Kara swisher i am delighted to be here with you. Its a real honor to talk about fern book, which you we have to i think for the cspan 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 its a book you write things you really think about people and youre not. People are supposed to see it. And of course, thats the whole premise of that movie and you have fun with it and its sort of gossipy and mean a little bit, but funny and so i decided thats what i was doing in my memoir and of what my 30 years covering Silicon Valley. The same time that subhead is a tech love story because i love tech. Yeah. So i dont want this idea that, you know, theres a lot of tropes out there. You know, tech is terrible. Its not terrible. Its how how its 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 people becoming the worlds richest, most powerful people. And youve been there since the beginning. I its interesting because, you know, you have a bunch of you have a bunch of great blurbs from a lot of people. Many of them are people that youve loved and hated or that youve 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 dont use that word. It was i never beat that word oc horrible word. Terrible word. But shes an entrepreneur, entrepreneurial reporter. Youre an entrepreneurial journalist and that is something first of all, i think there should be way more of that. I agree. And i think its so crucial because you are owning all your ip. In fact, youre 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 of it. You had to buck a lot of 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 to 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 didnt want to live in. I was gay. I did not one live in mississippi, not not my first choice. Didnt 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, its very its 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 postwatergate, but it still wasnt a very heady time for media, for especially newspapers. And i worked my way up. Thats all i did as i worked my way up slowly at first 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. Im 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 time, 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 was like, ill cover that. Ill cover this. And one of the things i covered retail for many years and watching the Retail Sector disintegrate in washington. I was a Business Reporter and i was studying business. That was one of the structures of the business was built on display advertising. I was like, well, this isnt going to turn out well. And for some reason, reporters werent paying attention. Why do you think theyre not Business People . I was like, yeah, this is not good. If this way. And then walmart was moving in and walmart was a very technologically savvy company. They didnt advertise as they knew how to get to people. Right. And it wasnt just internet, it was suppliers and Everything Else. Direct mail, email, things like that. And i actually emails didnt exist, but it was a lot. They were very technical. They knew when to have milk at the right place. Yeah. You know, i didnt just guess everything. And so one of the things that i felt was important was to understand the business youre in right . And reporters just arent interested and fascinating and i was like, well, if theres not enough money, its going to be a problem here. Like, what do you think . They can keep doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, and im going to do that. And so i focused on that. And then because i was the young person in the room, theyre like this this Online Services thing is really getting big. This companies are prodigy. Theres this Little Company called aol america online. They didnt call it aol at the time. Why dont you, young person go out there and the minute i saw it, i was like, oh, this is really bad for media and really interesting. And it was preinternet, 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 was like, oh, look, you dont 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 im like, no, itll 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, its going to be this way forever and ever and ever until the end of time. Im 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 grew, i had an email, everyone was like, why do i have an email . Readers will talk to you. Im 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, im 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 moved out to Silicon Valley to cover the nascent internet. This is the early the midnight 1990s. Well, so i it was interesting to hear you going out to yahoo excite. I mean, these places that dont even exist anymore, but yahoo does and yahoo does the truth. Thats true. Thats true. But i dont be evil. Yeah, thats because the monitor came later. Google was later. It was netscape. Yahoo and amazon were the very early ones. So im curious at what point . I mean, i always think about dont be evil. My second book was entitled dont be evil because and i looked at sort of the antitrust issues, which you get into a little bit. Im 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 isnt 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. Its endless. It was so easy to understand it and very few, a lot of the focus in tech at the time was on chips and about and computers that were sort of moving. You know, i had a mac and a macintosh in college, but very few people used it. They had very little interest in computers at college or at Journalism School. 