On with Kara Swisher - More Burn Book with Ted Sarandos

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

We continue Kara's tour of her memoir Burn Book: a Tech Love Story as she gets candid with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos about the nonsensical nature of 1990s/early 2000s tech culture, how technology disrupted media, where Kara's candor comes from and Ted's short-lived career as a journalist. This interview was taped at Live Talks LA on March 4,2024.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees, and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer.

Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. If you struggle just to get your customers to notice you, Constant Contact has what you need to grab their attention. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform offers all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly, all backed by their expert live customer support. It's time to get going and growing with Constant Contact today. Ready,

set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're still on endless tour this week for my memoir, Burn Book, a tech love story, which came out in February. I'm chatting at live events about my 30 years of tech reporting with some major figures in tech and many people I wrote about in the book. For this episode, we're heading to Los Angeles for a conversation with Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO who runs The Behemoth with Greg Peters. Ted joined the business back in 2000 and is really the one who drove the content business. He made binge-watching

a thing when in 2013, he made the call to drop all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once. He also was one of the four studio CEOs who brokered the deals with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA to end the Hollywood strikes last fall. I've interviewed Ted a number of times, but this time he got to interview me at Live Talks LA in front of a sold-out room on March 4th. We'll have that conversation after a long flight and a short break. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.

And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists, and they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings.

And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness,

a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim. And we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash Zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees. And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you.

Tells you which leads are worth knowing. And makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates This is a productionient Group, Inc.

I'm going to interview somebody who is a journalist, but not just any journalist. Kara freaking Swisher for crying out loud. That's my name. That's yes. And so I thought, how do you kind of go into this if you're an amateur at it? And the beauty of this book is you gave the answer in the book. Oh, okay. What is it?

So I'm going to quote you a little bit here. You said, first, make it a conversation. Yeah. We're going to try to do that. It's easy for us. Yeah. Second, do not be afraid to ask the question everyone is thinking.

Yeah, good. Third, conduct the discussion as if you were never going to interview this person again. Yikes. Yikes for you, really, not me. All right. So I'm going to keep your advice in mind and be in the back of my head the whole time. But I want to talk about this first. The book, the title, Burn Book, it's obviously a nod to Mean Girls. Right. So I thought this was going to be like a trashing of a bunch of

people. A little bit. It's a little bit. But it also sounded a lot like a trashing of a bunch of people. A little bit. It's a little bit. But it also sounded a lot like a Taylor Swift breakup song. Yes. So when you think about your relationship with these folks who you built on over the years, what would be one thing? If you could have one do-over. Do-over. With any of them and only one. You only get one.

What would you do? Well, if you go back in time travel, I guess probably go back and get Mark Zuckerberg interested in something other than tech. But I think probably, if I had to go back, I mean, it's called a tech love story, right? That's the second part. Because I wanted to make clear that I don't hate tech.

And I don't think you think I do. No. I think in a lot of ways, I joke about it, I don't like some people have done to the place, right? In terms of tech can be a real gift to humanity. And what I think is at the heart of the book is the idea that really irritated me from the beginning, I think, and not with companies like Netflix, because it was very clear what you were doing. You were selling something, right? It wasn't, you didn't, I don't think I ever heard from Reed Hastings, we're here to bring humanity together. Here's a CD, watch it. I think that was pretty much.

We did use the word connect too much though, too. We did that too. Did you? Did you? Yeah. Anyway. It's a very attractive word movie watching got it okay instead of going you know instead of going to my video store i went to netflix right but a lot of these people tried to pretend that they were doing something other than money making and i don't mind money making i'm like fine i'm and so that's why the first line of the book is so it was capitalism after all and It was and one of the things they if they had done that I think I would have rather

Heard that from them versus a lot of the nonsense and that they they took what was a public thing Which was the internet which was built by the US government They took advantage of it did not have any guardrails Got to do whatever they want because of having, did not have any guardrails, got to do whatever they want because of having this Section 230 to protect them from being sued, and then didn't have the respect to worry about safety, worry about implications, worry about propaganda. And I'm using the word propaganda rather than misinformation because that's what it is. That's all that it is. I think that's the only word you can have for it.

And I just, the lack of accountability and the lack of care for safety really started to really get on my nerves. The slides and the need to act like children was kind of weird and performative. But it just was a disappointment. The first time I went up to Silicon Valley, to Netflix, to the headquarters, for the very first time, in 1999, and it wasn't exactly,

they didn't have a slide. They did not. No, there was no slides, but it was kind of like, it was interesting. There were mountains and mountains of boxes, and I noticed that they were from places I'd never heard of, like drugstore.com and razorblade.com. And everyone was buying everything at the whateveritwas.com. And they were really living their life very differently than I was in LA.

And this notion, I don't know why offices had to be like playgrounds, but that was pretty prevalent. Well, Netflix's wasn't. Netflix's was not. No, we never did that. We never did that. No, it was interesting

because there was a dichotomy between like the apples of the world and Microsoft, which were unfun, right? Unfun. You know, they had chairs, like crazy. And then you would go to, I mean, Google was the absolute worst. It was crazy. I don't want to go on your fucking slide. I'm not.

