The Munk Debates Podcast - Kara Swisher on rise of Big Tech and Silicon Valley after COVID-19

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, technology journalist Kara Swisher joins us for a conversation on the fate and role of Big Tech and Silicon Valley post pandemic.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode, we normally provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. But our world as we know it has changed. And so has our format for the next few weeks. We're bringing you a special series called The Monk Dialogues. We invite the sharpest minds and brightest thinkers for one-on-one conversations live on Facebook to reflect on what our world will look like. after the COVID-19 pandemic. These dialogues provide you, the listener, with original insights into the pandemic's impact on everything from our shared values to the economy to international affairs. This week, we bring you Kara Swisher, technology journalist and New York Times

contributing opinion writer in conversation with Redyard Griffiths. This is an edited version of the live event recorded Wednesday, May 13th. Hi, I'm Redyard Griffiths, and welcome to this a monk dialogue. While we've been convening with you over the last number of weeks, all of these conversations with global thought leaders

reflecting on the world after COVID-19. The purpose of these conversations, these evenings, is to get our minds thinking about not the effect of this pandemic on us today or tomorrow, but how it is going to change our society in the months and years to come. Over previous episodes with people like Fried Zakaria, Muhammad Alarian, Samantha Powers, Malcolm Gladwell, we focused on topics ranging from global affairs to the economy, to our social values. Tonight, we get to dig deep into a vital topic that this pandemic has surfaced. And that is the role of big tech Silicon Valley in our society. And as our

guide, we're extremely fortunate to have one of the world's smartest thinkers on what is happening with big technology in America and around the world. She's a renowned journalist, author, and entrepreneur. She's a New York Times contributing columnist. She's the editor of the technology website, Recode, and a producer of a great podcast, Pivot, with New York Magazine. And she joins us now, and she's Kara Shwisher. Kara, great to have you on the program. Thanks a lot. Again, a real honor and a privilege to have this opportunity to spend an hour with you to dig into these issues. And let's start with that bigger perspective from you, Kera.

You've been writing, I've been reading your columns religiously during this pandemic. And you've come up with, I think, an important thesis about how this pandemic has impacted big tech and big tech's impact on our society as a result of the pandemic. Can you unpack that for us to kind of set the scene for our conversation tonight? Well, I think what I tend to write about and what I'm I've written about for a long time is the growing impact of technology on every aspect of our world, whether it's education, whether it's health care, whether it's commerce, communications, media, whatever, whatever gossip, whatever they're wanting to do.

One of the things I wrote very early in this pandemic is that tech has already been doing this and becoming sort of the biggest and most important companies in the world beyond any other company that's happened. And the people that run these companies are the richest people in human history and the most powerful and most unaccountable people in human history. And they have not just, you know, say they run the railroads the way others did or they have the steel mills like Carnegie did, but in fact they have data and information and they've never had so much data on so many human beings and it's an incredibly powerful thing. And this pandemic, which is global, which is these companies are global, has created a situation

where they are accelerating the trends they were already causing, such as sort of the the death of Main Street retail, this shift into these monolithic companies, Google owns search, Facebook owns social media, Amazon owns commerce. And so what's happened in this pandemic, as we've seen, is we need them desperately in a pandemic situation in order to operate our society. And it only further solidifies their strength and further takes away the ability of regulators to control them and the appetite to control them, which had been growing for a while of pre-pandemic. Well, Kara, that's a great segue to what I want to talk to you about next, which is that movement that you and others were part of pre-pandemic, which was to try to rein in big tech,

to try to reassert individual privacy, to try to encourage greater state control and regulation. Not state control, any regulation. State control is very different because you don't want the state to control free speech. What you want is some level of regulation that other major powerful industries have. And that's to be determined. I don't know what that entails, but certainly privacy legislation is one thing that we don't have in this country. We have it in states like California, but that also has not been fully implemented because of coronavirus. Well, do you think, though, that this whole push now towards contact tracing, which is going to be a big part of our response to this pandemic, I mean, it seems like a bit of a double-edged sort.

On one hand, it gives these companies even more data. Maybe it normalizes the tracking and surveillance of populations. On the other hand, is that an opportunity for smart regulation to start thinking about, okay, if we're going to use these platforms and these technologies for something that is in the public good, contact tracing, then can we put a regulatory framework around that? Are you at all optimistic that there might be something positive? I'm not particularly worried about contact tracing because we've been doing contact tracing in health crises forever. I mean, going back to 1918, they did a version of contact tracing with pencils and paper. You know, I mean, so that is not the difficulty. And actually, Google and Apple, who are trying to do it together, have been very transparent about how they're going to do this. I think the question is when some of this information gets into other hands and what it could be used for, such as insurance companies, if people lie in these things, if they don't have good data, that's when it gets sort of, you can't anticipate the problems that are going to have when you digitize things that were analog before, that were on pads and paper. And so that's the issue is that one of the things that has happened is government,

