Kara Swisher on the fascinating personalities running big tech | Overheard with Evan Smith
- [Narrator] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial. - I'm Evan Smith. She's a fierce and famous tech writer, convener, and podcaster whose memoir "Burn Book" is a "New York Times" bestseller.
She's Kara Swisher. This is "Overheard." A platform and a voice is a powerful thing. You really turn the conversation around about what leadership should be about.
Are we blowing this? Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving into the attention junkie? As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else. - This is "Overheard." (audience clapping) Kara, it's good to see you. - Thank you for having me here in Austin. - Thank you very much for coming back and congratulations on this book. - Thank you.
- You know, it's a memoir, but as you yourself say in this book, it's a book about you and tech. - Yes, it is, yeah. - Right? Which makes sense because, again, as you point out, you and the internet were both born in 1962. - That is correct. - Your stories are intertwined. - Exactly, intertwined.
No, I think the internet is a bit more successful than I am. But you know, I wanted to write not a book about myself, actually, and the head of Simon & Schuster, who was my first editor of my first book, about AOL, which was back in the '90s, John Karp, really urged me to put myself in it. And I was resistant to the idea because I thought, you know, Steve Jobs is more interesting, Elon Musk, et cetera, et cetera, Mark Zuckerberg. And I resisted it.
But I thought it worked really well and I was not someone that does that a lot. And so, I did it and I think it worked because it is a journey. I'm sort of the Nick character in "The Great Gatsby," essentially. - Well, but you know, your work in covering, chronicling, commenting on the tech industry, you have absolutely been a character, right? - Yes, absolutely, 100%. - In ways that many journalists have not been characters. So it makes sense that if you're gonna tell the story of the monitor of tech, you would be in it.
- I would agree, I don't love looking at myself like that, but I see the interest 'cause, you know, I'm adjacent to these people everybody is fascinated with. And I have had some impact on them and with them and met them before they were who they are. And I think that's what's interesting about me is I met them in the before times.
- Yeah, and you remember. - I remember everything. - You remember what it was like. So you described this as a meet cute love story until it turned south. - Gone wrong. - Between you and and tech. - Yes. - So why did it go sour? - Because it started off with a lot of dreaminess to it.
The idea of a "Star Trek" universe. And I use that metaphor because in fact, as it turned out, I was thinking of it that way. But I did an interview with Steve Jobs and he talked about that too.
He loves "Star Trek." He wants it to be "Star Trek." And so did I in a lot of ways. This idea of sort of the united group of diverse people, it was sort of like a Benetton commercial that then travels everywhere with technology, uses technology for good. - Right. - And then even converts villains into good people, right? There's a lot of hope in that show.
And I think it's all hope, essentially. It's not a dark show, it's a light show. And then you have the "Star Wars" version. And this is sort of two competing ideas of science fiction, which is, you know, much darker and, in fact, very dark. And the heroes are not heroes. The villains are not quite villains.
The Death Star survives, et cetera. And so, you know, I had this idea of it being amazing. Like, I fell in love with it when I saw it. And because I was a student of media and history, and I understood the impact that everything from the Gutenberg Bible, which I just saw one, just here in Texas at the university, to radio, TV, telegrams, you know, even carrier pigeons have on the wider society. So I was the student of that. And then when I saw this, I thought, oh, this is it.
This is all of them together. - Right, but when it turned out to be more "Star Wars" than "Star Trek"- - Yes. - When you figured out that actually evil does sometimes win. - Always wins, actually. - Always wins.
- Yeah. - Then that gave you, that's real upbeat conversation, Kara, we're having. - It's true though. - I have to say.
- It's this idea that, you know, the idea of "Star Trek" is the perfectibility of man, even though they're flawed. They're all flawed on that show. - Right. - But it's really, it's about a family, it's about things improving society.
And I think the first line of this book kind of says it all. Like, I almost didn't need to write another word after it. It was capitalism after all. And I love capitalism, I'm an entrepreneur. I've created businesses.
It's the capitalism in the way they practiced it is in the most, I would say, rapacious and venal ways compared to what the possibilities were. - You think people are surprised to learn that the people who run these tech companies are themselves rapacious capitalists? - No. - To me, it's a fun brand for them, right? - Yes, but it isn't. It wasn't at the beginning, it really wasn't.
It wasn't like an oil company. It wasn't making Twinkies. It really was something really quite breathtaking.
The idea that you could download a book, that you could communicate across distances, that everything would be digitized. That's a big idea. And so, these people are a little different than someone selling you gasoline. It just is.
- So, you keep saying these people, these people. - Right. - One of the things I came away from this book appreciating is that over the time that you got to be adjacent to the tech industry, it was not about companies, it was about leaders. - Yes, of course. - You make this point, that as we understand what tech is, it's not it, it's them.
- Yes, because it's the founders. You know, it's like meeting the Henry Fords. It's like meeting the, you know, the Andrew Carnegie, it's like meeting John D. Rockefeller or Ben Franklin. It's the founders. And so, it's a very different class of people than people who later take over any company. And so you're with the people who, I wouldn't say invented it 'cause the internet was mentored by the US government.
So, but who created these companies. And so, when you meet them in the before times, like a Jeff Bezos when he didn't have any money, or you were in the garage where Google was started, it's a really interesting thing to watch that journey of people through that. And so it's people, that's where I really got my inspiration because they all knew each other back in the last sort of robber barrons era. And so I was, like, really interested in the interactions between and among them and what they were like as people. - I'm interested in another observation you made in this book about when people are in line, they're reluctant to step out of line because they think that the road ahead or up for them is to remain in line, otherwise they lose their place. And you make the point that in order to get higher, to advance- - You get outta line.
- You have to get outta line. - Right. - And that the best of them got out of line. - That's right, right. Unless you're untalented, then stay in line. That's my one caveat to that. And you should know it if you are at whatever you happen to be doing.
And talent isn't everything, but you should know where you're- - You think a lot of them are self-aware enough to know "I actually don't have it"? - Some of them do, some of them don't. Well, you know, by who wins and loses. Although sometimes it's just pure luck, right? In some cases it's just you're at the right place at the right time.
But I don't believe in that. There's a level of persistence to these people. There's a level of iconoclasm, there's a contrarianism. It's now morphed into something really ugly. They're against everything now.
Like, no matter what it is, they're against it. And they don't have any solutions anymore. They just present you with their, I call it the industrial grievance complex, which is led by Elon Musk, essentially. But it's, you know, there's a contrariness in a good way that can be in a good way to doing things.
And a persistence that even that you, the word you used is pivot, of course, rather than fail. And they're sort of all borne by that old Thomas Edison line, which I cannot stand anymore, but it's, "I haven't failed, I found," no, "I haven't failed, I found 10,000 ways that don't work." Or something like that, it's a version of that.
And I like that idea, the idea that you keep going. And there's a lot of that in the American ethos. You know, keep going west. - Well, in fact, all of us who are not necessarily in tech have learned fail fast, right? - Right. - Be willing to try things.
Disrupt, break things, change things knowing that it may not be successful. And if it's not successful, brush yourself off and keep going. Learn the lessons of it. - Except the idea of disrupt is just disrupt to disrupt. That's where they started to lose me.
Which is like Facebook has that saying that they put on all the walls in a very artful way. I think they hired a very expensive graffiti artist to do it, so it looked genuine, but it wasn't. But that's fine, whatever. It was "move fast and break things," which is a software term which is move fast to break the code so that you can figure out how to fix it.
- But you objected to the word break. - I did; I know why they used it. I get, you know, they're always like, technically... I'm like, but you picked this one; why? There's so many different, there's crap, there's garbage in, garbage out. There's so many phrases in technology they could have picked, and that's the one they picked.
And it was interesting that they picked break things versus fix things, change things, improve things. You know, there's all kinds of words. But they love the idea of destruction.
And they call it disruption, but in fact, more often than not, it was destruction. - And it's for its own sake. - Yes, because we wanna burn it all down.
I mean, like someone like Peter Thiel who's sort of the patron saint of a lot of these guys, first funder of Facebook, for example, one of the first funders, important funders of Facebook. I feel like they just wanna burn it down because they don't like the way it is and that's the only way to do it. - But they don't have something they wanna replace it with.
- No, and they all have so much money they can insulate themselves when things do break down. - Right, so who is the, if this is about good versus evil, if this is about- - Well kind of. - Who is the goodest one of them all? I know that grammatically, that's a bad thing to say. - Yes, goodest. - But English teachers will forgive me for that. Who is the goodest one of them all in your experience? - Well, someone I was just talking to yesterday, Reid Hoffman, I really like him.
I think he's sort of one of the more unsung entrepreneurs. He created LinkedIn, a whole bunch of stuff. He was at PayPal. He's always been a mentor to a lot of, many, many, many entrepreneurs. He's very creative.
He has a sense of society and his role in society and his responsibility as someone with these gifts that he has. And he's willing to debate when you don't agree with him. He's also extraordinarily kind to people I lost faith in. You know, he continued to be for a long time with a lot of people who were, to me, bad actors, became bad actors. But that's all right. It's his nature, So I'm not gonna- - But he's unusual in that universe of people.
- Well, no, there's a lot of people. There's Brian Chesky who runs Airbnb. - Airbnb. - Lots of mistakes at Airbnb. But someone who has grown over the years. I always look for growth in a person. I think Steve Jobs grew over time, I think he did.
He started off kind of a bad boy and he moved into a much different place. I think he did. I watched it.
You know, even Bill Gates, you know, there's an improvement. Not everything, he's had some issues. But in the climate change tech stuff and the vaccine stuff, certainly. And so, I look for improvement and getting better. Evans Spiegel who runs Snapchat, what a bro, like, what a bro. Mark Cuban, the broiest bro of Broville.
Like, he would've been mayor of Broville. I love Mark Cuban. I think he's interesting, he's doing interesting things. - He's definitely- - Cost Plus.
- He's definitely sort of turned himself into somebody else, it seems like. - But he's still the same. - But he's the same guy. But who he is today versus who he just was- - 'Cause he's grown up. - It's pretty good.
- It's called growing up and adulting, I guess. - He's adulting. - Yes, right. But he's an adult, so why wouldn't he? You know, that's what we tend to do, we turn. You know, every time Elon does another boob joke or some horrible, heinous thing and everyone's like, ho, ho, he is just kidding, I'm like, he's 52, okay? Like, I'm sorry, like- - Yeah, don't let him off the hook.
- What are you doing? - All right, so let me ask you about him. I mean, you've mentioned him a couple times. I wanted to ask this question, but who broke Elon? What happened? - Elon broke Elon. - But how did it happen, what happened? - You know, you could read Walter's book if you want.
- No, I've read Walter's book. - Okay. - But that's not enough, I want your position on this. - I think he got it wrong, I think he got it wrong. I think he tried to hang it on this demon thing, that he's full of demons. - You think Walter? - I do. - Well, you know, he had Elon's cooperation.
And I asked Walter this not long ago. - Yes, so did I. - Did the fact that you got a cooperation mean that you got co-opted? Of course he said, "No." - No, of course not. Of course, they said nothing about so many things that have now been written about, of course.
And it missed the entire arc of what's happening. - So, what is the elevator pitch on who Elon actually is? - He's a very flawed person who's curdled into a really- - He's curdled. - Curdled into a really kind of a heinous jerk. I don't know what else to say. He's terrible, he's a terrible person.
He's unkind, he's narcissistic in the extreme. You know, me, me, me. I mean, he makes Trump look like a humble person, which is hard. - Kara, don't hold back. - I don't know what to say.
I mean, you can see it, I don't even have to say it. Look at it, look at it, look at everything. - You know, the something I did ask Walter that I'll ask you is, you know, if Tesla doesn't work or if SpaceX doesn't work, then he and the shareholders suffer. If Twitter, which I refuse to call X, doesn't work, we are the ones who suffer. Is that overstated? - It is overstated because Twitter, it matters to a small group of media and political people.
And I guess in that way it has an effect. - Well, but if it unleashes or if it lets the misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theory virus out of the test tube, I mean, you would have to believe that it wasn't out before. - It's now the, you know, thinking of "Star Wars," it's now that bar, it's the bar. - It's the cantina. - It's a cantina, right now. It's become the right wing cantina where they all sit around and say terrible things.
- So you don't think that the threat to all of us maybe is as great as it feels up close? - I don't think most people get their signals from Twitter. I think it's been small. First of all, it's always been a small company and a small footprint. It's very small. It's also never made money.
It was a terrible stock, it was a terrible business. And so, it gets an outsized influence 'cause political people and media people are on it and they're obsessing on it and they're addicted to it. - But in the end, it's not real life. - It's not, Twitter, I always say that to people. Or it's a lot of bots too, by the way. There's a very well known, I'm not gonna say who it is, journalist who's always fighting with bots.
And I write them, that's a bot. You're fighting with a bot, stop fighting with the bot. It's probably from Russia, could be from Iran, China, who knows? Like. - Right.
- But it's a bot. - That's what this is like now. - Yes, it's right, it's trying to attract, years ago, it was really, I don't think I put it this in the book, but there was a moment when Roseanne Barr, who's speaking of losing the narrative, truly, come on.
- I saw a picture of her and Vivek Ramaswamy hugging the other day on social media. - Great, sounds like a dinner party I don't wanna go to. So, she attacked Valerie Jarrett, who has worked for President Obama. - President Obama. - And said a terrible thing about her. I dunno if you recall, I'm not gonna repeat it. She compared her to an animal.
And you can guess which animal she compared her to. - I remember, yes. - So, what happened was, we got all this online rage over it.
And there was some like, "Roseanne's right." And some, "Roseanne's terrible." Like, that kind of thing. And then a couple weeks later, Sam Bee, who I like very much, said something not so nice about Ivanka Trump.
Not nice. One of Donald Trump's favorite words to call women, as you recall in the Roberta Kaplan case. So that got a lot of attention. And she shouldn't have said it.
It's just, well, it's just not nice. And that got a lot of this. Well, I had it looked at. It was all bots from the same company, each of them on either side of the equation. - Amplifying the rage. - Amplifying the rage. So it was the same company doing, I think Ivanka's right, I think Sam Bee is right, I think Roseanne's right.
I think poor Valerie Jarrett. - It's a mess. - And then they were all fighting with each other and then humans get attracted to it.
And then it became a thing. So that's what happens because we get attracted to traffic accidents and bots and digital malcontents or people with bad intentions are good at creating traffic accidents. - So, this is bad for us. And we look at where the tech world is today and where it's going and we wonder what else is going to be bad for us or even worse. You actually ask the question or pose this, is AI going to kill us? - Yes. - Like, that's the next thing that we have to be concerned about.
- Well, AI's been around for a while. - No, no, but for civilians, this is now suddenly becoming a thing that we have to be paying attention to. And the question is, how are we supposed to think about it? - Well, how would you think of the internet when it first got here? People were like, oh, interesting.
But this is gonna change everything. In tech, there's Cambrian explosions, boom over here. I would say there's been a couple. I would say the iPhone was a critical one.
Changed everything. And social media to an extent, not as big. But this is one of those, this is a big one, kind of thing.
And the idea of automating everything. You were already, one of my premises in the book that I had gotten early on was everything that can be digitized will be digitized, right? And so, this is now everything that can be automated will be automated, like everything. - With all the benefits and all the consequences.
- That's correct. - Both. - But that's the same thing you could have said about the internet- - The internet, right. - In the early days.
Had our government gotten involved and done just the most basic levels of regulation at the start around privacy, monetization, data, we probably wouldn't be in quite this much of a mess. - Well, and it seems to me, Kara, that's where all this goes. It depends on a couple of things. One is it depends upon whether government decides to get into this, right? - Decides, yeah. - I mean, they really have kind of not gotten into it. Where they've politicized it, it's not really been that they've gotten into it substantively. - No, no.
- They're just performing. - They haven't done anything. - They haven't done anything. - There's no rules. Europe's done a lot.
There's one woman in Europe who passed every major, they just started the DMA. It's called the DMA and the DSA, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, it's around competition. There are different things, content moderation. They have different rules there, they don't have the First Amendment. So the government has to be very careful.
But what tech has done is it's weaponized the First Amendment. A lot of stuff has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but they've made it seem like that. - Right, they play that card. - Yeah, it's free speech, like, but it's not. It's data theft. It's algorithmic transparency.
It's what is this doing to our kids? That kind of stuff. And they don't wanna tell you that. They're cigarette companies, but we pretend that they're magicians or something else.
Because the real problem is it's necessary for your work and your life to use these technologies. It's addictive. And everybody's addicted. It isn't just the teens are on it.
It's adults. - We're all addicted. - That's right, but it is addictive. Like, let's be clear, it is. And 100 years from now, they're gonna be like, wow, that was really addictive. Like it's liquor or cigarettes or whatever.
Same thing, same dopamine hits and everything else. And so, we have sort of given our lives over to a bunch of companies that behave like nation states, but with none of the responsibilities that nation states have for their citizens. We're their subjects, not their, you know, and they like to sort of cosplay that they're people of the people. One of my favorite things is really rich people saying, "I'm a person of the people." I'm like, you're not at all a person.
I don't think you've met a person in years, you know, who didn't work for you, essentially. And very few people try to come out of that. Speaking of echo chambers, that they accuse, you know, liberals of all the time, they live in the most echoey of echo chambers at all times. And anyone who disagrees with them becomes the enemy for many of them.
- Right, and they've been able to hold government off- - That's right. - By playing this card over and over. - Not just that, that we revere them, we have an idolatry of innovators in this country. We have an idolatry of rich people, that's for sure, since the beginning.
And so, they're rich, they're innovators. They also have moved into a space when we used to, you know, we've regulated cars and planes and pharmaceutical. Not well every time, but we, you know. - But a lot of things- - Planes are not falling out of the sky every five minutes, you know.
You have one door blow off of Alaska Airlines and hundreds of investigations, lawsuits galore. CEO gets fired. - Jobs lost, right? - CEO gets fired. And people are gonna go to jail or they're gonna be sued. - So there is accountability.
- For them. - For them. - Not for these tech companies. - Not for tech. - So tech has moved into this space, right when our government is fracturing in terms of ability to legislate and regulate without being apologetic about it on things they should be regulating.
And it's not gonna get in the way of innovation. That's such nonsense. We don't have any, so it doesn't really matter at this point. Tech has moved into that wide open space as the most dominant industry. It's as if Standard Oil didn't have anyone stopping them. We would all be taking Standard Oil and that's it.
Same thing with AT&T. And so, there's not a fulcrum against it 'cause the money is so vast. These sums are enormous.
You know, billion- - So government's not gonna save us and the companies themselves, by which- - Governments should save us, it absolutely could. - Should, but it's not. - No. - And as you point out in the book, what's gonna determine the future of tech and of our own future is going to be whether the right people are in charge of these companies. And if it's out of touch billionaires, as you say, we're screwed. - Right, in touch billionaires I have a problem with. I don't want them to have, like, they're not elected.
And you know, look, you have Ted Cruz here, good luck with that. But like, I'd rather have Ted Cruz decide. You elected him for some reason still escapes me. But nonetheless, you did, so he's an elected official. Let him decide along with all the others who we elect. Like, you don't have to like every elected officials, but they are elected by people.
Even if we have all kinds of problems with money and politics, et cetera, we have pretty good elections, right? They work, they tend to work. And so, I don't want even the best of them to make the decision 'cause they are, one, inept. They are incapable of the difficulties of what goes on. And it has nothing to do with shareholder value.
You know, you can't, like, finally at the end of his term, and I think President Obama was quite, you know, enamored with tech people and way too far. He could have done something much earlier. This is not a Democrat/Republican thing.
It's a widespread problem. But one of the things he said is tech isn't gonna solve all our problems. The penny finally dropped with him on that one. And I think it's really important that we stick with our elected officials because there's a scene in the book. Google was trying to buy Yahoo, and then it tried to control Yahoo.
And I was writing a series of articles. This was 10, 15 years ago, I forget. It was when Google was really starting to dominate search. And you know, I saw, the reason Google got big was 'cause Microsoft got pulled back by the government, right? And so, I wrote a story that I did in the rhyme of Dr. Seuss 'cause I was being obnoxious.
And I was editor of the site so I got to do whatever I wanted. And I wrote, the problem with Google is they have all these colorful balls and they're so friendly. I'm like, at least Microsoft knew they were thugs when they were doing it. Not nice but true. Like, they knew what they were doing. Bill Gates knew how to throw a punch and he knew he was throwing a punch and he admitted he was throwing a punch.
So I'm good with that. Like, I'm kind of like, okay, you thug, I got it. So with Google people, they're like, oh look at our colorful bicycles and our bouncy balls and our pretty colors or primary colors 'cause we're all in kindergarten here. And I said, they cannot have search dominance. And if our government doesn't stop them, there's something deeply wrong with our government. I kept writing it 'cause I was hoping to have an impact.
And so, when I write the thug line, I knew the Google people from the beginning. So I knew them well. And for some reason, they thought I was their friend, which I was not. I just was friendly, that's different. And so what they did is they call me and said, "Kara, you know we're good people.
You know, we're not thugs." And I said, "It hardly matters as far as I'm concerned." And I said, "I'm not worried about you." I said, "I'm not worried about you because I have a longer view of this." And I quoted Yeats, which "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," which was a mistake 'cause they hadn't read it.
But I was like, you know, this rough beast, "what rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem waiting to be born?" I said this to them. And they were like, "What, beast, what, huh?" And I was like, "Forget it, bad people are coming." I'm like, that's really the essential thing. And I said, "I'm not worried about you. I'm worried about the bad people.
And the bad people are coming. They always come when there's a powerful technology. They always use it. They always take it, take every technological advance has been used as a tool and/or a weapon. Always a weapon, often a tool. And so, I'm not worried about you, I'm worried."
And their whole thing was don't be evil. Which I thought was a little much and dramatic. Like, you have to go right to, can't you just don't be rapacious, or something like that. And I was like, I'm worried about the actual evil people.
And of course they were like, well, they're not coming. I'm like, they always come. - Well, and then- - They always come. - 15 or 20 years later, they came. - They came. Of course, they were there already.
- We have one minute left. You're a tough cookie. - Yes. - You know?
- You say in this book- - Ginger snap. - Pointing out people's failings is my calling card. Like, you have not shied away from doing this your entire- - No, but I say what I like too. I don't think that's true. I think I say what I like.
I have great hopes for them, right? I mean, ultimately- - But you don't worry about the consequences of saying what you believe. - No, I don't. - Maybe that's more the point. - Yes, that's correct. But I don't think, I think what I'm doing them is a favor. You know, at one point, it must have been Elon I was talking about, I was talking to, and I said he would disagree with me. He used to be able to talk to people relatively civilly.
And I said, you know, I'm telling you the truth. I'm your best friend at this point because no one else is. - No one else is gonna tell you the truth. - Right, and so I think it's a favor if you can get them nudged into a direction that is, to me, more thinking about the wider group of people. Because let me just, we paid for the internet.
They used our data. They became billionaires, we didn't, right? And we pay for the cleanup costs of everything they've done. We wouldn't tolerate this with pharmaceuticals, chemical companies, anyone else. And we tolerate it here. And I just, I'm perplexed as to why that is.
- Well, it's a heck of a story. - Thank you. - And a heck of a book. - Thank you. - And I love the opportunity to talk to you more about it. - Did it make you cry at the end? - It did not make me cry at the end, but I cheered for you.
- Okay. - Is that okay? - Yeah, okay. - All right, Kara Swisher, give her a big hand, thank you very much. Good work. (audience clapping) We'd love to have you join us in the studio. Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard
to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes. - I have one son who's a liberal arts person and the other is a computer. He's taking advanced calculus right now. He's doing, you know, he is a computer geek, essentially. And I required, and he loves taking, he has to take, he's at Michigan, he has to take a philosophy course every semester, an art course, a history course, or I ain't paying. - [Narrator] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.
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2025-03-23 07:56
