Reed Hastings on Hollywood’s Future, Netflix’s Shakeup and Knowing When to Leave

After nearly 30 years building Netflix – from its humble beginnings as a DVD-by-mail outfit to a streaming service powerhouse – co-founder and former chairman Reed Hastings fully walked away from the company when he stepped down from the board of directors this past June. His departure came at a tumultuous time in Hollywood and at Netflix itself. On top of the fallout from its failed bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix has also been struggling with stagnating engagement and slowing revenue growth, prompting a big C-Suite shakeup and a mass layoff earlier this month. Speaking at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, Kara and Reed talk about Netflix’s future and why he thinks making better content is the key to turning its fortunes around. They also talk about why Reed remains bullish on AI’s future, especially when it comes to education. 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.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  This is the polite part and then the impolite part. I will shame him in private.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Is the polite part when you wear the Warner Brothers Discovery shirt?

• 0:07Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I wear the.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I'm looking forward to the rest of it for sure.

• 0:24Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. After nearly 30 years building it into a streaming giant, Hastings fully stepped away from Netflix in June, when his term as board chairman ended. His impact on Hollywood is undeniable, but his departure comes at an interesting time, both for the entertainment industry with AI and the drama around the Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery merger, and for Netflix itself, which lost out on its biz to buy Warners. Just this month, it announced a big shakeup at the C-suite level and cut around 1,000 jobs. But Hastings is pretty busy in his post-Netflix life.

• 1:07Kara Swisher?

  He has a seat on the board of directors at Anthropic. He's still a big philanthropist, especially around education, and is the CEO again, now at the Utah ski resort Powder Mountain. I have known Reed since he started Netflix. I've known him a long time. I consider this kind of his exit interview. I want to hear about what he thinks about where he began and where he has been and what he's going to do going forward. He's still a relatively young man, and he's full of ideas. I have always found him to be one of the most intelligent and bracing CEOs. All right, let's get to my conversation with Reed Hastings. Our expert question comes from author and legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, another person I've known a very long time, Sir Michael Moritz. We recorded the interview at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco.

• 1:52Kara Swisher?

  A portion of it was taped in front of a live audience, so don't go anywhere.

• 2:04Speaker 02

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• 3:26Speaker 04

  I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by chef Paul Carmichael. We talk all about the incredible restaurants he's worked in, the best music to play in the restaurant bathrooms, and how he reacted when he found out his restaurant Kabawa had been ranked number one by The New York Times. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 4:06Kara Swisher?

  Reed, thanks for coming on On.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  What a treat.

• 4:08Kara Swisher?

  I know. It's been 12 years since we last sat down together like this. It was my Code Conference in 2014. It was the second season of Orange is the New Black. It was just about to come out, and her successful season two of House of Cards had dropped. You really helped. You didn't help. You did usher in major changes in the entertainment industry. If you had to pick one company that sort of shifted everything, it was you. Talk a little bit about that shift and whether you saw it coming or Hollywood didn't. I know Hollywood didn't see it coming.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Well, we did very traditional, great shows, like Orange is the New Black, or I don't know if you've seen this season's Diplomat.

• 4:44Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I just interviewed Carrie Russell.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 4:46Kara Swisher?

  I just interviewed Carrie.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  So think of the product that we make, basically the same thing, done extremely well, but we make it so much easier to watch, you know, to click and view it at your own time. You know, most of your listeners will forget that we used to have to watch at 8:00 PM.

• 5:02Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  It was somebody else set the schedule instead of us. It seems crazy now.

• 5:07Kara Swisher?

  Why was that such an astonishing thing for people? To me, I used to argue with Hollywood, is you're selling Coca-Cola in a 64-ounce bottle, and people want cans. They want to drink it their way rather than your way. And they had always insisted that people wanted it their way. And I was like, it's your schedule.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  I think it's the technology limitation. So there was broadcast TV, and that was a miracle, right? That you could have video in the home and transform societies globally. And then there was cable, and you got like 500 channels, but it was all someone else's. There was a little thing called TiVo, which was this hack where it recorded things, you know? And so you could get a simulation of watch when you want.

• 5:45Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  But the internet made it so much easier. Just boom, you could watch what you want.

• 5:49Kara Swisher?

  Right, it's funny you mention TiVo. I was there for the pitch meeting for TiVo. I was following around a venture capitalist, and they funded it, that one at the time. And it was a great, I was sort of like mind-blown. This is a great thing.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Great product and temporarily a strong company.

• 6:02Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  But they didn't figure out how to pivot into a kind of new era.

• 6:06Kara Swisher?

  Right, but one of the things at the time, one of the executives there said to me is the consumer has taken control and they're not going to give it back. They felt that that was the trend line, and I agreed with it. Talk about that, because people, because we had never really been asked before, once they had the opportunity, whether it was music or news, every single aspect shifted like that, and you all led the way in entertainment.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did. I think it's very clear that consumers want control. It depends on what that means, so you had to make it easy, too. And so we put, you know, unbelievable amounts of work in trying to make streaming easy. And in the first couple of years, it was quite hard and glitchy, and then it got better and better and better. And today, you never think about it, you just turn it on, it works.

• 6:47Kara Swisher?

  Right. And when you think about those days, you were the disruptors, right? You would consider yourself the disruptors. Hollywood first insulted you or looked down upon you, and then they kind of got scared of you, and now you're kind of part of the system in a way. Talk a little bit about that evolution.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Well, again, our distribution side was radical, like, you know, when you want and how you want. But our creation side's pretty traditional, you know, creating great shows like The Diplomat or films like The Unabomber. And so think of it as part of our world was quite different. Part of our world was becoming, we were so excited to become part of the Motion Picture Association. That was a big deal of acceptance, a big deal when we won our first Oscars and Emmys. So for a large part, we weren't disrupting there. We just did make it easier for people to watch.

• 7:39Kara Swisher?

  Of the many things you did, what do you think the most disruptive was in your tenure?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Well, definitely on-demand. You know, the idea that you paid a flat fee and you could watch as much as you want and when you want, you know, that was such a radical proposition, which today is taken for granted.

• 7:58Kara Swisher?

  And if you like, I think if you like this, you would like that, which I don't think existed, if you remember TV.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Not generally. I mean, you know, people were always trying to figure that out. There were companies in the 1990s trying to do that, partially to help figure out, would certain movies be more successful than others?

