"Kara Swisher"

0:06Hey guys, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I just got here. I'm really out of breath. What's happening? We're going to do a show. We're going to do a pod. We're going to do a show now? We're going to pod the hell out of this. Are you fucking... Let's do it. Are you ready to pod? I don't know if I'm... Get in the pod. Yeah. Get in the pod. Get in the pod. Okay, let's get in the pod. We have the cast. We're ready to pod. Okay. Let me just... Get it? Guys, that's how the name came up. You put a cast inside a small area, like a pod. Right. And then you speak. Yeah. Oh. It makes a pod cast. Yeah, you cast the pod.

0:38That's how it... That's how it's... So anyway, I'm going to show you how it works. Here we go. Okay. Welcome to Smart. Smart. Less.

0:49Smart. Less.

0:55Smart. Less. Well, I've never seen your hair so flat. Flat. I know. I said, were you just... Did you have a hat on? There it is. Are you late because you were at a flattening? Yeah, I just had to get my hair ironed, and I can never book this guy. Because for a while you were crimping it, weren't you? Yeah, yeah, it was fun. You were using a crimper? Yeah. Do you guys remember? Scrunchies? I sure do. Yeah, scrunchies and leg warmers. Yes, I used to wear my socks as leg warmers. That should be the title of your, there it is, of your autobiography, Jay. Scrunchies and leg warmers? Leg warmers. the jake and bayman story and then what were the things called where you'd strap on uh weights to your wrists oh the the uh the uh little heavy hands walkers yeah yeah i don't remember that it's a whole jason i asked you this before how in the world can you handle the heat that long outside playing golf every day um i can't even handle it walking to physical therapy you have to uh accept the fact that you're going to be wet and gross and sweaty and then go forward from there you know it's i don't like getting hot when you're not supposed to get hot you know when you're not supposed to moving stuff like if you're moving furniture or or how about uh acting in a scene that's supposed to be in the winter but you're outside and it's you're shooting it in the summer and you're not supposed to be sweating and you're in heavy clothes and it or or yeah it's like being stuck in a hot car with the windows that can't roll down and someone's giving you a haircut.

2:35To me, that's the biggest nightmare I could ever imagine. Because the hair sticks to your skin, you mean? Yeah, a dry haircut in a hot car with the windows broken. A dry haircut. What in the world made you think of that? That's so funny. Oh, no. Hey, you know what? By the way, I want to ask you this. I just came back from Zabar's. I had my little tuna sushi. And I'm standing, literally just five minutes ago, and I'm standing there and somebody goes, excuse me, are you online? I go, no, I'm in line. I'm not online. You know people who say online? I don't understand that. How old was the person?

3:11Pretty old. Yeah. This is what happens. But do you say online or in line? I was like, who says online? I say I'm... Oh. You're standing in line. If I'm waiting to buy groceries, I'm in line. Yes, exactly. If I'm, you know, logging into my Hotmail account, I'm online. Online, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So, and in Canada, they say lineup. They say there's a huge lineup instead of a huge line. At the grocery store? Yeah. They'll say, yeah, there's a huge lineup. And they all say lineup. I know. So, whatever. I don't know. I didn't understand online. So maybe some people get it and say, like, are you on lineup?

3:48Okay. Maybe not. Well, we've lost all of our listeners before the guest. All right, let's get to it. You know how I love tough cookies. Today I got a tough cookie who's super soft and squishy on the inside, full of love. I love this person. She's a super smarty. She's known for having her finger on the pulse of what's next in the tech world. She's also a podcast pioneer. I've actually heard her take credit for this one. Oh, my God. I love this woman. We finally get this woman back. She's been a friend for quite a while. Most interviews she does in aviator sunglasses. Let's see if she has one of them on today.

4:19It's the host of On with Kara Swisher and co-host of the Pivot podcast, my brilliant friend, Kara Swisher. Hi. Thank you so much for sharing. You had to suffer through that. That was exciting, the online thing. Well, oh, there's the Bidens. You put him on the Bidens. The Bidens? I was before Biden. Joe, do you hear that? Yeah, I'm sure he's listening closely. Didn't I say, Will, you clowned me during the interview with Biden, and didn't I call his wife by her first name? Yeah, you sure did. Right? It's Dr. Biden. It's Dr. Biden. Right. And I just said Jill. Oh, are we saying Joe and Jill? Yeah, like I'm boys with Joe and Jill.

