back to the original conversation. well, you so much, lila it was really a treat talking to you. kara swisher i am delighted to be here with you. it's a real honor to talk about fern book, which you we have to i think for the c-span audience, 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 kúind of too. it is for me, but it's a book you write things you really think about people and you're not.re supposed to see it. and of course, that's the whole premise of that movie and you

have fun with it and it's sort of gossipy and mean a little bit, but funny and so i decided that's what i was doing in my memoirat my 30 years covering silicon valley. the same time that subhead is a love tech. yeah. so i don't want this idea that, you know, there's a lot of tropes out there. you know, tech is terrible. it's not terrible. it's how how it's being used essentially. and so i want to say i love tech, but let me telppened. yeah. yeah. journey to do these people he powerful people. and you've been there since the beginning. i it's interesthave a bunch of you have a bunch of great blurbs from a lot of people. many of them are people that you've loved and hated or that you've trashed that list and have trashed you. and the thing that i actually love about this and this is the first thing i want to get into is you are, i think, a self appointed reporter preneur. is that the word. no, i don't use that word. it was i never beat that word oc horrible word. terrible word. but she's an entrepreneur, entrepreneurial reporter. you're an entrepreneurial and that is something first of all, i think there should be way more of that. agree. and i think it's so crucial

because you are owning all your in fact, you're even owning the things that people say about you and so yeah, i would love it actually if you could sort of d tell us just a little bit of the journey of you as a journalist before we into the other the other folks and the fact that pretty early on you saw t 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 s moving up the same food chain that existed before i started off. i went to i worked at the collegpa went to columbia journalism school, was offered a lot of jobs at places across the country, which i didn't want to live in. i was gay. i did not one live in dn't want to do the town hall reporting there like that. i felt like, n 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 actually, it's very it's a great place to be to watch how politics works in a newsroom. of in that

period where everything was going up and to the right as many media companies were, was[) well. it was post-watergate, but it still wasn't a very heady tfor media, for especially newspapers. and i worked my way up. that's all i did as i worked my way up slowly at first as a news aide, doing all you know, mostly scut work, essentially. and then i worked my way up eventually to become a reporter in the business section, which was the backwater. i'm always, yeah, everyone, you know, politics isord or metro or something like that. but i,ody else and did all kinds of stories and then the business section. at the time, barbarians at the gate was coming out and then business got a little sexy, right? that really turned everythg. and i started covering anything they threw at me. i was like, i'll cover that. i'll cover this. and one of the things i covered retail for many years and watching the retail sector disintegrate in washington. i was 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 isn't going to turn out well. and for some reaso paying attention.

why do you think they're not business people? i was like yeah, this is not good. if this way. and then wal-mart was moving in and wal-mart was a very technologically savvy company. they didn't advertise as they knew how to get to people. right. and it wasn't just internet, it was and everything else. direct mail, email, things like that. and i actually emails didn't exist, but it was a lot. they were very technical. they knew when to have milk at the place. yeah. you know, i didn't just guess everything. and so one of the things that i felt was important was to understand the business you're in right? and reporters just aren' interested and fascinating and i was like, well, if there's not money, it's going to be a problem here. like, what do you think? they can keep doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, and i'm going to do that. and so i focused on that. and then because i was the young person in the room, they're like this this online services thing is really getting big. this companies are prodigy. there's this little company called aol america online. they didn't call it aol at the time. why don't 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 pre-internet, really. internet did exist, but it was mostly via these compuserve and stuff. and so i also at the same time started to really lo the, the technology that was being used starting to being used a trash eighties which were the these little tiny radioshack i use the single or cell phone they had which was in a stcase and then the gordon gekko version. yeah. yeah, yeah. and i was like like a brick. yes. i was like, oh, look, you don't need to be in a newsroom anymore. why do you need to be here at all? because everything is portable. thl portable and boom is like'll be like star trek. i kept that like we like star trek and and i just kept running oh, it's going to be this way forever and ever and ever until the end of time. i'm like, no, i feel like history is littered with businesses. who did and so as i started to spend time with the internet people, as it grew, i had an email, ever was like, why do i have an email? readers will talk to you. i'm like, yeah, th idea. and then when you started to understand the world wide web and how you could download things digitally, books