I was 36 years old. I'm like, I'm not. You didn't want to go on your fucking slide. I'm not. I was 36 years old. I'm like, I'm not. You didn't like slides when you were a kid. I didn't like slides when I was a kid. I hated slides. I was like, not again. And it's not happening when I'm this old. And they had the performative garage door, which was kind of sad to me.

I was like, what are you doing? The performative nature of so many of these people was... I didn't know where it came from. It was sort of a rested development of their childhood or something. And it got in the way of what they were doing, which was a much more killer instinct, rapacious information thieves, as Walt Mossberg called them. That's what they were. I think of you as pretty tough, and you're pretty cynical. Thank you. I mean, in a good way, in a good way, in a positive way. I'm good. So why do you think in retrospect

that you believed that these folks were going to be anything other than capitalists ultimately? I believe that the technology was groundbreaking. When I first, you know, I have concerns like everyone else about where our world's going, not just from a climate change point of view, but like how do you get as much information out to people as possible? How do you keep democracy going? And one of the things in the book was the Star Trek, Star Wars dichotomy that I sketched out, which was Star Wars is, you know, it's very confusing and it's a dark tale. And in Star Trek, it's like I say, it's a United Benetton commercial where everyone gets along, and it's so diverse, and the villains become good, and they shift them,

and, oh, I didn't realize I shouldn't have tried to kill people. And everything works, and it's the idea is learning, you know, bold places you go where you haven't been before. And that's my version of it. And oddly enough, I had forgotten that Steve Jobs had said the same thing to me in an interview where he's like, I want Star Trek. We don't have Star Trek. And I kind of had that idea of Star Trek. And maybe because I grew up with Star Trek or you have this idea that you could use technology for good and you still can.

Like you absolutely still can. What happened was that it shifted rather dramatically to privacy violations, selling you stuff, selling your data for their advantage for when you get nothing back, right? That was the thing, is that you got a dating service, you got a map. By the way, guess who paid for all the maps? The U. The US government, right? They just took our maps that we paid for

and then did more with them. And so that was disappointing because I do think technology has the capacity to do amazing things. So you were excited about what they were doing and assumed that everyone would be doing good with it. Why not? Well, I assumed that it would be equal. I didn't think that they were going to make money from it. I'm not naive. I just thought the quote in the book that's critical, and I think is the center of the book, is the Paul Virilio quote about when you invent the ship,

you invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash. What I got worried about was after all this time, now so many ships, if you live in the Northeast especially, so many ships, wrecks everywhere across there. But the minute they put the lighthouse in, great, everything works. We don't want shipwrecks. But we have not put in lighthouses after all this time.

And they're the richest people on earth. They're literally the richest people, the most. They benefited the most. And we say thank you for what we've done for them like you know i just feel like it's just not a good trade particularly good trade i'm going to get back to those guys in a bit i do want to talk about what's in about the book itself a little bit because it's really uh first of all it's beautifully done which is a bit of a uh biography intertwined i didn't want to put the personal stuff in but yeah i was i'm going to get to that because it's really intertwined with 30 years of tech history

and a little bit of personal stuff, a little bit. You give us a little bit. And early in the book, you talk about tragically losing your father early. Your dad certainly had a big influence on you, seemed to, in the little bit we covered in the book. And in what ways was he able to? Well, I think when someone, you know, when your parent dies at a young age, you recognize time is so precious, like very precious. My dad got out of the Navy, got his first job, bought his first house,

and he keeled over from an aneurysm, just dead. Three kids. Like he was starting his life. And so I think when that happens, one, it sort of upends your entire life. And then it says, you don't have time. Nobody has time. It could happen. Yes, you have urgency.

And so you don't tend to waste time. And I was like that from very early. I mean, I tell a story in the book where I was in third grade and I walked out of class. I'm like, I've read this now, let's move on. Come on, let's go next. And so I'm out of class. I'm like, I've read this now. Let's move on. Come on, let's go next. And so I'm often like that. Like, I don't have a lot of patience for wasted time.

Yeah. You only put a couple of even photos of your family in your early days in the picture. You don't mention your mom too much. No. She's still with us. Yes, she is. Oh, yes.

Someone's laughing. He knows her. Yes, she's still with us. Any reason we don't give her a lot of ink in the book yet? She's the next book. Yeah, my brother and I are writing it. It will contain multitudes, let's just say. She's a difficult person. So you say say and you've said in the past and there's many examples in the book of the best way to live your life

is to plow through say what's on your mind deal with the consequences what do you think of that? have you liked that? oh absolutely it's not easy it's not easy to do

and I think a lot of again this kind of goes back to the tech ideas of things like radical candor and those kind of things and there's real radical candor and there's the things like you know which you can't do really i one time saw him in the polo lounge i was there meeting the tinder guy i don't know if you saw me but you were with i think it was jeff katzenberg yeah and i saw you trying to convince you must have been trying to

