So let's start, let's get started. And welcome to TU Wien. My name is Jens Schneider. I'm the rector of TU Wien, and I'm glad to welcome you all. First of all, of course, today, dear Kara Swisher and Misha Glenny, and dear Rector David Fox, a new director of the IWM, distinguished representatives of the city of Vienna, and our festival partners, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our famous Kuppelsaal. I hope you enjoy it tonight. And I want to have a little look back in history, because it's always good to see where you come from when you want to look where you're going. And this university was founded in 1815, so more than 210 years ago, at this time with a clear purpose. And if you walk outside, and maybe the one or the other has seen in golden letters the inscription on our main building here. It's just outside below me here now. And there's our first mission statement. And let me first read it in German. I don't know how many of you speak German. All right. Very good. Very good. It reads...
So in English: to the cultivation, expansion and refinement of trade, civic arts and commerce. And maybe some of you will also later look at the golden letters outside, and I made you hopefully a little bit curious about that. So more than 200 years later, you would maybe translate it as teaching, research and excellence in innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. So it was pretty visionary. TU Wien was a startup at that time: three professors, 45 students. And we say today, a little bit more briefly, our mission statement today reads: technology for people, not people for technology. So it's a small but important difference. And tonight's little asks two questions: what do the techs want, and what can we do about it? And I think, preparing this tonight, I saw that Kara has watched the big beasts of Silicon Valley up close for more than three decades. I would gladly leave the first question to her. I'm curious what the answer is. I'm told that they all listen to her podcast, and I hope a few of them are listening tonight as well. I don't know. And let me use a few minutes for the second question: what can we do? Last year we developed a new vision for TU Wien. So based on the mission statement, technology for people, we also say in our vision where we dare to reason, and it somehow echoes a little bit the motto of the Enlightenment. We chose the word 'dare' deliberately, because reason takes courage, and attention is monetized. Outrage scales better than argument, and a handful of companies decide what billions of people see, read and increasingly think. And in our world, reasoning is no longer a given. This is why we said it has to be defended or somehow reinvented. And let me be clear, this is not a speech or welcome address against technology, because we are a tech university and we are proud to be one. Technology itself is not the problem. The concentration of power and the monopolies around technology are what create the difficulties, and we want to contribute by fostering science and education, like more than 200 years, by enabling self-empowerment. And we want to develop towards a creative urban tech university, and we have one of the best places in the world to do so here in Vienna, because we have great partners and we have an ecosystem that allows us to do so. Our vision ends with one more word. It says unlimited. We chose it also deliberately as a counterpoint to the limited liability company, because today too often the Silicon Valley model, for example, has been unlimited ambition combined with limited liability. Move fast, break things, let others pay for it, even for the damage, is not a good thing. And personally, I come from structural engineering. I'm a civil engineer, and for many years I've signed off on structures like bridges that they had to carry loads for 50 or 100 years, and the signature meant one thing: I'm responsible for this. And allow me one simple question: who signs today for the foundation model? And I see four things we can do. The first thing is sovereignty. I think especially in Europe we can do more to be just a customer of data, for example, in artificial intelligence, because we can get sovereignty, but it doesn't mean necessarily to build our own mega structures. We can also work on distributed systems, small, agile, specialized models that we understand, verify and run our own infrastructure with good data and domain knowledge in the loop. This becomes decisive when physical AI now comes into play in robots, vehicles, buildings and energy grids. And I think now it comes to engineering territory, and this is something where Europe is really strong, like for example precision engineering. We are very strong in that. The second is democratization. The future of technologies must not be decided by a few mega corporations and their founders. The architecture of technology is also the architecture of power. Centralized systems concentrate power. Distributed systems contribute, and open models, shared data infrastructure and federated approaches are more than just tech choices. They are political choices, and I think engineers make them every day. Just recently, I think a great example is this Swiss Apatus LLM by EPFL and ETH that now is on the market and then you