America’s New Power Order: Kara in Conversation with Walter Isaacson

Kara’s 2023 interview with journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson about his Elon Musk biography was one of her most contentious conversations ever — and one of the show’s most popular episodes. They’re still friends, though. And at this year’s New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University, Isaacson got his chance to put Kara in the hot seat. In this live conversation, recorded last month, Kara and Isaacson talk about the future of A. I., how power is shifting in the United States, and how those changes are reshaping American life. They also talk about Kara’s new CNN series, “Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever.” Special thanks to the New Orleans Book Festival for hosting this event. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Sam Altman, you know well.

• 0:02Kara Swisher?

  I do.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  And you kind of like him and you kind of don't.

• 0:04Kara Swisher?

  Well, I don't not like him. I don't really care about these people whatsoever. I have a family and friends. Like, I'm sorry.

• 0:22Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We've got a special episode for you today. It's an interview I did with journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson, and technically, I'm the guest. Walter interviewed me a few weeks ago in front of a live audience at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. The last time I spoke with Walter, I chewed him out over his hagiography of Elon Musk. This time, we had a lot more fun. We talked about a bunch of things, including AI, how power is shifting here in the United States, who has it, who's losing it, and how those shifts are reshaping American life. I'm still right about Elon Musk, and he asked me if I was going to give him a hard time with it onstage.

• 1:03Kara Swisher?

  And I said, I think we know who's right and who's wrong about what happened here. Anyway, I really like talking to Walter. He's a really interesting person. He's a great journalist. Even if I don't agree with him about some things, he's working on a really cool book about Marie Curie. Anyway, I like talking to him. He's really fun. He's done a lot of stuff, and he was very early to digital, as I was. And he's always thinking big thoughts, which is always a good thing. All right, let's get to my conversation with Walter Isaacson. Special thanks to the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University for hosting the event. It's one of my favorite events of the year. It's really well done, and of course, I love New Orleans. So it's round three with Walter Isaacson. Stick around.

• 1:50Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources. The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire. They fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

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• 4:06Speaker 00

  Good night, Kara. How you doing?

• 4:08Kara Swisher?

  Thank you. Hi, everybody.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Here, pull it up closer. Oh, you got it.

• 4:12Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  So let's start with AI.

• 4:15Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Anthropic. You've been doing a lot of reporting on it. What's happening with all the companies doing AI? And who should we fear the most and least?

• 4:23Kara Swisher?

  Wow, that's a rather broad question. Let's talk about oxygen.

• 4:28Kara Swisher?

  What do you want to talk about? What's going on with the Pentagon? They're a legal...

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's start with the...

• 4:33Kara Swisher?

  Well, okay.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  The Pentagon. You explain what it is.

• 4:36Kara Swisher?

  He tags that, who is a moron.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Stan McChrystal said that last night, but he's much longer more diplomatic.

• 4:51Kara Swisher?

  The bubble above his head, moron. So he has gotten into his head. Well, I don't really want to pursue that person because he's a waste of our time, but although he's in charge of things that are very serious. Anthropic is an offshoot of OpenAI, as everybody knows. A group of people left, led by Dario, because they felt the safety issues around AI were so significant, they didn't like where it was going under Sam. And so they created Anthropic. It was funded by, among others, Amazon and many, many others. They're all sort of doing cross-investments in each other, Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft. Everybody's doing... It's sort of like a rondelet. Some might call it a Ponzi scheme. Some do.

• 5:36Kara Swisher?

  And so they're doing...

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Well, wait, let me interrupt. Is it a Ponzi scheme, the way they're investing?

• 5:40Kara Swisher?

  I don't know. Was the early internet a Ponzi scheme? In some cases, yes, and others, no.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  So is there a really big bubble that's about to burst?

• 5:47Kara Swisher?

  I have no idea. I mean, it happened in the internet. There's certainly a lot of spending and no revenue, so that's always an issue. But it didn't hurt the internet. You could say, you know, all these internet companies that died in the 2000 crash, well, they were all a Ponzi scheme, but Google. But Meta came later, actually, many years later. So it's a Ponzi scheme in that one of them is going to survive, one or two, and they're going to be enormous companies, or maybe several. In any case, it's an important business and also a Ponzi scheme, if that makes sense. And so Anthropic is backed by big people in Silicon Valley, and the money they need is so enormous because of the cost of compute and data and energy and...

• 6:29Kara Swisher?

  No revenue. I mean, there's revenue, but not compared to the costs. And so they got lucky because the Trump administration, you know, the coin-operated Trump administration, never to miss an opportunity for corruption, understood that this is going to be an enormous spend and, you know, whether it's data centers, whatever, because it's both physical and not. And so Anthropic is sort of the dark horse of this group and actually the best. And that's why the Pentagon was using a lot of their technology. They used it in Venezuela and elsewhere. And I think most people use it and understand it's the apple of this group, essentially. And compared to OpenAI, it was more like the Microsoft. And Microsoft actually, I think, has an investment.

• 7:12Kara Swisher?

  And Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, just backed Anthropic in this ridiculous fight, which is great for him. When they're deploying these things, they want to be able to do whatever they want. And Pete Hegseth, because he never met a metaphor he didn't mangle, was like, "We buy a plane and we can do whatever we want with it." It's not quite the same thing with this technology. And so Anthropic says, "Okay, you can use our technology, but if you're going to surveil Americans, we don't want to be part of it." Or if you're going to do drone attacks, which is going to be more and more prevalent in warfare going forward, they cannot be autonomous. They need to have a human interaction, which seems perfectly reasonable and they should be allowed to use their products the way they want to use them.

• 7:55Kara Swisher?

  And it seemed to have, you know, chapped Hegseth's ass and he has declared them a supply chain risk. Now, we have never done that in the history of the United States with an American company. Let's be clear. It's usually a foreign company. And so it's unprecedented to try to make an example of this company. To do so, now into the breach, as always, Sam Altman, unctuously flowed himself into, and said, "We'll do it and we'll agree, you know, we'll get that." But it's not clear what he has agreed to. And of course, there's a huge backlash. They are under enormous pressure, given they're going to go public this year. They need more money, et cetera, et cetera.

• 8:37Kara Swisher?

  And so there's this sort of, all the beefs of Silicon Valley are all being played out by the government. And so Anthropic has sued. The government will win, but it will hurt its business in the meantime.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Sam Altman, you know well, and you kind of like him and you kind of don't. Go ahead.

• 8:55Kara Swisher?

  Well, I don't not like him. I don't really care about these people whatsoever. I have a family and friends. Like, I'm sorry. I like them. I don't think about them once I stop talking about them. But, you know, I think I met him when he was 19, when he had a company called Loop. L-O-O-P-T. They always have these stupidly clever names for companies. And it failed. And then he went on to do a number of things. And he's a really interesting character. And I, there's part of, I mean, compared to a lot of people I cover, he's well-educated. He has a sense of history. He reads, which is always a plus. And so he's very, he's a very complex guy.