convince him to put stuff on netflix or something i'm sure i was yeah you were like so charming i could hear it it was really funny i was laughing and, oh man, I would never be able to do his job. But what you're doing right now and what you did in the book is, I mean, I think a lot of people watch it and say with envy because people do walk around not able to or feel like they're not able to say what's on their mind as clearly and directly as you do. Yeah, it's down to me and Elon Musk. But these things come with a cost, right? So what does it cost you over the years? You know, with really smart people, not nothing, not a thing. Like I interviewed Steve Jobs, like we had lots of beefs, you know, or Tim Cook or lots of people. Mark Cuban and I used to be

all the time about lots of things. There's a list of a dozen people like that. I really believe smart people do not mind having smart debates, and they like it, right? Because, you know, talking points get exhausting, right? 100%. And so I think they really like that. The other thing is it's really hard when you're in a position of authority, like if you're you or Bob Iger or Tim Cook, you have everybody telling you everything

and you don't know everything, right? I do talk to everybody. And so I have insights that maybe you don't know or might say something. And so most adults welcome that, I've noticed. I sort of mix the adults with the adult toddlers, essentially. And those who don't like it, I don't know what to say. If they want to be surrounded by people who they pay all day and be told they're really smart, that will make them less good at what they do.

And they make bad decisions. Another thing that helps is being right a lot of the time, calling it right. I know. I'm sorry, but I have been. You've done it. You've done a lot. Back to your parents for a second is that like willingness to i know you don't like to talk truth to power line but yeah your willingness or your ability to do that was that at home was that

a home practice um i think you have to in an italian family you have to like push back like a super and you know what it's from it's from being gay i honestly is because one of the things was i knew i was gay from very early on. And I sought out books. And I was like, oh, okay. This is what it is. This is a very unattractive viewpoint of gay people. Like, this is, I don't believe this.

And I used to read a lot of stuff that I didn't agree with. And I was like, that's not me. That's not how I feel. And there's a great book called The Celluloid Closet. And there's also a movie. And it's depictions of gay people. It was narrated by Lily Tomlin. I movie and it's depictions of gay people. It was narrated by Lily Tomlin. I highly recommend it by Vito Russo. They made this doc of it. And it's better as a doc because you see the scenes. And when you start to see it collectively,

you see why people hated gay people. You just saw it. You saw the propaganda building. I was riveted to this movie. And so I was always like, that's not how I am, and it made me furious. And so when people tell me things that aren't true, I'm like, that's not true. My brother told me about the movie years ago. Being gay in Phoenix was very tough. I bet. And he called me every once in a while and said, I'd like to come to LA and hang up for the week and be gay.

I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, we can't. His partner and him could not hold hands walking down the street. Phoenix was dangerous. Like, what do you mean? He goes, we can't, his partner and him could not hold hands walking down the street. It was dangerous. Yeah, again, not again, by the way.

Yeah, and he told me about the movie because he said, and which was fascinating to me, like there's the, there were so few gay characters that you would actually look for other characters

that seemed kind of gay to identify with. Right, and also they were always, you know, lesbians were always like trying to get straight ladies. I'm like, that's notbians were always like trying to get straight ladies.

I'm like, that's not the definition of lesbian. Thank you, ladies. No, thank you. I'm not interested. Honestly, it's the opposite. Let's be clear. It's 100%. You know.

And then, you know, guys were always either really like fae, you know, very prissy. Some are. Some aren't. It just depends. And they were conniving. You know, but it was always very negative. And everyone was suicidal in the end. And it was just, really, I have to say, it was the first time I was like, I cannot believe these idiots are saying something that isn't true.

And I'm putting up with this. And I think AIDS was one of the, I don't know how old you are, and I'm putting up with this. And I think, I think AIDS was one of the, I'm, I don't know how old you are, but I'm 61. And it was very much the AIDS crisis. I think really, I wasn't an activist particularly. I was, I definitely did marches and everything else, but I was just like, this is bullshit. This is bullshit. We're dying. And they're just doing this out of discrimination. It's really crazy. And your turning point into professional journalism

was kind of around the same thing. It was. Seeing the Washington Post cover something badly and then calling them on it. Yes, I stole pictures, yeah. They wanted to print pictures that were wrong about gay people, and I just hid them. That's all.

She says with great pride. I'm with you on the real value of a free press and why it's so important. Good. So good. And I was a, I don't know if you knew this, but I was a wannabe journalist. Really? Yeah. I was a high school editor of the newspaper.

What? What was it called? And junior college. The voice was our college paper that I was the editor of. Where? In Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona. And I was, I kind of stumbled into it. I signed up to be in high school to be on the yearbook.

And it was full, so they dumped me into the newspaper. Okay. And it was called The Scimitar, that newspaper. Scimitar. And my high school crush, who I've had for like two years, was in the class where I stayed. That was my attraction to journalism. But then I really fell in love with it. And I really admire, I think that I see journalists as heroes and continue to be.

