Sam Harris on Silicon Valley’s Slide into Techno-Authoritarianism

One of 2025’s most memorable images was of Silicon Valley’s billionaire CEOs lined up in the front rows at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was visual proof of the tech industry’s embrace of MAGA’s authoritarian-style of politics — one it has benefited from considerably over the last year. Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has been using his podcast, “Making Sense,” to talk about the ways tech moguls are corroding our politics, and although he used to be close with some of them, he’s become a vocal critic of their support for Trump. Kara and Sam talk about why he thinks the left is to blame for the tech billionaires’ shift to the right, why all of us are bad at sorting through the glut of information we find online, and the potential risks that come with the Trump administration’s hands-off approach to A. I. They also talk about what possible tech regulation could look like, and whether everyday people stand a chance against tech oligarchs and their platforms. (Please note: This interview was recorded before President Trump signed an executive order to block states from passing A. I. regulation.) 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

  In Elon's world, there is no need to explain

• 0:03Kara Swisher?

  The shift.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  This change of heart, right? So he is now coming back to a man who he told us all is, if not a pedophile himself, culpable for the rape and molestation of underage girls, right? And somehow that's fine now.

• 0:19Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm. Just kidding, folks.

• 0:32Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. As we look back on 2025, one of the year's most memorable images was of all the tech billionaires at President Donald Trump's inauguration. They were there. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Tim Cook mingling with the Trump family, his future cabinet members, and other stars of the MAGA universe. It was visual proof of the political shift to the far right that has been taking place at the highest levels of Silicon Valley and in tech more broadly. Over the last year, these same men have benefited a lot from Trump's authoritarian-style politics insofar that he's let them do pretty much whatever they want, which is exactly how they like it. But amid rising fears that we're now in an AI bubble,

• 1:18Kara Swisher?

  there's a growing realization that those benefits may come at a huge cost to Americans sooner than people thought. I wanted to talk to Sam Harris about Silicon Valley's shift towards authoritarian politics. Sam is a neuroscientist and the host of the Making Sense podcast, and he's been talking a lot lately about the power these tech billionaires have and the ways they're hollowing out democracy. I was really struck by how out there Sam was on this. He was very close to most of the tech moguls. We disagreed on a lot of things, including his thoughts on Islam. And we've had some difficult conversations over the years. But I was really struck by, I would say, courage on his behalf, because he was saying things that no one else is, besides myself and some other journalists. And it came at a cost to him that was probably pretty high.

• 2:03Kara Swisher?

  And he sort of is very articulately expressing what a lot of people in tech feel and are too cowardly to say, and he is not. So let's get into my conversation with Sam. Our expert question today comes from Kim Scott. She's the author of the book Radical Candor and a former executive at Google and Apple, so don't go anywhere.

• 2:30Kara 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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• 4:16Kara Swisher?

  Sam, thanks for coming on, on.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Happy to be here. Great to see you, Kara.

• 4:21Kara Swisher?

  Good to see you. After a while, I don't remember the last time we talked. It was many years ago. But things have changed, as they say. And when it comes to Silicon Valley's shift towards authoritarian politics, the word we're hearing a lot these days is techno fascism. I want you to talk a little About your journey, because at the beginning of your, you were like the toast of these people. Like, they loved talking to you and pointing you out to me and stuff like that. And much like Yuval Harari, that has changed, right? I think Yuval wrote a pretty critical book of where tech was going. And you yourself have changed in the way you think about it. Maybe that's not quite right, but I'd love to know how you define the word techno fascism. And if you think it's the right word to describe this moment.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so to start with the personal, I don't think I've changed. My views are more or less exactly as they were, at least on the relevant topics that I think we're going to touch.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  No, I just noticed a bunch of people change around me and several of these key people were friends. So, you know, for me, I don't think this is so much the case for Yuval, but for me, it really is a story of finding friends with immense public platforms, you know, doing a lot of harm and finding it impossible not to comment on that harm. And really, that's just spelling the end of the friendship. But I think there's a problem. I mean, I occasionally use the word fascist myself, but I think there's a problem in using the term. One is just so triggering for anyone right of center who thinks that the analogy to what was happening in Weimar Germany is just false on many levels. And on certain points, it is false.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  So fascism is just a historically contingent movement, which is, I mean, I think it's much easier to say something like authoritarianism, you know, or tyranny, or something more generic. So I think a lot of these guys have, for whatever reason, unmasked their inner authoritarian and they're not so fond of real democratic institutions at the moment. And they're fond of oligarchy and kleptocracy and authoritarian puncture of most of what has kept our system as healthy as it's been for as long as we can remember. And I mean, sorry, international alliances are unwinding as a result of this, et cetera.

• 6:45Kara Swisher?

  You haven't changed. That is absolutely true. But one of the things, and I feel like I had a very similar purge, although I did see elements of it, right? They were irritated by the press. They often structured their companies in ways that they had full control, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, but they always wanted complete control of their businesses, which I suppose I didn't mind, right? It made a lot of sense back then because a lot of people got run over by VCs or whatever, the stock market. And so I understood why they were that way. But what would be the word used? Techno authoritarianism? Or is there a word?

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Well, it sort of depends on which person and phenomenon we're talking about, because I think there are certain flavors of the unraveling here. I mean, on one level, I mean, if you're going to talk about somebody like Elon, so much of it is just trolling and a kind of solipsistic nihilism, right? I mean, he's just, he's just out of touch ethically with the harm he's causing, I think. For me, that's the only way I can explain.

• 7:48Kara Swisher?

  Not new, because he used, remember, he used to sort of attack anyone who had any normal criticism for Teslas, for example, when it was just a product. But go ahead.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so I missed that. Like, I was, you know, I was really just his friend. I really never saw him, you know, in his mode as being a boss. So for me, it's, in speaking about specific people where the relationships are now no longer friendly, I don't know if it's a story of I didn't know who they were in the first place, or, you know, they changed, right? So, you know, either accounts for the data at the moment. But just take, you know, Elon in his brief career as Doge, master of the United States. You know, the person I knew seemed to have been incapable of behaving the way I saw this person behave. I mean, if you're the richest person on earth tasked with making decisions that are suddenly going

• 8:38Speaker 00

  to harm some of the poorest people on earth, if you're, if you're, you know, cutting 20,000 workers in your healthcare workers in Uganda overnight, and you're miserating hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are relying on, on medical aid for tuberculosis or malaria treatment or HIV and many of whom are kids under the age of five, right? If you're doing all that work, then you have all these other jobs and you're the busiest man on earth. Are you going to spend your days and nights shitposting on X and celebrating your destruction of the greatest source of aid to the developing world, USAID, as feeding it into the wood chipper and calling all the people whose lives and careers you're upending over

• 9:22Speaker 00

  there as criminals? I just, I mean, he behaved like a total maniac and, you know, then discovers that, you know, one of the engineers he's hired to do this onerous work is a committed racist and rather than just fire that person, he does a poll on X to see whether he should fire him and then discovers that 80% of his fans actually have a soft spot for racism and then jumps out in front of a crowd and does what looks like a Nazi salute, not once but twice. And then when there's the predictable controversy and association with that, rather than apologize like a sane human being and prove that his heart is actually in the right place, he makes Nazi jokes on X and just trolls everyone. And so there's the spirit of a kind of adolescent am morality. I mean,

• 10:06Speaker 00

  just, I mean, forget about immorality. I mean, I think some people are genuinely sinister and happily create harms, but many people are just detached from the ethical implications of what they do. And in a person like Elon, when what you do is literally affecting the lives of countries at war and the lives of millions, I mean, this is a monstrous evil for which he and his drifting friends are culpable. So and everyone who is maintaining cordial relationships with him and them in that orbit are, in my view, participating in this evil, right? I mean, it's just, there should have been, I mean, right of center, it is such a fever swamp of conspiracism and

• 10:48Speaker 00

  delusion. Elon's reputation is well intact, but Bill Gates is thought of as a, you know, dangerous pedophile who was probably putting chips in us during, you know, within the COVID vaccines to somehow track us. Meanwhile, you know, I mean, Gates, I don't know Bill, you know, he could be an odd person. Leave that aside. There's no question he has held, you know, in his philanthropic work through the Gates Foundation, you know, he and his former wife have saved more lives than anyone in living memory. And it's the opposite of what Elon and his friends did in Sub-Saharan Africa under Doge, and yet right of center, you know, up is down and down is up ethically.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  No one cares about those distinctions.

• 11:34Kara Swisher?

  Right, absolutely, because they're so removed from that. But let's talk about how we got here. Silicon Valley's always had a libertarian streak, or I call it libertarian light, but especially with founders and executives, and the core is the idolatry of innovators, really, and individual entrepreneurs who take risks and get rewarded. Let's talk about that shift, because in this new embrace of authoritarianism and right-wing politics, is it so different from the past? Or what are the roots of the new shift from your perspective? Because you've watched this, you've been closer to them than I have, I've covered them. I'm not their friends, I wouldn't call none of them friends. You've explained the shift towards authoritarianism as a backlash of left-wing moral panic or

• 12:16Kara Swisher?

  wokeness, and that's certainly present when they talk about it. So draw a line for us as you see it.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Well, I do think the backlash against the far left is sincere, because I feel it myself, right? I mean, there's, what happened on the left in democratic politics created a kind of super stimulus politically and ethically, whereas it just got so crazy, or was perceived to be so crazy by everyone, I mean, even people, I consider myself left of center, I don't even consider myself in the center, but on every other relevant issue. But when you have someone like, you know, Kamala Harris running for president against the most odious opponent we've seen in living memory, I mean, somebody who has, you know, done his best to shatter our society with lies and tried to steal an election, all

• 13:04Speaker 00

  the while claiming it was being stolen against him, and engineered a, you know, something like an insurrection, if not attempted coup. The fact that we had a Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, who couldn't disavow her former support for taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries for incarcerated illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense, right? I mean, it's just, I mean, that was so, that kind of thing is so crazy-making, it's such a unnecessary own-goal on the left.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, of course, I think people with gender dysphoria should be, you know, have political equality, et cetera. But, I mean, there was just something, the capture of the, of democratic politics by the, the far-left activist class, where everything was a series of blasphemy tests around identity politics, whether it was the trans issue or Black Lives Matter. It was, I, I do view, so someone like Elon, I mean, when, when Elon said, you know, he's, he's going to go to war against the woke mind virus, and he, he just confessed that he was totally radicalized by the, the experience of, of, you know, in his, in his mind, losing a son to the, into a transgender cult. I think that is

• 14:21Speaker 00

  actually sincere. I don't think there's an ulterior motive behind that. I think that

• 14:25Kara Swisher?

  Perhaps not, perhaps not. But, I mean, I think COVID had a bit to do with it. But, you know, Trump couldn't admit, for example, he lost the election, he couldn't disavow his racist supporters. But each of these tech leaders, I get that it's irritating, but how, how do these tech leaders go from feeling frustrated about the Me Too movement, cancel culture, the Gaza campus protests, and the accusations of racial bias, to supporting someone who tried to overturn a democratic, it seems a bit of a reaction.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Well, so, so I, what I can't explain is why someone in the center, as many of these people were

• 14:56Kara Swisher?

  Claimed to be.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Couldn't keep both grotesque objects in view simultaneously, on the far-left and on the far-right, and in Trumpistan, and, and keep some sense of proportion, right? I mean, so I, I feel everything that Elon presumably felt about, you know, the far-left, certainly virtually everything, and yet, I always saw the danger of Trump and Trumpism as being far more grave to our, you know, to the functioning of our society, right? So I, I think you have to respond to both. But it is, I, I just, I did notice this pendulum swing, that, that everyone who was super sensitized to what was happening on the far-left grew more and more

• 15:41Speaker 00

  acquiescent toward what seemed like the only viable corrective coming from Trump and and Trumpism, right?

• 15:49Kara Swisher?

  And it was it also it was, you know, talking about censorship and then they banned books. It gets the extra step, right? Talking about issues with trans people or possibilities of being having a disagreement over sports, for example, and then going to banning them completely and removing rights. Like, it one is one does not equal the other in any way.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  No, I mean, there's there's no making sense of the failures of coherence among, you know, these new freshly minted fans of Trump and Trumpism. So I mean, if you if you pretended to care about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop because of all the corruption it might have indicated coming from the Biden family, how can you not care about what the Trump family is doing this very hour that that outshines the worst of what could have possibly happened under Biden's watch by a factor of a thousand, right? And it's just, you know, it's like just the Trump family's adventures in cryptocurrency alone, you know, the meme coin. I mean, that should have there's absolutely nothing ever alleged against Biden that holds a candle to that.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  And yet you're not seeing the same people who were tearing their hair out over Hunter Biden's laptop and its suppression by the mainstream media or discussion of its suppression by the mainstream media. It's just it these people are not coherent, right? They're tribal.

• 17:09Kara Swisher?

  I have an explanation. Let's have a hypothetical. Let's say the Biden administration and Democrats had championed all the same woke causes like racial equality and more open immigration policy, trans rights, but they cut taxes and took a hands-off approach to regulating tech and crypto and AI. Do you think we'd still see that shift to the right? Because yes, there are true believers to the MAGA cause, no question, but Shocking to see someone like Sam Altman or Jensen Huang or Tim Cook embrace what is based, and it seems like pure shareholder expediency to me. That's it.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, once you draw the circle wide enough to include a visibly nervous Tim Cook delivering some crappy solid gold Apple merch to the president, I think then you're just talking about political expediency and the thought that they have some fiduciary responsibility running a public company to do whatever it takes to raise their share price in the presence of a very vindictive, very kind of patronage pushing president. And that's, I think that's despicable. I mean, I think it's just an obvious failure of courage

• 18:24Speaker 00

  on all of their parts. If having many billions of dollars personally isn't sufficient to cause you to grow a spine, I don't know what it would take. So every billionaire who bent the knee to this guy, I think, really has something to apologize for in the end. But I think it's explained in those cases by not some newfound respect for Trump as some kind of business genius, but just recognizing that the country's being run by a personality cult, and at the center of that cult is a man whose oxygen really is flattery, right?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  And the only way to get anything done now for at least three plus more years is to pay obeisance to the guy and make him seem, make him feel like a genius in your presence because you're falling in all over him.

• 19:18Kara Swisher?

  Right. Now, there's also a spiritual component. I mean, you've written about issues around religion quite a bit to this embrace of authoritarian politics. Elon Musk used to question the idea of God. Now he claims he's a cultural Christian. There's also Peter Thiel. He gave a series of lectures where he warned that critics of technology and AI were ushering in an arrival of the Antichrist and the destruction of the US. What do you hear where the tech elites invoke religion and spirituality, especially as it relates to tech like Thiel does? Now, Thiel, he had religious feelings, but rest of them, not so much.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, everyone is sort of working out their existential crisis in various ways. So a lot of these guys have gone to Burning Man for years and done psychedelics for years. And the frame you put around all that, conceptually, is somewhat dependent on just the books you've read and the conversations you've had or haven't had and the ideas you've found persuasive. The place where it touches politics in a way that is at least intelligible to me, and some of these concerns I share, as you know, is that I do think there is a zero-sum contest between open societies generally, I mean, even beyond the West, but to talk about, it's

• 20:35Speaker 00

  usually framed as Western culture, but it's beyond that, and Islamic fundamentalism the world over. So we really do have a tension there, which I've spent a lot of time whinging about, and I think the last time we had a podcast, I whinged about that for the full hour. Yeah. But, and to some degree, you know, various characters in this space can probably share that same hobby horse. They look at the fact that in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, you can literally get a crowd of several hundred thousand people out onto the streets of London seemingly in support of Hamas, or effectively in support of Hamas, or at least not disposed to view Hamas as a terrorist organization, et cetera.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  And then somehow that moral confusion spreads to the finest campuses in our own country, right? So we have Columbia, Harvard, et cetera. And then you have Harvard, the presidents of three of those finest colleges brought before Congress, and they can't seem to figure out how to say that support for genocide is against their terms of service. And yes, there's a lot of fine print on all of those moments, and I'm happy to go down any of those rabbit holes if you want to, but the general picture here is one of people left of center being ruled by identity politics and white guilt and a criticism of the West

• 21:58Speaker 00

  that runs so deep, sort of in the vein of Noam Chomsky, such that America's blamed for everything, the West is blamed for everything, it's all colonialism and racism and slavery and awfulness, and we have nothing to be proud of. And...

• 22:13Speaker 00

  You know, there's a lot that makes sense of that. There's also many half-truths and lies, you know, weaving through all of that discourse. And at the end of the day, it's not a, it's just not a healthy way to, to, to run our politics.

• 22:27Kara Swisher?

  Sure, but we talked about the excesses of the left, which were obvious, and that is certainly a rabbit hole. My point is to say tech regulation could usher in the antichrist and the destruction of a country, that is

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I mean, that, you know, on its face seems crazy to me, but I, what I'm just trying to do is draw some point of contact between statements of that kind that seem extreme and cultic and weird and proto fascist to, to some set of concerns that I consider rational, right? So like, so Peter, if I were sitting across, I don't know Peter very well, and I know him, but I think we would both agree that, you know, that, that Western Europe has a problem of assimilation with its Muslim community that we're happy to not have here in America, and we don't want in America, right? So, so the figure, so in some sense, we would both

• 23:17Speaker 00

  agree with the project of let's not let America resemble Belgium with respect to this variable too much.

• 23:26Kara Swisher?

  Sure, but how does it get to anyone who wants tech regulation as the antichrist?

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I mean, that's

• 23:33Kara Swisher?

  I don't even understand it. I just, I think part of me thinks it's cynical.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Well, I think, I think so. I mean, if you imagine jumping from the critique of DEI, right? So what DEI was, in their view, is just a, a, the nullification of anything like meritocracy. We're not going to care about getting the best man or woman for the job. We're just going to care about checking quotas because we're, we're so guilty about, you know, our racist past. And so that from a kind of their pure entrepreneurial frame looks like just a race toward mediocrity and failure. And they don't, you know, so they don't want to be forced to do that. They don't want to

• 24:15Kara Swisher?

  I get it. It's the extreme nature. And also, by the way, it's a meritocracy, not a meritocracy. It often is friends of friends and friends of Peter, and now it's friends of Trump, like,

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:24Kara Swisher?

  because they've gotten, you know, triggered by an obnoxious college student who's kind of allowed to do that on some level when they're younger. But, you know, and it's a sort of a bad faith definition of DEI because excesses are different than Wow, this seems funny that only white guys can win. Like, hmm, this seems on you, unless they're better, right? But what?

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, what you have in the Trump administration is DEI for conspiracists and loons and grifters and sycophants. Right. I mean, this is not, if you care about meritocracy, then you should care that we have the least qualified, you know, high-level state servants we've ever had. I mean, it's just incredible. And there's a few exceptions there, but it's incredible to see who's making these decisions. We've got people who are used to doing condo deals, trying to figure the fate of nations.

• 25:14Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, exactly. So that would be Mr. Whitkoff. The venture capitalist Mark Andreessen did an interview with the New York Times back in January where he explained his shift from Democratic voter to Trump supporter in 2024, although he wasn't very Democrat. I didn't even know his politics, I'll be honest with you. And one thing that comes through in the interview is his core belief that tech companies are run by good people doing good things that make the world a better place. Now, there's plenty of evidence, not that way. So the spread of election disinformation, deep fakes, loss of privacy, lack of safety, increasing polarization, loneliness epidemic. I've been speaking to parents who allege their children died from suicide by any encouragement of chatbots, very compelling and depressing situation. So this shift to MAGA, does it have to do with pure ego?

• 25:57Kara Swisher?

  I feel like I was a little too mean to Andreessen and suddenly he's like, he's the good guy and he couldn't even imagine that some of these things are problematic. It seems like their feelings are hurt a lot by the general public seeing them as bad guys and so they blame Democrats, who mostly were handing glove with them for a very long time, by the way.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Well, there is an asymmetry here, which I've noticed, I mean, among people who are, you know, public figures to one or another degree, who got crosswise with the left and got vilified by people whose politics they really shared across the board. I mean, people who support gay rights and, you know, gender equality and everything, just everything on the list, legalization of drugs, et cetera. But...

• 26:42Speaker 00

  I mean, what you found is just the kind of narcissism of the small difference on the left to a degree that no one had ever really experienced before. And you would just be defenestrated the moment you got slightly out of step with the, with, you know, whatever, you know, ship of earth was then being uttered. And, and then they got, you know, simultaneously love bombed by everyone right of center, you know. So you have the, I mean, everyone, it's not just, just MAGA, but it's just everyone right of center will, will accept your, your pilgrims progress rightward without any judgment. I mean, you're just like, you're, you're, you're absolved of all your sins. And no matter how much you criticized these

• 27:22Speaker 00

  guys in the past, the moment you see the light about how awful wokeness is, they embrace you with open arms. And so to some degree, I feel like we've witnessed this very weird sociological experiment where lots of people with fairly prominent platforms just got inducted into a kind of cult because their families were treating them terribly. And, and it just felt better, right of center complaining about the left and how crazy it was.

• 27:51Kara Swisher?

  And when you think about that, it is, it's a lot of it's hurt feelings. It honestly feels like it in a lot of ways. I'll make the argument that they may have gotten defenestrated, but there was, there was a net right there. They didn't get that hurt. They got to come back. They're richer than ever. It's not, it's not, it's, it's feelings. It's, they had a lot of feels about whether people liked them or not.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, the most interesting thing from my point of view is, is the, the total lack of moral sanity and integrity displayed by everyone involved here. Because I mean, many of these guys were out of the closet hating Trump the first time around for, for all the plausible reasons. I mean, even J D Vance said that Trump is either, you know, an asshole of the first order or America's Hitler, right? And yet no one ever has to give a rational accounting of how their views have changed. I mean, they were, you know, after January 6th, Some of the guys on the All In Podcast, I think it was Chamath most vocally, you know, in the aftermath of January 6th.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think he said that, you know, Trump should be in jail for the rest of his life, right? It's like, so how these guys went from there to where they are now has never been explained, right? And they feel no burden to explain it because they have cultivated audiences that simply don't care about these kinds of ethical incoherency.

• 29:13Kara Swisher?

  Now we're doing this. Now, yeah, it's really quite interesting.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:17Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 29:28Kara Swisher?

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• 30:11Kara Swisher?

  climate, culture, 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. Support for this show comes from Delete Me. Have you ever Googled yourself and found your home address, phone number, or the name of a family member? It's unsettling. Here's what you do to clean up your online data footprint. Go to joindelete.me/kara and enter the code Kara. You get 20% off Delete Me. Delete Me removes your personal information that's being sold online. Delete Me was named the top pick for

• 30:55Kara Swisher?

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• 31:37Kara Swisher?

  That's joindelete.me/kara, code Kara.

• 31:45Kara Swisher?

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• 32:51Kara Swisher?

  Let's move on to where the shift towards authoritarianism in tech leaves everyday people. In an interview with The Atlantic's David Frum, you said, "We are in a Tower of Babel moment." That informational guardrails are gone, and in their place is a kind of, quote, "new religion of anti-establishment conspiracy theorizing." Expand on that. As a neuroscientist, why do we struggle to sort through the glut of information online and distinguish the good from the bad?

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Well, I think what we're finding, I mean, we've sort of always knew this, but in the presence of the Internet and social media, it's just become excruciatingly obvious, is that some percentage of us really have a taste for conspiracy thinking. And, you know, so it's not that we just believe one of them.

• 33:34Kara Swisher?

  Not a new thing.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  No, it's not new at all. I mean, it's, you know, obviously, it was with, you know, JFK and before, but you find that it's almost, it's just this kind of characterological trait that, you know, you love one of these anti-establishment narratives and you seem to love all of them. And, you know, someone like Joe Rogan is, is one of the poster boys for this style of thinking, right? It's just like the, like the contrarian take on some world event is endlessly interesting. It doesn't have to, and the kind of the search for anomalies in the standard interpretation is endlessly interesting. And what you get there, I mean, it's certainly when it gets weaponized on social media, is you get just the utter derangement of our politics.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  And it happens on both the left and the right, but it certainly happens more on the right. And traditionally, it's been, it's been more on the right. So you get, you know, Candace Owens, who, you know, within minutes of Charlie Kirk's assassination, was cooking up some alternate theory about what happened there. And it has, you know, she has an audience of millions who want to hear about this, right? And, you know, and so I don't know how, if you've ever followed how crazy she's gotten, but I mean, it's, you know, it's, she and Alex Jones are, you know, one upping each other into some sort of, you know, mystical state of confusion.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  So everyone is captured by the algorithm and it's a very perverse and weird algorithm as you go right of center and it's one that's been consciously gamed by Russian bots and troll farms. I mean, it's just like we've built this digital infrastructure and invited our enemies to weaponize it against us and we've monetized their efforts to drive us crazy in some kind of psyop.

• 35:22Kara Swisher?

  Tell me, as a nurse, why does that work, the inability? Does it distinguish the good from the bad? Is it the glut of information? Is it how it's delivered? What is different here? Because there's always, there was always a JFK, alligators in the toilet, whatever causes cancer.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  There's a range. I mean, a lot of people don't fall into this bin, but many of us are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure. I mean, just admitting that we don't know why something happened or we just have some probabilistic sense of, you know, I feel like maybe it's a 50% chance it was this or a 50% chance it was that and I'm okay with that. There's this desperation in many people to feel certainty on whatever point they're entertaining. And what conspiracy thinking offers you, I mean, it offers many things, but it offers this, this kind of, you know, race to cognitive closure, which

• 36:21Speaker 00

  is very entertaining. It's also very empowering for the disempower. I mean, if you're somebody who doesn't feel like you're at the center of the action or you're, you know, the world is the way you want it, it's very tempting to become part of a conversation that puts you, this, you know, this person on the fringe who no one's listening to, at the center of the truth, right? You have the true epistemology, right? And so it's a kind of... I mean, it's a kind of pornography of doubt, in my view, and a kind of a religion that gets spun up around achieving cognitive closure based on, you know, not especially rational thinking.

• 37:04Kara Swisher?

  Right, so one of the most striking examples of that supports the idea that we're in a tower of a bevel moment is the ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic. I just spent the day at University of Pennsylvania, and they're all going to flee the United States, all these amazing scientists, you know, in mRNA and other things, by the way.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:22Kara Swisher?

  Twenty years ago, the US was on the verge of halting the spread of measles. Now, thanks to the spread of vaccine misinformation, outbreaks are getting worse. There's a big one in the wake of Thanksgiving. Two children died of measles this year. I think there was zero for many, many years. And when the Biden administration pushed platforms to deal with COVID and election misinformation, they got accused of censoring conservative voices. So what's the solution? Are we just going to continue to go into this pornography of information and being misinformed?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you know, barring some real consequence that gets everyone's attention, I think we are. I mean, you know, some kind of economic or epidemiological or environmental catastrophe that is just unignorable. I mean, when you look at COVID, COVID was almost the worst-case scenario because it was, it was bad enough so that our, kind of, our seemingly rational response to it at every stage along the way was seriously disrupting of society. But it wasn't so bad that you couldn't have a wide, you know, diversity of opinion about what was rational to do. And you have a lot of people who could just say, well, this is just a cold, and I'm not, I don't care about it.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  And that was, you know, while that wasn't strictly rational, lots of people got away with living that way, and they, and they can now say, see, this was all much ado about nothing. And you had a lot of liberals. Trying to, in their own authoritarian way, trying to control my life and I'm gonna have none of it. And so I feel like we, we probably learned many of the wrong lessons from COVID.

• 38:58Kara Swisher?

  It wasn't killer enough. It didn't kill us enough.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so, and so, yeah, you could imagine, and it also, it killed old people preferentially and not kids preferentially. And so, I mean, next time around, we might be in the presence of a virus that is killing kids, right? And that, that will provoke a very different response, I think, or one would imagine.

• 39:16Kara Swisher?

  Right. But what about, well, that's what measles are, by the way. What would you say, this is not widespread, it's just a small group of people, but what about January 6th? Why wasn't that enough? It was one of the most witnessed live events, live stream on TV. It was appalling to watch. Didn't work.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  But you could, I mean, then you're Tucker Carlson and you can show the weird footage of cops just, you know, obviously scared cops just letting in a mob because they, they knew they were not in a position to resist the mob. And so it looked like just kind of the friendly opening the door to, and some kind of collaboration with the crowd. And so what, what was this? A false flag operation? And then you get this discourse of this counter narrative, which is obviously crazy.

• 39:55Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  But again, what is so corrosive here is that now we have a culture, or you know, or at least parts of culture, that doesn't care about hypocrisy and lies on any level, right? So like, so Tucker, Tucker suffered no rebuke from his own audience when it was revealed that for years, he had been pretending to like Donald Trump, and yet behind closed doors, he was texting that he thought Trump was a demonic force and he couldn't wait to be rid of him.

• 40:28Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Same thing with Dan Bongino just recently. I was paid.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Right. So, so I mean, I just, you know, perhaps you feel the same way. I cannot imagine having an audience that would stay with me, should it be revealed that I was, that I was that duplicitous, right? I mean, like, just, just perpetrating a fraud on them for years, just pretending to think one thing and thinking the other thing.

• 40:48Kara Swisher?

  You don't have a mother who loves Fox News then. It works. It's cognitively, it works.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  I mean, that's a culture that doesn't care about the truth, even, you know, and doesn't care about being lied to even by the people they are putting their trust in, you know? In Trump, we have somebody who lies with a velocity that we have never witnessed in public life. And yet, his fans, it's not like his fans don't think he lies. They know he lies. They just simply don't care.

• 41:19Kara Swisher?

  Don't care. Right, right. And speaking of which, it's the reason dictators like Russia's Vladimir Putin love the idea of politicizing truth. No one knows what to believe, so people often end up going along with the narrative pushed by those in power. In this case, the power to influence opinion is concentrated in the hand of a few billionaires outside the government in tech. And in this case, people like Musk, they're mainstreaming fringe ideas like the Great Replacement Theory and vaccine skepticism or whatever. I just spoke to journalist Jacob Silverman, who wrote the book about Silicon Valley's radicalization called Gilded Rage. He said, it's, get that, get it. He said, it's disturbing that we're still not really having a conversation with the lack of accountability that these leaders, these tech leaders face for their behavior.

• 41:59Kara Swisher?

  But that said, polls are showing the public, the wider public, is deeply distrustful of these people, both on the left and the right. So is that conversation gaining traction from your perspective? It feels like it, but perhaps not.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  I mean, AI, if anything, like the dreams of AI are realized, I mean, leaving aside that, you know, the existential concerns around, you know, the misalignment of AI with our well-being, but just if AI succeeds

• 42:29Speaker 00

  and, you know, basically cancels the need for most human labor,

• 42:36Speaker 00

  we're going to have a reckoning with wealth inequality that we just simply can't avoid any longer. Right. So it's been coming for as long as we've been alive, really, but it's, AI, I think, is going to force the issue in a way that will be undeniable.

• 42:49Kara Swisher?

  Yes, which people feel in their bones, right? You can feel people feel it, even if it is overwrought.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  And also, I mean, just if jobs, especially white collar, you know, higher cognition, higher status jobs evaporate preferentially in the face of this tech. I just think, yeah, they'll be, you know, the pitchforks are coming, whether they're carried by people who were, you know, used to be plumbers or people who used to be software developers. I just think in success. We're going to have to figure out how to have a far more equitable society than we have.

• 43:27Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I've always told them that. I'm like, you're just pushing off the day where you have to armor plate everything.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:33Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 43:42Speaker 03

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• 45:53Kara Swisher?

  In every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  Hi, Sam. I'm Kim Scott. I'm the author of the book Radical Candor. From where I sit in here in Silicon Valley, it seems like affluence and courage have become negatively correlated here. The wealthy believe they have too much to lose if they speak out. What is so alarming to me now isn't that an authoritarian president and a small cadre of right wing tech execs want to take over. What is truly surprising to me is that the same people who once believed in the power of technology to strengthen our society and our democracy have gone ominously quiet. Fear is a tyrant's best weapon. The people in Silicon Valley who have made fortunes

• 46:41Speaker 06

  still have a platform and a voice. Now is the time to use them and to stand together in solidarity. Our silence will not protect us. Why do you think more people are not speaking out? And how should we be speaking out?

• 46:58Kara Swisher?

  That's a great question.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so, you know, we're watching the ruination of so much that we care about, right? I mean, just, I mean, if you look at the stature of our country on the world stage, right? And what our country represents to our, you know, allies and former allies and for to countries that aspire, can only aspire to be democracies, right? But we used to stand for quite a lot in the, in the, I mean, it's not that we, we don't have things to apologize for. We have a checkered past. I mean, it's been 250 years, but on our best days, we really could be credibly be said to care about. You know, whether you, you know, killed or jailed your journalists or, or, you know,

• 47:44Speaker 00

  rigged your elections or, or imprisoned your political dissidents, right? And now, as a country, we seem to be, only care about whether you give our president and his rapacious family a hotel deal in your capital city, right? I mean, or you, whether you buy their, whether you enrich them directly by buying millions of dollars worth of, or billions of dollars worth of their cryptocurrency, right? I mean, that's where, where it's, it's an extortion racket that we're running on the world stage at the moment.

• 48:15Kara Swisher?

  So why aren't people saying things? I mean, both of us are smaller than all those people from a financial point of view. And I have an independent company, you have your own independent, we've, you know, we've sort of carved out these podcast little, little islands or whatever, that seem immune at this point, but why haven't others spoken up? What is your sense? They're terrified. They call me, I get a lot of out of girl, good job, good for you. I was like, yeah, and you, get, you know, please step up.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, so, I mean, it's often a story of incentives. I mean, so I think there is something perverse around the incentives of running a public company and imagining that your fiduciary duty to shareholders is the kind of a master value, right? That covers every other conceivable sin, right? So you can, you can literally, you know, shake hands with the next Hitler because that is what the market, you know, your, your future in the market will require. I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, but I mean, you get my point. It's just a failure mode of capitalism that we have to correct for. And it, and every one of these guys who we know thinks Trump is a, is a, is an imposter, really, I mean, even as a businessman, an imposter, right?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  None of these guys think Trump was even a major real estate developer, you know, when he was a real estate.

• 49:34Kara Swisher?

  No, moron is what I hear from a lot, what a moron.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  So that, so they're pretending to, to lionize him. And again, if, I mean, some of these guys have.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  A hundred billion dollars or more, right? You know, or, you know, I mean, 10 billion should be enough to inoculate you against these fears

• 49:53Kara Swisher?

  One.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  of being personally ruined by pissing off the President of the United States in our country, right? So this is what we needed. We needed someone like Jeff Bezos or Marc Benioff or, you know, any of these guys

• 50:06Kara Swisher?

  That guy.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  to say, listen, this is America. Uh, I'm not bending the knee to this maniac. Uh, I run a very important public company. If he seeks to damage it, uh, everyone, you know, everyone in the press is going to notice that and we're going to talk about it and we're going to ruin the political party that put him in power because this is not the kind of country we live in, right? I, you know, and, um, where, where was that guy or gal who's run, who's, who's running a public company, who's a nerd against personal harm because they, you know, that this is still America and they're as wealthy as they could ever need to be. I, I mean, it's, it's crazy making that, that we don't have dozens of examples of that.

• 50:48Kara Swisher?

  I, I would agree. So let's get some solutions to finish up. Right now, some of the biggest proponents of tech regulation are coming from within MAGA, interesting. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unveiled a citizens' bill of rights for AI. Steve Bannon has said AI is likely the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has also expressed fears about the expansion of AI with no guardrails. Um, I don't agree with them on most things and they always end up showing their actual ingredients very quickly, but, um, is there, is that a growing civil war within the populists and tech CEOs? Do you see that playing out and you imagine a scenario where populists actually win and regulate the tech companies?

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I can imagine if, if it became, you know, politically dominant, then, then it would be dominant. I mean, I, I don't know what the limit is of, the limit of influence is from the, the oligarchs, uh, at this moment. I mean, they, they don't get everything they want, um, because in some sense they're, you know, they're not aligned. I mean, like, you know, uh,

• 51:50Speaker 00

  You know, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can't get precisely what they want if they're competing in the race to space, right? Someone is going to get Trump's favor or not, right? So.

• 51:59Kara Swisher?

  Same thing with these media mergers, yeah.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  They're not, yeah, exactly. The media merger with Netflix now. So it's not, everyone's not aligned, but yeah, I just, I can imagine that it will take something like a minor catastrophe to get everyone's attention. You know, if we do something with AI that is sufficiently destabilizing to our economy, right? If someone unleashes something that, you know, makes the NASDAQ go dark for a week, right, and no one can figure out, you know, how much money they have.

• 52:34Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, right.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  I just think that's, something has to wake us up.

• 52:41Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I was just called a non-patriot by one of them, and I was like, oh, but you're selling chips to China? Okay, got it. Like, I'm not sure what to say. The Trump administration is sticking by these tech oligarchs, so with the help of AI czar David Sacks, I'm not a fan. Trump has promised to sign an executive order soon to bar states from passing their own AI regulations, something the tech elites really want, but a lot of people really don't. The do-whatever-you-want approach to the tech sector is what got us here in the first place, as you just noted.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  So, like, on a point like that, I would just say that there is a version of that that makes sense to me. I mean, I don't think we want 50 different sets of regulations around this kind of technology.

• 53:20Kara Swisher?

  I agree.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  But what it really demands is a sane set of regulations coming from the federal government.

• 53:25Kara Swisher?

  Which hasn't ever happened, you know. By the way, the tech leaders hated the Biden administration's push to regulate them, and recent called Biden's efforts to regulate crypto a, quote, a terror campaign. A little much, Mark. But what would that entail? Because they, I mean, I write the annual story, once again, we don't have tech regulation of any sort, even the most minor. The previous administration didn't get it right. This administration is letting all hell break loose. A federal system would obviously be best in AI, for example, but it doesn't happen because of the power of the people holding the purse strings.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Well, it also doesn't happen because of the perceived race that is existential against China in particular. Again, it might take

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Some terrible outcome that is, you know, that doesn't kill us all to get us to to collaborate with our our our enemies on this particular point and and and regulate in a way that's sane.

• 54:23Kara Swisher?

  What would be that sound policy, would you say, for example, the first one?

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Well, so, I mean, there are really two levels of the problem. There's the malicious use of this technology by, you know, bad actors. And perhaps the, you know, the inadvertent bad outcomes of of just the way the way people can use it. But there's the deeper problem that many people worry about, which is just the existential risk posed by the so-called unaligned AI, right? That we could build something that is super intelligent and becomes actually self-improving. And that this technology can fundamentally get away from us, right? And and what's what's truly alarming is that all the people, at least in the States, who are building this tech, I mean, people like Sam Altman.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  It's not like they think that those existential concerns are irrational. No, in fact, when you ask them, they put the probability of, you know, existential collapse at something like 20%. You know, they're not saying it's it's, you know, one in a billion, so don't worry about it. They're saying, no, no, this is a completely sane set of concerns. I am not quite sure how we're going to avoid it. We we hope as we, you know, walk these final yards into the end zone, we'll figure it out. But none of them think that, I mean, they they all acknowledge that they're playing a game of Russian roulette and that there's at least one bullet in the cylinder. And and we're just, you know,

• 55:53Speaker 00

  we're we're pulling the trigger because we have to, right? We economically have to, we're in a race against China.

• 55:59Kara Swisher?

  I called it the Xi or me argument with Mark Zuckerberg in his interview. And I was like, I don't like you either. But does it require some kind of true populist revolt that's centered on class-based politics, which Scott talks about, even if it has an anti-capitalist undercurrent in many ways? Although I would argue this Trump administration is socialist at this point, given all the things they're doing. What's needed for American democracy to thrive, if not populism? How do you envision citizens resting power back from authoritarians and tech oligarchs?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know. I haven't ruled out the possibility that cultural change could surprise us and be sweeping. I mean, for instance, I think that as AI, you know, as the AI sloppification of everything continues.

• 56:44Kara Swisher?

  Fair point.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  We might get to a point where many people, maybe even most people, declare some kind of, you know, epistemological bankruptcy with respect to the internet or with respect to social media. And it's like, if you're looking at a video and your first thought is now always, is this even real?

• 57:03Kara Swisher?

  Or this sucks.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Right? And that just gets locked in, right? It's like, okay, this looks like Vladimir Putin declaring World War III, but who knows if it's even real, right? Strangely, this could force a return, a new return to sort of traditional gatekeeping, right? But we might wake up in a world where all of a sudden, you don't believe the video of Putin unless you see it coming from the New York Times or Getty Images or like some official, you know, gatekeeper.

• 57:34Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  And this could, this could make social media far less captivating for people. I mean, one could hope that would happen.

• 57:41Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, there was an idea to mark the real stuff, not demark, not mark the fake stuff, which is kind of interesting to think about.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  But yeah, but I mean, now there's kind of an arms race between, you know, detecting fakes and producing fakes. And maybe there's an asymmetry there where it's always going to be easier to produce them than to detect them, you know, I don't know. But I just think, you know, I mean, to some degree, we all have to kind of personally work this out with respect to social media. And as you know, I deleted my Twitter account three years ago.

• 58:10Kara Swisher?

  I didn't delete it because I thought he'd do something shitty with my account. I just left it there.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, you know, it's always humbling to confess that that's like the greatest life hack I've found in the last decade or more. I mean, it was just, in terms of improving my life, it's just absolutely enormous. And I think, you know, it's possible that many more people will have a similar epiphany because there is something toxic about our engagement with these tools. I mean, leaving AI aside and its capture of our economy, just having our lives fragmented in this way by this, you know, this digital bride, you know, I mean, we're just.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  You know, so much of your sense of of what the world is and what you are in the world has been has been uploaded into this this space, which, I mean, honestly, I mean, again, there are exceptions here, but it is, it's easy to, you know, it's easy to say Twitter isn't real life if if you're me, because, you know, I've taken steps to immunize myself against the the pain of it all, but it really isn't real life if you're me. I mean, it's like, it's so, it is so amazing how much it doesn't matter what happens on on X. You know, even if it's Elon Musk attacking you by name and you're trending

• 59:31Kara Swisher?

  He likes to do that.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  that day. Yeah, you know, it really doesn't matter. And so, you know, many people may begin to yearn for a life in the real world, reading real books and having real conversations face to face. And that might be a kind of spiritual awakening for our whole culture. I mean, we might use these tools differently in the future.

• 59:52Kara Swisher?

  You do see younger people. Both my older sons are just not, just don't, what? What are you talking about? You know, they don't care. They do, they use YouTube to watch TV. That's how I would put it. I don't think they use it to be influenced. I think they're just like TV, and it's their version of television. But and which I watch quite a bit. So this has been a relatively gloomy conversation, but really interesting. But you're you, you say you're hopeful. We're in a quote emperor's new clothes situation where the truth is obvious, but just going unacknowledged by most people. So what needs to happen to start for the kid to point to the emperor and say, ah, you're naked?

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the kid, the kid is certainly pointing. I mean, they're, they're, he's always pointing. But I don't know, I mean, maybe as simple as just it no longer being Trump at the center of Trumpism, right? Like, when you ask yourself, can JD Vance or or any other

• 1:00:45Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, do I want to look at that guy?

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  plausible candidate, you know, inherit the mantle of the cult. And it certainly seems plausible that the answer to that is no. That's just for a variety of reasons. You know, the kayfabe of, you know, the professional wrestling, you know, vibe is not going to be sustainable.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  And and that we and we might, you know, suddenly be confronted by a a whole culture right of center that pretends never to have been as morally confused as they now are, right? It's lots of people come shuffling back into normalcy, pretending that they never got caught up into the in the denialism and the cultishness and the weirdness that is Trumpism. That's totally possible. They'll now suddenly care about, you know, for alliances with our democratic partners in Europe and they're no no longer fans of Putin and they don't remember that anyone ever was a fan of Putin in the Republican Party. I mean, it's just, it's all that's possible, you know?

• 1:01:46Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I don't know. What happened? What did I drink last night?

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  No, no, I didn't. I wasn't at that conference and no.

• 1:01:52Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what are you gonna say to them? I mean, oddly enough, Rachel Maddow said the same thing. We're gonna have to let them, this is their last chance and they need to start to shift or or or they have an opportunity.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  We might need something like a truth and reconciliation commission to at some level. I mean, you know, for someone, again, for someone like Elon, who's acted like such a maniac, I don't know how you get back into into normalcy without some kind of mea culpa. I mean, it's like, what what were you thinking during Doge?

• 1:02:30Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's not happening.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  When you were little, I mean, like, you know, and what were you thinking when you were bringing back neo Nazis and conspiracists with great fanfare on to X at a moment when we were watching a global eruption of antisemitism, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the Holocaust, and just and meanwhile, you know, all in the name of free speech absolutism, but also then just kicking off journalists who you didn't happen to like and complying with the demands of authoritarians the world over, suppressing the speech of political dissidents in, you know, countries like Turkey, right? I mean, just like, like, like. Who the hell did you become and how are, can you pretend to now be normal?

• 1:03:11Kara Swisher?

  Look, that's that you're asking for a Scrooge moment. He wakes up Christmas morning and says, boy, buy me the turkey.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  There'll have to be many Scrooge moments.

• 1:03:19Kara Swisher?

  Right, but what would you say if he called you and said, I am so sorry. I can't believe I attacked you and he does attack you. He attacks me much less than you. I don't even, wouldn't even know if he's been attacking me, honestly. But I was the face of evil, I think.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, but are you pure evil? The last thing he said about me on Twitter was that I am pure evil.

• 1:03:37Kara Swisher?

  That's his favorite.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  So I have that over you, I think.

• 1:03:39Kara Swisher?

  I believe I have heart of evil. I don't, I would have, whatever.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  You have a heart filled with hate if I.

• 1:03:43Kara Swisher?

  Hate, heart filled with hate, that's right. I'm sorry, that's correct. What would you say? He called you and said, okay, I'm really sorry. I, I'm gonna do whatever it takes to have reconciliation and truth.

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  I mean, that's, so that's an interesting question about essentially the physics of apology, right? Like what constitutes an acceptable apology? And for me, it really, it requires that the person sketch some rational path from where they were to where they say they now are, right? So it's like, how is it?

• 1:04:19Kara Swisher?

  What happened?

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, how is it that you think better of the things you did? And how are you now the person who views those things the way I view them? And, and, and so, and so I'm, you know, I'm willing to, I mean, apology and forgiveness. I mean, this is, this is some of the best, this is the best software we've got, right? I mean, like, the, the capacity to forgive someone, I mean, this is absolutely indispensable. Not just, you know, psychologically, but civilisationally. And we celebrate, you know, people being, having changes of heart and being forgiven at the deepest level. I mean, it's there, you're like, but even just like, you know, a rapist or a murderer. I mean, someone, literally, you can get someone coming out of prison

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  who, who really did commit the murders for which they were sent to prison. And now, you know, whether in a Christian context or just a secular context, you know, we, we acknowledge that people can apologize and be different people. But they, there has to be some intelligible path from there to here. And in the absence of that, it's just, it just seems like, you know, it just seems like a bad faith maneuver. And so, you know, I have no idea how I would respond unless I was in the situation.

• 1:05:32Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I probably wouldn't let it back.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  But it's not going to happen.

• 1:05:35Kara Swisher?

  I'm good for ban, I know it's not going to happen.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  I'm certainly not waiting for it.

• 1:05:38Kara Swisher?

  Certain people banish it, I say. Banish it without an E. Banish it. You are banished. I don't think that's the worst thing society's ever done for certain people, but we'll see.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  Life is too short, Kara.

• 1:05:49Kara Swisher?

  I understand that, but it's not that short. Let me just say. Anyway, I really appreciate.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  It's just long enough for it to matter.

• 1:05:55Kara Swisher?

  Just long enough, just long enough. Anyway, I really appreciated Sam. What an interesting, and we can whinge about things we disagree with later, but this was really smart, and I appreciate your thoughts on it.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Always happy to do it.

• 1:06:12Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castor, myself, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you know the emperor has no clothes, and yuck when I think about it. If not, you're drowning in conspiracy porn. 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.

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

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