YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Walker

lines on the record: 84
first: 2019-03-20
most recent: 2019-03-20
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

“They can find me through UC Ber And also at the Living New Deal, which is a project I direct that is documenting all New Deal public works and showing that we could do it again.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't work well for housing either, by the way. They work great for the upper 50%, but every wealthy country has a massive public housing program except us.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need it for water supply. We need it for health care. And then you can do the other stuff. I don't need the government to produce my cell phones or my cough drops or my orange juice. That's fine. Marca worked great for that, but markets don't do, I think everybody understands markets don't work well for healthcare now”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even a lot of upper techies are these kind of libertarians who say, oh, we can do it better than government. Well, no, you can't. We need government for a lot of the things essentials. We needed to build our highways.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's interesting. You know, there were some talk early in the 2000s about how progressive the techies were. Oh, they're not.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ultimately, they're easily bought. They are easily bought. And the people have to believe that we, the working people, produce everything. And yes, if you come up with a great idea like Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, I'll give you an extra, I'll double your salary. I'll give you a triple, but I won't give you $50 billion for it. That's nuts. And the idea, you know, workers are paid fairly. No, if a worker didn't produce more than they're paid, they'd be fired. That's called surplus. And those guys live on these mountains of surplus.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And guess what? When I was a kid, most of the new migrants to California, and there were millions of them, were white. Now, lo and behold, when our schools go to hell and we penny-pinch our schools, who's in them? People of color. And it's a disgrace. So you have to fight this on racial terms. It is about anti-racism, on class terms. We need our unions rebuilt. We need labor with strength to oppose these kind of corporate oligarchs and bring a little more sanity to the workplace. You know, even in tech, they overwork people massively. And they say, oh, but we're giving you all these goodies and you're going to get rich one day and so on. Well, let me tell you, those people produce a lot of extra goodies for the owners of these companies like Twitter and so on. I always say that.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's expensive. We need the money. We need to rebuild our infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers says we have a backlog of $4.5 trillion of maintenance in America. It's crazy. And you need education. Our public schools are a mess. You know, the teachers are striking because we've been nickel and diming and cutting our public schools everywhere for decades now. California, when I was a kid, California was in the top five public school system. We never even thought about our parents never thought about private schools. We went to public schools. And now, you know, by the end of the neoliberal period, by the early 2000s, we'd fallen to the bottom five in per pupil spending, you know, down with Mississippi and Arkansas and other really famously progressive places.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't do this by persuading the rich to change their ways. I'm sorry. The wealthy, the rulers have never given up their power without a fight. So what you do is what the old Marxists call class struggle. You can call it whatever you want, but it's political mobilization by the mass of people to say enough's enough. We're going to tax you at a higher rate. We believe that that is what society should do, a good society. And you pose it in ethical terms. And, you know, it's not, you know, you never come and say, I'm just going to come steal your money. That's bank robbery. It's about ethics. It's about the interest of the collective society as a whole and the good of the mass of people, whether it's to pay for health. And then you have things you need to do. We need universal health care.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. How do you get it to? That's a good way to put it. That's why they call it the Green New Deal. How do you get people here to get it through their heads? Some people do, like Mark Benioff has been giving a lot of money. A lot of people do chastise other rich people.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. It's what I was talking another very wealthy person the other day, and you were being very petty. And I said, you're so poor, all you have is money. Like, you don't even understand, you know, what's the solution to getting their attitudes change philanthropy? Because, you know, you have Alexandria Ocasio mentioning the marginal tax rate, which most people agree with in this country. Absolutely. Because they're trying to paint that they don't, calling them communists and socialists and everything else. Which is not. How do you get...”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, apparently Giannini and Kaiser built these empires. They were very successful. They never suffered. So like what's the problem? And yet they didn't build up this kind of obscene wealth.