included, i was like, industries and it creates new ones. and as i started to meet these people, they were talking my language right? and so i was like, i'm going to cover this because this is this is the beginning of television is the beginning of radio. i was a student of history and i did. and i moved out to silicon valley. i wrote a book on aol, and then i 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 don't even exist anymore, but yahoo! does andahoo! does the truth. that's true. that's true. but i don't be evil. yeah, that's because the monitor came later. google wyahoo! and amazon were the very early ones. so i' at what point? i mean, i always think about don't be evil. my second book was entitled don't be evil because and i looked at sort of the antitrust issues, which you get into a little bit. i'm curious at what point in that journey i think you went out and was it 97,

you began to feel like, oh, okay, this a bunch of cool people doing stuff and not being evil. this is actually bigger, potentially more problematic. when the f like, oh, it links to other things and you go wher you want to go. it's endless. it was so easy to understand it and very few, a lot of the focus in tech at the time was on chips and about and computers that were sort of moving. you know, i had a mac and a macintosh in college, but very few people used it. they had very little interest in computers at college or at journalism school. saying, you need to know computers. it seems like this will be like theand i the penny dropped right very early when i downloaded a book onto my hard drive and i was like, oh, did you see at that point, oh, copyright ms. 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. hand put things in. but you could seere whe when i saw google, i was

like, oh yes, of course's going to be algorithmic. it's going to be this. and that was not was not until 1998 or whenever it started. i did one of the first stories about their funding and went to the garage where they started rage and it was just you could sort it was all of what i was talking to the washington post about early on when there was early internet stuff, i kept saying this is it's so clear where this is going. and you're and i told graham, you're on you're on a lower flood plain and the water's rising. t his waders on not saying, no, i guess i'm going in a bn't have a big enough boat of what's happening. it's about to swamp. and you could craigslist to me was a moment of revelation. yeah. because it wasso 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 don't r, we want individuals songs. and when the ipod came out, you know, you could just you'd watchit and you'd be like, they're

ignoring consumers and they're ignoring and consume everybody whoever is beimers. 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, that's really interesting. i want to read a couple of passages from inpassages you're talking about this disruption. the tech titans would argue that they were no worse than cable networks like fox news. true, but a very lowwas no easily provable causality that they polarized the populace a nearly impossible thing to measure. n dismissed any weaponization as unintended consequen to where we are now. essentially, the weaponization bubbles. maybe so, but it was not an unimaginable consequence. french philosopher paul virgilio has a quote that i thi 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 technology progress. that's correct. so talk a little bit about what you began to see in terms of, wow, you' 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 thisple. like if you were talking to a big pharma company or finance or wall street or insurance, they'd never go. but changing the world with our products, you know maybe pharma --, you know, essentially. and they were buying the biotech e're making things, and then they're buying them. and that's the whole exchange that people to things were really interesting. they're juvenile ization of th and physically they would create offices that we children. yeah, because we want to stay childlike. and i'm looking at. like adult people using slide eyes and bouncing on bouncy balls. so you have to talk about one of my favorite anecdotes in this

book is the surrogate. well, i was going to say the sergey brin work birthday party, that baby me shower wherever but you and only ones that rejected wearing diapers. and once and once pajamas. yeah. what is this about? what? what is that infantilizing. it's fun. it's for fun. there was a lot of forced fun. kept thinking, did you not have childhood? because i don't know. what's thatdone with that party life and, you know, they'd be like, okay, you know fine. i'm like, i'm fun as an adult, not as i'm not particularly fun but it was really funny because i was fascinated by the performative aspects of itthen pretending it was real, that was the other thing. it's like we're rea colorful balls, like, and i'm like, is thatust performatively doing that? every industrys fleece. and cotton and the comfortable clothes was interesting to me as we don't wear ties around it, we don't have titles. yeah but you are. you sure knew who was in charge, right? 100%. you know, and it's interesting hings have now become mass market.

you know, that kind of give a you know what hoodie, but it's cashmere or the leather nnow, or even cubicle called no cubicle, open t 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 i'm going to be generous. but nursery school was more my have sandpits like it was weird they ballces. i went to a google party once and they had ball pits and slip and slide and i was like, what the heck is here? but it's beyond that. it's the idea of of that they can go back to youth brings you this that it's the glorification brings you creativity, which is not true. so jobs proved that over and over. indeed, he was an adult, by the way. he didn't there was nothing like that at apple, and they dijust ne in the creative department. i came away feeling like he was the guy that youll reai do, lord of of all of them. i don't like everything about steve jobs. i get the negative parts. i'm not here to judge his personal life. i'm not sorry. and i don't think i'm not here to judge the business. same thing with mark zuckerberg. a lot of people make fun of his looks. i'm like why are we discussing

