The New Yorker Radio Hour - Kara Swisher on Tech Billionaires: “I Don’t Think They Like People”

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “You can’t walk into my store and take all my Snickers bars and say it’s for fair use.” She is disappointed in government leaders who have failed to regulate businesses and protect users’ privacy. Although she remains awed by the innovation produced by American tech businesses, Swisher is no longer “naïve” about their motives. She also witnessed a generation of innovators grow megalomaniacal. The tech moguls claim they “know better; you’re wrong. You’ve done it wrong. The media’s done it wrong. The government’s done it wrong. . . . When they have lives full of mistakes! They just paper them over.” Once on good terms with Elon Musk, Swisher believes money has been deleterious to his mental health. “I don’t know what happened to him. I’m not his mama, and I’m not a psychiatrist. But I think as he got richer and richer—there are always enablers around people that make them think they hung the moon.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over the last 30 years, tech companies, the upstarts of the business world back then became the business world. Microsoft is rated the most profitable company on the planet by some rankings. Apple and Alphabet, which owns Google, are way up there as well. Tech companies have amassed incredible power. Their impacts on privacy, on mental health, on journalism, on just about everything, we're only beginning to understand it now. One of the sharpest voices on the evolution of the tech industry, and often one of the funniest, is the journalist Kara Swisher.

She knows better than anyone how the internet came to define so much of our lives. And since the 90s, she's been influential and even feared in Silicon Valley, and she's just published Burn Book, a tech love story. It begins with Kara Swisher's time at the Washington Post where we first met. I thought of you immediately some weeks ago when Tom Shales, the legendary Washington Post TV critic, died. Amazing guy. And it's my memory. It is my memory from a million years ago in the Washington Post newsroom when I was a child in the style section. Am I not crazy that you worked right close to him?

Yes. I was there. Yes, I was. I sat right next to him. I mean, Shales had an office next to Mary Hidar. And so it was this sort of style editor. And so, yeah, so Shales, I love Shales. What a guy. What a guy. What a guy. Kara, I've been looking forward to this for weeks, and I have tons of questions to ask you about your book, which is so much fun and so interesting.

And the result of so many years of covering the tech world. But I want to start out by asking you, how did you start to figure yourself out what you wanted to be who you want to. wanted to be? Well, one thing was I was gay, and I knew it from a young age. You know, a lot of people say it occurred to me at 21 when I started to have feelings about Martino Navratilova. It didn't. It didn't.

I knew when I was four years old, I was like, oh, I see. And I sought out a lot of information about it. And at the time, people don't remember this. I'm old. You're, I think, around my same age. It was not good to be gay. It was not good. You had to hide it.

It was furtive. And all the negativity, you know, I'm not good. it can build the furtiveness particularly and the hiding and pretending and a performative behavior. And I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I just had a real hard time with it. When did it become an issue with other people in a sense? One issue was I really very much wanted to go into the military. My dad was in the military, and I had a real interest in it and couldn't. It was, you know. So you wanted, as I understand it how you either wanted to be in the military as an analyst or in the CIA,

Right, one of those. Went to the journalistic path instead. Went to Columbia J school, I think. Yeah, I did. I just, it was a different path. It was a similar thing. It was about analysis. And I had been super interested in scenario building.

That was what really attracted me to intelligence work. It's like, if this, then that, if this, I was always, I loved a puzzle. And I loved a, if this happens, if you know certain information, you input it. And so it tracked with journalism. I wasn't in, I wasn't a journalist in high school. It was college where I started at Georgetown. And I also, I thought I could change people's minds in a way. A lot of things I wrote.

But about what? In other words, we know you for years and years now about your connection to tech. When did that subject either land in your head or on your lap or something? How did that arise? So I went to the post and I was the young person on the staff like I was. And so they're like, young person, go out to AOL, visit them. And it wasn't at the time, it was more news about contractors, government contractors and assemblers of computer systems, which, you know, CSI. There was, I forget the names of them all, but they all had acronyms and their names.

But this was AOL, and nobody knew what to make of it. And I had gotten interested in it early on because I had a fellowship at Duke. And I had started to really use these devices. I was dating someone who lived in the former Soviet Union. We were using all kinds of weird internet protocols to communicate. because it was phone calls were prohibitively expensive. So I was always drawn to this. And then I noticed it everywhere.