can freely use. Third, we need the places to merge the brains. Engineers alone cannot answer the questions of what we should do with technology. Answering this requires input from philosophy, law, economics and social sciences from the very beginning. And here Vienna had a real head start. In 2019, visionary researchers brought more than 100 scholars from many disciplines to this campus. From this time we have the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism. Its message was simple and it was urgent already at that time, maybe today even more. Technology must be shaped according to human values and needs and not the other way around. And what began as a manifesto has since then become a kind of international movement. We need to understand technology to be able to shape and regulate it. And sometimes people decide on regulation that don't have this knowledge. This is what we want to change. And this is exactly why a few months ago we founded the Vienna Center for Digital Humanism here in Vienna together with the University of Vienna, the Vienna University of Economics and Business and the Central European University with the support of the city of Vienna and the Federal Ministry here, the Federal Ministry of Women, Science and Research. And I want at this place also to thank the city and the ministry for their support because the center's guiding idea is simple: we as the humans are the ones who shape the machines, and technological determinism is neither inevitable nor desirable. And the aim of this center is not to slow down technology but to enable democratic societies to decide again on its direction, its limits and benefits based on a deep technological understanding. And fourth, now what we can do is the values. Human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights are at the core of TU Wien and in Austria. The European values are not a decoration. They are design requirements, specifications that are not up for negotiation. And this year's festival speaks of agency and of reclaiming it through complex reasoning. I think that's exactly the right answer to tonight's question. The tech would like us to believe that the future has already been written and that the rest of us are just the users. But we are not. I think we are the citizens, we are the researchers, we are the scientists, the lecturers, we are the engineers, and above all we are the humans that still can think for ourselves. So let us dare to reason, and tonight I think there's no better choice and better guides than Kara Swisher and Misha Glenny to do so. And thank you very much. Enjoy the evening.
And with this I would hand over to you, Professor David Fox, who is a director of the IWM, for his addressing words.
Good evening. I'm Michael David Fox. I am the director of the Institute for Human Sciences, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, here in Vienna. I am the new director, as I've been here since August. And it's a great pleasure to be here and to be able to make some opening remarks and to welcome you to the first event of the Vienna Humanities Festival. This is the ninth iteration of the Vienna Humanities Festival, and this particular festival I want to recognize several people who organized and conceived it. First of all, my predecessor and the previous director of IWM and tonight's moderator, Misha Glenny, permanent fellow at the IWM, permanent fellow Lutgar Hagedorn, our very hardworking staff, and not least Desi Gabrielova from the Time to Talk Association. Yes. Thank you so much. Let me just say a few words about the festival, which was founded by the Institute for Human Sciences, the Time to Talk Association and the Wien Museum 10 years ago in 2016. Since 2022, it has been continuously carried out by IWM and Time to Talk in an effort to bring the human sciences to the public for a week of reflection and dialogue and debate and open discussion. In this year's festival, we have over 25 events. As was previously mentioned, the overarching theme is agency, which has been translated into German slightly differently as 'etwas tun', to do something. And the meaning of this is to explore what it takes for us as a society and as individuals to reclaim agency. It's an invitation to everyone in Vienna to join for a celebration of thought and discussion and critical reflection. There's going to be over 20 debates taking place this Saturday and Sunday at the Academy of Fine Arts here in Vienna. Let me make one important announcement that at the last minute we have had to change the venue for tomorrow's keynote with Pankaj Mishra and Daniel Kehlmann. So it's going to take place at the Muth Theater, and everyone who signed up will get an announcement. I have to thank our supporters who have made this possible, first and foremost the city of Vienna, the Arista Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. So I'm absolutely thrilled that we can open this festival with Kara Swisher, and her conversation will revolve around the impact of AI on society and the world, which is foreign to I think me and to many of us, the world of the tech bros, but which we look forward to hearing about, but also the impact of AI on society. And tonight's moderator is Misha Glenny. So I invite you here to the stage. Thank you very much.