• 9:38Kara Swisher?

  And some of it, as many people have chronicled, he can be very manipulative. He can be very unctuous. He can be very tricky and mendacious to, but maybe not. And so there's a lot of like angling that he does all the time. And so I think that's the issue here with a lot of people and Sam. And, you know, you've read stories about people who've left. You know, and Dario's no perfection. He's got the arrogance of a technologist, as you can see from his typing. He writes a lot of like manifestos every five minutes, which are pretty good, actually. And so, you know, you have all these personal things playing out in this very serious theater of war.

• 10:20Kara Swisher?

  And it's not an excursion, by the way, which is Trump's latest word for this. I think he meant incursion.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Excursion, yeah. George W. did it.

• 10:29Kara Swisher?

  No, he did.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Oh, no, he said excursion, I know.

• 10:32Kara Swisher?

  Yes, but he meant incursion. But he meant war. So, so, so anyway, so you have this happening. And so it's really, there's just, what's happening is all these, these massive, aggressive companies are fighting each other, using the federal government as their latest battlefield.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Let me take the core issue on Anthropic. One of the core issues. Leave aside surveillance, the other core, which is you can't use our AI to do autonomous warfare and. drones without having a human in the loop.

• 11:03Kara Swisher?

  Seems reasonable.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  But leave aside whether they have the right to say that because they're a private company and clearly you can say here's how you use the project. Tell me why it seems reasonable to you if you were to see that 19 year old jockeys doing fighter planes get it much worse than AI drones.

• 11:24Kara Swisher?

  Because it's a person who takes responsibility for it. That's why we can't look at right now. We're in the midst of another thing that's related, which is all these chatbots, which I think is a very sweet term for synthetic beings. We have to stop calling them chatbots like they're adorable little plush toys. Right? They are, they can be malicious and malevolent and they create these things. And I've been spending a lot of time over the past couple of years interviewing all the parents of kids who have died using these chatbots and getting into these synthetic relationships. These people have started to become analysts, lawyers, doctors, these technologists without the guardrails, the rest of us are, you know, as Scott says, they are not bound by the law, but they're protected by it and we're bound by the law and not protected by it.

• 12:09Kara Swisher?

  And so one of the things that's really terrifying is like these, if you read these text exchanges between kids and these chatbots, you are going to want to find a tech person and strangle them.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yes, right.

• 12:23Kara Swisher?

  Putting this stuff out. I mean, as a parent, I have four kids, even with the stuff with adults is even terrible. Like this psychosis that happens. And so it's the same thing. It's like we are relying on these, this AI and it's fine if you're making a decision how to complete an email of an event of another conference event I don't want to go to. Like, thank you so much. Like they do a beautiful job declining for me. But it's that, not this one. I love, I love you, Walter. But, but it is your life and death decisions and they may be better at say finding cancer or that those are the good things and we should try to find what we should take things that they do well and. supersize them and find a way to mitigate against the dangers.

• 13:07Kara Swisher?

  But when there's a person involved, there's someone accountable. There's no one accountable. Right now, all these companies, whether it's Character AI, which is a Google affiliated thing, Gemini, ChatGPT, nobody's home when you go to say, will this person die?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Couldn't it be pretty easily solved if we make the real world laws we have apply to the virtual world?

• 13:29Kara Swisher?

  Yes, it could be.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  And you could sue somebody for something happened to them.

• 13:32Kara Swisher?

  There is a big lawsuit going on right now in California around the impact of social media, but they've been largely protected by Section 230.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Right, that's my point.

• 13:40Kara Swisher?

  And so you can't, you can't displace them or fire them because they have full, they have monarchical control of their companies.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Should we just get rid of 230 and explain?

• 13:51Kara Swisher?

  I don't know, it's too complicated. It has to be reformed in an intelligent way, but they have captive of our Congress. They used to hate Washington, as you know, like, I don't care about Washington. You know, Bill Gates, that was his famous thing. I don't care about lobbyists. They are running the government right now and they are, they, they were standing front and center of Trump's inauguration. And so they have complete control over our elected officials. They absolutely do. Someone like Amy Klobuchar has not been able to pass a privacy bill, an antitrust bill, you know, a transparent algorithm bill. They don't let you. They're doing it right now in California. They've created this super PAC that's going to try, California's been the most aggressive about regulation.

• 14:34Kara Swisher?

  These rich people have just created another PAC because they figured out, they hated the government. Oh, we're so smart, we don't need the government. Except the problem is the government is full of ex-student body vice presidents with subpoena power, so that's a problem. And so they decided to buy it and they went, oh, we can buy it. Oh, that's easy. And then they plant their people in these positions of power, like someone like Emile Michael, who's the one fighting with Anthropic.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Or David Sacks.

• 15:02Kara Swisher?

  David Sacks. I have a lot of experience and, and of course, the reporters who cover this actually don't. I have experience with Emile Michael. I and other people at my website wrote the story that got him fired, which was, there was a rape of a woman in India and one of his minions. Took the medical files trying to prove she was lying. It was all illegal and he got bounced out of there. And I know these people.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Wait, explain who he is now to them.

• 15:27Kara Swisher?

  He's the one who's the deputy director of whatever the fuck at the Pentagon, you know. But essentially, he's been writing tweets. This is a government official writing tweets about a company. They start, Saks started it because they have beefs that have nothing to do with our safety. These are Silicon Valley beefs that they have decided to move to Washington. And they're pretending they're here to protect us. They're here to protect themselves and their interests. Same thing with Jeff Bezos, same thing, all of them, all of them. And, and of course, your good friend Elon Musk, who is the original OG of.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  We had an over and under on how many minutes it would take before you.

• 16:09Kara Swisher?

  That's pretty good, that's pretty good.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Knowing Elon Musk.

• 16:12Kara Swisher?

  Might we acknowledge? Might we acknowledge I was right?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Everybody was right.

• 16:20Kara Swisher?

  I'm not gonna, I'm gonna, I am gonna officially, the moratorium on giving Walter a hard time for Elon Musk. I am, it's done today.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  How long does it last? Another 44 and a half?

• 16:29Kara Swisher?

  Unless you write another book where you say he's a genius.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  I'm writing on Marie Curie.

• 16:34Kara Swisher?

  Oh yay, a dead person.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Uh, going back to the fact that you have.

• 16:38Kara Swisher?

  And I like which, I like her work.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:42Kara Swisher?

  I'm excited for that book.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Radioactivity is one of your favorite sports.

• 16:45Kara Swisher?

  I will have you on my podcast. We will only talk about radioactivity.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Yes, uh, going back to you, you have kids.

• 16:51Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Four of them.