And I don't know if you know this case or not, but when I was young in Phoenix, there was an investigative reporter named Don Bowles who was investigating mob influence in Arizona and was blown up in his car. Oh, my God. And he was about to expose the truth, to your point. And so it just felt like a very virtuous thing. Yeah. I didn't go on with it because I discovered my second year at junior college,

I was not a very good writer. So I went to Plan B, I went to business. Oh, good. Well, it worked out well for you. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks. So what do you think is the risk or possibility of a free press,

given what's happening? Oh, it's under massive attack. Now, look, I don't think the press can't be, make mistakes. But you know, from the very beginning, this country, the strength has been the ability to speak truth to power in some fashion by whoever, not just the press. But you know, I think one of the things that happens is when you become a post-fact society, it's very dangerous of what happens. And one of the problems we've had is that for a while we were in an information desert, right? I mean, I think most people just didn't read the media, right? There

just wasn't. And people just didn't engage in it. And they had a very small group of things, whether it was a nightly news, which is just three shows essentially, or one newspaper. It still was the attitude of one group of people who owned it, but people had not too much information. And what happened the opposite is now there's too much information. It's an information flood and people believe whatever's written in a lot of ways. Now with Facebook being the distributor of information without any editorial control whatsoever, and I get their arguments why they don't want to be, but there is an irresponsibility with letting any piece of shit roll over.

So this is an impractical trade, but do you think the world, or let's say the country, was a better place when there was one source of truth, which was maybe Walter Cronkite, even if he was wrong? No, I have always welcomed the Internet. That was one of the things I liked. I had a big argument with a bunch of people. We need gatekeepers. I'm like, well, because they're going to protect everyone. I'm like, well, as far as I can tell, all the gatekeepers are straight white men on the Upper East Side of New York, you know, running the networks or the New York Times or something like that. And so I don't think, same thing with Hollywood, it's much better

when it's more diverse. So I've always believed in the diversity of the press. It's just that if it's un... If there's no ability to pull the lies and the malevolent players out, it really... I am the one person who pays attention to Steve Bannon. He talks about flooding the zone. Flooding the zone is with bad information, drowns out the good information. It's just a classic propaganda move.

Yeah. So that's why I'm... It's not diverse anymore. It's just... it's malignant. And that was the big interview I had with Mark many years. I mean, everyone focuses on the sweat interview, which I felt bad for him. I honestly did. But that interview about anti-Semitism was troubling for me, for him to not recognize, which he later did, but that amount of anti-Semitism going over the transom with no stopping it.

They're going to do it. Anti-Semitism has existed since the beginning of time. It is going to be supersized in a way that is impossible to control. It doesn't need a new spreading tool. Yeah, well, on a much lighter note, I did learn something else in the book about you that I did not know.

Was this your impact from Calvin and Hobbes? Yes. And I thought that you were like in a very kind of class of your own in terms of this, but there's a whole documentary about Calvin and Hobbes worship. I didn't know. Do you know this? I don't worship them, but. Dear Mr. Watterson, there's a doc about it.

Oh, well. You could be. Was it on Netflix? No, it's not. I watched it. It was on Prime. Prime. What?

That's why you haven't heard of it. Did you? Well done. Well done. I'm sure Jeff Bezos is somewhere crying on his yard. Yes. I'm sure he's upset about this. Do you love his midlife crisis like I do?

I'm about to turn 60, so it makes me very nervous. You have a lovely wife. Don't, don't. You have a lovely wife. Sorry. What's your question about Calvin and Hobbes? Can you share with folks about Calvin and Hobbes, how it influenced your thinking? So that's where I got to understand what was happening, which is the heart of the book

is this everything that can be digitized will be digitized. And I recognized that, I think, a lot earlier than other people. And it was because I was on a fellowship. I downloaded Calvin and Hobbes into my, it must have been a compact computer, maybe a Dell of some sort. But I was amazed that I could download the book. That was something special. And I really, it was like one of those moments where you were like, oh, whoa, whoa. And I remember looking at everything around me. I was thinking the news, and then I saw Craigslist. It sort of was, a lot of those moments were, Netflix too.

When you guys started putting things digital, I was like, oh, this is what people are going to do once the pieces come into place. And so I downloaded this Calvin and Hobbes book, and it was so clear to me that everything would go on this worldwide network. It was like a light bulb moment. It was a light bulb moment. And I kept saying it to people, and I was also obsessed with cell phones. Even the big ones. I had the big one.

I had the Gordon Gekko one. I had all the cell phones, and I kept saying to people, you know, you're not going to be in the office. And I was also remote 10 years before everybody else. OG, work from home? I was. Mostly because I was such an unpleasant person.

No one was trying to force you back to the office? I didn't like the office. It was a lot of talking. I'm busy. That, for me, it was interesting in those early days. Meeting Reed in 1999, he described Netflix exactly like it is right now in 1989 Yeah and the internet was so slow and so expensive for video and I remember him telling me and I had this

That where you saw it and said oh my god, it's gonna be everything. I thought he might be crazy No, I wasn't sure if he really if that's really gonna happen, right? But he we went but it was very matter-of-fact about it. Yeah, I well, you know, I just downloaded a South Park video, it took seven days, I don't think this is really going to happen. Right, yeah, right. And he said, no, no, no, the internet's going to get twice as fast as half the price every 18 months, it's called Moore's Law, look it up. Yeah, look it up.

Yeah, and this was read. So what convinced you, like you believed it? I went home and digested the meeting, and I said, you know, I don't know that I've ever met anyone who really radically changed the world before. I bet there are a lot like this. Yeah. Very sure of themselves, very clear about. He's definitely sure of himself.