Hi. Thanks very much to the two rectors. It's great to be back in Vienna. And what an event. How can I describe Kara Swisher? Well, it's hard to exaggerate how influential Kara is in the tech world. She's been covering the tech world for over 30 years. Hers is a really pioneering role as well. She has the reputation of being a fearless truth-teller about and to Silicon Valley. Above all known for her very sharp wit and blunt interviewing style, and she has an unmatched network in the tech industry. She knows all the tech bros and many, many others beyond. And she's chronicled the rise of big tech from its early idealistic beginnings to today's powerful global monopolies, which we'll get into. She has set up a set of conferences. She has podcasts. She was the Wall Street Journal's tech correspondent in San Francisco as everything was building up. She writes for Vanity Fair. She's written for the New York Times. She works with CNN. Everyone wants a piece of Kara Swisher.
I would say worked with CNN. Worked for CNN. Just this week, I told, I said, 'Fuck the Ellisons.' And I feel like that will get me fired, which is my great hope. So I just, I also, I'm in a bit of a mood right now because I just found out something I said last week, which was denied, that they were going to ask Elon Musk for money for CNN, and there's just a report that that's precisely what they're doing.
Yeah. This is a pattern that Kara publishes something, it's furiously denied by those involved, and then a week later it turns out to be true. Now, we're not going to talk too much about her first 30 years because after you've heard her speak, you can all rush out and buy a copy of Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. It is a terrific read, insightful, but also, can I say, it's a really easy read as well and funny. So don't forget to take one of those home with you. Kara, I'll go straight into the conversation because first of all, welcome to Vienna. Welcome to the Humanities Festival. It's great to see you here. I was going to go back into the 1990s a bit, but because of everything that's going on at the moment, I think we'll keep that fairly short.
It has pertinence to where we are now.
It does. It does. Well, I'm going to ask you a question so that you can go back and forth at the same time. So I'd like to ask you why you identify December the 10th, 2016 as the precise date when, as you put it, the internet went off the rails.
Yeah. I was in San Francisco at a farmers market with my son, who was younger at the time. He's now 25. I think he was 15, 16. And we were getting some food. Farmers markets in San Francisco are spectacular, by the way. And I got a call from someone that said all these tech moguls were going to Trump Tower to visit him. This was during Trump I, which looking back looks like a picnic. It was not a picnic, but compared to today, it certainly is. And just to be clear, you need to understand people in the United States overall, except for now a very small group of people, despise him. And you need to see the polls. I know America looks pretty bad from abroad, but there is a real movement happening across our country among not just young people. So I don't want to say bear with us, because you should just break up with us now, but it is, from here, it must be terrifying. It's terrifying living it. And but there is the numbers. He just reached into the 20s in approval rating, which is un-Nixon. He has worse approval ratings than Nixon at the time of his being kicked out of office. The joke, of course, in the United States is he really likes the teens, so that's where he's heading. That's an Epstein joke. I love that joke. Anyway, getting back to it. So anyway, I had gotten the call and I wrote a story very quickly about them all going there, which was a big surprise because almost to a person, every single person going had in some form called Trump a... to me, like, that's the words they were using, including Elon Musk. But they all went to Trump Tower because they were desperate for tax repatriation from Europe in particular. They were desperate for no regulation whatsoever, which they hadn't suffered under Obama. By the way, Obama also sucked up to the tech. Now he's all mad at them, but he was at the time doing a lot of things. So they wanted no regulation whatsoever, and that continued. They wanted tax repatriation. They wanted any number of things from the government, and they knew Trump was a coin-operated president. And these had been not very political people. I didn't know Elon's politics. They just weren't. They were absolutely not involved. They actually disdained politics. But all of them, including three immigrants, even despite Trump's obviously racist history, showed up to suck up to him at Trump Tower. So I wrote this story. I broke the news of this thing that was happening. And actually, the only person who actually called me back was Elon, who I spoke to a lot. And he was of the mind that he