that ica havoc. they're an invase a lot of the species we think of as being here, weurbrought. and it's an interesting the climate is changing to the extent where we're not invasive or try to go back to the original species. that's a more complicated conversation. you so much, lila it was really a treat talking to you. jy

kara swisher ighted to be here with you. it's a real honor to talk about fern book, which you we have to i think for the c-span audience, webook in context. can you give us can you give us th book is an expression actually mean girls is out now, 'ich isbook you write things you really think about people and you're not.re supposed to see it. and of course, that's the whole premise of that movie and you have fun with it and it's sort of gossipy and mean a little bit, but funny and so i decided that's what i was doing in my memoirat my 30 years covering silicon valley. the same time that subhead is a tech love story because i love tech. yeah. so i don't want this idea that, you know, there's a lot of tropes out there. you know, tech is terrible. it'no terrible. it's how how it's being used essentially. and so i want to say i love tech, but let meppened. yeah. yeah. journey to do these people beconghe powerful people.

and you've been there since the beginning. i it's interesting becae, you know, you have a bunch of you have a bunch of great blurbs from a lot of people. you've loved and hated or that you've trashed that list and have trashed you. and the thing that i actually love about this and this is the first thing i want to get into is you are, i think, a self appointed reporter, preneur. is that the word. no, i don't use that word. it was i never beat that word oc horrible word. terrible word. but she's an entrepreneur, entrepreneurial reporter. you're an entrepreneuria and thg first of all, i think there should be way more of that. i■#'s so crucial because you are owning all your in fact, you're even owning the things that people say about you ■tand so yeah, i would love it actually if you could sort of d tell us just a little bit of the journey of you as a journalist before we get into the other the other folks and the fact that pretty early on you saw tnt media. yeah, you need to be on top of it. you had to buck a lot of powerful interests to get there

and to eventually. so one of the things that i saw very traditionlywaame food chait existed before i started off. i went to i worked at the college ne went to columbia joum school, was offered a lot of jobs at places across the country, which i didn't want to live in. i was gay. i did not one live in dn't want to do the town hall reporting there like that. i felt l n happening for kara. and so i wanted to start at the top. i started at the bottom of the washington post as a newsy in the style section, which i actually, it's very it's a great place to be to watch how politics works in a newsroom. of in that period where everything was going up and to the right as many media companies were, was■& well. it was post-watergate, but it still wasn't a very heady tim]j for media, for especially newspapers. and i worked my waydid as i wory way up slowly at first as a news aide, doing all you know, mostlt

up eventually to become a reporter in the business section, which was the backwater. i'm always, yeah, everyone, you know, politi iord or metro or something like that. but i,ody else and did all kinds of stories and then the business section. at the time, barbarians at the gate sexy, right? that really turnedlverything. and i started covering anything they threw at me. i was like, i'll cover that. i'll cover this. and one covered retail for many years and watching the retail sector disintegrate in washington. i was a business reporter and i was studying business. that was one of the structures of theg. i was like, well, this isn't going to turn out well. and for some paying attention. why do you think they're not business people? i was like, yeah, this is not good. if this way. and then wal-mart was ng in and wal-mart was a very

technologically savvy company. they didn't advertise as they knew how to get to people. right. and it wasn't just internet, it was and everything else. direct mail, email, things like that. and■i i actually emails didn't exist, but it was a lot. they were very technical. they knew when to have milk at the ri place. yeah. you know, i didn't just guess everything. and so one of the things that i felt was important was to understand the business you're in right? interested and fascinating and i was like, well, if there's no 'a problem here. like, what do you think? they can keep doing out of hearts, and i'm going to do that. and so i focused on that. and then i was the young person in the room, they're like this this online services thing is really getting big. this companies are prodigy. there's this little company they didn't call it aol at the time. why don't you, young person go out there and the minute i saw it, i■m was like, oh, this is really bad for media and really interesting. and it was pre-internet, really.

internet did exist, but it was mostly via these compuserve and stuff. and so i also at the same time started to really lo the, the technology that was being used starting to being used a trash eigh■óes which were the these little tiny radioshack i use the post single or cell phone they then the gordon gekko version. yeah. yeah, yeah. and i was like like a brick. yes. i was like, oh, look, you don't need to be in a wsroom anymore. why do you need to be here at all? because everything is portable. th is all g portable and boom is like, haha 'll be l. i kept that like we like star trek and and i just kept running , oh, it's going to be this way forever and ever and ever until the end ofhistory is littered wh businesses. who did■e thant? and so as i started to spend time with the internet people, as it grew, i had an email, ev was like, why do i have an email? readers will talk to you. i'm like, yeah, i idea. and then when you started to understand the world wide web an■0ñd how things digitally, bos