• 16:52Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  One of them almost went to Tulane.

• 16:54Kara Swisher?

  Yes, sorry.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  So it's that old and one of them's about a year old, right?

• 16:57Kara Swisher?

  Uh, no, no, no, Walter, you're not keeping up with the Swisher family. Uh, no, one is four.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:03Kara Swisher?

  Uh, one is 23.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:05Kara Swisher?

  So I have a 23-year-old, a 20-year-old, a six-year-old and a girl.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  And how has your allowing them or their use of social media and you're dealing with that? How, how's that been and how has it changed?

• 17:19Kara Swisher?

  Oh, I love the word allowing.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I didn't know how to say it.

• 17:22Kara Swisher?

  Doing a lot of work there. My son's actually kind of missed a little bit of the social media age. They're a little older, 20 and 23. But they, both of my sons have taken social media. It's a real trend among young people, I think, off their phones. They use, because they find it, my son took like the dating stuff. He's, they both have girlfriends. My son's living in San Francisco now with his girlfriend. But he's a great kid. He took it off and I remember him telling me, I was like, "Why'd you take it off?" And he goes, "It makes me feel bad." And I was like, "Excellent reason." You know, just what Salman Rushdie just said. You feel so much better when you remove it. My other son, I mean, I think he, they both use YouTube as television. I think that's, YouTube is television now.

• 18:06Kara Swisher?

  But they're not that engaged in social media and not that engaged in their phones. They're very, they're not. My son just went ice climbing, the other was hiking in Berkeley yesterday. So they find it very debilitating to use that stuff. And they'll use it for work and YouTube, definitely for television. They stream. So, and the little kids, all they do is watch K-pop Demon Hunters on repeat.

• 18:30Kara Swisher?

  I just interviewed the creators. They just got season two for the parents in the room. Yay. But the next movie, the sequel. And actually Netflix sent me a box with two backpacks in them. And I'm gonna accept them. I don't care if it seems corrupt.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  In the age of Trump and no more media.

• 18:47Kara Swisher?

  I became the best parent in America the other day when they arrived. Along with, did you see Hillary Clinton's merch move?

• 18:54Speaker 00

  No, what?

• 18:54Kara Swisher?

  Oh, she has a thing, "You can hold me in contempt till the cows come home." T-shirts.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. Ellen the bad line.

• 19:03Kara Swisher?

  Hillary Clinton has run out of fucks.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  So you, you've created a media empire.

• 19:10Kara Swisher?

  An empire, yes.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Totally, an empire. You have, you know, both two podcasts, a series, longevity.

• 19:17Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  There's The Audacity, which is not yours, but you're a character and it's coming out. I was talking, we were talking about Simon and Schuster, your publisher.

• 19:28Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, hi.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  And Paton is sitting there being the.

• 19:31Kara Swisher?

  That book is sure coming, I bet I'll do it.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  She owes you a book, she said. But instead of owing them a book. We were talking last night about how publishing companies to try to get into this space where Vox is and you are. And I don't even know what the word is for it, because podcasts minimalizes it too much. What type of media will be the next thing that you're on to?

• 20:00Kara Swisher?

  You know, I think about a lot because Walt Mossberg, who is actually, I try to do a lot of different things and I don't usually take people's word for like, media is dying. I don't believe it. It's just not true. I just think what the way it was was dying and then something else always takes its place. That's historical, right? As you know with most, you've written about innovation so many times, things supplant each other and there's nothing new under the sun, which is an old phrase, but 2002, we started the All Things D conference. And the only reason we started the conference first was because the Wall Street Journal wouldn't let us invest in what they called a blog at the time. I said, you know, kids are using the internet. I was a young person then. And I was like, you know, the youngs

• 20:41Kara Swisher?

  kind of like the internet. So you might want to stop printing publicly, you know, they wanted to do a Saturday Journal. And I was like, fine, but give me a million dollars to do this. And they wouldn't. And so we did the conference, which was instantly profitable, which was the famous conference where you had Gates and Jobs and stuff like that. And they didn't give me money for doing the site, the All Things D site for five years. And it was just one of these struggles with these old media institutions. And so Walt and I spun off, you know, even after making millions. And one of the things that happened there is they didn't give us any money initially for making the millions of dollars in profit. But then they gave us a percentage of the business, which was stupid on their behalf.

• 21:24Kara Swisher?

  One executive came up to me and was like, I wish we had given that salary raise to you. And I'm like, I'm thrilled that you didn't.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  But you moved on to something-

• 21:33Kara Swisher?

  We moved on to get our own money. We got our-

• 21:35Speaker 00

  No, but not just the business model, but to a new type of media-

• 21:39Kara Swisher?

  Yes, which everybody is doing-

• 21:40Speaker 00

  That's somewhere between podcasts, audiobooks, visual?

• 21:43Kara Swisher?

  Yes. You know, Martha Stewart called it Omni Media and they made fun of her many years ago. That's exactly what it is. It's, I don't know if you want to use the word Omni, but you know, one of the things I think about, like when I did my last book, Burn Book, which did very well as a book, but what I did on the book tour was I, instead of doing the regular book tour, I had people in the book interviewing me at every single venue. And we sold out. They were crazy, like popular. And I thought, I missed an opportunity to get a sponsor for this. But I did put everything on my podcast, all the interviews, because they were all different, whether Sam Altman did one, Ted Sarandos did one, Lorraine Powell Jobs did one. I should have thought- strongly about that it was more than that and I should have done more in the video space on that at the time. And so when you're making a book, or I just announced

• 22:28Kara Swisher?

  a series called Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever on CNN, everyone's like, why are you doing cable? I'm like, I'm not doing cable. I'm doing something else. You don't understand that it's, it's going to live online. It's going to be a podcast. There's going to be a podcast. I may do an event. There's going to be a book. I'm sure I'll deliver it soon, Simon and Schuster. But there's going to be, I think about everything and not necessarily all of them, but just depending on what the product happens to be. Like, it may be a podcast. It may be this.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Well, let's take the long

• 22:59Kara Swisher?

  Maybe merch. I haven't gone into merch yet.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  No, you don't. Yeah. We don't need t-shirts with all your

• 23:04Kara Swisher?

  Yes, you kind of do. I'm going to make a lot of money at it.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:07Kara Swisher?

  If I have Scott saying, you know, it's good, it'll work. We have plans.

• 23:14Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 23:24Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture,

• 24:08Kara Swisher?

  sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. Plus, The Guardian wants to emphasize they're not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube starting May 13.

• 24:27Speaker 02

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• 24:58Kara Swisher?

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• 25:43Kara Swisher?

  with your care team, so support is always in reach. Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/cara to access personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair, menopause, and more. That's forhers.com/cara. Individual results may vary, and stopping treatment may result in weight regain.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Let's take the longevity thing you're planning, which is about people in Silicon Valley in particular who want to live forever type of things. How are you going to make it? It'll be a book? Will it be a 10-part series?

• 26:17Kara Swisher?

  It's a six-part series. It's already done. The CNN series is done. And the original title, before all this happened, was Peter Attie as a schmuck. And...

• 26:28Kara Swisher?

  That was in my...

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Oh, that could be right.

• 26:30Kara Swisher?

  Yes, it did.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  That could be Mark's shirt, yeah.

• 26:33Kara Swisher?

  You need to pay attention to what I'm telling you. What I was irritated with was, one, Silicon Valley people lecturing me on all manner of things they didn't know about, including health, and because they are godlike, they think they should live forever, or they should hack death, and I think it's just nonsensical. And what I was referencing was this amazing speech that you know about with Steve Jobs, which Steve Jobs had a very good sense of death and understood that mortality is what creates innovation. And he gave this amazing speech, I recommend it, which really inspired me about, you know, live your everyday like it's the last.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  This is the Stanford commencement speech.

• 27:10Kara Swisher?

  The Stanford speech.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  What you can find online.

• 27:12Kara Swisher?

  He was sick, and then he wasn't sick for a little bit, and then he was sick again. In that period, he did this amazing, astonishing speech, and so that was my inspiration, the Steve Jobs mentality versus, say, a Brian Johnson or an Elon Musk idea of like, we should let, we're so amazing godlike creatures, we should live forever. And so, and part and parcel to this is my obsession with the conspiracy theories all over the internet, politically and otherwise, but in the healthcare area, it's really awful. Like, all this nonsensical bullshit that's there. And so, the charlatans bothered me, especially online, because they had weaponized health. And then, at the same time, there's this astonishing blossoming of science happening right now, whether it's someone you wrote about, Jennifer Doudna at CRISPR, the cancer

• 27:56Kara Swisher?

  research, mRNA vaccines, like, they're gonna have a vaccine for cancer, all this incredible use of AI to detect illnesses, GLP-1s, there's all this astonishing stuff happening, and then there's all these charlatans. And so, I go and try all the charlatan stuff and try to blow it up, and then I try to focus in on people that are doing the real work, so it's substantive and silly at the same time. And then I'm gonna do podcasts around it, then I might do an event, you know, there's gonna be a book, you know, I'm gonna try to, like, focus in on the people that are doing the amazing work, but also slap the charlatans wherever I can slap them out of the picture.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  All right. [applause]

• 28:44Speaker 00

  And tell me about the audacity.

• 28:46Kara Swisher?

  Oh, I didn't work with these people, but it's a series that... It's interesting, The Times wrote about this yesterday, but the shift of tech people from very silly and you kind of root for them, and they end up, at the end of Silicon Valley, they do the right thing, they have a technology that could really hurt people, to today, you have Mountain Head and this, where the technologists are the villains. And really ridiculous, drug-taking, sex-having villains, essentially.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  How did the techies become both villains and right-wing?

• 29:21Kara Swisher?

  Oh, I don't know if they're right-wing, I don't think they have any...

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Well, I guess, I shouldn't say that, go ahead.

• 29:25Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I think they're not right-wing, I think they're just people, as I joke with you, they're people who weren't hugged enough as children, that now are taking it out on the rest of us. I think whatever is in their financial self-interest is what they do, or they're, you know, even down to Tim Cook, who I happen to like, you know, bringing that golden statue to Trump. I mean, what an embarrassment. To me, there's a level of, if you have that much fuck-you money and not saying fuck-you seems kind of ridiculous, like, on some level.

• 29:57Kara Swisher?

  Now, he can do damage to them, that is 100% true, but for how long? And, not much longer, I suspect. And so, I think some of them, very much real, very real. I think, like, David Sacks was conservative, he was conservative-ish, and I think they tried...

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Libertarian, Teal, Mike.

• 30:14Kara Swisher?

  I would call it libert... Peter Thiel, honestly, is the only one who was always like this, and deserves, you know, his ridiculous stuff, is something he is... He's consistently heinous, essentially. But, he's consistently, and very smart person, you know, has consistently sort of espoused this idea that democracy doesn't work, and that the Uber men should be running everything, you know, you've read all their stuff, is that the unitary executive theory and... Oh, these women are so irritating. And when they got the vote, that sucked. That kind of stuff. And then you have people who have come along to it and sort of entered the picture. You know, Elon was never, I never knew.

• 30:58Kara Swisher?

  Elon was somewhat liberal, as I remember him call me when they were going to do this anti-trans and anti-gay thing in the first Trump administration. What can I do, Kara? And I was, and now today, couldn't be worse on the topic, you know, and really terrible. I don't, lots of things happened with him, including ketamine. But among other things, he just morphed. I think because the woke mind virus, it's actually not a woke mind virus that affected him, it's a Twitter mind, it's an X mind virus. You know, this Nazi porn bar, he's been hanging in it too much, and therefore, he's

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, talk about that a little, because we had Salman Rushdie sitting there a moment ago. And he said his life and mind have been liberated now that he's taking social media of his own, because you're living, let's call it Twitter or X.

• 31:45Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  But if you're living in that world, you think the world is more dystopian than it?

• 31:51Kara Swisher?

  It is.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  It really is.

• 31:53Kara Swisher?

  I made the mistake of going on it the other day for a second, and I was like, oh, God, this place again. I love Twitter, I did, I did. I was one of the first people, I had one, I still have 1.6 million followers on there, and I'm not on it. Like, that would be good for my marketing, like, but I just can't, it's like a real

• 32:09Speaker 00

  By the way, you're on Blue Sky and I'll tell you the thread.

• 32:11Kara Swisher?

  I am on Blue Sky.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  How come those didn't work? They didn't catch on?

• 32:14Kara Swisher?

  Threads is bigger than Twitter right now, and Mark Zuckerberg's run right over that, so.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  He never then, well, maybe

• 32:21Kara Swisher?

  Instagram is massive.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Instagram is

• 32:23Kara Swisher?

  But Instagram and Threads is bigger than X right now.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 32:27Kara Swisher?

  And growing.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  When you post on Threads, do you get the same feedback?

• 32:30Kara Swisher?

  Oh, absolutely. Actually, you know, listen, I ain't no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but it's a nice product, I have to tell you. Like, it doesn't, like, one of the, I shouldn't, I'm not going to say the word, they always call me on Twitter, but it starts with C and ends with T almost regularly. It's a really good place, I have, it's a really interesting, you know, sometimes it's not great, but it's sort of a version of what Twitter used to be for me. And actually, I'm doing a lot of news discovery on it. Again, I'm not one who loves to compliment Mark Zuckerberg, but it's a good product. And there's all kinds of issues with it, like a lot of things. I think Blue Sky has reached this, the founding CEO just stepped down. They need to do more, that kind of stuff. But it's, I have both of them. I have half a million people on each of them. That's pretty good.

• 33:14Kara Swisher?

  And they, I'll tell you, the response rate is great. But X is so polluted with bots and malignant figures that it's useless.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Since you talked about Section 230, I want to make sure people know what it is.

• 33:27Kara Swisher?

  Oh.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Which is, it's just the section of the law that says if somebody posts something on social media.

• 33:33Kara Swisher?

  Yep.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  The company, X or Facebook.

• 33:36Kara Swisher?

  It wasn't a mission for social media. It was for chat groups.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Right. It was way back at the beginning of the Internet.

• 33:41Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  But on X, you can say anything you want.

• 33:47Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Including the words that are used about you.

• 33:50Kara Swisher?

  Yep.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Why is it you have no recourse to even sue the person who said it?

• 33:56Kara Swisher?

  I don't even care if any stupid.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  But leave you aside.

• 33:58Kara Swisher?

  I don't care if an incel calls me that name. Good luck. Enjoy your, whatever you're doing. I don't, that doesn't bother me at all. I think, it's not a recourse. It's, what kind of place do you want to create as a gathering place online? That's really the idea. What kind of business do you want to run? And again, if Elon wants to do this, he should be able to, right? I do think it has a deleterious effect on society. I think what it creates is this sort of hateful toxicity. It's a death cult. I don't know what else, you know, having just done this. There's a really interesting scientific studies that people who, who avoid death and try to get away from it, create polarized societies of hatefulness. Those who accept it and make it part of their world, it's, to me, it's suicidal.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Is that partly responsible for the type of politics we have now?

• 34:45Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I think, I think it is. I think it's really an interesting moment where dunking on people, it, nobody's talking about, like, what do we want to solve? And it's sort of a basic hatred of humanity, like, ugh, these people. Like, how dare they be different? How dare they be, you know? And I, you can have a good argument about DEI programs, fine, whatever. But it's really not our biggest issue, is it? I mean, I remember sitting with, um... Someone in media where they were like, you know, you can't say what you want anymore. This was a rich white guy, like, "You can't say what you want anymore." I go, "It seems like you can, all your, all your direct reports are other white guys." "Oh, it seems like you do whatever you want." And he's like, "Yeah, but I get shit for it." I'm like, "Oh, sorry sweetheart." Like, I think I called him sweetheart.

• 35:30Kara Swisher?

  "I was like, 'So sorry you can do it.'" And he goes, "Well, I think it's one of the biggest issues of our time." And I go, "Ugh, I think poverty and child abuse would be my choices." But, you know.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  I, I, I don't know if you're proud of this, you actually should be, but if I remember correctly, because I've followed you forever.

• 35:47Kara Swisher?

  Oh, you have.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  You were the first person to say, "You know what, Trump can win."

• 35:50Kara Swisher?

  I did.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  This is way back in 20...

• 35:52Kara Swisher?

  It was, you remember, we had that discussion?

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:55Kara Swisher?

  Because, here's why, I watched The Apprentice. I was, I watched all, I loved that show.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Oh, God, really?

• 36:00Kara Swisher?

  I mean, a terrible show, but it was a great show. I like that kind of thing. I also like anything Gerard Butler is in, so this is my taste. Greenland 2, everyone's like, "Go see one battle after another." I'm like, "Greenland 2 is where I'm going." So, it's really good. So, I, I was watching The Apprentice, and I knew how popular he was, what Jeff Zucker created there, even though it was sort of false. And you could see sort of what was happening online with this fake personas, these personas, but people who were genuine. And I had just done an interview with Kim Kardashian, who was enormously popular online, not just in the reality TV business, but she had numbers, and I had done an interview with her. She is genuine to who she is, right?

• 36:44Kara Swisher?

  Online, sort of erupting beyond media companies, politics, and things like that. And so I thought he was really good online. Like, he was, he was, he's our first internet troll president, right? And so was Barack Obama, but to a much more sort of hands-off, right? You know, you know, like, everything is like that with him. He's gotten a lot better, I can tell you that. But, AOC is the, I did a comparison in New York Times between AOC and Trump, and they're sort of doing a, they're not the same thing, but a similar...

• 37:14Speaker 00

  And Mom Donnie.

• 37:15Kara Swisher?

  Mom Donnie's friggin', like, Olympic-level online stuff. But, and, and very sweet, too. He's got a very, it's a very sweet but pointed kind of thing. Everyone's different to themselves, but Trump was really good at that. And I remember Arianna Huffington's like, "We're putting Trump in the entertainment section." I was like, "No, no." And I was with a bunch of political people and Washington reporters. They're like, "Oh, he's so ridiculous." I'm like, "No, he's not. He's a poor person's version of a rich person, at least that I can tell." Like, you know, actually, in this audacity, this, one of the characters said, "You're a dumb person's version of a genius," which I thought was a great line. Yeah. It's so true for so many people. It was also self-deprecating. He used to be.

• 37:59Kara Swisher?

  Now, he's sort of, something's occurred in his cognitively-disabled brain that, but he understood the joke. He was using all, I studied Roy Cohen quite a lot, because he was speaking of the original conspiracy theorist and a manipulator of media, who was his mentor. You know, I could see that it would work on people. And the Democrats had such a flaccid, after post-Obama, did not have the same kind of idea and was very much not, and I don't mean listening to people, like, I have this encounter when they were trying to do Silicon, remember, they were doing Silicon Hall or Silicon Beach? They were gonna make the Silicon area in Kentucky. I've traveled there.

• 38:41Kara Swisher?

  And we, they were talking, they were promising all these software jobs. They did all these tours where they would go and Trump was promising, "I'm gonna bring back coal and bring back whatever." And I went there also to speak in front of these people. And they got up and made all these ridiculous, "We're gonna make you software and digital and this and that." And I got up, I go, "Listen, everybody, first of all, coal is not coming back. And when it comes back, it's gonna be robotics. You know why? Because you get black lung and a machine don't. And they work 24/7. So FYI, this guy right here, the owner, he can't wait to replace you." So they were doing that. And one of the things, and I said, "They are, you are not, this is not gonna happen to you." But one of the people came up to, and I was scared I was gonna get hit by these people,

• 39:25Kara Swisher?

  but they came up and said, "Thank you for telling us the truth about this." I said, "No problem." And they said, "It's nice for you to come visit real Americans." And I looked at this guy, who's a big gold miner, and I said, "I'm a fucking real American. I don't know what you're talking about. Why don't you come to San Francisco and hang out with me in the Castro? Like, why do you get to be the real American?" And I don't like I was like such bullshit. And he liked that he was like, oh, I'll come. I said, well, make sure you get your thong and it'll be great. And we laughed.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Careful of it.

• 39:54Kara Swisher?

