And I think from the perspective of regulation, ensuring the neutrality of these platforms is actually absolutely essential. Here's another example that's got me worried. So Facebook, all of media is dependent on Facebook for traffic and therefore for revenue.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It's the same sort of concern, which is that let me put it this way a search engine looks and behaves as if it's a neutral thing, that it's kind of using math in order to determine what comes at the top of its search results and what comes on page four. Now, as we've said, it's the thing that comes at the top of the search results that's the thing that we're most likely to read or to buy. And so that gives Google huge control over outcomes in information and in business too. If you're able to game that system best, you spring to the top. Now, one problem we see with the platforms is that as these guys keep getting bigger and bigger, they go from being simply the platform, simply being a tool, to also being an actor on their own platforms. And so Google, the classic example,”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Is it? No, but is it okay if there's just one store? Like if there's just like if everything is just kind of in one place, it's going to come really quickly. And it can be really cheap. But isn't there a problem with that? And I think there are problems. There are definite problems. One problem is that it means that Amazon exerts enormous control over the people who supply it with the stuff it sells, which is in economics, it's the problem of monopsony. It's that when you're the dominant seller, it means that all your suppliers are completely dependent.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “They have necessarily have the profits to show for it, but because they're thinking in such a long-term sort of way about constructing complete and total dominance. And so it started off as the everything store, pretty ambitious goal. But then it just kind of morphed into all these other different areas where it's a movie studio. It owns the Washington Post. It owns Whole Foods. It powers the cloud. And like, where does Amazon ever going to stop? And is it okay?”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Amazon. Amazon represents a different sort of danger. Amazon. With Amazon, we're kind of returning to a very right now it's a fairly incohate anxiety about size. As Amazon kind of drifts in the next couple years to being 50% of all retail, it's a pretty impressive achievement. Even if you're a critic of Amazon, you have to say, damn, that is one of the greatest businesses ever. Maybe the greatest business ever. Maybe Amazon is the greatest business ever.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Confirmed because your information is sorted so aggressively to confirm your biases. And if you're just hearing the things that you want to hear all the time, it is intellectually incapacitating. You become weak when presented with fake news or propaganda or demagoguery or when they're bad actors out there who are trying to exploit the system in order to so distrust or to foment anger.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “But one of the things that Facebook has done is that it's kind of very, very powerfully amplified that trend. Because Facebook is a feedback loop. Facebook takes everything that you tell it, and then uses that data as a basis for sorting information. That Facebook, as I said, it knows so much about you. Everybody knows so much about you, unfortunately, but they know basically the things that give you pleasure, and they know the things that give you anxiety and the things that turn you off. And so it takes that information and it arranges the things in your new seed in order to exploit those emotions. And politically, that's extremely dangerous because it does reinforce the filter bubbles in a very, very industrial strength sort of way. Where your biases are constantly being”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So, the biggest concern is actually it's political, which is that right now in our society there's diminishing basis for common fact. So that if I say the sky is blue, that becomes a partisan issue will process that through whatever media that they're getting. And there's this term called filter bubbles. And so our politics was becoming really polarized before the internet. There's no doubt about that. And people were starting to sort themselves geographically on the basis of political opinion.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “That's really interesting. I think that's right too. It's kind of instinctually my sense. And you see it within American liberalism, for instance, which I think really does follow that type of curve where it goes through periods where it celebrates corporate concentration as being efficient, and then it starts to worry about corporate concentration and starts supplying antitrust pressure on it. And so antitrust kind of comes and it goes and kind of cycles in generations as power waxes and wanes.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Already. Then you've got the Steve Bannon, right, which is a Steve Bannon is incredibly hostile to Silicon Valley. There's a guy who's running for Senate in Missouri, who's the Attorney General, who's Republican, who just brought a lawsuit against Google. And so who knows how this is all going to shake out? I think that the companies are going to face pressure, though, that's going to come at them from all different angles.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “But I don't think that it's a neat division. So if we shift a little bit to the center, I was in New York a couple weeks ago talking to a conference for a group called No Labels, which is aggressively centrist and aggressively nonpartisan. And it was organized by Bill Crystal on the right and a guy called Bill Goston on the center left. And one of their five big ideas for this year was taking on the Titans of Tech. And it was an audience filled with Wall Street types and people who identify as centrist, and they were really interested in this topic because they care about the future of democracy. And these companies exert enormous influence on the course of democracy and also they're people who care about the functioning of markets and they worry that if things become too centralized, we're actually stifling opportunities for investment and opportunities and the incentive to create startups could start to diminish. Maybe even has diminished.