This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
KARA SWISHER:
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 was at The Washington Post in the nineties. I was using email and I was using the internet. All the reporters are 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, what is it good for, for you?
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
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.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields—AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAI’s GPT-4 or other AI tools, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible
ARIA:
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 In other words, the stat is wildly outdated.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?
REID:
Our guest today definitely has a perspective on all that. Kara Swisher is a renowned tech journalist known for a 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’s 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. 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.
ARIA:
Kara has been a driving force in shaping the narrative around technology, business, and accountability in both Silicon Valley and media.
REID:
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. Kara, let’s start by quoting you to you.
KARA SWISHER:
Why not?
REID:
Exactly.
KARA SWISHER:
Sounds good to me.
REID:
So you said that you’re “an optimistic pessimist.”
KARA SWISHER:
Yeah.
REID:
You assume the worst, and you’re thrilled when the best happens.
KARA SWISHER:
Yeah.
REID:
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.
KARA SWISHER:
Mhm. Alright.
REID:
What’s one technological accomplishment in the last five years that pulled you towards your optimistic side?
KARA SWISHER:
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.” Killer robots. But I tend to look at this and think, here’s a real opportunity—and it’s born outta 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 data, databases seems to me perfect for this kind of technology.
ARIA:
And so specifically, I had many people reach out to me actually and say, “oh my God, like, you know Kara Swisher? You’re going to interview her? Ask her about health tech. She’s super into that.” And so do you think, 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?”
KARA SWISHER:
Well, yes, I mean, 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 weren’t sure you wouldn’t have thought about Uber, which I find very helpful. Like I, you know, whatever you think of the company, it’s still 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, transformed.
KARA SWISHER:
And so that’s why I get excited about it. 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 the Possible show! So it’s possibly we’re dead. No. We are going to be dead, all of us. And so I think the, 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 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 creative right? In that regard. He’s—it energizes him in a way that’s really positive and brings all his experience to bear, for example.
REID:
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, but if we’re actually saying, “do a lot of tech now.” [Laugh] Right? As a way of doing it—strikes me as a much more likely way to make any real dent on this issue than all of the other things that are put on. And you seem to have been just like playing down the tech part of it.
KARA SWISHER:
The 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 piers 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 everyone else, you know, cosplays 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.
ARIA:
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?
KARA SWISHER:
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 my, I talk about my brother a lot who hasan anesthesiologist—he really avails himself to a lot of these things. Because you can’t see—he and his, 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 a hundred ideas is better than three. And especially when two of the three are terrible and say ninety of the hundred are bad, but you have, then you have eight ideas. Right? Or whatever. And so I, I think it, they avail themselves because of data and they, and they bring more information to the floor. 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 cont—news content.
REID:
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?
KARA SWISHER:
Well, you know, I just had a—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 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.
KARA SWISHER:
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, right? 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 so that’s how there’s a lot of that happening. And that’s exciting. And some of it’s really cool. Puck is another one—that focuses on power, of course. So that’s got an audience. But there’s all kinds of small—Heather Cox Richardson, she makes bank like you can’t believe—
ARIA:
She’s incredible.
KARA SWISHER:
—with her history lessons.
KARA SWISHER:
Essentially it’s the 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 are great. 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, games and things like that. And the news does fine. 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, they’ve added different things on, which makes it wide ranging. But if you look at their profits, they’re not that profitable.
KARA SWISHER:
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 of those people in 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 there, you’re not going to have very many New York Times‘, right? There’s not going to be that many viable businesses. 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.
KARA SWISHER:
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 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? Like, I know every dollar I make and what I’m owed, right? I just am—not just CNN anchors, all of them, the whole TV business is really outta whack. Costs and revenues are outta 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? I just ranted.
REID:
No, but not surprising, given the other podcasts I’m on—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 I think are essential for modern, healthy societies, and especially democracies. You know, that’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.
KARA SWISHER:
But what is the scale? Like, right now, Reid, start a media company. Y kind of can’t. You kind of, it doesn’t work. And it—because it costs money to do. 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 actual business is being dominated by people who are much more efficient at what they’re doing. But they don’t have the cost of actually making journalism. They just sort of live off of it. So I don’t see how that works.
ARIA:
A lot of people would argue that like, it never worked, that local journalism was—like people bought it for their kids’ little league scores and then stayed for the good journalism. Or, even back in the day, they were buying it for the crossword puzzle. My question for you is like, is supply and demand in this situation just 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?
KARA SWISHER:
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 it 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 agree with that. I just think that you just have to like—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 rely on the kindness of strangers. Or a billionaire buys you—which, some billionaires are better than others, right? But, you know, it’s either Marc Benioff or Laurene Powell Jobs or Jeff Bezos or whoever—or, the guy in LA, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who I’ve interviewed.
Pi:
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.
KARA SWISHER:
He’s losing money—$100 million hurts, when you lose $100 million, 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, 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 and this kind of 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.
REID:
Well, I mean—I am I presume you are too—you know, a fan of PBS and other things. And, you know, amplifying those at least a little bit, I think is a—is a positive contribution.
KARA SWISHER:
Sure. Yes, yes. Look, that’s the thing—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, their, the costs 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 love sub—my sons both watch substantive things on Reddit and YouTube. But what does that mean for the cable business? What does that mean for news organizations, 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 a real problem, I think, eventually.
REID:
Yeah, it’s kinda like, it’s the bits now. Not the ink. What do you think—there’s obviously a whole bunch of discussion about how AI can be potentially furtherly 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?
KARA SWISHER:
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 frigging day. It’s like saying I don’t, like—when I started off in the internet it was at The Washington Post in the nineties. 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, and 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.
KARA SWISHER:
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, what is it good for for you? So you, things are, you know, paths are made by walking. You’re not going to know how it works unless you do. Now at first it’s going to be silly things. Like, you sent me that book of me—remember you sent me all the Kara 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 going to buy it.
KARA SWISHER:
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. 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 a hundred 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? 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.
ARIA:
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.
KARA SWISHER:
Let’s just call it propaganda.
ARIA:
Yeah, propaganda.
KARA SWISHER:
Let’s just call it propaganda.
ARIA:
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 could we do?
KARA SWISHER:
Sure, yeah. Yes. I mean, it’s a tool and a weapon thing. The guy, 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 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 that 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.
KARA SWISHER:
He just says, I mean, he has, if—I just interviewed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has written a lot about strong men and dictators. In her new book, you know, she was using the links between the Mussolini’s of the world and the Stalin’s and, and Trump and, 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, 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—it just works. And so why wouldn’t it work if it was even more stuff thrown at you and everything. So that, that’s what worries me. And then, then the companies don’t have any interest in fixing it. They just, they just let it go. Like the toxic waste that spews through the system—they just are like, “yep, it won’t have any effect downstream.”
REID:
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, 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 [laugh], right?
KARA SWISHER:
Yeah. I think they don’t care to fix it. And you know that, 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 cost, 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 cleanup of it. I, 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. And that’s—
REID:
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, it, yes, you can solve it. Apply some of that, that ingenuity and tech, and technology, and innovation and solve it.
KARA SWISHER:
Right?
REID:
That’s the whole point of changing.
KARA SWISHER:
Yeah, that’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 their, in their interests. And, and it’s, it’s kind of sort of thank—it’s a thankless task for, for a technology we mostly like, right? But it’s also right there. And I think Mark was very much like, you know, free speech, you know, it is free speech on—it’s free speech for idiots. I just don’t understand. It’s like, no, no, you don’t have free speech, by the way. And you, 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.
REID:
Well, and, and last little comment on this thing before we move on 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?
KARA SWISHER:
Really? Oh, Elon lies. Wow. It’s how I, you know what I say? Hello? He lied [laugh]. Anyway, whatever. “Hey, we’re getting a robot taxi! [Laugh]. See my jazz hands?
REID:
That’s exactly.
KARA SWISHER:
Give me a break. We have one. It’s called Waymo. It works fine in San Francisco mostly. Mostly.
REID:
Yes, exactly. And so anyway, so let’s, let’s talk about your latest book. 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.
KARA SWISHER:
See, I think it’s going to be a TV series too.
REID:
Oh, awesome.
KARA SWISHER:
Watch out, Reid. Who’s going to play you?
REID:
[Laugh]. Oh, now you’re giving me something new to be anxious about.
KARA SWISHER:
Well, at least you’re a good guy.
REID:
The subtitle: A Tech Love Story—
KARA SWISHER:
That’s correct.
REID:
Yeah. So say a little bit about the book and then, you know, emphasize why the surprising subtitle?
KARA SWISHER:
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 used this analogy was the Star Trek analogy, which was like a good version of tech, right? Where it’s all going to go up and into the right, villains are solved. And so I, 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.
KARA SWISHER:
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 did, 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 cell phone I saw, I was like, “oh, look at that.” Like I could see the implications in a good way, right? So the, the, 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 the, I mean like would I be against electric lights?
KARA SWISHER:
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, on the whole moving people out of small towns, wider range of ideas and where ideas spread. Always a good idea. Horse is a good idea, 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 Burn Book.
