Transcript: Kara Swisher, Author, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

MS. ELLISON: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Sarah Ellison, a reporter here at The Post, and today I am really thrilled, truly thrilled to be joined by Kara Swisher, who is--who in some ways needs no introduction but is a tech journalist, columnist, entrepreneur, also an author. We are here to talk to her today about her new book called “Burn Book: A Tech Love story.” Kara, welcome.

MS. SWISHER: Thank you. It's called “multi-hyphenate” now. I don't know if you know that, but that's the term. That's the technical term now.

MS. ELLISON: I got it. Got it, got it.

MS. SWISHER: Also mom too.

MS. ELLISON: Also, but too many hats, too many hats.

MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: How do you find time to do everything?

Well, first, before we get to the book, I want to--now that we have you, I want to ask you a little bit about some news that we were all sort of listening in on yesterday, which were the oral arguments for the Supreme Court case--

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MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: --that will be decided sometime in June about a Texas law and a related Florida law, where these laws have basically banned social media companies from suspending political candidates and media organizations.

MS. SWISHER: Yep. Right.

MS. ELLISON: And I'm just wondering if you could walk our audience through what the stakes are. Why should we care about this? How important are these arguments and will this decision be?

MS. SWISHER: Yeah, I think the Supreme Court will knock it down because--there's two conflicting decisions. That's why they had to take it up. People have supported it or not supported it, different judges, and so they have to decide here.

Basically, it's the first big free-speech case that has come up in a long time, and the question is, can you force social media companies to put on stuff they don't want to put on? That's like saying The Washington Post has to do whatever it does. It's the government reaching in and telling The Washington Post they can't not write about someone they don't want to write about. These are publishing companies, as far as I'm concerned and I think a lot of people. They've become massive distributors of news, and they've created organizations that aren't precisely like a news organization, but they are. They're the way people get their media, and so can they be forced to do that? Can you--and if--their argument, some of it is they're like a telephone company. Should they be forced to be told who can use or not use their systems? They can't be. They have First Amendment rights themselves.

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I often don't take the tech company side on this, but this is just an egregious overreach of government power, and they're dressing it up in censorship ideas, which is a bogeyman on the right. Everything's been censored. Of course, these people never shut up. That's kind of an interesting phenomenon is that the people who cry most about censorship really literally never stop talking. And I'm talking to you, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And one of the things that's problematic here is that there's a real movement to do this, to control speech by the government. The other case that's being taken up that is also related is coming soon, which is whether our government can talk to tech companies about problems and things like that or if it's seen as coercion. That's an important case too, because the government, as most people who've read the First Amendment know, you’re not--the government shall make no law, not Google, not Facebook, not Amazon. The government shall make no law, and so the question is, to what extent can government talk to and warn tech companies of problems, which they should be able to have a robust exchange? The question is, where is the line drawn on coercion to take things down?

MS. ELLISON: Right. I mean, on January 6th, 2021, you tweeted at Jack Dorsey, who was then running Twitter, that he should suspend Donald Trump's Twitter account.

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MS. SWISHER: Yes, he did.

MS. ELLISON: So who should decide? Who should decide?

MS. SWISHER: You know, I'm not entirely comfortable with two people deciding to remove someone from most of social media. In that case, it was Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but I am certainly not comfortable with the government doing it. That, I'm certain.

I think, you know, these are private platforms. Everyone likes to go on and on about the public square when it's convenient for them, but they are not a public square. This is a private square owned and operated by some of the richest people on earth.

Now, whether they should have that role, we can address that in other ways. Should there be more competition? Should we have more antitrust laws? Should we deal with privacy issues? We don't deal with those things, the unlimited power of these tech companies, and it's conflating here. Like, just because they have unlimited power doesn't mean they don't have free speech, and to try to impose the government forcing people to leave Donald Trump on a platform if he breaks the rules, I'm sorry. You wouldn't do that to The Washington Post. You wouldn't do that to, you know, CNN. It's just if you take it out to other media, it's a real problem, and that's what the First Amendment is for. These companies have First Amendment rights.

