Kara Swisher's 'Tech Love Story'

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, the renowned tech journalist, Kara Swisher, with her new memoir called Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. It's kind of a love-hate story really, I might describe it as, about the companies and devices we all use constantly but are alienated from at the same time, the tech moguls she has covered for 30 years who have powered these epic changes in our culture, and Kara's own changing views on the industry she's covered since the birth of the internet. Kara Swisher hosts the podcast, On with Kara Swisher, and co-hosts the podcast Pivot with her and Scott Galloway. She appears regularly on CNN, was a New York Times columnist as many of you know, and founder of Recode, among other things. Kara, thanks for making this one of your stops. Welcome back to WNYC.

Kara Swisher: Well, thank you. I'm thrilled to be here and most of my family is thrilled I'm here because they listen to you all the time.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's great. Can I start with a story that some of our listeners may have seen in the New York Magazine excerpt from the book in which you describe being a young journalist at The Washington Post 30 years ago and being relegated to covering this new thing called the internet, because the editors saw it as fringy, a low-impact beat? What year was that and why were you more interested than your editors at the time?

Kara Swisher: It was '92 or '93. I covered AOL because they actually had me do it because I was the young person on the staff. I was relatively young compared to everybody else. I think it was in my early 30s. I understood this internet computer thing. That was why I was put on it. They had interest in me moving into political area, but I liked business. I like covering business.

As you know at The Washington Post, politics is the center of all the action there if you're an ambitious young reporter, but I was super interested in digital right from the get-go. I didn't think it was a backwater. I thought they were going to change everything. There was a company in the Washington area called America Online and that's the first company I covered. At the time, computers were mostly around government contractors.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we thought AOL was going to change the world at that time.

Kara Swisher: We did.

Brian Lehrer: Now, we make fun of anyone who still has an AOL email address.

Kara Swisher: Yes, but they did change the world. They introduced the vast majority of people, consumers, to the idea of using digital services. They were the very first ones who commercialized it. They used to have a foam finger they used to give out that said, "It's so easy to use. No wonder it's number one," and it was so easy to use. That was a critical part of getting people to start to use the early internet. Now, of course, it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous in your life.

Brian Lehrer: That excerpt in New York Magazine includes a prediction you made early on talking about changing the world that, apparently, The Washington Post management didn't see coming and was skeptical of when you brought it up that Craigslist would kill classified advertising in their newspaper and really all newspapers just as a point of oral history. Can you tell some of that story?

Kara Swisher: Yes, I had covered retail before. I covered digital stuff at the Post. I had seen how Walmart had come in. There was a decimation of local retailers at the time and there was things like Hechingers and Woodys and things like that. That really knocked a strut out of the economic underpinnings of The Washington Post, especially since Walmart, which was heavily, technologically fast-forward in terms of how to stock its stores.

They didn't advertise because they didn't need to. They knew other ways of reaching customers and that was a problem. Then I saw Craigslist, which was these digital classifieds essentially. It was at no cost to people and it worked and it was fun. If you remember classifieds from the old days, they were expensive. You had to deal with a difficult customer service representative much of the time. Most of all, they didn't work that well. They didn't work.

You had to sit there with your finger and go down the list. A digital one, which is easily searchable and constantly updated and zero cost, was a much better thing. When I saw it, I was particularly disturbed. I was like, "This is a big business for The Washington Post." Same thing with news. When news became free online, you had to have differentiated news because you couldn't do things as usual. If you're thinking about a stool, all three businesses were under siege by digital.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and that was the tip of the iceberg, of course, or maybe from Silicon Valley's perspective, the tip of the spear that has landed us in the place we're in now where the old business models for journalism are disintegrating, so much to the detriment of local news and maybe democracy itself as verified truthful information that now has to compete with rampant disinformation on social media and all of that. You point to this quote, and we're going to play the clip, from Mark Zuckerberg from 2021 on Facebook's responsibility for fighting that. This was on a podcast from The Verge and here's that audio.

Mark Zuckerberg: When you think about the integrity of a system like this, it's a little bit like fighting crime in a city. No one expects that you're ever going to fully solve crime in a city. The police department's goal is not to make it so that if there's any crime that happens that you say that the police department is failing. That's not reasonable. I think instead, what we generally expect is that the integrity systems, the police departments if you will, will do a good job of helping to deter and catch the bad things when it happens and keep it at a minimum and keep driving the trend in a positive direction and be in front of other issues too, so we're going to do that here.