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 problems. I did data for the google people. I did. That was later. But initially it was like just a directory. Yahoo was not a search engine. It was a directory where people hand put things in. But you could see where it could go, right . It was easy. And when i saw google, i was like, oh, yes, of course its going to be algorithmic. Its 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 could sort of, 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 its so clear where this is going. And youre and i told don graham, youre on youre on a lower flood plain and the waters rising. And he didnt put his waders on, not saying, no, i guess im going in a bigger boat. Im like, you dont have a big enough boat of whats happening. Its about to swamp. And you could craigslist to me was a 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 giving us albums . We dont want albums. We want individuals songs. And when the ipod came out, you know, you could just youd watch it and youd be like, theyre ignoring consumers and theyre ignoring and consume everybody, whoever is being affected by this is ignoring consumers. And then you got to understand that the power lay in the hands of the tech people now 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, thats really interesting. I want to read a couple of passages from interesting passages youre talking about, you know, this, this disruption. The tech titans would argue that they were no worse than Cable Networks like fox ne. True, but a very low bar. Fair enough. And there was no easily provable causality that they polarized the populace a nearly impossible thing to measure. Most of all, they often dismissed any weaponization as unintended consequences. Youre getting to where we are now. Essentially, the weaponization of the internet, the silo bubbles. Maybe so, but it was not 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 technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technology progress. Thats correct. So talk a little bit about what you began to see in terms of, wow, youve 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, theyd never go. But changing the world with our products, you know, maybe pharma people would, but they knew it was , you know, essentially. And they were buying the Biotech Companies like were making money, were making things, and then theyre buying them. And thats the whole exchange that the tech people to things were really interesting. Theyre juvenile ization of themselves and physically they would create offices that were for children. Yeah, because we want to stay childlike. And i was like, its childish is what im 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 birthday party, that baby me shower wherever but you and gavin newsom were the only ones that rejected wearing diapers. And once and once pajamas. Yeah. What is this about . What . What is that infantilizing. Its fun. Its for fun. There was a lot of forced fun. Like. And i kept thinking, did you not have childhood . Because i dont know. Whats that . Because im done with that party life and, you know, theyd be like, okay, you know, fine. Im like, im fun as an adult, not as im 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. Its like were really wacky. Like, yeah, look at our colorful balls, like, and im like, is that wacky . Or is you just are you just performatively doing that . Every industry has its own little uniform, right . And there was fleece. And cotton and the comfortable clothes was interesting to me as we dont wear ties around it, we dont have titles. Yeah, but you are. You sure knew who was in charge, right . 100 . You know, and its interesting because all of these things have now become mass market. You know, that kind of i dont give a you know what hoodie, but its cashmere or the leather sneakers or, you know, or even cubicle called no cubicle, open plan culture, which frankly i think doesnt work for a lot of people. But is the status quo now because of tech . Because of tech, all those cultural change, they like that. And i was like, i think they just wanted to recreate college. If im 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 its beyond that. Its the idea of of that they can go back to youth brings you this that its 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 didnt 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 dont like everything about steve jobs. I get the negative parts. Im not here to judge his personal life. Im not sorry. And i dont think it interfered with his. Im not here to judge the business. Same thing with Mark Zuckerberg. A lot of people make fun of his looks. Im like, why are we discussing this . Right . Hes not my business, right . I felt like he was a persistently and consist buoyantly creating exciting products that that were what he wanted to make and he didnt do it by committee. He was like, i like this. And if im right, ill make a lot of money if im wrong. He he was never pretending it was not a product and i appreciated that. He sometimes did the art and science, the beauty. But it was beautiful, like. Yes, it just was. And so i didnt mind his marketing, but he kind of did it like a marketing at chanel, you know, and people like carrie, his reality distortion field. Im like, im fully aware, but its delightful. Yeah. I dont know what to tell you. Hes 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. And so i liked that 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, toxic masculinity. 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 enjoyed every interaction i 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 didnt it was like, you know, he just didnt he like we argued all the time and i appreciated that. I didnt we didnt have to agree, but we could have disagreements. I didnt 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 time and had cultural references and societal references and pop culture references. A lot of times with these other techies, they just didnt finish college. They lived in their little bubbles. They ate the foods. They all they dressed the same. And i thought they were not creative in a way. And i think and then when they made 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. Im going to come back to that point. But i want to kind of tap something, you know, when you talk about how theyre all eating the same food, theyre 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 im