5:02Kara, thank you so much for saying yes to the rude Sean for canceling on you on the road. I know he did. I know, I heard it was in your HBO thing. I haven't watched that yet, but I heard. You should be in full protest. It's fine. Who did you replace me? Matt Damon or someone like that? Matt Damon, someone becoming lucky actor whose career is over now. It's over. He's out of the business. That Oppenheimer thing was a waste. It was a disaster. for him. Yeah, yeah. No, we had a... It's okay. I could give a fuck, but okay. Wow. That's what Sean said you'd say. Yeah, yeah. I was going to ask you if you were nervous to be on today, but clearly you're not.

5:39You don't care. I'm like 10 podcasts in this morning and I'm prepping for a Chris Christie interview, so I'm really fine. Wait, you just... Did you interview Chris? No, it's Monday. Monday or Tuesday. Something like that. How do you prep for a Chris Christie interview? Now, I'm a diehard Democrat, but I don't mind listening to him speak sometimes. He really can frame a position. Well, when he's attacking people in his own party, he's, you know, it's like a symphony. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, that's the issue is that do you forgive him from his trespasses kind of thing? And I think a lot of people don't want to because he really was down with Trump for a very long time until Trump tried to kill him with COVID.

6:19And so, like, what happened? Like, that kind of thing. And, of course, there's the Bridgegate. and obviously, you know, but he's a great, he was a prosecutor in New Jersey. And there was also the closed beach gate as well. The beach gate, that was a nice thing. Do you remember that one? Yeah. No, what happened there? Kara, I remember, do you want to tell it? You tell it. Yeah, he was on a beach by himself with all these pictures and then it became an internet meme which was my favorite part of it. Because, and here's why, is because he was using the New Jersey governor's summer beach house, right?

6:49They have one. And he had closed, as governor, he had closed all the state beaches for various reasons. I think for maybe because it was... COVID. COVID, yeah. Was it COVID? Yeah, it was COVID. Nothing attracts the virus like a two-foot swell. Like a beach, like sand. But then he was out on the beach by himself. And that was the first time we ever saw a politician be a hypocrite. It was astonishing. It was astonishing. But it's called the Jersey Shore. Just remember, it's the shore. There's no beach in Jersey. It's the Jersey Shore. It's the Jersey Shore. Sure, sure, sure. That's fair enough. but he did wash up there.

7:23I mean, there were a lot of, obviously, comparisons that were made to, yeah. Whales. Oh, God. I was waiting for someone to take the softball. Well, anyway. Anyway, it was great. We didn't. We didn't. No, you brushed against it. You did not hit the ball. No, no, no. It was just a foul. Just a foul. Kara, you just do podcast after podcast after podcast. Yeah, I do. I do. And how do you still love to do it? I love it. I started about 10 years ago. Are you not podcasted out? No, I think you guys are doing great. Are you going to get into radio eventually? What's going on? No, no, no, no. I actually, no, no.

7:55It's a dying medium. No, I actually went to Bob Pittman, who runs iHeartRadio, when I had this idea. And he sat me down. I've known him since he covered AOL. I wrote a couple books on AOL. He was one of the characters in the book. And he goes, Cara, podcasting is a dead end. You shouldn't do it. And I was like, oh, yeah. Oh, Bob Pittman. Okay, Bob. You should do radio. Then you know who straightened him out with, John Sykes. Johnny Sykes. Yeah. Johnny Sykes told him you're wrong, Bob. Yep, indeed. But anyway, so I loved it. I love doing it, and I love doing all the different ones we do. Well, for my sister who may not know what you do and the brilliance that you are, you have been reporting on the tech industry since the early 90s.

8:37You're like one of the first people to ever kind of dive in with the big CEOs of all of these companies and get into their heads and interview them. And you've spoken to all of them, Bezos, Elon Musk, like just everybody. Yeah. And you're one of the most brilliant, I think, people I've ever met and known and been friends with. Thank you. And I love it. You're like, you're free. Like, I don't have to read a book thanks to our friendship because it's just like I text you. I'm like, what does this mean? You're like, do this, don't do that. And it's fantastic. Yes, I'm your Circuit City service desk.

9:07You're super valuable asset to all of us dummies out here in the world. Yeah. You seem dumb. You seem dumb, Jason. Stupid. I noticed that too. It's the hair. She noticed it too. When I was cramped, people thought I was... You're the pretty one. Yeah, well, you should have seen me with the cramp. No, actually, Will, with the gun show that you were just doing. Right? Yeah. What's going on there? No, right? But what an asset we have in you. It's a show that's been running for a long time. And your podcast, the way that you explain and break down things for all of us, it's so complicated. Thank you.