Brian Lehrer: Mark Zuckerberg there, Kara Swisher here. Why do you include that quote?

Kara Swisher: Because it was ridiculous. He's actually being disingenuous there because he doesn't want to solve crime at all. He doesn't care if crime exists. He doesn't want to have a police department. A lot of these companies are media companies. They are media companies. What the problem is, is media companies thought they were helpers of media companies when, in fact, they became media companies, except that they didn't take the responsibility parts very seriously if at all, which means that they had all the benefits of media without any of the costs of media.

It was just such nonsense because, essentially, he owns the city, but he doesn't pick up garbage. He doesn't have street signs. You can't fire him. You can't get rid of him. You can't sue him. You can't throw the bum out, but he runs everything. Then meanwhile, he's decimated any other possibility of any businesses that would help a consumer in any way.

Brian Lehrer: That was shortly after January 6th. That was the context for that clip, talking about fighting disinformation. What, if anything, are they doing differently now to fight disinformation in this year's presidential election cycle?

Kara Swisher: I don't think they're doing anything. I think they've cut back on content. They just have given up on it because it is massive. Look, in a recent interview, Elon Musk with Don Lemon talked about, "Okay, there's 100 or 20 articles in a newspaper and there's 5 million." Well, that's not our problem. Just because you want to build a business where you have five million things to deal with a day and may take all the-- In X's cases, they don't make money.

In Facebook's cases, just because you build a business with that much scale, it's not our problem you can't monitor it. That's how they like to say, "There's just too much of it." Well, don't build a platform like that. What they're doing is cutting back because it is really hard to monitor and it's very expensive. Their businesses soon become not such good businesses if they had to really do the kind of monitoring that's required. They hide behind the First Amendment and free speech in order to abrogate their responsibility to keep it clean. They won't do it until they're forced to.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anything you always wanted to ask Kara Swisher but never had her over for dinner or maybe more aptly, in this case, never engaged her on Twitter, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, on the occasion of the release of her new book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. By the way, do you tweet? Do you still tweet? A lot of people have walked away from it.

Kara Swisher: No, I'm still there. I'm just not giving up my name because some troll will take over it. Honestly, I've been there since 2007. I got there before he did, so I'm going to just stay and keep my little home. No, I don't and I've had to turn off comments. I'd love to say this to everyone on Twitter who gives me a hard time. I don't like being called names all day. I just don't. I didn't happen before Elon took over and I got a little bit of it. Now, whenever I turn on comments, I get incredibly sexist and misogynistic things at me.

I'm sorry. I don't want to engage it. I don't have to. I don't have to have it happen to me on the street. I can walk away. I'm there. Every now and then, I put something up if I think it's important. In general, no, I don't use it for much of anything, unless there's something related specifically to X and they do something or if he puts up a particularly anti-trans or anti-gay thing or anti-women or anti-Semitic if he promotes something like that, but that's just another Tuesday for him.

Brian Lehrer: Is Elon Musk, who you've covered for so long and have had a real talking relationship with for decades, in a way, the personification of the extremes of tech's impact on society? Let me read a little bit of what you write for our listeners or describe it. You write that you admired the way that Musk moved toward big ideas that solved big problems, electric cars, solar panels. Now, you call him one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology and he didn't even know it. Kara, he didn't even know in part--

Kara Swisher: That's Mark Zuckerberg. That's Mark Zuckerberg you're referring to.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's Zuckerberg. I'm sorry. I got that mixed up, but the first part of that was Musk, right?

Kara Swisher: No, the first part was Zuckerberg. I think I called him the most disappointing person. Someone who is morphed into a troll, in a really toxic troll in a way that is so disturbing to watch. He's really gotten radicalized in a way that is very typical of many people online by the way or anybody who's subject to intense propaganda and thinks he's right all the time.

He thinks he's living in the matrix and he's the hero of the story, but he's not. He's really just a troll and a jerk. I think he has immense power. He has no pushback from people around him. Everybody's on his payroll. He's got challenges. He's talked about them himself. He's got mental challenges. When you're that rich, nobody tells you you're wrong. You get rid of everyone who tells you you're wrong. That's what's happened here.

