Nick Gillsepie, editor-in-chief of Reason says: "I thought you might be interested in our interview with Chris Anderson, which is now online."
Among the highlights:
- Anderson says he was a "complete fuck-up" who graduated high school late
and flunked out of the University of Maryland with "a 0.0 G.P.A."- Calls himself a "small 'l' libertarian" who nonetheless voted for Al Gore
in 2000: "But I'm not proud of this. I wish the system would put forward
politicians that I could vote for."- Says being a parent of four young children "has made me a better boss."
- Dismisses the Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes' criticism of The Long
Tail: "I struggled a little bit with some of those statistics in my first
week of researching this, too, but fortunately, I had time to actually do
the math."- Takes on social theorists such as Paradox of Choice author Barry Schwartz
who fear that too much choice is paralyzing: "The answer to the paradox of
choice is help."- Talks about his musical past in a band called R.E.M., which lost a Battle
of the Bands to the famous band of the same name.- Discusses his proudest achievement at Wired: "What I'm most proud of is
that we made our very optimistic message about how technology can change
the world [matter again] after many people had written that off after the
dot-com bust. I'm very proud that we stuck to our mission and that that
message resonates [again]. I don't think we caused it to resonate, but when
the world recognized what sort of felt obvious to those of us who live in
this world, I was very proud that we were still leading that."