wrong, but i think what youre getting at is this kind of an app for everything, a meta kind of consumerist culture, way through life, comfort, what you. So heres a question for you. If we assume that thats what Silicon Valley is doing right now, which i think is right, are there other places im 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. Theres lots of great Tech Companies that started in boston and lotus. One, two, three. Was there all kinds of stuff happened there. Theres a lot of robotics there close to mit. Often when theres a college or an important college that happens. Austin certainly had its resurgence with dell and some other and apple located a big facility there. That was interesting, but still not where it would goes like this. Awesome. Let me clarify the question, because actually what im asking is if we assume that Consumer Tech and the Consumer Internet was was and is sort of based in the valley, now that were entering a period where were really moving into business internet, were 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 . Its going to be it can be everywhere. Its 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, theres just a really good wall street journal. You know how they all left california because it was terrible. Theyre back, right . Because they. So no more texas and florida. Not as much. They suddenly move back. What dont they like about texas and florida . Low taxes. They like the low tax that if youre 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, its california. So you covered the dot com bubble. The first one, there was several. There were several, but im talking about 99, really. And for my sins, i have to admit, im going to im going to do a confession. Youre 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 like, oh, weve reached a high watermark if theyre hiring journalists to do that, like me to do this. But but i did it. And it was an incredible experience. I mean, what i came away feeling was i believed even less of what i was hearing from the mouths of the people. But i was actually more admiring of anything that got done because i realized how hard it was, 100 , right . Yeah, absolutely. I do something. Yeah, i think, you know, there is an the positive elements of tech people in general are risk. Theyre not risk averse, which is great. Neither am i, which is, i think, a good quality. I have. They dont mind failing. They love that Thomas Edison quote, i have not failed to have ten, 10,000 ways. It doesnt work, which im so tired of hearing. Im like, sometimes its just lets just move along. But they dont mind it. And certain people get to suffer failure easier. I would say white men, and its very clear, you know, they always like know im like, look, look around, look around. Everybody. They they turn. That is a good quality. The ability to move along and change a shift is also a suspension of disbelief. You know, crypto, crypto, crypto. Oh, no, no, no, no. I and i kind of like that because they sort of convince themselves and whatever particular hype cycle there happened to be in, some of them are very real mobile. Was i generative . I certainly is crypto. I was like, yeah, moneys already digital. Yeah. Now its 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 theres elements of it that are interesting. No, its a well, i always thought with Digital Currency that id rather 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, were going to disrupt this now. And im like, why . Why this like that . It was always my question is something certainly needed to be disrupted. Other things to disrupt, for disrupt sake is just a toddler, is it . Youre 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 have a productive thinking. Right. So youve 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 those terms, whats froth, whats real . Where are we going to be in five years . I think very little of it is froth. I think its 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, the popularization and probably microsoft was another when that whole platform stuff then mobile was a shift was like that changed the iphone was a critical i think its 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 didnt know what i wouldnt have predicted uber, but i would have said something. Somethings coming. I dont know what it is, but its 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 its what its 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, in speeds that are astonishing and you dont quite. Theres so much data out there now, it itll start to really make sense of all this massive data and begin to change, ensure its like saying electricity. What did electricity do . Well, a lot like what is what did the internet do . It wasnt the internet itself. Its how it transformed various things, whether its music or or commerce or finance. This is the same thing now. Its going to aim a lot more at white collar work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like someone was like, well, in fact, im like, therell be no more loss. So see, its why have them. Theres no reason. Its just data that needs that. You just had people do like monks and scribes, so yeah, thats just and people dont like hearing that, but youre sort of like, i dont know what to tell you. Lets 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 the only factor. But it certainly got us there. Were about to potentially disrupt 30 to 40 of white collar work. I mean, i dont see us having a really serious conversation about our government. Isnt our government. Is. And were going to have. So i believe but i dont 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 dont 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 its going to change journalism rather significantly. Im like, in a good way, say like headline is right and i want to headline awarding Journalism School golden pike. It was called i think and you know, you dont do that or you just dont theyre 