Brian Lehrer: Just to be clear, you were just now talking about Musk, right?

Kara Swisher: Musk, yes. With Mark, it's a different story. I think in my many interviews to him, he's not a radicalized person. I think probably he's, apparently, from what I understand, a very nice family guy. He has nice kids, everything else. I think what he's done is he's taken on responsibility for something he's completely inept at doing and/or doesn't feel like doing it. That's a different thing.

That's someone who has these massive responsibilities and has just decided not to take them or not to do anything about them, including allowing-- We had an interview in, I think, 2018 or '19 where we argued about anti-Semitic bile that was flowing over Facebook in massive amounts. He felt it was okay. I felt it was going to lead to bad things. His lack of ability to anticipate consequences made me feel he was inept to the task that was ahead of him.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play another Zuckerberg clip that I think goes in a way to the point you just made. This is from just a few weeks ago in late January, when he and other tech CEOs testified before Congress about the links between the teenage mental health crisis and social media. This is from his opening statement where opposite of what we usually expect from corporate CEOs, he seemed to be asking the government, "Regulate us. Please, regulate us." Listen.

Mark Zuckerberg: I hope we can have a substantive discussion today that drives improvements across the industry, including legislation that delivers what parents say they want, a clear system for age verification, and control over what apps their kids are using. Three out of four parents want app store age verification and four out of five want parental approval of whenever teens download apps. We support this. Parents should have the final say on what apps are appropriate for their children and shouldn't have to upload their ID every time. That's what app stores are for.

Brian Lehrer: Kara, if you even understood what he was getting at there--

Kara Swisher: Yes, he's saying that it's Apple's job to fix it, not him. I think that's what he's saying. I believe that's what he's saying. It's his job too. You know what I mean? I think there's a lot of push to have kids not able to use any of these apps. There was one in Florida just now. He's just always trying to push away responsibility on someone else. That's what he's doing there essentially.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think about that Florida law? For people who don't know, they passed a law this week that would actually ban kids, I think it's under 16 or 16 and under, from many of the major social media platforms.

Kara Swisher: Oh, God, I can't believe I'm agreeing with Ron DeSantis, but here I am. I've always pushed for age-gating. I think this stuff is addictive. We don't know the impact on kids. We do it with cigarettes. We do it with liquor. We do it with driving. I don't know quite why something that obviously has addictive qualities and is affecting the mental health of young people, we don't consider important to think about regulating a little bit.

I do believe in age-gating. Parents can do it themselves, but it's way too much to put in the hands of just parents. Same thing with cigarettes. Kids are going to cheat. They're going to get the liquor or cigarettes or whatever it happens to be. At least as a society, we say, "Maybe not so much until you're at an age where you can really accept and deal with this in a much more mature way."

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned AOL before. Here's Ralph in Washington, DC, who said he read your older book about AOL, America Online. Ralph, you're on WNYC with Kara Swisher. Hello.

Ralph: Hello, Brian. Thank you for taking the call. Hello, Ms. Swisher. Yes, I did read your book. When I read the book, I was employed at AOL at the time. I worked there for 20 years. Before AOL, I worked at Prodigy as a-

Kara Swisher: Oh, wow.

Ralph: -bulletin board manager or what you would term as content moderation. If I remember correctly in the book, you referenced the Frank Discussion board at Prodigy and how I think you termed that could have been the beginning of Prodigy's downfall. I was a supervisor actually of the team of board editors that monitored the Frank Discussion board in the evening.

Kara Swisher: Sure.

Ralph: I can agree with you about that. Yes, you were right. You weren't wrong. What I wanted to know basically was what you thought about the fact that these companies like Facebook and whatnot have gotten to be just too big to do content moderation. You look at Facebook and they have billions and billions of members. We had trouble monitoring the situation at AOL when it was just six million.

Kara Swisher: That's right.

Ralph: The thing about it is I just wanted to get your take on that.

Kara Swisher: Well, that was a really interesting case because I can't believe you worked both places. The joke I made about Prodigy was everything IBM knew about retail and everything Sears knew about the technology, but the idea was that these laws needed to be put in place to protect them because people were libeling other people, et cetera. That was correct at the time.

I agree. The flood of this should have been anticipated and figuring out how to put things in place, which is almost impossible when you unleash a flood of people to say whatever they want. I don't know the solution. I think I know what it is, but I do know, you don't create a business that creates this scale problem and then throw your hands up at doing something about it.