was going to change his mind. He was going to... he goes, 'I will change his mind on immigrants.' He was pro-immigrant before, because in fact he was one. And he remains one. And so soon it was also, I think Sundar Pichai was there, Sergey Brin was there. Peter Thiel, who was a longtime supporter of Trump. So it wasn't a shift for him, but it was a shift for the rest of them. And he said, 'I can change his mind, Kara.' And I said, 'It's so nice to meet you, Jesus, but I don't think you've returned. This is ridiculous. He's a racist. This is a man who's been a misogynist or rapist. I mean, a racist. The rapist is alleged rapist. For a long time, and I don't think you can.' But they went, they had this very chummy meeting. And after, I called them sheeple, which is people who are sheep, people of the sheep essentially. And they got mad at me. They were like, 'Well, we're not sheeple. We're there to, like, we'll defend immigrants. We'll defend liberal, tolerant issues that they had previously been for.' And I said, 'You are... he is going to change you. You are not going to change this man. You know, at this advanced age, he was committed to the bit, as they say in the United States.' And so I was sort of... I guess I was shocked that they did this, because it seemed like a step further than they usually went. They had already wouldn't mind violating your privacy. They wouldn't mind sucking up all the good vibes. But this was really unusual, I thought. And so that's why when they went there, and then, you know, I think I probably shouldn't have been as surprised as I was that they doubled down in the second inauguration by being in the very front row of the inauguration, in front of cabinet officials, elected officials and everybody else there. They were... Jeff Bezos. Elon by this time had been red-pilled rather extremely. And there was Bezos, who had been opposition to Trump, was sitting there in the front row with his new wife, which had a lot to do with it. And Mark Zuckerberg and his wife in the audience. There was also Sergey Brin, who started Google. Sam Altman and Tim Cook had hidden themselves in the back, which was what I called the greatest engineering feat in history, because they didn't want to be seen, but they were there. And all of them were. And it was really... and including someone who had said, 'I would never be in a room with Trump,' was there also. And so by Trump II, they were fully in the tank for this guy. And really did figure out that you put money in and you get contracts out or whatever you want, and have since benefited rather grotesquely along with Trump in an incredibly... probably the most corrupt administration. And that's after Ulysses S. Grant, and that's saying a lot. So...
Yes, I think the FT stated today that he is statistically the most corrupt president in US history, but also...
Right, the joke we make in the United States is he runs the country like Fredo and he runs his grift like Michael Corleone, if anybody watches The Godfather.
So before we go on to what happens after the inauguration in the second Trump administration, I want to take you back to one or two things that you've noted about the 90s and the 2000s. You quote Douglas Engelbart, amongst other things, the inventor of the computer mouse. He said, 'The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing,' and you agreed with that. So let me ask you why you think it's more important than writing or printing.
You know, writing certainly, of course, you know, with... it's interesting because, you know, people used to communicate on vellum, they used to on papyrus, on wax and everything else. And then when the automated press came in, that changed everything. And Europe itself went from a few thousand books that were hand-done for a small group of people to 10 million within a couple decades. It's astonishing, about 50 years. Yeah. It's an astonishing thing. But this is something, and I think I recognized this well before other people, was this was a global information system that was available anywhere at any time, 24/7. And I had come to the realization very early that anything that could be... and I was a student of the Gutenberg press. I was a student of all technologies, all these technologies. But it was one of these technologies that could go everywhere, like at all times, all day long, and it would suck up everything into the digitization, and most things are able to be digitized. And so that to me was the power of it. It created a worldwide global network of information in a way that was accessible to everyone at all times, and especially as the devices became smaller and more inexpensive, that it was really... it was sort of the idea of what Star Trek had and other sci-fi put out there with a communicator and things like that.
Yes. You write that there are two types of tech bros. One who believes in the future as being Star Wars and one as Star Trek, right? What's the difference between the Star Trek...