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 theyre like, we have to have people do headlines. Im like, why does it why why cant they generate 100 of them . Then you look and then a person looks at them and picks two. The person doesnt remove themselves. Its just whats going on. And i would let me finish. So i go. So i go. So we have we have to do it ourselves. Im like, can i ask you a question . Did you like getting those 4 strawberries . Because they dont cost 4. They cost 4 because it was automated. Do you like getting stuff delivered by amazon . Well, thats because someone elses job. I said is coming for your job now. And so thats to me, every 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. Weve been here before it just happens to be that data is the is the is the gold here. I guess you think theyre going to spin it and hey, theyre going to spin into gold. Well, and that that brings me to 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 it really is different. And and its just going to haen in such a way that if we dont have some kind of major safety net under people, that its going to be politically disruptive in ways that are going to make. Well, we know that and we know that because of what happened with the last round with the internet. Right. It didnt it they didnt need much to do what they were doing, which is radicalize. Lots of people have all kinds of disinformation, which is simply propaganda. Lets just stop calling it and disappear. Its just propaganda. Thats what it is. Its people using inaccuracies to sway a group of people to do something thats really all it is. And and so its happened. So we know now this is a superpower version of that which was already superpower from the book or the billboard or the tv or the radio. And so we have to we should have no buy now what it does. And so if its 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 cant pass actual legislation, they have a Bipartisan Committee to discuss and put up guidelines. Thats because they cant do anything. Yeah, but to be fair, im going to push back a little bit, isnt it . Because congress is pretty much bought out by the tech titans. I mean, thats not thats not an excuse. I dont its not an excuse, but its a its a mutual say. Yes, but its that look, we have done this. Weve legislated airlines, not perfectly. 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 theres specific things in the 25 year, 30 years that the internet has grown or the internet powers have grown, the Top Ten Companies in the 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 theyre not many of them tech people. If you look at the top ten, theyre tech people for the most part, not an ounce of legislation. An address is them not an ounce. Now, they may have a lot of money, but guess what . Weve 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 cant do it . To say we cant do it is an excuse on our part . Well, i think youre 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 lets 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 perspective. Ive always found the weird mix of kind of hippie libertarianism, just i dont get that libertarian lite. Okay, okay. I dont even think they know what it means. Explain. I dont if i if i pressed them and made them define it, they wouldnt know. Now, i just dont like people bothering me. Im like, that is a two year old, right . You know, or teenager back to diapers and one right or no actually teenager like i dont want people bothering me. Dont bother me, mom. Thats really what theyre hopeful. I dont know if thats a philosophy or a political thing, but its a teenager area. I dont know what it is, but i think theres things at play is which is persistent lying to themselves about what they are. And it gets back to what we were just talking about, which is its capitalism. Thats all it is, is capitalism. Im sorry. Youre not changing the world. You want to make money and we treat them like theyre magicians. What i want to. Its funny that you just said that because i was opening opening the book to read another passage which gets said just this. Internet people love to do things like this. Youre talking about some of the childish behavior since it gave them an air of i dont care for corporate formalities which appeal to th audience th were aiming at and made good copy, much 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 youre quoting yourself that selfcongratulation and selfdeception and are now a part of the valleys ethos right up there with fearless risk taking money, effort and programing genius. I wrote listing lines like, its not about the money. It was. Its not about the fame. It also was theres no dress code special parking spaces, no fancy offices here because were 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. Well 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 theyre entering the society and starting to lecture us on things . Venture capital is giving us people, giving us Foreign Policy advice. Id really rather they sit down. Right . Im going to listen it. Dont eat lincoln and gun it. Im going to i know its crazy to rely on experts that experts dont know what theyre 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, doctor welby, sorry, not i dont recall you getting a medical degree and i dont think you know what youre talking about at the very least, you dont know. Like, lets start with that. But they cant acknowledge that thats really nuts that entering into other areas, whether its any there is no topic they arent an expert on and they arent an expert on any topic except the narrow thing they do. I wonder sometimes of them are some. Yeah, i wonder sometimes if thats a tech person thing or if thats a rich person. And im thinking about the ways in which financiers tend to become philosopher, just nachman and he really. Well, no, but its 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 its the conditions when you get that rich, you have all these enablers going. What