included, i was like, it■á de industries and it creates new ones. and as i started to meet these people, they were talking my language right? and so i was 'm going to cover this because this is this is the beginning of television he radio. i was a student of history and i did. and i moved out to silicon valley. i wrote a book on aol, and then i moved out to silicon valley to ■gcover the nascent internet. this is the early the midnight 1990s. well, so i it wasar you going o! excite. i mean, these places that don't even exist anymore, but yahoo! doesahoo! does the truth. that's true. that's true. but i don't yeah, that's becausr came later. google w later.yahoo! and amazon were the very early ones. so i'm curiou■(hgs at what poin? don't be evil because and i looked at sort of the antitrust

issueswhich yoget into a little bit. i'm curious at what point in that■l journey i think you went out and was it 97,í. 96, 96 that you began to feel like, oh, okay, this a bunch of cool people doing stuff and not being evil. bigger, potentially more problematic. when the first te i used a browser, i was like, oh, it links to other things and you go wherever you want to go. it's endless. it was so easy to understand it and very few, a lot of the focus in tech at the time was on chips and about and computers that were sort of moving. you know, i had a mac and a macintosh in college, but very few people used it. they had very little interest in computers at college or at journalism school. d i kept saying, you need to know computers. it seems like this will be like theand i the penny dropped right very early when i downloaded a book onto my hard drive and i

was like, oh, did you see at that point, oh, copyright problems. i did data for the google people. i did. that was later. but initially it was like just a directory. yahoo was not a search engine. it was a directory where people hand put things in. but you could see whe it coul ws like, oh, yes, of course it's going to be algorithmic. it's going to be this. and that was not was not until 1998 or whenever it started. i did one of the first stories about their funding and went to the garage where they started the cleanirage and it was all of what i was talking to the washington post about internet stuff, i kept saying this is it's so clear where this is going. and you're and i toldon graham, you're on you're on a lower flood plain and the water's rising. and he didn't put his waders on,

not saying, no, i guess i'm going in a biggen't have a big enough boat of what's happening. it's about to swamp. and you could craigslist to me was a moment of revelation. yeah. because it was anoercoso i focut then i moved to si people were y resistant to napster and everythi e why are you giving us albums? we want individuals songs. and when the ipod came out, you know, you could just you'd wat'e ignoring consumers and they're ignoring and consume everybody, whoever is being affected by mers. and then you got to understand that the power lay in the hands of the tech people n and not the entertainment companies and the media companies or the es or the finance. i was like, no, no, the power is in the distribution and the technology that distributes it. yeah, that's really interesting. i want to read a couple of passages from interesting, passages you're talking a, this.

the tech titans would argue that they were no worse than cable networks like fox news. true, but a very low bar. fair enough. and there was no easily provable causality that they polarized the populace a nearly impossible thing to measure. stn dismissed any weaponization as unintended consequences. to where we are now. essentially, the weaponization of t internet, the silo bubbles. maybe so, but it was not an unin consequence. french philosopher paul virgilio has a quote that i think lot when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technology progress. that's correct. so talk a little bit about what you began to see in terms of,

wow, yo've mtioned■ a lot of the innovations and what could be better, but what about the really dark side of thgs■q? well, you know, it started off like what was unusual about this ple. like if you were talking to a big pharma company or finance or wall street or insurance, they'd the world with our products, you know, maybe pharma people woubut they knew it was --, you know, essentially. e're making things, ande biotech then they're buying them. and that's the whole exchange that the techhings were really interesting. they're juvenile ization of themse and physically they would create offices that were children. yeah, because we want to stay childlike. and i was ke i'm looking at. like adult people using slide ey aso you have to talk about of my favorite anecdotes in this ok is the surrogate. well, i was going to say the sergey brin work birthday party, that baby me shower wherever but you and gavin newsom were the

only ones that rejected wearing diapers. and once and once pajamas. yeah. what is this about? what? what is that infantilizing. it's fun. it's for fun. there was a lot of forced fun. like. and i kept thinking, did you not have childhood? because i don't know. what's that? because i'm done with that party life and, you know, they'd be like, okay, you know,ult, not as i'm not particularly fun, but it was really funny because i was fascinated by the performative aspects of itthen , that was the other thing. it's like we're really wack■ colorful balls, like, and i'm like, is thatust performatively doing that? every industry has its owns fle. and cotton and the comfortable clothes was interesting to me as we don't wear ties around it, we don't have titles. yeah, but you are. you sure knew who was in charge, right? 100%. you know, and it's interesting because l hings have now become mass market. you know, that kind of

give a you know what hoodie, but it's cashmere or the leather now, or even cubicle called no cubicle, open t work for a lot of people. but is the status quo■? cultural change, they like that. and i was like, i think they just wanted to be generous. but nursery school was more my you ow hey sandpits like it was weird they ball pit. i went to a google party once and they had ball pits and slip and slide and i was like, what the he that. it's the idea of of that they can go back to youth brings you this that it's the glorification brings you creativity, which is not true. so jobs proved that over and over. deed, ■'■: was an adult, by the way. he didn't there was nothing like that at apple, and they did just ne in the creative department. i came away feeling like he was the guy that you really. i do, lord of of all of them. i don't like everything about steve jobs. i get the negati parts. i'm not here to judge his personal life. i'm not sorry. and i don't think