this? right? he's not my business, right? i felt like he was a tently and consist buoyantly creating exciting that were what he wanted to make and he didn't do committee. he was like, i like this. and if i'm right, i'llake a lot of money if i'm wrong. he he was never pretending it was not a product and i iaec sometimes did the art and science, the beauty. but it was beautiful like. yes, it just was. and so i didn't mind his marketing, but he kind of did it like a marketing at chanel, you know, and people like carrie reality distortion field. i'm like, i'm fully aware, but it's delightful. yeah to tell you. he's really good at selling things and so that i appreciated i appreciated his presence on podcasting, on privacy, on if you go back to our interviews, it is a astonishing the things heghtful person and he was a smart person. and so i liked that about him. i also thought he was full of passion,ery many of these people were not. they were in it for the mon

kalanick yeah, he was really well, he had other various toxic masculinity. yeah, toxic masculinity. but this is e uber, not the founder. he was he was t forward. so i liked him. i like i enjoyed every teraction i had with him even when we were arguing because i felt like it was he never you never wilted like a hothouse flow. zt it was like, you know, he just didn't he like we argued all the time and i appreciated didn't have to agree, but we could have disagreements. i didn't know him as well as my partner, walt mossberg, but i they were just it was alwaysinteresting 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 didn't 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 could tell you about everything else andnuts. i mean, i see that all politics,

business today still, although i the bloom is a little bit off the rose. i'm going to come back to that point. but i want to kind of tap something, you know, when you talk about how they're all eating the same food, they're all doing the sai was struck towards the end of the book. you talked about silicon valley business of assisted living for millennials. yeah. and andg, but i think what you're getting at is this kind of an app for everything, a meta kind of consumerist culture, way through life, comfort, what you. so here's a question for you. if we assume that that's what silicon valley is doing right now, which i think is right, are there otherking about? boston, maybe, or parts of your there? are there places where9k different tech revolution? no, i think silicon valley was this. the people tried to createh in boston. there's lots of great tech companies that started inwo, three. was there all kinds of stuff happened there. there's a lot of robotics there close to mit. often when there's a colleg an important college that happens. austin certainlyad resurgence with dell and some other and apple located a big

there. that was interesting, but would goes like this. awesome. let me clarify the question, because actual assume that consumer tech and the consumer internet was was and is sort of based in the valley, now that we're entering a period where we're moving into business internet, we're moving into internet of things, supply chains industrial internet lking about earlier, is that going to be someplace else or is going to it's going to be it can be everywhere. it's so much more in something to do with the woman who came up with the unicorn, which was the billion dollar value companies. and the numbers are still clearly heavily in calif. they just are. and actually, there's just a really good wall street journal. you know how they all left california because it was terrible. they're back, right? because they. so no more t florida. not as much. they suddenly move back. what don't they like about texas and florida? low taxes. they like the low tax that if you're going somewhere just for the money, you know how that sets up. you know, perfectly fine by the way, austin, again, very vibrant. and i think, you know, space stuff there, for example can steve case, whoabout 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 nowan francisco. is that right? interesting. really is. and of course, chinasome other places. but for the most part, it's california. bubble. the first one, there was several. there were several but i'm talking about 99, really. and for my sins, i have to admit, i'm going to i'm going to do a confession. you're catholic. so and maybe not practicing on. 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, we've reached a high watermark if they're hiring journalists to do that, like me to do this. but but i did it. and it was an incredible experience. i mean, what i came away feeling was i believed even less of what i was hearing from the mouths of admiring of anything that got done because id how hard it was, 100%, right? yeah absolutely.ah, i think, you know, there is an the positive elements of

tech peoplin general are risk. they're not risk averse, which is great. neither am i, whichink a good quality. i have. they don't mind failing. e, i have not failed to have ten, 10,000 ways. it doesn't work, which i'm so tired of hearing. i'm like, sometimes it's just let's just move but they don't mind it. and certain people get to suffer failure easier. i would say white men, and it's very clear, yo i'm 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 be in, some of them are very real mobile. was i generative? is crypto. i was like yeah, money's already digital. yeah. ant to hide it, right? or you want to find another way of moving value. i get it. i kind of am not so sure it needed as much hype as it did, but there's elements of it that