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And, you know, you could do all kinds of scenarios, but it's a real problem if the Supreme Court sides with Florida and Texas, who have to be the most cynical people on earth. They are political players that are trying to score political points. Do you want to rein in tech? This is not the way to do it. This is the worst possible way you should be able to do it. And that said, the government should be able to talk to tech companies, especially around terrorism or safety issues or at least recommend and warn tech companies and work together with the government in serious cases, not frivolous cases, but in serious things that they need to be warned about.

MS. ELLISON: I'm not going to go on forever about policy--

MS. SWISHER: Yeah, sure. Please do.

MS. ELLISON: But I do want to ask you one other thing, which is that the Senate seems to be on the verge of doing something that hasn't been done--

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MS. SWISHER: Mm-hmm.

MS. ELLISON: --ever maybe, which is the Kids Online--

MS. SWISHER: --Safety Act.

MS. ELLISON: --Safety Act.

MS. SWISHER: Mm-hmm.

MS. ELLISON: And I want to hear sort of whether you think--I mean, it seems like it's going to pass the Senate.

MS. SWISHER: Mm-hmm.

MS. ELLISON: The fate in the House is uncertain, but what do you think of that? Is that going to happen? Is that significant?

MS. SWISHER: No, it's never going to be a law because the House isn't going to--so it doesn't really matter. I mean, we need some sort of safety act about kids. This is not the way I would necessarily go about it. I don't mind a little legislation.

One of the initial problems of the legislation is that it gave states’ attorneys general far too many--too much power here, because in states where they don't like gay people, they could say gay people are bad for children, right? It could go really--I'm a gay person, but anybody, you know, they could decide anything they want in these states.

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And so, you know, you've got to sort of have a federal version of this, and I see some of it is good. Some of it is problematic. What I might do is spend a lot more time on age gating. Should young people be able--you know, we age-gate a lot of things. Some of this stuff perhaps should be age-gated. There should be stronger laws about child exploitation and maybe many more exceptions to Section 230 where people can do liability, you know, where they can sue these companies if they have a case, and they either win or lose based on the law. That, I'm more comfortable with that. These sort of omnibus kind of safety rules, I think are a little performative on some level, and they don't anticipate all the problems. I think there's a lot more surgical ways to deal with things like this, but, you know, they can't pass. They can't agree on lunch up there on the Hill. So I'm not sure they’re--they haven't passed any substantive internet laws in--let me--let me check now--forever. Never, never ever. So I don't expect them to do so now.

MS. ELLISON: You brought up Section 230, and I want to just spend a minute on that.

MS. SWISHER: Sure.

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MS. ELLISON: What are your thoughts on whether that's going--I mean, should that go away? You talked about--

MS. SWISHER: No.

MS. ELLISON: --some exceptions to it. Yeah.

MS. SWISHER: Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, here's the problem. I wrote about it at the time, for The Washington Post, actually. There was a thing called the Communications Decency Act. Much of it was ruled unconstitutional, I believe, and--but this stayed. And this was an immunity for these tech companies, because at the time they were created, they could have been sued out of existence, right, because if something was on their platform, should they be liable for it? If I say something libelous, should Steve Case be liable for it, et cetera? Because they were really almost common carriers in a lot of ways, and so I think it was to protect a nascent industry.

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Well, right now that industry has grown. It was a baby. Now it's a giant baby, and it's a giant, powerful, rich--most rich baby of all time. And so do they deserve those protections now? Now, the minute you get rid of Section 230, they can’t--could be sued out of existence. But the fact that there's no liability for these companies, or very little, is problematic. Liability is one way we control egregious acts, right, in some way? It's fair.

And so the question is, where can we put--how can we change it and adjust it in a way that could be smarter for the times we live in now? Same thing with antitrust laws. How do we adjust and change to address the current situation? And at the time, it was a great law. Right now, it gives them kind of an out.