really needs these tech giants to help them do their job. And so what does that mean? It doesn't mean necessarily a bad thing because these are the companies that are good at these things. It's just a question of what does that mean? What does that mean when Microsoft and Amazon fight over a major defense contract, which they have been doing? It was rewarded to Microsoft. It was originally supposedly going to go to Amazon and President Trump got involved. There's all kinds of litigation around that. But it still focuses on that these tech companies are moving into not just communications and the sort of apps and games and entertainment, but they're also moving into defense, security, surveillance, health care, transportation in ways that really are the heart

of society and the control of society. Let's talk a little bit about something else that you've also written, I think, powerfully on in the last little while, is this whole notion of essential workers and how we obviously understand there are essential workers in health care, a lot of them for their response to this crisis. But you point out, there's also essential workers in tech now, yet they're treated very differently in terms of regulation, in terms of society's views about those workers. Please elaborate on that for us. Well, you know, like delivery workers that are delivering your food now, that are work for Amazon warehouse workers. And I got the idea from Nicole Hannah-Jones, who works for the New York Times, who's did the 1619 project

there, which is amazing if you haven't seen it, you should. She was talking about the ideas that these are essential workers that we now use the word essential. When before we sort of of thought of them as fungible people. These are people that had these gig economy jobs where they had no health care benefits, no savings benefits, none of the benefits that often go with employment, none of the protections that often go with employment. And the gig economy has grown enormously. Like, I think half of Google's workers are contract workers, which is better for Google, but not so necessarily good for these workers. And that's not just people that do all kinds of things like advertising, but the cafeteria workers and things like that. And so it creates two classes of

employees, one employee who are highly compensated and lots of benefits, and the others who don't. And Uber driver is another example. Are they an employee? Are they not an employee? Maybe they don't want to be employee, but maybe they should have benefits. And so it creates this sort of, the idea that these people are essential when we treat them so shabbily before and pay them so badly. Nicole Hannah Jones calls them not essential workers, but sacrificial workers. These are the people getting sick. Obviously, healthcare workers are heroes in this situation. But there's all kinds of workers that do not have the protections in this crisis, at least in the United States, is different in Canada. I know, and it's certainly different in Europe, has shown how vulnerable

these populations are. But, Carrie, it seems that you're painting a picture here of a kind of resurgence of big tech, not that they weren't powerful before this crisis, but a kind of doubling down of their essentialness, if that's a word, to our society. I mean, give us a sense of the future. Are you optimistic that these sacrificial workers can be brought within a new regulatory framework and acknowledge for what they do? Are you at all optimistic that government can act in a smart way to curb the power of these BMS that are just growing by leaps and bounds in our society? Well, it depends on the government, right? I probably trust Canada more than I trust the U.S. I certainly trust Europe more than I trust the U.S. There's been almost no, there's been zero

regulation of U.S. tech. And these are all U.S. all these big companies are pretty much U.S. tech companies, except for what's happening in China. So no, I don't see any real legislation. You see things around the edges. You see some fines, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, this country settled with Facebook over a consent degree. It had violated, which it had also signed many years ago. And they paid $5 billion, which is, I think Facebook made in 30 seconds the other day. I called it a parking ticket. So in this country, no, I don't see any real. regulation, although you do hear it from certain candidates. I mean, Elizabeth Warren, for example, was quite aggressive and very smart on this. Josh Hawley, who's a Republican, has been talking a lot

about this. Mark Warner, a senator from Virginia as another one. There's all kinds of people here and also around the country at state's attorney generals. There's all kinds of people who could be doing this, but I think all the focus will now be on coronavirus and the fact that a lot of these companies have really helped us. I mean, it's not going to be as easy to attack Amazon going forward, given how helpful they've been throughout this and how much they've solidified their lead and continue to do so going forward. I mean, Jeff Bezos just announced $4 billion to what my partner on Pivot calls to virus harden his distribution system. And so it's really, it's a time when these companies are going to have, the winners are going to really win,

and it's going to clear out the, it's going to call the herd for any of their competitors in a way that I think we, that it's going to be surprising when we get out just how powerful and how massive these companies are going to be beyond how already massive they were. Kara, do you know, you point out that Amazon is clearly a winner here in terms of the court of public opinion. Are there some losers in that the big five technology companies? Are there others that you would point out? No, none in the Big Five. They're all doing great. We're all using their services like crazy. And then you have smaller companies like Zoom and some others that have gotten a real boost from this. Companies like Google and Facebook have seen some fall off in advertising. But when it's over, they're going to suck it all up because every other media company is going to be in such distress. And so what's happening is these companies have enormous low of cash and everything else that they can sort of ride out the storm. And the rest of us are kind of limping along behind them with broken like broken legs, like dragging ourselves. And so the competition, is going to be in advertising. They already were sucking up everything. They're going to suck up the rest of it

where there's very few companies that can compete against them. Again, accelerating trends, commerce, Amazon, people are now using it. People who never used Amazon Prime or used Amazon delivery services are going to be very interested in that. Walmart is another company.