i'm not here to judge the business. same thing with mark zrb looks. i'm like, why are we discussing this? right? he's not my business, right? i felt like he was a peis consist buoyantly creating exciting pruc that were what he wanted to make and he didn't do it b committee. he was like, i like this. and if i'm right, i'lle ong. he he was never pretending it was not a product and i appreciated that. sometimes did the art and science, the beauty. but it was beautiful,t just was. and so i didn't mind his marketing, but he kind of did it like a marketing at chanel, you know, and people like carrie, his reality distortion field. i'm like, i'm fully aware, but it's delightful. yeah. to tell you. he's really good at selling things and so that i appreciated about him. i appreciated his presence on podcasting, onvacy, on if you go back to our interviews, it is a astonishing the things heghtful person and he was a

smart person. and so i liked that about him. i also thought he was full of passion, which v■"y many of these people were not. they were in it for the money. i thinhe, travis kalanick yeah, he was really well, he had various toxic masculinity. yeah, toxic masculinity. but this is the uber, not the founder. he was he was the one who reay pushed it forward. so i liked him. i like i enjoyed every inraction ihim even when we were arguing because i felt like it was he never you never wilted like a hothouse flower. he jusdidn't it was like, you know, he just didn't he like we argued all the time and i appreciated that. didn't have to agree, but we could have disagreements. i dnpartner, walt mossberg, buti they were just it was always interesting to talk to someone who was thinking all the time and had cultural references andp culture references. a lot of times with these otherh

college. they lived in their little bubbles. they ate the foods. they all they dressed the same. and i thought they were not creative in a way. and i think and then when they made could tell you about everything else andnuts. i mean, i see that all across dtculte, politics, business today still, although i think the bloom is a little bit off the rose. i'm going to come back to that point. but i want to kind of tap something, you know, when you talk about how they're all eating the same food, they're all doing the same thing. i was struck towards the end of the book. you talked about silicon valley at this point being in the business of assisted living for millennials. yeah. and andg, but i think what you're getting at is this kind of an app for consumerist cultuy through life, comfort, what y y. if we assume that that's what silicon valley is doing right now, which i think is right, are there other placeking about?

boston, maybe, or parts of your there? are there places where tech revolution? no, i think silicon valley was this. the people tried to create th in boston. there's lots of great tech companies that started inwo, th. was there all kinds of there close to mit. often when there's a college or an important college that happens. austin certainly had its resurgence with dell and some other and apple located a big there. that was interesting, but still t whe would goes like this. awesome. let me clarify the question, because actually what i' assumer tech and the consumer internet wa valley, now that we're entering a period where we're really ming internet of things, supply chains, industrial internet, agriculture lking about earlier, is that going to be someplace else or is going to be every it's going to be it can be everywhere. it's so much more in something to do with the woman who came up with the unicorn, which was the billion value companies.

and the numbers are still clearly heavily calif. they just are. and actually, there's just a really good wall street journal. you california because it was terrible. they're back, right? because they. so no more texas and not as much. they suddenly move back. what don't they like about texas and florida? low taxes. they like the low tax that if you're going somewhere just for the money, you know how that sets up. you know, perfectly fine by the way, austin, again, very vibrant. and i think, you know, space stuff there, for example, ceai can steve case, who wabout. and i do thi t forward, that you can be things everywhere, but there still is a plus to being like i right now cted in san francisco. is that right? interesting. really is. and of course, chinasome other . but for the most part, it's california. sobubble. the first one, there was several. there were sever■xkal, but i'm talking about 99, really.

and for my sins, i have to admit,fession. you're catholic. so and maybe not practicing confession. left a media owned media company and worked for a tech startup in europe, one in 1999, which that if i was actually thinking straight as a business reporter, it should have been like, oh, we've reached a high watermark if they're hiring journalists to do that, like me to do this. but but i did it. and it was an incredible experience. i mean, what i came away feeling was i believed even less of what i was hearing from the mouths of the people. but i was actually more admiring of anything that got done because i rd how hard it was, 100%, right? yeah, absolutely. i do somah, i think, you know, e is an the positive elements of tech people in general are risk. they're not risk averse, which is great. neither am i, whichhink, a good quality. i have. they don't mind failing. they love that thomas edison quote, i have not failed to have ten, 10,000 ways. it doe'm like, sometimes it's jt

let's just movelong it. and certain people get to suffer failure easier. i would say white men, and it's very clear, you know, i'm like, look around, look around. ■#everybody. they they turn. that is a good quality. the ability to move along changa suspension of disbelief. you know, crypto, crypto, crypto. oh, no, no, no, no. i and i kind of like that because they sort of convince themselves and whatever particular hype cycle there happenedo be in, some of them are very real mobile. was i generative? is crypto. i was like, yeah, money's already digital. yeah. now it's just you want to hide it, right? or you want to find another way of moving value. i get it. i sure it needed as much hypase interesti. no, it's a well, i always thought with digital currency that i'd rather have it be still digital and then backed by an actual central bank complicated.