you just said is brilliant and sometimes its not. Yeah, yeah. So i think thats 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. Thats really and in the last show, only one person was in a bar with regular people. You know, thats thats 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 theyd be like talking to you like oh yeah, youre right. And that was stupid. And you go, you did that again. And theyre like, thats not what they say. My, my staff says, i was right. I was like, oh, did they did your staff say right . How interesting do taylor like you know, all everybodys 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 people, especially psychedelics. Look at i dont know. Well see where. This all goes but the fact matter there is abuse of these things happening and they get to do whatever they want. The journal 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 its combined with health challenges, i think hes and feeling like you own the world and wealth and covid like you can see where how we got to we are pretty easily what they did that was very deft in the journal and i thought they did i have to give kudos to them 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 they all were benefiting by 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, hes taking ketamine, whatever. Whats important is why is he being allowed to break rules that other people cant . Well, heres why these happen to be these rules. But yeah, its because the money 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 wasnt like, well, what it is, every decision you make has to do with growth, even if its the self esteem of girls. Sorry, we need to make money. If its, you know, misinformation, antisemitic, misinformed, asian. Oh, sorry. Free speech. Like i was. Do you have any responsibility to what youre making . Essentially . You know, its so interesting. I mean, in all of this was sort of not even hiding in plain sight. Im thinking about the google, the original google, you know, the stanford project that that larry and sergey did, where if you read down to page 37 to the appendix, the risks of targeted advertising are kind of right there. They knew they could represent, you know, to stick with musk for a minute because hes a big character and you have a lot of thoughts on him. You you open and also with dont be evil you open with the idea 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, theyre taking them at their word right . Right. Real disjointed picture there. You call up elon to talk about it. Tell us a little bit. So what happened was i was with my son was a saturday, i think whatever day it was before this meeting. And i was good at scoops. Im just a really good beat reporter. And someone said, theres a meeting. Trump theyre all going. Im like whos going . And they told me this. Im like, who . Like it was all of them. Like essentially and no, nope. Usually when these things happen, theres a press release or they or the pr people call you and saying, oh, soandso is going to this meeting, tim cooks going to this meeting or whatever. There was a way it worked and it was silent and i was like, well, of course, because theyre 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. Im going to ban muslims. Yeah. And i was like he said like and i counted how many times as much as the number got too high. How many times he said it. And im of the maya angelou school. If they say what they are, believe them, right . If they tell you what they are, believe them. And and Donald Trumps not that hard to parse. He has hes hes you know, hes been being racist very for decades. Right. Hes 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 a 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 cant always answer the phone. He always inserted himself, which i really appreciated. And i said, what are you doing . Youre an immigrant. He hates immigrants. Well, no, maybe not. White immigrants like yourself, but white libertarians. Yeah, he wasnt 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 thats 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, were going in your room, you know . And i said, well, you youre 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 and they respect 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 antigay stuff isnt good. And hes changed his tune on that one. And and i was like, you cant go. You cant. Well, im going to join this thing. Im going to hope for the best. I can. We can convince them. Its like it reminded me a great deal of the hitlers of oh, dont we got them. We got it. We got this. And i was like, oh, no, hes president. Its kind of a big job. And you all have to Say Something. Youre the most powerful, rich people on the planet. You might want to make a statement. You know, youre and they didnt. And and and they didnt. They skulked in they skulked out. Trump got the best press release. He look he they legitimized him very quickly and then i was little like youre the richest, powerful people on the planet and youre bending your knee to this guy like you dont need to right now. You are. You have the catbird seat. And so i was kind of like really . But i think it was all about the money then too, because and then very quickly, you began to see during the trump administration, you start to see decoupling with china, you start to see cold war turning into that they want which they want, they want it. And i was 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 were like, no, wait, were national champions. Amazon thinking, okay, were just going to go with the us and do back end infrastructure. But the military or, you know, whatever, i mean, its a fascinating the money is why rob a bank its where the why work for the governments where the money is thats where the next growth is and they know better. And so why wouldnt they go there . I mean, again, if they had just said we just really like the money care, id have been fine. Got it. Thank you. Thank you for telling me the