• 8:15Kara Swisher?

  And one of the things, when I interviewed you at this basement at Sundance, I remember you all saying very significant things onstage, you, Jason, Kylar, and Chad Hurley, about how consumers were shifting, largely ignored and mostly. One of the things you were offering is, I think it was you or Chad, is you're an indie movie, you can now find your audience instead of just one movie theater on the Upper East Side of New York. That's your distribution, essentially. It was much pushed back on, that this was not something we needed in any way. When, from your perspective, did it shift, that the power dynamic shifted between you and Hollywood?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's a fascinating panel, because of course, that's the head of Hulu, the head of YouTube, and the head of Netflix.

• 8:58Kara Swisher?

  And you were small.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  And it was, we were undiscovered. We were, as you said, in the basement.

• 9:04Kara Swisher?

  They were in a literal basement.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:06Kara Swisher?

  I tried to get us on the main stage, they refused.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:10Kara Swisher?

  You know what I kept saying? I said, these companies are going to kill all of you, like, just so you know.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very welcoming.

• 9:15Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I know. Well, I just tried to make it sexy.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I would say. The growth of the internet is really hard to understand because it was this got faster and faster and faster. It got to the Xbox, got to the television, got easier and easier. And that was not obvious to most people. And so I think that's why they kind of missed how big this would be in just 10 years.

• 9:39Kara Swisher?

  Why didn't anyone follow you that much? It took them a while, the streaming to happen. I mean, Disney did it in fits and starts. HBO had nine different names. It just went on and on.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean HBO struggled, but I think Disney did an incredible job for an incumbent and they spun up a big effort. You know, they bought Fox, they, you know, did this and, you know, they've done very well. And then all those companies started Hulu. So they were owners of Hulu. So I think they were pretty active in it. You know, it's easy on when you're a grow up in tech, you know, to like take on new markets. That's kind of what we thrive on.

• 10:11Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And if you run regularly, like the guy used to run Blockbuster, John Antiocho, very thoughtful guy, very consumer focused and very good at video stores. It rolled up the market. But he was so selected to be good at video stores that these other things, you know, were hard. This idea of DVD by mail seemed to him nuts.

• 10:34Kara Swisher?

  Well, let's fast forward today. You know, Netflix just announced a big shakeup, a C suite shakeup. You're no longer on the board, just to be clear, or an executive there. But chief content officer, Bell Bajaria, who'd been there 10 years, film chief Dan Lin, their shorter timer out. People were cut, around 1,000 people. This came a few weeks after your former co-CEO, now he has another co-CEO, admitted the company wasn't growing as fast enough and engagement was up just 2% in the first half of the year. What's it like to be on the outside looking in for the first time? Because one of the things about you is you creatively restructured constantly.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  You know, I read about all those changes. I heard about them first in the paper.

• 11:10Kara Swisher?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  As they got reported. In the paper, I'm dating myself, online news.

• 11:14Kara Swisher?

  In the paper.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So I didn't know those were coming. And, you know, it's hard because I'd like to be in the fray, helping, you know, those are traumatic moments and saying goodbye to some people, getting other people to focus on, okay, we really need to take up our creative excellence and, and just to be supportive. But they're very competent people. They'll figure it out. So I'm not worried about it.

• 11:42Kara Swisher?

  But just from the outside, you're a really smart guy. Everybody has caught up, right? Fine. It took, I mean, one of the things I used to talk to Hollywood, it's like, when Netflix is lapping you again and again and again, they've caught up. They've started to catch up. Some of them at great cost. Some of them are doing better.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, interestingly, the competition between the Hollywood, Disney, et cetera, is all pretty stable. It's YouTube that's really gaining share. So it's a little bit like the tech side. And part of it is their business model on YouTube is they don't commission content.

• 12:12Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  People put it up on spec and then it's there's incredible amounts of creativity. They have 3 million paid creators who are fighting for attention.

• 12:21Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. And they might get a movie like Obsession or Back Room or something like that.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  That is incredibly small amount of viewing on YouTube.

• 12:27Kara Swisher?

  I know that. And it took a while to develop it.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  It's the stuff that's very attention grabby. So in hacking attention, YouTube's platform is very good. And in particular, all the content, because if you're a creator on YouTube and you want to get eyeballs, you better be snappy. And so it's a highly tuned machine for attention and it's winning viewing hours.

• 12:50Kara Swisher?

  So what does Netflix do? Because Netflix is the most tech forward of these companies. And that's something I think that Hollywood didn't get. You were both a media company and a tech company at the same time. And they were media companies that use tech essentially and didn't really like it that much. What does Netflix do in the face of a tech platform that has basically free content, free content costs?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Well, then they share like 60% of revenue with those creators. So it's not, it's not free, but it's the, they don't have to take responsibility for the content.

• 13:17Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. And they don't have to spend it, make it, the risk that it's involved in it. What is Netflix has tried to do a bunch of things like podcasts, shorter form content. It hasn't gotten into news yet. It might. I don't know if you, you never wanted to get in the news, correct?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  No, entertainment has very different brand properties.

• 13:33Kara Swisher?

  I would agree, yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  So we want to be where you relax.

• 13:38Kara Swisher?

  Sports is another area.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  You know, for me, I think the strategy is doing more and better television shows, more and better movies. I think they are broadening. Back to you said, there's the podcast, there's some cool things like Alex Honnold, you know, climbing this tower in Taipei, you know, that's very gripping. Yeah. Sort of things that are thrilling. So the core brand property is about being thrilling. Like we realized, it took a long time, that we could be distrusted, we could be disliked, but we can never be boring. Okay. That the essence of an entertainment brand is to be thrilling. Like you just can't ignore it. You got to participate. So that's what I think they're very good at is trying to be more and more thrilling.

• 14:22Kara Swisher?

  So when you're like that, how do you compete with YouTube? Because the numbers are really quite jarring, 14%. I know both my kids and you have kids similar ages. That's where they get all their information from is YouTube, you know, and they like Netflix. There's no question they, they use, and they use my Netflix. It's a family thing. But how do you then stay thrilling in that kind of watching environment? If you were young Reed Hastings, running this thing, what would you do?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Well, let's see, if you look at the beginning of television, 1950s, 1960s, movie viewing went way down because suddenly there's this new hot object.