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, whereas kind of are shaped and formed and disseminated and have the ability to affect mass opinion. Media is incredibly dependent on Google and Facebook. And with this last election, they've kind of seen an opportunity to beat up on Facebook especially. Now, I think that their hostility to Facebook has something to do with the election, but it also has a lot to do with media's own sense of dependence and the way that on Facebook and the way that Facebook is distorted media. So there's psychodrama there for sure. But look, there's something really interesting that's happening in our political system right now, which is that this topic of monopoly has appeal across”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I think one thing is that there's a split right now between the way that elites perceive these corporations and the way that consumers perceive these corporations, that elites in some way have suffered or can feel like they can see the dangers pretty clearly of some of these companies. So in media, the hot topic.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Out of these systems. And in the American way of thinking about the world, one thing that Americans have always thought long and hard about is power, that we have a constitutional system that is set out to create balance so that power doesn't end up getting lumped together in any one place. And when Thomas Jefferson and the founders thought about power, their biggest concern at that moment was executive power and power invested in a king. And so a lot of the system in the Constitution focused on that. But they were also worried about excessive concentrations of private power, and they could see the ways in which once you had excessive concentrations of private power, it would be bad for the democracy. And that was a kind of core thinking in American political economy up through the 1960s and 1970s. And then it just kind of faded away.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “To harness that piece of technology for human purposes. And so I think we need to start thinking about how we can create systems and rules that can harness these technologies for human purposes. That's one part of it. And so there's a role that government can play in all that. So right now your data is not protected. Your health data might be protected. Some of your financial data might be protected. But the data that these guys are collecting is not at all protected. And we act as if they own that data and so they can trade on a market and they can do all sorts of things with it. There's a huge incentive for them to keep ramping up their surveillance of us because that's essential to their business advantage. So we should have some rules about data. Then I think it's necessary to have a vision and an analysis about kind of what's what we want out of our economy and out of”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I'll answer by analogy, which is that automobile was created. Automobile, great piece of technology, replaces horses and buggies, a very efficient way to get from point A to point B. You don't have to rely on trains, which are kind of more of a command and control system where you've a rigid line that kind of takes you from point A to point B. And here you have more freedom to go to wherever you want to go faster because the automobile. But the problems, right? So the automobile, when it was created, a lot of people got run over because there weren't stop signs. There weren't traffic limits. And they were horribly horrible for the planet because we did nothing to control the emissions. And so over time, we took this incredible thing and we tried to harness it so that it was more consonant with human beings. And so we created all these rules from safety belts to fuel emission standards that tried.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I just think, I mean, more cautious, less transgressive, almost more robotic in a way, in the way that we go and how we go about the world?”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Or try to find out things about themselves. And so if I knew every Google search would become public and I had health questions about some condition, would I ask those questions to Google if I thought that they could possibly become public? I don't want the world to know that maybe I have herpes or that I have a heart condition or whatever it is or that I'm worried that I have some embarrassing skin condition. Who knows what it is? You're less likely to ask those questions if you're going to possibly be shamed for having them. Or let's put it in the realm of ideas. What if I am interested in anarchism or Ayn Rand or whatever? I don't want my future employers to know that I was kicking around those ideas. Maybe I could be penalized for that. So rather than exploring those ideas, I'm just going to be a little bit more cautious about the world until I become extremely cautious.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, I mean, I don't totally foreclose the possibility that there's some good that comes of it. So let's just start with one concept, which is privacy. I'm fairly devoted to privacy as a concept that I think is essential to human selfhood. But privacy, so Zuckerberg argues that the disappearance of privacy is probably a good thing because if we're transparent human beings, we're going to behave more virtuously so that if you're the same person in the office that you are at home, you'll have integrity and you're probably going to behave better. And in my book, I'm pretty hostile to that point of view. In the end, I will be military.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “See your own addiction to technology. But we don't really focus on our own self-improvement, but we're terribly obsessed with making our kids better than we are. And so I think that a lot of parents go into a state of panic when they look at their kids and their use of technology and they're filled with a sense of dread”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Well, first of all, the idea that we could live in a world without gatekeepers is just illusion. And it's like, it's almost like anarchism, right? That people are Marxism. They kind of dream about the withering away of the state, that there could be a world in which we all interact with one another as loving, caring human beings where you don't need the power of the state. The power of the state always returns. There's always one group that kind of exists to exert dominance. There's always power. There's always power. Yeah, you can't escape power. And that's true of the internet too. So the question of kids is, I mean, I think that the answer has to do with kind of how we as parents end up responding and what we teach our children about how they interact with this universe. One of the things, so when you see your kid with an iPad or with a phone hunched over texting or swiping or whatever, it reflects yourself back to you.