Kara Swisher on AI, media, and accountability

What will the media landscape look like as tech companies, as opposed to traditional media, own increasingly more ink? And who better to offer an optimistic take on the news industry’s future than…Kara Swisher?! Reid and Aria speak with the famous—and famously direct—tech journalist, author, and podcast host about the roles and responsibilities of journalists covering rapidly developing innovations, along with those of the technologists driving advancements. They cover the OpenAI/New York Times lawsuit, disinformation, TikTok legislation, and AI’s potential to improve healthcare and climate outcomes. Plus, Kara makes the case that today’s content creators benefit from staying relatively small vs. striving for scale. Topics: 3:30 - Hellos and intros 3:54 - Technology that makes Kara optimistic 6:40 - Technology to solve climate change 8:43 - Why health-tech and climate tech inspire optimism 10:09 - State of the media landscape 15:34 - Can smaller-scale media work? 16:56 - Pi weighs in on Patrick Soon-Shiong 19:33 - How will AI impact media misinformation 22:27 - Impact of AI in politics 27:52 - Kara’s latest book 30:36 - Is AI training “stealing”? 37:28 - TikTok ban 42:51 - A question for Reid: Is TikTok worth buying? 45:43 - How to shape capitalism 51:30 - Rapid-fire questions For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Select mentions: Burn Book by Kara Swisher Platformer News founder Casey Newton Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat Anchor Oyster Bar What if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Possible is an award-winning, weekly podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Hosts Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger explore what’s possible with forward-thinking leaders, deep thinkers, and ambitious builders across many fields, such as technology, art, education and healthcare. These conversations center on the ways technology—and, in particular, AI—is shaping the future. In episodes, AI tools such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Inflection’s Pi are at work, offering informational asides, prompting guests, or demoing what they can do. Lastly, between guest episodes, Aria interviews her co-host Reid on his latest takes on what’s possible if we use technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  You'd be shocked. I am the hopeful person in media. I'm the one that argues for it. When I started off in the internet, I was at The Washington Post in the 90s. I was using email and I was using the internet. All the reporters were like, "Why are you using email? Why are you having readers listen to you?" And I was like, "Why are you asking that question? Like, of course you'd want..." And I would urge people at the time to use the internet, use cell phones, understand the distribution methods, all the time. I say the same thing now with AI. Use it every single day and all of them. Try the different ones. They'll come and go, just like the internet sites did. But use them so you understand it. And then figure out why it's good for you. Like, what is it good for for you?

• 0:44Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:46Aria Finger?

  And I'm Arya Finkar.

• 0:48Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? What we can possibly get right if we leverage technology like AI and our collective effort effectively?

• 1:00Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields: AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.

• 1:10Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations showcase another kind of guest, whether it's Inflection's Pi, OpenAI's GPT-4, or other AI tools. Each episode, we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.

• 1:22Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:29Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:37Aria Finger?

  Once, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said that every two days, we create as much information as we do from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. The scariest part of this? He said this in the summer of 2010, before Instagram, Snapchat, and even TikTok started. And of course, before the explosive growth of generative AI. In other words, the stat is wildly outdated. And one can imagine how, in this era of AI, there's an even greater volume of information speeding our way. How can anyone possibly digest it? Let alone fact-check it? What can be trusted and who's accountable?

• 2:16Reid Hoffman?

  Our guest today definitely has a perspective on all that. Kara Swisher is a renowned tech journalist known for her fearless, incisive reporting style. And her signature aviators, she has been known to wear over her decades-long career covering Silicon Valley, during which she has interviewed everyone from Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, and, well, me, among others. She covered and helped shape the tech beat at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and co-founded All Things Digital and Recode. She's also a mainstay in the podcast world and hosts two shows, On with Kara Swisher and Pivot.

• 2:56Reid Hoffman?

  Her new book, Burn Book, is an unflinching, sometimes scathing examination of the tech industry and the founders who built it. She doesn't shy away from confronting the consequences of tech titans race to scale.

• 3:09Aria Finger?

  Kara has been a driving force in shaping the narrative around technology, business, and accountability in both Silicon Valley and media.

• 3:18Reid Hoffman?

  We'll talk to Kara about all this and see if we can get her take on how AI might bring the best out of humanity. Here's our conversation with Kara Swisher.

• 3:34Reid Hoffman?

  Kara, let's start by quoting you to you.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 3:38Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Sounds good to me.

• 3:39Reid Hoffman?

  So you said that you're an optimistic pessimist. You assume worst and you're thrilled when the best happens. Given the ethos of this podcast, the Possible Podcast, we're going to start off by focusing on exactly that. What amazing things might happen if everything goes right? So let's warm up and venture in that direction. What's one technological accomplishment in the last five years that pulled you towards your optimistic side?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Oh, some of this cancer research done by AI. I think it's really fascinating. And, you know, the gene folding or anything in healthcare with AI to me is really promising. And I tend towards it even though I know better, right? Like, oh, it's going to go all bad and we're going to all die from drone robots essentially, but killer robots. But I tend to look at this and think, here's a real opportunity. And it's born out of my own health issues. I had a stroke many years ago. My dad died of a cerebral hemorrhage. And just the knowledge of what they don't have that's trapped in all kinds of databases seems to me perfect for this kind of technology.

• 4:43Aria Finger?

  And so specifically, I had many people reach out to me, actually, and say, oh, my God, like, you don't care, Swisher, you're going to interview her? Like, she asked her about health tech. She's super into that.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:53Aria Finger?

  And so, yeah, do you think, like, does that optimism for you expand to other areas? Are you like, oh, we can do these amazing things in health tech, why not education tech? Why not all of these other areas for AI?

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Well, yes. I mean, that's, that's the premise. It's like, when you saw the internet for the first time, you weren't going to imagine what was going to happen. I don't think Reid did. I don't think I did. You know, when you saw the iPhone for the first time, you had some sense of where things were going, but you, you weren't sure. You wouldn't have thought about Uber, which I find very helpful. Like, you know, whatever you think of the company, it's still the, the changes. I use it a lot. I was just visiting my son in Argentina. For example, I used it there. Just, you wouldn't have imagined it. And so I don't know what to imagine, but I can imagine healthcare is a heavily data oriented business. It is so inefficient. It's the one area that hasn't been affected by digital in the way you'd, you know, transform. And so that's why I get excited about it.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  It's also a positive thing. You know, I can anticipate all the negative things all day long, if you want to, you know, and this is a possible show. So we're, it's possibly we're dead. No, we are going to be dead, all of us. And so I think that, to me, healthcare seems, and the second thing is climate change, obviously. Again, it's not going to be solved by technology. That's kind of too, it's, it's no silver bullet. But you can, this is a data heavy area that we could start to really come up with better ideas. And so, and some, and when I see a lot of the climate change tech people, I find them very moving. And I find even people I didn't get along with for many years, like Bill Gates, who I now like because we talk about climate change tech, you know, I've, even he's gotten

• 6:31Speaker 00

  creative, right? In that regard, he's, he's, he's, it, it energizes him in a way that's really positive and brings all his experience to bear, for example.

• 6:40Reid Hoffman?

  But one thing to double down on that, that I think is important. Is like personally, I think the actually biggest goals to fix climate and to improve climate, actually, technology, whether it's energy, clean, you know, clean energy, which ranges anything from nuclear to, you know, wind and solar and all the rest. And I think the set of those things, whether it's questions around like, what do we, what can we do for, you know, the biology of plants, which are also mechanisms for carbon capture and whatnot, geoengineering. And I tend to think, I understand the kind of lefty critique of you're just saying technology in order to say, do nothing now. And it's like, well, what if we're actually

• 7:20Reid Hoffman?

  saying, do a lot of tech now, right, as we're doing it, strikes me as a much more likely way to, to, to make any real dent on this issue than all of the other things that are put on. And you, you seem to have been just like playing down the, the tech part of it.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  To do it now? Oh, no, no, no, I'm not playing down. I just don't think it's the only solution. Like, there's all kinds of behavioral solutions and everything else about how we waste and, you know, just food waste. I mean, it's just something that could be done better. That's all. But I, what I, what I would hope against is, no, listen, we had a whole day, the last, one of the last codes, I spent a whole day with climate tech people. Like, there was someone doing fusion, there was someone doing heat transfer stuff, someone was doing geothermal, someone was doing, she had these devices on peers that were collecting energy. You know, I am all in for this kind of stuff. And I've actually found the entrepreneurs to be really much more mission driven in a real way than

• 8:19Speaker 00

  everyone else, you know, cosplay is doing, right? They're actually mission driven. And as someone who has a lot of kids, I think a lot about their future and the world they want to live in. My worry is that we're going to spend too much time with mitigation over solutions, right, over new and exciting things. You know, solutions based is where I would like to be. I'm very interested in as many solutions right now as possible, even if some of them don't work.

• 8:43Aria Finger?

  And do you think there's something intrinsic about health tech and climate tech that just make them more amenable to technological solutions, or AI is going to help them more? Or are there things that other sectors can learn about how those entrepreneurs are doing it right and are more mission driven?

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they're data heavy and they're also idea. Scarcity, right? Where are the big ideas? And you can't, like, when you think about medical stuff, like, I talk about my brother a lot, who has an anesthesiologist, he really avails himself to a lot of these things because you can't see, he and his colleagues can't know enough, there's not enough to read. And so, it just makes sense that idea generation is something that I think this stuff does really well. And you don't have to like all the ideas, but 100 ideas is better than three, and especially when two of the three are terrible, and say 90 of the 100 are bad, but then you have eight ideas, right? Or whatever.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  And so, I think they avail themselves because of data, and they bring more information to the fore. And it's also probably better information, like, it's just kind of like, this is what happened in the surgery, this is what happened, and it's less prevalent to, say, if you're going to put it in the justice system, or if you're talking about news content.

• 10:00Reid Hoffman?

  Well, that brings up a natural question of expertise, which is the future of the media ecosystem and journalism, which I think we want to cover in a couple of different ways. But what do you think the current state of the union is, or state of the media is? And what are, you know, kind of some of the key broken things to fix?

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Well, you know, just before this, I had a conversation with someone at a big media company, and we were talking about this. And one of the things that I find really interesting is, you know, I have gone down in my media business to be smaller, right? I've shrunk myself, and in shrinking myself, I do a lot better, right? And so, there's all these smaller organizations, they're kind of like startups, that are very nimble, whether it's Casey Newton at Platformer, he does great, let me just tell you, he does great economically, and he does great from a content perspective, right? He's making stuff the audience wants. You know, we're like a lot of little restaurants that are really popular, right? But we're not, I don't ever see me being a restaurant chain, I don't want to get bigger, essentially. And so, there's a lot of fascinating stuff

• 11:01Speaker 00

  being done on the small scale that is economically viable, makes a good living for people. Is super good in terms of content. That's doing great. And you see those experiments all over the place. You know, whether it's the information, whether it's, you know, they stay in business because they make money and they, the audience grows and people like them. It also doesn't have to get that big to do really well, right? It can stay, you know, this small, very successful restaurant, essentially. There's one in San Francisco that I love called Anchor Bar in the Castro. And it just is always going to be there. It only has this many seats and it's always excellent and it's going to be there forever it wants to be, I suspect. And, and so that's how, there's a lot of that happening and that's exciting and some of it's really cool.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Puck is another one that, that focuses on power, of course, so that's, that's got an audience. But there's all kinds of small ones. Heather Cox Richardson, she makes bank like you can't believe. She's incredible. With her, you know, her history lessons, essentially. It's one lady who lives in Maine and types away. I think she's making $5 million in revenue. It's like, that's a good, that's a good business, you know? And she has like two people doing it or whatever. So you can see the economics of that, right? Then there's the very big organizations and the very biggest is essentially the New York Times, which is not a very big company. Like, we keep saying, oh, look at the success of the Times. Well, one, it makes all its traffic and money on cooking and Wordle or, you know, or games and things like that. And the news does fine.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  It does well and it's growing, but not like those other parts of it. So I like what they've done there, what they've added different things on, which makes it wide-ranging. But if you look at their profits, they're not that profitable. They're pretty, they're profitable, which is great and they're solidly profitable, but they're not that profitable. And the way newspapers used to be, like minting money. And their revenues are, I don't know, $2.4 billion? That's pretty small when you think about it. That's one of the things I think about is like, that's the biggest and most successful. And I'm leaving out the Disneys and those people of the world because they've got their own unique challenges and I'm not in that business. I'm not in the entertainment business. But they're, you're not going to have very many New York Timeses, right? There's not going to be that many viable businesses.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Facebook and, or Meta and Alphabet or Google and, essentially Google and Facebook own digital advertising. And look at Facebook's enormous surge in stock price. They're, they're hitting on all cylinders. They own digital advertising and AI is going to help them enormously make that even. They've bypassed the Apple problem they had with that. And so that's just, they're just, the New York Times is a drop in the bucket to them. And so who is going to be big? I have a contract with CNN, which is interesting, but you know, their business is challenged, to say the least. So they've got to change. You know, I was looking at the one story about all the different salaries of the anchors there. And I'm like, how is it that they deserve this money if they don't make it?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Like, I know every dollar I make and what I'm owed, right? I just, not just CNN anchors, all of them, the whole TV business is really out of whack. Costs and, costs and revenues are out of whack. And so, and the audience is declining because they're not making stuff people want necessarily. So what is it that people want? You can do really well on the small scale, but not so much on the big scale. And so that's, is that worrisome? I don't know. I don't know. What do you think?

• 14:21Reid Hoffman?

  Well.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  I just ran.

• 14:23Reid Hoffman?

  No, no, but not surprising, given the other podcast, Masters of Scale, Blitzscaling, et cetera. I tend to be a strong advocate for figuring out the scale solutions. And I think figuring out scale solutions to make sure that quality journalism especially, because it has important civic functions, you know, important cultural functions that, that I think are essential for modern, healthy societies and especially democracies. You know, it's part of the reason why I kind of share the passion and interest in this. And business model is obviously one of the ones to figure out of what we can do to enable that. Because, you know, to some degree, scale is only with scale business models.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  But what is the scale? And you had, like, right now, restart a media company. Like, you, you kind of can't, you kind of, it doesn't work. And it, because it costs money to do. Look, look, Facebook, one of the reasons it can make so much money, it doesn't have to check things, right? It doesn't have to, it's just an expensive business that now, the, the actual business is being dominated by people who are much more efficient at what they're doing. But they don't have the costs of actually making journalism. They just sort of live off of it. So I don't, I don't see how that works.

• 15:34Aria Finger?

  A lot of people would argue that like it never worked, that like local journalism was like, people bought it for their kids' Little League scores and then like stayed for the good journalism, or they even back in the day, they were buying it for the crossword puzzle. Like, my question for you is like, is supply and demand in this situation just like not what we should be talking about because people aren't going to be demanding the best? And so should this be just nonprofits? Should it be local news bundled with something else?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know if there's any one answer because, you know, I would say that Casey Newton has a lot of influence with his great work and he's tiny. Like, he doesn't, you don't have to, I think I do too. And I don't, I'm not, I'm not very big, but I have a lot of influence. And it did used to be that people came for the comics or the crosswords or whatever. But they also came for the local news and stuff like that. And those were, there were, there were no other competitors. And so when there's no other competitors, it's very easy to be good, right? You can, you don't have to be that good. And I would, I would agree with that. I just think that you just have to, like, where is the, where are the economics anymore? That just doesn't exist. And so you have the choice between being a nonprofit, which means that's hard to do, because then you

• 16:43Speaker 00

  rely on the kindness of strangers, or a billionaire buys you, which some billionaires are better than others, right? But, you know, but, you know, it's either Marc Benioff or Lorraine Powell Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, or whoever. So, or the guy in LA, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who, who I've interviewed.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Pi. Allow me to offer some context on that subject. Patrick Soon-Shiong is quite an accomplished individual. He's a South African American businessman, investor, medical researcher, philanthropist, and transplant surgeon. His ownership of the LA Times has been a source of controversy. As for whether he's losing money on it, the newspaper industry has been struggling financially for some time. Soon-Shiong has stated that he bought the paper because he values the role of journalism in society and wants to support it. He's also invested in improving the paper's digital presence and has stated that he's committed to making the LA Times profitable in the long term. Okay, Kara, back to you.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  He's losing, a hundred million dollars hurts when you lose a hundred million dollars, even if you're as rich as Jeff Bezos. And so, you know, there's only so much fanciness to owning the Washington Post. So then you're at their behest and then their children's behest. So it's a charity is what it is. It becomes a charity. And then you can have public funding of this stuff. And in this country, forget it with the First Amendment and the partisanship. It works in Britain. It's not going to work here. And it barely works in Britain.

• 18:09Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, I am, I presume you are too, you know, a fan of PBS and other things and amplifying those at least a little bit, I think, is a positive contribution.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Sure. Yes, yes. Look, that's the thing is they've got, the problem is, they don't own the digital advertising business anymore. No, it's owned by two companies. That's it. Then secondly, they don't own the distribution anymore. And that's what's really problematic. It's also owned by those tech companies. And their costs are going up while the other, the cost of the tech companies are becoming more efficient. Like, my son watches Frontline every week. He watches it on YouTube. So that means he's one, not watching PBS. He didn't, when I asked him, he's like, I don't watch PBS. I watch Frontline. Like, so he watches it fully. So it's not like there's not lack of interest in heavy, long-term stuff. I think that's a lie about young people. They're not all watching dance videos. They

• 19:05Speaker 00

  love some, my sons both watch substantive things on Reddit and YouTube. Well, what does that mean for the cable business? What does that mean for news organization, right? If you don't own the ink, you remember, like, don't argue with someone who has a barrel of ink, who owns the ink. Well, they don't own the ink anymore. They just don't. And so that's, that's a real problem, I think, eventually.

• 19:26Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, it's the bits now, not the ink. What do you think, this, obviously, a whole bunch of discussion about how AI can be potentially further complicating for this, you know, generative of misinformation, some of the scale thing, which is, you know, AI applied to the business model advertising scale. If you were putting on your hopeful hat, your optimist hat, and you said, "This is what I would hope AI would do to help make media/journalism better." What would those things be?

• 20:01Speaker 00

  You'd be shocked. I am the hopeful person in media. I'm the one that argues for it. Every time I see someone, I'm like, "Use it every single friggin' day." It's like saying I don't like... When I started off in the internet, I was at The Washington Post in the 90s. I was using email and I was using the internet. And this is pre-Netscape, too, so I was using FTP. Anyway. All the reporters were like, "Why are you using email? Why are you having readers listen to you?" And I was like, "Why are you asking that question? Like, of course you'd want..." And I would urge people at the time to use the internet. Use cell phones, understand the distribution methods, all the time. I say the same thing now with AI. Use it every single day and all of them. Try the different ones. They'll come and go, just like the internet sites did. But use them so you understand it, and then figure out why it's good for you. Like, what is it good for for you?

• 20:46Speaker 00

  So, things are... You know, paths are made by walking. You're not gonna know how it works unless you do. Now, at first, it's gonna be silly things, like, "You sent me that book of me, remember? You sent me all the care things," which is cute. Or, when my book came out, which is, may I say, a bestseller, there were all fake versions of it that got Amazon... It was selling a whole bunch of... Which they were probably dying that it was my book that they did it to. But it was fake versions of my book, and that was kind of like, really eye-opening. But only because people were getting cheated, who were gonna buy it. And then I was getting cheated of my IP. They were obviously scraping everything I did. So, I just say, "Try it, try it." I was still interested in what they were doing. So, I'd say, "Try it, try it, try it."

• 21:29Speaker 00

  The other thing is, it could really help in lots of areas that can be automated, like headline writing is a really good example. I was arguing at this dinner I was at where they're like, "People have to write headlines." I'm like, "Why?" Like, I won the headline award at my journalism school. I was good at it. But I think if AI can generate 100 of them, and I get to pick the two, as long as they're accurate, do you have a human intervention? What's wrong with that? Like, I don't... It's like... I'm always like, are you churning butter still to make your butter? I don't get it. So automation, I think, doing all kinds of information using AI that is data-heavy is fine, just as long as there's a human element in making sure what goes out isn't false, right?

• 22:09Speaker 00

  I also think there's like such a huge landscape for disinformation that it's vast and enormous. And we should be able to see that right away and figure out the counter businesses to that. What are the counter businesses to? You know, there's lots of opportunity in protecting content, too.

• 22:27Aria Finger?

  Well, I feel like that takes us down a road to the other place that people are most skeptical, which is AI and politics. It's like, we have a massive election coming up in this country and around the world, and people are seeing disinformation, misinformation, you know, wrong election days from, you know, Joe Biden.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Let's just call it propaganda.

• 22:45Aria Finger?

  Propaganda.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Let's just call it propaganda.

• 22:46Aria Finger?

  Like, is there any way, like, okay, you were the techno-optimist on journalism. Is there any way that AI can help us fight back here? Do you think there just needs to be regulation in the political sphere? Like, what can we do?

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, yes. I mean, it's a tool and a weapon thing. Brad Smith, who was president of Microsoft, wrote a book called Tools and Weapons, right? So is a knife a tool or a weapon? It's both, right? So obviously, I just, it's just, my issue with tech people is they never anticipate the weapon part of it, as if it never is going to happen. And to me, politics has always been a dirty business. There's always been cheating. If you had better tools to cheat, why wouldn't you use them? And they always like, can you believe it? I'm like, yeah, I can believe it. Like, that's my thing, is that they're, they're always so surprised that it would be used for nefarious purposes. And so, you know, the thing is, a lot of the misinformation is in plain sight with Donald Trump, right? He doesn't hide it.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  He just says, I mean, he is, I just interviewed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is a, who's written a lot about strong men and dictators. In her new book, you know, she was using the links between the Mussolinis of the world and the Stalins and Trump and what's happening now. And one of the things that's interesting is it's the same old tactics, right? These aren't new tactics, which is spread, flood the zone with misinformation or questionable information, say things that aren't true, but then repeat them, continually try to pull down institutions. It's really kind of a playbook for dictators. And so this just accelerates it, although it's doing rather well in just the slower, in the 30 mile per hour version of Donald Trump, as it will in the new version. And I think that's

• 24:22Speaker 00

  It just works. And so why wouldn't it work if it was even more stuff thrown at you and everything? So that's what worries me. And then the companies don't have any interest in fixing it. They just let it go, like the toxic waste that spews through the system. They just are like, yup, it won't have any effect downstream.

• 24:40Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, I completely share your worry. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, this is, as you know, I very rarely go on the critical front with some of these things. I think there's so much criticism already. A lot of the people do that. But on both Meta and Twitter, the, no, no, it's just totally freedom of speech. And you can say that the earth is flat and the moon was made out of cheese and the moon landing never happened. And it's like, well, wait a minute. If this is what the volume of your stuff says, there's a problem, right?

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I think they don't care to fix it. And, you know, that interview I did with Mark many years ago in 2019 over antisemitism, I think I was dead on right. He changed it two years later, but that was two years of unmitigated toxic waste flowing through the system. He doesn't want to pay the real cost of his business because he doesn't think it's his business. But it is his business because he built that. He built that river. And we are living next to it, essentially, and drinking from it. And so it's really important, if he wants to have that business, to take responsibility for the repercussions. Now, Elon recently was like, well, you know, I think in this Don Lemon interview, he's like, well, the newspaper has 20 articles and we have 5 million. I don't really care. I don't really, if you want that business, you have to pay for the

• 25:56Speaker 00

  cleanup of it. Like, that's like, okay, so, and, so you make more toxic waste, then you need to clean it up more. And the difficulty, I do appreciate. I do appreciate the difficulty of doing it. But don't be in that business if you can't figure a safer way to do it. I just don't, I don't get why you get a pass in that.

• 26:13Reid Hoffman?

  Well, and also, look, this is part of the reason I'm a, I'm a technology optimist, in my use of the phrase, not in other people's, is that, well, yes, you can solve it. Apply some of that, that ingenuity and technology and innovation and solve it. That's the whole point of changing.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not lucrative. Why do you? Why would they do it? I think the reason they don't is because one, it is hard. And two, it's not as interesting to them. Like cleaning up is not there in their interests. And and it's it's kind of sort of thank it's a thankless task for for technology we mostly like. Right. But it's also right there. And I think Mark was very much like, you know, free, you know, it's free speech on it's free speech for idiots. I just don't understand. It's like, no, you don't have free speech, by the way, and you do have responsibility if you're a private company. They're they may be publicly traded, but they're private companies. If you create any other industry that creates this much toxic waste and doesn't clean it up is in jail. Those people are in jail.

• 27:14Reid Hoffman?

  Well, and and and last little comment on this thing before we move on to to to other interesting things is, you know, I did find ironic and interesting how much Elon pre acquisition trying to get out was like, and it has a huge robot problem, you know, kind of bot problem. Then, you know, the day after acquisition bots, what any issue here?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Really? Oh, Elon lies. Well, you know what I say? Hello, he lied. Anyway, whatever. Hey, we're getting a robot taxi. See my jazz hands?

• 27:44Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Give me a break. We have one. It's called Waymo. It works fine. Mostly, mostly.

• 27:50Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly. And so, um, anyway, so let's let's talk about your latest book, uh, which we did a little bit before, but I think it's worth to do here. You know, nestled under the speaking of headlines, the well chosen title, Burn Book.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  I think it's going to be a TV series too. Watch out. Who's going to play you?

• 28:08Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, now now you give me something new to be anxious about.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Well, at least you're a good guy.

• 28:17Reid Hoffman?

  The subtitle, A Tech Love Story.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 28:21Reid Hoffman?

  So so say a little bit about the book and then, you know, emphasize

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:25Reid Hoffman?

  why the surprising subtitle?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Because I love tech, because I do. I just don't like what some people have done with the place, right? It's sort of like, I see so much promise in tech and so many, even at the very beginning, the first thing I, you know, I saw, and I use this analogy, was the Star Trek analogy, which was like a good version of tech, right? Where it's all gonna go up and to the right, villains are solved. And so I really had that kind of vision of it. And, you know, oddly enough, I had found an interview I did with Steve Jobs where he said the same thing. And then you kind of get into a Star Wars version of it, which is not so pretty, right? Which is Death Star, and evil prevails and everything else. And so there's, I really, like, if I saw the, I use this example in the book,

• 29:07Speaker 00

  if I saw the first flight by the Wright Brothers, I would be going, wow, they flew, not like, oh, it didn't go very far, right? I'd be like, whoa, that is something special. And so every time, when I first saw the internet, for example, and I'm not talking about all tech, because I didn't cover the early computer days, I mean, I have knowledge of it, but I didn't cover it. When I first saw the internet for the first time, I was like, wow. And I, you know, or the first cellphone I saw, I was like, oh, look at that. Like, I could see the implications, in a good way, right? So the possibilities were endless of this worldwide communication system where we all realize our commonalities was really big. And I really, there's, it still is. Like, I mean, like, would I be against electric

• 29:51Speaker 00

  lights? No. Like, right? Like, that's the kind of thing. And so these inventions can be so groundbreaking and changing. The car, even the car, on the whole, moving people out of small towns, wider range of ideas, and where ideas spread, always a good idea. A horse is a good, is a good technology. And so I love technology. I just don't like when it's taken, one, to make obscene amounts of money, without any care for the social agreement we all have, and where you don't feel like you do, when you do damage, you have to pay for it, essentially. That's, that's my issue, was, so that's why it's a burn book.

• 30:36Aria Finger?

  So I would love to know what you think. Some people think that the way we get AI, like the training is stealing. It's using data sets that aren't theirs. Obviously, OpenAI is being sued by The New York Times and other authors. What do you think of that? Is that fair use or is that stealing?

• 30:53Speaker 00

  No, it's not fair use. They're really using their stuff. They, look, just pay up, just pay up. Your business is not going to be as good. They got to find a business, FYI, all of them. All the AI companies have got to find a business, besides being sold to Microsoft, Reid. They, you got to find a business that's beyond just acquisition. And so I think we're still in those early, it's like the sort of early internet companies, same thing. I just, it's like we're, I know there's going to be a big business here. I just don't know which one is going to be the big business, right? And so at the very start, if we get costs, the correct costs you should be paying for the stuff, you should pay your costs. Now, to me, the New York Times lawsuit is a negotiation. That's what it seems like to me. Like, how much are you going to pay? Same thing with all the others. But this is valuable. They're not just pointing to it like Google did,

• 31:38Speaker 00

  pointing to The New York Times. They're going in and taking their stuff. So I've always thought it was shoplifting, like when, when they used to go in with YouTube. It's more akin to that. When they, remember when YouTube was not policing all the stuff that got put up and said, what can we do? Well, of course, they figured it out right away and they figured out a monetary system. And that's worked out well. Same thing with record companies, right? Oh, we can't help but steal it. There's no other way. You know, people can't get their stuff. They figured it out. And actually, it's been good business for the record companies, right? This has worked out rather well for them. They'll figure this out. They should pay what it costs, figure out the right price, and then stop this nonsense that it's fair use. It's not fair use. It's just not. It's just pay for what you, what you're eating. Thank you.

• 32:20Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, it probably doesn't surprise you. I have a slightly different point of view.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Okay, let me hear yours.

• 32:24Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, slightly different point of view than yours here, which is, I do think that it's really important to make sure that the You know, kind of call it the equivalent of, you know, reproducing your work or inversions of it, or all the rest of it, I think is, is very important to, to keep that part of copyright and all the rest kind of economics. If it's kind of the equivalent of reading it, the way that a human being is reading it, that's all of the training, I don't actually think that's theft or shoplifting. You know, the same way that kind of like having, you know, a search index, go through it and index it and search is also I not, don't think shoplifting. I heard your difference of like, look at links to it and you go to it. And I think that if you're-

• 33:06Speaker 00

  I think it was difference between what YouTube did and Google did, but go ahead.

• 33:09Reid Hoffman?

  Uh, what do you mean by the what YouTube did?

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Meaning YouTube was benefiting off of content that was stolen that people posted to it, right? This is more akin to that, but go ahead.

• 33:19Reid Hoffman?

  Well, no, I actually think it's more akin to, to, to Google because like, for example, if you look at the, the New York Times lawsuit, to reproduce the simulacrum of the article, they have to put in a third to half of the article into the prompt in order to produce the rest, which suggests that a person already has access to the article. And so it isn't actually in fact doing anything that creates the economic damage. And then they argue both the, you know, A, it produces the article and it also produces something, claims it's the article and is wrong. And you're like, okay, look, it, it, you know, it's kind of all over the place in this, this this generative side. And I agree with you, it's a negotiation, but I think the negotiation where it settles isn't so much on training data, but as much on what's current news, the ability to use

• 34:03Reid Hoffman?

  the reference thing about like, is the New York Times claims, it's like, okay, well then you should be accurate about that, right? For, for these kinds of things. And I think that there is, are good business models there potentially for how the, how that works. And I think it's different than the training question. That's the-

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, fair, fair. But what I'm saying is eventually we're all going to have to come to a conclusion on how we're going to do business together, right? And the first time wasn't so good for the media companies because essentially the tech companies came in and said, we're here to, you know, I use the reference of to serve man, the Twilight Zone episode is a cookbook. And I said that all the time to these media companies. I'm like, I remember Mayor Levin was going out to Google. I'm like, they're not your friends. Oh, they're going to give us money to put news up. I'm like, don't take their money. They're here to be in, they're media companies. These are media companies, however they want to play it, without the costs of media companies. And so I was always like, look, just make a deal with them. Do something because you're at, you know, you don't have a lot of leverage with these people, like at all to speak of. And so what are you going to get out of it?

• 35:05Speaker 00

  And what is the right relationship? And I think the past one was so bad. To be wary of these companies is probably good business, it seems to me.

• 35:14Reid Hoffman?

  Look, I think that's right. I think we need to figure out kind of what the BD deal is. I do think that there is, you know, competition in the space of creation of content, distribution, economic models, just like there is in all these things. And so it shouldn't be considered to be, you know, completely a, you know, kind of a partnership of peanut butter and chocolate. Because there is some contested ground in all these things. And that's actually one of the reasons why I think that the question about like, how brand and currency of information is represented and all the rest, I think is, is actually an important part of how this will sort out. And I tend to think that where the data stuff will be is on that more than on the training stuff. For similar reasons, the reason I use the parallel.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  You all have to decide what's valuable and what's, you know, you have to sort of take some responsibility as tech companies. Like, okay, I remember being at my house when Larry Page was there. And he was telling me New York Times was the same thing as some little junkity junk. We'll put them all in the same place. I'm like, what are you talking about? The quality level is so different. That's like saying this Twinkie is as delicious as this cucumber, nutritious as cucumber. Not cucumber, that's not very nutritious, something that's nutritious, right?

• 36:24Reid Hoffman?

  Please not a Twinkie.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  No, but a cucumber isn't very nutritious either, apparently. But I like them. But like, he was putting them all on the same level. And the whole group of them at Google was doing that. This was way back when, when they were starting Google News. And I was like, there is a difference, like that you pretend there is no, same thing. Facebook had the same attitude, like every news service is the same. And I was, I was like, at some point, you have to pick quality if you're going to make a quality service, right? Like, just pick, you can decide what quality is or decide what you want to do. But it just was this sort of disdain. What's really interesting is that so much of the tech people who are the bros that are really irritating are all like, we're going to replace all the media. They just can't wait to do that. And it's largely because some of the media was critical of them, right?

• 37:09Speaker 00

  To me, that's it's all about their own personal foibles. But that's where they go when the real business really is going to be in medical and climate and other things. That's where the real money is going to be, right? But they love the idea of somehow figuring out a way to bypass media. Like Trump, they love media because they can't stop frigging talking about media.

• 37:28Reid Hoffman?

  Since we're talking about media, and one of the things that's current news is TikTok. You know, obviously, there's this this House bill, there's kind of challenges in whether it's mining data, fostering addiction, you know, possible surveillance. So what's your view on the state of play on TikTok? Should it be banned?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  I have a very sophisticated view. I don't know if I want to use the band. I think, look, if we had a robust online privacy bill and a foreign adversary element of it, this would all it should cover everybody, by the way, the fact that we're singling out TikTok makes it easy for TikTok to say, I'm a victim because they kind of are, right? That said, I wrote a column five years ago now, I think it's almost five years or maybe four years ago, where I said, I love TikTok's the best new product I've ever seen. I use it on a burner phone because Communist China. Like, I don't know what else to tell you. This is a perfect surveillance and propaganda service. And I assume they're going to do it. Like, why wouldn't they? Because they never really had an entrance into this country with such

• 38:28Speaker 00

  a product, right? They'd never been able to break in. They tried a number of times with Alibaba and all kinds of stuff, but they never made it. This thing had gotten real ground here. So I never was like, prove it. I'm like, prove it. Of course, they'll do surveillance and propaganda. What are you talking about? Like, and every company I covered in China always had a Chinese Communist Party element. There just never was one there. I covered the Google thing when they were spying on Google. And remember, eBay went in there, Yahoo had a set. Look, this is their business is to spy on us and propagandize us. That's the that's the business of that country. So of course, they're going to do it. By the way, guess what? So would we if we were allowed in that country, and we're not allowed in that country. And that's precisely what we would do. We would also try to be entertaining, but we'd want to spy on them. Of course, we would.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  We'd want to do propaganda. Of course, we would. We often do it through our movies, by the way, but they don't let those in there now. Right? They are very particular about the movies that get in there. So to me, if there's not reciprocity, and there's not, and you assume that's what they're doing, at the very least, it's a real danger. Like, it doesn't, it's 170 million spy balloons over our country. And so, we have to think about them as a foreign adversary. And as much as people don't like to say "foreign adversary," China is our number-one foreign adversary. And if you read anything that Xi Jinping says at his, they're very long and sloggy, but if you read them, or get a translation of them, he's saying he wants to dominate technologically across the world in the next century. That's what he says.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  And he says he's quite detailed about it. I'm taking him at his word, that that's what he wants to do. And so should we, because we have a better internet, we have a better government, we have a broken government, but we have a better government. And so, I think we need to have a larger privacy bill, and in the interim, maybe scare them a little bit with this bill. So, I'm not against it. I'm not, I'm not sure this is the right bill. I don't know if it's going to even pass in the Senate at this point. Right? There's enough opposition to it, so it hardly matters. But it's certainly, I'm in the sort of Mike Gallagher camp of this thing. Like, he's a representative of, let's assume the worst, like, optimistic pessimists. I'm assuming they're doing bad things. So, I'm kind of for it. At the same time, it does help Facebook. It's going to help Facebook.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  It just is. They're our national champion in this area, and so, it's going to help Meta. That's not great. And I know Marx, in an interview I did when all the attention was on the anti-Semitism, he talked about the, he essentially was saying, "It's Xi or me," you know, in terms of social media, like, that kind of thing. And I was like, "I don't like my choice." I mean, I like you. If I have to pick, it's you, obviously, but, ugh, like, no. So, that worries me a little bit, is helping a bigger company, but I don't really think that's why we should make a decision against it. They're definitely, we definitely have to have strictures in place for this company, even if they don't even prove it. I don't care.

• 41:20Aria Finger?

  Well, to your point, it's not about singling out TikTok. It's about what are the foreign adversaries? What are we doing across the board? Like, we're not going to single them out because we want Meta to succeed. Like, let's just look at this from a national security.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  I think Meta should have privacy, online privacy bill too, like what they're doing to data. I just feel like it's, if we don't have reciprocity there, ask yourself, why not? Like, why wouldn't we? Because they know what we would do. And why wouldn't they? You know, even, and I, I think the people working for TikTok in the US are great. I don't have any, I think they think it's not a problem, but every, you know, look, think about Jack Ma when they, they hid him away for like two years, right? Like, can you imagine us hiding Jeff Bezos away and just saying, I don't know where he is? Like, can you imagine him in hiding? That's what Russia does. That's what China does. Like, think about hiding Jeff Bezos.

• 42:09Aria Finger?

  You interviewed the COO of TikTok on your podcast. Like, what do you do when you're interviewing someone who, who you know they're not gonna, you know, give away the thing that you want to ask them about, they're not gonna talk about it? Like, what do you do?

• 42:19Speaker 00

  I don't think they know. I don't, I think they're trying their hardest to be better in terms of safety, although they're gonna run into the same problems Facebook does, right? I think they're trying a little better to create a more entertaining platform and, and I think it's really interesting how they formulated that algorithm. Let me just say, on the other side, it can't be sold. It can't sell the algorithm. They can't, they won't sell the, because that'll be proof, right? That'll be proof if we get the algorithm in our hands. And by the way, what is it without the, it's a, it's a brand name, right? So, I don't even see it being able to be sold. So, I don't know, Reid, would you buy it? Would you? I mean, Microsoft was, was jacked into it in the last scheme that Donald Trump had.

• 42:59Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I would say, look, I think that TikTok asset's actually very valuable in China globally and in the US. I just think it's a question of price. If there's, like, you know, if it was offered to purchase. On a question of price, I certainly would because I think there's a lot of things you could you could do with it that would be pretty amazing. By the way, I'm a I'm an investor in in ByteDance, you know, the parent company of TikTok. So I'm, you know.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  It's all Americans, 60%, right? Isn't it?

• 43:27Reid Hoffman?

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  It is. It's some number that's quite high that owns ByteDance.

• 43:32Reid Hoffman?

  But it's, you know, because, you know, there's various things that I think it does quite well, and I think it can contribute in very good ways. So I don't think the algorithm is is like this genius secret sauce, other than the fact, and this is part of what plays with AI, is that when you run training on very large sets of data, you get some unique capabilities, where that capabilities is actually, in fact, very is very important. And without those capabilities, well, then, you know, TikTok US is irrelevant. You could you could just build it in some other way. But I do think the question around saying we should treat our market to, you know, Chinese companies or any companies.

• 44:15Reid Hoffman?

  I agree with your earlier point of not making it specific to TikTok, not making it specific to China, although foreign adversaries, but just saying, here is our general principles. And I think the principled approach is the is the right way to go.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Can you I see to me, TikTok, and I'll finish up, is a broadcast network. It just is a modern broadcast network is what it is. It's an entertainment network. It is not a social network. It is an entertainment network. Would we let them buy Disney? Would we let them buy CNN? Absolutely. There wouldn't even be a question, right? Like, for a second, like, would we let Chinese company own? Now, look, Saudi Arabia owns a ton of stuff all over Silicon Valley. I get it. Like, there's not, there's hard to keep it. But we do have rules in place about this. And so if they and I know the foreign ownership rules have been weakened over the years, but just put it to to would you let them buy? Would you let them own CNN and broadcast all over these? You just wouldn't. It'd be no.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  And I see them as a broadcast network, just a modern version of a broadcast network. And so I don't know if they're putting the thumb on the scale of Palestinian versus Israel. I think it's a lot more complicated. If you meet any young people, if you actually talk to them, they're not, my son is not on TikTok. He has some opinions now about this because he can see pictures, right, from Gaza. So this is not. TikTok changing kids' minds. It's just not. It's just, it may be a little bit, perhaps. Who knows? But it's much more complex than that. And so if it's a broadcast network, let's treat it like a broadcast network. That's my feeling.

• 45:43Reid Hoffman?

  You know, one of the things I've been grappling with is how does scale technology get built? And generally speaking, the only thing I see for how to build it is technology companies or adjacency to technology companies. Adjacency, you know, I was on board at Mozilla for 11 years. That's adjacent to Google, OpenAI, adjacent to Microsoft. You know, so you do have 501(c)(3) is to do this. I actually, you know, with Kiva and everyone else, I try as much as I can to get as much public interest tech stuff empowered as I can. But it still kind of leads me back to scale tech tends to be built by companies. And so therefore, I tend to get to the, the question of, given that I tend to think

• 46:24Reid Hoffman?

  that solving the, the major scale problems in the world is somewhere between 30 to 80% tech, depending on the problem and how you do that, that you have to figure out how to engage companies doing this the right way. And that was one of the reasons why, you know, when you kicked off your book, because it turned out it was capitalism after all. I went, yeah, I agree. And I think that's what we're trying to shape to make these solutions. And I-

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Right. But I don't think you can. Like, just, just go ahead, finish your thought.

• 46:56Reid Hoffman?

  No, no. Well, then you're, you're anticipating the exact question, which is, for me, like, I, I view the work to being how do we shape the capitalism and the companies to target as much of these problems as we can and to extend in various ways, whether it's public benefit corps or other things, use ways of doing it, whether it's incentives. One of the reasons I like journalists, you know, being critical and saying, look, you actually act, in fact, have to say what you're doing, why you're trying to do it, articulate your values, be responsive to, to, to tough questions, you know, et cetera, is all kind of trying to get the companies to be building these things. And, and, and you're both an optimist,

• 47:40Reid Hoffman?

  but I think you're a little bit more skeptical than me here. And I wanted to get your-

• 47:44Speaker 00

  I'm not skeptical. I can say, look, I can, there's a thing, there's an expression, "I believe what I see. I don't see what I believe," right? I believe what I see. And I see companies as, you know, on the privacy bill, for example, everyone's like, "Oh, tech companies." I'm like, "You know what? They're in the business of stealing data, so they're gonna do it." So like, it's up to the government to do something about it. Like, they're, I don't mean stealing data, but they're in the business of shareholders, right? That's their business, is making money for shareholders. That's what they do. And for us to pretend that we're waiting for their better natures is kind of like, why isn't Procter & Gamble getting us to eat more carrots? They're just not gonna. They want us to eat Fritos, or whatever the heck they're making, whatever. They want us to use Bounty towels. That's why they're not selling reusables, right? That's what their business is, is to get us to consume more. And the same thing,

• 48:28Speaker 00

  for some reason, we've decided tech is different than a banker, or a consumer products person, and they're not. They're just here to sell you shit. And that's what their, whatever their shit happens to be, that's, or to make money. And so, at this point, I'm like, are we waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to be nicer? Because he may or may not, but, you know, who knows? It's not really, that's not really his job, any, at all, to do that. And so, it would be really nice if companies had more of a regard for the society they operated in and benefit from. I just feel like that this is their business of being in, and when I say so it was capitalists after all, it's because they cosplayed being something else, that they were magicians, that they were here to do good. They weren't here to do good. They

• 49:11Speaker 00

  just were there to make money. And I'm good with that. That's all I'm saying is, so why do we have to, like, again, like, would we go to a, why do we not have fair lending practices? Because the businesses don't make monies doing it. Like, you think bankers saying to go, "You know what? Poor people need better lending terms. We shouldn't, like, take advantage." They're just not gonna do it. Like, who can we screw? Is there, like, who can we get more money out of? Who can we get a loan that they shouldn't be paying? Who can we, like, story after story after story, the same thing, that's banking. Healthcare, who can we get, who can we throw out of the situation and die of cancer so we don't have to pay? Like, they just don't, like, maybe there's some nice people in it, but it's not designed. So the only governor they have on it is one, the press, pointing it out,

• 49:53Speaker 00

  "Oh, look, look who's paying onerous fees for, you know, trailer parks," you know? I think that's a Warren Buffett company, by the way. You know, who's doing this? That's who we need to focus on, is the government, is the press shaming them, or figuring this out? Like Texas, for example, has enormous amounts of pollution. Like, let the press point that out and then the government has to do something about it, or at least monitor them. And I think they've hollowed out our government in such a way, all these various right-wing organizations particularly, and academics I would also throw in there. So, a mix of academics, government, and press really does equalize the alkaline in our system, right?

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Because if it was up to companies, it's like the truffle, it's that book, the Lorax. We're in the friggin' Lorax. The Lorax is gonna keep making truffula sweaters, or whatever, truffula trees. They're not gonna care about the last truffula seed. But someone is, the government, or a do-gooder, or whatever. And that's what we don't have, is the respect for government and the ability for government to help mitigate and modulate the worst impulses and maybe push it in a certain direction, and at the same time, not get into the business. Because private companies always are more innovative than government can ever be, right? It just is, by nature. And has the better people, has the better money. So, these public-private partnerships that used to be a thing of beauty, see internet,

• 51:19Speaker 00

  see everything, see Tang, see space travel, vaccines, can work. That worked beautifully, right? It just did. Like, why not that?

• 51:36Reid Hoffman?

  All right. Rapid-fire questions.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:39Reid Hoffman?

  Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Oh, so many. I love them all. Well, Barbie, the Barbie movie, I loved. I thought that got cheated at the thing. I love that Barbie. There's so much going on in that movie, especially about women, about men. There's a lot about men in that movie. Everyone's like, "It's a woman movie." I'm like, "No, it's a movie about men." Greta Gerwig is so fantastic, I just can't even.

• 52:02Aria Finger?

  What's a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 52:06Speaker 00

  How did you do so well with your kids, parenting? I think parenting. I have great kids.

• 52:11Aria Finger?

  That's awesome.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  And I don't think that it's all me, but I have to say, me and my very, I remarried, but my first wife and my wife now is, we're really good parents. We're really, and we have some tips for you, especially with boys. And I think, I wish they would ask anymore. Lesbians should raise all the boys.

• 52:29Aria Finger?

  I have three boys. You're gonna have to tell them your tips offline. Thank you.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Kindness.

• 52:34Reid Hoffman?

  Where do you see progress from Ometum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 52:39Speaker 00

  I'm really interested in all these psychedelics. I'm not like, I've never taken any, but I think it's really the ability to relieve pain from people in a way that's more sustainable and more healthy, I think is interesting. I do think all these Ozempic stuff is really interesting around, I think there's a diabetic industrial complex in this country, and I think it's really interesting. And I think we should, and the government especially, we can, you know, this whole like, oh, you're fat because you're lazy, or, you know, there's, we get addicted to food in the same ways, and the way these companies voice this crap on especially poor people, just an interesting things around it. I think it has interesting questions. I don't know where it's going, and it obviously has to be safe, but some of the stuff around

• 53:22Speaker 00

  addiction, well, is also, it shows very strong, you know, people don't drink as much when they're on these things. So it's not gonna be just for rich people, I don't think. It'll initially be just for rich people, but that's okay.

• 53:34Aria Finger?

  And now, can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what's the first step to get there?

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Oh, this obsession with like categorizing people, it's just, I'm a Star Trek person. Like, it's just, like, the other day, someone was asking me about early being gay early, and just that people don't like each other because you're gay, it just doesn't make any sense. It's like so stupid. It's such a stupid waste of talent. And all those people who died of AIDS, if you go look at their histories as they were creating before they died, what they could have contributed to the world was massive, massive, when you just saw them, like, who? Just like, why are we doing that? I think all the isms, the sexism, ageism, everything else, like, it's so dumb from an economic point of view. I feel like, like, at some point, the penny's gonna drop. And the people who are so divisive, and they're often the richest people in our world right

• 54:29Speaker 00

  now, I'm thinking of the Bill Ackmans and the Elon Musks, they don't have any solutions. They just wanna friggin gripe about everything, and they wanna be grievance. So, the grievance industrial complex, if that could go away, would be great. Like, I'm so tired of hearing about what you don't like. Like, get a therapist and get the hell out of my space. Like, get off my lawn. But I would really like people to be thinking, being solutions-based going forward, because, like, we're gonna rise and fall, no matter, like, together, whether we like it or not. And to focus in on all our differences has been the most single disappointing thing of this era. The reason I have hope is because I have a lot of kids, and I think if you have a lot of kids, you think about the future a lot more than other people. And you don't have to have kids, but you should think about the people that come after

• 55:14Speaker 00

  you. What an amazing way to end the Possible podcast. All things are possible, but, you know, I'm still an optimistic pessimist. It's gonna all go to shit.

• 55:30Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 55:49Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Ralas. And a big thanks to Eileen Boyle, Elizabeth Herman, and Little Monster Media Company.