complicated. they just feel like they want to disrupt everything■2 and their whole little meme is like, we're going to disrupt this now. and i'm like, why? why this like that? it was always my question is something certainly needed to be disrupted. ot things to disrupt, for disrupt sake is just a toddler, is it? you're just a toddler, essentially. i read something interesting recently. i wonder what you would say in theof looking at the dot com bubble. 1999 years leading up and after and i today and and thinking about every i would argue i think most bubbles have a speculative part but then they have a productive thinking. righ so you've got a lot of voltage internet. did you lay a lot of fiber optics and then that you descrie moment in thos's froth, what's real? where are we going to be in five years? i think very little of it is froth. i think it's a really significant there are significant moments in technology, the graphical user interfacee chips, the computer, the laptop.

that was sort of the, you know, the popularization and probably microsoft was another when that whole platform stuff then mobile was a shift was like that changed the iphone was a critical i think it's probably if i had a point to one device that was the most important device. 200000 when i got that, my hands were like, oh, it was another like, oh, i see where this h univers. i didn't know what i wouldn't have said something. something's coming. i don't know what it is, great. yeah, right, exactly. u] so. so you could see those shifts and i think social was another one, generative eyes, another one because it's what it's doing is, is taking the internet and opening it up like going like cracking open thitself and servu in new ways, in speeds that are astonishing and you don't quite. there's so much data out there now, it it'll starto re this mae data and begin to change,h ense

it's like saying electricity. what did electricity do? ll is what did the internet do? it wasn't the internet itself. things, whether it's music or or commerce or finance. this is the same thing now. it's going to aim a lot more at whited< collar work. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. like someone was like, well, in ■mfacti' more loss. so see, it's why have them. there's no reason. it's just data thatds that. you just had people do like monks and scribes, so yeah, like hearing that, but you're sort of like, i don't know what to tellthat for a minute. cause this is something i think a lot about. if, if we look at the ti of the moment and this is what i argued in my last book that disrupting 8% of 8 to 12% of manufacturer jobs, depending on how■0 you count itn part got us to trump, but not the only factor. but ittaly got us there. we're about to potentially disrupt 30 to 40% of white collar work. i mean, i don't see us having a

really serious conversation about our government. isn't our government. is. and we're going to have. so i believe but i don't think ubi i in those fantasies a libertarian fantasy is coming on the ballot here nancy is really interesting, actually. work., it works in some levels. creativity. everyone becomes an entrepreneur. if you have a minute. not everybody, but we don'■'t teach entrepreneurism. right. like true. we do teach pull youwrself by your own bootstraps and give any nobody any help. that is a very different thing. so lots of but what i do think is that, look, every single like i had at a dinner the other night and they were all it was all 8[journals and one it was that high minded kind of. and i try to avoid at all times ■#and i was talking, they askede about i said, well, like it's going to change journalism rather significantly. i'm like, in a good way, say like headline is right and i want to headline awarding journalism school golden pike. it was called i thinkn't do thau just don't they're the kerning happens on the computer and i said so and i think it will

generate 100 headlines that might work in seconds. the guy in the corner there takes 50 friggin minutes for a not a good one, right? not a good one. and then you get one out of him and they're like, we have to have people do headlines. i'm like, why does it why why can't theythen you look and then looks at them and picks two. the person doesn't just what's . and i would let me finish. so i go. so i go. so we have we have to do s. i'm like, can i ask you a question? did you like getting those $4 strawberries? because they don't cost $4. they cost $4 because it was automated. li amazon?e getting stuff well, that's because someone else's job. i said is coming for your job now. and so that's to me, every single one of these jobappened t happened■n with, with, with, you know, the the loom when they were making h manufacturing. we've been here before it just

happens to bat data is the is the is the gold here. i guess you think they're going to spin it and hey, they're going to spin intod. that bringo another topic i want to look at that you kind of touch on wa antitrust and concentration of power question about so, so a lot of folks and i think the jury is out, but a lot of folks would argue that the■p depth and breadth of this change, particularly ai powered, is it really is different. and and it's just going t happen in such a way that if we don't have some kind of major safety net under people, that it's going to be politically disruptive in ways that are going to make. well, we know that and we know that because of what happened with the last round with the internet.do what they were doin, which is radicalize. lots of people hdisinformation,y propaganda. let's justto disappear. it's just propaganda. that's what it is. it's people using inaccuracies to sway a group of people to do something that's really all it