And for example, remember the teletype machine at the Washington Post that was at the entrance right there on the fifth floor? I kept steering it and I'm like, why are they look, have that? Why do they need that? It's all going to be in the computer. And I kept saying that to people and they're like, Kara, move away from the teletype machine. And I was like, but it's an antique, don't you understand?

And so I just got interested in. And no one wanted to do it. That's really pretty much it. And once I got there and saw what AOL was doing, it fit in with my worldview about propaganda and about misinformation, but not just that, but about information, a global information system. And then I started to focus on the post because when I saw Craigslist, I was like, oh, classifieds are screwed. And then when news was free, I was like, my own business is going to get killed here. So what do we do here? And so that's where I got interested. At a certain point, it seemed to me reading you that your tone shifted, you became more skeptical of the big figures. In fact, skeptical to the point of you seem to, you can't stand some of them.

You're brutally, brutally, justifiably critical of them in your book. If it's possible to put your thumb on it, what was the first example of when that penny dropped and you said, this is just this, this is deeply problematic and nobody's seen it. Yeah, I think, you know, initially when one time, there were several different times, when Google tried to buy Yahoo and wanted 90-some percent of the search market, I'm sorry, that was a monopoly. I had covered the Microsoft trial for the Washington Post peripherally, and they were acting like, no, no, no, this is, we're nice. And I'm like, oh, I don't think anyone should have nine, I don't care how nice you are. The next person might not be nice, right?

I was like, huh, and then when Google again started copying books on their own and just doing it and recording live television, I was like, you don't have any respect for copyright. What do you think costs money? What are you doing? It felt like shoplifting to me. And they were like, no, no, no, Kara. It's for the people. I'm like, well, the only people that seem to be doing well financially are you. Like, I don't know. It seems. There seemed to be almost a kind of, when we look back at the robber barons, or we look back at other tight. tycoons in the past who were exploitative and awful. Somehow this breed, they wore turtlenecks, they were young. Not turtlenecks, just be clear. T-shirts and hoodies. But yes, they did. Actually, one of the first stories I wrote at the journal was about that ridiculous performative stuff. I did one on they, they only like tacos and, you know, they only go to burrito places, except it was all catered in, right? Or these titles that they had, Chief Yahoo or Chief Experience Officer. And I'm not the

CEO. Well, the only one who did it, like, honestly, was I'm the CEO bitch, which was Mark Zuckerberg. I appreciated that, at least. I was like, okay, thank you. But a lot of them had this thing, and they'd be like, you know, I'm just like everyone else. I'm like, hmm, you seem to own most of the company and you're in charge, but you want to pretend you're not in charge. So if it was a community, why don't we benefit? Why don't we get some of the money? That happened with AOL. There was an event where Steve K. said we make $54 from each customer. I forget what it was for each user. And I put my hand up. I'm like, oh, if we're making $54 off of me, where's my Vig? Where's my part? Where's my half of that? Because it's my information, right? And so a banker is

not going to tell you, I'm here for you, Dave. I'm here because I want a community of money. Like, you'd laugh them out of the room, right? Like, anyway. So let's jump in and talk about what seems to me a really pivotal moment in your book. December 2016 is a meeting that the newly elected Donald Trump had with tech leaders, including Elon Moss, Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO, Sacha Nadella. And you described this as a major turning point on how you viewed the tech industry. Why is that? That's correct. The first sentence of this book is it was capitalism after all. These people had decried Trump to me privately over and over. He's not going to win. He's a clown. He's not going to do what he says. And Musk said that too. Like he's the only one he really. did own up to it, like that he said it. And they, their need for money, and these were the richest people on the planet, right? And they walked into this meeting, which I scooped this story.

Nobody knew they were going. Can you imagine meaning the president and not saying anything? Because they were embarrassed, and yet they wanted to get their repatriated income. They wanted to get their tax breaks. They wanted to get no regulation continuing. They wanted that to keep going on, that game to still go on. And I couldn't believe they went into the meeting as the most richest and most powerful people on the planet, and didn't say anything about immigration, gay rights, that they had talked about caring about. And at least immigration, I thought they'd say something

because this guy was way out there on Muslims and on immigrants. He had called them rapists. And this was like two of the people in there were immigrants, Satcha Nadella and Elon Musk. I was like, do you have nothing to say what you want from this person, given your enormous power collectively? You're like nation states. You have nothing to say?