Well, they're all Star Wars now. They're all Star Wars now. They're all little Darth Vaders. And all that it entails. But, you know, the quote I was using was from Steve Jobs, who died many years ago, who talked about the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. And Star Trek is a very hopeful, diverse version of the future where you use technology for the service of humanity, and they find villains and they change them into good people. Like, it's a very hopeful, even though they have their adventures and mishaps. It's... you know, look, first the crew looks like a Benetton commercial. So, I mean, it's... you know, it's very... it was a very hopeful version of what technology could do for everybody. And also talked about the dangers of technology misused. And it was very... it was... it's a really prescient and important series. And Star Wars is quite the opposite. It is about the autocracy that comes with technology. And, you know, it's the idea of technology being a tool or a weapon. And technology is always both, right? And which one are we going to pick? And in this case, too many of these people now are sort of in that dystopian Star Wars version of where even the good people don't win. Like, they don't... the Empire does strike back. And even though they blow up Death Star, even at the very end of it, it's not clear who's going to prevail. And that is, I think, the truth, unfortunately.
And so you see a parallel with that going on at the moment, really, with the absolutely the proliferation of...
Autocracies. Yes, the ability to surveil people at scale is the dream of autocrats everywhere. You know, one of the things I said many years ago was controversial. You know, they're saying, oh, the autocrats want to stop the internet. I'm like, are you kidding? The autocrats love the internet. It's a way to surveil and it's a way to surveil in a way that's very effective and control and manipulate. So there's elements of propaganda. There's elements of surveillance. There's elements of sort of, you know, in A Brave New World, it was... what is happening to everybody. So it pacifies the populace, although it's not so pacifistic these days in the United States.
Do you have a sense of why, I mean, if we go back to the 1990s and John Perry Barlow's famous manifesto about the internet, which saw the internet as a place where states and corporations were not welcome, and that this was a sort of, you know, democratizing choice. How is it that it was the populists and the far right who learned much more quickly to use this as a political instrument?
Well, political and media instrument, right? It's both and the same because, you know, many years ago I used to spend a lot of time interviewing right-wing people and I was really interested in how they used radio at first to get some purchase because they were largely left out of corporate media. And, you know, everyone's like, the media is so liberal. I'm like, really, it isn't. It's just not anything. It's sort of centrist. But the right was largely left out of that. But what they did is they availed themselves first to radio and then were very active on the internet because it was an inexpensive way to get to people. It was an inexpensive way to unearth the deep vein of white supremacy that exists in the United States and everywhere, by the way. You know, we didn't invent it. Many countries here did too. It was a way to sort of tap into the hatred really well. And I think the right, you know, the right's typical stance is not hopeful, it's hateful, right? And that effect is just as effective as hopeful. And so I used to watch as right-wing people, Ralph Reed or Focus on the Family, which is from Colorado, really avail themselves to these digital tools. And it made sense because they were zeroed out of what was then mainstream media in the United States, which were the big networks and the big newspapers. You know, that's where the real influence was. And I felt the audience, you know, I had an expression I used back then was the consumer has taken control of the media and it's not giving it back. That it was a very different pull system than had been previous, and these gatekeepers weren't going to be able to hold on to their influence. And I had myself had an issue with these gatekeepers because, you know, they were like, oh, the media was better when I was like, it was a... it was, you know, 26 white men on the... straight white men on the Upper East Side of New York. I don't think that's a particularly good way to run a country either. And so I enjoyed the ability for lots of people to have voices, but it was very easily... I saw it very easily as a tool for autocracy, totalitarianism, fascism just as much. And I kept... I had studied as my... I went to Georgetown University and my minor was Holocaust studies, and I spent a lot of time on particularly on propaganda. And I thought this was, you know, can you imagine if some of these people had control of this kind of data? They were already good at data, by the way. They kept exquisite, unfortunate data. But can you imagine if they were able to avail themselves to these tools?
Okay. I want us now to go through some of the tech bros, what they were like when you first got to know them and how they have subsequently morphed. So I'm going to do it by names. Okay. I want to start with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. What were they like when you first met them?
