Franklin Foer – World Without Mind

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:46)
My guest this week is Franklin Foer, the author of the recently published book, World Without Mind. The topic of our conversation is one that I've been thinking through often this past year. The impact that large technology companies have on our minds and on our behavior. This conversation is only indirectly related to markets, but given that the companies we discuss are now several of the largest companies by market cap in the global stock market, what happens to them likely impacts all of our portfolios, whether we own them or not.
Given that these companies compete for our attention and dollars, they also affect our businesses. As an example, my friend Brent Beshore and his team at Adventures recently wrote a long and incredibly thoughtful piece on how they think about Amazon as a force in the market and how they plan on navigating around such a fierce competitor. Franklin's book, especially the early history, is very thought provoking, so it is no surprise that our conversation was too. Please enjoy our talk on the modern tech giants.
This is going to be an exploration of one of my, I guess one of the most interesting topics that I've been thinking a lot about recently, which is the role that these enormous tech companies play in our lives and the impact that they have on our minds. I love the title of your book and given the really rich history, which is not what I was expecting at the beginning of the book, was really what grabbed my attention. I was hoping we could start there and maybe I'll just pick a spot because it was something that stood out, which is for you to describe what The Whole Earth Catalog is.

**Franklin Foer** (2:08)
Right, so The Whole Earth Catalog was the creation of a hippie called Stewart Brand. Stewart Brand was sitting on top of a building in San Francisco one night and he was just coming down from LSD.
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. Stewart Brand went around from college campus to college campus trying to hector people into creating a movement for a picture of the whole earth. He became a godfather of the environmental movement in a way because of this.
More importantly, he was hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
One of the totally fascinating things about Silicon Valley 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 1960s. It was also the place that gave us Steve Jobs, the internet, personal computing. I don't think you could have had one thing without the other. Innovation was actually born out of the spirit of the counterculture. One thing that happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that thousands of people de-camped 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 were living in the communes? He was a proponent of the idea that tools were a necessary thing for these communes to survive. That's 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. 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.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:26)
So the book itself sold some absurd amount of copies, right?