YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Barzun

lines on the record: 64
first: 2021-08-03
most recent: 2021-08-03
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

“Dhawk, he's still alive. I haven't met him. I wish I had, and I sent him a note thanking him for his story. He wrote a beautiful autobiography called From Many One, which I encourage people to read. And it's funny, he hated the word credit card because credit he didn't want people to go into debt. And so as you tell the story of what became Visa, it's hard now with 20% APR, right? It's so loaded in so many people's lives who are burdened with credit card debt. But his idea was basically electronic money. And what he got to do was a great example of pyramids versus constellations. The old system was big banks like Bank of America on the West Coast, Citigroup, and others on the East Coast. They would get all the little banks. And he worked, he was a mid-level manager at a mid-tier bank, and he was middle-aged, right? And they would force all the...”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark Carney, I think, in his great new book, I don't know if you had a chance to read that, but wonderful book called Values talks about that. I said, well, what is going on between just today, between the butcher, the baker, the brewer, and you, and your dinner, and who you're having to dinner and why you're having them to dinner? And it seems to me it is pretty obvious that it isn't total dependence on someone else's charity, nor is it total independence. What is happening every day in the marketplace, literally buying bread, beer, is interdependence. That word is kind of loaded, some people love it, some people really don't like it, but that is what is going on, has been going on. And there are habits around it and practices around it that these leaders can show. And I think we can redevelop these habits.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great leaders I try to talk about in the book, and we'll get to this later, have realized that And it sounds sort of strange, but pure selfishness. But, and this is time to, it is not like what we need, these leaders, I think, show us, and in some cases tell us, the opposite of selfishness isn't selflessness, right? And I thought Kamal, all the work you've done in economics covering it at the highest levels, there's that famous Adam Smith, which I will paraphrase, right? You do not rely on the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, the brewer, for your dinner. You do not rely on them being selfless. And we have interpreted that over 200 plus years as, oh, I know, it's them being selfish that adds up invisible hand and all that.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was and I found myself as a young person in their 20s involved in early commercial internet or old world wide web businesses. There was that sort of techno-optimism. Which promised something in 1989 was that year, I think the essay, his essay came out, and it was, you know, the Berlin Wall goes down, the World Wide Web goes up. So it's this inflection point, this hinge of history. Which way are we going to do? The pyramid maybe goes away. It felt like a jump ball to use the basketball term. But I think as we look back upon that time, and I quote Sherry Turkle from MIT, who wrote a book, wrote a book recently called Alone Together, right? Which gets it that weird thing of we've used technology to become free from hassles, free from, free from. And it just leads to alienation and loneliness too often. And so”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Freedom together, not some wishy compromise, half free, half together. Freedom through and with one another. That is the best American idea. It's not limited to America. That's democracies in general. Offer, if we're willing to work for it, and if we haven't lost the habits of it, how we can be free together.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone gets this right. The together is the Democrat and the freedom is the Republican. And what we've seen in COVID has brought this into stark relief in both countries, both your country and my country. The freedom crowd over my adult lifetime has taken that to the extreme, which is freedom from freedom from just leave me alone. The Together Crowd has gone to its extreme of We're all in this together, sometimes they'll talk about herd immunity as if we're cattle. And not me, us, pure collective. And I think that freedom from one another and total togetherness are deeply unsatisfying for what we need and what we actually want. And what we need and want is freedom together.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First in the Cold War and it has sort of remained, I think, too much at the front of our minds in life, in foreign policy, in business. And it has a role and a place, and we can talk about that. There is a place for the pyramid mindset. It just shouldn't be at the front of our minds. And it crowds out this instinct to look at others like stars and to build big things together. I mean, if you Another way to think about it, you think in our adult lifetimes, and I think this plays out in the UK, but obviously I can think of it more in America. But if you think about whether this would work, Tory labor. If there were just two cars in a parking lot, identical cars, and you could name the game is for viewers of the Zoom to guess which is the Democrats car, which is the Republicans. They only have one bumper sticker, one word on each bumper sticker. Car number one says freedom. Car number two says together.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think you've hit on the tension. I think it started and you go back to that logo, they never even bothered printing into metal, casting into metal. They never used the back of our great seal, which is what we call the logo, for 150 years after they created it until the depths of the financial depression in the 1930s, where FDR had seen the government sort of powerless to do anything about it. And he saw the very powerful big business that had consolidated during the previous decades. So he decided to fight consolidated power with consolidated power. He puts the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill, and he didn't do it, obviously, intentionally. Well, he did it very intentionally. In fact, they put the front of the logo first on the dollar. And we have in the book, as you could see, he approves the new dollar bill, but he insists that the pyramid come first. And we put it first in the depression, first in the Second World War.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bottom up, if you think about it, Kamal forces you into one of two roles. Either you are looking at those around you as beneath you, or you're looking at yourself as beneath someone else, neither of which I think is a very helpful or empowering way to get big things done together”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One from many how you can achieve unity without demanding uniformity, how you can get the best of diversity without succumbing to division. And this, as I argue, is the consolation is a good image to keep in mind. You can be yourself, a star, but fit into something much bigger than you by making new connections to those around you, other stars. And I contrast that, as you said, with the pyramid. Now, I think everyone on this Zoom, we know the world of the pyramid. This is, I think, our default setting. This is the world of up, down, in out, ranking, rating, sifting, sorting. It's the world of top-down. But interestingly, it's also the world of bottom up. Bottom up sounds better at first if you've”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is interdependence. And we don't celebrate interdependence day in America, but we could and we should, I think. And obviously we have fallen short of that ideal at the beginning when we made those documents and ever since. But it is a great idea. How you can be”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And on the dollar bill, it's all quite geometric, but the original one that they approved was asymmetrical stars, big stars, little stars, kind of disorganized, but radiating light behind them. And this was a very practical thing for them. This is how they thought you should think about how the newly independent states would choose to work together in the United States, how the United States as a country would choose to work and engage with other countries around the world, or even more small, sort of how you as a citizen would engage in the community around you. And it is basically a symbol for what I argue in the book is a symbol for interdependence. And I think it is the best idea America has ever had that we celebrate Independence Day, right? But any band of revolutionaries can declare independence. The hard part is figuring out what to do after that.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the tricky thing is it took longer to design that logo you just showed. It was a two sided logo than it did to win the war. And we don't have time to get into the whole bit. But for the back of the logo, they settled on that pyramid, which symbolized for them strength and durability of consolidated power. That's for the back. Now, for the front, they had the eagle, and this all took a while, but they had the eagle with olive branches representing peace and arrows representing war, and then the shield. But there was a formula for these things back then, a formula that you guys, I think, developed. And the front of the logo needed a motto. And so it was the Latin Epluribus unum from many one. And then they needed a crest. Now the crest was supposed to serve as the essence of the overall thing. This took a while, but they settled on what they called the radiant constellation.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, and thank you for having me, and hello, everybody. I wish I was there in person on Freedom Day. Well, the story starts on July 4th, 1776, which, talking to a British audience is always a little tricky. I mean, you talked about meeting at a garden party in our backyard, as we call it, and we had to throw like we do in embassies all over the world, a July 4th party. Potentially tricky with you lot because, you know, it was independence from you all. And so a British friend joke to me for my first July Fourth Party in London. He's like, oh no, don't worry. We celebrate that too. We call it Thanksgiving, which I thought was kind of clever. But back to the story. So on July 4th, 1776, in Philadelphia, turns out there were two declarations made that day, the famous one, but the second one was we need a logo. Like I'm sure your new news venture and you had that moment. You wanted a new logo for this new news endeavor. And so they did.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source