• 14:58Kara Swisher?

  Television.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Television. And then movies got a lot better in the 1970s. There was a whole creative revolution in the pacing and the realism. And then movies fought back and became, you know, again, up until the internet or up until COVID, really a substantial art form. So I would say the parallel there is, you know, YouTube is the television in that example and where the movies is we have to take up the creative bar and push ourselves to be ever more gripping, real, connecting, and do what we do incredibly, I say we, they do incredibly well.

• 15:34Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. But how do you make that, you know, thrilling? Like in the new age? Again, do you have to be short? Do you have to be snappy? Is that the only thing?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  I doubt that. I mean, I think those are the brand properties of YouTube. And I think it's hard to out YouTube YouTube.

• 15:48Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  So I think that the better thing is to concentrate on, think of sports and being able to, you know, have live sports and things that are long form in that way.

• 16:00Kara Swisher?

  So when you think about building a company like Netflix, the kind of scale that you did, and let me just say, you're one of the great astonishing technology entrepreneurs, I would, I would say in my mind. But you went from movie rental by mail concept to a streaming giant and more than 320. It's not a small company, right? Even though Wall Street's not happy with Netflix right now.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  It's down 5% or so. So it's a big deal.

• 16:19Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it's a big deal. How do you know what to focus on as a CEO? How did you know?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I don't feel like I had any science to that. I was what I would call a brute force leader. Like I had one gear, which is work harder.

• 16:32Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  As opposed to being like very clever. So I would try to have the most one on ones, know the most people throughout the company, know the metrics really well, get up first, go to bed last. I'm not sure that's a very good path, but that was like what I did.

• 16:51Kara Swisher?

  How would you characterize the Netflix culture under you? Now, it's tough, but you didn't have sort of the Jeff Bezos jackass structure. Like they, they had a very.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  We borrowed a lot of things from Amazon, like the memo structure.

• 17:03Kara Swisher?

  What was it called? The code?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Freedom and Responsibility.

• 17:06Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. But for some reason, it wasn't quite the same imagery for some reason.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure it's not the same. It's, you know, going to be different, but I have a lot of respect for Amazon's culture. I would say ours, you know, was really focused on how do we inspire rather than manage? How do we give employees a lot of freedom and let them make choices? So the very simplest, crudest examples, vacation, used to be even in tech, you know, you got three weeks of vacation. And I remember feeling how absurd it was because we were working, you know, 14 hour days instead of eight hour days. So like why, that's like almost a two acts difference. And then why was someone cared whether it was three weeks or two and a half or three and a half weeks of vacation? So one of the first things we did is get rid of, you know, a limit on how many days of vacation.

• 17:53Kara Swisher?

  Of course, the people you hire don't want to take any.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  It's trivial, but so then what we want to do is inspire them to care about the mission and to work on it. But I tried to be a good example and took a lot of vacation.

• 18:04Kara Swisher?

  When you think about your greatest decision, I mean, you, there's going to be a lot of looking back, what would it have been? And what is the one year like should have done that?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Well, I probably greatest decision was to get into streaming and 2007 YouTube started in 2005. So we started very early and started licensing TV shows.

• 18:25Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, a lot of from the big studios.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:27Kara Swisher?

  Friends.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Because they were used to licensing the cable networks.

• 18:30Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, they loved it. They thought, wow, lucky us.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Additional revenue. That was great. So, you know, there were many decisions on the way getting into original content, giving Ted Sarandos the license to spend money on originals, which he did with Orange is the New Black and House of Cards.

• 18:48Kara Swisher?

  But you didn't, we're sort of half and half on, correct?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  I looked at as a very open question if we were, I knew I was not good enough to do that.

• 18:55Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  It was unclear if Ted was, and he made it clear that he was.

• 18:59Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  So those were some big decisions.

• 19:02Kara Swisher?

  What about one that you look back and you thought, that I should have done sooner? Was it podcasts, the short form, sports?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Um, you know, Android was an example relative to Microsoft of an ad-supported operating system. Prior to Android, there was just operating systems that you paid for.

• 19:20Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  And when Google did that, it was very innovative and got a lot of traction. And then essentially Roku has done that for televisions. And I didn't figure that out, that there was that kind of opportunity. So that would be the missed decision.

• 19:37Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. Advertising was another one that you all didn't.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  There's advertising on the channel. That's pretty straightforward because lots of cable networks do that.

• 19:45Kara Swisher?

  You didn't want to do it. I remember you saying.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was more HBO focused.

• 19:48Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And I think the team is, you know, let's be broad and you can have choice. So again, you can pay for no advertisements, which is really what YouTube has gone to too. You can get YouTube premium and have no ads. So I think we both have the more expensive version with no ads or the less expensive version with ads. So.

• 20:06Kara Swisher?

  I think people are used to that. You were co-CEOs with Ted Sarandos, you mentioned before you stepped down in that role. He's still doing it with Greg Peters, taking your place. Why do you think the co-CEO structure works well for Netflix?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Just because the people, Ted and Greg are so committed to success in the company and thinking company first. They're low ego. They work well together. I don't think it's a general technique, you know, over the next 100 years of Netflix. I'll bet co-CEOs.

• 20:31Kara Swisher?

  100 years.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Only 10, 20%.

• 20:33Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  So.

• 20:34Kara Swisher?

  You think Netflix is going to be around 100 years?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:37Kara Swisher?

  Why?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Because I think humans are going to be around and humans love entertainment.

• 20:41Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Did you ever almost sell Netflix anytime? I remember Yahoo thinking about buying you.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  We never got into negotiation with everybody. So it wasn't that close. But there's lots of people who took a look at it.

• 20:52Kara Swisher?

  Right. Did you ever consider selling?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the very early days, both with Blockbuster and Amazon, we thought about it.

• 20:59Kara Swisher?

  Because you're like, ugh, this is.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  They're just, they're good companies and it might have been since, but neither got into any negotiations. So it was sort of just pretty loose.

• 21:09Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I used to always tell Bob Iger to buy you all early. He didn't listen to me. Maybe he should have, maybe he shouldn't have. They did a pretty good job.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  They did.

• 21:17Kara Swisher?