That's not a digital company. It's a traditional retailer, but it has been heavy into that. Its business has gone up enormously because they've been as considered an essential grocery store here in this country. But the fact of the matter

is they sell other things, but all the other businesses that sell other things that compete with Walmart can't be in business. And so you can just see the giantification of every, all the giants are going to do really well while all the mom and pop stores, which I think make up a bulk of the real strength of, at least the United States, are going to really suffer hard coming back and not have the money to compete properly. Before we go to audience questions, I just want to keep pushing our conversation forward in time. You've written about this buzzword that's now kind of circulate. around Silicon Valley, parts of Wall Street, America 2.0. Sounds a bit trite, frankly, but behind it, I guess, is an idea that, you know, you don't waste a crisis and that out of a

crisis comes an opportunity to restructure. Can you unpack what the core elements of that idea are? And do you think there's some viability there, maybe politically or elsewise? Yeah, it could be hopeful or not hopeful, right? What is it? Is this a chance to really get rid of the, can I say shitty, the shitty things of our country and introduce great things. I mean, I think that's, what is America 2.0 to you? Is it a country full of giant companies that have enormous lobbying power, my dislike fortunes and an ability to control the destinies of so many people? Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur and sports owner, talked about it with me on a podcast. And his was a vision where we had to focus a lot more on AI and robotics and sort of focusing on people and not giant

corporations, focusing on helping people. That was his version of America 2.0. I think the question is, what would you want it to be? What would be the recipe you would have if you'd begin to, like, a lot of things are going to be having to either recover or not exist at all. What should exist? What should be supported? And so, you know, it's just a question of what America 2.0 will be and what it should

be. And does it give us a chance to renew ourselves, which would be the positive way? Or does it solidify some really scary trends that are in place around income and quality among power of giant companies around a political system that is so partisan right now. This health care crisis has become partisan, of course, because we're in the Trump era. So is that what we want for America and the whole world? I think America is very different than the whole world right now. We're kind of out of step with it.

But in these crises, there can be opportunities to really rethink how we formulate ourselves. I'm going to, Kara, go to some audience questions because we've had hundreds that have come in by email. We've got people watching online now. The first is from Jonathan. He's put in quotations, disruptive innovation by Silicon Valley is no more than using technology to bypass consumer and worker protections. He mentions Lyft, Uber, DoorDash. In a post-COVID world, what criteria would you use to evaluate the merits of tech companies to create social value versus extracting from it. So an interesting question from Jonathan

about can we actually create social value with these companies? Well, of course you could. But the fact, look at something simple like this, an Uber ride. You remember they cost a couple dollars? Like at one point I drove across San Francisco was $4.

I thought, oh, this is great. But the fact the matter is it didn't cost $4. Someone somewhere paid that price, whether it was a VC or these people that are in the front of the car that aren't get paid enough, right? And so a lot of these companies have been built off the backs of these workers

and these people's work, and they aren't getting full benefits to that. And so the question is, like, and they talk about how smart they are and how innovative they are, when the fact the matter is they don't have to pay the costs. Like Facebook does not have to pay the costs of the damage its content has done to society. They pretend they're not a publisher and therefore aren't responsible for the possible damage they cause. They've never paid those costs, and that's why their business is so good. You know, here at Media Central, we have to check everything.

We have to have people that are accurate. And so, you know, that's not a fresh new idea, but the question is, how much do they extract, given what they put back? I think consumers have to think really hard about the trade they're making for these apps. And Margaret Vestager, who's a very sort of the bane of Silicon Valley, talks about this idea of trading convenience for the good. Why are you always trading convenience for the good? I think of it in a more American way is that consumers are cheap dates to tech companies all the time. they're cheap dates. They get a map or a dating app or, you know, oh my goodness, I can send a text with, you know, emojis all over it, or I can turn a filter to give me a giant tongue or whatever.

And what they get in exchange is all your information and they get to monetize it. You are a very cheap date to these tech companies and aren't getting the kind of value. And so if you're not getting the value, what value should they be giving you going forward? And I think that's a discussion we should be having at the top levels of our government. It's not going to happen here. in this country, but it certainly should happen. You mentioned Margaret Vestager, the EU kind of privacy commissioner. Do you think Europe is getting this right? Do you think their kind of move against technology, big tech companies with regulation,

has been adequate? Or, I mean, the pushback is that this curdles innovation, it drives up costs, it makes Europe economically phobic to technology, and lets China. in the United States and the rest of the world run away as the places of innovation and the places of the future. Well, yeah. I mean, there is a settlement of do whatever you can that creates innovation. And I think more regulation does lead to less innovation. At the same time, not enough, not any regulation leads to giant companies, which means less innovation. So it's sort of an interesting recipe. And you certainly can't see an enormous amount of, I mean, Spotify, I think,

is the one company you can look at, which is super innovative in Europe that comes from Europe, but there's not that many. And there's a reason for that. That said, I think they have different ideas of what privacy entails than they do in this country and then they do in New Zealand or Canada or somewhere else. And so I think they're responding to how people there feel about privacies. And so she's appropriately doing what's right for those citizens. The problem is it's a global world. And therefore, if Facebook or Google is doing one thing in one region, they tend to have to, you know, have to do it elsewhere just so they're covered. And so I think parts of what they're doing around, I think the attitude is correct is that these tech people didn't hang the moon.