truth and now its not to say some of them dont have, you know, its just they always were selling how world changing and philanthropic they were. Yeah. Its not as its 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. Its like its mind blowing. It is mind blowing and i mean, youre landing on something really important, which is that the darpas this was public darpas great work. Even tesla meaning elon spacex. Theres 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 im 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 dont know why we didnt i dont know why we dont. Its ours, by the 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 theres this trope now that only technology can be innovative. Well, i dont know. The governments been. Yeah, you know its, so its 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 a 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 theyre we represent the tea party and we dont you know, governments terrible. Listen, that and i and i like to stay on the phone with these people. And i said, really . Yeah. Governments terrible. I question how did you get to work today and theyre like, i drove and i said on a road that was built by the government, you need to get the hell off that road because thats government. I was like, the government did well in world war two. I feel like that worked out well for all of us. Im so glad the nazis didnt win. 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 that this is part of a great experiment of democracy. But its all because of you and your genius at making us a digital dry cleaning service. Im sorry. I just dont buy. Yeah, yeah, well, that much of it, i do. Some of it is innovative and invention, but its. But, but what youre saying is its a collective effort. Its not just a matter of individuals. Yes. They love to self aggrandize in a way thats really, you know, even right now is the version of that. Right. Everythings about him. We must point all twitter. No. Zoe shiver has a great book where she he had them change the algorithm. So everybody followed him and listened to him. What is that . But what is that . But a king who wants everybody to. Its a king, right . Its what it is. Its certainly not innovative. Its 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. Im like i like puzzles and like and i wanted to be in the military. Youre a military analyst. I like thinking how could what is the scenario . How can this go . And so i reason i was a pretty good reporter because id always been like, if this than this, if this i was one of those people and id sit down and i could almost guess news stories because if i know enough about them, what they like, where they read, who theyre friends with, you really can. Okay, what are they doing . Whats their next move . And with a lot of people, its pretty easy to figure that out. Like people are very gettable, essentially. And so i was sitting there and i was looking at trump using twitter, which is, you know, everybody has their medium twitter. Trump had his and jfk had his. And our, you know, hitler had his, etc. , etc. And i just was watching him. And then i started to see some stuff abouthe weaponry he had about insurrection. He started to tweet about that and i was like, oh, wait a minute. This is really very problematic. And hes breaking the rules of platform. Theyre doing nothing about it, right . And so i wrote a column in 2019 and mid 2000 in october of 2018, where i said, im putting im making up a hypothetical here that id say to people where what if trump loses the election, starts to tweet online that it was stolen over and over again. It goes up and down the food chain, which it does online. Food chain goes from the very bottom and sort of the dregs for chance, and it goes up to the top and down to the bottom again. It has a really interesting path, but its it makes sense to me. And what if he does that and then he does repeats it again and again, like propaganda, and then he asks them or convince them to do something about it in real life. What would you do . And everyone is like, what would throw him off the bat . I said, why dont you do it now before it happens . Same argument i had with Mark Zuckerberg about holocaust deniers. Its the antisemitism is going to seep into the ground and well never get it out once you let it see, you have to stop it. We have free speech. Im like, not thats. No, you can make a yes. Government cant do it. You can like you can. You are not the government. So you can stop the antisemitism because if not its going to seep in and be worse. Were where we are today because of the allowing of that stuff to go on and on and on for years and years. Because were poison now. And so that was what happened. I wrote a column saying, i think this is going to happen. When i wrote it, i got calls from all the leaders, how dare you say we would be handmaidens . I dont think i call them handmaidens to sedition, but i thats what i thought. And how dare you . This isnt where its going to go. And i was like, this is exactly the way its going to go. And thats what happened. You know, i a lot about how were going to put this back in the box all the toxic and were not in and in part i think were not because the Business Model that weve just been talking about for the last 30 minutes or so is now kind of everybodys Business Model, you know . I mean, really, 85 of value lives in ip and data most almost every company that i can think of is monetizing data and information in some way. What does the future look like . And im curious if you could link that, but lets 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 im going to own it and im going to buck any system. I actually think theres theres something coming there between companies monetizing information and data and individuals beginning to say, actually, this is my ip, thats i want more of that. What does that fight . I think right now with agi, theyre scraping peoples content. Lets sue them. Copyright. Thats