9:35We're trying to figure out and navigate all this stuff. Yes, I want to ask you about AI. Yeah, AI, I want to know. But front of mind right now for me are two things, both Musk-related. one, current status on the cage match and also why are we switching from the bird to the X? And I'm sorry if there are articles out there that explain all this, but I'm not a reader. Well, I think the X one is this is your brain on drugs. But let's start with, well, you know, it's interesting because I knew Elon when he had a failed company, actually. One of his early companies he got kicked out of. He made a couple million dollars, but was sort of washed up pretty early on and then started a company called X.com, which was a competitor to PayPal.

10:20They hated each other. I covered them. They had this sort of, you know, man, boy fest arguments going on. And then they merged and luckily sold to eBay and made their fortunes. And Elon, you know, had a lot of mistakes before that and actually was a really intriguing and interesting person because the rest of them went off and did kind of stupid things. and Elon started doing space, Tesla, really cool stuff. And I've spent a lot of time with him and he's changed rather drastically in the last... Let me ask you this because obviously you know this. So yeah, I remember when X and PayPal merged and he tried to bring X on.

11:00He tried to drag that over and he tried to get rid of PayPal. And there was a legal thing there with Peter Thiel. He had a big argument about that. Yeah, he got zeroed out. And he got zeroed out. And it seems like, to me, he's obviously a fairly clever guy, Elon Musk. It does appear that he misled people about his education. It seems like he did not graduate with any degrees from any of these places that he claims he got degrees from, including Queens in Canada. and he doesn't have all these high flutant degrees and he calls himself a physicist and all this kind of shit. Yeah, he calls himself a lot of things.

11:40So it's bullshit. So what's happening is, and Jason, this would make you crazy, because he's actually just lying about it and nobody just says he's just lying, right? Well, you know, look, let's be clear. Look, what's interesting is to meet these people before they had money. And they change rather drastically. Some of them do, some of them don't. I mean, Tim Cook is a lovely guy. Brian Chesky runs Airbnb. Couldn't be nicer. But some people get warped really beyond repair after they get so much money and being the world's richest man and then this concept of yourself. And, you know, there's a book coming out by Walter Isaacson that's going to talk about his early life, but his father was quite brutal to him.

12:19He was bullied as a kid. That doesn't mean every bully becomes this. But I'm saying he is a self-made person in terms of the stuff he's done as a business person. Sure, sure. However, at the same time, He's also, so not only has he lied about that, but he's also misled people about he didn't invent Tesla. He didn't invent any of these things. He stepped in, and I think that he's obviously quite a shrewd businessman. That's what he is best at. But he tries to sell himself as the inventor when really he's a good businessman. And it's okay to be a good businessman, but he doesn't get his, he wants the credit for being a big brand.

12:51A tech visionary. I mean, I think he sees himself as the Iron Man, you know, that guy. I think that's Robert Downey Jr.'s role there. but he does have technological chops. There's no question. You couldn't fake it this long. But you're right. He didn't start Tesla. He bought companies. He's buying Twitter. He's turned out to be very bad at media. But he is, let me just say, he is quite brilliant in terms of business. And he also, you could say that Steve Jobs didn't have real technical chops. It was others, Steve Wozniak and others, but he knew how to build a business. And that was critical. That was critical.

13:24Agreed. And by the way, I'm not suggesting that he's not smart. I'm defending Elon right now. No, I know. I think he's amazing. He's a super chode right now. Well, this is your fifth podcast of the day. The one thing that sounds pretty interesting that he's, well, there's a few things he's doing that's kind of interesting, but this is Neuralink or? No, Neuralink is a brain, just a chip in your brain, essentially. Yeah. Is that as kind of real as they want it to sound? And if so, what is it? No. It's the idea, sort of like, you know, you watch The Matrix, you put something in your brain and it gives you, you know, you immediately can do karate or whatever.

14:02It's like a port that you can, like, put a thumb drive into. Sean, if you learned karate in a nanosync, I'm going to fucking lose it. Wait, what are we talking about? What are we talking about? It's a pill? No, it's a chip. It's technology that you put. There are some ideas that it could help people who cannot walk and things like that. Eventually, we'll have that, yes. And so Elon's idea, and this was really interesting when I interviewed him once was that AI was, he's been obsessed about AI for a long, long time and very worried about it. And in fact, he was an early investor in a lot of stuff.