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take somebody like APG Anini, Bank of America founder, whether you like him or not, he built the world's biggest bank. He lived in a modest home down in Atherton or Hillsborough. Hillsboro, never he was never had massive mountains of money. He gave a little philanthropy to UC to build an agricultural building and so on. Henry Kaiser, probably the most important industrialist on earth around World War II. He was here, headquartered in Oakland. He lived in a ranch house in Lafayette. You know, and he never, there's no huge Kaiser Foundation. It's the medical foundation. That's what he put his wealth into, was service, creating the greatest HMO in America to provide health care for working people.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that in smaller and small. And that's what we've seen happen. We have plenty of evidence of that. And we also have evidence that when we corporations and the rich at a high average rate from the 30s through the 70s, we got greater equality. The rich were still, it's not like”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the others look, they develop this ideology when they're sort of the outsiders and they're the little guys. And they say, yeah, of course, we're doing this great stuff. We need to be rewarded. Okay, that's fine when you're a bunch of little guys. When you become the biggest corporate monopolist on earth, the most valuable corporations on earth, you can no longer say that. When you're multibillion,”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Poor people. Hopefully, they're not all as kind of wacko as Elon Musk wanting to go to Mars and so on. But a lot of them are.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. I think that somehow I think a lot of them don't think that. I think a lot of them are like when you say that to them, they're like, whoa, like you're just going to end up being one of those sort of dyspopian movies where you live in the clouds and the poor people live in them.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How can you change that attitude? Because the attitude among those who have that money is like, first of all, I earned it, I made it, which is fair. You know, they got, they were billionaires because we thought of something. Secondly, there's the go-go build, like move fast, break things. It's okay if we take as much as we can. How do you get through to them? One of the things I said to someone the other day, we've got to like figure out a way to deal with inequality and pay for it, or else you're just going to have to armor plate your Tesla. Like that's the only, that's what you're going to have the choices.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, thank you. Thank you. I like to believe I'm a wordsmith at times. But the Bay Area, what we don't admit, I think, is that the Bay Area is one, if not the greatest generator of inequality in the world. That is, enrichment at the top. And because our average income is very high, our wages tend to be behind, we go, oh, aren't we wonderful? But in fact, we're producing obscene riches at the top that need to be redistributed. We can't let this go on.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think the darkest part is inequality. I think we all know about the rise of inequality. A lot of it, of course, we don't know until some French economists taught us how ironic that our economics profession, not only can it not predict the next recession, it has paid no attention to inequality until Emmanuel Science at Berkeley and Pequetti. From France started doing these fantastic studies of wealth. So we now all know, we feel and we experience this massive increase in inequality. And I think it's grotesque and it's a threat to democracy and it's a threat to the kind of society we all want to live.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. The thing about this kind of technology as opposed to cars, you know, with cars you can have trucks and jeeps and a few other things, you know, maybe army vehicles and so on. But with this technology, it is highly varied. So it connects into a lot of things. So it gives you a certain kind of diversity. In addition, of course, the Bay Area has lots of other things going on. It's got biotech, for example. It's got huge financial and business services sectors, food sectors. So you never quite know what the next single be. And the reason big cities, one of the reasons big cities survive better than little towns is they're not as specialized. So we will suffer some losses in the future as tech changes and maybe decentralizes much more than it has now.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you have huge masses of workers doing kind of info tech around, say, finance and fashion and other things, corporate management in New York. Huge sectors in LA, in Austin, in London and so on. Out of that is likely to come the next great innovation. It's not necessarily going to be us because this thing is so dispersed. And if there's one thing we know, and I wrote about this 30 years ago about industrial technology is it does shift. There will be these apical shifts.