all. You know this its not terrific. If this is the law we have to use, we should have more stronger ones. Lets start there. Lets start with that. Lets start to put guardrails around. We can all agree what we dont want to happen. Killer robots. I think we can all agree on that. Right. Maybe, maybe a few people would be like, yeah, lets have those. Lets have guidelines around where the provenance of this information is. Lets have theres some very easy stuff we can all agree on. And heres what we would like this to be. Gene editing. Wed like you to give back some. Wed like to have safety standards. I mean, the biden executive order was pretty good in that regard. Yes, it was recently. But it cant be an executive order. It has to be legislation, right. Theres a lot of stuff that we can figure out really quickly around that antitrust which you know about is another thing they cannot dominate everything. They cant end it because its expensive, this stuff. So wheres 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 isnt. Thats china, in case youre interested, thats what they do in china. Totally different system. I mean, ive 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. Im just looking at a place where you get into something personal, which is the fact that as a im going to call you an overachiever. Is that fair . As an overachiever, busy, busy, busy person. You got four kids, youve got three jobs. You had a stroke. Yes, i did. You had a stroke. And its interesting because it comes at this point after youve been talking to steve jobs at a point in his life when he didnt have a whole lot longer. Thats correct. And and theres a little bit of twinning there that i picked up on that. Very much so. He affected me in great me. Yeah. 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. Im not a buddhist but i get he was steve was i get ephemerality i get like randomness things life isnt fair like just happens and theres no reason for it. And its 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 thats what happened to him. Time compressed. He understood that and he gave one of the best speeches, i think, of one of the greatest speeches of all time, which was his stanford speech about life being too short, death being the most informative way to be so creative. He was most creative in the years he was dying or were all dying, but he was really dying faster and and some of some of it maybe didnt have to happen that way, but thats the way it went. And and he really was very wise about it. It affected me 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 several different phases of this but now it was clear when he did this interview he was he was skeletal. You know, and hes 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 didnt say, oh, okay. Its 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 life and you know what . He had a great and hes like, i want this, i want this and this. And it was really. And he knew what i was doing. You know, he was very aware of it. But he was he was always forward. He didnt waste his life. Right . He didnt 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 and it was a it was one of those things in my face. One of my Favorite Book is franz kafkas the trial and everything is about authoritarian. Its about god that is about god. In my reading of it. And its 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 doesnt mean arrested in that book to me he was stopped by god. Start to think of what youre doing 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 im like i like what im 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, wasnt 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, hes very modern. Its a, its 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 to ask you whats on your reading list at the moment . Im reading this amazing book called northwoods, and im blanking on the author, but its a book about im really interested in architecture. You know, i think a lot about the architecture of the internet, right . I talk a lot about that. Like how it was built is what the reason why it enraged men equals engagement is because they built it that way. It doesnt have to be built that way. Important. It doesnt have to be built that way. It can be built another way. And in that vein, ill 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 whatever. And she said, we have this house and its full of cracks and the basement is flooded. We didnt build this house. We have to fix it. Right. And so it was really smart things. Its like, lets stop talking about the house. Lets 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 didnt it was made a beautiful movie because of that northwoods is the same thing and its 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 theres a lot of tragedy. But you you meet everyone whos 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 other people that were there before there was so much. The house is the only thing that knows what happened. And i love this book because its about its about history, its about death. Its about, you know, how we forget thing and move on and the house endures and eventually the house. But the house also falls into disrepair. And then its 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 different chat. One of thems a diary one of thems the maps, one of them. Its just so interesting and intricate. Its just a beautiful story about ephemerality of life and how you have to you have to take this long view, and you do northwoods and you do take along well. I hope youearn about the internet. You dont have hate to act like this book. I dont i dont hate tech. I dont know. I mean, its clear that you dont. Its i love it. I love it attack love story, burn book, stop doing these things to my house. I love we have to fix and share. It was great to be here. We thank you so much for the good interview and i really appreciate thoughtfulness and stuff and you know, awesome. Great to be with you