Then meanwhile, guess who's the richest people in the world? These people. Maybe they're not such good businesses if you have to run them in a responsible way. Maybe that's what's happening here and so we allow them. It's like we allow pharmaceutical companies or chemical companies to spew all their toxic waste into the body politic. We have to pay for it just like the opiate makers.

There are so many comparisons in society where we do stop these companies from doing things. I'm not talking about excessive regulation, I'm talking about any regulation whatsoever. There isn't any. The regulation that exists exists from the time the caller was talking about, which was to protect them, the Communications Decency Act had in Section 230.

It was to protect them from giving them broad immunity to be able to grow. Now, they've got this broad immunity and they can't even be sued. This is like the best racket. Can you imagine a racket like this? You can't be sued. You're the richest people in the world. You don't have to pay the true costs to do business and society pays the price for you. Man, I'd like to get into that business.

Brian Lehrer: Ralph, thank you for your call.

Kara Swisher: Thank you, Ralph.

Brian Lehrer: Politically speaking, the Democrats seem to emphasize policing misinformation. The Republicans emphasize not centering free speech, maybe because their side is benefiting more from the misinformation, and really nobody wants corporations in the interest of their profits to decide what political speech is allowed to appear on their supposedly neutral platform, but the social harms of disinformation are very real. Do you have an opinion on what the right balance is?

Kara Swisher: First, I want to push back on the idea of policing and censoring. First of all, it's called editing. They need to edit. Rupert Murdoch got sued and lost because of Smartmatic, right? He got sued and he lost and he paid almost $1 billion. There are prices to doing your job badly.

Brian Lehrer: He's got a newsroom with-

Kara Swisher: That's correct, but why are they--

Brian Lehrer: -journalists who he employs.

Kara Swisher: That's great, but this is the same thing.

Brian Lehrer: The caller Ralph was just making the point about like, "Anybody can go on Facebook, Twitter, et cetera."

Kara Swisher: Well, then don't have a business where this happens. This is the thing. I think we have to rethink what a media company is. These are media companies whether you like it or not. TikTok is a media company. It has impact. Just because it lets anybody do anything, they're not a phone company. They're a media company however you think it. Then Republicans throw around the word "censorship" quite a lot, especially for people who never shut up, and that's another discussion.

It's not censorship to say, "This is what we do. We do it all the time across media." We talk about the idea of editing, the idea of responsibility. Immediately, people go into this free-speech dementia that is really kind of odd. Even Zuckerberg, he's like, "The First Amendment." I'm like, "The First Amendment says government shall make no law, not these companies. These companies can do whatever they want if they feel like it." They're not here to protect our First Amendment rights. They're here to make money off our engagement. That's what they're here to do.

To pretend otherwise is laughable. What they do is they cloak themselves in the First Amendment. They cloak themselves in free speech and then proceed to be hypocritical. Elon Musk is a perfect example. "Free speech, free speech, except the people that I don't like, and then I throw them off." Give me a break. I'd rather you sit down and stop talking about free speech because they don't really want to protect free speech. They want to protect themselves and their interests, which I get, but I wish they would stop lecturing us, the rest of us about it. Again, government shall make no law.

Brian Lehrer: We got that great call from Ralph with an internet origin story. I think we're getting another one from Evelyn in the Katonah area. Evelyn, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Evelyn: Yes, thank you, and thank you for having this particular session. I have skimmed the book. I bought the book, which is amazing. I'm happy to actually read every single word of it. I skimmed it. It's fantastic. The reason I'm calling is that I used to work at Prodigy back in 1984. That particular company was a-- Let's see. CBS, Sears, and IBM, so one had the computers, one had the communication, and one had the shopping arrangements agendas all lined up.

I remember sitting in many, many meetings regarding content moderation. I would say one-third of our company, at one time or another, the employees were called in to edit. What's baffling and the reason I'm calling is that that was back in 1984, so what has taken so long to resolve the issue of appropriate content for the audience? It seems as though when it was small, we were able to do it. As technology advanced with editing capabilities, I don't understand why emphasis and money wasn't put into that aspect of the product.

Kara Swisher: I get your point.

Brian Lehrer: Evelyn, there you go. Go ahead, Kara.

Kara Swisher: Because it's expensive. That's why. Because it's too much. You don't create a business and then say, "Oh, well, I can't do what my business did. I can't fix the negatives of my business." It's interesting. I mentioned Prodigy again, but they were the early ones obviously. AOL supplanted them very quickly actually. It was a work in progress. I don't blame them for failing or CompuServe or others.

There's lots of pioneers along the trail who haven't made it over time, but they always pointed in a direction that this was going to be where news was delivered, where there was a lot of media going on, where there was a lot of communications, commerce, everything else. In a lot of ways, Prodigy had all the pieces of it. It just was early before people were really using these things.

I think the reason they don't do it is because it's expensive. They look better when they're not moderating. Now, there's all kinds of interesting ways to moderate. Like at Reddit, they do decentralized moderation or they have contextual advertising versus behavioral advertising. Behavioral advertising really does lean into viral content, which leans into hate. There's all kinds of ways they can mitigate this stuff.

It's just not profitable when they do that. That's the whole lie here is that they're such profitable. They're so rich. They're so smart. Well, they're not paying the costs of what it costs to actually do it. First of all, the internet was paid for by the American taxpayer, just FYI, but they're just not paying the costs of the impact their business really has. They've taken all the good bits. Of course, you would do that if you were wanting to make a lot of money.

Brian Lehrer: Andy in West Sayville, you are on WNYC with Kara Swisher. Hi, Andy.

Andy: Hi. I worked for a company called PlayNet back in the early '80s. We had the first what became Internet Relay Chat. When we finally went live with the system, we had not been online for a week when all of us young college students in our 20s were called into a-- because it was a startup and it was with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We're all working part-time for this outfit and we get called in.

The president of the company says, "Hey, look, I just had a complaint from one of our main investors because we rolled out the original system to the 500 investors." Just because someone tells you that she is a nursing student at one of the local colleges does not, in fact, mean she is a nursing student at a college. In fact, she might be a major investor's 13-year-old daughter and you guys are flirting with her online and he's not happy. Which is, to me, ultimately, the root cause of all this is anonymity, right?

Kara Swisher: Yes.

Andy: A 13-year-old kid can't go into a grocery store and buy beer because they're going to go, "You're not 21," and it's obvious, but we can all be completely anonymous on Facebook. We can all be completely anonymous on any kind of chat space or Reddit or anywhere else. If you have to actually have to sign your name to things, I think people are, A, a lot more polite, B, are smart enough to know, "Well, even if I think this, I shouldn't say it out loud." If we really want to solve this problem, we have to take away, at least in some part of this space, the thing that was really great about the internet, which was that anonymity, but ultimately--

Brian Lehrer: Such an interesting question. Destructive, you're saying. Kara?

Kara Swisher: It can be. In some cases, anonymity is important to protect people in terms of rape victim or people in countries where they have to be anonymous, although everybody's trackable now, so I'm not sure if that's really a solution anymore. I really do agree with you. I think it's like if you can be whoever you want, you can act however you feel like. That said, a lot of people just act like jerks now with their names on it. Hello, Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? You know what I mean?

They actually relish being trolls. You're right. Anybody could be anybody they want and it creates a situation. Sometimes it's fun and there's all kinds of-- Speaking of PlayNet, there's lots of kinds of games where people do that. That's cool and interesting when people have other personalities and things like that. It really does quickly take a dark turn if that's the case. It takes a very dark turn. The problem is the way this is designed. Bad players can really take advantage of it even if there are good uses for it and there's no safety around that.

The same thing with videos. When they showed me Facebook Live for the first time, my first thought was, "Some mass murderer is going to put a GoPro on their head and kill everybody and then broadcast it. What are you going to do about that?" They, of course, had not anticipated this problem. They called me a bummer and I was like, "I'm sorry. It makes sense." I'm not a mass murderer. Boy, sure, this is exactly what mass murderer is looking for attention and to become famous and so this is perfect. Again, it's the anticipation of consequences, which seems sorely lacking in this group of people.

One, because it's not profitable to anticipate consequences. Two, it's this juvenilization of these creators that they are somehow special and magical and shouldn't be touched because their genius will somehow be hurt if we question them in any way. I don't know. That's not how adults act. By the way, it's an adult business, a money-making business, and that's what I focus on. The first line of this book says that it was capitalism after all. Everything else is just nonsense as far as I'm concerned.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, Kara, we're at the end of our scheduled time, but I wonder, do you have until the top of the hour?