14:33He's quite prescient about a lot of trends. And so he thought at first that AI was gonna kill us essentially, that same old trope. And then later he decided it was gonna treat us like house cats, like that we were, okay, we'll just feed you. Then he moved on to anthills, which was interesting. So that like when we're building a highway and we destroy an anthill. We don't know it. We don't want to, but it's in our way. But we don't think, ah, I shall kill the ants today. So he thought that we need more throughput in our brains to keep up with AI. That was the inspiration. But then he also has Starlink, which is different, which is doing satellites.

15:10What's Starlink? Which is internet. It's satellite internet. It's being used in Ukraine quite actively for battlefield communication. As opposed to fiber optics? Yeah, it's a satellite. and he's got the, nobody is as far along as he is. Same thing with SpaceX. Why is that more advantageous than fiber optics? Because it's in the air. Places where they don't have the cable laid. You can't drag the cable. Where do you live in Los Angeles? It's all cable. You got cable right up your ass. And we will be right back. All right, back to the show. All of these tech companies that care that you, wait, I want to stay on AI first because then I want to ask that last question.

15:53So, so... Yeah, yeah, I will decide what you're going to say. What are you thinking about? I'm sorry, Sean. I'm fascinated just by technology. I just love it. And you know, Scotty, my husband loves, you know, lives for... Yeah. We can't just have a light switch. It's got to be, you know, this button turns this and I can do it for my phone and whatever. But now, and then like last November, it was a chat GPT seemed to come out of nowhere. I was like, what? everybody's like what's chappy gpt and like in two days everybody was you can ask it this and do this and then since then there's been like you know and you hear like 50 companies coming out yeah so talk to me about that where is that coming where did it come from why did it come out so fast and does it scare you what or what no i'm scared i'm not scared of ai i'm scared of people who use ai how's that like it's kind of you know don't be scared of the actual tech it's like being scared to the internet, it's what people do with the internet.

16:49And it's not going to suddenly become self-aware and do a Terminator move. A lot of sci-fi is based on that, that these machines care about us. They don't. They don't have any opinion about us. Yeah, they're not going to lock the pod bay doors anytime soon. Yes, and decide, hello. You know, I think the issue is a lot. This has been around for a while, and by the way, Elon was an early investor in OpenAI, which was public. It was a non-profit. Which is the company that owns Chachapiti, right? Yes, and then it now has a capitalist arm. It has a profit arm. But what it was, was he and others, not just him, were worried about the development of AI that would be controlled by the Googles, the Facebooks, the Apples, and the Amazons of the world.

17:32Which all have now their own AI. That's right. And so it started like that. And so it's being run by Sam Altman, who I have huge regard for. I really like him. He's a great guy. Yeah, I want to meet him. No. No, no. He is. Let me just say. I don't want you to meet him. He's up. He's up again. I don't know if you know this. They siphon through who I can see. You can't meet him. Oh, really? Okay. You can see him. Also, he's a gay, by the way. He's a gay guy. I know. I think he's a smart gay. He's a smart gay. So anyway, so what's happened is there's been a quantum leap in computing. There's been a quantum leap in the development of it.

18:04It's been going on for a long, long time, like more than a decade or longer than that, machine learning and stuff like that. And so suddenly it started to take some leaps because of computing power and scale. and information. And there's these things called large language models, LLMs. That's what they call them. It's a catchy name for them. And as we get more data, the data starts to teach itself and pattern match. That's really, I'm trying to, it's like to do an easy thing. Like say you had abacuses and calculators for a while and then you got the spreadsheet. And you don't think of that. Abacai.

18:38Abacai, thank you. I don't know. I have all their albums. I actually don't know. You're so smart, Will. So it's just that the computers are becoming smarter and smarter and teaching themselves. And so artificial, it's not a really great word, artificial intelligence. Generative AI is the best word, is that it generates itself based on the patterns that come. And G-A-I spells gay. Right, guy. But Kara, it occurs to me that recently I was thinking about, like we assigned the term AI kind of to everything. Now you go online or you're going to buy something or whatever they say, and it's, you know, it's AI generated or AI, you know.