And so I'm not of the get rid of it. I think people that do that don't really understand the issues and don't understand the actual law itself. We just have to start to put some very specific other laws in place that might protect us a little better and also protect the rights everybody has, data privacy, algorithmic transparency, anti-hacking. If they know about a hacking, they have to tell you, you know, disclosures. There's all kinds of things they could do to mitigate these issues.

MS. ELLISON: One of the things that we're in right now is an election year, and we think a lot about that at The Washington Post.

MS. SWISHER: You do.

MS. ELLISON: I see you on Threads, and Threads has specifically said that they're going to back away from political content--

MS. SWISHER: They are.

MS. ELLISON: --and news content. What do you think was behind that announcement and that decision, and what do you think of it in an election year in particular?

MS. SWISHER: They can do whatever--they can do whatever they want. It's not their--they're not--look, Mark Zuckerberg isn't your political mommy. You know what I mean? If he doesn't want to do it, he doesn't have to do it.

I don't mind. Like, look, certain publications decide how much politics. Obviously, The Washington Post covers a lot. I don't--I think we put them up as saviors or it's their duty or--it's not. It's their company. They can do whatever they want. If they want that to do, it actually does tone down. They don't have to deal with all the disaster there, right? They don't--like, they got it bad with the Trump stuff, right, when they took them off or they put them in purgatory or whatever the heck they did to them. Very difficult to try to litigate all this stuff and especially when they're completely inept at it, by the way. They're not just bad. They are damaging, the way they made decisions, and so they just want to not have to deal with it at all and everybody talk about cat videos and flower arranging and, you know, the latest book they read. I think they’d prefer that.

It's much more like Instagram, although there's issues on Instagram, all kinds of problematic issues--

MS. ELLISON: Right.

MS. SWISHER: --as there are in humanity, by the way. And so I think they just are like, “I think we'll check out this year on this one,” and that's what they're going to do. So that's their decision. I don't much care.

MS. ELLISON: Yeah. I mean, you've written about this though too. It's also going to drive sort of the traffic away from traditional media on those platforms.

MS. SWISHER: Mm-hmm.

MS. ELLISON: And you've written, you know, very forcefully about this, about how these--I can't--what did you say? They--that they obliterated the business model for media companies.

MS. SWISHER: They did, yeah.

MS. ELLISON: I’m just wondering. Help us understand exactly how that happened.

MS. SWISHER: Well, specifically, the Washington Post, I have a lot in the book about what happened at The Washington Post. And I have huge regard for the Graham family who owned it, and that's who I worked for, Ben Bradlee and others, when I was young. This was back in the last century, and one of the things that I saw coming very early--I had written about a retailer called the “Hafts,” and it was--I wrote a series of really great stories. And none of--nobody remembers them, but they were the richest family in Washington. They were coming apart.

And I moved over to digital because I was the young person on the business staff, and they were like, “Give it to the young person,” right, essentially. And when I started exploring it, it was very quick to see. I was a student of media at Georgetown. I went to Georgetown Foreign Service School in propaganda, and so once you started to see some of these things--I had already seen sort of a troubling issue around display advertising, because local retailers had died, like Garfinkel’s and Hecht’s and some others or had moved to bigger organizations. And companies like Walmart were coming in, which were highly technical actually in how they stock stores and everything else, but they weren't advertising. So I was like, ooh, that's a problem, right? Like, that's a big--you know, that’s a big economic engine of The Washington Post.

But then when I saw classified--when I saw craigslist, I was like, “Oh no. This is bad,” because that was a big economic engine. And the minute craigslist came in, it didn't just decimate it. It collapsed the whole classified business, right, with free classifieds. And it was partially--it was a a lot to do with how media conducted this. The classifieds were expensive, ineffective, and static. Like, and in the new era, that wasn't going to happen.

And then lastly, when you saw a lot of free news being put out there, you wondered what happened to subscriptions, and what could The Post or any news organization do to make stuff that people were willing to pay for? So it changed the economics so quickly, and then into that--into that delta ran Google and Facebook, which sucked up all the digital advertising, which is where it was going next. And they could afford to lose money at it until it became very profitable, and these companies couldn't make that transition from physical to digital as quickly.

MS. ELLISON: One of the things you are the best at is puncturing the egos of these men, mostly men in Silicon Valley.

MS. SWISHER: Mostly.

MS. ELLISON: And I'm wondering if you can sort of unpack for the audience, are these just the newest version of robber barons, or is this--

MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: --a different crop of people? How should we think about these sort of "Masters of the Universe"?

MS. SWISHER: Some of them are good; some of them are bad. They're all unaccountable, right? They have unaccountable wealth. They have unaccountable power.

I--look, we can make fun of our public officials all the time, and they're laughable on many occasions, right? Like, you just sit there, and you sort of roll your eyes. But the fact of the matter is, no matter what you think, whatever side you're on, they are elected. This is what the people decided. This is who they chose, and so that is that.

The people that are making decisions for us on all range of issues, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg deciding whether or not to kick Holocaust deniers off a platform where most people get their news, that's a problem. Like, that's a real problem. And so I think a lot of them are inept to the task or inexperienced.

Some of them are quite good. Like, you don't--like, look, they just do what they do. I often use Tim Cook as the example. Can you imagine Tim Cook putting up, you know, boob jokes or Ukraine thoughts online? Like, come on. He doesn't do it. He does his job. He makes whatever he's making, Vision Pro or new iPhones or whatever. At the same time, he has enormous power in the App Store, right, to decide who wins and who loses, and that's right now subject to federal scrutiny, what's happening in court cases around the App Store with Epic and things like that.

So I just feel like they have so much power and so much money. It's never going to end well, even if they have good intentions, even if their CEOs are mature. Unfortunately, a lot of the CEOs are not so mature. I call them “adult toddlers” in many cases. No.

MS. ELLISON: Yes. Well, you did--you did say--I love this line. You sort of write with this sense of disappointment that these, quote, “once fresh-faced wunderkinds I had mostly rooted for now make me feel like a parent whose progeny had turned into, well, assholes.”

MS. SWISHER: Yes, yes.

MS. ELLISON: And this evolution, is it inevitable? Is there something that like power--you know, power corrupts, or is there something--

MS. SWISHER: Sure does.

MS. ELLISON: --specific about the tech world that makes this happen?

MS. SWISHER: No, no. It's just--it’s rich people, right? It doesn't--like, listen, we're having to endure Bill Ackman right now. He's a hedge fund guy, right? What does he know about DEI? But he sure does talk about it, and everybody pays attention because he's a rich guy who happened to give money to Harvard. You know, like, okay, so that gives you the right to be a persistent irritant, you know? And like if I--what if I started tweeting about hedge fund investing? Oh, let me tell you what I think without any knowledge of the situation. Let me take out my personal foibles on everybody else and pretend it's something about something serious. So this is what rich people do once that now they've gotten a little power and they got their own little networks, right? Let us tell you, because we're rich, what we think about Ukraine. Like, the fact that VCs--some of them are smart, I guess, you know--are like pontificating about what we should do in the South China Sea. I'd rather they just sit down, like, otherwise.

So I think it's--I think it’s a function--it’s a disease of rich people who have people licking them up and down all day, that they must be right. And that's why many of them don't talk to me anymore because often I'd be like, “What are you talking about, sir?” And then after a while, they don't love that. They don't love being told they're inept or stupid or that was stupid, because everyone else is being paid.

MS. ELLISON: Right.

MS. SWISHER: Everyone else is being paid at--but this has happened in Hollywood. This happens. It's just on a mega scale because they are--they’re not just a little rich. They're obscenely rich. They're crazy rich, right? You know what I mean? They're crazy rich. And so they can do whatever they want. They're little nation-states in and of themselves, the companies and the people.

MS. ELLISON: And they don't talk to you anymore. Is it fine? That's fine?

MS. SWISHER: No, no, no. That's not true.

MS. ELLISON: I thought that you still had--

MS. SWISHER: No.

MS. ELLISON: Not.

