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

“Yeah, it takes off and looks like the brave new world and we've revolutionized communications and everything looks just fine.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Richard Walker. He's a professor emeritus at Berkeley. He studies human economic and urban geography as well as the history of California. His new book is called Pictures of a Gone City, Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area. All right, as the 2010s went, everything looked great. Everything looked great.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the platforms were there even though we hadn't realized how much they were going to change the world. And in 2010s, that's when it happened. And it literally changes the world. I mean, we live in the world, the tech world that these guys develop for better or worse. All right.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think both people here in the world weren't paying that much attention in the 2000s because the big news then was the financial bubble and the housing bubble, which, by the way, was actually centered in the world on California. People don't know that. And then the huge collapse of Great Recession. But this economy pulled out of the Great Recession faster than any place in the United States and probably anywhere in the world around 2010. It just started shooting up because the groundwork had been laid, had Facebook, you had smartphones, you had Google, and boom. And the great thing about the technology of our time, the positive, is a lot of new things can be developed on the basis of these apps. That is a little bit of software goes a long way once you have these platforms.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it doesn't matter. Really, it didn't. It didn't get going quite a lot. Yeah, it takes off in the 2000s, in the 2000s. That's right. Paint the picture, and then I'm going to talk about the book that you've written. So then it's a really go-go period. It's a crazy go-go period. It was a crazy go-go period. There was a little bit of a slowdown and then”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Played with an 80s, but they couldn't quite do it, it wasn't quite small. So fast forward today, lots of companies then suddenly appear, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, which was nine, people don't realize how late Google got to the game here was 99 when it started when it started.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the smartphones, the smartphones were really. But you know, the iPod, when do they come out with that maybe 2001 or 2? It's very early. Because a lot of the technology that went into smartphones was already played with in the 80s and 90s, but they couldn't quite do it. It wasn't quite small. You know, remember the chips are getting smaller and smaller. So you could finally do it. And then Apple, of course, a certain brilliance of Steve Jobs image. ability to imagine what it should look like and how it would work.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And then there were the media, you know, like red herring and so on that were pushing the sort of ideology of the internet. And they were right in one sense. This was going to revolutionize the world. They were about 10, 20 years ahead of time.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And then Berners Lee comes up with the idea of the World Wide Web, but they're already using an internet and it's supported by the Defense Department, as people now should know. But here we had more of the firms playing with this, more of the little computers, more So, this was the most densely internet wired place on earth by the 90s. And then it also had this culture, and a whole culture developed around the use of this, a kind of utopian view developed at the well through Craigslist, through other kinds of early kind of media and practice.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Post war Cold War came together, as Fred Turner's wonderful book, Annalise Saxinian talking about why Silicon Valley outpaced Boston and Route 128. She wrote in the 90s and how it had to do with this much more open social environment. Sharing live and let live you can fail and come back, whereas Boston was a much more corporate, a little more uptight. Right.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, they understand that once you build an agglomeration like this, there is a social order that goes with it. That is, people understand the industry, they are sympathetic to the industry, they're knowledgeable in the industry, you have politicians and government people and other sectors and organizations who are supportive of the industry and all that counts. The one thing so often missed is the sort of social order of California, which is very open, very kind of, you know, we like to say laid back and so on. And that actually counts. And there are some very good work done on the post-World War II part of this story about how the sort of counterculture combined with the cyber culture of”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, you've got the specialists, like even lawyers, VCs, marketers, the producers of the silicon, the producers of the machinery to etch the silicon chips, and so on. And so now, of course, it's all apps and all the interaction there. So it changes over time, but it's the same principle about interaction. Now, the other thing you're trying to get at, which I think is really important, and the economic geographers often miss entirely, is the social context.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's two things when you get these big concentrations of an industrial, specialized industrial district. And economic geographers, geographical economists have done plenty of work on this to show that the more firms you amass, bigger labor pool, the more specializations, the way they feed into each other becomes, the total becomes more than the sum of the parts. You get what are called external economies of agglomeration. And once this gets going, it's a virtuous spiral that's very hard to stop or break up. And Silicon Valley got a very early start and has outrun every other place.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of all places Was there anything about this geography that would attract people? I mean, obviously, there's the cultural issues during the early computer, you know, all the way people are changing their lifestyles and things like that. But was there anything about California or this area of California that mattered?”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly in Silicon Valley, people don't know that Fleeta Forest was in Palo Alto, the Lytton brothers were in San Carlos. There were some other things like the loudspeaker was invented in Napa of all places and the TV, what's his name, invented the TV or co-invented it in San Francisco. So it was a little more diffused then because it wasn't a fundamental technology. As time went on, it concentrated more. Was there anything about this GR?”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not at all. You know, it's one after another. But it was all in the same getting back to geography. It was all in the same geography around Palo Alto, around Berkeley, around different universities.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From Intel and so on. I mean, I don't know if I'm boring. No, not at all. But, you know, one after another. The economy goes down in the early 70s, mid-70s, and then it comes back again with this massive profusion of these specialized chips, which make it possible to make small computers finally, the personal computer in the 80s, local area networks, distributed networks, which have chips that communicate along the, well, at that time, telephonic lines, but now, of course, it's all laser lines and glad. And it was all in the same way.