And they were so like, we know better, we'll handle it. And then I thought, no, no, you're just going to go in the special room and close the door on the rest of us. And the rest of us are going to pay the price for what happens here. And so that was enough. It had been building, but that was, it was a huge. I shouldn't have been so naive, but I guess I was. I'm talking with the journalist Kara Swisher, author of Burn Book, a tech love story. We'll continue in a moment.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking today with Kara Swisher, one of the most authoritative journalists on the tech industry to date. Swisher has just published Burn Book.

That's not the burn book of mean girls' fame, although the title is probably no coincidence at all. This burn book is subtitled, a tech love story. Swisher is become disenchanted, even enraged over the years by the constant violations of users' privacy, monopolistic practices,

and the way these companies have consistently ignored disinformation and mental health impacts. She eventually fell out with some of the leading tech people who had been her subjects and her sources. I'll continue my conversation with Kara Swisher. Let's talk about somebody who is a very vivid presence in your book. You write that in these early days you used to always be able to count on Elon Musk to answer your phone calls and, quote, engage with me on a semi-human basis. When did that change? Because on October 17th of 22, he sent you an email with the subject line,

You're an asshole. What was he reacting to? What happened with him is what I liked about Elon, and I'm going to, people are going to, people who, and one thing that's really interesting is I really did like. And people go, how dare you have liked him? I'm like, what do you want me to say? I did. Like, I'm not apologizing for that.

The New Yorker wrote a quite positive profile of him back when, about when he was, mainly about electric cars. Right. Okay. Electric cars, it wouldn't have been where it was without Elon Musk. Sorry, people, I know you hate him, but that's the facts. That's the facts. He really pushed it forward. Same thing with rockets. He changed the dynamic. I remember him calling me once so excited that he got a contract from the government because Lockheed and the rest of those people had it locked up. And I agreed with him. Good. Yay. Someone else is loud in. And the stuff he was doing was innovative and lowering costs. I appreciate that, although I don't love the government completely stepping out and letting private companies run everything.

I've never feel good about that. And at the time, as you recall, everyone else was building, and I use this example a lot, but like a digital dry cleaning service, or a digital maid service or a digital, you know, kombucha delivery service. And when you get 400 calls like that, David, from these smart people, you're like,

you literally want to like hit yourself with the cell phone on the head. You're like, I cannot listen to this crap anymore. And when someone comes with big ideas, You welcome them, and I welcome that among Elon. I don't know what happened to him. I'm not his mama, and I'm not a psychiatrist. But I think as he got richer and richer, there's always enablers around people that make them think they hung the moon.

I think that can be very deleterious. Real wealth is mostly deleterious on people's psyche, unless you have a very strong psyche, right? And then during COVID, we had an interview, and he got very angry because I disagreed with him that COVID might affect more than zero. people. And he went on and on about how much he knew. He read all the studies. I didn't read all the studies. He read it. And I was like, did his own research. Okay. Right. You know, and then he started to

sound like those crazies online. I was like, I don't think you know. I don't think any of us know. So, okay, sure, genius, you know. And, and it began to dawn on me. And then he became even worse. And, but then with Twitter, when he bought it, he and I had a long exchange, which I have in the book about what to do about Twitter, because I love Twitter. So did he. He loved the product. Twitter? No, I'm not on it at all. He and I had an exchange, because I thought he could do a good job. It needed a jolt because its business model was terrible for its entire history. Its stock price stayed in the doldrums.

It was a very slow-moving company, but still a terrific product at its heart. And then something happened. And I got to tell you, I don't know. Disagreement seemed, he never seemed bothered by disagreement, and then he was. But exceptionally so. Let me just tell you, this is what dawned on me. He loves video games. This guy loves video games like you can't believe. He thinks he's ready player one. This is what Ben Messerick pointed out to me and I think he was correct. He thinks he's the main character in the video game and the rest of us can be shot or done or we don't exist. And it doves tales into his ideas around simulation. He thinks this is a simulation. The whole world. I don't know if you know that. Yeah. He's talked about it in an interview with Meg several times. But he thinks this isn't real except he's the main character. Oh. Then it

makes sense to you when that, when you put that into it. You're like, oh, I see, he's the main character. So it doesn't matter what he says. Unless I'm crazy, a politics has taken hold since 2016. Oh, yeah. And it's deepened. There's a kind of libertarian, right-wing, I can solve all problems. And it's rooted in something that I recognized years before this. You'd go into a conversation with someone like Mark Andreessen, who, is by definition intelligent as an investor. Really. You know, God knows how much money is an investor. But a lot of these guys, you meet with them,

and they don't just know what they know, they know everything. That's correct. That is correct. Yeah, he's a particular condition. Well, you put a garden hose up in the air and you sprit some, and everybody else is stupid. That there's a psychology as well as an emerging politics. Talk about what that politics is in 2024.