Kara Swisher: Sure, happy to.

Brian Lehrer: Because we're getting so many great calls and I have more questions too, so we're going to continue in a minute with Kara Swisher, tech journalist. Her new book is Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. Stay with us.

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with tech journalist Kara Swisher, author now of Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. How sarcastically or not do you mean love story in your subtitle?

Kara Swisher: Because I do love tech because I think it can do amazing things for people. The key quote in the book is one by Paul Virilio, who's a French philosopher, where he says, "When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you invent plane crash. When you invent electricity, you invent electrocution." The point is every single technology comes with both positive things and negative things.

The problem that I've been saying over and over again on this book tour I've been having is that we have the ships which have made people obscenely wealthy. We have all the shipwrecks they've caused that we pay for, but no lighthouses. Why not? If you put in lighthouses, if you have things where it's responsible and it's focused on the people who actually paid for the internet, it could be astonishing around drug discovery, around climate change, tech, around all kinds of things that would be helpful.

What's happened is a lot of people have gotten really rich. There've been some good things about it, no question. Would you stack rank whether electricity is good or not? Good and bad, right? Why can't we have protections in place that make it as good as it can be to mitigate the downside and put pluses on the plus side? I've always thought tech could bring us together. Instead, it's been used by malevolent players to push us apart.

Brian Lehrer: Meredith in Jersey City, you're on WNYC with Kara Swisher. Hi, Meredith.

Meredith: Hi, thanks so much. I just want to thank Kara for being the adult in the room and for calling on these tech companies to be responsible and be accountable. I'm wondering what her advice would be to hold these tech companies responsible and accountable when so much of our activism and advocacy these days are on their platforms.

Kara Swisher: Yes, that's the thing. Isn't that interesting? I think that's the thing. We're so reliant on these companies and given them unlimited power. Guess what we have, elected officials that can do something about it. Just the other day when Mark Zuckerberg was appearing in front of Congress where Senator Hawley asked him to apologize to these families whose kids had been hurt because of this online they were blaming for suicides and different things that had happened to them.

He asked him to turn around and apologize to them, which he should do, by the way. He didn't, FYI. He just said, "I'm sorry for what's happened to you," which is not an apology. That aside, I literally wanted to turn the camera around and say, "You need to apologize to these families for never doing something about it. Instead, you're a cosplaying, attention sponge who can't possibly--"

Brian Lehrer: You're talking about the senator?

Kara Swisher: Hawley. Yes, all of them, him in particular because he's forcing someone to apologize when you should be sorry yourself. You've never passed a law. Give me a break. These regulators work for us. These legislators work for us and they've done no laws whatsoever. They've done it in Europe. I just did a big interview with Margrethe Vestager. They passed the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act.

We haven't updated our antitrust. We haven't put in a national privacy bill. We haven't had algorithmic transparency. The list is long of the bills they haven't passed. The government is trying, of course, with some of these antitrust cases, but they're woefully outmatched. They've taken away money from these organizations. They've subjected themselves to lobbying on this stuff. At this point, our legislators should be the ones doing something about it and we should demand that they do.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, Kara, does Nicole Shanahan appear in your book? She comes out of Silicon Valley and is now Robert Kennedy Jr.'s running mate.

Kara Swisher: No, she doesn't. I'm sorry. She doesn't.

Brian Lehrer: She doesn't. Have you ever covered her?

Kara Swisher: No, because she doesn't have any companies of-- No, I'm sorry. She's not a technology person. She can say she is, but I'm more of a technology person than she is or more qualified in that to talk about that. No, she married Sergey Brin and she has a lot of money. I'm sorry to say this, but that's why she was picked because she has a lot of money from a marriage to the Google founder, so okay. Great. Good for you.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think the political media is mischaracterizing her when they call her a Silicon Valley figure?

Kara Swisher: She's there socially, I guess. Sure. She has a company. Anyone can have a company in Silicon Valley. I've never covered anything she's ever made. It's just she's not an entrepreneur of any status whatsoever. To say so is laughable. I'm sorry. It's just not the case. She can say so, whatever.

Brian Lehrer: Ron in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Kara Swisher. Hi, Ron.