is. and and so it's happened. so we know now this is a sion of that which was already superpower from the book or the billboard oror the . and so we have to we should have no buy now what it does. and so if it's even more potent, should have guardrails in place. of course. what do they do in congress? they have meetings. they have meetings that are closed to people with all the power brokers. essentially, they right now, because they can't pass actual legislation, they have abipartis and put up guidelines. that's be be fair, i'm going to push back a little bit, isn't it? because congress is pretty much bought out by the tech titans. i mean, that's not that's not an excuse. i don't's nouse, but it's a it's a mutual say. yes, but it's that look, we have done this. we've legislated airlines, not perfectly. we have leslated form. we have legislated finance. we have legislated insurance. we do legislate like football, for goodness sake. we legislate media. we do there's

the 25 year, 30 years that the internet hase internet powers have grown, the top ten companies in the world are tech companies, the top most valued except for thedis with aramco. yeah. and maybe one of the louis vuitton people or something like that. but if you look, i have a lot of targets, literally all tech people, the top richt people in the world are either oil people and they're not many of them tech people. if you look at the top ten, they're tech people for the most part, not an ounce of legislation. an address is them money, but guess what? we've been here before. we were here with andrew carnegie. we were here with john rockefeller. we were here with standard oil. we were in the at&t. do you think we can't do it? to say we can't do itexcuse on ? well, i think you're getting at something important. and this is clearly to do, which is deal with power, not price, because this is a is a barter. things have changed.

culture of the valley for a minute and some of thenal stories that you tell in this book. first of all, i would love your perspective.96j=the weird mix of kind of hippie libertarianism, just i don't get thatay, okay. i don't even think they know what it means. explain. i don't if i if i pressed them and made them define it, they wouldn't know. now, i just don't like people bothering me. i'm like, that is a two year old, right? you know, or teenager back to teenager like i don't want people bothering me. don't 's really what they're hopeful. i don't know if that's a philosophy or a political thing, area. i don't know what it is, but i thth things at play is which is persistent lying to themselves abo what they are. and it gets back to what we were just talking about, which is it's capitalism. that's all i'm sorry. you're not changing the world. you want to make money and we treat them like they're magicians. what i want to. it's funny that you just said ■cthat becau was opening

opening the book to read another passage which gets said just this. internet people love to do things like this. you're talking about some of the childish behavio since it gave them an air of i don't care for corporate formalities which appeal to the audience they were aiming at and made good copy, much of it is is of course performaling to the public these inventors were going to seize power and have a good time doing it. i even wrote a story about the lives of silicon valley, which holds up rather well a quarter century later. no wonder then that and you're quoting self-congratulation and self-deception and are now a part of the valley's ethos right up there with fearless risk taking money, effort and programing genius.

i wrote listing lines like, it's not about it was. it's not about the fame. it also was thxrere's no dress code special parking spaces, no fancy offices here becau■d wiye. they were just different ones. no one is really in charge here. oh, i could go on. i could go on. but this is early. this was. w'll knock them pretty quickly. any other lies that we should be

paying a the moment that they know better and right that they're lecture us on things? venture capital is giving us people, giving us foreign policy advice. right?ally rather they sit dow i'm going to listen it. don't eat lincoln and gun it. i'm going to i know it's crazy on experts that experts don't know what they're talking about. you got interview the elon musk where he lectured me on covid befo it every study i know. i was like, listen, doctor welby, sorry,' not i don't recal you getting a medical degree and i don't very least, you don't know. like, let's start with that. but they can't knowledge that that's really nuts that entering into other areas, whether it's any there is no topic they aren't an expert on and they aren't an expert on any topic except the narrow thing they do. i wonder sometimes of them are some. yeah, i wonder sometimes if that's a rich person. and i'm thinking about the ways

in whichcome philosopher, just n and he really. well, no, but it's ray dalio. george soros mean they all want to become writers and philosophers after. they make the money with what they would. it got them there, right? yeah, i guess so. butunger, which maybe it's the conditions when you get that re enablers g. what you just said isnot. yeah, yeah. so i think that's the problem is. theytt people, their worlds get smaller and smaller and smaller over time. i think they depict that super well in succession. you notice they yeah, they planes to the apartmts to the cars, to the, you know, tight got tighter and tighter over the seasons. that's really and in the last a bar with regular people. you know, that's that's observ. i was well, i did the podcast for it, so i paid a lot of attention ■ah■÷ but it really is and you started to see it with them is in sometimes they'd be like talking to you like oh yeah, you're

right. and ain. and they're like, that's not what they say. my, my staff says, i was right. i was like, oh, did they did your staff say right? how interesting do taylor like you know, alls are aligned withu know i think recently the wall silicon valley, which was drug use by these tech people, look at i don't know. we'll see where. this gse of these things happening and they get to do whatever they want. depicted it really well. this is an elon musk case and the effect it might be having on him. and i think it explains a lot, actually. combined with health challenge iand feeling le world and wealth and covid like you can see where how we got to we are pretty easily what they did that was very deft in the journal and i thought they did i have to give kudos to them forft part out loud. was that the reason the board