And I think that's a very good attitude to treat them as their businesses. Like they're like, I don't think we talk about financial services companies like this. I don't think we talk about, you know, banks like this. We are very, citizens are very clear that these are money making operations. But I think some stuff that they're doing in Europe is certainly appropriate. Some of it is probably too far. So there's a medium between do whatever you want. and do whatever you feel like because I'm a billionaire or because I'm smarter because I have

control of these things and have too much regularly. There's a medium between them and often the argument is that it's one or the other. You're listening to the monk dialogues, a special edition of the monk debates podcast where we invite big thinkers to reflect on what our world will look like after COVID-19. This week, tech journalist Kara Swisher on the future of big tech and Silicon Valley after COVID-19. Let's take another question from our audience. I'll get this up on the screen and then read it to you. It's from Karen.

Do you, Kara, think that we'll see more automation of commerce or less once we come through this, you know, she's asking about faceless shops. I mean, not just e-commerce, but is the physical world of commerce, as we know it, about to become disintermediated and fundamentally, transformed or are we going to go back to Hobbits because, hey, we're social animals. We like to touch. We like to talk. We like the physicality of each other and of society. No, we don't. Actually, retail has been hurting for a long time. What's happened with like JCPenney and others that have been filing for bankruptcy is something that's been happening a lot. This has just been the slow,

the slow as death for these companies, and then they just died now because now they've had an event that's really gotten to them. So no, I think people have moved toward just the way they aren't in a movie theaters. Movie theater is another business that is structurally unsound now and was structurally undound before. The trends were moving away from them and more towards home viewing or streaming or things like that. So you're going to see, I think, a real consolidation in retail and many fewer stores. They have to be special if people are going to create them. And it's going to be very hard and experiential. There's all kinds of things that you need to do in a, you know, like here in DC, they have something called Union Market. It's fun to go to. It's fun to shop

that. But I think it's going to be very difficult for retailers going forward, except the commercial rates of commercial real estate is going to be a bargain going forward. But it's going to be very hard. It's going to accelerate trends that already happen, including automation, which I think people have gotten very, very used to doing now contactless, something that had been sort of slowly growing, but now is growing really fact contactless purchasing. I think some of these innovations that Amazon is doing in its stores are pretty cool, walking in a store and just taking things and you get charged as you go out. It's very hard to, these systems are getting really, really good. I think automated warehouses is probably on the way. If you visit any of these online retailers,

including Amazon, you see that this is, you can just see what's going to happen. There's going to be less and less in need of people. But Kara, you're, I share your hope, your optimist about, you know, a 2.0 kind of social order coming out of this, but you just painted a picture there, which I also agree with you is very compelling in terms of much less people needing to do jobs to work, a lot more automation, no cashiers, no people working in warehouses, maybe nobody driving trucks. What happens to society? How does society work? How does technology keep that all together and running? Different jobs, right? I mean, this has happened before. The farming to manufacturing shift was rather, They just had a lot of jobs in manufacturing, right?

I mean, some jobs, if you think about it, some jobs, coal mining is one that my family was in the coal business. And so I think about a lot, people shouldn't be mining coal, robots should. Like, it's dangerous. It's bad for you. It's maybe on some level in software or at some part in the process, humans should be involved, but for the most part, eventually machines do it better. Humans doing repetitive things probably will be replaced.

Anything that can be digitized will be digitized. should be digitized in many ways. And so the question is, how can we create new jobs that are creative that only humans can do, that appeal to our higher sense? And how can we structure societies so that people can be innovative in and of themselves? You know, Andrew Yang, who is a presidential candidate here, talked about UBI. That's, of course, an interesting thing. If you give people a little bit of an economic breathing room, can they come up with, can they do better things? I don't know. I think the question is how innovative can we get our culture so that we're doing things that we are getting rid of the wrote things and putting in things that are more otherwise we are going to have a situation

we're going to have lords and serfs right this idea of some people who are in this information economy this creative economy doing really well and then the others sort of serving them and i sometimes call them dabbies they're going to be dabbies of doing it you know if you've watched harry potter But Kerry, is that where we're at right now in the middle of this pandemic? Yes, I think we are. I think we are. You know, one of the things before this pandemic happened, I think I wrote this in one of my columns at the times, I was talking to someone about income inequality.