are interesting. no, it's a well, i always thought with digital currency that i'd rather have it be still digital and then backed by an actual complicated. complicated. they just feel like they want to r whole little meme is like, we're going to disrupt this now. and i'm like why? why this like that? it was always my question is something certainly needed to be disrupted. other things to disrupt, for disrupt sake is just a toddler, is it? you' essentially. i read something interesting recently. i wonder what you would say in the 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 t. so you've got a lot of voltage internet. did you lay a lot of fiber optics and then that you built can you describe a i at the moment in those terms, what's froth, what's real? where are we going to be in five years? i think very little of it is froth. i think it's a really significant there are significant moments in

technology, the graphical user interface or the chip, the chips, the computer, the laptop. that was sort of the, you know the popularization and probably microsoft was another when that whol stuff then mobile was a shift was like that critical i think it's probably if i had a point to one device that was the most important device. 2000 7007. when i got that, my hands were like, oh, it was another like, oh, i see w universe. i didn't know what i wouldn't have predicted uber, but i would have said something. something's coming. i don't kn great. yeah, right, exactly. and so. so you could see those shifts and i think social was another one, generative eyes another one because it's what it's doing is, ising the internet and opening it up like going like cracking open the internet itself and serving it up to you in new ways, in quite. there's so much data out there now, i this massive data and begin to chan ensure it's like saying electricity.

what did electricity do? well, a lot like what is what did the internet do? it wasn't the internet i it's how it transformed various things, whether it's music or or commerce or finance. this is the same thing now. it's going to aim a lot more at white collar work. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. like someone was like, more loss. so see, it's why have them. there's no reason. it's just data thatds that. you just had people do like monks and scribes, so yeah that's just and people don't like hearing that, but you're sort of like, i don't know what to tell you. let's land on that for a minute. cause this is something i think a lot about. if, if we look at the politics of the moment and this is what i argued in my last book that essentially disrupting 8% of 8 to 12% of manufacturer jobs, de you count it in part got us to trump, but not the only fac got us there. we're about to potentially disrupt 30 to 40% of white collar work. i mean, i don't see us having a really s conversation about our government. isn't our government. is. and we're going to have. so i believe but i don't think ubi i in those fantasies a libertarianng on the ballot here nancy is really

interesting, actually. i mean, it works in some le work. creativity. everyone becomes an entrepreneur. if you have a minute.teach entrepreneurism. right. like true. we d bootstraps and give any nobody any help. that is a very different thing. so lotof people fail. but what i do think is that, look, every single like i had at a dinner the other night and they were all it was all journals and one it was that high minded kind of. and i try to avoid at all times and i was talking, they asked me about i said well, like it's going to change journalism significantly. i'm like, in a good way, say like headline is right and i headline awarding journalism school golden pike. it was called i thinkn't do that or you just don't they're the kerning happens on the computer and i said so and it will generate 100 headlines that might guy in the corner there takes 50 friggin minutes for a not a good one, right? not a good one. and then you get one out of him and they' have to have people do headlines. i'm like why does it why why can't theythen you look and then a person looks at them and picks two. the person doesn't remove themselves. it's just what's going on.

d i would let me finish. so i go. so i go. so we have we have tos. i'm like, can i ask you a question? did you like getting those $4 strawberries? because they don't cost $4. they cost $4 because it was automated. do you like getting stuff delivered by amazon? well, that's because someone else's job. i said is coming for your job now. and so that's to me, every single one of these job shifts. and it happened with farming, it happened with, with, with, you know, the the loom when they were manufacturing. we've been here before it just data is the is the is the gold here. guess you think they're going to spin it and hey they're going to spin into gold. well, and that that brings me to another topic i want to look at that you kind of touch o 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 tha depth and breadth of this change particularly ai powered is it really is different. and and it's just going to happen in such a way that if we don't have some kind of major

safety net under people, that it's godisruptive 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 in. right. it didn't it they didn't need much to do what they were doing, which is radicalize. londs of disinformation, which is simply propaganda. let's just disappear. it's just propaganda. that's what it is. it's people using inaccuracies to sway a group of people to do something that's really all it is. and and so it's happened. so we know now this is a superpower version of that which was already superpower from the boboard or the tv or the radio. and so we have to we should have no buy now what it does. and so if it's even more potent should have guardrails in place. of course. what do they do in congress? they have are closed to people with all the power brokers. they right now, because they can't pass actual legislatbipartisan committee to discuss and put up guidelines's because they can't do anything. yeah, but to be fair, i'm going to push back a little bit, isn't it? because congress is pretty much

bought out by the tech titans. i mean, that's not that's not an excuse. use, but it's a it's a mutual say. yes, but it's that look, we have done twe've legislated airlines, not perfectly. we have legislated form. we have legislated finance. we have legislated insurance. we d for goodness sake. we legislate media. we do there's specific things in the 25 year, 30 years that the grown or the internet powers have grown the top ten companies in the world are tech companies, the top most valued except for thedis with aramco. yeah. and maybe one of the louis vuitton people or something like that. but if you look, i have a lot of targets, literally all tech th world are either oil people and they're not many them tech people. if you look at the top ten they're tech people for the most part, not an ounce of legislation. an address is them not an ounce. now, they may have a lot of money, but guess what? we've been here before. ere here with andrew carnegie. we were here with john rockefeller. we were here with standard oil. we were in the at&t. do you think we can't do it? to say we can't do it is an excuse on our part?