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, okay. There can be a terrible problem. But one problem, one thing that won't happen, really, is that cost, high. High costs are produced by the very success of the place. And there's a simple view that high costs will kill the goose, the lace of golden egg, and that's never true. What is happening is that the place is so successful. And tech that it's spilling over. So Google has huge offices in New York and Austin and so on. They've, of course, already distributed production to East Asia, the booming areas of East Asia, the boom in Shenzhen, China, in Guangdong had a lot to do with tech companies producing there. But the other thing is that the tech sector, what we call tech, that is information technology, is so ubiquitous now.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what you just people have looked at this by the 1970s and 80s, you see the corporations had simply lost touch with developments of technology elsewhere like Japanese car manufacturing. And they were so used to being sort of fat and happy that they'd really lost interest in that kind of lean and hungry competition and innovation. So we're going to see some of that now with our big companies like Google and Facebook and so on. So far they've been saved by the fact we have so many startups that what they do is gobble up the startups that will work for them. So that keeps innovation kind of inside. They absorb it like an amoeba in a way. Absorbing mitochondria from other supercelled organisms or bacteria or something.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's no easy answer. There's no agreed upon answer to that. Undoubtedly, success breeds its own failures eventually. That's a due way. The corporations get too fat. We saw that with American, you know, United States dominated the world economy in the post-war era. We had two-thirds of the manufacturing coming out of the Second World War. We had the most advanced corporations, most advanced corporate organization, most advanced Fordist production systems, and so on.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what about solving all these areas of people? But then you will see another growth spurt because this is still the center of innovation. But how does that end? How do cities become less innovative? Is it because they get too rich or too successful? Or there's all kinds of studies on what causes the innovation cycles to end.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Job growth peaking and the stock market's starting to sag, you know, you're heading into a recession. So that's going to happen. Now how bad it's going to be is another question. It's not going to be like the Great Recession. The financial games are not as severe this time. However, we never know how much financial finagling there's been until after it collapses and how much it is attached to us. You know, in the 1990s, the dot-com bubble, we were responsible. Same thing when the housing boom went away in 2007-8 California was just hit, especially our interior areas. So we'll have to see, but it isn't going to be pretty, let's put it that way. It's never pretty when it goes down after a boom of this magnitude.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we'll start with the fact that it's inevitable that there'll be a recession. It was actually going to come in 2017 and 2018. But when Trump was elected and the Republicans had their majorities, they passed this huge tax cut. That is a classic Keynesian tactic, which Republicans always denounce if Democrats try to do it. Oh, you can't do stimulus. But they did a massive stimulus. The economy surged, especially stock prices and the profits went going into the banks for the big corporations. But that's passed, and that blip is passed. And now the economy is sagging. The stock market had a very serious troubles, and late in the year 2018. And I think we're going to see it. Whenever you see the job figures peaking,”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, Silicon Valley, that's sort of halfway to Los Angeles, isn't it? And the Central Valley, nobody here thinks about that at all. And yet it's part of the Bay Area as a whole. You know, this is the fourth biggest city in the country. It is the richest city per capita in the world. This is unbelievable measure of success. We grew in this boom by about 50% in GDP. I mean, that's astonishing. It's an astonishing. You know, people go on, oh, China, you know, the growth. No, we're the China of the 2010s, the Beijing of the 2010s. No wonder it looks like we're being turned topsy-turvy. So people need to appreciate how important, how successful, how wealthy this place is, and at the same time, what problems, rapid growth and wealth and inequality and so on.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, gone is obviously a slang for a city that's disappearing. But it's also gone in the 50s, also slang. Oh, that's a really gone tune, man. So it could be both good and bad. And I think what I'm trying to capture in this book is The Good and the Bad. And I often sound kind of like a siren of negativity here, but people want to hear the reasons for a lot of the problems they're experiencing because they look around them and they go, what the heck is going on here? And I try to explain that in a logical, rational, empirical, defended way and so on. At the same time, one of the purposes of the book was to tell people in the Bay Area and people beyond how important this place is. A lot of people here don't realize. You know, they don't realize how big it is. If they live in San Francisco,”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's taken from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti back written in 1951 that I just love. I've always loved and I always wanted to use that name.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we go, oh gosh, we have all these homeless people. Well, you know, it doesn't have to be that way because it wasn't that way to a certain point.