Yeah, for sure. And so I said, I don't know if he's right, but if he's wrong, I'm going to learn a ton. Yeah. I'm just going to learn a ton. Yeah. But it just seems so clear once you saw the World Wide Web. Anyone who saw it, anyone who saw Craigslist, it was so much better. And I think most people were in denial that it was better, right?

But I think, you know, at the Wall Street Journal, I was urging them as a young person to really use digital, and they want to do another Saturday print journal. And I was like, you really, this is coming. And we want to get the kids. Yeah, yeah, like get going because this is over. And one of the things I think press did that they didn't do well was they didn't get the tech expertise they needed to transform themselves.

Hollywood's the same way. Listen, that 300-mile thing, the difference between the tech people, so many, I would come down here all the time. It was so pronounced back then, yeah. Only two people. I'm leaving Netflix out of it and you, because you were part of a tech company, I think. You had sort of the mix of the two. Well, we were, I mean,

because we were mailing, like mailing disk was the cheapest way to move bits around. Right, exactly. So it was a tech company, but I'm very... They liked you for that. You were selling their content, right? Low tech, tech company at the beginning. But there were only two people in the entire, I visited every one of these people. I was

a covered Napster, everything else, was Bob Iger and Barry Diller were the only people who absolutely understood what was going to happen to me. Or had vague ideas of it. Back in 2000, the only Hollywood person that ever came to Los Gatos was Peter Chernin. Oh, Peter Chernin too. You're absolutely right. Yes. Yeah. He was definitely... I think it was a real wanting not to believe it was going to happen. The music people were first.

That was where it first hit. And I remember talking to Hollywood people and I was like, this is coming... Are you kidding? This is perfect. And I think for us, we always... Not going to happen. We knew it was coming. When we got in, we said the DVDs are going to be dead soon.

What were they calling you? What was Jeff... I just talked to him the other day, Jeff Bukas. The Albanian Army? The Albanian Army, when he called you that. Which, by the way, nothing motivates employees more than something like that. Yes. He probably helped us.

We're really worried about the Albanian Army. And I remember when he said it, I called him. I said, oh, man, the Albanians are really good at war. Like, better watch the frigging Albanians. Our next company meeting, we had berets and dog tags. Yeah, and he said that. And just recently, he goes, well, I didn't quite mean it that way. I go, stop it.

Like, just own your Albanian, you see. People forget that Jeff Bukas is funny. He's very funny. He's very funny. I'm sure he thought it was really funny when he said it. And he sold that company off to AT&T at the right time. So kudos. Slow clap for him. We'll give him the Albanian army. Yeah, funny when he said it. And he sold that company off to AT&T at the right time. So kudos. Slow clap.

We'll give them the Albanian army. Yeah, right. He understood it. But I think they have that. Bob said, you know, selling arms to third world countries. Right. Giving us their licensing content. He did know that.

But then he did it, right? Then he did it, right? So what's happening now has to be done, whether you like it or not. And economically speaking, it's really hard. Sometimes, I think one of the things I said, which made some people here angry was, your enemy is not the studios. It's not who you think it is. Now, I get the salaries, I get everything else. But your enemies are these tech companies. They just literally are going to eat everything in their path. And they have the means and the money to do so and so this was years ago i was saying this i'm like and i think media really missed it i mean newspapers was that they

thought these people were their friends and they were they are not your friends they are they want to eat you alive is the book a wake-up call for this i mean honestly yes in this new agi stuff who do you think dominates agi ag AGI is going to be devastating for Hollywood. It's going to be devastating for media. It is, they are now, before, you know, there's this thing in the book where Larry Page is, we're in New York, he has to stay in my mom's apartment because of a blackout, you know,

and he was going around to publishers to try to get them to, he was starting to put their books on his service without permission. And I was always like, IP, you might want to look it up. You can't take people's things. They had to print books first. And I kept calling him like a shoplifter. It didn't work. He didn't care. And he also, it wasn't even like malevolently not care. He's like, of course I can do it. Like he had no sense of IP. And it was crazy. And he was like, he I can do it like he had no sense of IP and it was crazy and and he was

like he went to these meetings with these publishers and he said they're not cooperating and I said that's because they know you're here to kill them like you're here to kill them but a lot of people didn't recognize that this is what and they thought they were there for tools they thought we're going to help you we're going to help you. We're going to distribute you. They want to eat everything. And with AGI, they used to just point to it and control it by distribution. Now they're going to scrape everything they can, and then you're going to have to go get it back. That's the real issue. Anyone with IP should be suing those companies every single day until you get what you want.

That part of it, I'm more with you, too, on the notion of the human creativity is going to be very not likely to be replaced in this model. Not likely. But the tool, like you said, there's going to be that piece that has to be settled, the ingestion of things and who pays for that and how does it get paid for. They should pay you. It's fine if they pay you. It's just that here's the thing. My hope is that these things are digitally fingerprinted so that you're able to identify. That's correct.

But YouTube, it worked out for YouTube. They ended up, you know, initially they put that stuff up, didn't do anything about it, and then they worked something out. Now, same thing with music in a lot of ways. So what are you going to do? Although, look, Universal, someone told me last night, Universal pulled their music off of TikTok. There are tons of fake Taylor Swift songs on there now made by AI like on TikTok. So what do they need that for? They will do anything to suck and scrape your stuff and remake it and mush it up in some way.

