87 - Dinesh Paliwal, Harman CEO. Alex Jones & Media’s Wild Summer

The conversation with Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal begins at 27:58.

Free speech is getting exhausting. It’s a game of online publishing whack-a-mole as wingnut Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, finally gets suspended from Twitter, only to direct his audience to Tumblr. How should those of us who still love America feel about the amount of crazy that’s going on in the media game these days?

MoviePass is testing its business model … on Solo. Borrowing a page from Darth Vader’s Cloud City book of negotiating tactics, movie theater subscription company MoviePass is altering the terms of your deal – pray they don’t alter it further.

And skinny bundles are the new skinny jeans. In further evidence of a trend I like to call “The Great Rebundling,” digital distributors and content companies are hooking up faster than you can say, “Ban Alex Jones.” The latest to swipe right on each other: Verizon doing a deal for free Apple Music and Samsung doing a deal to pre-load Spotify on all its devices.

Last but not least, for the Fortt Knox one-on-one this week I’ve got Dinesh Paliwal, CEO of Harman International, the high-end audio company Samsung bought for 8 billion dollars last year. He’s talking straight about the future of music formats and the right way to play business hardball with China.

Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.

Joining me on the show today to break down the headlines: I’ve got Ed Lee of the New York Times. Dan McComas, former senior vice president of product at Reddit. And joining me a bit later, Brent Lang, the senior film editor at Variety; and Cherie Hu, columnist at Billboard.

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