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that would do a lot. And now we have prop C, and that's going to help, but we need even more. You have to remember that for 50 years, we've abandoned money for public housing at the federal and state levels. Public everything. You know, when I was, I have to say this. When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and 60s, there was no such thing as homelessness. My parents would talk about hobos and bums of the 1920s and 30s, especially in the Depression. You had all these guys riding the rails and so on because of mass unemployment. Well, what do we have now? It all came back with the neoliberals and the cuts and public spending, public programs, the loss of low-income housing, as we squeezed them out and had an earthquake or two that didn't help.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, if the tech companies and all those well to do techies would like to pay more taxes, we could have more street cleaners. And we should. I mean, I absolutely agree with you. It's disgrace. Our homeless treatment of homeless is a disgrace, a moral, it's a moral pustule on American society and a local society. Although the city of San Francisco is trying, it's done a lot. It's been a lot of money on homelessness and it's a really hard issue. It's not a simple thing. And people sometimes treat it as simple, but mostly you need more money.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the homelessness has to do with a number of causes, and I'm not an expert on homelessness. I'm not going to go there, but I will say that the housing crisis has squeezed more people out on the streets or living in their cars. There's a lot of them living in their cars who are even employed in regular jobs in Silicon Valley. And the burbs, you get more of that because people can kind of escape in their cars. In San Francisco, it's often, you know, they're out on the streets. So there is that, and there's also problems of our terrible abandonment of health care and care for the mentally disabled and so on and our treatment of drugs and so on. So all that goes into that street problem. I will oppose your view that there's a spike in crime because by and large, crime has been going down.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you got this huge movement. At the same time, you have enormous spikes in crime, homelessness, drugs in San Francisco. The streetscape in San Francisco has changed dramatically in the last three years. While on the streetscape is really quite dire. So, how does that happen?”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's just not true. You've got to look at both sides of the equation. I mean, it's simple economics. And yet, the economists constantly come out and say, well, you just build more, and that's so simple. They don't understand housing. They don't understand neighborhood effects. They don't understand communities and jurisdictions and the whole politics of the urban field, which makes that very difficult under all circumstances and even worse when you've got a huge boom.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lower class apartments. We don't hear too much about those generally because we take for granted that the rich are going to do that and they have a lot of political clout. What's surprising to people is, okay, you're going to make transit development in the mission district or in MacArthur station in Oakland and people suddenly are very upset because it's going to transform their neighborhood. Then we hear everything about it. Oh my God, how can they oppose us? We need more housing, so on, so and so there is that. But by and large, the main problem I will reiterate is on the demand side, not on the supply side. And yet conventional wisdom has it all being a shortage of supply due to opposition by NIMBYs.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, urban geographers, neighborhood effects are fundamental. What goes on in one side of your neighborhood, there's going to be a fairly wide area in your little town in these small suburban towns like Crupertino or Orinda or Walnut Creek will affect everything there. And these places have precisely been carved up to secure protected environments, protected communities for the well-to-do in most cases, and then the rest is left to the working people. Now, there are real problems of exclusivity, exclusive towns like Palo Alto and Arinda, Natherton, who protect a very low-rise environment and do not want any new development, certainly not.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, of course, in a period of very rapid change, you didn't expect a lot of people get up on their hind legs and say, wait, my neighborhood has been totally transformed. I'm losing my housing. My friends have been pushed out. And they oppose new developments because what else can they do? They don't have the power of taxation. That's the Republican Congress that gave away $2 trillion to the rich in the latest round of tax cuts. They've done that now four times, going back to Reagan. So helping the people at top get richer, equality grow, inequality grow. So what are people at the local level going to do? One of the things that one of the few powers they have is to oppose new developments because they know when you get a new development, it's going to go almost surely to the top 20% and it's going to change the neighborhood. As all geographers”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“1950s when we had a period of very dramatic Because of the impact of the Great Depression, which wiped out a lot of the wealth of the rich, and then high taxes because of the New Deal, and then labor organizing helped by the New Deal's labor laws. So suddenly the top and the bottom move closer together. And surprise, surprise, you had mass building for little houses, for your average blokes, your average folks.