lñ communications. >> charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers, and we are just getting started, building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. announcer: charter communications supports cpan as a public service along with these other television■z provids , giving you a front row seat to democracy. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2024] announcer: now on "after words," journalist kara swisher talks about her career covering the tech industry and its key players. she is i and columnist rana foroohar. "after words" is a weekly interview program with guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. it's a real honor to talk aut fern book, which you we have to

i think for the c-span audience, we first need to put the burn book in context. can you give us can you give us the background? sure. burn book is an expression actually mean girls is out now, which is kind of too. it is for me, but it's a book you write things you really and you're not. people are 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 gossipynd and so i decided that's what i was doing in my memoir and of what my 30 years covering silicon valle 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.s terrible. it's not terrible. it's how how it's being used essentially. and so i want to say i love tech, but let me tell you what happened. yeah. yeah. journey to do these pele becoming the world's richest, most powerful people. and you've been there since the beginning. i it's interesting because, you know, you have a bunch of you have a bunch of great blurbs fr l people. many of them are people that

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'usrrible word. terrible word. but she's an entrepreneur, entrepreneurial reporter. you're an entrepreneurial journalist and that is something first of all, i think there should be way more of that. i agree. and i think it's so crucial because you are owning all your ip. in fact, you're even owning the things that people say about you and so yeah, i would love it actually if you could sort of start there and 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 the internet was going to eat all media. yeah, you need to be on top ofyf powerful interests to get there and to own events on ten. yeah, eventually. so one of the things that i saw very traditionally, i was moving up the same food chain that

existed before i started off. i went tof6 i worked at the college newspaper. i went to columbia journalism school, was offered a lot of jobs at places across the country, which i didn't want to live in. i was gay. i di not one live in mississippi, not not my first choice. didn't want to do the town hall reporting there like that. i felt like, no, not happening for kara. and so i wanted to start at the top. so i started at the bottom of the washington post as a newsy in the style section, which i loved. actually, it's very it's a great place to be to watch how politics works in a newsroom. and the post was sort of in that period where everything was going up and to the right as many media companies were, was doing really well. it was post-watergate, for media, for especially newspapers. and i worked my way up. that's all i did as i worked my way up as a news aide, doing all kinds of things. and then you know, mostly scut work, essentially. and then i worked my way up eventually to become a reporter in the business section, which

was the backwater. i'm always, yeah, everyone, you know, politics is word or metro or something like that. but i, i just worked harder than anybody else and did all kinds of stories and then got this job and made something of the business section. at the te, barbarians at the gate was coming out and then business got a little sexy, right? that really turned everything. and i started covering anything they threw at me. i walike, i'll cover that. i'll cover this. and one of the things i covered retail for many years and watching the retail sector disintegrate in washington. i was that was one of the structures of the business was built on display advertising. i was like, well, this isn't ing to turn out well. and for some reason, reporters weren't paying attention. why do you think they're not business people? i was like, yeah, this is not good. ifhis way. and then wal-mart was moving 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 suppliers and everything else.

direct mail, email, things like that. and i actually emails didn't exist, but it was a lot. they were very technical. they knew when to have milk at the right 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? and reporters just aren't interested and fascinating and i was like, well, if there's not enough money, it's going to be a problem here. like, what do you think? they can keep doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, and i'm going to do that. and so i focused on that. and then because i was the young person in the room, the serviceg is really getting big. this companies are prodigy. there's this little company called aol america online. they didn't call it aol at the time.you, young person go out there and the minute i saw it, i was like, oh, this is really bad for med ainteresting. 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 love the, the

technology that was being used starting to being used a trash eighties, which were the these little tiny radioshack i use the post single or cell phone they had which was in a suitcase and then the gordon gekko version. yeah. yeah, yeah. and i was like like a brick. yes. i wa't need to be in a newsroom anymore. why do you need to be here at all? because everything is portable. this is all going to be portable and boom is like, haha care. i like me but i'm like, no, it'll be like star trek. i kept that like we like star trek and and i just kept running up against people who are like, oh, it's going to be this way forever and ever and ever until the end of time. i'm like, no, i feel like history is littered with businesses. who did that? and so as i started to spend time with the internet people, as it an email, everyone was like, why do i have an email? readers will talk to you. i'm like, yeah, that is the idea. and then when you started to understand the world wide web and how you could download things digitally, books included, i was like, it destroys industries and it creates new ones. and as i started to meet these people, they were talking my

language right? and so i was like, i'm going to cover this because this is this is the beginning of television is the beginning of 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 minedcover the nascent intern. this is the early the midnight 1990s. we, so i it was interesting to hear you going out to yahoo! excite. i mean, these places that don't even exist anymore, but yahoo! does and yahoo! does the truth. that's true. that's true. but i don't be evil. yeah, that's because the monitor cameer. it was netscape. yahoo! and amazon were the very early ones. so i'm curious at what point? i mean, i always think about don't be evil. my second book was entitled don't be evil because and i looked at sort of the antitrust issues, which you get into a little bit. i'm curious at what point in that journey i think you went

out and was it 97, 96, 96 that you began to feel like, oh, okay, this isn't just a bunch of cool people doing stuff and not being evil. this is actually something bigger, potentially more problematic. when the first time 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 understandands 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. and i kept saying, you need to know computers. it seems like this will be like the pen, like kind of thing. and 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 ■lproblems. i did data for the google

people. i did. that was later. but initially it was like just a directory. yahoo was not a it was a directory where people hand put things in. but you could see where it could go, right? it was easy. and when i saw google, i was 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 cleaning. susan wood just guys garage and it was just you coul you could piece it together and it was all of what i was talking to the washington post about early on when there was early internet stuff, i kept saying this is it's so clear where this is going. and you're and i told don 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 bigger boat. i'm like, you don't have a big enough boat of what's happening. it's about to swamp. and yo moment of revelation. yeah. because it was another economic

structure, a media company. so i focus first on media, but then i moved to music and the music people were highly resistant to napster and everything else. and i thought, oh no, this is ■#?why are you ving us albums? we don't want albums. we want individuals songs. and when the ipod came out, you know, you could just you'd watch it and you'd be like, they're ignoring consurs and they're ignoring and consume everybody, whoever is being affected by this is ignoring consumers. and then you got to understand that the and not the entertainment companies and the media companies or the commerce companies 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 about, you know, this, this disruption. the tech titans would argue that they were no worse than cable networks like fox news. true, t a very lowar.

fair enough. and there was no easily py thatd the populace a nearly impossible thing to measure. most of all, they often dismissed any weaponization as ■ú■ you're getting to where we are now. essentially, the weaponization of the internet, the silo bubbles. maybe so, but it was not■b an unimaginable consequence. french philosopher paul virgilio has a quote that i think about a 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■y technology carries its n 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, you've mentioned a lot of the innovations and what could be better, but what about the really dark side of things? well, you know, it started off like what was unusual about this

group of people. like if you were talking to a big pharma company or finance or wall street or insurance, they'd never go. but changing the world with our products, you know,they knew it was --, you know, essentially. and they were buying the biotech companies like we're making money, we're making things, and then they're buying them. and that's the whole exchange that the tech people to things were really interesting. they're juvenile ization of themselves and physically they would create ofk2fices that were for children. yeah, because we want to stay childlike. and i was like, it's childish is what i'm looking at. like adult people using slide eyes and bouncing on bouncy balls. so you have to talk about one of my favorite anecdotes in this book is the surrogate. well, i was going to say the sergey brin work baby me showert 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 forunlike. 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, fine. i'm like, i'm fun as an adult, not as i'm not particularly fun, but it was really funny because i was fascinated by the performative aspects of it and then pretending it was real, that was the other thing. it's like we're really wacky. like, yeah, look at our colorful balls, like, and i'm like, is wacky? or is you just are you just performatively doing that? every industry has its own little uniform, right? and there was fleece. sting 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 all of these things have now become mass market. you know, that kind of i don't give a you know what hoodie, but it's cashmere or the leather sneakers or, you know, or even cubicle called no cubicle, open

plan culture, which frankly i think doesn't work for a lot of people. but is the status quoof tech? because of tech, all those cultural change, they like that. and i was like, i think they just wanted to recreate college. if i'm going to be generous. but nursery school was more my you know, they did have sandpits like it was weird they ball pits in places. i went to a google party once and they had ball pits and slip and slide and i was like, what the heck is here? but it's beyond that. it's the idea of of that they can go back to youth brings you this that it's the glorification of youth that brings you creativity, which is not true. so jobs proved that over and over. indeed, he was an adult, by the way. he didn't there was nothing like that at apple, and they did just fine 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 negative parts. i'm not here to judge his personal life. i'm not sorry. and i don't think it interfered with his. i'm not here to judge the business. same thing with markerg. a lot of people make fun of his looks. i'm like, why are we discussing this? right? he's not my business, right?

i felt like he was a persistently and consist buoyantly creating exciting products that that were what he wanted to makand he didn't do it by committee. he was like, i like this. and if i'm right, i'll make a lot of money if i'm wrong. he he was never pretending it was not he sometimes did the art and science, the beauty. but it was beautiful, like. yes, it 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'delightful. yeah. i don't know what to tell you. he's really good at selling things and so that i appreciated about him. i appreciated his presence on podcasting, on privacy, on if you go back to our interviews, it is a astonishing the things he predicted because he was a thoughtful person and he was a smart person. andthat about him. i also thought he was full of passion, which very many of

these people were not. they were in it for the money. i think he, travis kalanick yeah, he was really well, he had other issues. there were other chips in various toxic masculinity. yeah, toxicascunity. but this is the uber, not the founder. he was he was the one who really pushed it forward. so i liked him. i like i eoy had with him even when we were arguing because i felt like it was he never you never wilted like a hothouse flower. he just didn't it was like, you know, he just didn't he like we argued all the time and i appreciated that. i didn't we didn't have to agree, but we could have i didn't know him as well as my partner, walt mossberg, but i they were just it was always interesting to talk to someone who was thinking all the te anhad cultural references and societal references and pop culture references. a lot of times with these other techies, they just didn't finish college. they livedn 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 money, they felt like they could tell you about everything else and that really drove me nuts. i mean, i see that all across culture, 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 kindf 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 and i think correct me if i'm wrong, but i think what you're getting at is this kind of an app for everything, a meta kind of consumerist culture, way through life, comfort, what you. so here's a question for you. if we assume that that's what silicon valley is doing right now, which i think is right, are there other places i'm thinking about? boston, maybe, or parts of your there? are there places where different tech revolution? no, i think silicon valley was this. the people tried to create these like, look, there is great tech

in boston. there's lots of great tech companies that srt boston and lotus. one, two, three. was there all kinds of stuff happened there. there's a lot of robotics there close to mit. often important college that happens. austin certainly had its resurgence with dell and some other and appleated a big facility there. that was interesting, but still not where it would goes like this. awesome. let me clarify theking is if we assume that consumer tech and the consumer internet was was and is sort of based in the valley, now that we're entering a period where we're really moving into business internet, we're moving into internet of things, supply chains, industrial internet, agriculture we were talking about earlier, is that going to be someplace else or is going to be everywhere? 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 dollar value companies. and the numbers are still clearly heavily in calif. they just are. and actually, there's just a really good wall street journal. you know how they all left