And I kept saying income equality is going to be such a big deal. You are so relentlessly rich that the money you people have now is so massive. And you need to think about what that means. When you need to think about what it means when there are enormously wealthy people and very poor people, which has gone on since the beginning of time, but it's really quite striking now, especially with all this unemployment that's to come and is happening right now. And I think I said to them, someone had said this to me and I remembered it was, you're either going to do something about income inequality or you're going to armor plate

your Tesla. Which one do you want? You know, what kind of society do you want? I don't think anyone wants the latter. I think we want to figure out a way so that everybody has dignified, safe work with good health care and an ability to raise their children. without worrying about where the next paycheck is coming from. We're so wealthy a country, a country, excuse me,

that we should be able to work that out. And I think it's going to be harder to do so after this because of all the debt and the unemployment and the economic downturn. That's the result of what is essentially just nature, you know, taking aim at humanity. Okay, I'll keep my eye out for armored Tesla. That would be a very bad sign.

Okay. Let's go to our next question for you, Kara. We've got this coming in from email in the last 72 hours. Again, people across Canada, the United States. We've got viewers from Europe joining us. How will the pandemic affect the rollout of 5G technology? Will countries be more circumspect about the hard way they use in their networks? And, Kara, this is a key issue for Canada.

We're under a lot of pressure from your government to push back against Huawei and the 5G technology that we already have in our communication networks in this country. what's your take on this? Is it a tempest and a teapot? Is there a real concern here about Huawei and China and 5G that we need to be paying attention to? Well, I think it depends on where it is in the network, right? It depends on what part it's being used for. I think there should be concern. I'm never agreeing with Donald Trump on almost anything on any day of the week. But certainly concerns about China's surveillance, China's power and stuff like that or something. I talked about this. I've written columns about this for a long time. They've certainly become this global powerhouse in terms of technology and technology innovation. And so the question is, do you want a Chinese internet? Or do you want a more democratic? one. That said, some of the stuff is overblown and xenophobic. And, you know, it's cast in that light. And the question is, who can roll out these 5G networks? Because these 5G networks are critically important to development. And especially coming out of a pandemic when we need economic growth. We're going to need better ability to do this. And so, as in most things, it's more complex than don't let the Chinese into your network. The question is, who is going to do this and how are they going to,

how are they going to develop? And Huawei has what most people consider to be really terrific technology. And so, again, it's so complex. I think it's probably a tempest in a teapot, but it's something we should be paying attention to as we begin to develop these global networks and how embedded will a country like China, which certainly has a terrible record on surveillance and other things, be in the networks of countries.

I certainly wouldn't trust the Chinese to not want to take advantage of that. Yeah. Just while we're on this theme, the kind of global dimension here, I mean, what's your feeling about the, someone who would say the kind of growing skepticism about the early promises of Silicon Valley and these technologies? They were going to create a flatter, freer world. And instead, in the middle of this pandemic here, it looks like these technologies are now being used to wage informational soft wars. They're creating borders and boundaries. They're hardening national identities. They're impeding human freedom. What's your take on on that big kind of aspiration of Silicon Valley to change the world for the good? A lot of it was marketing. Let's be clear. Like, you know, I mean, we never like, oh, banking. Like, you just like, you think about any other industry. It's just never, I guess Hollywood would be the closest. Like, Hollywood had such a dreamy idea and then sort of the reality of Hollywood. Of course, there was this after Nathaniel West and others wrote about the real Hollywood. You know, it just, it was just, I think the media was part of it.

These innovations are amazing, like some of the things. You know, we're living, we're living an era where Thomas Edison's are living right now, whoever is the equivalent of Thomas Edison, whether it's Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. So that's exciting. There's a really good book by Brad Smith, who's president of Microsoft. And it's incredible that Microsoft has sort of done a 360 in terms of being the evil empire and now is actually under Sachinadella and Brad is really quite a, a really good corporate citizen in terms of technology.

But he wrote a book called Tools and Weapons About Technology. And it's a really good book. It's mostly about policy and things. But it's about the idea that this tech can either be a tool or a weapon. It's like a knife or you can think of a lot of things that are both tools and weapons. And a lot of what's happened on the Internet, all the bad parts of what could happen were seeing the partisanship, the ugliness, the twitchiness, the short attention spans, the addiction. At the same time, there's still the most amazing possibilities of education in terms

of telemedicine, in terms of uniting the world. The problem is humanity, right? It's how it's going to that's always been the problem. And I'm not like equating it to, you know, the idiotic things, you know, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Guns actually kill people. It's different. It's a different kind of thing where we could take advantage of a lot of stuff if we were in a better frame of mind. If it wasn't built in such an addictive nature that played to our filter bubbles, there is great possibility there. So I feel like one of the reasons I think I'm so hard on the tech industry is because when I started off, I thought that too. Like I thought, wow, this could be a way that everyone in the world, it's not a Coca-Cola commercial, but everybody could come

together in some way and see our commonality. Unfortunately, the way it's built for virality, for engagement, for enragment, makes it an addiction, makes it really something else is turned. It doesn't mean it can't be turned around or aren't good parts to it. Yeah, good, great insights. Let's go to another question here from our audience, and here it comes up from Barb asking, what do you consider the ethical balance between privacy and using technology to combat disease, in this case, the pandemic? Do you think, Kara, that those things are in tension, or do you think that there's such a public health, public good need to contain this virus that, frankly, we should put our privacy concerns on the backseat until we get this under control?