well, i think you're getting at something important. and this is clearly to do, which is deal with power not price, because this is a barter. this is a barter exchange. data is a barter. things have changed. so let's go. i want to come back to the culture of the valley for a minute and some of thenal stories that you tell in this book. first of all, i would love your the weird mix of kind of just i don't get thatay, okay. i don't even think they know what it means. explain. i d't if i if i pressed them and made them define it, they wouldn't know. now, i just don't like people bothering me. i'm like that is a two year old, right? you know, or teenager backand one right or no actually teenager like i don't want people bothering me. don's really what they're hopeful. i don't know if that's a philosophy or a area. i don't know what it is, but i think there's 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 it's capitalism.all it is, is capitalism. i'm sorry. you're not changing the world. you want to make money and we treat them like they're magicians.

what i want to. it's funny that 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. you're talking about some of the since it gave them an air of i don't care for corporate formalities which much of it is is of course srforling to the public these inventors were going to seize power and have a good it. i even wrote a story about the lives of silicon valley, which holdup rather well a quarter century later. no wonder then that and you're quoting self-congratulation and self-deception and are now a part of e valley ethos right up there with fearless risk taking money, effort and programing genius. i wrote listing lines like, it's noit was. it's not about the fame.there's no dress code special parking spaces, no fancy offices hereau 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 w quickly. any other lies that we should be paying a the moment that they know better and right that they're entering the society and starting to lecture us on things? venture capital us

people, giving us foreign policy advice. i'd really rather they sit right? i'm going to listen it. don't eat lincoln and gun it. i'm going to i on experts that experts don't know what they're talking about. interview the elon musk where he lectured me on every study i know. i was like, listen doctor welby, sorry not i don't recall you getting a medical degree and i don't think you know what you're talking about at the very least, you don't know. like, let's start with that. bu owledge that that's really nuts that entering into other areas whether it's any there is no topic they aren't an expert on and they aren't an expert on any topic except the narrow thing they do. i wonder sometimes of them are some. yeah, i wonder sometimes if that's a rich person. and i'm thinking about the ways in which financiers tend to become philosopher just nachman and he really. well, no, but it's ray dalio. george soros mean they all want to become writers and philosophers after. they make the money with what they would. it got them there, right? yeah, i guess so. but these guys do it younger, which maybe it's the conditions when you get thate enablers going.

what you just said isnot. yeah yeah. so i think that's the problem is. people, their worlds get smaller and smaller and smaller over time. i think they depict that super well in succession. you notice they yeahhey planes to the apartments to the cars, to the, you know tight got tighter and tighter over the seasons. that's a bar with regular people. you know, that's that's a really profound observation. i was well, i did the podcast for it, so i paid a lot of attention on for them. but it really is and you started to see it with them is in sometimes they'd be like talking to you like oh yeah, you're right. and that was stupid. and you go, you did that again. and they're like, that's not what they say. my, my staff says, i was right. i was like, oh, did they did your staff say right? how interesting do taylor like you know, alls are aligned with you know i think recently the wall street journal stories about something everybody knew in silicon valley which was drug use by these teche, especially psychedelics. look at i don't know. we'll see where.

this all goes but the fact matter there is abuse of these things happening and they get to do whateveey depicted it really well. this is an elon musk case and the effect it might be having him. and i think it explains a lot actually. combined with and feeling like you own the world and wlt 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 gifinally like saying the quiet part out loud. was that the rea the board was letting you get to know this stuff was because they all were bene hundreds of millions of dollars. well, okay. oh, i see now. and ithat was smart. you could sit here and talk about just the drug use, which is like, ketamine whatever. what's important is why is he being allowed to break rules that other people can't? well, here's why these happen to be these rules. but yeah, it's because the money and and again, the first was capitalism after all. and w got so tired of them telling me it wasn't like, well, what it is, every decision you make has to do with growth, even if it's