ARIA:
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 open AI 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?
KARA SWISHER:
No, it’s not fair use. They’re really using their stuff. They, 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 this 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.
KARA SWISHER:
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, 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.
REID:
Yeah. It probably doesn’t surprise you I have a slightly different point of view.
KARA SWISHER:
Okay, let me hear yours.
REID:
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, and then searches also. I not don’t think shoplifting. And I heard your difference of like, look, it links to it and you go to it. And I think that if you’re—
KARA SWISHER:
I think it was different between what YouTube did and Google did. But go ahead. Go ahead.
REID:
What do you mean by what YouTube did?
KARA SWISHER:
Meaning YouTube was benefiting off of content that was stolen that people posted to it.
REID:
Yeah.
KARA SWISHER:
Right? This is more akin to that, but go ahead.
REID:
Well, no actually I think it’s more akin to, to, to Google because—like for example, if you look at 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 that 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 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 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—
KARA SWISHER:
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 Mara Levi 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 not here—they’re here to be, 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, what are you going to get out of it 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 seems to me.
REID:
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, space of creation of content, distribution, advertisement, you know, 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, of peanut butter and chocolate. Because there is, there’s some contested ground in all these things. And that’s actually one of the reasons why I think that the, 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—
KARA SWISHER:
You all have to decide what’s valuable and what’s you, you know, you have to sort of take some responsibility as tech companies. Like, okay, I remember being at my house and Larry Page was there, and he was telling me, “the New York Times was the same thing as some little junky 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 cucu— as nutritious as this cucumber. Or not cucumber, that’s not very nutritious. Something that’s nutritious, right?
REID:
Please not a Twinkie.
KARA SWISHER:
No, but a cucumber isn’t very nutritious either, apparently. But I like them. But like, like he was putting them all on the same level and I, 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, like that you pretend there is no—same thing.
KARA SWISHER:
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? To me, that’s, it’s all about their own personal foibles. But they’re, 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.
REID:
Since we’re talking about media, and one of the things that’s current, current news is TikTok—you know, there obviously there’s this, this house bill. There’s kind of challenges and whether it’s mining data, fostering addiction, you know, possible surveillance. So what’s your view on the state of planned TikTok? Should it be banned?
KARA SWISHER:
I have a very sophisticated view. I don’t know if I want to use the word banned. I think, look, if we had a, 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. The best new product I’ve ever seen. I use it on a burner phone because communist in China.” Like, I don’t know what else to tell you. This is a perfect surveillance and propaganda service. I, and, 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 a product, right?
KARA SWISHER:
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, and everyone 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. They were just never, it wasn’t there. I covered the Google thing when they were spying on Google. And remember eBay went in there. Yahoo had us, said—look, this is their business is to spy on us and propagandize us. That’s their, that’s the business of that country. So of course they’re going to do it. And by the way, guess what? So would we, if we were allowed in that country and we’re not allowed in that country.
KARA SWISHER:
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. 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’re very particular about the movies that get in there. So to me, if there’s not reciprocity and there’s not and, and you assume that’s what they’re doing, at the very least it’s a real danger. Like it doesn’t, it’s a hundred, 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.
KARA SWISHER:
That’s what he says. 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, 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 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.
KARA SWISHER:
At the same time, it does help Facebook, it’s going to help Facebook, it’s just is. There are national champion in this area and so it’s going to help Meta. That not great. And I know Mark’s—in an interview I did when all the attention was on the antisemitism. He talked about the, he essentially was saying, “it’s G 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, that, 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.
ARIA:
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.
KARA SWISHER:
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, hid him away for like two years, right? Like, can you imagine us hiding Jeff Bezos away and just saying, “Hmm, 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.
ARIA:
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 going to, you know, give away the thing that you want to ask them about. They’re not going to talk about it. Like how, what do you do?
KARA SWISHER:
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 going to 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 of 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.
REID:
Well, I would say, look, I think that TikTok assets actually very valuable in China, globally, and in the US. I just think it’s a question of price. If there’s you, 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—
KARA SWISHER:
It’s all Americans. 60%, right? Isn’t it? Like 60%?
REID:
I don’t know, but—
KARA SWISHER:
It is, it’s some number that’s quite high that owns ByteDance.
REID:
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 to any companies.” I, I agree with your earlier point of not making it specific to TikTok, not making specific to China, although foreign adversaries, but just saying, here’s our general principles. And I think the principle approach is the, is the right way to go.
KARA SWISHER:
Can you, I see, to me TikTok—now, I’ll finish this 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, 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, would you let them buy, would you let them own CNN and broadcast all over? You just wouldn’t. It’d be no.