They did that with me, which was amazing on this book tour. There are fake Kara Swisher books all over Amazon, right? With very attractive comely photos of me. AI generated. They're terrible. I look really strange, Femi. And they were up there and my wife saw it. She's like, what is this? Who is this? In the search. And I was like, what is this? What is this? And I realized what it was. It was AGI. And I wrote Andy Jassy, who's running Amazon, and I essentially wrote, what the fuck?

Like, and he's like, oh no, it's you, that it did it to you. Of all the people. Of all the people. He said something like, of all the gin joints in the world, it had to AGI you.

And it got some attention. But, you know, I was just with Savannah Guthrie and they took something of hers. She has this Faith and God book. They made a workbook and it happened to your God book. They made a workbook, and it happened to your wife, too. They created a workbook next to it that isn't hers, but they didn't just do that. They didn't just take that down, which is a lie.

And it's her brand next to it, and your wife's brand. Just knock off of the cover. Right, so knock off the cover. But then it said, buy Savannah Guthrie's book and the workbook. Oh, they put them together? That's right. And they were selling my book with my fake lady books. You know what I mean?

And I was like, fake lady doesn't get sold with cash. But like, who gets the $16.99 for that? And then the customer gets a crappy book. And they think it's my fault. Like, honestly, the whole thing is, but they still make the money and they should have anticipated this 100%. We'll be back in a minute.

Support for this show comes from Grammarly. 88% of the work week is spent communicating, typing, talking, and going back and forth on topics until everyone is on the same page. It's time for a change. It's time for Grammarly. Grammarly's AI ensures your team gets their points across the first time, eliminating misunderstandings and streamlining collaboration. It goes beyond basic grammar to help tailor writing to specific audiences, whether that means adding an executive summary, fine tuning tone or cutting out jargon in just one click. Plus, it surfaces relevant information

as employees type so they don't waste time digging through documents. Four out of five professionals say Grammarly's AI boosts buy-in and moves work forward. It integrates seamlessly with over 500,000 apps and websites. It's implemented in just days, and it's IT-approved. Join the 70,000 teams and 30 million people who trust Grammarly to elevate their communication. Visit grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. Grammarly to elevate their communication. Visit grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. Grammarly. Enterprise ready AI. Think about those businesses that grew their sales beyond their forecasts. Companies like

Momofuku or Feastables by Mr. Beast or even a legacy business like Mattel. When you think about them, sure, you think about a product with demand, a focused brand and influence-driven marketing, but part of their secret is actually the business behind the scenes. As in the business that makes selling and buying simple. And for millions of companies, that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. With their shop pay feature, they can boost conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned

and way more sales going. So if you're into growing your business, you want a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling, whether that's on the web, in your store, and everywhere in between. Because businesses that sell more, sell on Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash voxbusiness, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash voxbusiness to upgrade your selling today.

Shopify.com slash VoxBusiness. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe. Payment management software isn't something your customers think about that often. They see your product, they want to buy it, and then they buy it. That's about as complex as it gets. But under the hood of that process, there are a lot of really complicated things happening that have to go right in order for that sale to go through. Stripe handles the complexity of financial infrastructure, offering a seamless experience for business owners and their customers. For example, Stripe can make sure that your customers see their currency and preferred payment method when they shop. So checking out never feels like a chore.

Stripe is a payment and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like Uber, BMW, and DoorDash. Stripe has helped countless startups and established companies alike reach their growth targets, make progress on their missions, and reach more customers globally. The platform offers a suite of specialized features

and tools to power businesses of all sizes, like Stripe Billing, which makes it easy to handle subscription-based charges, invoicing, and all recurring revenue management needs. I love your OKR list for identifying a partner, your wife, and how you vetted your wife, I guess, through the list. Yes, I did. It's objective key results. Objective key results, yeah.

Your wife would have to be kind and generous, emotionally available, compromise ability, intuitive, kind to your kids. These are like, as you go through life and you think about that list, which seems like it served the list as well. It worked. A month. Yeah.

If there were a similar list for a tech CEO, what would that be? There are a lot. I have a whole chapter about it. I really like what Mark Cuban's done with himself. I really do. I think he's doing, go watch him on Twitter. He's doing God's work, arguing with them all about diversity, equity, inclusion. He's like trying to make, you know, considered arguments of his experience and say, this is why I like it.

This is why I don't. This is what the good thing is. This is why it's a good thing. And he's making, he's a business person. So he's telling you from a business point of view why he's doing it. And then Elon's response is always, you're a moron, like fucking idiot. Like he doesn't want to have a discussion about it. He just wants to dunk on people. I think Mark Cuban is someone who's really, he was a real tech bro boy. Was he a tech bro? But he has changed and he's doing this stuff with cost plus drugs.

I like anyone that moves forward as a person, right? Brian Chesky is another good example. He's made a lot of mistakes. I don't mind mistakes. Evan Spiegel is another person who really was a bro. Like, what a bro he was. I've had an argument with him right near here at lunch where he blamed me for his college emails, which I was like, listen, dude, that was you. That was all you writing terrible emails. So anyone who progresses is good on my, or tries to do something and

recognizes their responsibility. I would put like in your next version, I would nominate Reed Hastings to be in there. Because on top of all those things, I think he has a lot of- I don't read in with these people. He's an adult. Talk about an adult. He's an adult. Absolutely. And he orchestrated the succession of the company over about 10 years. He did.

And while he was a young man, left. Yes, he did. He's got things to do. No, I wouldn't put your company in that. I don't find your company.

It's hard to place Netflix. But yes, Reed is an adult. He is in the Tim, if I put him in a group, it would be Tim Cook, him, you know, a lot of people like that. You think very highly of Steve.

Such an adult. Steve, I love Steve. I love Steve. I know his faults. I know all his faults. Yeah, I was gonna say, I love the prick to productivity ratio. Ratio. Yeah. And my limited interactions with him, he was pretty high on the prick scale. He was, yeah. Before he got to the productivity scale part. Yeah, but the productivity was off the charts.

The productivity caught up, yeah. You know what? But I bet he was a prick not about, you'd never see him dunk on Twitter. It was about the product, right? No, always, always. It was always about the product. I got a call a Saturday morning

when we were about to put Netflix on Apple TV. And someone called me and they said, I think you should get on this call. Steve Jobs is on screaming at everybody about how ugly our red, our logo is. And all the people didn't know what to say to him. Right, but it was about the product. But he was on with a bunch of junior engineers

talking about the color in our logo, how it would look like on his product. I'm okay with that. It was about the product. See, that's the thing which is really interesting about him is it was never, literally, he would never, you know, like, you don't know what Reid or Tim Cook thinks about Ukraine.

We have to endure these venture capitalists. What do I need to know? Yeah, yeah. Like, let me tell you what to do in Southeast Asia. I'm like, shut the fuck up. Well, quick rapid fires. Someone you never get tired of talking to, interviewing. It would have been Steve Jobs.

He was really interesting to talk to, especially about products. I really like talking to Sachin Adela. He's really interesting. He's really a very complex human being, and I think he's done a terrific job there. I always like talking to Cuban. He's really fun, and he's a fun guy to go out with. I like talking to Cuban. He's really fun. He's a fun guy to go out with. I like talking to him. He's always- He will answer a text in 10 seconds.

A text in 10 seconds. 10 seconds, yeah. But it's always interesting, and he doesn't always agree. We had a big debate about Elizabeth Warren and the Huel text, which he was fun. I always like talking to Steve Case. I like Steve Case a lot. There's a lot of different people. I'm going to try to name a woman. I always, because there just aren't there in tech as many as there should be. Mary Meeker was really interesting. She's not really doing that when she was an analyst. I really like talking to her.

Lisa Su, but you always end up talking about chips, and I'm completely out of my element with her. She's really cool. She runs AMD. A lot of people, a lot of people. Katie wants to know, your oldest kids are about to enter the workforce. If they wanted to work at a FANG company, which one would you tell them to apply to and which one would you tell them to avoid? Oh, wow. That's a good question. My 18-year-old's at University of Michigan and he's a science engineering. So

he's the most technical person of the two of them. And so I wouldn't recommend him going to any of them, actually, because they're not the future of what's really interesting in technology. I think climate change tech, biotech, the stuff around health care is really astonishing. So I think that's where he's headed. For my other son, he just was in a movie, Ted. I think if he wouldn't, he just wouldn in a movie Ted I think if he wouldn't he just wouldn't he doesn't like social media he took it all off his phone

he said it makes him feel bad so he was good he was like I feel bad every time I use it he does like YouTube he watches stuff on YouTube he does watch my Netflix sorry but but he's going to be off soon, I swear

to God. I just can't believe I said that. We got an eye on him. Yeah, okay, good. I did kick my mother off. Selective enforcement. Selective enforcement. So I wouldn't recommend, I don't, none of them. None of them. I wouldn't want them to work for anyone. TJ asks, it seems every few months there is a wave of panic about TikTok in Washington.

Yes. Do you think the concern about TikTok is overblown, understated, or is it being given the appropriate level of concern? It is not overblown. I wrote a column a couple of years ago saying TikTok's the most exciting new product I've seen in a long time. It's entertainment. I think you think it's entertainment. I think you've talked about that. And I'm using it on a burner phone because Chinese Communist Party, this is a surveillance device, a surveillance or a propaganda device. And it's already bad enough when it's for capitalist reasons, but this is a country

that has really... Everyone talked about that balloon that was over our country. By the way, there's many more balloons than you think, but I just talked to someone who's tracking all the... There's a lot of balloons flying over our country. It's crazy. We're so stupid. There's no balloons, our balloons balloons flying over china but they're flying

over us um it's not the chinese people it's it's this government this is it's a balanced economy and i very much like a lot of the people who work there and i like the product i think it's a great product but if we can't have social media in their country operate without any uh thing they shouldn't be able to operate in this country that That's one. Two, I just think some of the people I've talked to who are really smart about this stuff, someone who's leaving Congress, Mike Gallagher is quite smart about it, Mark Warner, Bennett, all these people who've seen a lot of this stuff are very clear what's happening here. We just, we cannot, this is a real problem. And it's not because kids love it. If they separate it or somehow found a way to protect it,

they just cannot assure us that the Chinese Communist Party isn't. And if we, you know, we can act all like, oh, they don't really want to beat us, but they really want to beat us. They really do. And we've got enough fascist problems in this country, authoritarian problems, that we don't need to add on, you know. And they've come in and done so much propaganda and why wouldn't they? That's what they do. Carrie, do you think pre, way predating TikTok,

do you think Steve Jobs understood the addictive nature of this? He did. He talked about it. You know, he did talk about it a lot. I think he thought the business plans of things like Facebook and others were by nature addictive and deleterious. And he said it quite, he hated the business plans. He hated the advertising nature of it. He hated the idea of virality. I'm not sure, there are elements you can do on this phone to make it less addictive. They haven't done nearly enough stuff to make it less. These are by nature, casino machines. And so I urge you to read Tristan Harris. But there's certain things they could have done, put things files below and not let it happen. Like Uber is not something you go on and sit there and stare at it. It's just a utility, right? Same thing with Netflix. You kind of watch, you have your watching the next thing, but people do have some control of their entertainment. They don't sit there endlessly.

But a TikTok and things like that, you can't stop. It's addictive by nature. So yes, I would say we're not doing, I think we have to think really hard. I agree with exactly zero things that Donald Trump does, including his just existence, really. But he was correct on the danger of it. Executionally, as always, as he does with everything, it was wrong and it wasted a huge opportunity to have a real bipartisan discussion about this. He wrecked what should have been a really important discussion in this country.

Linda asks, regarding the gender pay gap in tech, Mark Benioff at Salesforce recognized this about 10 years ago and tried to address it. What about the rest of the industry? You know, actually, numbers are getting better, but it's not more of a pay gap. It's a people gap, that there's not enough people. It's just, many years ago, one of the best leads I've ever written on a piece, and I edited it myself so I thought it was great and I wrote it um and I approved it was I think I used to write pieces that it was just one piece and it wasn't really a written piece there were there were three in a row

three in a row uh the first one was called the men and no women of Facebook and I just put their pictures on it and no women yeah it was just no one in the management. This is priest Cheryl Sandberg even, and she ended up apparently representing eight women, I guess. But it was really amazing how the very few people they had. This is early, early Facebook. And then I wrote the men and no women of the Web 2.0 boards, because boards you can get. You can really find a diverse group of thinkers.

And same thing. It was all the same thing. And the one board that drove me crazy was Twitter, which early on had 10 white men. And so my lead of the story was on the board of Twitter, which has three Peters and a Dick, which was so good. That's good. I should have left journalism. I was like, and I'm out. Mic drop on that one.

In the head of it, Dick Costolo called me, and he's like, I said, first of all, if that's your name, that's your name. I don't know what to tell you. And he's like, very funny, very good penis joke. I go, thank you, thank you. He was a comedian, right? He was. He was a stand-up guy.

He goes, but it's not fair, and he said something to me, and he's actually one of the better guys. Goes, you know, but we have standards. Always the word with women and people of color. Standards. And I was like, well, let me look at your stock price and your results and everything else. Because it looks like you're a clown car, which Mark Zuckerberg called it. A clown car that ran into a gold mine. You guys are fucking idiots.

Was that the standard? Fucking idiots? And he was like he was like well when you say it like that and i was like well when i say it like that so there were no standards and and what's incredible is that they they that it persists it persists this idea so it's either straight white men are the best people on earth or maybe they're wrong like you know like kind of thing and so i think they the line i use in the book is they think it's a meritocracy and it's a mirror-tocracy they really do like hang on

and i'll leave you on this there's a reason why tech is unsafe for people or the unsafe parts happen because the people who created it do not feel unsafe and they're never unsafe and so they don't understand it and this is not some whiny never unsafe and so they don't understand it and this is not some whiny liberal talking about it they don't think about implications they don't think about consequences and they as we go this is this book is two years late for my publisher but it's actually on time with AGI we need to think very hard about the implications of what's going to happen and we have to set guardrails, and we have to stop listening to them tell us that if we set guardrails on them,

innovation will die. It will not die. It will thrive if we set some guardrails. It's like kids, and this is a bunch of kids who've been given sugar for far too long, and they have diabetes, and they're fucking nuts. And so, you know, that's it. Thank you. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Naeem Araza, Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Mary Mathis, Kate Gallagher, Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, and of course,

to all the folks at Live Talks LA. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you can binge listen to my book. If not, I will not speak to you after I get on the New York Times bestseller list. In any case, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back on Monday with more.

But hey, we also have a special bonus episode coming tomorrow, Friday. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees, and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer.

Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe. Stripe is a payments and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like Uber, BMW, and DoorDash. Stripe has helped countless startups and established companies alike reach their growth targets, make progress on their missions, and reach more customers globally. The platform offers a suite of specialized features and tools to fast-track growth, like Stripe Billing, which makes it easy to handle subscription-based charges,

invoicing, and all recurring revenue management needs. You can learn how Stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at Stripe.com. That's Stripe.com to learn more. Stripe. Make progress.