MS. SWISHER: Oh, I do. I talk to all of them. Let me just--not Elon.

MS. ELLISON: Yeah, I was just going to say.

MS. SWISHER: He and I had a falling out. But I talk to the rest of them. I've talked to all of them. You know, look, the ones that are adults--like, I talk to Tim Cook. I talk to Bob Iger. I talk to, like, a lot of them, like, whoever they happen to be in media or technology. I just talked to Satya Nadella recently. Like, he's an adult. He can deal with, you know, difficult Kara. Oh no, she's going to ask me a tough question. How--whatever shall I do? I'm just--I'm just--I hate to use the Tucker Carlson phrase, “just asking questions,” but I'm actually just asking questions. And I think most intelligent people, smart people, strong people really can face a decent question. I'm not asking them personal questions. I'm not asking them stupid questions. I'm asking them, “Okay. This happened. Tell me what happened here,” and I think most intelligent people are fine with it. It's just the big babies that, like, lose their brain because--I don't know. Who knows? They should get therapy, I think, personally.

MS. ELLISON: You definitely have interviewed almost all of them--

MS. SWISHER: All of them.

MS. ELLISON: --if not all of them.

MS. SWISHER: All of them. All of them.

MS. ELLISON: And the one who comes to mind most often these days is somebody you've sparred with publicly and regularly--

MS. SWISHER: Mm-hmm.

MS. ELLISON: --who you used to be quite close with, and that's Elon Musk.

MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: And I'm wondering--I mean, there's so many elements, whether it's the woke mind virus, his relationship with government.

MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: But can you just at the very top line, can you just tell us what you think has happened--

MS. SWISHER: About him?

MS. ELLISON: --to Elon Musk? Yeah.

MS. SWISHER: All right. I get a lot of flack for thinking he was really inspirational. Like, I said so. I just was--here was--here was me as a beat reporter, and as you know, Sarah--you're an excellent beat reporter too--you're a beat reporter. You can't really say what you think of anybody, you know, for a long time.

But then when I got to AllThingsD, one of the reasons I created it within The Wall Street Journal was I was sick of not saying what I thought--

MS. ELLISON: Mm-hmm.

MS. SWISHER: --about stuff I reported on, right? I did not talk about things I didn't know. I did extensive reporting, and then I came to a conclusion. That's what AllThingsD was about, to get rid of the to-be-sure statement that The Wall Street Journal foisted upon me. And you know that sentence, right? “To be sure, some people say”--you know that one--"Rupert Murdoch is not a terrible person.” Like, I just am like he is. Like, stop it. Like, I think he is, based on my reporting, and I can say that.

And so once I started doing that, I was able to say that, and one of the things I noticed was a lot of really smart people, in my mind, working on stupid things, right? Like, if I had to talk to--I use this example on this book tour. Like, if I hear one more digital dry cleaning, you know, “I'm doing a digital, but it's digital, Kara,” I'm like, “But you're still cleaning the clothes, right? Like, I don't get it.” They were all so dumb, the ideas. Like, they started to get really dumb and minuscule, right, kind of like doesn't really move the needle.

Here was a guy who had been doing--like, he did a Yellow Pages thing, not that impressive. Fine, whatever. Digitizing Yellow Pages, okay. They did a payment system, which was interesting. He did X, and then he merged. He and PayPal merged and sold it. Okay. Made some money. But instead of doing what everybody else did, like, you know, part-time VCs and full-time pontificators, he started--he worked--he didn't create Tesla. He invested in it and then became the head of it, Tesla. He did SpaceX. He was doing some, like, brain company. He did a tunnel-digging thing, which seems to be kind of kooky, but I liked the initiative. It was interesting, right?

MS. ELLISON: Mm-hmm.

MS. SWISHER: But at least on a couple things, space and energy, saving for cars, boy, that was important to me. I was like, oh, finally, someone is dealing with real issues, right, that have impact. Now, what happened to him is--there's lots of theories on what happened to him, but he had a part of his personality that was silly, like a lot of them. And not just silly, just stupid, juvenile. Like, you know what I mean? A boob joke, a penis joke, a dank meme. He had that, like, and he was far too old, as many of them are, to be telling so many of them. But it was a minor part of his personality. There were issues around racial issues and sexual harassment issues at his factories. Look, this was throughout--I was in the middle of covering Uber on this issue. This was not fresh--or at Kleiner Perkins. This was problematic across the tech industry. We wrote about it. But at the same time, these were really interesting, innovative companies.

Then something happened during covid. That is where we first--when he did that first “pedo” thing, I was like, that's weird, which this is the cave diver who he accused of being a pedophile. Nobody throws around that term loosely, and I was like, wow, that was weird. You know what I mean? That was weird. That said, he did win in that court case. It was stupid on his part and really cruel. Then during covid, he started pontificating about covid because he was mad because they were closing down his factory, and he--you know, he was on the knife’s edge of going out of business, right, on a lot of things, and this was pre-covid. And we did an interview before covid where he went through a very dramatic period when Tesla was in big trouble. They got a government loan, and then they were really in a valley-of-death situation. And when we were doing this interview, I think it was 2018. It was Halloween. I remember it was Halloween, but he kept saying he had to sleep on the factory floor. That's something he said. And I was like, “Why?” Like, “Because I had to be there.” And I was like, “Okay. Like, there's a bed nearby. Like, you could have gotten a motel next door.” And then he was--so it was highly dramatic. And then he said something to me, which was like, if Tesla didn't survive, humanity was doomed. That was essentially the message. And I was like, oh, that's a little dramatic. That's a little egomaniacal. It was weird. You know what I mean? I filed it away. He didn't do it that often, but he had that sort of godlike tendency.

And then during the Trump--the first Trump thing, when I talked to him quite a bit about--they were going to do an anti-gay executive order, they did the Muslim thing, he and I talked. I was like, “They're going to do a Muslim ban,” and he's like, “I shall convince them otherwise.” I remember that, and I said, “Listen, Jesus, good for you, but I don't believe you can stop him. Like, I think you're wrong. You're misjudging this guy badly because he says it.” Trump is so explicit. It's not like he's hiding under a sheet doing things, although--well, that's a good, interesting metaphor I just used. But he was very explicit in his racism and homophobia and et cetera. And so that was interesting. I was like, “Wow. You really think you're God,” you know. It was language that was--that made me uncomfortable. That's for sure.

MS. ELLISON: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

MS. SWISHER: But then we had an interview during covid where he started to say things that were strange. You know what I mean? Like, “There will be no covid deaths or whatever.” He had--“It's not a big deal. I'm not getting the covid vaccine. The government is trying to get me. The man is trying to get me.” It was that tone. And I kept thinking, well, you kind of are the man.

MS. ELLISON: Right.

MS. SWISHER: So it's okay to be safer than sorry, right? We don't know. And I think I kept saying, you know, maybe they're overreaching, but we don't know. What if it's real bad? Right? Like, maybe it's good to be a little bit, but he saw it as government overreach. I saw it as safety. That was problematic.

And then the Twitter stuff, and I just--I don't know. I think he's just gotten radicalized, the way a lot of people are online. I think drug use, as The Wall Street Journal has written quite accurately about, might be part of it. And then it's just being the world's richest man with everybody, again, licking you up and down. He gets particularly licked, and so he's always right. And we had a big falling out, inexplicable falling out, but I don't care, whatever.

MS. SWISHER: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. That relationship, it's--in some ways, it's a perfect lead-in to the other idea that I wanted to bring up, which is that you have had this long relationship with so many of the--I mean, you see--

MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: You're interviewing Mark Zuckerberg when he's a baby and, you know, still around now.

MS. SWISHER: Yeah. He doesn't talk to me very much, but I accept it.

MS. ELLISON: But you're--I mean, other people who've written big biographies and had a big presence--Walter Isaacson. Michael Lewis was sort of criticized for his proximity--

MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: --to his subject, and you have gotten some--I mean, you've had this long life--

MS. SWISHER: Yeah.

MS. ELLISON: --and you were--you were--your job was to get scoops, and you got a lot of them. And now--and I wonder the relationship that you've had, how you balance that, sort of that proximity--

MS. SWISHER: Well, you know--

MS. ELLISON: --and that sort of role as a critic.

MS. SWISHER: --I'm going to push back on this one because they're like, oh, she wasn't tough on him.

MS. ELLISON: Yeah.

MS. SWISHER: I don't know if you've noticed. It's interesting, because a lot of the PR people I dealt with back then was like, “I don't know what these people are talking about. Kara drove me frigging nuts,” right?

MS. ELLISON: I remember those interviews. I remember those interviews.

MS. SWISHER: That's correct. It's like--

MS. ELLISON: Yeah.

MS. SWISHER: It's really interesting because it's like a lot of people who weren’t maybe born then didn't pay attention to what I was doing. I mean, early on, I wrote a lot about Google's monopoly power. I wrote a piece that called them “thugs.” You know, this is in the early 2000s. They cannot have search dominance. Uber, we'd strafe them, and we did a lot of breaking stories, including about, you know, using personal files and their privacy issues. We were very tough on Facebook from the beginning. I was very tough on them on privacy. We had the famous interview in 2000--I think it was ’10 or earlier where he sweat, where we were pushing him on privacy. I had an interview with him where I pushed him on Holocaust deniers. That was 2018 or--’17 or ’18. In The New York Times, my very first column was Mark Zuckerberg is a digital arms dealer, and so are the rest of them. And so when they're like she wasn't tough enough, I'm like, “I'm sorry, boys. Where were you? Like, I'm sorry I was a beat reporter, but honestly, like, can you look? Can you look at what I wrote?” No, they couldn't possibly look at what I wrote. I was like, “Okay. Mommy wasn't mean enough because she had to have relationships with them”? I don’t--the one you could give me a hard time on is Elon Musk, but honestly, very few other people were doing it. And I thought he was doing a lot of really interesting things.

MS. ELLISON: Interesting.

MS. SWISHER: And he didn't--you know, everyone was like, you're doing it so you can have interviews with them. I'm like, “Mark Zuckerberg literally sweat on my stage, and it embarrassed the hell out of him.” I was super tough on all these people. I don't know what you want. Would you want me to attack him? Like, do you want me to like throttle him in a live cage match, speaking of cage matches? I just--I didn't--I never got it.

And I'll be honest with you, Sarah. Some of it is sexism, honestly. It's like I--I shouldn't say this, but I lapped a lot of these reporters constantly. So did all the AllThingsD reporters. And as you know, having been at the--you were at the Journal, it was--there's a lot of, like, competition within these things.

MS. ELLISON: Sure.

MS. SWISHER: And I just feel like I'm very pleased with my record on being tough on these guys--

MS. ELLISON: Yeah.

MS. SWISHER: --and calling attention to privacy issues. I was one of the first people to write about sexism in the thing. I did a whole story calling "the men and no women of Facebook." This is 2000 and whatever--whatever, probably later, because they came out later. But I wrote one of the first stories pointing out the sexism on boards, on this and that. Again, okay, sure. I'm super friends with them. Like, I just--I never socialize with, you know--

MS. ELLISON: Yeah.

MS. SWISHER: I'm pretty tough on Rupert Murdoch, someone you know about.

MS. ELLISON: Yeah. No, I mean, it's an interesting thing when people look back and don't remember the toughest interviews.

But I want to ask you--I mean, this is such a wide-ranging book, and it's sort of a memoir, but it's sort of the history of Silicon Valley. What do you want people to take from the book? You know, as I think you've noted, there's a sort of insider's take, and then there's the rest of the world--

MS. SWISHER: Sure.

MS. ELLISON: --that wants to just know something about this incredibly powerful group of individuals that are running our society.

MS. SWISHER: Sure.

MS. ELLISON: But what do you want people to take away from the book?

MS. SWISHER: Well, I didn't write it for insiders. You know, really interesting. Like, is there news here? No, it's a memoir of what happened. I'm writing it. If you want to read a really quick and pretty easy-to-read history of the internet, this is for you, right? It's fast. You know, you're on a plane, you want to learn about it, I think you'll be fine with it. If you're someone who likes to know what these people were like from a historic point of view, this is my opinion of what they were like. Like, everyone's going to have their own take. Walter Isaacson had his take. Demons, demons, that was it. Like, come on. Like, I didn't agree with that one. But everybody has their own take on what people are like. So this is my take. So I had some insight because I met them in the before times, and let me show you what they're like now. So I think it's very valuable to know the before times.

I also have a very serious strain going through this book, which is about unaccountable power of billionaires, unaccountable power of tech, and the impact tech is going to have on our lives and how it has occupied us, that it controls us versus us controlling it, given we've put so much into it, our data. The taxpayer paid for the internet. We gave loans to Elon Musk. We have helped these people become as big as they are, and we are their product, right? We are the product. And so I want people to really understand as we go into this new age of artificial general intelligence--now, artificial intelligence has been around for a long time--that we have to put things into place. Regulations, not a ton of them. I'm a capitalist. You know I've created startups. I don't love a lot of regulation. I certainly would like more than one, more than zero actually. And so that's--we have to start to put in--you're not going to mitigate damage from anything, everything all the time.

But I think the key quote in this book, if I had to pick it, is the Paul Virilio quote--

MS. ELLISON: Mm-hmm.

MS. SWISHER: --in which when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. Now you're not going to stop shipwrecks, but you can do things. You can create a lighthouse. You can--you know, there's mitigation to--every technology has seeds of negativity. I'm not against--it's just going to happen. Damage happens, but it doesn't have to happen this much.

And then the last thing is--my favorite anecdote in the book is when I argue with the Google founders about trying to take over Yahoo. This was way back when, when I was being so nice to them. I called them “thugs,” and they called me because they were mad I wrote that because I compared them to Microsoft and said they shouldn't have 97 percent of the search market. That is abuse. That is monopoly abuse. And one of them called me, and he said, “I can't believe you said that about us. We're nice people.” I'll never forget this, and they don't study history. They aren't very literate. Like, these people don't have a sense of history. And I--you know, they have the “don't be evil” thing. And they're like, “We said don't be evil. We're nice people.” I said to them--and I'm certain they didn't hear it. I said two things. I said, “One, I'm not worried about you. I'm worried about the next person. I'm worried about the malicious people. I'm worried about the dangerous people who are coming next,” because all these tools can be used in incredibly dangerous and scary way to control whole populations. And I referenced at the time--and I'd forgotten the Yeats poem, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” And I said, there is a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem waiting to be born, and of course, they were like, “Huh?” And I was like, “I can't explain, but bad people are coming. Like, I know they're coming. They always come. And this technology is perfect for authoritarians and fascists and propagandists, and you are pretending they're not coming. And I know they are, and they will knock on your door and you're not the problem, but what you're doing so sloppily is the problem.”

MS. ELLISON: Well, on that positive note--

MS. SWISHER: [Laughs] Oh, I really liked the Vision Pro. How about that? I enjoy it. [Laughs]

MS. ELLISON: So I wish we could keep going. This is so fascinating, but we are out of time.

MS. SWISHER: Love my AirPods.

MS. ELLISON: “Burn Book,” everyone.

MS. SWISHER: Okay.

MS. ELLISON: Thank you so much for joining us, Kara.

MS. SWISHER: Thank you. Thank you.

MS. ELLISON: It's been a real pleasure.

MS. SWISHER: Thank you so much, Sarah.

MS. ELLISON: And thank you to our viewers for joining us here at Washington Post Live. Please join us for other programming in the future, and if you would like, you can sign up for a Washington Post subscription, getting a free trial by going to WAPO.st/live.

Thank you again. I'm Sarah Ellison.

[End recorded session]

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