KARA SWISHER:
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.
REID:
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 the board of Mozilla for 11 years. That’s adjacent to Google, OpenAI adjacent to Microsoft, you know, so you do have 501C3’s that do this. I actually, you know, with Kiva and everything 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 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, “as 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—
KARA SWISHER:
Right, but I don’t think you can like, just, just go ahead, finish, finish your thought.
REID:
No, no. Well then no, you, you, 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 then 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, but I think you’re a little bit more skeptical than me here. And I wanted to get your—
KARA SWISHER:
I’m not skeptical. I can 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 going to 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 the, 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 going to, they want us to eat Fritos or whatever the heck they’re making—whatever—they want us to use Bounty towels.
KARA SWISHER:
That’s why they’re not selling you reusables. Right? That’s what their business is, is to get us to consume more. And the same thing. For some reason we’ve decided tech is different than a banker or a, 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 ca—and when I say, “so it was capitalist after all,” it’s because they cosplayed being something else. That they were magicians, that they were here to do good.
KARA SWISHER:
They weren’t here to do good. They 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 bank—why do we not have fair lending practices? Because the businesses don’t make money’s 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 going to 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. It’s same thing that’s banking. Healthcare: who can we get, who can we throw out of the situation and dies 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.
KARA SWISHER:
So the only governor they have on it is, one, the press. Pointing it out. “Oh Look, look who’s paying onerous fees for, you know, trailer parks?” You know, I think that’s a Warren Buffet 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, 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, that it, that they—and academics. I would also throw in there. So a, a mix of academics, government, and press really does equalize the alkaline in our system, right? Because if it was up to companies, it’s like the truffle, it’s the, that book, the the Lorax. We’re in the frigging Lorax.
KARA SWISHER:
The Lorax is going to keep making truffle of sweaters or whatever, truffle of trees. They’re not going to care about the last truffle of seed. But someone is the government or a do-gooder or whatever. And that’s what we don’t have is this, 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 their, 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, see everything, see Tang, see space travel, vaccines is—can work. That worked beautifully, right? It just did. Like why not that?
REID:
Alright. Rapid-fire questions. Okay. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
KARA SWISHER:
Oh, so many. I love them all. Well, Barbie, the Barbie movie I loved. I thought they got cheated at the thing. I love that, Barbie—there’s so much going on in that movie and especially, especially about women, about men. There’s a lot about men in that movie. Everyone’s like, “it’s a woman—” I’m like, no, “it’s a movie about men.” Greta Gerwig is so fantastic. I just can’t even.
ARIA:
What’s a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
KARA SWISHER:
How did you do so well with your kids? How? Parenting, I think parenting. I have great kids.
ARIA:
That’s awesome.
KARA SWISHER:
And I, I don’t think that it’s all me, but I have to say, me and my very—I, I remarried—but my first wife and my wife now is, we, 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 me more. Lesbians should raise all the boys.
ARIA:
I have three boys. You’re going to have to tell me your tips offline. Thank you. [laugh]
KARA SWISHER:
Kindness.
REID:
Where do you see progress and momentum outside of your industry that’s, that inspires you?
KARA SWISHER:
I’m really interested in all these psychedelics. I’m not like a, 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 this 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, if we can, you know, this whole like, “oh you’re fat because you’re lazy.” Or you know, there’s—we, we get addicted to food in the same ways, and the way these companies impose this crap on, especially poor people. Just an interesting things around it that—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 addiction will—is also, it shows very strong, you know, people don’t drink as much when they’re on these things. So it’s not going to be just for rich people. I don’t think—it’ll initially be just for rich people, but that’s okay.
ARIA:
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, and what’s the first step to get there?
KARA SWISHER:
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 they’re, 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. I mean like, it’s so, it’s so dumb from an economic point of view. I feel like, like at some point the penny is going to drop. And the people who are so divisive and they’re often the richest people in our world right now, and I’m thinking of the Bill Ackmans and the Elon Musks.
KARA SWISHER:
They don’t have any solutions. They just want to frigging gripe about everything and they want to be grievance. So the, the the grievance industrial complex. If that could go away, it 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 think being solutions-based going forward because like, we’re going to rise and fall no matter, like together, whether we like it or not. And to, 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 you.
ARIA:
What an amazing way to end the possible podcast. [Laugh]
KARA SWISHER:
All things are possible, but you know, I’m still an optimistic pessimist. It’s going to all go to shit. So.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Adrien Behn, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Aileen Boyle, Elizabeth Herman, and Little Monster Media Company.