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, everybody thinks it's in the East Coast or somewhere else. And then the 20s, they could mass produce tubes. And that's when you get the mass radio boom, the one that created the FC. Eventually the New Deal responds with the FCC. Roosevelt is our first radio president. Then in the late 30s and through World War II, it was these giant specialized tubes for the war, for warfare, radar and sonar. That's how Hewlett Packard made their money originally. Then in the 50s, you get... The silicon chip, and that leads a new kind of digital miniaturized electronics. And then you've got the integrated circuit in the 60s.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, okay. In the early 20th century, it was tubes. And the guy who invented the tube perfected the vacuum tube was Lee de Forest. And he moves to Palo Alto in 1908. He's hired by Federal Telegraph. And there's quite an important boom in radio technology then, which then gets picked up by for ship-to-shore transmission, by the Navy, and for commercial radio. People don't know that San Jose actually had the first commercial radio station in the country.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, we had quite a boom in tech in the 50s, again in the 70s, and again in the 80s and 90s, pretty much every decade. So can you describe?”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, obviously. I mean, I think we use this word technology to describe the latest and greatest. So right now it's digital technology. Computers and smartphones. But actually what happens is technology, the technical base of industry and capitalism has been revolutionized again and again and again going back at least 200 years. And that's a systematic process of which this is just the latest phase. And so yeah, railroads were high tech in their day. Machining was high tech in its day. Right. The automobile and so on and so forth”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. And by, you know, in the original gold rush, you had about five years of panning. But after that, it's all deep mining, gold, silver.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, and the Bay Area revolutionized mining. Mining had not been industrialized until the California gold rush. And a lot of the equipment and the mining, the technology of the engineering and so on was developed here. Tutra was one of the guys. Yeah, one of the guys. With his tunnel and Comstock Load. Right. But people forget a lot of the more humble stuff, you know, Union Ironworks. And handy an worksy iron works and others making the machinery to dig, to grind, to process and so on, the ore coming out of those mines. Which was the first.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go through a few of the tech booms. Let's go. I mean, obviously the one people know, but as I said, was the gold brush. But talk about, and that was a tech boom in a lot of ways, if you think about it, mining is tech.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And, you know, we tend to think that mining booms produce these mining towns like Virginia City that come and go. What we don't understand so well is that even a major city, a huge metropolis, can be hit by that kind of a gold rush, boom, a silicon rush in this case, which is equally amazing in terms of the number of people it brings in, the transformation of the landscape, and also sometimes how fast it goes away. Like in the 1990s when we had the dot-com boom, then it collapsed. And literally hundreds of thousands of people moved out. The companies collapsed. Their stock values collapsed by 90%, many of them. And the Bay Area was devastated.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there is that. The one thing that is absolutely constant is the ups and downs, the sort of boom and bust. And whenever we're in a boom, we forget about the bus. Absolutely. And we just had an enormous one in which California was central in the 2000s. And then we got this amazing gloom. And this was one of the greatest in the history of the Bay Area, maybe the greatest. And we're all surprised that this happens. Right.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And changes and affections. I just had Shashana Zuboff from who written surveillance capitalism talking about. Impact of that and the changes in how we look at capitalism are. I think she's called capitalism a chicken and it can have take any taste depending on the kind of capitalism.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's absolutely something to remember there have been many tech booms going back a century, actually. And many urban booms in the Bay, going back a century and a half. And we have to see urban growth that way because it can be extremely fast, extremely unnerving, extremely transformative within even a decade, as we've seen. Because that's the way capitalism works.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. I have for about 30 years. At least I've done general economic geography, but a lot of my work is on California. I've done history of California agribusiness over 150 years. I've done an atlas, a social atlas of California. I've done work on the environmental movement and how central it is here, how central our environmental movement is to the world. And I've done a lot of work on the Bay Area. I led field classes for years, taught classes for years. So I know the Bay Area pretty well. And I'd been meaning, I've written a lot of historical essays and been meaning to a book on the Bay Area. And then when this last tech boom hit in the 2010s, I thought I should do a book about math.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in the Bay Area, actually, but I went away for graduate school and came back to teach. In the geography department in Berkeley. And again, I kind of backed into geography because geography is not a field that's well known in America. It's very popular in Britain or Canada, but not here. So it's a lot of us who get into it sort of stumble into it. But it turned out to be a wonderful home where you were free to study a lot of interesting things, say a lot of interesting, and maybe controversial things. And so I was there at Berkeley for almost 40 years.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, nervous study cities and how they work. So I did a lot of work on economic geography. So why, for instance, an industry like tech is so concentrated in certain places? Why certain places specialize? How they grow, how they decline, and so on. Also studies things like housing and its relationship to employment, OOM and bust and urban growth. And urban effects, city effects on the environment, things like that. So it's a wide range of things.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not allowed a long story. I started in economics and I couldn't stand orthodox economics. So then I went over backed into geography as a sort of environmental geographer. But along the way, became an urbanist as well”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about your background. I want to get into the book because the issues around San Francisco have never been worse. I think I've lived here for 10, 15, maybe 20 years actually. And the change has been really dramatic in terms of this beautiful, beautiful city has changed really for the worse, I think, for most people. And I want to get to the heart of what that means. But why don't you give me some history of you? What have you, how did you get to doing studying urban geography?”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 or 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 GBR is busy. C terms. Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as the one person posting disgusting photos of San Francisco on Instagram, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Rico Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Richard Walker, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who studies human, economic, and urban geography, as well as the history of California. He's the author of several books, and his most recent one is called Pictures of a Gone City, Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's a very important topic for people who live here, and it's really gotten quite problematic for those who live here. Welcome to Rico Decode Richard.”
2019-03-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Richard Walker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT