podcast
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Each week on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish pulls listeners out of their digital echo chambers to hear from the people whose lives intersect with the news cycle. From the sex work economy to the battle over what’s taught in classrooms, no topic is off the table. Listen to The Assignment every Monday and Thursday.
Kara Swisher’s Big Tech Burn Book
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Mar 14, 2024
Kara Swisher is a journalist turned entrepreneur, a podcast star with high wattage guests, a punchy interviewer who never backs down, and now an important voice in the public debate over whether and how to regulate tech companies.
Audie talks with Kara about her new memoir, “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.” Their conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at American University’s Sine Institute of Policy & Politics, where Kara is a 2024 Fellow.
Kara Swisher is the host of “On with Kara Swisher,” and co-host of “Pivot” with Scott Galloway. She is also a CNN Contributor and regular panelist on The Chris Wallace Show, Saturdays at 10a ET on CNN.
Episode Transcript
Audie Cornish
00:00:00
'Having seen my name in a burn book as a kid, I can tell you it's not a good thing. Technically, it's a way of naming and shaming people in your social circle, but most people don't run in the same circles as Kara Swisher. The former tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is on a massive book tour. Her memoir is titled Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. Her on-stage moderators include people she's covered as a journalist, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Bob Iger of Disney, Sam Altman, the current CEO of OpenAI. And while those interviewers wanted to talk to her about her broken relationship with Elon Musk or her views on artificial general intelligence, otherwise known as AGI, I wanted to know how she got to be her the definitive beat reporter of the consumer internet age with a Google executive for an ex-wife, a journalist-turned-entrepreneur who co-launched major high-tech and media conferences, AllThingsD and Code, a podcast star with high-wattage guests, a punchy interviewer who never backs down and now an important voice in the public debate over whether and how to regulate tech companies. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. Kara Swisher and I spoke before a live audience of students and professors at the Sine Institute of Policy and Politics at American University. That's where Kara is also a 2024 fellow.
Audie Cornish
00:01:36
Hi, everybody. How are you? Good morning. Good morning. Come on, you don't want to bring this energy to Kara Swisher, okay? Because that's not what you're going to get back. Good morning.
Audience
00:01:48
Good morning.
Audie Cornish
00:01:50
Nice, nice.
Audie Cornish
00:01:53
And that's where we met for this conversation, which I began with an admission. We're friends.
Audie Cornish
00:01:58
And I have to say, it made me not want to do this interview with you today.
Kara Swisher
00:02:01
Oh, okay. All right. Good. Why?
Audie Cornish
00:02:02
Because I feel like I'm too close to you to do the interview properly.
Kara Swisher
00:02:08
Oh, all right. Okay.
Audie Cornish
00:02:08
But I felt like you were then the right person to talk to because your whole career is talking to people that you might be a little too close to.
Kara Swisher
00:02:17
Some of them.
Audie Cornish
00:02:18
Some of them.
Kara Swisher
00:02:19
Some of them. Yeah. Yes. That's a good point. So let's go.
Audie Cornish
00:02:23
The other thing about Kara, which I've told her, is you talk to men the way men talk to women.
Kara Swisher
00:02:32
Yes. Yes. Yeah. Some men.
Audie Cornish
00:02:32
Some.
Kara Swisher
00:02:33
Some men. She said this.
Audie Cornish
00:02:35
But do any of you guys know what I'm talking about when I say that? Does that mean something to you?
Kara Swisher
00:02:37
'She said that. We did a - she was a guest host on Pivot. We're like, that's exactly what's happening here. And as I thought about it, it was really interesting because I was talking to my wife, Amanda's here also, and she was talking to a man. And I said, this is how you do it. You compliment him. Men aren't used to physical compliments and you say, that's a nice shirt. So I do that. I do kind of do that a lot. But then if I really want to really get stuff out of them, I actually neg a lot of these men I covered. And I'm like, did you lose weight because you were fat last time I saw you, you know, stuff like that. And I realize I was just in this. I came in from San Francisco last night where I did a series of sessions with Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Gavin Newsom, and I did it. I was negging them without even trying, and it was really interesting.
Audie Cornish
00:03:24
So I'm fascinated by this. And I was reading the book looking for your villain origin story, like trying to figure out how you got to be what, you know, as a student, she identified.
Kara Swisher
00:03:35
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:03:35
'Strident, confident, in the book sometimes you use the word arrogant, talking about yourself even as a young person. And I think that there's something to the fact you're running against a lot of cultural programing, as kind of a femme, you know, woman-identifying person. You're going to hear a lot about how you should be.
Audie Cornish
00:03:57
Yes.
Kara Swisher
00:03:57
And you aren't any of those things?
Kara Swisher
00:03:59
No. I would say I'm the exact opposite of Katie Britt as her performance last night.
Audie Cornish
00:04:05
Who is the senator from Alabama who gave the State of the Union response.
Kara Swisher
00:04:09
I was literally like, she, to me, in that thing was, ChatGPT, show me a Stepford Wife in a kitchen and I and didn't win the lead role in Our Town in high school and so.
Audie Cornish
00:04:24
Yeah. 'Cause with ChatGPt, you do have to be distinct with the prompts.
Kara Swisher
00:04:27
Yes, very distinct, actually. So you want to know how I got the way I got?
Audie Cornish
00:04:32
Well.
Kara Swisher
00:04:32
Yeah. Okay. The origin.
Audie Cornish
00:04:34
What are your theories?
Kara Swisher
00:04:35
'I think I was born this way. Because when I was a kid, and again, the names were put on you as a girl. If you were like this, "headstrong" is the word they might use. And then later, when I was in school, it was "bossy" or, and it's almost always from men. Not always, but almost always. But some, an interviewer who I competed with quite a bit back in the day and used to beat on a regular basis said I had uncommon confidence, which I found incredibly irritating. And I said to him at the - right when he did it, I was like, uncommon? Why? And he was like, well, not everyone's confident. I'm like, why is that unusual? What, am I supposed to be, you know, shy and retiring? Am I supposed to be submissive? Like, what? What is going on here? One, I was like this. Two, may have been about being gay. I knew I was gay at an early age.
Audie Cornish
00:05:25
Interesting.
Kara Swisher
00:05:25
'And so, I didn't feel like I needed to have the approval of men. I think girls get into that quite a bit, pretty early. I liked men, so I also like men. And so I got along with - I always got along with men at every stage of my career and teachers and everything else. And then probably my dad dying, I think, made me tougher because you sort of had to be. My dad died when I was five. And so if I think back on it, really, I really did get steeled during that period. My mom married someone who wasn't very nice. I was - I'm not Cinderella here, but.
Audie Cornish
00:06:01
No, no. You do the same thing in the book, though, is you start to speed past that point of the story.
Kara Swisher
00:06:05
I do, I do.
Audie Cornish
00:06:06
And I want to know, I mean, you were only five.
Kara Swisher
00:06:08
I was five.
00:06:09
We both have kids around that age now.
Kara Swisher
00:06:11
That's correct.
00:06:11
And it does bring you back to that place.
Kara Swisher
00:06:15
'It does. I, I had - and before that, I have older kids, too. And I remember when my - there's two points in my life that were really important, when I, I passed the age my dad died at. And that was interesting because I didn't think I'd live past that. So I kind of lived my life in a rush because I thought I would die at that age. I think that's very common among people whose parents die early, and my brothers are the same way. We're like.
Audie Cornish
00:06:38
Right.
00:06:39
In a rush, we have no time for this. And then, when my son turned, my oldest son, he's 21 now, turned five, I realized the devastation. I really did. I was like, God, he knows me so well. And you know, you don't have memories. I don't have a lot of memories of my dad. I always thought I should get hypnotized or something, which I haven't done, but I have little pieces of memories.
Audie Cornish
00:06:58
Because that's the age where those images start to be shaped, right?
Kara Swisher
00:06:59
'But how well does my four-year-old know me? My two-year-old? Like, would they remember me? Maybe not. But we have clear relationship every single day and they're deep. And so, the devastation was very clear to me, then. I remember being struck when he turned the age I was, because it was clear that I was much more hurt than I realized. But you cover up pretty quickly. A lot of people whose parents die at a young age become something that, Irvin Yalom calls "highly functional." He was he was a psychiatrist, wrote a really good book called The Loss That Is Forever, about people whose parents die at a young age. And I do remember being - that was when I realized how good I was at...
Audie Cornish
00:07:45
Moving forward.
00:07:46
'Moving forward. I don't think - years ago, my - a friend of mine was in one of those therapies where you talk to someone every day, and we were talking about it, and I was like, what in the world do you find to talk about? Like, I don't have that - I'm not that interesting. Like, what parts of your life could you find? And they turned to me and said they were going to become a therapist so that's why they do it. And I said, I just don't have that much to talk about. I just don't feel like I would have something to talk about every day for hours about myself. And, they said, you're blocking. And I said, it's working, 'cause I'm pretty happy, like. I was like, where's the depths? And, you know, my wife talks about it a lot. Like I said, when I met her, I said I wasn't neurotic. I said, I don't have any neuroses.
Audie Cornish
00:08:32
That's not your vibe at all.
Kara Swisher
00:08:33
'No, it's not, but it really isn't. Either it's there and I hid it so beautifully. Like, I'm a like a mafia don and I - the cement is deep.
Audie Cornish
00:08:40
Yeah, the sunglasses help.
00:08:42
Yeah. I'm trying to avoid intimacy with you. I actually, I forgot my other glasses.
Audie Cornish
00:08:47
But it does make me think about this stepdad. Because you have this person who comes into your life, but you describe him in extremely specific ways in the book.
Kara Swisher
00:08:55
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:08:56
'You use phrases like "casually cruel," "manipulative." You don't describe him as abusive. So I'm not - I don't want to give.
Kara Swisher
00:09:03
It was abusive.
Audie Cornish
00:09:03
You do feel that now?
Kara Swisher
00:09:04
Yeah, I do. I do.
00:09:05
Can you describe what it was? Because you were so young.
Kara Swisher
00:09:07
Yes.
00:09:07
So by the time you're ten, 11. What are those interactions?
Kara Swisher
00:09:11
'It was not physically abusive. It's, you know, everyone always you know, you tend not - to minimize mental abuse. Right? That - I vaguely recall, but I remember this dog was a basset hound named Prudence. And my stepfather got rid of it. It disappeared one day. Can you imagine your dad's dog going? And didn't explain it? And when I was slightly older, he made up stories of what he did with it. He's like, oh, I dropped it in the river and all this stuff. It was. It was so cruel.
Audie Cornish
00:09:39
And are these happening when...
00:09:40
When I'm a child.
00:09:40
It's just kids with him? Is mom around?
Kara Swisher
00:09:44
Mom's around.
Audie Cornish
00:09:45
Yeah.
00:09:45
And she let it happen. Yes, she absolutely let it happen. And to be kind to her is, she's this young person with three kids, and their husband died and she got married pretty quickly. I get it, I get that kind of thing. But she let him do it. She let him do it. He was very. You know, one thing is he was a game player. He loved strategy games, whatever it was. And and so I got very good at, like, backgammon. I was a really good. But I don't play it. I don't like it, and I'm good at it. It's really weird because it was so aggressive and he taught me in such an aggressive way. And I was also, interestingly, really good at it. Like, I actually did have those qualities of a sort of a killer like sense of game playing.
Audie Cornish
00:10:26
By the way, we just heard the word killer in the context of backgammon.
Kara Swisher
00:10:29
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:10:30
So you have an idea of what these games are like.
Kara Swisher
00:10:32
Yes, you can do, but it is.
Audie Cornish
00:10:33
Yeah. It is, it is.
Kara Swisher
00:10:33
'It's like, I must win and dominate. So he did teach me those. He had those qualities, which is a good thing. He had a very strategic mind. And I would say you can learn good things in a bad way, right? And he would do all kinds of things. He bugged our house. He was paranoid. And it was. And we used to - but we used to find humor in it, because my brother and I would always make fake drug deals over the phone, we're like, did you get the pound of hash? You know.
Audie Cornish
00:10:58
Because you knew he could hear?
Kara Swisher
00:11:00
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:11:00
In that, like, 80s and 90s way of your parents are listening on the other line? Or he had.
Kara Swisher
00:11:05
Yes. No he put bugs. Yeah. Like Nixon. He's like Nixon. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:11:11
So I'm not going to armchair psychiatrist this, but it does, to me, uniquely prepare you for Silicon Valley.
Kara Swisher
00:11:18
It did, it did. I say I'm an optimistic pessimist. I really do think the worst is going to happen. And then when it doesn't I'm like, yay, it didn't, you know?
Audie Cornish
00:11:27
'I know. But it also, you know, you describe a number - I want to talk about some of the people you encountered in the early part of your career, because you're a young person.
Kara Swisher
00:11:36
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:11:36
You're at school. You decide for a variety of reasons, as you were kind of cut off from doing what you want to do, right? Joining the armed services, specifically the CIA.
Kara Swisher
00:11:45
I did, that was really a disappointment for me. I wanted to be in the military very much. My dad was in the military. He had just gotten out when he died. He was in the Navy, and I wanted to be in the Navy. I have a lot of family members on his side in the Navy, actually, and I really wanted to. I have a great patriotic streak. I have a real belief in America.
Audie Cornish
00:12:04
But you not doing it is somehow at odds with how I think of you.
Kara Swisher
00:12:08
Really?
Audie Cornish
00:12:09
Like, why didn't you just do it?
Kara Swisher
00:12:10
Because I had to lie. This is even before Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It was you got kicked out and on a dishonorable discharge. I'm that old. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was another opportunity. And I was like, I ask and I tell, so, uh, that's a problem.
Audie Cornish
00:12:25
Like, you knew you wouldn't be able to do it.
Kara Swisher
00:12:27
'It was so offensive, even more than just kicking people out. That was Clinton. That was a Clinton-era thing. That was so offensive to me, Don't Ask, Don't Tell. So I couldn't do that. And then years later, when they finally got rid of everything, I wanted to join the reserves. But I was actually too old, so I never got a chance to do it. I would - I thought about joining the CIA. I went to the Foreign Service school, it was a feeder to the CIA and the State Department, both things I - at the time there was this the Clayton Loantree scandal. You should look it up. There was all this Russians manipulating Americans that lived in Russia. I didn't even speak Russian so I don't know why they were so concerned. But when I went for some of the interviews, they were like, you could be blackmailed. I'm like, I'm out. And they were like, but you could be blackmailed. And I was like, but I'm out. It was like these discussions. Like they were ridiculous.
Audie Cornish
00:13:15
Yeah.
Kara Swisher
00:13:15
But they were very obsessed with gay people at that time. And finding out. And I was like, there's nothing to find out. Well, at one point they were like, well, what if you went to Saudi Arabia? They kill gay people here. And I'm like, I don't speak Arabic, but okay.
Audie Cornish
00:13:31
Why would you send me there?
Kara Swisher
00:13:31
Why would you send me there?
Audie Cornish
00:13:33
How did this shape how you think about discrimination? How you think about these kinds of things?
Kara Swisher
00:13:39
Oh, furious. Because it was also the era of the AIDS, the AIDS era. And it was during the Reagan administration. I was in college then, and I was furious about how they treated people with AIDS. And I think a lot of people became activated then. Gay people were like.
Audie Cornish
00:13:54
Also, when you face discrimination, I don't know about you, but it makes you feel that identity more acutely.
Kara Swisher
00:13:59
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:13:59
Even if you were strutting around your life.
Kara Swisher
00:14:01
Oh, people made you.
00:14:01
Yeah. They're telling you, guess what? You're not out of this box.
Kara Swisher
00:14:04
'Right. And with gay people, you can hide, right? And with race and if you're Jewish, you don't - you can't hide as easily. And so, the two problems, and I'm not going to stack rank anyone's discrimination, but one is you can hide but you have to be furtive, which really was terrible. I can't even tell you how terrible that was. And I wasn't good at furtive, and I was very outspoken. And the other thing was, your family can dislike you. Like, your family discriminates against you. So, it creates this weird thing, and your friends and people didn't know a lot. It was such a different time. It really was. I can't - you, it was, it's shocking the changes that have happened. But I wanted to have kids and it was not open to you. That was not something that was open to you. And so, I even, I think, a thing I bought a baby, a onesie for my child. I said, I'm having a kid. And I kept it, and he wore it all the kids wore it. And, you know, it just is really hard to be not who you are. And I really was who I was. And I came out pretty quickly. And the AIDS thing was it, I was like, that's enough. That's enough with you people. People are dying. The Reagan administration was pretending people didn't have AIDS. You remember Rock Hudson, the whole thing. It was such. It was such nonsense. And, you know, when things like Angels in America came out, I was like, exactly.
Audie Cornish
00:15:20
Yeah. But I think it's maybe hard for this generation to understand because they've grown up with activism at their fingertips.
Kara Swisher
00:15:28
Yes.
00:15:28
Right, like very young people.
Kara Swisher
00:15:30
Yeah.
00:15:30
Are running major nonprofits.
Kara Swisher
00:15:33
Yeah.
00:15:33
You know, and that was not, like, coming up, that was...
Kara Swisher
00:15:36
But it's its own set of challenges.
Audie Cornish
00:15:38
It is.
00:15:38
But for sure it was hard. It was really hard. And it was. And you didn't have the internet like.
Audie Cornish
00:15:44
Right, like, building community.
Kara Swisher
00:15:44
'You know, my ex-wife ran PlanetOut which was one of the first, AOL was one of the first gay communities, where people could talk to each other and find each other. I remember Megan, who went on to join Google and then was the CTO of America. She had like seven members of PlanetOut there were from Vatican City, which was really interesting, but they were everywhere. That was the thing. They were everywhere. People were everywhere and dying to meet each other. So, which is why the online space held such promise for me, especially around gay people. It was really, or people that couldn't meet. Everyone from gay people to one of the first group I encountered was a group of quilters at AOL who had never met. They were just, like, quilting, and they were sort of alone in their little communities. And then they met online and they made a giant AOL quilt with each other. And then Steve Case brought them all into, to meet each other. They never met. And I remember thinking, this is a magical medium.
Audie Cornish
00:16:42
You're listening to Kara Swisher. I spoke with her last week at American University. We'll have more after the break.
Audie Cornish
00:16:57
Welcome back. I'm speaking with Kara Swisher about her memoir, "Burn Book: A Tech Love Story." It's about her career covering the rise of Silicon Valley's biggest leaders, from Tesla founder Elon Musk, whom she calls her biggest disappointment to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. She lives in a chapter called The Menches. Why do you think they liked you? Did they see you as one of them?
Kara Swisher
00:17:21
No. And this was interesting. I don't think that because I had been, you know, I was at the Wall Street Journal or at The Washington Post first, and they needed me, right? I wasn't an entrepreneur until ten years later. I didn't start, I didn't leave the safety of the big newspaper until 2002, which was a long time I'd been covering.
Audie Cornish
00:17:38
But the fact that you could call up someone and say, this is what I think you should do, this is what I think you should buy.
Kara Swisher
00:17:43
'Oh, I didn't tell - this is what - I said, I'm going to write this. I would tell them what I was going to do. They never - they often didn't take my advice. I was writing the story of how I thought mobile was going to take over Yahoo! And I said to Jerry, no, you're ******* these guys are going to eat you. And I said, you should take them off. And I didn't think he was going to do it. They never did. They never did what I said.
Audie Cornish
00:18:05
But do you think they appreciated again, we talked about how you talk to men. Was there something about the way you had those conversations? Because now I see an industry that's quite closed.
Audie Cornish
00:18:15
Yes.
00:18:15
It's very hard to talk to any of them for any reason.
Kara Swisher
00:18:18
Mm hmm.
00:18:18
And I think that you, your stature in the industry and you have the history.
Kara Swisher
00:18:23
'Well, now I do it. Yes, I - now I do it in public. Like, I had a public argument with Marc Benioff. I was like, Elon's doing this anti-Semitic, this anti-gay, this anti-trans. These are the values you said you held dear. And he goes, well, he can land a rocket on a surfboard. And I was like, I don't understand. So he's a racist who can put a rocket on a surfboard? What I was trying to get at there was like, you should say something. And I said it to him publicly in front of a crowd of 1,000 people. I said, why aren't you saying something publicly? I think you should if you say you support gay people. This guy just said, Paul Pelosi's in a gay love triangle. And that's how we got beaten up. Why won't you say anything? And his excuse was, well, he's really innovative. Like we must excuse his sins for that. And so, that's what it turned into. When I was at the Journal, I was a beat reporter. Write a beat, you know? And at some point you have to say, Google bought this. This happened. And the reason I left it was because I got so frustrated at doing an enormous amount of reporting. One particular time was Webvan, and I was like, this ain't going to work. And I wanted to say it in the Wall Street Journal. I wanted to just let that be the way I communicated it. And the editors said, get someone else to say what you think. And I, you know that, right?
Audie Cornish
00:19:39
It's very common.
Kara Swisher
00:19:39
Which is really common. And then they always had a thing in the Journal, they use this term "to be sure, some people say," you know, that kind of thing, which I hate. Which is, and I was like, to be sure some people are idiots. It was not true. And so that's why I started AllThingsD, because the minute we did AllThingsD, if you go back, we were like, this is a goat rodeo. This is what here's the reporting, here's the scoop. And then let us tell you why it's a goat rodeo. Because we did the reporting for you. That was more valuable.
Audie Cornish
00:20:07
What I'm interested in is, the memoir, you use this analogy of love, you know?
Kara Swisher
00:20:11
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:20:12
And love clouds your judgment.
Kara Swisher
00:20:13
It does. It can, it can. But I love the tech, not the people. I love the possibilities of technology. I really did believe, and I probably was from being gay now that I think about it, it's like, we can come out and meet each other now.
Audie Cornish
00:20:28
'Were there red flags that you missed industry-wise in terms of how that culture was changing?
Kara Swisher
00:20:33
No, because I think we were on that a lot earlier when Google, I wrote a particular tough piece on Google about their need to be the Borg and take over everything. We wrote that and.
Audie Cornish
00:20:43
The antithesis of "don't be evil," right?
Kara Swisher
00:20:45
No. Yes. Right. Exactly. So we wrote a lot of those in 2001, 2002 saying this company is starting to turn into Microsoft. And they got mad at me for doing that. And we were saying if they do that, they will have unlimited power, because this is where advertising is going and everything else. We were super tough on Yahoo's mistakes. Twitter, Uber, we got, I think we helped get Travis Kalanick fired over that. And that was later.
Audie Cornish
00:21:13
There's a way that, given when you started covering it and where you are now, that your experience kind of mirrors our own cultural experience of the industry.
Kara Swisher
00:21:21
That's correct. Yes. Which I was trying to get at.
Audie Cornish
00:21:22
Yeah. Good. So I did the homework.
Kara Swisher
00:21:25
Here's what I push back.
Audie Cornish
00:21:26
But, just, it goes from grandiose utopia.
Kara Swisher
00:21:29
I was not a fanboy. I definitely was not those people.
Audie Cornish
00:21:31
But we all were, right? Like, we were.
Kara Swisher
00:21:33
No.
00:21:34
I do think that we were sold not a bill of goods, but definitely there was a reverence for young tech leadership. They were bringing us something.
Kara Swisher
00:21:43
A hundred percent.
Audie Cornish
00:21:43
'It was - we were not talking about them like they were robber barons or railroad guys, okay, it was very different. Whereas now, people do see them as insular.
Kara Swisher
00:21:54
That's correct.
Audie Cornish
00:21:55
Reckless.
00:21:54
That's correct.
Audie Cornish
00:21:55
'Self-aggrandizing billionaires.
Kara Swisher
00:21:57
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:21:58
And I do feel like that is a shift.
Kara Swisher
00:22:00
But I don't think people heard it. We did an interview with Mark Zuckerberg where we ran over him so much that he sweat, he almost sweat to death.
Audie Cornish
00:22:06
The infamous flop sweat. Yeah. And The Social Network did that.
Kara Swisher
00:22:09
'But we had been pressing him about privacy and Beacon. We were particularly tough about Beacon. And we're like, what are you doing? This is worse - even Steve Case. At one point when he was collecting all this information, we were talking about the hacking, the possibilities of hacking it. And he was at one investor meeting and he was bragging about how he made $63 each person. Right? 63. I mean, that's what the data that they got that you coughed up to him.
Audie Cornish
00:22:36
Because we're the product.
Kara Swisher
00:22:37
That's correct. And I raised my hand and I said, where's my $30? Like, why are you taking my things? And I think one of the problems that it led to is this sort of the which Scott Galloway calls the idolatry of innovators. And I think that's true.
Audie Cornish
00:22:52
We're in this strange moment now with generative
Kara Swisher
00:22:55
AI.
00:22:55
Artificial intelligence, AI. And you were recently talking to Sam Altman, who.
Kara Swisher
00:23:00
Yesterday, last night, six, 12 hours ago, yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:23:03
But you also said there needs to be a certain kind of personality in this next generation.
Kara Swisher
00:23:09
There does there also needs to be an aggressive person too, like.
Audie Cornish
00:23:13
You said contemplative, also, right?
Kara Swisher
00:23:15
He is much moreso.
Audie Cornish
00:23:15
And this is not to pick on him in particular, but I feel like AI is being greeted with far more skepticism.
Kara Swisher
00:23:21
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Audie Cornish
00:23:21
In some corners, panic.
Kara Swisher
00:23:23
A panic. But that's because of science fiction but go ahead.
Audie Cornish
00:23:26
Yeah, sure. But it's a very different, like, this is going to be so cool. We're going to get to do, but it's much more like, whoa.
Kara Swisher
00:23:32
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:23:32
Are the robots going to kill us all?
Kara Swisher
00:23:34
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:23:34
And what are those lessons that you take from the last couple of years of reporting into this next phase?
Kara Swisher
00:23:42
'I, you know, it's interesting because I'm, I'm in the middle. I'm like, Dr. Fei-Fei Li, I'm in the middle. I'm like. And people are surprised, they're like, don't you want to stop this? I'm like, we could solve cancer. No, I don't. Like, again, I don't think I'm too hopeful because I'm very aware of the dangers. I think what's good about this era is the actual makers of these things are contemplating the dangers of them. And honestly, the first person who talked about it was me ten, 15 years ago was Elon Musk. Was very worried about that. He was sort of deep in the sci-fi part of it, and it shifted a little bit over time. He first it was Terminator, it was the Terminator. This is it. And then it became, well, it'll treat us like house cats. And then it was like, oh, it's really like you're a builder. And you go over an ant hill and you kill it. You don't think about it like it became that, which I think is probably more accurate. It'll only do what we tell it to do, right?
Audie Cornish
00:24:37
Well, how should reporters approach this now, based on what you went through those early years?
Kara Swisher
00:24:44
I am making a heavy pressure on regulators right now. I spend a lot of time texting regulators, saying, what are you doing?
Audie Cornish
00:24:52
Do you think people didn't do that enough in the past? Not you, broader tech press?
Kara Swisher
00:24:56
'Yes, I think it was, we just let - it is an astonishing thing to think about the most powerful companies in the world and the richest people in the world in the history of the world, not having any regulation applied to them. And then the regulation that applies to them is advantageous, which is section 230. It's really unusual for the richest people in the world not to be able to be sued at all. Like really, pretty much not everybody.
Audie Cornish
00:25:18
'Yeah. Becuause again, we've talked about this in Congress. It's not like banking regulations where there's a constituency of lawmakers who want to do more regulations and the banks push back, but there's a push-pull.
Kara Swisher
00:25:31
Well, but there are regulations.
Audie Cornish
00:25:32
With tech, it's often like, we don't want to squash innovation.
Kara Swisher
00:25:36
Right, that's what they do.
Audie Cornish
00:25:36
And then, silence.
Kara Swisher
00:25:38
'Silence, right. We won't squash innovation. And so, that's been their excuse is we don't want to. And honestly I think what squashed innovation is our reliance on them to self-regulate and therefore disaster after disaster. And so,
Audie Cornish
00:25:51
Are we headed in the same direction?
Kara Swisher
00:25:53
I compared it couple of years ago in the New York Times, I compared Mark Zuckerberg is like he's got a butcher shop and he's like, some of the meat is probably going to kill you, but I don't know what which one. And, but it's not my responsibility to worry about the rancid meat. You're just going to have to. Good luck, that kind of thing. And he got mad at that. But I felt like that was a good thing. But to me, ultimately, now this guy just wants to make money. And that's why the first line of the book is, so it was capitalism after all. And I think that our regulators are now on the hook because these people are here for the shareholders.
Audie Cornish
00:26:25
But they look outmatched, frankly.
Kara Swisher
00:26:27
They are outmatched.
00:26:27
'I'm looking at Sam Altman and I just think, I don't know, a single lawmaker that is going to get to toe-to-toe with this person.
Kara Swisher
00:26:34
They're not.
Audie Cornish
00:26:34
'Much less be toe-to-toe with this person.
Kara Swisher
00:26:36
Well, that's the thing, is astonishing to think the federal government does not have enough power. And they don't. They really don't. I mean, these people have. I jokingly said I was around some Facebook people. I was like, what are those, like 80 PR people just on me? And they're like, no, 40. And I was like, oh.
Audie Cornish
00:26:53
Yeah.
Kara Swisher
00:26:53
You know what I mean, like?
Audie Cornish
00:26:54
But Joe Biden in his State of the Union, the president talked about trying to do regulations, I think, specifically against voice imitation.
Kara Swisher
00:27:02
Yes, deep fakes, yeah. Well, that's because he got got. He got got. They did all these things with him.
Audie Cornish
00:27:07
But is that a moment for someone to.
Audie Cornish
00:27:10
'They're all been moments. You know when there was a moment? The insurrection. Like, look - I, you know, sorry. It was - one of the best pieces I wrote is in 2019, I wrote a column in The New York Times, my first column in The New York Times in 2017, I called them digital arms dealers. That's why I did that column, because I wanted to alert public officials to what was happening. And so I said, these people are really hurting us. I wrote a column before Covid saying they're going to have more power than ever after Covid, because we have to rely on them so much, and then they'll be richer and they'll be trillion dollar companies, and then we can't stop them. But during 2019, I had argued with Mark about Alex Jones. He moved into Holocaust denial as I was worried about anti-Semitism. That was a very famous interview where he said, Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie, and he wasn't going to take them off his platform. And I said, you are going to reap the rewards of what you're doing here in a very bad way. But the column I wrote was saying, when he loses in 2020, he's going to say it was stolen, and then he's going to make sure he says it over and over again. He's going to radicalize his people. He's going to - it's going to go up and down the right wing echo chamber. It's all over the place, the right wing echo chamber.
Audie Cornish
00:28:23
I just worry that you've told us a story about people who rise to power virtually unchecked.
Kara Swisher
00:28:30
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:28:31
And once they get there, don't want any kind of accountability.
Kara Swisher
00:28:33
They don't.
Audie Cornish
00:28:34
You and I have talked about how hard it is for lawmakers to get it together. And now we're staring down this dark tunnel of AI.
Audie Cornish
00:28:42
This is the most important computing change in the generation.
Audie Cornish
00:28:46
And you've moved to Washington.
Kara Swisher
00:28:47
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:28:48
To talk more about regulation.
Kara Swisher
00:28:50
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:28:51
Are there willing ears?
Kara Swisher
00:28:53
There is.
00:28:53
Is there a constituency in all of us? Do we care enough, or is it more convenient for us to like, order food in helicopters or whatever in the appt than to actually deal with this?
Kara Swisher
00:29:03
That is correct.
Audie Cornish
00:29:04
Because I don't want to be in a love story with flames on it ten years from now, right? You know what I mean? Like, I would like to get this.
Kara Swisher
00:29:10
Haven't we all?
00:29:11
I would like to get it right, so to speak.
Audie Cornish
00:29:14
'Well, here's the problem. Because it's it's already in-built. There's - the lobbying is astonishing. There is a feeling by - you know, you saw those parents face Mark Zuckerberg the other day.
Audie Cornish
00:29:24
Right, in Congressional hearings.
Kara Swisher
00:29:25
And there is a, like, what are you doing? But even that was enough. He didn't apologize. He said, I'm sorry for what happened to you. That is not an apology, as far as I can understand it. And I saw his eyes and he was quite upset. I, you know, he's a person. I know he doesn't seem like one, but he is. And I think one of the problems is it just it is always pushback. And by the way, it's not just Republicans who are, just, spend their time just cosplaying, like, TikTok, let's get 'em. Like, that's not our biggest problem. It is a problem, by the way.
Audie Cornish
00:29:53
But we are, exactly, going through this fight on Capitol Hill right now about TikTok.
Audie Cornish
00:29:58
Right. I get it but guess what? It is a problem. I wrote about it five years ago, but what we really need is basic things, an artificial general intelligence safety regulation. A privacy bill would be nice this ten, 20 years into it, a national privacy bill, a data transparency bill, an algorithmic transparency bill. Like, there's ten of them. I wrote a story a long time ago called the Internet Bill of Rights and named the ten.
Audie Cornish
00:30:21
We should say, the EU, the European Union.
Kara Swisher
00:30:23
Has acted.
Audie Cornish
00:30:24
Started to act and make actions.
Kara Swisher
00:30:27
No, they have acted.
Audie Cornish
00:30:27
Why do you think they are able to do it in a way that that U.S. Can't?
Audie Cornish
00:30:29
'Because they don't get the benefits from these companies that our country does, right? These U.S. companies, the financial benefits they aren't getting the benefits, they're getting a lot of the negatives. Their governments aren't bought and paid for by these tech companies. And so, they don't - they're not under as much pressure. And so Margrethe Vestager, I'm actually talking to her next week, is able to put these fines on. And she's not getting pushback. And it's a much more privacy oriented world over there in Europe. It just is.
Audie Cornish
00:30:54
Are you in your activist era?
Audie Cornish
00:30:57
No. You know, you know, I think I have been. If You go back, I was. I think if you, I.
Audie Cornish
00:31:03
But this is different. Moving to Washington. You're burning the relationships. Not that hard because they're, like, all on the book tour.
Kara Swisher
00:31:09
But, yes, they are, thank you.
Audie Cornish
00:31:11
You're speaking more publicly.
Kara Swisher
00:31:13
No, only people I like are on the book tour. Elon and I are not going to be doing appearance together.
Audie Cornish
00:31:17
That's fair. But you you trust Altman more than I do right now. Let's just say it that way.
Kara Swisher
00:31:21
Do I? Yeah. Well, it's a low bar. If I can impact him, sure. I want to impact him. I did say to him, last night.
Audie Cornish
00:31:30
Do you see? That's why I'm asking. Do you see that also now, as part of your work?
Kara Swisher
00:31:34
Yes. I said to him. I said, I have great hopes that you'll try to at least do. I know it's a big moneymaking thing for all of you, and you're already a billionaire, so I suppose you have enough money. But I said, if you start down the ugly road of Elon Musk, I am going to turf you. I think I said that to him. I'm going to turf you. I'm going to try to turf you at least kind of thing. So yeah, I think I can have.
Audie Cornish
00:31:55
What does turf you mean?
Kara Swisher
00:31:57
Put you down.
Audie Cornish
00:31:58
Oh, okay.
Kara Swisher
00:31:58
Put you down. Like don't get up. Don't get up, that kind of thing. But the idea is I'm watching you and I'm hoping for the best from these people. Like, the new group of people. And look, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are doing climate change.
Audie Cornish
00:32:11
You're hoping for the best but you're ready to take them down for the worst.
Kara Swisher
00:32:14
'Yes. And I think what they're - by nature, because the money involved is so big, it's so massive, they're going to want to advantage shareholders. That's what they do. That's what they do. But in doing this, I'm hoping that some of them and I would say you can find people who are - who do understand the gravity of the situation like a Satya Nadella at Microsoft. It's not activist. It's more you know, speaking of CNN, I think Christiane Amanpour, I really like that saying "truthful, not neutral." I'm not neutral about this. And I think this new era, if Trump wins, he understands the uses of online to manipulate and quash people. And so, I see, like, this could go real bad, real fast. And that's the whole point that I'm trying to make, which I did, I think, with the Star Trek/Star Wars metaphor, which is we could go Star Trek, which is good, or we could go Star Wars, which is bad. But it's not the tech that's the problem. It's the people manipulating the tech. So I guess you could say I'm an activist. I'm an activist for unaccountable power, not being unaccountable, and that we should not have private companies running space. Government people should be involved and so should citizens. We should not have giant companies control AGI, and that's what they're doing right now. So if I keep saying, hey, big companies are controlling AGI. Government, what are you going to do about it? Enough times that someone will listen and they will also listen because they think the people that can do something about it are listening to me, which is often the case, right? That happens a lot.
Audie Cornish
00:33:56
The Kara Swisher.
Kara Swisher
00:33:57
Thank you so much.
Audie Cornish
00:33:58
Amazing. Wonderful.
Audie Cornish
00:34:00
'Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and Pivot with her co-host Scott Galloway. Her new memoir is called Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. We spoke at American University in Washington, DC. Special thanks to Director Amy Dacey and everyone at the Sine Institute who made us feel so welcome. That's all for today. We'll be back with a new politics episode on Monday. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Our engineer is Michael Hammond, Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. And thank you for listening.