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. I mean, it's the working people, the bottom 75, 80%, which is basically the working classes, get shoved out because they can't pay the high rents in the middle. And there's a lot of dissatisfaction with that. There's literally hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced from the West Bay. And that's because partly because of the boom, but it's partly because of inequality. You have incredible enrichment at the top. Those people have the money to bid for housing. And even when developers build housing, and they are building a lot of apartments these days, those go to the top 20% because developers are in it for the profit. So they're going to build, and there's plenty of demand at the top. So just to satisfy that demand. And the only time we got, for example, mass building of low-income housing or working class housing,”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out in the Central Valley, down in Hollister, all the way up in Lake County is unbelievable. And the result, because they've been displaced from the center. So there's housing being built at the edge, there's housing being built in the middle, it's being built all around, but it's very hard to do it fast enough because housing's a very strange product. You can't just up the production of housing the way you can of juice bars or eyeglasses or something small like that. It takes a lot of time. You have this spatial problem of how do you find, you have to find plots, buy up the plots, then you have to get the zoning permission, make sure you've got all that. Then you have to get your architects. Then you have to get your tenants. Then you have to get your contractors. And they're all in a boom. They're all busy. So they get more expensive. And the whole thing, you know, there's really a bottleneck effect.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's true and false. Okay, tell me. It's true in a narrow sense. You've got to remember that the bear also sprawls out. So the Bay Area as a whole, the Metropolitan area, which is now eight and a half million 12 counties, goes 100 miles in three directions, not into the ocean, obviously. And people are commuting from...”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's not enough housing, but there can't be in a very rapid boom. And this is well known from studies of housing booms elsewhere and over history is that when it takes off, there's a real time lag before building can resume.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. And so the West Base gets the worst of this, but the whole Bay Area just has this massive surge of demand for housing. And it can't keep up. And we can't possibly build stuff fast enough for that. So housing prices shoot up.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, probably almost a half a million have come in in this boom. So that's a lot of people. Some of them bring families. They're not all young techies. Because when there's a boom like this, the opportunity, people migrate, most migration is for jobs. It's not to try and get welfare payments or something for jobs. And so when the Bay Area booms, people come surging in. So I've had a huge surge of people. But more than that, a huge surge of money. The companies are making massive amounts of money. There's a lot of outside capital pouring in. So you have more money than you, I mean, money's literally burning holes in the pockets.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you realize it's actually looking back at you and they're taking all the information about you and sharing it and spreading it and giving it to the NSA and so on. So all of a sudden you have a series of really big problems in the tech world itself. Then in addition, what people in the Bay Area understand is the enrichment and the rapid boom have created this unbelievable urban upheaval, which is a combination of massive building, a massive displacement, new people showing up, and the whole landscape the city changes. But the worst, of course, is the housing crisis.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think in the Bay Area, we may have realized it sooner because we're more tech savvy, but also we have to live with it. So on the one hand, you have, you realize that all these little startups that are so exciting have turned into giant corporate bulldogs, you know, that are no different than the old big three car makers or the big railroad companies in the 19th century. You're going, wow, that's not exactly what I imagine. Then you start discovering, you know, you get the tweeter-in-chief and the misuse of these technologies for harassment, bullying. It's kind of mad. Openness seems great until you get people massively harassed because of something they say and everybody descends on Twitter or Facebook to attack them. You think that you're looking out at the world and getting all this information through Google?”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything people get very enthusiastic about everything from Facebook to ride sharing to tweeting to whatever. And it takes a while as these things always do for society to wake up to the downside.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT