“Possible” by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger featuring Kara Swisher
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's on! It's on!

Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Today is a holiday, so we're taking the opportunity to share an episode of Possible, a podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, the American investor and entrepreneur who's played a crucial role in companies like LinkedIn, Airbnb, and OpenAI, and his co-host, former Do Something CEO, Aria Finger.

They recently interviewed me on their show, and we talked about OpenAI and the New York Times lawsuit, disinformation, TikTok legislation, and AI's potential to improve healthcare and climate outcome. Enjoy a taste of possible. We'll be back on Thursday with more on. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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You'd be shocked. I am the hopeful person in media. I'm the one that argues for it. When I started off on the internet, it was at the Washington Post in the 90s. I was using email and I was using the internet. All the reporters were like, why are you using email? Why are you having readers listen to you? And I was like, why are you asking that question? Like, of course you'd want. And I would urge people at the time to use the internet, use cell phones, understand the distribution methods all the time.

I say the same thing now with AI. Use it every single day and all of them. Try the different ones. They'll come and go just like the internet sites did, but use them so you understand it and then figure out why it's good for you. Like, what is it good for for you? Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman. And I'm Aria Finker. 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.

We're speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields, AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more. These conversations showcase another kind of guest, whether it's Inflections Pi, OpenAI's GPD4, or other AI tools. Each episode, we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion. In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

This is possible. 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? Our guest today definitely has a perspective on all that. Kara Swisher is a renowned tech journalist known for her fearless, incisive reporting style.

And her signature aviators, she has been known to wear over her decades-long career covering Silicon Valley, during which she has interviewed everyone from Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk and, well, me, among others. She covered and helped shape the tech beat at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and co-founded All Things Digital and Recode.

She's also a mainstay in the podcast world and hosts two shows, On with Kara Swisher and Pivot.

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. Cara has been a driving force in shaping the narrative around technology, business, and accountability in both Silicon Valley and media. We'll talk to Cara 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.

Cara, let's start by quoting you to you. Why not? Exactly. Sounds good to me. So you said that you're an optimistic pessimist. You assume the worst and you're thrilled when the best happens. Given the ethos of this podcast, The Possible Podcast, we're going to start off by focusing on exactly that. What amazing things might happen if everything goes right? So let's warm up and venture in that direction. Mm-hmm.

What's one technological accomplishment in the last five years that pulled you towards your optimistic side? Oh, some of this cancer research done by AI. I think it's really fascinating. And, you know, the gene folding or anything in healthcare with AI to me is really promising. And I tend towards it even though I know better, right? Like, oh, it's going to go all bad and we're going to all die from drone robots essentially.

but killer robots. But I tend to look at this and think, here's a real opportunity. And it's born out of my own health issues. I had a stroke many years ago. My dad died of a cerebral hemorrhage. And just the knowledge of what they don't have that's trapped in all kinds of databases seems to me perfect for this kind of technology.

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. Like she asked her about health tech. She's super into that. Yeah. And so, yeah. Do you think like does that optimism for you expand to other areas? Are you like, oh, we can do these amazing things in health tech?

Why not education tech? Why not all of these other areas for AI? 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 Reed 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, 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, you know, transform. 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 a possible show. So we're, it's possibly we're dead. No, we are going to be dead, all of us. And so I think that to me, healthcare seems, and the second thing is climate change, obviously. Again, it's not going to be solved by technology. That's kind of too, it's 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 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. Even he's gotten creative, right, in that regard. It energizes him in a way that's really positive and brings all his experience to bear, for example. But one thing that doubled down on that that I think is important is

is like personally, I think the actually biggest goals to fix climate and to improve climate, actually technology, whether it's energy, clean energy, which ranges anything from nuclear to wind and solar and all the rest. And I think the set of those things, whether it's questions around like, what can we do for the biology of plants, which are also mechanisms for carbon capture and whatnot, geoengineering.

And I tend to think I understand the kind of lefty critique of you're just saying technology in order to say do nothing now. And it's like, well, what if we're actually saying do a lot of tech now? Right. The way 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. To do it now? Oh, no, no.

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 what I would hope against is...

No, listen, we had a whole day, 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 who,

to be really much more mission-driven in a real way than everyone else cosplays doing. They're actually mission-driven. 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, over new and exciting things. Solutions-based is where I would like to be. I'm

I'm very interested in as many solutions right now as possible, even if some of them don't work. 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? Yeah, I think they're data heavy and they're also idea driven.

Where are the big ideas? And you can't, like, when you think about medical stuff, like I talk about my brother a lot who has an anesthesiologist. He really avails himself to a lot of these things because he and his colleagues can't know enough. There's not enough to read. And so it just makes sense that...

idea generation is something that I think this stuff does really well. And you don't have to like all the ideas, but a hundred ideas is better than three. And especially when two of the three are terrible and say 90 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 fore. And it's also probably

probably better information. Like it's just kind of like, this is what happened in the surgery. This is what happened. And it's less prevalent to say, if you're going to put it in the justice system or if you're talking about news content. 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 that

And what are, you know, kind of some of the key broken things to fix? Well, you know, I just had a, just before this, I had a conversation with someone at a big media company and we're 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 I'm shrinking myself. I do a lot better.

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. 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 the audience grows and people like them. It also doesn't have to get that big to do really well, right? It can stay, you know, this small, very successful restaurant, essentially. There's one in San Francisco that I love called Anchor Bar in the Castro. And it just is always going to be there. It only has this many seats and it's always excellent and it's going to be there forever. It wants to be, I suspect.

And 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 ones. Heather Cox Richardson, she makes bank like you can't believe. She's incredible. With her history lessons, 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 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 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 added different things on, which makes it wide ranging.

But if you look at their profits, they're not that profitable. They're profitable, which is great, and they're solidly profitable, but they're not that profitable 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 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 Timeses, 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 hitting on all cylinders. They own digital advertising and AI is going to help them enormously make that even, they've bypassed the Apple problem they had with that. And so that's just, they're just, we're,

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 their business is challenged, to say the least. So they've got to change. 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? I know every dollar I make and what I'm owed, right?

I just, not just CNN, there's all of them. The whole TV business is really out of whack. Costs and revenues are out of whack. And so, and the audience is declining because they're not making stuff people want necessarily. So what is it that people want? You can do really well on the small scale, but not so much on the big scale. And so that's, is that worrisome? I don't know. I don't know. What do you think? Well, no, no, but not surprising.

given the other podcasts, 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, 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, right?

But what is the scale? Like right now, read, start a media company. Like you kind of can't. You kind of, it doesn't work. And 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 costs of actually making journalism. They just sort of live off of it.

So I don't see how that works. A lot of people would argue that like it never worked, that like local journalism was like people bought it for their kids' little league scores and then like stayed for the good journalism or they even back in the day, they were buying it for the crossword puzzle. Like my question for you is like,

Is supply and demand in this situation just like not what we should be talking about? Because people aren't going to be demanding the best. And so should this be just nonprofits? Should it be local news bundled with something else? Well, I don't know if there's any one answer because, you know, I would say that Casey Newton has a lot of influence with his great work and he's tiny. Like he doesn't, he 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 no other competitors. And so when there's no other competitors, it's very easy to be good, right? You don't have to be that good. And I would agree with that. I just think that you just have to, like, where is the...

where are the economics anymore? That just doesn't exist. And so you have the choice between being a nonprofit, which means that's hard to do because then you 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 Mark Benioff or Lorraine Powell Jobs or Jeff Bezos or whoever, or the guy in LA, Patrick Soon-Shong, who I've interviewed. Hi, I'm Pi. Allow me to offer some context on that subject.

Patrick Soon-Shong 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-Shong 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, Cara, back to you. 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 behest and then their children's behest. So it's a charity is what it is. It becomes a charity. And then you can have public funding of this stuff. And in this country, forget it with the First Amendment and the partisanship. It works in Britain. It's not going to work here. And it barely works in Britain. 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 is a positive contribution.

Sure. Yes, yes. Look, that's the thing is they've got, the problem is they don't own the digital advertising business anymore. No, it's owned by two companies. That's it. Then secondly, they don't own the distribution anymore. And that's what's really problematic. It's also owned by those tech companies and their costs are going up while the other, the cost of the tech companies are becoming more efficient. Like my son watches Frontline every week. He watches it on YouTube.

So that means he's one, not watching PBS. When I asked him, he's like, "I don't watch PBS, I watch Frontline." 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. My sons both watch substantive things on Reddit and YouTube.

Well, what does that mean for the cable business? What does that mean for news organization? Right. If you don't own the ink, you remember, like don't argue with someone who has a barrel of ink who owns the ink. Well, they don't own the ink anymore. They just don't. And so that's, that's a real problem, I think, eventually. Yeah. It's kind of like it's, it's the bits now, not the, not the ink. What do you think this, obviously a whole bunch of discussion about how AI can be potentially useful.

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 slash journalism better, what would those things be?

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 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. Um,

All the reporters were like, why are you using email? Why are you having readers listen to you? And I was like, why are you asking that question? Like, of course you'd want... And I would urge people at the time to use the internet, use cell phones, understand the distribution methods all the time. I say the same thing now with AI. Use it every single day and all of them. Try the different ones. They'll come and go just like the internet sites did, but use them so you understand it. And then figure out why it's good for you. Like, what is it good for for you? 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 care things, which is cute. Or when my book came out, which is, may I say, a bestseller, there were all fake versions of it that got Amazon. It was selling a whole bunch of which they were probably dying that it was my book that they did it to. But it was fake versions of my book. And that was kind of like really eye opening. But only

only because people were getting cheated who were gonna buy it. And then I was getting cheated of my IP. They were obviously scraping everything I did. So I just say, try it, try it. I was still interested in what they were doing. So I'd say, try it, try it, try it. 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 and 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

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. Let's just call it propaganda. Yeah, propaganda. Let's just call it propaganda. Like, is there any way, like...

okay, you were the techno-optimist on journalism. Is there any way that AI can help us fight back here? Do you think there just needs to be regulation in the political sphere? Like, what can we do? Sure. Yeah. Yes. I mean, it's a tool and a weapon thing. Brad Smith, who was president of Microsoft, wrote a book called Tools and Weapons, right? So is a knife a tool or a weapon? It's both, right? So obviously, 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 always so surprised that it would be used for nefarious purposes. And so, you know, the thing

The thing is, a lot of the misinformation is in plain sight with Donald Trump, right? He doesn't hide it. He just says, I mean, he has, I just interviewed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who's 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 Trump and what's happening now. And one of the things that's interesting is it's the same old tactics, right? These aren't new tactics, which is spread everywhere.

flood the zone with misinformation or questionable information, say things that aren't true, but then repeat them, continually try to pull down institutions. It's really kind of a playbook for dictators. And so this just accelerates it, although it's doing rather well in just the slower, in the 30 mile per hour version of Donald Trump, as it will in the new version. And I think that's

It just works. And so why wouldn't it work if it was even more stuff thrown at you and everything? So that's what worries me. And then the companies don't have any interest in fixing it. They just let it go, like the toxic waste that spews through the system. They just are like, yeah, it won't have any effect downstream. Yeah. I mean, I completely share your worry. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, this is

As you know, I very rarely go on the critical front with some of these things. I think there's so much criticism already. A lot of the people do that. But on both Meta and Twitter, the no, no, it's just totally freedom of speech. And you can say that the earth is flat and the moon was made out of cheese and the moon landing never happened. And it's like, well, wait a minute. If this is what happens.