was letting you get to know this stuff was because they all were benefiting by hundreds of millions of dollars. well, okay. oh, i see now. and ithat was smart. you could sit here and talk about just the drug use, which is like,tamine, whatever. what's important is why is he being allowed to break rules that other people can't? well, here's why these happeto be these rules. but yeah, it's because the money and and again, the first line of was capitalism after all. and what i got tired of them. got so tired of them telling me it wasn't likell decision yos to do with growth, even if it's the se■kaof girls. sorry, we need to make money. if it's, you, misinformed, asian. oh, sorry. free speech. like i was. do you have any responsibility to what you're making? essentially? you know, it's so interesting. i mean, in of not even hiding in plain sight. i'm thinking about the■n ge, go,

the stanford project that tt larry and sergey did, where if you read down to page 37 to the appendix, the risks of targeted advertising are kind of right there. they knew they could represent, you know, to stick with musk for a minute because he's a big and you have a lot of thoughts on him. you you open and also with don't be evil you open with the idea that 2016 and these tech executives going to sit with donald trump, a guy that iñ0n wise, you know what they said their values, they're taking them at their word right? right. real disjointed picture there. you call up elon to talk about it m> tell us a little bit. so what happened was i was with my son was satur i think whatever day it was before this meeting. and i was good at scoops.j/ beat reporter. and someone said, there's a i'm like who's going? and they told me this. i'm like, who? like it was l essentially and

happen, there's a press release or they or the pr people call mm cook's going to this meeting or whatever. there waa way it worked and it was silent and i was like, well, of course, because they'use buty want things including repatriation of their taxes. they wanted government contracts, they wanted no regulation. and so i can see why theybut tht immigration and look, i cannot ld trump. but he said what he was going to do. i'm going to ban muslims. ■/yeah. and i was like he said like and i counted how many times as much as the number got too high. how many times he said it. and i'm of the maya angelou school. if they say what they are, believe them, right? if they tell you whabelieve the. and and donald trump's not that hard to parse. he has he's he's you know, he's been being racist he's been being misogynistic for decades. this is not so they were going .

and so i was going to write a news story like, look at tlqs. this is interesting. this is a it was all of them. it was■ all and the ceos. and so i called up, i srt can'tr the phone. he always insted himself, which i really appreciated. and i said, what are you doing? you're an immigran he hates immigrants. well, no, maybe not. white immigrants like yourself, but white libertarians. yeah, he wasn't at the time. he was sort of he had voted for obama. hei would say it was it was hard to pin him down, but he was much more on the democrat side for a long time. and we that's how you get to be thwot riif you were kind of do w the people who shifted over after and and so he was like, well, we're going in your room, you know? going to say something publicly about the immigration stance because of anyinilicon valley was on by immigrants really, many people in silicon valley were immigrants.

a lot of the leaders have been from another country and they respect immigration. they want these visas and everything else. and and isomething about immigrt least. kara.e very i know. and he was also concerned about gay rights issues at the time. he was like, this anti-gay stuff isn't good. and he's changed his tune on and and i was like, you can't go. you can't. weg to join this thing. i'm going to hope for the best. i can. we can convince them. it's like it reminded me a g d't we got them. we got it. we got this. and i president. it's kind of a big job. and you all havto people on the planet. you might want to make a statement. you know, you're and they didn't. and and and they didn't. they skulked in they skulked release. he look he they legitimized him very quickly and then i was little like you're the richest, powerful people on the planet and you're bending your knee to

this guy like you don't need to right noyou are. you have the catbird seat. and so i was kind of like really? but i think it was all about the money then too, because and then very quickly, you began to see during the trump administration, you start to see decoupling with china, you start to see cold war turning into that they want which they want, they want it. and i was fascinatedthe tech tin either sides of that debate. i mean, zuckerberg and to have f both ways at first, and then we're like, no, wait, we're national champions. azon thinking, okay, we're just going to go with the us and do back end infrastructure. but the military or, you know, ■p■ywhatever, i mean, it's a fascinating the money is why rob a bank it'wh■ere the why work for the governments where the money is that's where the next growth is and they know better. and so why wouldn't they go there? i mean, again, if they had just said we just really like the money care, i'd have been fine. got it. thank you. u for telling me the truth and now it's not to say some of them d■o'y always were

selling how worldyeah. it's not as it's not a favor to use the internet which was paid for by the us government and build a business off of our give you a little, that little and then not pay taxes. it's like it's mind blo. and i , you're landing on something really important, which is dar'c darpa's great work. even tesla meaning elon spacex. there's been a lot of talk along the reason has tesla exist today is because of government loan. yeah you know mean he goes on about the government i'm like whoa do you just on that point do you have a position should we adopt, you know, say a more danish standard or an israeli standard about government takes back some of the profit? oh, i think we should have. en more. and in tesla, i don't know why we didn't i don't know why we don't. it's os, every every bit of innovation wasnivolved in basicd