I met them in their garage. In the garage with Susan Wojcicki. She died recently, unfortunately. She was a lovely person. You know, quirky. They're different a little bit. Different in the same quirky, awkward, some level of autism, you know, they all have some level of that. They do. Awkward socially, brilliant, brilliant, not very many... just not very... I wouldn't say pleasant because Larry could be very cutting. Sergey was kind of just goofy. All manner of crazy ideas. They wanted to build a ski lift for San Francisco's hills and stuff like that. I enjoyed that. It was funny and weird and but largely very open-minded about people and wanting to give people tools. Initially, Sergey has now become a crazy Trumper. Just for people to understand, Larry, you never see him. He's sort of a hermit. I don't even know what he's doing now.
He hardly speaks. What happened to the 'Don't Be Evil'?
Well, it was interesting because they asked me to write that. They asked me to because I was one of the few people that covered them. I met them when they were very small, and I think it was Larry who called me and asked me to write it. And I said, 'No, I'm covering you. I can't do that. That's ethically wrong.' Which seemed to escape him for some reason. And I said, 'But I do have a comment. When you say don't be evil, there's an awful lot on the left side of that. I mean, evil is pretty far, but you can do all manner of nefarious... Don't be evil. I definitely won't be evil, but I might be, you know, predatory. I might take your privacy. I might be unpleasant. I might push fascist regimes on all of us.' So I was like, I feel don't be evil is way far to the way far. It gives you a lot of room to be an... I think that's what I said to him. That's just my thought. I thought it was arrogant and obnoxious at the time, and I still do today.
And how does Brin turn into a crazy Trumper?
I don't know. I, you know, he... I broke the story about him having an affair with someone at the company, which then resulted in the head of one of the major divisions. It was his girlfriend. He was cheating on his wife with the major executive's girl. The whole thing was such a mess. You know, we lost touch after I broke that story. But it was a corporate story. It was insane. The guy went off anyway to... so it was hard to explain to him. I was like, 'You really can't sleep with people at work, and you really can't sleep with an executive's girlfriend, and you really... like, I don't... I'm like, I'm not even going to go into it. You strange, ethically shabby person.' But he, you know, I don't know. He had a wonderful wife. She's amazing. All of them had first wives that were all amazing. Let me just say, the second wife's not so much. But MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos's wife, is a really spectacular person. Same thing with Laurene Powell Jobs, which he died. That was different. And certainly Sergey's wife, Anne Wojcicki, I like a lot. And Justine Musk, by the way, who I just talked to this week. So, you know, he just changed. I don't know. Was it... I don't know. A midlife crisis, whatever. I, you know, I just think... and he now has a girlfriend who's a Trump influencer. He had another one. He had a series of them. One of them ran for president with Robert Kennedy Jr. I don't know. I don't know.
Okay. What about Bezos? Because he's a rather different character in some way.
Yes. Jeff was always tough from the start. He was an adult. He was much older than them when I met him. A lot of these people were pretty young. Mark was 19 when I met him. 19 or 20 when I met him. And...