19:14Well, that's just marketing. We're just talking about, it's just technology. That's all it is, right? No, no. So we keep assigning the, okay, sorry. No, it's not. It's different. Before, you know, you'd search for Google and then it would come back with whatever, like Will, your name, right? Sure. You'd come back. Now it can do, it goes into the search. And so before you'd get the page related to you, now you'd get all the information and then it gets fed back at you, which is much more interesting. So it goes deep into the sites and then generates, you know, I'm going to France, give me a thing.

19:45Before you'd have to search. Now it will do things. And it will be embedded in, it's now being embedded in Microsoft, in Gmail, in everything you do. And there'll be an AI for insurance. There'll be an AI for healthcare, lots of different healthcares. There'll be an AI for everything, like travel. And that's, it's just bringing you information faster in a way that will predict things. Help me understand one thing that our industry is currently battling with, with the strike, both with the writers and the actors. One of the issues that they're concerned about, that we are concerned about, is this, when you're talking about generative AI and the way in which it aggregates a bunch of previously created content or performances, books, movies, all these things.

20:36um so when it ingests all of these things such that it can train itself um to spit back out a result um there are people like sarah silverman and these novelists that are saying well hang on a second you are training your model based on things that we have done and we should be either compensated or licensed get a license fee or something yes right how did they think because i am assuming the horse all of them the millions of horses have left the barn now no no no no No, because it's not protected by Section 230. None of this is protected. It's copyright issues. And that's one of the ways they got money out of YouTube.

21:13And so what she's doing is absolutely correct. I think Barry Diller is going to do the same. A bunch of newspapers are getting together. And actually, ChatGPT just licensed AP, the content for AP. So the name of the game now is to own your IP, if you're a creator or you're an actor or whatever. And that's what you guys are arguing over. And let me just say. Well, so help me understand that. Yeah, so let's say that somebody, So for Tracy or people like me out there that are not right. There's a lot of Jason Bateman. There's a Jason Bateman AI. There is. So, yeah. So, I mean, I could put a prompt into an AI thing and say, give me a performance that combines Jason Bateman's role on Silver Spoons with his role on Arrested Development, whatever the hell it is.

21:56I'd watch that. The people who own those. I'd watch the bucket of that. The people who own the show Silver Spoons and own the show Arrested Development, do they get compensated for those performances being in the blender? Yes, but you don't because you signed away your content rights a long time ago. That's why. Whoever owns the content, that particular content. Now, there might be some law legal cases where you say, well, this was never imagined that it would take my face or it would take my performance. But whoever owns your – ownership of IP is so important, intellectual property. I own all my IP right now because I want to do it.

22:38And so if – you know, Google used to just grab things and they didn't care about IP. They got in trouble for that. But they do own – they have owned a lot of your stuff. So does Facebook. They own all your stuff because you signed it when you didn't realize it. But then – sorry, so I can hold on to this track. So then the people who do own Silver Spoons and Arrested Development, have they received a check for this use of that material in order to train these AI machines? They will. I think these companies are not going to... There's now a bill in Congress that will say it's absolutely not protected.

23:13Section 230, you'd know what that is. Why does that have to be retroactively challenged in the court? But, well, then why didn't they receive a license fee before they ingested these performances? They didn't ingest everything. They may have made a mistake by ingesting it. They'll have to go back and pay for any kind of copyrighted content that's under copyright. So all the things that are aggregated inside of AI that are owned by... Some of them are owned by them. Some of them are their own data models. And so it'll just depend on what's in there. And so the provenance of where it came from will be super important.

23:44But I guess what Jason's saying, I think Jason told me, that their entire model is built on information that was not created by them. Right. But they might own the rights to. But they don't own the rights to all the books that Tom Clancy has written. If they're out of IP, they can. Right. What do you mean out of IP? What does that mean? Out of copyright. Yeah, if they're not copyrighted. Meaning it becomes public domain. So they can take Beethoven music. But that's over 100 years old. Tom Clancy books are not 100 years old. So they're going to have to. YouTube pays licensing fees. Like there are, it does happen.

24:16And so the question is what, they can't just grab anything. Although I'll never forget, I was walking with Larry Page. You started Google at Google in the early days. And there was a room of televisions. And I said, what are you doing? They were on, like it was a circuit city at the time. And he said, I'm taping all of television. And I was like, what? Like, it was so crazy. No way. And he was using closed captioning to search television. And I said, do you have the rights to do that? And he goes, well, it's going to be great for people to be able to search television. It's great for the companies.