stuff. they have this there'this trope now that only technology can be innovative. well, i don't know. the government's beenah, you k'o exhausting to listen to some people just constantly. i remember when is it when the when the the right wing the ones that hate government all the time, they all do now. but there was a group, the tea party people, i had someone call me in san francisco and they got my number was they're we represa party and we don't you know, government's terrible. listen, that and i and i like to stay on the phone with these people. said, really? yeah. governments terrible. i question how did you geto an'i drove and i said on a [padwas bu need to get the hell off that because that's government. i was like, the governm■)t likl for all of us. i'm so glad the nazis didn't win. i really feel the government innovated in space. the government. and they like to do is think they love to trash

everything but them and and then you sort of start to suspect, you know, you were helped by this where is the sense of commonality and civility and the fact that this is partf great e. but it's all because of you and your geniusa digital dry cleaning service. i'm sorry. i st do' buy. yeah, yeah, well, that much of it, i do. some of it is innovative and invention, but it's. but, but what you're saying is it's a collective effort. it's not just a matter of individuals. yes. they love to self aggrandize in a way that's really, you , righf that. right. everything's about hi point all. no. zoe shiver has a great boo he he algorithm. so everybody followed him and listened to him. what is that? but what is that? but a king who wants everybody to. it's a king, right? it's what it is. it's certainove. it's weird, actually, just sticking with the tea party line to occupy twitter.

you were warning before we had the capital. yes, i was. i wrote a full column about it.s the tip offs. i just am one of these people pe and i wanted to be in the military. thinking how could what is the scenario? how can this go? and so i reason i was a pretty good reporter because i'd always been like, if this than this, if this i was one of those people and i'd sit down and i could because if i know enough about them, what they like, where they read, who they're f with, you really can. okay, what are they doing? what's their next move? and with 's pretty easy to figure that out. like people are very gettable, there and i was looking at trump using twitter, which is, you know, everybody has their medium twitter. trump had his and jfk had his. and our, you know, hitler had his, etc., etc. and i just was watching him. and then i started to see some

stuff about the weaponry he had [ouhe started to tweet about tht and i was like, oh, wa a really. and he's breaking the rules of platform. they're doing nothing about it, right? andwrote a column in 2019 and mid 2000 in october of 2018, where i said, i'm putting i'm making up a hypothetical here that i'ay to people where what if trump loses the election, starts to tweet online that it was stolen over and over again. it goes up and down the food chain, which itom the very bottom and sort of the dregs for chance, and it gdown to the botm again. it has a really interesting path, but it's it makes sense to me. and what if he does that and then he does repeats it again and again, like propaganda, and then he asks them or convince them to do something about it in real life. what would you do? is like, what would throw him off the bat? i said, why don't you do it now zuckerberg about holocaust

deniers. it's ground and we'll never get it out once you let it see, you have to stop it. we have free speech. i'm like, not that's. nou government can't do it. you can like you can. you are not you can stop the at seep in and be worse. we're where we are today because of the allowing of that stuff to go on and on and on for years now.ears. and so that was what happened. i wrote a column saying, i think this is going to happen. when i wrote it, i got calls from all the leaders, how dare you say we woue handmaidens? i don't think i call them handmaidens to sedition, but i that's what i thoug and how dare you? this isn't where it's going to go. and i was like, this is exactly the way it's going to g that's . you know, i a lot about how we're going to put this back in the box all the toxic and we're not in not because the business model that we've just been talking about for the last 30 minutes or so is now kind of everybody's

business model, you know? i mean, really, 85% of value lives in ip and data most almost every company that i can think of is monetizing data and infoio some way. what does the future look and i'm curious if you could link that, but let's go back to kind of yourct that you were smn most journalists very early on ■rsaying, this is my content and i'm going to own it and i'm going to buck any sys there's something coming there bencompan and data and individls say, acts is my ip, th'i want more of that. what does that fight? i think right now with agi, they're scraping people's copyright. that's all. you know this it's not terrific. if this the law we have to use, we should have more stronger ones. let's start there. let's start with that. let's start to put guardrails around. we can all agree what we don't want tkiller robots. i think we can all agree on that.

right. maybe, maybe a few people would be like, yeah, let's have those. let's have guidelines around where the provenance of this information is. let's have there's some very easy stuff we's what we would le this to be. gene■ editing. we'd like you to give back some. we'd like to have safety standards. i mean, theyes, it was recently. but it can't be an executive order. it has to be legislation, right. there's a lot of stuff that we can figure out really quickly antitrust which you know about is another thing they cannot they can't end it because it's expensive, this stuff. so where(d's innovation to happen from the bottom up strength of our country is innovation from the bottom up. it is not iti isn't. that's china, in case you're interested, th' different syste. i mean, i've always thought that actually one of the great advantages for the us is decentralization and that we should be focusing on that when we think about national security. let me go back.

