Adam Conover
speaker
142 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Adam Conover’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, they fund all those startups that make James Bond's little gadgets.
He's doing well. I'm 42 and I haven't like murdered anybody. Haven't murdered dozens of SS men. I haven't killed any mayors, I haven't taken over the scientific publishing of two entire nations yet.
Like the last generation was just stronger and better, you know.
It's because of the cell phone, you know?
This is settlers of Catan logic.
Every time we eat a Currywurst, you think of Maxwell and his quest to take over all of publishing.
Yeah, these guys sound awesome. They fucking are at this point. And they're arbitraging pork bellies instead of money. By the way...
Maybe the first clue that they're not as smart as we think they are, that they were like, hey, we could, you know what would be better than being paid in money, being paid in pork bellies, receiving the pork bellies and then having to travel around Europe reselling your rancid pork bellies for Austrian money? Austrian money can't be great.
Just going around the open mics handing out $5 bills.
And this is not like a huge part of the budget of any one university anyway. So he could charge an arm and a leg, but it's just going to be some... Ah, the library has to pay for a little bit of it. It doesn't cost them as much as their mortgage.
Yeah, because it's, oh, you mean scientific knowledge, the birthright of mankind? That our tax is paid for? In fact, the only permanent and important thing humanity does on the entire planet to discover how the universe around us works? Yeah, that should probably be a free public resource.
I also have to say, like, there's been a lot of talk in the last 20 years about, you know, for-profit journals and, you know, all the problems in scientific publishing. I always thought that that profit motive was relatively recent. I didn't realize it was rapacious, even at the dawn of this shit.
And presumably somebody could have started a version of academic publishing that didn't work this way. That was like, you know, a lot of people say like, what if Jimmy Wales had not started Wikipedia, right? We would have maybe had a different business model. There could have been a business model that went a better way.
Oh, 100 Prozent. Nein, ich meine, das ist ein guter Beispiel.
Wenn das nicht existierte, könnte etwas Schlechtes sein. Es könnte eine bessere Version des wissenschaftlichen Publikums sein.
Yes, yes, of course. If I was a scientist, I'd be like, this guy is so great. He's treating me the way I deserve to be treated. Of course. I mean, I study ants, but of course I should go on a free, all expenses paid trip of Europe.
That's an incredible summary of how it works. And like peer review, you know, we're taught in college anyway, that this is a good thing. The fact that it's free labor is, Und nicht nur Freilabor für die Wissenschaft, sondern Freilabor für die Journalisten selbst. Es fragt sich die Frage, was genau der Publisher überhaupt tut, außer... Fuck all. ... auf die Prüfungspresse zu starten. Fuck all.
Das ist die einfachste Part. Yes. Like fucking Random House does that shit. Like, what is the... What is the power that these companies have? Like, why wouldn't a university system just start their own journal and do this themselves?
Verdammt, du hast mich verrückt. Das ist das, was ich normalerweise in Segmen mache.
It's also such a classic example of rent-seeking, as economists call it. Because, again, the government is funding it. The journals are making money off of it. Like, Maxwell made so much money that his daughter is an heiress. Billions. Billions. And so they are profiting off of it, but they do not put money back into the system. Absolutely not.
Showing 21–40 of 142 · page 2 of 8
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