YouSaid · the spoken record

Franklin Foer

lines on the record: 59
first: 2017-12-12
most recent: 2017-12-12
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

“Yeah, Kindle is synonymous with ebooks. And so when Hashette said enough, Amazon said, okay, you want to play that game? And so they stripped the buy button off of Hashette books. They delayed shipments on certain books. Or if you searched for one hashet title, you were redirected to assignment and Schuster title. And so I was really radicalized by this. I was like, oh my God, monopoly isn't an abstract problem. It's like it's really, it's actually, it's hitting me in the gut. They're punching me in the place where it counts. And so I got very active with the authors guild and I ended up writing an article for the new republic where I was editor called Amazon Must Be Stopped. So really aggressive article. And two weeks after my article appeared, my bosses at the New Republic got a letter from Amazon and it said Dear New Republic, because of your recent cover story.”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they kept extracting terms. And Hash got to the point where it screamed enough. And so Hashette took a hard line and Amazon responded by being very, very aggressive to Hashette. Now, Amazon controls an enormous part of the ebooks market. I mean, it's somewhere between 70 and 90 percent. Nobody can say exactly how much they control. But obviously.”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm a writer. Writers are really narcissistic, and they can't necessarily see problems until they afflict themselves. And so in 2014, Amazon was engaged in a contract renegotiation with the French publishing giant Hachette, which is the little brown is one of their big imprints, 12. And I'd written a book for one of Hashette's imprints. And the course of the e-book contract negotiation, Amazon just kept squeezing and squeezing. And Amazon initially set the price for e-books at $9.99, which is something they did without consulting the publishers. They just kind of decided that this is what books should be priced, which had the effect of resetting the entire publishing industry. And so Amazon says, okay, we want to set the price here. And if you want to get good placement on our pages, you have to pay us this much.”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Video games can transform your consciousness, but I think that this idea of kind of collectivism and utopianism end up manifesting themselves in a lot of the core concepts of Silicon Valley. So just to give you an example, I mean, we think of Silicon Valley as being libertarian. We think of Ayn Rand worshippers, and those exist. There's no doubt that they exist. But so much of what Silicon Valley is about is about the collective. It's about recreating the commune. It's the reason why...”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of explain it as a tool of personal liberation, which is totally important. Or one thing that's fascinating to me is that he went to one of the labs where programmers were playing Pong, which was the first video games. And he was like, oh my God, this is just like LSD. It's another way of achieving consciousness. So this is the crucial point. This is like the punchline to this whole story. So the communes completely fail, right? They're big flops. That utopian experiment dissolves and people dissipate and go back into the, get absorbed into society. But the spirit of the communes doesn't die and it really lives in this part of Northern California. And I think what Stuart Brand and a lot of other people did was they tried to take the ideals of the counterculture, the ideals of the commune, and find ways to replicate them in technology.”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so he spent a lot of time hanging around all these programmers who were obsessed with the whole Earth catalog. Steve Jobs was one person who was obsessed with the whole Earth catalog, but you had this whole crew at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox Park, which is a legendary space for innovation in the birthplace of personal computing. In no small measure because Steve Jobs went there and saw the personal computer that they were building and he totally borrowed from it in order to create the Mac. So what brand was really good at doing was kind of he was very articulate and he could and he was pithy and he was as you say a great marketer and so he saw what was happening in these labs in Silicon Valley and he gave a name to it and so he was the first person to come up with the idea of the personal computer not that people were developing the thing that was the personal computer but he gave it a name and helped kind of”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, kind of expressive of a lot of the spirit of the kind of the back to the land utopianism of the communes. But as we know, the communes failed. But Stuart Brand ended up creating this really strange, interesting book called The Whole Earth Catalog that was recommending tools and books to the people who were living out in these communes. And that book, which celebrated technology as being consistent with the spirit of the counterculture, became kind of a Bible to a lot of people in that generation.”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that it had these two things rubbing up against one another? It was the epicenter of LSD and the grateful dead and was really a birthplace of the nineteen sixties. And it was also the place that gave us Steve Jobs, the internet, personal computing. And I don't think you could have had one thing without the other, that innovation was actually born out of the spirit of the counterculture. So one thing that happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that thousands of people decamped to go live in communes. And Stuart Brand had this idea. He said, well, why don't I just go sell stuff to help these people who are living in the communes? And he was a proponent of the idea that tools were a necessary thing for these communes to survive. And that's actually”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the whole Earth catalog was the creation of a hippie called Stuart Brand. And Stuart Brand was sitting on top of a building in San Francisco one night, and he was just coming down from LSD. And he sat and he stared out across the rooftops, and he just kind of had this revelation. He asked himself, why the Earth is curved? Why haven't I ever seen a picture from outer space of the whole earth, not just part of the Earth, but the whole Earth? Stuart Bragan went around from college, campus to college campus, trying to hector people into creating, to create a movement for a picture of the whole earth. And he became a godfather of the environmental movement in a way because of this. But more importantly, he was hanging out with Ken Keesey in the Mary Pranksters. And one of the totally fascinating things about Silicon Valley.”
2017-12-12 · Invest Like the Best · Franklin Foer – World Without Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.67] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source