I don't think it's a choice one or the other. I don't think it has to be. I think these things can be designed so that there is anonymousness. They can design them that way and they can make it so that they're helpful. I don't think this thing is going to be solved without a very big lift by technical. in terms of speeding it up. It makes contact tracing easier. It makes a lot of things easier. And so it should be doing good things because people have never been more connected through their phones and it should be able to alert you when people around you have COVIDers. You know,

there's all kinds of things that could happen without it being it's that person. Like, you know, don't talk to that person. But to have an ability to know where you're going and whether it's safe, you could see all kinds of things that could be done without violating people's privacy. that would be great, would be really, really helpful. And, you know, in testing, all kinds of things that you could do, one would hope that these researchers are availing them. The communication between researchers, for example, wouldn't be possible without technology today.

The speed of information has never been faster. And that's a great thing. Of course, it's also a bad thing, because then you get bad information goes around the world. Some of the stuff you're seeing around antivaxers is just appalling. Like, for example, and bad information can move so, fast around the world. And that's not just at White House briefings. It's actually everywhere on Facebook and other places like that. And these social media networks to their credit have been trying really hard to clean these things up, which means they can. So I think they can do it without violating privacy. I don't think that has to be a foregone conclusion. Talking about bad information, Kara, this in some ways was personal for you during this pandemic. You wrote a column that got the attention of Sean Hannity on Fox News about your mother. Tell us a little bit about that. because it kind of brings this home.

It makes it real. Oh, Sean Hannity. You know, at the beginning of this crisis, everyone got caught like, this can't be, right? That's normal, right? It's like, what? And she had, as the information was coming in, she had all this other information

that was inaccurate, that was highly inaccurate. And so she had been watching, she's probably listening right now. She had been watching Fox News. And I was really worried for her. She's in Florida. She's staying there for the winter. and, you know, some of it was fine.

Like Nancy Pelosi's, you know, is plotting the takeover of the world, whatever. I don't really care about that stuff. But what was more problematic was this is the flu. This is like the flu. This is, it's no big deal. I can go out. And then she'd go out and I'd have no way of stopping her. And so we got into a lot of fights on the phone.

We fight in general sometimes. But this was really, I was really worried because she's of the age that that would be more dangerous for her. And so she started to do that. like, where are you getting this news? And of course it was because she watches Fox News and she's in the Foxhole, as we like to joke. And again, it's fine if it's just political stuff. But when it becomes very good to get very good health information and getting this kind of diatribes about it, which was sort of tracking on what President Trump was saying, or hydroxychloroquine, like you should use that. And that's turned out to be very dangerous for a lot of people. Just this bad information.

So I wrote a column about it. And I said, listen, they really, on health care information, they should really try very hard to get it right. And instead of trying to, you know, and they mix news and pundry, which all the cable stations do, by the way, let's be clear. None of them are clean in the way they do that. It's hard to distinguish between the reporting and the punditry. And so I wrote this. And the lead was, I'm not going to sue you, Sean Hannity, because there had been talk about

people suing Fox News because of all this early information was so incredibly bad. And he got angry. I don't, he started tweeting at me and, and whatever. He's, he's on his own trip, as they say, in this world. And he thought, I don't know, he got very sensitive about the issue. He's threatened to sue and whatever, you know, we'll see. But I was focusing on my mom getting good information in the health care area. She can watch as much gossip as she wants, but, you know, or whatever, but or have political

points of view as many families differ in this country. But the fact of the matter is basic health information should be. accurate. And that's what I was writing about. Yeah, no, that's a critical point. I think, let's hope everyone agrees with that. We can't politicize the science. Well, yes, you can. That's the thing. Well, we are. That's exactly what's happened in this country. So. Yeah, I agree. But let's hope that we try to resist that tendency. Let's go to our next question for you, Karen. This is from our online audience watching live. How will company culture shift post-COVID-19? Are we going towards more remotely distributed teams or is this actually going to be a reactive anti-silo culture? I mean, when we're

over with this thing, let's hope that that happens at some point, are we all going to want to be back in that office with our colleagues as social animals connecting with each other and being what we were on, I don't know, January 15th, 2020? Well, no, because I think the trend toward remote working was already at work. You know, I am the original social distancer. I've been working at home for 20 years now. I don't like offices. They kind of make me nervous. But I think people do have reasons to be in the office. But what's really interesting, a lot of the tech companies are sort of saying, do what you want. They had already been experimenting around workplaces and what they're like and desks and nobody has established desk and all kinds of interesting food and other experiences at these tech companies.