And who's got it? It's literally people who are safe and rich and are unaffected and will be building that little castle in the sky that they're going to fly to when the rest of us are choking down here. And they know better. You're wrong. You've done it wrong. The media's done it wrong. The government's done it wrong.

We know better when they have lives full of mistakes. They just paper them over. They have such a cynical view of people. And ultimately, I don't think they like people. I think they find governing shabby, and then they pontificate of what we should do. And then not just that. They actually have influence, like with Elon and Crimea and things. They don't just pontificate, because that I can deal with.

You're just a blowheart, right? They have decisive influence. Somebody like Elon Musk's system of satellites has been incredibly influential in the war in Ukraine. Which, let me tell you, is an innovative and interesting thing he did. But should he be deciding what to geo-fence? I think not. But he can. Right.

So you point out in the book, Kara, that in the last 25 years of the Internet age, our government leaders have passed zero, zero privacy protections. They haven't updated any trust laws or addressed its impact on mental health, especially in teenagers. Privacy, no. When it comes to regulating these companies, Facebook, Amazon, Google, where should we start and where do you see any leadership coming from? Well, let me put aside one kind. First of all, self-regulation is not going to work. It doesn't, like, let that airline self-regulate, let banks self-regulate. We see where that's gone, right? And let me tell you, let's start with the premise is no regulation is going to work quite well enough. And the government falls down on the job a lot of times, but at least there's some semblance of guardrails on all those industries. When the door blew off the Alaska thing, there was so many investigations.

People were fired. There's implications for mistakes at Lockheed. At the government investigated, there's going to be fines. There's going to be lawsuits. Everybody gets to go around the thing for one door, one door. Today, two stories, one in the Washington Post, and this is not a new story, not the Washington Post, one in the Wall Street Journal, one in the New York Times, about the impact on young girls of Internet, you know, and sexualization of young girls. Two stories. Are you kidding me?

No, who gets fired? Who's getting fired here? Who's getting sued? Who's getting, this is like astonishing to me. And so. What's the dynamic behind it? Why is there no regulation there? Money?

Shear amount of money. Money is one thing, but it's not the only thing. It's one that the politicians, first they were scared of it and didn't know what they were talking about. And that I get from any new industry. But now there's plenty of people who know stuff. Amy Klobuchar, Senator Warner, Senator Bennett, Mike Gallagher, who just left, I think is very smart about these issues. I don't agree with them on everything. Ken Buck was another person.

I was amazed, Carrie. I was watching, quite frankly, I was watching the CEO of Connie Nast, testers. about AI to a Senate subcommittee, and a few other people were testifying. And Josh Hawley, who's very far on the right on most, he was very smart about AI and the possibility of how this, it could be terrible. So there are people, sometimes you'd watch committee meetings, and people had no idea how to turn on a phone or how Google made money. It was pathetic. That was Orrin Hatch. That was the Orrin Hatch moment when he said, like, how do you make money? And they take advantage of that. And look, again, I'm not going to

blame these companies. This is what capitalistic companies do, get every edge they can for their shareholders. This is their charge. I think that the government has abrogated. Now, not all states have, you know, California's been very aggressive, certain states have, and in the negative way, they've been aggressive, right? In Texas, some of these loony laws that they're trying to pass. And so into the breach of federal regulation has come all kinds of a patchwork of some good, some bad, and all very confusing. And in confusion, these big companies get bigger. Invita is now a $2 trillion company. Apple's a multi-tillion dollar company. Microsoft. Which makes the chips that presumably is going to power AI. That's correct. That's the latest one.

And so these people are, these are nation states. Let's try to be clear. And they are affecting us. And what's astonishing is, you know, when cars didn't have airbags or opiates were used, they got sued. You can't sue these people. You can't get them out of power. Why not? Section 230. Explain. A lot of these companies, if they, the early ones, if people posted on their things, they'd get sued by the person and then they'd never, they would be, die in the, in the, in the crib, essentially, because of lawsuits. That is absolutely true. Now, it protects them from liability in a lot of instances where they shouldn't be protected. Now, listen, I don't,

I'm not with the people that want to just get rid of it, because they're, That's also stupid. But we need to think about how we want to cover liability. We're doing it again. We're of such an innovative country in terms of allowing innovation. The worries I have is that right now in generative AI, it's so expensive. What do you think? Everyone was like, Sam Maltman's raising $7 trillion for a new chip thing.