  The disruptor image has been part of Netflix. Has Netflix lost that? Do you feel like it has? Because it's hard to be a disruptor when you are.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  I don't think it, I bet to most consumers who didn't know about DVD or the various other battles, they come to it, young people, it's just like YouTube's not a disruptor at this point.

• 21:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  It's an establishment.

• 21:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  And it's good at its model. And I think we're the same.

• 21:40Kara Swisher?

  You consider them establishment compared to.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  I think that's what consumers think of it as.

• 21:45Kara Swisher?

  Although I would say they'd have less competitors than you do. Like you have now have Hollywood breathing down your neck.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, TikTok is their big competitor, which again, you know, on a phone is very competitive, not so much on the TV.

• 21:57Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. So your departure came after a months-long bidding war between Netflix and Paramount to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix had it. You had a picture of Ted, you know, in front of the Warner Brother with David Zasloff. We know how that ended. Now it's merged with Paramount. What changes for Netflix and for the entertainment industry more broadly? I mean, you, you were for that deal, but you all walked away too when the price got too high. And I think a lot of people feel that $80 billion debt is insane unless you're Larry Ellison, I guess. And even if you're Larry Ellison, it's pretty lofty.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, ultimately, we got a couple billion dollar breakup fee from Paramount.

• 22:34Kara Swisher?

  That was nice.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  So that was good. And then we're.

• 22:36Kara Swisher?

  Sweet, sweet Larry money.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  You know, so, but again, it's really the focus on the content and how do we have, you know, a higher percentage of the top 100 shows of the year and top 100 films? That's the real animating force for Ted and Greg.

• 22:54Kara Swisher?

  Right. And was it a good thing not to get it?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  It's all price intermediate. At the price that we had bid, we were really happy. And then the price went up a bunch and it seemed a bridge too far.

• 23:05Kara Swisher?

  A bridge too far. And it just was like, we can't do this. It doesn't make economic sense to us.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we could have done it. It's not a chance, but chose not to.

• 23:13Kara Swisher?

  How do you look at what Paramount has done? What is their biggest challenge? The debt?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, they're figuring out how to integrate and how to, but they've, they've done reasonably well. David hired Enon, it's very sharp. And so they seem to have a good start.

• 23:30Kara Swisher?

  And what is Netflix's next move?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Continuing to take the content up. So that's, that's the big thing.

• 23:38Kara Swisher?

  So distribution isn't, it's not AI, it's not, it's opportunity?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  There's a lot of AI behind the scenes, but for consumers, they don't really see that. They just see, oh God, there's a lot of interesting films.

• 23:50Kara Swisher?

  We're going to move our conversation over to the Masters of Scale Conference in front of a live audience read. We'll finish up here in the studio on the other side.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 24:00Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 24:10Kara Swisher?

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• 24:51Kara Swisher?

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• 25:25Kara Swisher?

  Support for the show comes from Framer. If you want to create a website that looks great, feels handcrafted and comes together fast and seamlessly, then look no further than Framer. It's a complete website platform, not just a builder, so teams can lodge and keep improving their sites in one place. It helps creators, teams and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. You're able to prompt, inspect, edit and publish in one place at a whole new pace. On Framer, agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale while people bring taste, judgment and control. And it all takes place in the same workspace where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed and published. These ideas land on the canvas, stay editable and can

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• 26:36Kara Swisher?

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• 27:17Kara Swisher?

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• 27:50Kara Swisher?

  I want to talk about AI with this crowd. And you sit on the board of Anthropic, one of the leading AI firms. You're very bullish about it. Recently, we've seen calls for a slowdown from Anthropic CEO Dario Amade, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and even Elon. The public largely wants it too. The negativity is at huge levels polling.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's split because if you ask, "What's your consumer usage?", they're like, "Oh, I like that." If you ask about data centers, it's hugely negative.

• 28:15Kara Swisher?

  Yes, which is a proxy.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Or joblessness.

• 28:17Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it's a proxy.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  It's got two personalities.

• 28:18Kara Swisher?

  It definitely does. Talk about how you're weighing this right now. How fast is too fast? And of course, there's the famous person who quit and said the 10% chance. They knew it then. I've been at dinner parties. They've talked about it. Talk a little bit about where it is, because it definitely illuminated. A lot of people just put their head up when they saw that.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't think he was the ideal messenger, but your point is, it's in the meme, right?

• 28:42Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  The meme is there. Look, we lived through a terrible era with nuclear weapons, where we could have blown each other up, and there were times when it was close. And I don't want to repeat. I don't want to...

• 28:55Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Just because we got through a 10% chance of nuclear holocaust, let's not do that again.

• 29:00Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  So let's keep the odds way, way low about what it can do. But on the same lens, you can get a lot of attention by saying the world's going to end tomorrow. We humans, we're very focused on Armageddon, whether that's the...

• 29:14Kara Swisher?

  Well, except it's the creators who are saying it. Elon said, they all do, all the creator. It's not like me or someone else. It's the actual maker.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  No, but it resonates. So what's happening is, the public resonates on it. So then it's really fun to say those things, you know, at times. And, you know, it's not impossible. So I'm not saying it's, you know, like, maybe using one of these things, you can crack into the Russia nuclear arsenal and launch it. That would be catastrophic.

• 29:41Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I would imagine. A nuclear bomb can ruin your day. Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  There are scenarios that, you know, it's not zero probability.

• 29:49Kara Swisher?

  Right. But where do you see it now? Because, you know, you said, you've said AI will usher...

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Because AI is a force for... I mean, think about our daily interaction with it. Like, it's using it as AI doctor for, like, consumer medicine, you know, is fantastic. It's helping me in all kinds of design tasks. It's helping writing software. It's helping on... I mean, my day-to-day experience is incredibly positive on it. I get frustrated when it's not quite as intelligent as I want it to be, or the voice doesn't quite work. But again, its rate of improvement is substantial.

• 30:21Kara Swisher?

  But you said it will usher in the great act of creative destruction. Explain what you mean by that.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Well, sure. I think what's going to happen there is companies are going to get very competitive. So take Oracle. There'll be an Oracle challenger that will use AI and build an incredible database or set of applications that'll be much lower cost. And that's the creative destruction. It's going to speed up capitalism and give entrepreneurs... I mean, there'll be new ones who compete with Netflix. There'll be new ones who compete with everybody using AI. So that's the creative destruction. But that's not the same or anything to do with humans and kind of risk. So remember, in AI, there's sort of two big classes. There's the misuse case, sort of the North Koreans use one of these things, or the Unabomber

• 31:10Speaker 01

  uses AI to do something really bad. So that's the misuse case. And then there's the loss of control, where the AI gets so smart, we can't... the sort of HAL scenario. So we have to protect against both of those. We've gotten much better just in the last 18 months with a thing called classifiers, which is like a front end on your AI usage. So if you ask it, you know, "How do I rebuild a COVID-19?", you know, it doesn't let you do it, because that's this separate subsystem, the classifiers. It's not perfect, but...

• 31:41Kara Swisher?

  But right now, I mean, pretty much all the AI guys are at the White House every Tuesday for lunch, it seems like, which is... CNN always calls, it's like, "Tech people are at the White House." I'm like, "Call me when they're not, actually." That's what I'd like to comment on. But self-policing, self-policing, no guardrails, self-policing, no regulation. How do you look at that?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that's the best way, because I think this, you know, if we go down that path, as we are, there will be incidents that happen. And hopefully, they're not too awful, but you don't know. And then there'll be regulation, you know? So we tend to wait till something happens. And then think of the global financial crisis 2008, and then a whole bunch of new regulations come in. So that's the likely case here, unfortunately.

• 32:32Kara Swisher?

  Might it be a better idea to possibly anticipate those things, like you do every 10 minutes?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  You should be at the White House, you know, so...

• 32:40Kara Swisher?

  I feel like I'm not going to get invited to the White House. Crazy.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  It's... Dario was there for dinner.

• 32:45Kara Swisher?

  Dario looked like he wanted to run out. What was going on? He was hiding behind people. He was like...

• 32:50Speaker 01

  He got called to the front. It was crazy.

• 32:52Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. I thought they were gonna, like, I thought it was going to be a glory of the flies, and he was going to end up in a bad situation.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Look, I think regulation, I think, would give us a higher expected value, lower the chance of an incident, because we want AI to get better and better and better so that it can do these things for us. And the public will demand, you know, draconian limits if it does something horrible.

• 33:16Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Right? And so it's really in all of our interests to avoid that. And so that's what everyone's working really hard to make sure their systems are safe. But it's tricky, like, with the hugging face, that as much as we try, there are some unpredictable things that are happening.

• 33:34Kara Swisher?

  Right. So if you tell it to cheat, it's going to do really good at that, for example?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, they didn't tell it to cheat. They told it not to cheat, and it did anyway. That's the kind of scary part about it.

• 33:44Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, because I don't know what it trained on. Wait, humanity. You see opportunities for AI to disrupt education. This has been a particular area of interest to you. You told Semaphore that AI is going to quote, "First, much better than the typical, and then much better than the very best than all teachers," which is something to say. Now, evidence suggests the opposite, that AI in classroom is worse for kids, and it cannot stimulate emotional skills, social emotional skills, critical thinking that teachers teach. So why do you remain bullish on education?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Well, you know, look, if you look at the usefulness of drugs 200 years ago, it was pretty negative, because they weren't good drugs.

• 34:20Kara Swisher?

  No.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  And if you look at the usefulness of AI for tutoring, it's not that good right now. So you have to back to the exponential. You have to think, okay, how good is AI going to be at stimulating human beings for learning, as opposed to give them the answer in two or four years? And I think it's going to be tremendous, because AI is going to be tremendous at many, many things. So most of the time you use AI, you want the answers. You want it crisp. You want it right. And some of the time, you want to learn how to do something. Okay? And that's this different modality. And we have to spend enough time on that training data and motivational. But humans, especially young humans, learn really well, one-to-one. Okay? Where there's a person, an adult, who knows it and is questioning them. And I started

• 35:05Speaker 01

  as a math tutor, and then eventually became a math teacher. Okay? And I went from one kid to then, you know, 30 or 40 kids. And it's a lot harder, because you just, you know, the kids are learning less per hour.

• 35:17Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  So the idea is to have every kid have a tutor. And we can't quite afford that today, because that's sort of, you know, 100 bucks an hour stuff.

• 35:25Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  But if it's an AI, it's possible. So I think what we're going to see is, again, over the next two to four years, we'll have generalized tutors that teach you a lot of things. Teach you medieval history, if you want. And it's, we'll quiz you and bring up different pieces of history and back and forth. They make it playful and fun and, you know, age-appropriate. And we'll be able to do the same for a seven-year-old, a 14-year-old. So what I want to do is help bring about AI so that it's nourishing of young brains, not destructive. And if we're too simplistic about the software, well, it's like evaluating drugs, you know, 200 years ago. They don't work.

• 36:04Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's true. And, you know, technology's never been damaging. No, I'm teasing you. Even though you left Netflix, you're still a CEO, right?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, Powder Mountain.

• 36:13Kara Swisher?

  You're the chief ski bum at a semi-private luxury ski resort in Utah called Powder Mountain.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, there's private planes, there's private golf clubs, and now there's private ski resorts. So 500 families, huge mountain. You get it to yourself, so it's always uncrowded. There's fresh snow all the time.

• 36:33Kara Swisher?

  That must be nice, yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. So it's like running a private airline. It's a very boutique thing.

• 36:37Kara Swisher?

  So why did you pick this?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Because I fucking love it. I mean, you know, it's not, it's not service to the world. It's just so joyful.

• 36:48Kara Swisher?

  No, no, it's not service to the world.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  I'm like the little mayor of the town. I walk around. I'm the owner, you know? It's a fantasy. And, oh my God.

• 36:55Kara Swisher?

  Is this like a very dull Yellowstone, right?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  No, it's very exciting. It's got all this art.

• 37:01Kara Swisher?

  No, you don't want to be like that Yellowstone.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  It's a very exciting Yellowstone. Yellowstone was the first...

• 37:05Kara Swisher?

  No, I mean the TV show. You don't want to do that. There's a lot of murder.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  There's the Yellowstone, private ski club.

• 37:09Kara Swisher?

  There's a lot of murder happening there. I hope that's not the case in your case. So you just want to do that?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  So it's just an incredible joy. It's very physical. It's sort of designing this building, what the menu is, you know, all these things. So, you know, like, other ex-CEOs get a sports team or a 500-foot boat. I have a ski mountain.

• 37:28Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  So think of it as, it's an indulgence.

• 37:31Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Okay? Of the first order, but it is super fun. And that's also got a public ski side, which will make them better and better.

• 37:38Kara Swisher?

  Great. But very last question, though. You've also been very politically active, especially on the Democratic side. You're about the only one. It's you and Mark Cuban sort of wandering around.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Did you see Bloomberg just put 80 million into it?

• 37:49Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, and Mike Bloomberg just put 80 million. Are you going to do that too?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  I have not done that.

• 37:52Kara Swisher?

  Okay. Will you? Like, today?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  There's no plan to do that.

• 37:55Kara Swisher?

  Okay. Why? Either what happened to all of them, and what didn't happen to you? Like, why?

• 38:05Kara Swisher?

  Basically, why aren't you fellating Trump?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Well, you're asking a serious question, which is, I think Biden's legacy in a couple of areas, crypto in particular, was very obstructive of any progress, very labor union, very traditional. And a lot of people developed fears that the crypto approach would become the AI approach. And so that triggered, you know, like, think about not inviting Elon to the electric vehicle summit.

• 38:35Kara Swisher?

  Oh, I heard about that.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, those kinds of things, you asked, why did that whole community turn right? Because they feel like they got pushed out of the Democratic coalition that, you know, was sort of Obama-like before, or, you know, before that Clinton.

• 38:51Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, but they're not toddlers. They can deal with it in a different way.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Well, they want an America where there's a lot of things done and a lot of invention and a lot of technological progress. So they're North Stars, technological progress for human prosperity.

• 39:05Kara Swisher?

  Why not you?

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Why not be?

• 39:07Kara Swisher?

  Why didn't you, why aren't you at lunch at the White House?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Well, I was not that big in crypto. I'm kind of anti-crypto, and so it didn't offend me.

• 39:14Kara Swisher?

  Right. But you've been a staunch, pretty Democratic supporter.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I remain working within, and a lot of the work I do is unchartered schools, a form of school choice, and that's tough in the Democratic coalition. You know, it's a lot of arguments going on there. I can't really explain why I didn't change, because I see hope in the Democrats, but there's good things the Republicans do, too, and you want there to be this competition. I mean, you know, that's very healthy for our society. And, you know, Trump's done a lot of terrible things. He tweeted when I got off the board, like, you know, "Reed, what a criminal," blah, blah, blah. So 25 years of all this Netflix, and that's what I got.

• 39:58Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  So it's like, okay. Well, and I've never met him, so I don't know where they're going with that, so.

• 40:04Kara Swisher?

  Don't go changing, as I say. Anyway, I think you didn't do it because you're an adult, that's why.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  But again, if you installize all Republicans, you're not really moving the country forward.

• 40:14Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, no, I'm not infantile.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  But, well, if you say, "I'm an adult because I stay Democratic," that's, I think you're having fun with it, but...

• 40:22Kara Swisher?

  Not an adult because you stay Democrat, is that you don't take it personally and you have, you push for the things you want. That's different.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Some of the people take things personally, and that's not great, I agree, but I would say that the regulatory state and the assumptions about that got to a stage where it was inhibiting, think of energy development, think of all that, think of the abundance argument now on the left, which is, you know, the abundance argument is, we all became Ralph Nader's, and a good life was how many projects did you block? Okay? That was the critique from a Democrat about the left. So I think that has a lot of validity, which got triggered from that rightward move that you referred to. So hopefully, we win them back in this next cycle, and, you know, if a Democrat wins

• 41:12Speaker 01

  in Texas, that's going to be an amazing sign.

• 41:14Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute. Support for the show comes from Shopify. If you have a great idea for business, don't let another year go by without acting on it. Shopify can get you up and running fast. If you move quickly, you could even have your business launched in time to take advantage of Black Friday. Shopify helps launch a store and start selling in a few simple steps without needing to be an e-commerce expert. And sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant can help with business tasks along the way, from store setup to planning promotions. Shopify's pre-built themes and AI site builder can make it easier to create a professional storefront.

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• 43:57Kara Swisher?

  We're back in the studio. Now, every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Yours comes from author, venture capitalist, and former Sequoia Capital managing partner, Sir Michael Moritz. Let's listen to it.

• 44:07Speaker 05

  Hello, Reed. You're on the board of Anthropic amongst all your many other activities, and therefore you've got a front-row seat on the world of AI. Where do you stand on regulation? And if you're for regulations, how would you go about fashioning them, and what do you think they should cover?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Well, a very broad topic there.

• 44:28Kara Swisher?

  Very broad topic.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's inevitable that there'll be some regulations. The art is finding out, you know, what's the right level that keeps everybody safe and allows us to improve the services tremendously, so that AI has a chance to do all the wonderful things. You know, Dario talks about it as the age of miracles that's coming, and they're very passionate about having AI invent amazing things for all of us humans that feels miraculous. We want to make that come about.

• 44:59Kara Swisher?

  How do you make it when the public feelings about it, and I know consumers like it, there's an uptake of it, but it's, the anger is very high among people, and of course, it's around data centers, and it's a proxy for job worries, everything else. A lot of the ways that the creators have put it forward is, yeah, we're coming for your jobs. The way they talk about it has been terrifying to a lot of average people. How do you shift that idea that it doesn't feel either, you know, billionaire-funded, we'll do what we want, the Gilded Age, the railroad's coming through, it's going to be good for you, you'll see, even if we go over your farm, or your kids are using AI and they, they get messed up mentally. You know, there's all these lawsuits. How do you change that narrative?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I would say, you know, we don't know, essentially, at this point, how to change the big narrative, other than going out and showing the benefits. So we got to actually cure some diseases. That'll help.

• 45:55Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  We got to have people be able to use AI in their lives to great gain more and more, and so that becomes the dominant theme, is the things they use. And, you know, AI is working in the sense of, we all are using it a lot more and more. So I think it's going to be, work out very well and very positive. Data centers, yeah, you wouldn't want them in a suburban neighborhood, and the value of a data center has gone up so much so quickly, the developers have put them in many not-so-great places.

• 46:24Kara Swisher?

  Or you have Elon having the, you know, running the gas-powered ones in Memphis, or Kevin O'Leary in Utah.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  So basically, the rules around where you build data centers, the zoning was not tight enough.

• 46:34Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  So they popped up in a lot of places they shouldn't be. But if it's in a super rural area, then, you know, it's fine.

• 46:41Kara Swisher?

  I would argue, even then, I've interviewed many mayors, and they have tried to put in what you would call good data centers, right? And we, we already have data centers everywhere in this country. People don't realize that. But he tried to put in one. Everything was right. Everyone was informed, no secret deals, everything you'd want, a closed-loop water system.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:01Kara Swisher?

  They rejected it.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  And where was it?

• 47:03Kara Swisher?

  Michigan.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Michigan?

• 47:05Kara Swisher?

  Wouldn't do it. The anger was so high.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:08Kara Swisher?

  And it has to do with billionaires, it has to do with anger, feeling like corruption, feeling like the Gilded Age. I think that was part of it, like, no, we don't trust these people. They're not here now.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  And this is a vote against the establishment.

• 47:20Kara Swisher?

  I guess. It was everybody, though. It wasn't, it was bipartisan, too.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I understand, but it's, but it's like, stop, we don't want this to go ahead.

• 47:27Kara Swisher?

  Right, yeah.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Well, that just shows you the serious issues that AI has reputationally that we have to continue. But you asked the question, I don't have a solution for how to solve that. So for now, we're continuing to, we're kind of improving the AI, make it more relevant to people's lives and more useful.

• 47:45Kara Swisher?

  Are you worried there would be, because the opposite is a disaster, a misuse of it, that will cause everybody to want to really regulate it in a way that might be problematic for its development?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Well, some regulation is probably appropriate.

• 47:59Kara Swisher?

  All right, well, answer his question. What would you say? What would be a good piece of regulation? The front, there's the frontier act.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Like certifying around safety, you know, is it going to break out and do things we don't understand? What are the barriers to using it? You know, say, in North Korea, to design a really bad virus, something like that. So biosafety is probably the biggest one.

• 48:19Kara Swisher?

  So what's preventing that serious discussions among all citizens besides, and Trump is self-policing, that's his answer.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and today, both OpenAI and Anthropic have really good classifiers that's a front end on the AI, so if you try to get it to design a bad virus, it will stop.

• 48:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, but that's self-policing. Do you think that's an adequate way to regulate this?

• 48:43Speaker 01

  You know, it seems to be for now. It doesn't apply to, like, some of the other models.

• 48:49Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  So, and, but they're not yet that strong, so, but they're going to become stronger.

• 48:55Kara Swisher?

  Should the government step in and actually take the responsibility like it did? You mentioned before nuclear energy.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think biosafety is the clearest case, where I think the government should require that all AI... Are protected against being able to be used to design very bad viruses.

• 49:10Kara Swisher?

  What else? Give me something else.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Let's start there.

• 49:12Kara Swisher?

  Start there, just one. Because you know, nuclear energy is very well regulated. So are pharmaceuticals. So are airplanes. Why is this? Why does this get a free pass?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Well, when you say well regulated, I'm not sure that it's highly regulated.

• 49:26Kara Swisher?

  Highly, planes don't often fall out of the sky. We haven't died of a nuclear bomb in forever.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. On the other hand, the nuclear industry basically died. So you know,

• 49:37Kara Swisher?

  It'll be back.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  The post Three Mile Island. So I would say those it's more, you don't want to use the nuclear industry as an example of good regulation. That was passed over, regulated and led to a lot of problems.

• 49:50Kara Swisher?

  Should there be international treaties around AI?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Potentially, you know, right now it's mostly a US company thing and some Chinese companies.

• 50:00Kara Swisher?

  Right. But should there be a multilateral effort by everybody?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  That probably is pretty complicated. And the question, you know, again, once there are many nuclear powers, you kind of have to do that for nuclear. But right now it's us and China. So that's not the the critical issue. Critical issues, biosafety and preventing bad intent people from using AI to design very bad bioweapons.

• 50:24Kara Swisher?

  Right. Who do you think should be at that table? To me, it looks like it's only the CEOs with financial interests at that table with Trump. It's not citizens. It's not scientists. It's not other experts. It's not critics, which is the way most people feel democracy should work. It's only people who either handed money for the ballroom or he considers powerful. Why is it turned out that way?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that's a reasonable critique of Trump's approach, but there's lots of things you could critique about Trump's approach.

• 50:52Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  That's one of them.

• 50:53Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  I think the key thing is Trump's going to be president for the next two years. So let's try to figure out where we can work with him to have, he cares about biosafety, too. He doesn't want a bio incident on his watch. So we got to work all together to, again, minimize the chance of a of a bioweapon.

• 51:12Kara Swisher?

  A bioweapon, yeah. I'm not so sure he thinks about it that much, but that's just me. That's just me. I'm sure he doesn't, wouldn't love it, but it's not, I don't think it's top of mind. The the ballroom is top of mind, though.

• 51:24Kara Swisher?

  Now, a couple more things. Unlike a lot of other tech CEOs, you continue to give money mainly to Democratic candidates and causes, I mentioned before.

• 51:32Kara Swisher?

  Given Trump's sagging approval ratings right now and the potential for midterms to break hard for the Democrats, we'll see. Do you think there's going to be a shift in Silicon Valley coming? I wouldn't, people are always like Silicon Valley used to be very liberal. I'm like, it never was in my experience. It wasn't any, there wasn't anything. Or you'd have a John Chambers or Meg Whitman on the outlier of Republicans. You'd have very liberal people, maybe a few, and it was largely the workers. But I never saw it as anything, really. So what is going to happen if it breaks for the Democrats with tech? Because they've they've built a lot of enemies.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Super hard to tell. There's so many scenarios. Does the Dems win both the House and the Senate or just the House? What does Trump do in reaction to that? So it's it's hard to say what's going to happen in the next two years.

• 52:18Kara Swisher?

  What would you want the Democrats? They've already talked about subpoenas. They've talked about data centers has been a big flashpoint for voters and it's become an issue. I think AI will become one of the big issues of the next presidential election. What would you like to see from Democrats without leaning too hard on the tech as villains narrative?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  My guess is after the midterms, people are going to be thinking about the presidential election.

• 52:40Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  And trying to govern in a way such that the voters want to say, let's have a Democratic president. And so on the Republican side, Trump's power will be less and the new candidates running for Republican nomination will be more. So then it will be another of those great contests for ideas, you know, how much regulation? How do the benefits of AI spread to as many people as possible? Those questions.

• 53:08Kara Swisher?

  What would be the one thing tech could do to, you know, because the the image right now, including movies that are coming out, is not good, is not a particularly good image.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Think of pharma. Pharma is hated by the general public and to my eyes is continuing to do amazing and positive work. But people hate the high drug prices. And so pharma is deeply hated. So sometimes like my pharma friends, you know, they're like scientists, doctors, and they just have to get used to it and continue to make progress and accept that. And they've never really been able to change. I mean, you know, they did the COVID vaccine in a year, remarkable. Did people fall in love with those companies? They did not.

• 53:48Kara Swisher?

  They did not. But what could happen when, because there is, there was this sort of, all tech people are heroes. And now it's villainous. It's really quite villainous, if you look at all. And I don't think either.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  It's gone to the natural state. I mean, think of banking leaders are thought of as villainous. Pharma leaders are thought of as villainous. Airline leaders thought of as villainous. So you kind of have to think, okay, that's the natural state of how much of the public thinks about business.

• 54:16Kara Swisher?

  Although initially, tech leaders were not seen that way, right?

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in a new industry, you know, where it doesn't have that big an impact and it's all fun.

• 54:23Kara Swisher?

  Right. It's like, oh, Christopher Columbus, he just, oh, wait a minute. Just like.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, movie industry is generally well thought of.

• 54:31Kara Swisher?

  But is there something tech could do to, you know, because there's also an anti-billionaire.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 54:37Kara Swisher?

  You're fighting the billionaire tax here in California.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think tech has become another industry, like banking or pharma, that's a very important and, you know, very competitive and very dynamic, but not well liked by the public.

• 54:55Kara Swisher?

  So they just got to get used to not being liked.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 54:57Kara Swisher?

  What if they just did nice things?

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Did that work in pharma?

• 55:01Kara Swisher?

  It worked eventually for Carnegie. We all think of him well now, even though he was villainous then.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was railroad guy. And I mean, that was, you know, it's like Leland Stanford. I mean, I think 100 years.

• 55:11Kara Swisher?

  That asshole. Oh, we like the university. So it's 100 years. I mean, should they be more philanthropy? The biggest philanthropist is Mackenzie Scott right now, you know, who quietly.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  She does amazing work. But again, you grew up in a time when tech was popular. And so you're you're aching for that romantic day. And if you look at other industries, that's not the norm.

• 55:35Kara Swisher?

  You know what I would like, honestly? I'd like them to shut up. Like, they talk too much. They tweet too much. They tell you what they think of everything too. I want them just to go off and make great things and not be involved in every aspect of our lives.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  So a variant of shut up and sing.

• 55:49Kara Swisher?

  Shut up and, yeah, shut up and play. Shut up and play would be like, shut up and make. That would be really nice. But they seem to, they're ubiquitous in a way that I think people are, have had enough. And, you know, you've been against this billionaire tax, but there really is an anger right now among income inequality. What needs to be done to solve that problem? Because even if you're not for this particular bill, and I would agree with you, this one is problematic, there is a push for more taxes for the wealthy, like, or corporations, which has have gone, they're, they've paid less and less year after year. How do you solve that problem? Because that's, again, an enduring problem of our country.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been a big fan of higher taxes for rich people, especially closing various loopholes like long term capital gains being cheap, estate taxes, all of those things. This particular ballot initiative in California Prop 40 is super poorly written, and it's a one time supposedly 5% tax. And if it passes, then like, what's the next one going to be 50%? You know, it's just sort of crazy smash and grab. You know, if they had done, you know,

• 56:57Kara Swisher?

  Alternative minimum tax.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  A 10th of a percent every year, you know, and it was like small and ongoing. And then I think they probably would have won. So but that doesn't appear to be the goals.

• 57:11Kara Swisher?

  And do you ever see yourself running for office or doing anything like that?

• 57:15Speaker 01

  No, the people who are really good at it are synthesizers, and they listen a lot. And I'm more of like a public intellectual type, you know, like a battler personality, which is not what you want in politics.

• 57:27Kara Swisher?

  Is there something like critical that you want to work on? Education has been one of them. Is there something?

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been working on education, a combination of charter schools and AI for developing our human brains. So that's the main focus for me is how will AI be used in education?

• 57:44Kara Swisher?

  And if you were starting Netflix today, or a version of Netflix, what would it be? What would it, look, how would you build it?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Well, it'd have to be, you know, around AI and it would have to be something different than Netflix, because competing with them is hard. So I'm not sure what the particular area would be. But there's so much opportunity when you look at all the young startups now taking advantage of the AI dislocation. They're going to be able to build amazing products, both physical and virtual.

• 58:15Kara Swisher?

  Is there one that stands out for you, you've seen lately?

• 58:18Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I'm following a lot in the education space narrowly. So there's a great one called ELO. It's hello without the H. That's fantastic for reading and really improves your confidence that listens to them and is a very patient coach. And now it's doing math also.

• 58:34Kara Swisher?

  And it's AI.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't know that in it, but it is AI.

• 58:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I don't know if I'd let my kid use it. I'll be honest with you.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's probably why it's not marketed as an AI tutor.

• 58:43Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you shouldn't. Don't say it. Don't say it.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, but it's very stimulating for the kids. And then they're not doing YouTube Kids.

• 58:54Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. And then if you were, one advice to someone who's doing a startup today, and one advice to a CEO who needs to go, you have gone with great elegance, I would say. Many CEOs do not. They get dragged screaming. What would be each advice on each end of that career?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  You know, for the startup, I'll be selfish and say I wrote a book called No Rules Rules, which is all the things I wish I understood when I did a startup, lessons of growing an organization. And then for people thinking of retiring, I would say, you know, there's a lot of life left in doing things. And it's great to retire and at least from one career, and then engage in a bunch of other work.

• 59:38Kara Swisher?

  All right, Ree, thank you so much.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  What fun, Kara. Thank you.

• 59:45Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Vicky Vergalino, Michelle Aloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Doobie, and Megan Burney. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Eamon Whalen, Jim Mackler, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. 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.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

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