the volume of your stuff says, there's a problem, right? Yeah, yeah. I think they don't care to fix it. And, you know, that interview I did with Mark many years ago in 2019 over anti-Semitism, I think I was dead on right. He changed it two years later, but that was two years of unmitigated toxic waste flowing through the system. He doesn't want to pay the real cost of his business because he doesn't think it's his business, but it is his business because he built that. He built that river and we are living

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. Like that's like, okay, so, and, so you make more toxic waste and you need to clean it up more. And the difficulty I do appreciate. I do appreciate the difficulty of doing it, but don't be in that business if you can't figure a safer way to do it. I just don't, I don't get why you get a pass in that. Well, and also look, this is part of the reason I'm a, I'm a technology optimist in my use of the phrase, not in other people's.

is that, well, yes, you can solve it. Apply some of that ingenuity and technology and innovation and solve it. That's the whole point of changing. It's not lucrative. Why would they do it? I think the reason they don't is because

Because one, it is hard. And two, it's not as interesting to them. Like cleaning up is not there in their interests. And it's kind of sort of thankless. It's a thankless task for technology we mostly like, right? But it's also right there. And I think Mark was very much like, you know, free speech on technology.

It's free speech for idiots. I just don't understand. It's like, no, you don't have free speech, by the way. And you do have responsibility if you're a private company. They 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. Well, and last little comment on this thing before we move on to other interesting things is

I did find ironic and interesting how much Elon pre-acquisition trying to get out was like, and it has a huge robot problem, kind of bot problem. And then the day after acquisition, bots? What? Any issue here? Really? Oh, Elon lies. Well, you know what I say? Hello, Elon. Anyway. Yes.

Whatever. Hey, we're getting a robo-taxi. See my jazz hands? Give me a break. We have one. It's called Waymo. It works fine. Mostly, mostly. Yes, exactly. And so anyway, so 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.

I think it's going to be a TV series, too. Watch out, Reed. Who's going to play you? Oh, now you're giving me something new to be anxious about. Well, at least you're a good guy. The subtitle, A Tech Love Story. That's correct. So say a little bit about the book and then, you know, emphasize why the surprising subtitle.

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 to the right, villains are solved and everything.

So I really had that kind of vision of it. And, you know, oddly enough, I 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, if I saw the first flight by the Wright brothers, right?

I would be going, wow, they flew. Not like, oh, it didn't go very far, right? I'd be like, whoa, that is something special. And so every time, when I first saw the internet, for example, and I'm not talking about all tech because I didn't cover the early computer days. I mean, I have knowledge of it, but I didn't cover it. When I first saw the internet for the first time, I was like, wow.

And I, you know, or the first cell phone I saw, I was like, oh, look at that. Like I could see the implications in a good way, right? So the possibilities were endless of this worldwide communication system where we all realize our commonalities was really big. And I really, there's, it still is like the...

I mean, like, would I be against electric lights? No. Like, right? Like, that's the kind of thing. And so these inventions can be so groundbreaking and changing. The car, even the car on the whole, moving people out of small towns, wider range of ideas and where ideas spread, always a good idea. A horse is a good technology. And so I love technology. I just don't like when it's taken advantage

One, to make obscene amounts of money without any care for the social agreement we all have and where you don't feel like when you do damage, you have to pay for it, essentially. That's my issue. So that's why it's burn book.

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?

No, it's not fair use. They're really using their stuff. They look, just pay up, just pay up. Your business is not going to be as good. They got to find a business. FYI, all of them, all the AI companies have got to find a business besides being sold to Microsoft read. 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, where 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 it,

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. 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 stuffs.

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 what 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're eating. Thank you. Yeah. It probably doesn't surprise you. I have a slightly different point of view. Okay. Let me hear yours. 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 very important to keep that part of copyright and all the rest kind of economics.

If it's kind of the equivalent of reading it the way that a human being is reading it, that's all of the training. I don't actually think that's theft or shoplifting, you know, the same way that kind of like having, you know, a search index go through it and index it in searches. Also, I don't think shoplifting. I heard your difference of like, look at links to it and you go to it.