lf esteem of girls. sorry, we need to make money. if it's, you know, misinformation, anti-semitic misinformed, asian. sorry. free speech. like i was. do you have any responsibility to what you're making? essentially? you know, it's so interesting. i mean, in all of this was sort of not even hiding in plain sight. i'm thinking google, you know, the stanford project that that larry and sergey did, where if you read down to page 37 to the risks of targeted advertising are kind ofe. they knew they could represent you know, to stick with musk for a minute because and you have a lot of thoughts on him. you you open and also with don't 3i 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, they're taking them at their word right? right. real disjointed picture there. you call up elon to talk about tell us a little bit. so what happened was i was with myatever day it was before this

meeting. and i beat reporter. and someone said i'm like who's going? and they told me this. i'm like who? like it was all of them. like essentially and no, nope. usually when these things happen, there's a press release or they or the pr people call you and saying, oh, so-and-so is going to this meeting, tim cook's going to this meeting or whatever. there was a way it worked and it was silent and i was like, well, of course, because they're embarrassed because but they want things including repatriation of their ta government contracts, they wanted no regulation. and so i can see why they went. but there was silence about immigration and look, i cannot stand donald trump. but he said what he was going to do. i'm going to ban muslims. yeah. and i was like he said like and i counted how many times as much as the number got too high. how many times he said it. and i'm of the maya angelou school. if they say what they are believe em, righ believe them. and and donald trump's not that hard to parse. he has he's he's you know, he's

been being racist very for decades. right. he's been being misogynistic for decades. this is not a new, fresh thing. and so they were going there. and so i was going to write a this is interesting. this is a it was all of them. it was and the ceos. and so i called can't always answer ins doi migrant. he hates immigrants. well, no, maybe not. white immigrants like yourself, libertarians. yeah, he wasn't at the time. he was sort of he had voted for obama. he had been pretty democratic. i would say it was it was hard to pin him down, but he was much more on the democrat side for a long we that's how you get to be the worst right wing person. if you were kind of do you know the people who shifted over after and and so he was like, well, we're going in your room, and i said, well you you're going to say something publicly about the immigration stanceilicon valley was on by immigrants really, many people in silicon immigrants. a lot of the leaders have been from another country and they

respect immigration. they want these visas and everything else. and and isomething about immigration, at least. at the very least, i will convince him. kara. i know. and he was alsorned about gay rights issues at the time. he was like, this anti-gay stuff isn't good. and he's changed his tune on that one. and and i was like, you can't go. g to join this thing. i'm going to hope for the best. i can. we can convince them. it's like item don't we got them. we got it. we got this. and i was like, oh, no, he's president. it's kind of a big job. and you all have to say something. you're the most powerful, rich people on the planet. you might want to make a statement. you know, you're and they didn't. and and and they didn't. they skulked in they trump got the best press release. he look he they legitimized him very quickly and then i was little like you're the richest ending your knee to this guy like you don'edt neyou are. you have the catbird seat. and so i was kind of like really? but i think it was all about the

money then because and then very quickly, you began to see during the trump administration, you start to see decoupling with china, you start to see cold war turning into that they want which they want, they want it. and i was fascinatedthe tech titans lined up on either sides of that debate. i mean, zuckerberg and facebook google tried to have it kind of both ways at first, and then we're like, no, wait, we're national champio. amazon thinking, okay, we're just going to go with the us and do back end infrastructure. but or, you know, whatever, i mean, it's a fascinating the money is why robwhere the why work for the governments where the money is that's where the next growth is and they know better. and so why wouldn't they go there? i mean, again, if they had just sa just really like the money care, i'd have been fine. got it. thank you.u for telling me the truth and now it's not to say some of themy always were selling how world changing and philanthropic they were. yeah. it's not as it's not a favor to e internet which was paid for by the us government and build a business off of our money and then give you a little, that little and then not pay taxes. it's and i mean,

you're landing on something really important, which is that the darpa's this was public darpa's grt even tesla meaning elon spacex. there's been a lot of talk along tesla exist today is because of government loan. yeah you know mean he goes on out the government i'm like whoa do you just on that point do you have a position should we adopt, you know, say a more danish standard or an israeli standard about how the government takes back some of the profit? oh, i think we should have. i think we should have taken more. and in tesla, i don't know why we didn't i don't know why we don't. it's 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.s this trope now that only technology can be innovative. well, i don't know. the government's been. yeah, you know it's, so it's so exhausting to listen to some people just constantly. i remember when is it when the when the the right wing the ones time, they all do now. but there was a, i had someone call me in san francisco and they got my number was one of those robocalls kind of thing. and they're we represent the tea

party andn't you know government's terrible. listen that and i and i like to stay on the phone with these said, really? yeah. governments terrible. i question how did you get to work today and they're like, i was built by the government, you need to get the hell off that road because that's government. i was like, the government did well in world war two. i feel like that worked out well for all of us. i'm sodidn't win. i really feel the government innovated in space. thethey like to do is think they love to trash everything but them and and then you sort of start to suspect you this where is the sense of commonality and civility and the fact that this is part of a great experiment of democracy. but it's all because of y your genius at making us a digital dry cleaning service. i'i just don't buy. yeah, yeah, well, that much of it, i do. some of it is innovative and invention, but it's. but, but what you're saying is it's a collecti e not just a matter of individuals. yes. they love to self aggrandize in

right now is the version of that. right. everything's 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 andstened to him. what is that? but what is that? but a king who wants everybody to. it's a king right? it's what iainly not innovative. it's weird, actually, just sticking with the tea party line to occupy twitter. you were warning before we had the capital. yes, i was. i ote a full column about it. talk a little bit about that was the tip offs. i justse people who sits around. i'm like i like puzzles and like and i wanted to be in the you're a military analyst. i like thinking how could what is the scenario? how can this go? i reason i was a pretty good reporter because i'd always been like, ithis t this, if this i was one of those people and i'd sit down and i because if i know enough about them, what they like, where they read, who they're friends with, you really can. okay, what are they doing? what's their next move? and with a lot of people, it's pretty easy to figure that out. like people are very gettable,essentially.

and so i was sitting there and i was looking at trump 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 had about insurrection. he started to tweet about that was like, oh, wait a minute. this is really very problematic. an's breaking the rules of platform. they're doing nothing about it, right? and so i wrote a column in 2019 and mid 2000 in october of 2018, where i said, i'm putting i'm making up a hypothetical here that i'd say to people where what if trump loses the election, starts to 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 goes up to the top and down to the bottom again. it has a really interesting path, but it's it makes sense to me. and what if he does that and then he does rep again, like propaganda, and then he asks them or them to do something about it in real life.

what would you do? and everyone is like, what would throw him off the bat? i said, why don't you do it now before it happens? same argument i had with mark zuckerberg about holocaust deniers. it's the antisemitism is going to seep into the ground and we'll never get it out once you let it see, you have to stop it. we have free speech. i'm like, not that's. government can't do it. you can like you can. you are not the government. so you can stop the antisemitism because if not it's going to seep in and be worse. we're where we are todayse of the allowing of that stuff to go on and on and on for years and years. because we're poison now. and so that was what happened. i wrote a columnthis is going to happen. when i wrote it, i got calls from all the leaders handmaidens? i don't think i call them handmaidens to sedition, butand how dare you? this isn't where it's going to go. and i was like, this is exactly the way it's going to go. and that's what happened. you know i a lot about how we're goiput this back in the box all the toxic and we're not in and in part i think we're not because the business model that we've justhe last 30 minutes

or so is now kind of everybody's business model, you know? i mean really, 85% of value lives in ip and data most almost every company that i can think of some way. wh does the future look like? and i'm curious if you could link that, but let's go back to kind of your pathway and the fact that you were smarter than most journalists very early on saying, this is my content and i'm going to own it and i'm going to buck any system. i actually think there's there's something coming there between companies monetizing information and data and individuals beginning to say, actually, this is my ip that's i want more of that. what does that fight? i think right now with agi they'repeople's content. let's sue them. copyright. that's all. you know this it's not terrific. if this is the law we have to use, we should have more stronger ones. let's startt. let's start to put guardrails around. we can all agree what we'killer robots. i think we can all agree on that. right. people would

be like, yeah, let's have those. let's have guidelines around where the provenance of this information is. let's have there's some v easy stuff we can all agree on. and here's what we would like this to be. gene editing. we'd like you to give back some. we'd like to have safety standards. i mean, the biden executive order was pretty good in that regard. yes, it was recently. but it can't be an order. it has to be legislation right. there's a lot of stuff that we can figure antitrust which you know about is another thing they cannot they can't end it because it's expensive, this stuff. so where's the government funding to allow innovation to happen from the bottom up strength of our country is innovation from the bottom up. it is not invention from the top down. it just isn't. that's china, in case you're interestedat they do in china. totally different system. i mean, i've always thoughttactually one of the great advantages for the us is decentralization and focusing on that when we think about national security. let me go back. i'm just looking at a place where you get into something personal, which is the fact that as a i'm going to overachiever. is that fair? as an overachiever busy, busy, busy person. you got four kids, you' got