  My family's from West Virginia, so I kind of know these people. But but with AI, yes, it's going to supplant all kinds of jobs and it's going to happen at a speed. We've had it happen before. Farmers were the original entrepreneurs. There were 90% of people were farmers. That's an entrepreneurial job when in the back of the day, figuring out what to do. Now it's 2% and something like that. It's some number that's really low. Manufacturing underwent that. Of course, we had the Luddites and everything else, as you know. And then now we have this, this and the Internet that did.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  But in the previous two revolutions, there were more jobs after they happened than fewer jobs.

• 40:34Kara Swisher?

  There became more jobs, but there was also, which we forget because we have a deficit of memory about history, incredibly socially problematic revolutions and fights. This is happening at such a speed that people don't understand. And so companies are doing layoff. They did too many hiring during COVID. Now they're doing layoffs and they're using AI as the excuse. But the fact of the matter is, you aren't going to need like someone. Here's a good example. Barry Dillard, I had lunch a couple of years, I mean, a year ago, I think, or two years ago. And he said, I, you know, he had 6,000 programmers. He's like, I bet I have 2,000. So a lot fewer people can do a lot more using AI tools. It's just not clear.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  But that increase in productivity could end up creating.

• 41:20Kara Swisher?

  Yes, but will it create more jobs or less jobs? And what are the other people going to do? If you're a plumber or an electrician, that doesn't.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  They're in good shape, actually.

• 41:30Kara Swisher?

  You know, which is what the Palantir, did you see that? Palantir, that guy needs to stop talking like seriously.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Alex Karp?

• 41:37Kara Swisher?

  He really needs to stop talking like he just, soon he's going to pontificate on Salman Rushdie, which I'm then I'm going to tackle him and we're going to please stop talking about things you know nothing about. And so or Bill Ackman, the other one. I think I'll start talking about hedge fund investing because I know this much. I know more about hedge fund investing than he knows about almost anything except hedge fund investing. He has an IPO coming up, by the way. Personally, I wouldn't buy it.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  How do you personally use AI?

• 42:07Kara Swisher?

  What do I know?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  How do you use AI?

• 42:09Kara Swisher?

  I try to use it every day, and I think everyone here should do that and understand where it fits in with your life. You know, I think it's critically important. It's back when the Internet first started, Walter was around at CNN at the time, I think.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Oh, Time Magazine?

• 42:22Kara Swisher?

  Time Magazine.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Ninety-two.

• 42:24Kara Swisher?

  I think you have to think.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  I see. I'm gonna give a shout out to Jim Barksdale, came in and

• 42:28Kara Swisher?

  What?

• 42:29Speaker 00

  He and Tim Berners-Lee.

• 42:30Kara Swisher?

  Is Jim here?

• 42:31Speaker 00

  They're both here. There's Jim. Wave your hand, or whatever. But Jim was the one who came in 1992. He'll correct me if I'm wrong.

• 42:38Kara Swisher?

  Let me tell ya, quality person of the people. I really don't like Silicon Valley people, and he's amazing. Ethics, quality, great business, knew what he was talking about. Sadly, did not rein in Marc Andreessen, but you tried. I really appreciate it. He was an amazing guy. Amazing leader.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  And, yeah, and when he came, he said, all right, 1992, web browsers, they were just creating mosaic.

• 43:05Kara Swisher?

  Difficult situation.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:07Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. I mean, one of the things that Jim said, and he knows this, he had a bunch of minds, and I found, Jim, I found this the other day in a box when you left, they did a party for him, and they had all, they have a book of his sayings, and one of his sayings was, "It's important to keep the main thing, the main thing." Which I loved, it's such a great idea. But he was trying to bring financial discipline to a business that really was under siege because of Microsoft at the time, and tried his best and sold it off correctly to AOL eventually.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  And you wrote a book about that.

• 43:38Kara Swisher?

  I did, he was, yeah, he was in it. But one of the things that was important was Just because AOL sort of missed the boat, it doesn't mean it wasn't important. And that's what I think about, like which of the ones coming forward are going to be. But getting back to using AI, you've got to figure out, if you're in insurance, what does it help you do better? Where does like, there was a great book by the guy who just died, Daniel Kahneman, marvelous book about, there were 20 insurance adjusters versus AI. AI was more accurate, something like that. They got 20 different decisions from 20 different people, depending on if they had a bad coffee that day, or something, or bad.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  But you keep saying we have to keep humans in the loop.

• 44:22Kara Swisher?

  Yes, so what does it do? It's sort of like, how did the car help us? The car doesn't run everything, the car changed this country, right? Absolutely, so did the plane. I was just at the Air and Space Museum with three of my kids, and there was a bunch of quotes, nobody ever reads what's on the wall there, about when Orville Wright, and there was a sister involved that was very critical, FYI, there's a Wright brother's sister, who's his Wright sister, and the mother was also critically involved, very interesting family. There was a bunch of, there was a bunch of quotes of the day, this is going to ruin everything, like this is going to, society is now doomed, and then others who said, no, it's going to change everything.

• 45:05Kara Swisher?

  Well, it did both those things, right?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  And so will AI.

• 45:09Kara Swisher?

  So will AI. And so what can we do to stress the things that were, that are good about it? And what can we do to mitigate the obvious dangers? The ability to do autonomous drones, the ability to make decisions? In the early days of AI, I was at a dinner with a bunch of very well-known people, and they were debating this, and they were truly terrified at the possibility. I mean, I hadn't seen them, usually they're frequently wrong, but never in doubt, but they were very much worried about where it was going. And one of them said to me, you know, if you tell it to solve world hunger, which it probably could pull from all sorts of disparate sources, the number one answer would be kill 100 million people.

• 45:54Kara Swisher?

  But that's the best answer if you want to solve world hunger. But it's not the best answer. It's a bad answer. But from a logical perspective, it's sort of like Spox running all over the place. The logical answer is to kill people. The same thing when they just tested nuclear. What should we do in the Mideast? Most of these, most of these things said nuclear bomb would work. Well, yes, it would, but it would be bad. Oops, became drones.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:22Kara Swisher?

  But, and then the other thing that the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a group that Elon is trying to put out of business and has been unsuccessful. They just showed that, you know, when they were showing different things of building bombs, causing harm, violence, attacks, all of them recommend the worst thing to do.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  How would you regulate it?

• 46:45Kara Swisher?

  You could start with just base. First of all, we haven't done privacy regulation around our data. You're being used. You know, you seen The Matrix? That's all of you, just so you know. They're using your data. Like yesterday, Grammarly, you ever heard of it? It's another AI thing. They took all of my information and were giving advice as Kara Swisher.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  They were saying they were Kara?

• 47:07Kara Swisher?

  No, they were taking all. I have said a lot of things and have done a lot of interviews. They were bringing it all together and then they were offering people advice from Kara Swisher without asking Kara Swisher or paying Kara Swisher or anything else. So they, and Matthew McConaughey has talked about this, lots of people. They, they are rapacious information thieves and they will take whatever. Sam Altman talked about this is we're going to take all of intelligence and sell it back to you. Well, it's our intelligence. It's not fair. So basic data, we should have a federal privacy law. We do not have one 20 years into this day. Algorithmic transparency. Why don't we, what is in there? What is in your little black box? What, how does it go in? What happens?

• 47:52Kara Swisher?

  How do you decide? You know, they pretend they're like, they think they're like Kentucky Fried fucking chicken. Like, it's not a secret. You can actually, by the way, you can figure that recipe out today using AI. But we need to know what's in there. What is going in? What are the inputs? What is the data you're having? Garbage in, garbage out is one of the famous tech phrases. We need to have an ability to sue these people. And by the way, if they win, good for them. If they lose, great for us. Like, so we should...

• 48:23Speaker 00

  So in other words, if an algorithm...

• 48:25Kara Swisher?

  Liability.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Amplifies hatred and causes a problem, you should be able to sue the company that created that algorithm.

• 48:32Kara Swisher?

  That's correct.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  And you can't do that now.

• 48:34Kara Swisher?

  Not for the, not in many ways. And by the way, let's have that debate. They don't want to have that debate with us. They don't want to, like, privacy. Right now, you know, we should be debating our tax system. Now, I'm not for that California billionaire's tax, but there's a new one they're proposing that's pretty good. Like, makes sense, makes it much more fair. The idea, like, rich people don't pay, the numbers are just there. The math is there. They haven't been paying as many taxes. There, there's a way to do it that doesn't create class warfare. Although maybe a little class warfare is not a bad thing sometimes, right? That these people are advantaging themselves through every single possible means, and everybody else gets to pay the bill, whether it's through, and they take...

• 49:18Kara Swisher?

  You know who paid for the internet, everybody? You did. The American taxpayer paid for the internet. And it's a good, and guess what? Our government did that. The government paid for research around these amazing mRNA vaccines, around space travel. Guess who's benefiting? Not us, they are. And so, to me, we should get a piece of that.

• 49:48Speaker 06

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• 51:00Speaker 07

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• 52:29Speaker 00

  Tell me about the politicians now. Get you a bit out of your tech comfort zone.

• 52:34Kara Swisher?

  No, I live in Washington now. I spend a lot of time with politicians.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Tell me which ones you think get it, from Talarico to Ro Khanna. Who do you like?

• 52:44Kara Swisher?

  I just did a long interview with Mark Warner that's great about Iran and cybersecurity and election security and a number of things. I think he's a former venture capitalist, really sharp, especially on cybersecurity issues. I think he's terrific. Amy Klobuchar, even though her legislation has not made it, I think she's trying really hard to do the right thing. She wrote an amazing book on antitrust that is so big. I used to joke with her, you could throw it at a poodle and kill it. It's like this. I read the entire thing. I know a lot about antitrust now.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Should we be using the antitrust laws to break up the big tech companies?

• 53:20Kara Swisher?

  We need to innovate the antitrust rules. They're written for an era of 100 years ago. They're written for the gilded, like, not twice.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Although, they still say if you have a dominance in a field and you leverage it in another field, then we're letting that happen.

• 53:37Kara Swisher?

  It changes. It's not the same thing. It's very, it's like, what is antitrust today? We need a wholesale rethinking because it doesn't work. Like... Correctly, I know the judge in the case that Facebook just won because things have changed, right? And so now Facebook has plenty of competitors. Things change really quickly and government doesn't keep up with law. So a redo of the antitrust bills. To me, the only way is litigation. Because our government is not going to respond because of the deleterious effects of Citizens United. I did an amazing interview with Larry Lessig about this other case that is going to possibly knock the stuffing out of super PACs, which is, will go a long way.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  But that'll never pass the Supreme.

• 54:16Kara Swisher?

  No, no, it looks like it will, actually. It looks like it might. And so we just have to stop having, this dark money stuff is really problematic because the tech people are taking advantage of it and causing all manner of nefarious things. And years ago, when the Tea Party was sort of going around, I got a call on the phone from, I like to stay on the line with these callers, right? And they go, you know, our government has never, you know, done anything, it's the people, give it back to the people. And I said, oh, how did World War II work out for you? I was like, because if not, we'd be goose stepping down, you know, Pennsylvania Avenue if we didn't have the government who fought the Nazis. So I was like, that worked out pretty fucking well. How do you like the road you're on? Guess who built that? The National Highway System.

• 55:01Kara Swisher?

  Get off the fucking roads if you don't like the government. Don't like, you know, I'm not, I agree, there's too much regulation in certain areas, but the deli on my corner should not have more regulations than Elon Musk. It just seems, it just like.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  What about Palantir and Alex Carr?

• 55:19Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I said he talks too much. He's insane to me. I mean, it's interesting because everyone who refuses to talk to me, I realize, you know, they all refuse now because I'll do it, I won't lick them up and down anymore. But. I think it's fine to do that business. He's in the defense business and that's been a Lockheed or whatever. I think they have demented ideas about our society that perhaps they shouldn't be involved in.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  But let me talk about the Defense Department, which can't build anything. It can't get the fire.

• 55:51Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  The Vatican, it can't get a rocket and orbit.

• 55:55Kara Swisher?

  It's great to work with US companies to do that. There's nothing wrong with it.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Right. So should there be, I think Palmer Lockheed is doing Andoril and Palantir, obviously Musk. Should we have these private tech billionaires be taking over our defense?

• 56:13Kara Swisher?

  I think we should have competent people in the government buying this stuff, just like a good vendor might. I don't think they should be pontificating and involved in, I don't think they should install their minions in positions of power. And look, I'm not naive, this has happened.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  You don't think Lockheed and Boeing did that?

• 56:30Kara Swisher?

  Of course they did, but did you know what their personal politics were? Did you know they were tweeting about like white supremacists? Not, the last time we had this problem, it was Henry Ford. And by the way, rest in not peace, Henry Ford. Even, thanks for the car, but fuck you, essentially. But, you know.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, he bought newspapers and they were anti-Semitic.

• 56:54Kara Swisher?

  He did, that's correct. That was the last time. If I recommend anything, Rachel Maddow did an amazing series of podcasts called Ultra, where you get a sense of what happened here, and she just did one on the Japanese internment. It has so many echoes of today, of misinformation, of lies, of the government manipulating things, of business getting, weird billionaires want, there was a weird Texas billionaire wandering around doing something terrible. Hughie Long, all this stuff. This is something that's happened again and again in our history, but we've never had such wealth. I mean, he's going to be a trillionaire if the SpaceX thing goes off as it's supposed to. He's going to be a trillionaire.

• 57:35Kara Swisher?

  There's nothing, it's unprecedented in terms of wealth and power and the ability to overwhelm government. And when you have, again, a moron like Pete Hegseth in there, who just today said, he didn't, this is incredible, this is astonishing. He's, CNN had a Chyron, and who reads the Chyrons except this narcissistic prick, said, war intensifies. That's a neutral world. It is intensifying. The more service members were killed. It's not going away. Like, we're not stupid. He doesn't like the word "intensifies." He goes, "The Chyron should be Iran on its last legs."

• 58:15Kara Swisher?

  You know, and then he said, "Swear to God," he goes, "I can't wait till David Ellison gets in charge." He's arguing with the word "intensifies." If this doesn't remind you of Brave New World and the rest of it, you really should start reading that.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Thinking of David Ellison and the media and stuff, you've been working with CNN for a long. What should happen to CNN?

• 58:36Kara Swisher?

  I don't think he should own it.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Barry Diller?

• 58:39Kara Swisher?

  I'd love Barry Diller to own it. That'd be a lot of fun. He's a really smart programmer. I don't agree with Barry on lots of stuff, but at least he likes journalists. I just don't think he's qualified. I don't think, because you're born to a rich person, you should modificate on media.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  Were you talking about Barry Diller or Ellison?

• 58:56Kara Swisher?

  No, Barry Diller is a pro. No, David Ellison, he's a nice guy. He's a very nice guy. I did a podcast with him, but the fact of the matter is, he was born on third base and hit a homerun. Thinks he hit a homerun, and that's great, but I don't know why we're... This is a lot of media properties in one person's hand. Now, I think these are... Some of them are declining media properties, so I'm not as worried. But he has shown a proclivity to suck up to Trump. He happens to... I knew him as pretty Democratic, but I don't really care. But he's shown a proclivity to suck up to Trump, and Trump is very aggressive.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  What is that... I mean, what is Trump's power to get people all over? You said Tim Cook at the beginning, you got Ellison now.

• 59:39Kara Swisher?

  Tariffs. He wants to get out of tariffs. Everyone has a different...

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Everybody's just doing it for money, you think?

• 59:43Kara Swisher?

  Money, yes. Like I say, they're so poor, all they have is money. They're so poor, they don't have a sense of civic duty and about a bigger picture. So, they want shareholder... And I appreciate that. I'm a capitalist. I like making money. I make a lot of money. But, you know, I also can make decisions, and so... Depending on what they do at CNN, I'll leave. I don't make that much money from them and I can wander over to somewhere else. And so, we all have to make our decisions. And I've said I'll leave and I've spoken to some of their executives and they're like, "Will you really leave?" I go, "I'll really leave and really loudly and there'll be a lot of fuck you." So, I don't know what to tell you. But I do that, right?

• 1:00:28Kara Swisher?

  And I have the choice to do that because I have choices. A lot of people don't in those situations.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Well, none of the people we're talking about lack choices. Tim Cook doesn't lack choices.

• 1:00:37Kara Swisher?

  Correct, but I get his argument. I do get his argument. I get why they all have to do it. But again, they also have, like Dario said no. You know? And then Sachin.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  And he's been banned as a doctor.

• 1:00:51Kara Swisher?

  But you know what? You know who then said no? Sachin Adelman said no. Guess what? There's going to be a lot more no's. Lisa Murkowski just said no to this stupid save act, you know? It's a really good word. You should all use it and we can all say it. And by the way, there's going to be a price. You know what? Maybe I won't have season two of Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, but guess what? I'm going to do something called Kara Swisher Wants to Not Die. I don't know, I'll call it something else. I don't care. It's like...

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  All right, since we're at a book festival.

• 1:01:22Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Talk to me just a little bit, let's just finish up with, would you read in the future?

• 1:01:28Kara Swisher?

  When is your book coming out?

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  The Marie Curie?

• 1:01:31Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that one.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  Probably, I don't know. Priscilla, when is it coming out? Baby? Huh? And I'm supposed to go home right now and type, she said.

• 1:01:41Kara Swisher?

  I thought so, yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Kara Swisher?

  I know that's...

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  I think that was a hand signal for, go home and type.

• 1:01:46Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  Now, tell me what you read and whether the...

• 1:01:50Kara Swisher?

  Oh, I tend to read fiction now. I'm doing a lot. I just reread The Underground Railroad. I just reread that amazing book.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, Colson?

• 1:02:00Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I just reread it. I had read it quickly and I spent a lot more time on it. I love... North Woods, which I love that. I love that author. He's amazing. I just love it. It's such a beautiful book about time and I love time travel. It's a little bit of, it's just wonderful. I just finished the piano tuner. I tend to read everybody. I'm now going to read all of Salman Rushdie's books and I was just-

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  I was about to say, I recommend Salman Rushdie.

• 1:02:25Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I would. I've always felt like, and my wife was a book editor at the Boston Globe and is a really, was an editor, was also an editor-

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  Amanda.

• 1:02:34Kara Swisher?

  Amanda at a publisher. She's an incredible, has incredible taste. I'm kind of dumb. Like, I feel like I'm dumb around nonfiction and so I always felt Salman Rushdie was too hard for me. Like, and I have a lot in my head and so I tend to, I'm reading mostly fiction right now and when I get recommendations, I try to read it. And I actually, right before this, I went online and I said, "What's the easiest Salman Rushdie book to start with?" Apparently-

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  You should go to ChatGPT.

• 1:03:04Kara Swisher?

  Well, it gave me a good recommendation.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  I'll recommend David Eggers's books because they-

• 1:03:08Kara Swisher?

  I have interviewed him. I've read all his books.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  It's all about what you write about.

• 1:03:12Kara Swisher?

  No, I've interviewed, when The Circle came out, I did a great interview with him. Those are sort of in my genre, so I tend not to want to read in my genre books. I probably will read the book Hail Mary is, Project Hail Mary is based on, because it looks like an amazing movie. And I will note that what's really interesting about, the Oscars are coming up, I just did a great show with Matt Bellany, all the, speaking of humans and not AI, there's all this controversy in Hollywood about AI slop and AI replacing and there's going to be definite changes in Hollywood because of this, but the two most important movies, three or four most important movies, were all from original artists, whether it

• 1:03:51Kara Swisher?

  was Sinners, One Battle After Another, or Ryan Coogler's brilliant, or Weapons. All the popular movies with regular people, humans, not AI. And so that to me was really important.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Kara Swisher.

• 1:04:06Kara Swisher?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:04:12Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Lozal, Michelle Elroy, Catherine Millsap, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Madeleine LePlante-Duby, Corinne Ruff, and the New Orleans Book Festival. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're building an omnimedia empire like Martha Stewart and me, and you're a genius. If not, you're a moron like Pete Hegseth. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

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