And I think that if you're... I think it was different between what YouTube did and Google did. But go ahead. Go ahead. What do you mean by what YouTube did? Meaning YouTube was benefiting off of content that was stolen that people posted to it, right? This is more akin to that. But go ahead. Well, no, I actually think it's more akin 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 the

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's kind of all over the place in 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, OK, well, then you should be accurate about that. Right. For for these kinds of things. And I think that there is

are good business models there potentially for how the, how that works. And I think it's different than the training question. That's the. 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 the

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, it's a cookbook. And I had said that all the time to these media companies. I'm like, I remember Merrill Levin was going out to Google. I'm like, they're not your friends. Oh, they're going to give us money to put news up. I'm like, don't take their money. They're not here. They're here to be in their media companies. These are media companies.

however they want to play it without the costs of media companies. And so I was always like, look, just make a deal with them. Do something because you're at, you know, you don't have a lot of leverage with these people like at all to speak of. And so what are you going to get out of it? And what is the right relationship? And I think the past one was so bad that,

to be wary of these companies is probably good business, seems to me. - Look, I think it's right. I think we need to figure out kind of what the BD deal is. I do think that there is, you know, competition in the space of creation and content, distribution, 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 peanut butter and chocolate, 'cause there's some contested ground in all these things.

And that's actually one of the reasons why I think that the question about like how brand and currency of information is represented and all the rest I think is 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. You all have to decide what's valuable and what's, you know, you have to sort of take some responsibility as tech companies. Like, okay, I remember being at my house when Larry Page was there and he was telling me the New York Times was the same thing as some little junkety junk. We'll put them all in the same place. I'm like, okay,

What are you talking about? The quality level is so different. That's like saying this Twinkie is as delicious as this cucumber, or as nutritious as this cucumber. Or not cucumber, that's not very nutritious. Something that's nutritious, right? Please not a Twinkie. 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 dip like that. You pretend there is no same thing. Facebook had the same attitude. Like every news service is the same. And I was, I was like, at some point you have to pick quality. If you're going to make a quality service, right? Like just pick, you can decide what quality is or decide what you want to do. But it just was this sort of disdain thing.

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, it's all about their own personal foibles.

But that's where they go when the real business really is going to be in medical and climate and other things. That's where the real money is going to be, right? But they love the idea of somehow figuring out a way to bypass media. Like Trump, they love media because they can't stop frigging talking about media. Since we're talking about media and one of the things that's current news is TikTok,

You know, obviously there's this house bill that'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 play on TikTok? Should it be banned? I have a very sophisticated view. I don't know if I want to use the band. I think, look, if we had a robust online privacy bill and a foreign adversary element of it, this would all it should cover everybody. By the way, the fact that we're singling out TikTok makes it easy for TikTok to say I'm a victim because TikTok.

They kind of are, right? That said, I wrote a column five years ago now, I think it's almost five years or maybe four years ago, where I said, I love TikTok's the best new product I've ever seen. I use it on a burner phone because communist China. Like, I don't know what else to tell you. This is a perfect surveillance and propaganda service.

And I assume they're going to do it. Like, why wouldn't they? Because they never really had an entrance into this country with such a product, right? They'd never been able to break in. They tried a number of times with Alibaba and all kinds of stuff, but they never made it. This thing had gotten real ground here. So, and everyone was like, prove it. I'm like, prove it. Of course they'll do surveillance and propaganda. What are

talking about? Like, and every company I covered in China always had a Chinese Communist Party element. There was just never one there. I covered the Google thing when they were spying on Google and remember eBay went in there. Yahoo had us sit. 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. 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 are very particular about the movies that get in there.

So to me, if there's not reciprocity and you assume that's what they're doing, at the very least, it's a real danger. It's 170 million spy balloons over our country. And so we have to think about them as a foreign adversary. And as much as people don't like to say foreign adversary, China is our number one foreign adversary. And if you read anything that Xi Jinping says at his...