I'm like, that's not enough, right? It's crazy, but it's expensive. So therefore, the only people that are going to dominate are the big company. Not the small ones. So where is the innovation going to come about if these giant companies control every bit of information? How are you going to fight copyright issues? David, you must be concerned with them ingesting all your content, right? Condi Nast has got to be losing its mind over this. But do you have the firepower to fight them? Copyright laws are pretty good, by the way. That's a good way to go at these people. But at some point it won't be because, you know, Barry Diller's fighting. The New York Times is fighting them. Because you know what they did last time. Well, this time. They're not just... This is the second time, in a sense, this is the second time around. It's worse, because, David, they're not just going to links. They're not just controlling people getting to you, which is getting to your site. They're controlling the, they're going in and taking the content and vomiting it back up.

That's theft. I don't know. That seems like theft to me on a very basic level. So if you're sitting as the head of the New York Times or Condy Nast or the Washington Post, what would you ask for, demand, stand? your feet about from the tech companies where AI is concerned? Pay me for my stuff. You can't have, you can't walk into my store and take all my Snickers bars and say it's for

fair use. Like, what are you talking about? Like, get into legislation, bother the senators and consens. You have increasingly less power over time. They have increasing power. Get in there and say, they stole my stuff, sir, and I would like to be paid, either get paid for. By the way, stole it again. Stole it again.

They didn't steal it the first time, not quite. Not quite. What they didn't distribute it. They choked the means of distribution, and then they stole the advertising business. Now, fair and square, they stole it. And they took them. Remember when everyone was taking Facebook money? Remember they were giving you money?

I don't know if you guys did. Of course I remember. They came to me. Cheryl Samba herself came to me and said, we want you to be part of this new thing. I go, you want my stuff for free? And she's like, yes, because then you'll get more distribution. I go, you want my stuff for free? No.

How about no? There's a lovely moment toward the end of the book, and you write this. When I started covering the nascent sector in the 1990s, meaning tech, I had truly believed in tech's ability to transform the world, to solve problems that had plagued us for centuries and allow us to finally see our commonality over all our differences. And so there's not just kind of tech futurism there. There's a sort of a sense of a new politics of a world transformed. when did you lose that sense if you have? I have not. You have not.

I'm a Trekkie. I'm a Trekkie. I said to my heart. I used that analogy because Steve Jobs did, and I did too, is that there is a Star Trek version of the universe where we ultimately all get along, even despite the problems and there's always problems. But often in Star Trek, if you notice, or you really pay attention, villains turn into good people. They do. But in Star Wars, that is not the mood of that, of that, you know, science fiction. Yeah.

It's an intergalactic battle, and evil wins a lot. And even at the end, it's not a victory. Victory is never assured. I do believe that technology can bring us together. It can make a better world. It can make better drugs. You can make us live longer and better. Arguably, the worst problem we face is climate change.

Climate change. Is technology going to have a magic wand for that? Well, you know, I love when you said shoot a hose in the sky, because I've been in that meeting, too, where they get like, I'm open to all ideas, but it's an existential threat. And my fear is, their plan is to, there's one, I'm not going to say who it is, but one of these guys told me their plan for ecological collapse, like the apocalypse is in. Their apocalypse plan, and they have them. You've written about them, and you wrote about them, right? Wasn't it you guys? Evan Osrest's written about it. You know, you go off to New Zealand and you hide in the bunker.

They had a motorcycle at their house, a speedy motorcycle that would get them to their place in Big Sur. and they told me where it was, you know, like that it's here and it's got a bunker, it goes down, it locks this, I've got this food, I've got this, told me the hope was fascinating. It was fascinating, listening to it. I was like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, interesting. And they had this, it had everything. They had a garden, they had the whole water, blah, blah, blah, electricity generator. And they said, what's your plan? And I said, my plan is to come to your house with a gun and shoot you and take your motorcycle. That's my plan and invite all my friends. And they were like, and of course, I could hear the click, click, click in their head, like, how am I going to stop this lesbian with a gun? What am I going to do? Because they're pretty good with guns, those lesbians. And you could hear it. And he was like, that was a contingency I hadn't thought of.

Anyway, I'm not going to shoot him. I might. Caras, thank you so much. This is great. Kara Swisher's Burn Book is just out. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is. a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Calaliyah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deket.

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