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “The dream was always having everybody wrapped up into one. There's this idea of oneness, of wholism. It's like it's a really, it's just kind of driven through our thinking about the internet. And I think in the end, it actually kind of becomes the basis for monopoly, that the idea that everybody could be stitched together into one global village is really the basis for the greatest business opportunities ever. And so it was only a matter of time before the thing that starts off is the utopian commune ends up getting captured by the giant firm.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “One of the fascinating counterfactuals is, is it possible to imagine an internet that exists in a way, shape, or form that's different from the internet that we now know? Is it inevitable that it gets captured where we have to think of it as one giant network? Or is it possible to think of it as a bunch of smaller interconnected networks? And this idea of the architecture of the internet and how we think about the architecture of the internet, is it centralized or decentralized? Is there ways to accentuate the decentralization or the accentuate the centralization? Those become very crucial foundational ideas that shape the outcome of how it develops as an economic unit as a communications unit. And it seems to me that we were always pointed in this direction of centralization simply because”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So the big dream was always the one of creating a global village. And that's a really important dream of the 1960s. Marshall McLuhan, who was this Canadian philosopher, theorist of media who gave, who was a kind of a regular on TV talk shows in that era, talked about the global village. And that was a real aspiration that got absorbed into the counterculture. Really part of the idea of the commune too. It's just that once we understood that we were part of a global village, it would reshape human consciousness. We would behave better towards one another. We would behave more responsibly towards the planet. If only we could see the way in which it was all connected together, if we could see if we were part of a whole Earth to use Brand's phrase. And so to me, that's a lot of the impetus that drives the creation of actually the internet. Which if you think about it, I mean, this is really...”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “It seems kind of crazy to me. But on the other hand The idea that I could watch every television show in the world in the palm of my hand, if you told me that when I was a kid, I'd say there's no way that's ever happening. That's so far-fetched. And it's here”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So that's one part of it. And the second is that we are as a species becoming cyborg. It's just kind of a fact. And you see it now in the way in which I couldn't have gotten to this podcast if I hadn't used Google Maps to guide me here because I have no sense of direction and I've outsourced that all to my phone, which is awesome. I'm happy. It's like I'm really psyched to be relieved of that burden.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “A lot of what is being automated is actually mental functions. There's a form of intellectual automation that's happening right now. And one thing that distinguishes these technologies is that they stand between us and reality in a way that feels fairly unprecedented. That if I want to understand the world, these machines, these devices become my portal into large chunks of the world. And so they have a lot of power to set the terms for reality. And what happens is that they pick winners and losers. The thing that appears at the top of the Google search engine is the thing that you're most likely to read. The thing that appears at the top of the Facebook newsfeed is the thing that you're most likely to read. The thing that appears at the top of an Amazon search is the thing that you're most likely to buy. And so these platforms kind of shape the world by picking winners and losers.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “First of all, just to be clear about a couple things. So technology is one of the things that defines us as a species. I mean, it is our ability to affect nature, and it's something that distinguishes us. And human beings have always tried to have tools that kind of augmented the human body or replaced the human body. So factories automated upper body work. Hammers are an extension of the arm. And I think that's great. And Google is one of the most magnificent creations in human engineering. It's just, it's really incredible. And the iPhone is a marvel of design and engineering. But that said, I think what happens, so this is not exactly the answer to your question, but I think we just need to distinguish the ways in which these platforms and these technologies are a little bit different.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “This way of thinking about the digital economy as if it was much more dynamic than everything that it had replaced. And I believe that too. Until around that time when I was writing that piece about Amazon and Amazon was behaving so badly towards Hachette, and I began to think, you know what? Maybe things have actually settled now. And the idea of the platform, the idea of these networks was such that huge chunks of the economy were going to just become dependent on the platforms and the networks, which gave the platforms and networks a huge power to assert control and dominance over the course of markets.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “About Amazon were no longer running our ad campaign with you. Please confirm receipt of this sincerely Team Amazon. I was like, Jesus, these guys just proved the thesis of my book. And it just felt like to me like, you know, I just was interested in kind of the way in which the digital economy had settled. My first job out of college was with Microsoft. I worked for Slate, which was then owned by Microsoft. And I moved out to Seattle and I was really excited about the possibilities of an e-magazine and it just seemed cool. But Microsoft at that time was kind of set as the empire. And then because of so many reasons, Microsoft kind of tumbled briefly from its dominant position. And it opened up this seemingly wide open economy where these companies rose in a nanosecond. And so we were kind of stuck in.”

    2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source