And now this week, a lot of them, like Twitter has said, nobody needs to come to work anymore. You can work from anywhere. Now, this has been done previously by a company called Basecamp and another WordPress were very early to this innovation where it was distributed employees. I think you're going to see a lot more of that because the cost savings, if you don't have to physically be there, you know, some jobs require it. You may not have to be it. And some people may like it. At the same time, some people might be like, get me out of this house, right? Let me get somewhere else. But I think that's already been a trend. It's already been a trend in tech and it's certainly going to be a trend in offices. There's no reason to have these expensive offices everywhere where people have to

commute. And as traffic gets worse and things like that, I think you're going to, it's already, it's accelerating a trend that was already happening. You're listening to the Monk Dialogues, a special series of the Monk Debates podcast. Each week, for the next few weeks, we'll bring you one-on-one conversations with the sharpest minds and the brightest thinkers, reflecting on how COVID-19 will change our world. as we know it. If you're enjoying this podcast, write a review on iTunes. Check us out on Twitter or Facebook for the date of our next live monk dialogues. And send us your questions for our guests in advance at dialogues at monkdebates.com.

Now back to the episode. Let's take a couple more questions here. So this comes from Thomas with Google Alphabet Labs pulling out of their Toronto Waterfront Development. experiment. Where do you see big tech in terms of land development, municipal affairs, and just generally, Carol, what did you think of that decision? Is Toronto better off for not having this? And why? You know, I just get nervous when Google starts to plan cities, don't you? Like, I think everyone with Toronto did a big cheer, I guess. They were sort of nervous about the information. I get nervous anytime big companies start to act like governments that are elected by the people. I have a real issue.

with lack of accountability. And even if they're going to bring you the most beautiful things in the world, if their CEO can't get fired because they control all the stock, if they have enormous amounts of money and power and can't be fired, can't be, they have boards that are just rubber stamps. I get nervous about that because where is the public represented in any of this? And so I think that's the issue a lot of people had there is what information, you know, sort of, I know there's an expression, don't look a gift of horse in the mouth, but maybe you should, Right. And so I think a lot of people had worries about what they would do. At the same time, you know, these companies have been, especially Google, has been long interested in what a city is like and they are going to be integral to cities going forward. What is it? You think about transportation. Like, how are we going to have transportation in these heavily congested cities? We're moving to the mega cities. Or maybe that'll change after this pandemic. But we had been. It has to be done. There has to be autonomous cars. There has to be a much more efficient way to do food distribution. kinds of stuff. And so those companies are going to be part of this, especially because it all

rides on information and data and the ability to manipulate data and use data and use insights from data. And so they would naturally be interested in it. I think a lot about years ago, Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Francisco and he's now governor of California doing what most people consider him to be a very good job there right now. He was telling me a story about when the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brand, came to him. the idea of putting chairlifts all over San Francisco in order to get people up the hills. And he said he just didn't know what to do when they said it. And he sort of had to be like, uh-huh, okay.

But they also had some very good ideas that didn't end up turning out to how to get more data into the city, more, more Wi-Fi and all kinds of stuff that later happened on its own. But I just worry when, what will they extract for the privilege of doing this? And that's the worry I would have had if I was there. Kerr, I just want you to give us your thoughts quickly on the U.S. election that you're going to face come November 2nd because Big Tech. What election? We'll see. Big Tech is going to be a big part of that election. There's issues around free speech,

issues around accuracy in the media. It seems like this is a, I don't know, a bit of a type rope for these companies to walk with some real risks here for them politically, but also in terms of public trust and public perceptions. Well, it depends on the tech company. You know, Twitter has banned political advertising. Google is somewhere in the middle where it's going to be doing more watching of the targeting. And Facebook has said anybody can lie anywhere you want, essentially. And so I think it's good.

I think all of them have been preparing, especially with foreign interference. You know, they're not going to let 2016 happen again. I think 2018 went pretty well. But this is a really important election. And the manipulation of voters is problematic. And, you know, lots of writers write about this topic. I think they're on their best behavior in terms of trying to make sure that there's not foreign interference. The problem is a lot of it is domestic interference now and the ability to put out inaccuracies and do micro-targeting and things like that.

And I think this is all developing as they get their hands around the enormous power they have on the flow of information. You know, I think it'll be an interesting election, especially around because all the things we used to do, having these conventions, having regular campaigning. sort of retail campaigning is not going to happen because of coronavirus. So a lot of it will be in the digital space, right? Whether it's Trump doing his nightly briefings or Joe Biden in the basement, whatever it is, it's going to be a much more digital affair. And so the question is, how effective will these candidates be at doing this and how much attention and excitement can they generate digitally, which is harder, I think. And then there's, of course, the issues around safety of voting, which I think everybody is concerned about and the ability of people to have their

votes be counted. And I think that's, I think that doesn't get nearly enough attention as opposed to the Trump campaign manager who keeps buying Porsches or whatever. You know, it's going to be a really noisy election and yet it's going to probably be all on digital. And I think it won't be over after the election, given, you know, how President Trump behaves online and other stuff like that. So it's going to go on for a really long time this, this election long after it's over. Sounds like fun. Sign me up. Aren't you sick of America, the United States and Canada? Aren't you like, ah, shut up?