california because it was terrible. they're back, right? because they. so no more texas and florida. 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 places, by the way, austin, again, very vibrant. and i think, you know, space stuff there, for example, certain things. but you can steve case, who was the aol ceo, has really talked about this talent everywhere. and i do think the pandemic pushed that forward, that you can be things everywhere, but there still is a plus to being like i right now centered in san francisco. is that right? interesting. really is. and of course, china and israel and some other places. but for the most part, it's california. so you covered the dot com bubble. the first one, there was several. there were several, but i'm talking about 99, really. and for my sins, i have to admit, i'm going to i'm going to do a confession. you're catholic. so and maybe not practicing confession. i 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 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 ■nwas i believed even less of wt i was hearing from the mouths of the people. but i was actually more admiring of anything that got done because i realized how hard it was, 100%, right? yeah, absolutely. i do something. yeah, i think, you know, there is an the positive elements of ch general are risk. they're not risk averse, which is great. neither am i, which is, i think, 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 doesn't work, which i'm so tired of hearing. i'm like, sometimes it's just let's just move along. but they don't mind it. and certain people get to suffer failure easier.

i would say white men, and it's ry clear, you know, they always like know i'm like, look, look around, look around. everybody. they they turn. change a shift is also a suspension of disbelief. you know, crypto, crypto, crypto. oh, no, no, no, no. i and i kind ofat because they sort of convince themselves and whatever particular hype cycle there happened to be in, some of them are very real mobile. was i generative? certainly 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 kind of am not so sure it needed as much hype as it did, but there's elements of it that are interesting. no, it's a well, i always thought wier have it be still digital and then backed by an actual central bank rather than complicated. complicated. they just feel like they want to disrupt everything. 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 ctainzly needed to be disrupted. other 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 the phone. a colleague wrote a piece kind of 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 right.■ so you've got a lot of voltage internet. did you lay a lot of fiber optics and then that you built, can you describe a i at the moment in thosems, what'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 interface or the chip, the chips, the computer, the laptop. that was sort of the, you know, e 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. 2000 7007. when i got that, my hands were like, oh, it was another like, oh, i see where this is headed kind of thing in universe. i didn't know what i wouldn't have predicted uber, but i would have said something. something's coming. i don't know what it is, but it's going to be great. yeah, right, exactly. and 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 the internet itself and serving it up to you in new ways, ins that are astonishing and you don't quite. there's so much data out there now, it it'll start to really make sense of all this massive data and ensure it's like saying electricity. what did electricity do? well, a lot like what is what did the internet do?

itn'it's how it transformed vars 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 white collar work. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. like someone was like, well, in fact, i'm like, there'll be no more loss. so see, it's why have them. there's no reason. it's justa needs that. you just had people do like monks and scribes, so yeah, that's just and people don't like hearing that, but you're sort of like, i don't know what to tell you. let's land on that for a minute. cause this is something i think a lot about. if, if we look at the politics of the moment and this is what i argued in my last book that essentially disrupting 8% of 8 to 12% of manufacturer jobs, depending on how you count it in part got us to trump, but not inly 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 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. i mean, it works in some levels. it could work. 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 yourself up by your own bootstraps and give any nobody any help. that is a very different thing. so lots of people fail. 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 journals and one it was that high minded kind of. and i try to avoid at all times and i was talking, they asked me 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. u know, you don't do that or you 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 2 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'th generate 100 of them? then you look and then a person looks at them and picks two. the person doesn't remove themselves. it's just what's going on. and i would let me finish. so i go. so i go. so we have we have to do it ourselves. i'm like, can i ask you a question? did you like getting those $4 strawber?5ribecause they don't . they cost $4 because it was automated. do you like getting stuff delivered by amazon? well, that's because someone else's job. i said is coming foir your j s'y single one of these job shifts. and it happened with farming, it happened with, with, with, you know, the the loom when they were making it happen with manufacturing. we've been here before happens to be that data is the is the is the gold here. i guess you think they're going to spin it and hey, they're

gowell, and that that brings meo another topic i want to look at that you kind of touch on towards the end of the book, which is the 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 depth and breadth of this change, particularly ai powered, is is dferent. and and it's just going to happen in such a way that if we don't have some kind of major safety net under people, that0ó disruptive in ways that are going to make. well, we know that and we know that because of what happened with the last roundith the internet. right. it didn't it they didn't need much to do what they were doing, which is radicalize. lots of people have all kinds of disinformation, which is simply propaganda. let's just stop calling it and disappear. it's just propaganda. that's what it is. it's people using inaccuracies to sway a group of people to do and and so it's happened. so we know now this is a superpower version of that which was already suppower from the

bo tv or the radio. and so we have to we should have no buy now what it does. and so if it's even more potent, we 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 a bipartisan committee to discuss and put up anything. yeah, but to 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 excu■>se. i don't it's not an excuse, but it's a it's a mutual say. yes, but it's that look, we have done this. we've legislated airne we have legislated form. we have legislated finance. we have legislated insurance. we do legislate like football, for goodness sake. we legislate media. we do there' specific things in the 25 year, 30 years that the internet has grown or the internet powers have grown, the top ten companies in t world

are tech companies, the top most valued except for the saudis 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 richest people in the world are either oil people and they're notanthem te. if you look at the top ten, they're tech people for the most part, not an ounce of legislation. an addressn ounce. now, they may have a lot of 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 it is an excuse on our part? well, i think you're getting at something important. and this is clearly what the biden administration is trying to do, which is deal with power, not price, because this is a barter. this is a barter exchange. data is a barter. things have changed. so let's go. i want to come back to the culture of the valley for a minute and some of the personal stories that you tell in this book. first of all, i would love your

weird mix of kind of hippie libertarianism, just i don't get that libertarian lite. okay, 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 diapers and one right or no actually teenager like i don't want people bothering me. n't bother me, mom. that's really what they're hopeful. i don't know if that's a philosophy or a political thing, but it's a teenager area. i don't know what it is,ere's ts which is persistent lying to themselves about what they are. and it gets back to what we were just talking about, which is it's capitalism. that's all it is, is capitalism. 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 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 behavior since it gave

them an air of i don't care for corporate formalities which appeal to the audience they were aing at and made good copy, mu■ech of it is is of course performative signaling 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 yourself that self-congratulation and self-deception and are now a ett up there with fearless risk taking money, effort and programing genius. i wrote listing lines likit was. it's not about the fame. it also was there's no dress code special parking spaces, no fancy offices here because we're not hung up on status symbols. 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. we'll knock them pretty quickly. any other lies that we should be paying a special attention to at the moment that they know better and right that they're■t enterig

the society and starting to lecture us on things? venture capital is giving us people, giving us foreign policy advice. i'd really rather they sit down. right? i'm going to listen it. don't eat lincoln and gun it. i'm going to i know it's crazy to rely on experts that experts don't know what they're talking about. you got a real dose of that? i did interview the elon musk where he lectured me on covid before it happened. this is what i read every study i know. i was like, listen, not i don'tl you getting a medical degree and i don't think you know what you're talking about at the very least, you don't know. rt with that. but they can't acknowledge 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 somimes if ■9■g■j that's a tech person thing or if that's a rich person. and i'm thinking about the ways in which financiers tend to become philosopher, just nachman and he really. 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. but these guys do it younger, which maybe it's the conditions when you get that rich, you have all these enablers going. what you just said is brilliant and sometimes it's not. yeah, yeah. so i think that's the problem is. they attract rich 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 apartments to the cars, to the, you know, tight got tighter and tighter over the seasons. that's really and in the last show, only one person was in a bar with regular people. you kno■ that's that's a really profound observation. i was well, i did the podcast for it, so i paid a lot of attention on for them. 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 that was stupid. and you go, you did that again. and they're like, that's no what thesay.

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, all everybody's interests are aligned with you know i think recently the wall street journal stories about something everybody knew in silicon valley, which was drug use by these tech look at i don't know. we'll see where. this all goes but the fact matter there is abuse of these things happening and they get to do 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. and and when it's combined with health challenges, i think he's and feeling like you own the world 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 ha to give kudos to them for finally like saying the quiet part out loud. was that the reason the board was letting you get to know this stuff was because ey all were bene hundreds of

millions of dollars. well, okay. oh, i see now. and i think. that was smart. you could sit here and talk about just the drug use, which is like, oh look, he's taking ketamine, whatever. what's important is why is he being allowed to break rules that other people can't? well, here's why yeah, it's becy and and again, the first line of the book was it was capitalism after all. and what i got tired of them. i got so tired of them telling me it wasn't like, well, what it is, every decision you make has to do with growth, eveif it's the self esteem of girls. sorry, we need to make money. if it's, you know, misinformation, anti-semitic, misinformed,si 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 all of this was sort of not even hiding in plain sight. i'm thinking about the google, the original google, you know, the stanford project that larry and sergey did, where if you read down to page 37 to the

appendix, the risks of targeted advertising are kind of represe, you know, to stick with musk for a minute because he's a big character and you have a lot of thoughts on him. you you open and also wh ■be eva that 2016 and these tech executives going to sit with donald trump, a guy that i mean wise, you know what they said their values, what they said, they're taking them at their word right? right. ted picture there. you call up elon to talk about it. tell us a little bit. so what happened was i was with son was a saturday, i think whatever day it was before this meeting. and i was good at scoops. i'm just a really good beat reporter. and someone said, there's a meeting. trump they're all going. i'm like who's going? and they told me this. i'm like, who? like it was all of them. like essentially and these thins

happen, there's a press release or they or the pr people call you and saying, oh, so-and-so is going to this meeting, tim cook's going to this meeting or whatever. there was a way it worked and it was silent and i was like, well, of course, because they're embarrassed because but they want things including repatriation of their taxes. they wanted government contracts, they wanted no regulation. and so i can see why they went. but there was silence about immigration and look, i cannot stand donald 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 w 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, you what they are, believe them. and and donald trump's not that hard to parse. he has he's he's you know, he's been being racist very for decades. right. he's been being misogynistic for decades. this is not a new, fresh thing. and so they were going there. and so i was going to write news story like, look at this. this is interesting.

this is a it was all of them. it was all the power brokers and and the ceos. and so i called up, i started to call and you can't always answer the phone. he always inserted himself, which i real appreciated. and i said, what are you doing? you're an immigrant. 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. he had been pretty democratic. i 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 the worst right wing person. if you were kind of do you know the people who shifted over after and and so he was like, well, we're going in your room, you know? and i said, well, you you're going to say something publicly about the immigration stance because of anything, silicon valley was on by immigrants really, many people in silicon valley were immigrants. a lot of the leaders have been from another country a they resp■■ect immigration. they want these visas and

everything else. and and i said really got to say something about immigration, at least. at the very least, i will convince him. kara. i know. and he was also concerned about gay rights issues at the time. he was like, this anti-gay stuff isand he's changed his tune on that one. and and i was like, you can't go. you can't. well, i'm going 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 great deal of the hitlers of oh, don't we got them. we got it. we got this. and i was like, oh, no, he's president. it's kind of a big job. and you all have to say something. you're the most powerful, rich 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 out. trump got the best press release. he look he they 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' you are. you have the catbird seat.

and so i was kind of like really? but i think it was all about the money t 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 fascinated by the way the tech titans lined up on either sides of that debate. i mean, zuckerberg and facebook google tried to have it kind of both ways at first, and then we're like, no, wait, we're national champions. amazon thinking, okay, we're just going to go with the us and do back end infrastructure. but the military or, you know, whatever, i mean, it's a fascinating the money is why rob a bank it's where the why work for the governments where the money is that's where the next growth is and they knoebw 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. thank you for telling me the truth and now it's not to say some of them don't have, you know, it's just they always were selling how world changing and philanthropic they were. yeah. 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 money and then say here let me give you a little, that little and then not pay taxes. it's like it's mind blowing. it is mind blowing and i mean, you're landing on something really important, which is that the darpa's this was public dar's grwo tesla meaning elon s. 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' 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 how the government takes back some of the profit? oh, i think we should have. i think we should have taken more. and in tesla, i don't know why we didn't i don't know why we e way. you know, every every bit of innovation was initially started. i think the government is more involved in basic research and ■stuff. they have this there's this trope now that only technology can be innovative. well, i don't know.

the government's been. yeah, you know it's, so it's so 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 aiq group, the tea party people, i had someone call me in san francisco and they got my number was one of those robocalls kind of thing. and they're we represent the tea 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. and i said, really? yeah. governments terrible. i queiodid you get to work today and they're like, i drove and i said on a road that was built by the government, you road because that's government. i was like, the government did well in world war two. i feel like that worked out well for all of us. i really feel the government innovated in space. the government. and so what 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 tt this is part of a great experiment of democracy. but it's all because of you and your genius at making us a digital dry cleaning service. 'm sorry. i just don't 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 collectiveff it's not just a matter of individuals. yes. they love to self aggrandize in a way that's really, you know, even right now is the version of that. right. evabout him. we must point all twitter. no. zoe shiver has a great book where she he had them change the algorithm. so everybody followed hi him. what is that? but what is that? but a king who wants everybody to. it's a king, right? it's at it is. it's certainly not innovative. 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. talk a little bit about that was the tip offs. i just am one of these people who sits around. i'm like i like puzzles and like and i wanted to be in the military. you're a military analyst. i like thinking how could what is the scenario? how can this g and 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 almost guess news stories because if i know enough about them, what they like, where they read, who they're friends with, you really can. okay, what are they doing? what's their next move? and with a lot of people, it's pretty easy to figure that out. like people are very gettable, essentially. and so i was sitting there and i was looking at trump 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 about insurrection.ponry he h he started to tweet about that

and i was like, oh, wait a minute. this is really very problematic. and he's breaking the rules of platform. they're doing nothing about it, right? and so i wrote 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'd say to people where what if trump loses the election, starts to/t tweet onle that it was stolen over and over again. it goes up and down the food chain, which it does online. food chain goes from the very bottom and sort t up to the top and down to the bottom 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 then he asks them or convince them to do something about it in real life. what would you do? and everyone is like, what would throw him off the bat? i said, why don't you do it now before it happens? same argument i had with mark zuckerberg about holocaust deniers. it's to seep into the 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. no, you can make a yes. government can't do it. you can like you can. you are not the government. so you can stop the aisism because if not it's going to 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 yson no. 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 handmaidens? i don't think i call them handmaidens to sedition, but i that's what i thought. and how dare you? this isn't where it's going to go. and i was like, this is exactly the wait go. and that's what happened. you know, i a lot about how we're going to put this back in the box all the toxic and we' 'e 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 information in some way. what does the future look like? and i'm curious if you could link that, but let's go back to kind of your pathway and the fact that you were smarter than most journalists very early on saying, this is my content and i'm going to own it and i'm going to buck any system. i actually think there's there's something coming there between companies monetizing information and data and individuals beginning to say, actually, this is my ip, that's i want more of that. what does that fight? i think right now with agi, they're scraping people's content. let's sue them. copyright. that's all. you know this it's not terrific. if this is the law we have to use, we should have more stronger ones. let's start start to put guardrs around. we can all agree what we don't want to happen. killer 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 can all agree on. and here's what we would like this to be. gene editing. we'd like you to give back some. we'd like to have safety standards. i mean, thepretty good in that regard. yes, 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 o really quickly around that antitrust which you know about is another thing they cannot dominate everything. they can't end it because it's expensive, this stuff. s's the government funding to allow innovation to happen from the bottom up strength of our country is innovation from the bottom up. it is not invention from the top down. it just isn't. that's china, in case you're interested, that's what they do in china. totally different system. 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. i'm just looking 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 fair? as an overachiever, busy, busy, busy person. you got four kids, you've got three jobs. you had a stroke. yes, i did. you had a stroke. and it's interesting because it comes at this point after you've been talking to steve jobs at a point in his life when he didn't have a whole lot longer. that's correct. and and there's a little bit of twinning there that i picked up on that. very much so. yeah.fected me inu tell me about that. he was one of the things i liked 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 for it. and it's just the way things go. so i was living like that and so that put me an idea of time. i had a limited amount of time when steve got sick. i think that's what happened to

him. time compressed. he understood that ae of one ot 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 dying or we're all dying, but he was really dying faster and and some of some of it maybe didn't have to happen that way, but that's the way it went. and andme quite a bit. and and one of the questions i asked him, which i think was one of the best questions i ever asked him, was we did the last interview with him before he died. really, before you got real sick? i think we did it in june. he got he died in november, i guess. whatever. and it was some close that we did it in. but he never did another one after that and he was very thin he he had gotten sick and then well and then six so we watched him through se 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 are you 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, okay. it's very specific. interesting. and the crowd was like, she just ask a dying man what he was going to do with the rest of his lif'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 wasys forward. he didn't waste his life. right? he didn't waste his time. and i really appreciated that about him when i had the stroke, it was the same thing. i was like, look at this. my dad died in a young age i. this is a very major it was i had a hole in my heart. i had a blood clot 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 god. in my reading of it. and it's because it says, you know something someone must have been telling lies about josef k

because he was arrested one fine morning, rested, arrested means stopped. it doesn't mean arrested in that book to me he was stopped by god. sting with your life and so that stroke was a is an arrest was an arrest of me and i had 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 like doing what i feel like. yeah, you have a beautiful markus aurelius quote too about you already dead. yeah, yeah. and look and let the lightness come forward. yeah, well, in the last guy was smart, wasn't he? was like that. i want to. i want to meet him. i know. like you up you were up in the mud and all this stuff and you managed to pull this out of your hat. like what? i feel like it was from the future guys that i know a few. yeah, but he in particular, he's very modn.a, it's a really interesting thing. 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 want t 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'minterested in a. 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 that way. important. it doesn't have to be built that way. it can be built another and in that vein, i'll talk 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 terms of caste versus racism or ageism or wher have this house and it's full of cracks and the basement is flooded. we didn't build this house.

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 because it took you thinking in a different way cast really didn't it was made a beautiful movie because of that northwoods is the same thing and it's about a house that gets built by these two people that are escaping a puritan village, salem or something like that. they fall in love, they run off 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 got there because someone got killed. he was eating an apple. it was in his stomach. and then and then it goes through all the owners of the house. right. and over time. and then you hear all their stories and what happens to them. but none of them know about the re before there was so much. the house is the only thing that knows what happened. and i love this book because

it's about it's about 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 and then it's really 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 diary one 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 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 thapprd stuff and you know, awesome. great to be with you.

announcer: business and thenis politico lead to conspiring to bribe senator bob menendez with the mercedes-nzn exchange for favors according to a reporter. a federal court in newor jose a rebate admitted to bribing seto menendez and his wife. he is the first to admit his role in the corruption case. mr. aribe is also poseto in the ongoing investigation. senator menendez and his wife e cused of accepting $500,000 in cash, 13 gold bars, and the mercedes-benz as bribes. ♪ pres. biden: two years ago democracy faced its greatest threat and though il --

announcer: president biden delivers the annual state of the union address during a session of congress to outline his priorities for the country. watch our live country beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern with our preview program followed by the state of the union speech. then an alabama senator will give the republican response, and we will get your reaction by taking your phone calls andment. watch the state of the union address live thursday on 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span, c-span now, our app, or online at c-span.org. announcer: president biden announced the united states will airdrop humanitarian aid to gaza amid the israel-hamas war and said the u.s. will insist israel lielp they need, no excuses. the president made these remarks in the oval office while meeting with the italian prime minister giorgia meloni.