at a place where you get into something personal, which is the fact that as a i'm going to call you an overachiever. is that fai busy, busy, busy person. you had a stroke., you've yes, i did. you had a stroke. and it's interesting because it comes at this point after you've been talking to point in his life when he didn't have a wholeot longer. that's correct. and and there's a little bit of twinning there that i picked up on that. very much so. he affected me inhe was one of d about steve and probably why it attracted you. my dad died at a young so death was always ever present in my life and. and ephemerality. i'm not a buddhist but i get he was steve was i get ephemerality i get like randomness things life isn't fair like just happens and there's no reason forhings go. so i was living like that and so that limited amount of time

when steve got sick. i think that's what happened to him. time compressed. he understood that and he gave onofe of the greatest speeches of all time, which was his stanford speech about life being too short, death being the most informative way to be so creative. he was most creative in the years he was but he was really g faster and ait maybe didn't havn that way, but that's the way it went. and and he really was very wise. and and one of the questions i him, which i think was one of the best questions i ever asked him, was we did the last rview with him before he died. really, before you got real sick? i think we did it in june. he got he guess. whatever. did it in. some but he never did another one after that and he was verythen well and then six so we watched him through several different

phases of this but now it was clear when he did this interview he was he was skeletal. you know, and he's still vibrant ■]and let me just say, he was always vibrant. and you asked i thought this was so beautiful that you said, how aryou going to spend the next ten years? no, i said, what are you going do the rest of your life? oh, i didn't say, oh, okaintere. and the crowd wasq like, she jut ask a dying man what he was going to do with the rest of his life and y knoat? he had a great and he's like, i want this, i want this and this. and it was really. and he knew what i was doing. you know, he was very aware of it. but he was he was always forward. he didn't waste his life. right? he didn't waste his time. really appreciated that about him when i had the stroke, it was the same thing. i was my dad died in a young age i. this is a veryle in my heart. i had a blood clot a■nd it was a it was one of those things in my face. one of my favorite book is franz kafka's the trial and everything is about authoritarian. it's about god■ that is about

god. in my reading of it. and it's because it says, you been telling lies about josef k because he was arrested one fi s stopped. it dsn me he was stopped by god. start to thinkwh y that stroke was a is an arrest was an arrest of mead to think, what do i want to do? and i continue to i'm like i like what i'm doing. i like not working for people. i like owning my ip. i lioi feel like. yeah, you have a beautiful markus aurelius quote too about you already dead. yeah, yeah. and look and lightness come forward. yeah, well, in thet, wasn't he? was like that. i want to. i want to meet him. you up you e mud and all this stuff and you to pull this out of your hat. like what? i feel like it was from the futureuys that i know a few. yeah, but he in particular, he's very modern. it's a, it's a really

i keep thinking he was from the future and he went back and just decided to wear fur and the in gladiator are all right i will on that and i wao ask you what's on your reading list at the moment? i'm reading this amazing book called northwoods, and i'm blanking on the author, but it's a book about i'm really interested in architecture. you know, i think a lot about the architecture of the internet, right? i talk a lot about that. like how it was built is what the reason why it enraged men equals engagement is because they built it that way. it doesn't have to be built way. important. it doesn't have to be built that way. it can be built anotherî vein,'k about northwoods in a second, but origins, i just i interviewed isabel wilkerson, who wrote origins, which it was an origins. it was cast, and then it was made into origins, which i also love by ava duvernay. that was a great book. and one of the lines in that book was, okay, was talking about racism and why we talk about caste as maybe caste in caste versus racism or ageism or whatever. and she sa, have this house

and it's full of cracks and the basement is didn't build this h. we have to fix it. right. and so it was really smart things. it's like, let's stop talking about the house. let's try to rebuild it in a way that works. and so i really appreciate it that book for that becauset yout way cast really didn't it was made a beautifulecause of that northwoods is the same thing and it's about a hoe that gets built by these two people that are escaping a puritan village, salem or somethinlikeall in love, they rf to the wilderness and build a house. now look, everybody dies in weird ways back then, and there's a lot of tragedy. but you you meet everyone who's lived in this house over since it was. so you know how it got there. you know how the apple orchard goteone got killed. he was eating an apple. it was in his stomach. and then and thenf the house. right. and overstories and what happeno them. but none of them know about the other people that were there before there was so much.

the house is the only thing that knows what hapne book because it's about it's abt history, it's about death. it's about, you know, how we forget things and move on and the house endures and eventually the house. but the house also falls into disrep you know, it gets remade by someone in more modern times. i love this book and the writer is one of these. and currently he writes kinds of different chat. weonofne of them's the maps, one of them. it's just so interesting and intricate. it's just a beautiful story about ephemerality of life and how you have to you have to take this long view, and you do northwoods and you do take along well. i hope you learn about the internet. you don't have to hate to act like this book. i don't i don't hate tech. i don't know. i mean, it's clear that you don't. it's i love it. i love it attack love story, burn book, stop doing these things to my house. i love we have to fix and share. it was great to be here. we thank you so much for the appreciate thoughtfulness and

stuff and you know, awesome. great to be with you. h

a absolute and true