three jobs. you had a stroke. yes, i did.and it's interesting because it comes at this point after you've been talking to point in his life when he didn't have a whole lot longer. that's correct. and and there's a little bit of twinning there that i picked up on that. very much so. 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. young so death was always ever present in my life and. and ephemerality. i'm not a buddhist but i get he was stev was i get ephemerality i get like randomness things life isn't fair like just happens and there's no reason for it. and it's just the way things go. so i was living like that and so that put me an idea of time. i had a limited amount of time when steve got sick. i think that's what happened to him. time compressed. he understood that and he gave one of the best speeches, i think, of one of the greatest speeches of all time which was about life being too short, death being the most informa way to be so creative. he was most creative in the years he was dying or we're all

dying, but he was really dying faster and and some of some of it maybe didn't have to happen that way but that's the way it went. and and he really was very wise about it. it affected me quite a bit. and and one o him, which i think was one of the best questions i ever asked him, was we did the last rview with him before he died. really, before you got real sick? i think we did it in june. he got he 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 different phases of this but now it was clear when he did this interview he was he was skeletal. you know, and he's still vibrant and let me just say, he was always vibrant. and you asked i thought this was so beautiful that you said, how are you going to spend the next ten years? no, i said, what are you going do the rest of your life? oh, i didnest say, oh, okay. it's very specific. interesting. and the crowd was like, she just ask a dying man what he was going to do with the rest of his lifeat? he had a great and he's like, i

want this, i want this and this. and it was really. doing. you know, he was very aware of it. but he was he was always forward. he didn't waste his life. right? he didn't waste his time. 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 kafka's the trial and everything is about authoritarian. it's about god that is about god. in my reading of it. and it's becaus been telling lies about josef k because he was arrested one fine morning, rested, arrested means stopped. it doesn't mean arrested in that book to me he was stopped by god. hink of what you're doing with your life and so that stroke was a is an arrest was an and i had to think, what do i want to do? like what i'm doing. i like not working for people. i like owning my ip. i like doing what i feel like. yeah, you have a beautiful markus aurelius quote too about

you already dead. yeah, yeah. and look and let the lightness come forward. yeah, well, in the last guy was smart, wasn't he? was like that. i want to. i i know. like you up you were up in the mud and allto pull this out of your hat. like what? i feel like it was from the future guys that i know a few. yeah but he in particular, he's very i keep thinking he was from the future and he went back and just decideto wear fur and the in gladiator are all right i will on that and i want to ask you what's on your reading list at the moment? i'm reading thiscalled northwoods, and i'm blanking on the author but it's a book about i' really interested in architecture. you know i think a lot about the architecture of the i talk a lot about that. like how it was built is what the reason why it enraged men equals engagement is because they built it that way. it doesn't have to be built that way. important. it doesn't have to be built that way. it canher way. and in that vein, i'll talk about northwoods in a second but origins, i just i interviewed isabel wilkerson who wrote origins, which it was an origins. it was cast, and then it was

made into origins, which i also love by ava duvernay. that was a great book. and one of the lines in that book was, okay, 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 it's full of cracks and th flooded. we didn't build this house. we have to fix it. right. and so it was really smart things. it's like, let's stop talking about the house. let'try to rebuild it in a way that works. and so i really appreciate it that book for that because it took you thinking in a different way cast really didn't it was made a beautiful movie because of that northwoods is the same ing and it's about a house that gets built by these two people that are escaping a puritan village, salem oing like that. they fall in love, they run off to the wilderness and house. now look, everybody dies in weird ways back then, and th lot of tragedy. but you you meet everyone who's lived ov was. so you know how it got there. you know how the apple orchard goeone 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 and i love this book because it's abou's about death. it's about, you know, how we and move on and endures and eventually the house. but the house also falls into disrepair. and then it's really you know, it gets remade by someone in more modern times. i love this book and the writer is one of these. and currently he writes kinds of one of them's a diary one of them's the maps, one of them. it's just so interesting and intricate. it's just a beautiful story about ephemerality of life and how you have to you have to take this long view, and you do northwoods and you do take along well. don't i don't hate t i don't know. i mean, it's clear that you don't. it's i love it. i love it attack lovstory, book, stop doing these things to my house. i love we have to 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 you.