They're very long and sloggy, but if you read them or get a translation of them, he's saying he wants to dominate technologically across the world in the next century. That's what he says. And he says he's quite detailed about it. I'm taking him at his word.

That that's what he wants to do. And so should we, because we have a better internet, we have a better government, we have a broken government, but we have a better government. And so I think we need to have a larger privacy bill and in the interim, maybe scare them a little bit with this bill. So I'm not against it. I'm not, I'm not sure this is the right bill. I don't know if it's going to even pass in the Senate at this point, right? There's enough

opposition to it. So it hardly matters, but it's certainly, I'm in the sort of Mike Gallagher camp of this thing. Like he's a representative of let's assume the worst, like optimistic pessimists. I'm assuming they're doing bad things. So I'm kind of for it at the same time. It does help, um,

It's going to help Facebook. It just is. They're our national champion in this area, and so it's going to help Meta. That's not great. And I know Mark's, in an interview I did when all the attention was on the anti-Semitism, 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 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. 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. I think Meta should have privacy, an 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 think the people working for TikTok in the U.S. are great. I don't have any. I think they think it's not a problem. But every you know, look, think about Jack Moth when they hid him away for like two years. Right. Like, can you imagine us hiding Jeff Bezos away and just saying, I don't know where he is? Like, can you imagine him in hiding? That's what Russia does. That's what China does.

Like think about hiding Jeff Bezos. You interviewed the CEO of TikTok on your podcast. Like what do you do when you're interviewing someone 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 what do you do? 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 frequently.

Facebook does, right? I think they're trying a little better to create a more entertaining platform. 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 that because that'll be proof, right? That'll be proof if we get the algorithm in our hands.

And by the way, what is it without the, it's a 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? I mean, Microsoft was jacked into it in the last scheme that Donald Trump had. Well, I would say, look, I think the TikTok asset's actually very valuable in China globally and in the US. I just think it's a question of price. If there's like, you know, if it was offered to purchase,

on a question of price, I certainly would, because I think there's a lot of things you could do with it that would be pretty amazing. By the way, I'm an investor in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. It's all Americans, 60%, right? Isn't it? I don't know. I don't know. It is. It's some number that's quite high that owns ByteDance. But it's, you know, because there's various things that I think it does

uh quite well and i think it can contribute in very good ways so i don't think the algorithm is is like this genius secret sauce other than the fact and this is part of what plays with ai is that

When you run training on very large sets of data, you get some unique capabilities where that capabilities is actually, in fact, very is very important. And without those capabilities, well, then, you know, TikTok US is irrelevant. You could you could just build it in some other way. But I do think the question around saying we should.

treat our market to, you know, Chinese companies or any companies. I agree with your earlier point of not making it specific to TikTok, not making it specific to China, although foreign adversaries, but just saying, here's our general principles. And I think the principle approach is the, is the right way to go. Can you, I see to me, TikTok, and I'll finish up, is a broadcast network. It just is a modern broadcast network is what it is.

It's an entertainment network. It is not a social network. It is an entertainment network. Would we let them buy Disney? Would we let them buy CNN? Absolutely. There wouldn't even be a question, right? Like for a second. Like would we let Chinese company own Netflix?

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 the East? You just wouldn't. It'd be no. 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.

One of the things I've been grappling with is how does scale technology get built?

And generally speaking, the only thing I see for how to build it is technology companies or adjacency to technology companies. Adjacency, you know, I was on board of Mozilla for 11 years. That's adjacent to Google, OpenAI, adjacent to Microsoft. You know, so you do have 501c3s that do this. I actually, you know, with Kiva and everyone else, I try as much as I can to get as much public interest tech stuff empowered as I can. But it still kind of leads me back to,

Scale tech tends to be built by companies. And so therefore, I tend to get to the question of, given that I tend to think that solving 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. Right. But I don't think you can. Like, just go ahead. Finish your thought. Well, no, you're anticipating the exact question, which is for me, like I view the work to being how do we shape capitalism?