Well, for us, it's like a professional sport. We get to watch it. Why don't you be like, shut up down there? Simmer down. America. We need to simmer down America. Well, the border's closed for more than one reason right now. Let's squeeze in a couple. I want to come to Canada. You're not allowed. We'll see what happens in June, Carol. We might get you out. All right. Deborah Robinson's asking you, I'd like to know what Kara thinks the Toronto tech community

can do that Silicon Valley has been unable to do. I know that's a bit micro for you, Kara, that you don't necessarily follow Toronto carefully. I think innovation can happen anywhere now. And I don't think that Silicon Valley has the magic sauce anymore. I think there's all these issues around San Francisco, around living in the Bay Area and stuff like that. And that innovation can happen anywhere. And the idea that it has to happen in one place, I think, is over.

And there is something nice about having a community of people, an analog community of people, where the VCs, the universities, and the entrepreneurs all interact with each other. I think that's critically important to innovation. There's sort of an iron triangle here in Silicon Valley, in terms of that with Stanford and the graduates that then come and see the other graduates. But I do think there's an opportunity in that you can innovate from anywhere. And if you create these communities, you can create companies together. I don't know a lot about the Toronto community, so I can't speak highly intelligently of them.

But build yourselves around a company like Shopify or others and start to build an ecosystem that can be not necessarily competitive with Silicon Valley, but create innovation on its own that appeals to customers there and then build it outward. Well, one thing we are seeing, Carol, which is interesting, is a lot of global immigration, tech immigration is coming to Canada because of the situation in the United States with your president. So that has been a bit of a win for Canada for the last couple of years. Of course it is. That's a great win. Listen, I wrote about this a long time ago. If you go around most of U.S. tech, Sotchanadella is an immigrant.

Sundar Pichai is an immigrant. Elon Musk is an immigrant. Sergey Brin is an immigrant. You just go over and over. It's just insane what we're doing here around immigration. It's been the greatest strength of tech, and tech should be even more outspoken, not just for themselves,

but for all immigration and all immigrants at any level. I say this a lot. You don't know where innovation is going to come from. And someone, I think it was Gene Case, the wife of Steve Kay, showed a book, talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not. And somewhere there is, like,

She's laughing with this thought. There's a little girl in, you know, a slum in India who has an answer that we need in this world, an answer to cancer, an answer to the next social network, an answer to something. And she's not going to get the opportunity. And so I think that's what we have to build around the world, is to take the talent that exists throughout the world and make the opportunity global and bring that talent to where it belongs and not just keep it to one geography or one zip code. I think that's just in the world going forward that can't happen if we're going to have a better world.

Kara, that's a wonderful and positive note for us to end our... Oh, I'm positive. Wait, just a second. End our dialogue with you this evening. And again, thank you for giving us this hour. It's such a pleasure to have an extended conversation with someone like you that has not just the background knowledge and the contacts in this industry, which are hugely impressive, but has just spent the hard time kind of thinking through your ideas and thinking through some of these big questions. So a real privilege for us tonight and thank you again. Well, thank you for such a substantive conversation. It's really a pleasure.

Well, that concludes our Munker dialogue on big tech and how this pandemic is reshaping our society through technology. I hope you've enjoyed the thoughtful, informative, and substantive conversation that we've had. I'd like to just quickly preview for you some of our upcoming talks. We've got a number of interesting speakers set up. Next week, Scott Gottlieb, who many of us have seen in the news, an important voice to go to on this pandemic, the former head of the American FDA, the Food and Drug Administration,

saying as recently as yesterday that we're in the second inning of this pandemic. So we're going to have a conversation with Scott Gottlieb about the public health dimensions of COVID-19. what are the lessons learned? How will healthcare and public health change in the months and years to come? And again, we'll be looking to take your questions by email to the Monk Debates website or via Facebook. So we look forward to having you as part of that important conversation next week for our next month dialogue. I'd like to end by acknowledging and thanking a number of the key organizations and groups that have been making these dialogues possible. first and foremost, the Peter and Melanie Monk Foundation and its sister foundation, the Aurea Foundation,

who are funding these dialogues in their entirety. These evenings are brought to you by both foundations as a charitable good, a public service to encourage in the spirit of the monk debates informed conversation, informed discussion, and reflection and analysis on this pandemic. So thank you to both foundations. I'm Rudyard Griffiths. You've been listening. to the Monk Dialogue on technology and the COVID-19 pandemic. We're going to do this all again next week and for the continuing weeks. So thank you for tuning in. Enjoy the rest of your evening. Good night.

The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths, Ricky Gurwitz, and Debbie Pacheco are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Philip Wilson. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.