Ron: Hi there. Ouch, Nicole Shanahan, that was rough.

Kara Swisher: That's true.

Ron: I wanted Kara to comment on another shipwreck. That's the result of, especially with the emergence of AI, is the suck that it's making on energy and these huge data centers are consuming so much energy. It's reversing any gains we're making in fighting climate change. That's it.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I agree with you. This is the computing power, especially around AI and not just that crypto before that and just in general. A lot of these companies are actually doing some really interesting things around trying to figure out alternative energy things largely because of costs, which is a good reason to do it. It just seems good. Google had something with cooling and heating from ground energy down below the earth. They've done solar. They've done all kinds of things.

I think it's important to push them to do these things because this is where a lot of the energy is being used if you really look where things-- It's in places you don't realize. I think this is a perfect place for tech to innovate on and they have. It's not entirely true they haven't. Google was at the forefront of some of these things, but all these companies do know that they need to depend less on current, on fossil fuels. A lot of them are working on nuclear energy. I actually find it fascinating, some of these small nuclear devices.

I know that sounds scary. Actually, it's really promising, the safe use of nuclear power. I know I'm touching a third rail, but it's true. There's a lot of misinformation about nuclear energy. Sam Altman is working on a company. There's some stuff around fusion, hydrogen. I've been talking to a lot of these companies. There's all kinds of ways they're doing it, but I do think tech has been at the forefront of trying to do things there. In this case, I believe they're a little more forward than other companies in that regard. You're right. It is a giant energy suck.

Brian Lehrer: How do you see AI overall as life-altering, era-altering, maybe even species-altering as many people do?

Kara Swisher: Yes, I think you have to make a reductive-- That's the thing. It's so reductive there. You have the techno-optimists where everything is up and to the right. You know they're wrong because they were wrong the last time. Then you have the techno decelerationists essentially who are like, "It's going to kill us." I had one person call me that if I didn't stop Sam Altman, I guess, physically, he was going to kill humanity. That's the plot of The Terminator. I understood scientists and The Terminator, which I enjoyed as a movie.

I think it's a complex subject. Again, we need to have our regulators in place understanding the problems and come to global decision-making on things like killer robots, drone armies. We should be able to say, "Maybe not so much on the killer robots. Maybe not so much on creating dangerous drugs," and, at the same time, say maybe we should promote drug discovery on cancer and things like that and have the government be involved in it.

I know "government" is a dirty word, but it isn't. It just isn't. You're welcome for the internet. The government did that. The government does a lot of good things. It should be a partner with private companies because private companies are more innovative by their nature because they're pushed by profits, right? They're more innovative like the stuff that's going on. Let me give a compliment to Elon Musk, the stuff they're doing. I'm going to give a compliment to Gwynne Shotwell, who actually runs SpaceX.

Some of the innovations they are making are very important. That said, we shouldn't just depend on him and them because we need a wide-ranging number of companies. The greatest strength of the US is the bottom-up innovation that we have to promote among our people and across the world. It's so incredible what's happening. We should be pushing that. Instead of letting large companies dominate everything, nothing good is going to be happening with large companies dominating just historically. That's the case.

Brian Lehrer: On that duality you were just pointing out between-- I can't remember the exact words you used, but tech utopians and tech-- What was the opposite? We have 20 seconds left. Were you ever a tech utopian as so many people were in the early days?

Kara Swisher: 20 seconds. I was a Star Trek gal. I'm a Star Trek gal. I believe in Star Trek. I don't love Star Wars so much. It's a dark and dystopian vision of the future. As Steve Jobs said to me in an interview, "I'd like it to be Star Trek."

Brian Lehrer: There's a pro podcast host who knows how to do 20 seconds in 20 seconds.

Kara Swisher: Sorry. You want more?

Brian Lehrer: No, no, no.

Kara Swisher: William Shatner rocks. William Shatner rocks. What can I say?

Brian Lehrer: That was a compliment. That was a compliment.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I know.

Brian Lehrer: The renowned tech journalist, Kara Swisher, who you can hear on her podcast On with Kara Swisher and the podcast Pivot with her and Scott Galloway. Her new book is called Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. Thank you for being so generous with your time and thoughts for us.

Kara Swisher: Great. Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Happy Easter to all of you who celebrate. Have a great weekend, everyone. Stay tuned for All Of It.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.