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

being critical and then saying, look, you actually, in fact, have to say what you're doing, why you're trying to do it, articulate your values, be responsive to tough questions, et cetera, is all kind of trying to get the companies to be building these things. 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

I'm not skeptical. Look, 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 day 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 that to us to pretend that we're waiting for their better natures is kind of like

Why isn't Procter & Gamble getting us to eat more carrots? They're just not gonna. They want us to eat Fritos or whatever the heck they're making, whatever. They want us to use bounty towels. That's why they're not selling 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 consumer products person. And they're not, they're just here to sell you shit. And that's what they're, whatever their shit happens to be, that's 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 who knows? That's not really his job 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 benefited

from. I just feel like that this is their business of being in cap. And when I say, so it was capitalists after all, it's because they cosplayed being something else, that they were magicians, that they were here to do good. They weren't here to do good. They 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, 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. 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 Buffett company, by the way. You know, who's doing this? That's who we need to focus on is the government, is the press shaming them or figuring this out?

Like Texas, for example, has enormous amounts of pollution. Like let the press point that out and then the government has to do something about it or at least monitor them. And I think they've hollowed out our government in such a way, all these various right-wing organizations particularly, and academics I would also have thrown in there. So 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 that book, The Lorax. We're in the frigging Lorax. The Lorax is going to keep making truffle sweaters or whatever, truffle trees. They're not going to care about the last truffle seed. But someone is, the government or a do-gooder or whatever. And that's what we don't have is the respect for government and the ability for government to help mitigate and modulate the worst things.

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, technology,

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

All right. Rapid fire questions. Okay. Is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future? Oh, so many. I love them all. Well, Barbie, the Barbie movie I loved. I thought that got cheated at the thing. I love that Barbie. It'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. I've got a Gerwig is so fantastic. I just can't even. What's a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

How did you do so well with your kids? Parenting. I think parenting. I have great kids. That's awesome. And I don't think that it's all me, but I have to say me and my very, I remarried, but my first wife and my wife now is we're really good parents. We're really, and we have some tips for you, especially with boys. And I think I wish they would ask me more. Lesbians should raise all the boys. I have three boys. You're going to have to tell me your tips offline. Thank you.

Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you? I'm really interested in all these psychedelics. I've never taken any, but I think it's really the ability to relieve pain from people in a way that's more sustainable and more healthy, I think is interesting. I do think all these eczempic 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, I think government, especially, we can, you know, this whole like, oh, you're fat because you're lazy or, you know, there's, we get addicted to food in the same ways and the way these companies poise this crap on, especially poor people, just an interesting things around it. I think it has interesting,

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

Oh, this obsession with like categorizing people. It's just, I'm a Star Trek person. Like it's just like the other day, someone was asking me about early being gay early and just that people don't like each other because you're gay. It just doesn't make any sense. It's like so stupid. It's such a stupid waste of talent. And all those people who died of AIDS, if you go look at their histories as they were creating before they died, what they could have contributed to the world was massive, massive when you just saw them, like who, who,

Just like, why are we doing that? I think all the isms, the sexism, ageism, everything else, like it's so dumb from an economic point of view. I feel like at some point the penny's gonna drop and the people who are so divisive, and they're often the richest people in our world right now. I'm thinking of the Bill Ackman's and the Elon Musk's. They don't have any solutions. They just wanna frigging gripe about everything and they wanna be grievance. So the grievance industrial complex, if that could go away,

would be great. Like, I'm so tired of hearing about what you don't like, like get a therapist and get the hell out of my space, like get off my lawn. But I would really like people to be thinking, being solutions based going forward, because like we're 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 and,

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. What an amazing way to end the Possible podcast. All things are possible, but, you know, I'm still an optimistic pessimist. It's going to all go to shit. Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young.

Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schleed, Adrienne Bain, and Paloma Moreno-Gimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Ellis, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rallis. And a big thanks to Eileen Boyle, Elizabeth Herman, and Little Monster Media Company.