Yeah. And the others were in their 20s. I believe they were in their 20s. Jeff was older. He was my age. He and I are the same age, I think. And, you know, he had been at a hedge fund in New York, and he had that Wall Street hedge fund kind of thing going on. Brilliant. A real visionary in a lot of ways, I have to say. Very good business person. Very certain of himself and smart. He had a lot of really... I always thought he was the visionary, the inheritor of Steve Jobs' visionary role. Just an... just a complete... just like such a... he was so cutting to employees. He was always, you know, he had this sort of laughing, haha guy. That laugh he had. But not nice. Not a nice person. Just not... just I don't care. I don't really... he's not my friend. But he was tough. He was tough, as we say in the United States. And he ran that company that way. I very much like the new CEO, Andy Jassy, who was there from a young age also. I like him personally. But, I mean, again, we're not friends, but I happen to like him personally. But, you know, he was tough. He was a tough guy. And then he had the greatest midlife crisis of anyone's life. I think we've all seen it in living color when he rented Venice for his second wedding. How is it that Taylor Swift had a wedding, no pictures, and this guy, like, you're sort of like, come on. At least we want to see the Taylor Swift pictures. We do. I'm sorry, but we do. She's not going to show them to us because she doesn't feel like it. Because she's not an insanely narcissistic prick. So, new song coming out this week. We're very excited in the United States. It's a happy thing. So anyway, so he was, you know, he was good at what he did. He really did understand it, and he took advantage of not paying taxes. He took advantage of all manner of things. He had a real chip on his shoulder. Like, I remember when they called it Amazonbomb. It was in Barron's with a picture of his head, which lends itself to a bomb shape because he's bald. He was furious about that. He called me. He's like, I'm like, I don't work for Barron. Why are you calling me? Like, he was very petty about stuff like that, but brilliant, very brilliant. Now, I, you know, he's obviously focused on space, very much in a competition with Elon, which he's losing. But, you know, never know. He's very smart. Just, you know, I last time I saw him was at the funeral of a longtime executive of Amazon who died tragically in a bicycling accident, and who I liked, and I had written a profile of. And literally he came up to me still angry about some story I wrote 10 years before, and I was like, get the fuck away from me. Like, what are you... this is a funeral. Can we move on? Like, it was so weird. He's like, and another thing. I was like, and we're done. We're done. We're done. We're done. We're going to have to get over it, you know.
Can I tell you one thing? Oddly enough, when I was pregnant with my son, the New York Post, under the very fine Rupert Murdoch, and by that I mean not fine, I call him Uncle Satan, but because he's very charming, by the way. They wrote a story on Page Six that Jeff Bezos might be the father of my son, because we had a discussion about it at one time. Someone overheard. You know, he was a very geeky guy in that science way, and he just wanted to know how I got pregnant, which was totally inappropriate for him to ask, but I told him anyway. And so for some reason, this idea that he was the sperm donor, he was not. And at the time, he said, 'Well, it could be anyone like me.' And I said, 'No, you're too short and not attractive enough.' So, my sons are stunning, by the way. Just...
I don't doubt it. Very tall.
What about the two early titans? Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs. I like Steve Jobs a lot. He had all his quirks and strangeness, but today he looks like a gentleman, right? Like, compared to today, he was very well educated. He was very well read, self-taught. He loved art. He loved science. He, you know, he had a real... he had a much wider... he, again, older. He could be a son of a... but like, it was like parking in handicap spots. Like, I don't care at this point. I'm like, great. That's... if that's your worst thing, I'm here for you. I really like his kids. Like, his kids are great. I like his wife, his widow. He was fascinating, and always... he didn't mind throwing down, and I liked it because it was all explicit. If he disagreed with you, he told you, and we would argue about lots of things, and I just thought he was just one of these really important figures and created...
And also he saved Apple from...
He saved Apple. He was a great business person, great sense of style, just very privacy-focused, and it was real. It was absolutely real.
So Apple is sincere about...
Was sincere. We'll see. Let's see. Right. Let's see.
So you think that's changing?
I don't know. So far, you know, signs point to... why did you give Trump that gold statue? Why did you go to the Melania documentary? I mean, you didn't have to, you people. That was Tim Cook. The new one. The minute he got in office, he changed Lake Ontario to Lake America. Not a good sign.
He didn't. It's nonsense that he had to.
And he did. So he's willing to bend a knee, as did Tim Cook. I don't think they were arguing with me, some people there, that Jobs would have done it. I was like, absolutely not. And I did call his family, and they were like, absolutely not. He would not have been... he wouldn't... he'd be... he wouldn't. And Gates is really interesting. He's sort of a... he was kind of a jerk all along, kind of like petty, and also had significant autism issues initially. He's worked on it a lot, and I really admire him for the philanthropy. I like his ex-wife better, I would say easily by far, by a country mile. But interesting, he certainly had poor judgment around Epstein. I'm not so sure he had poor judgment very... you know, Sergey was also on Epstein Island just... Oh, really? Yes. But they all had poor judgment. Some of them had just poor judgment. Some of them should go to jail. There's like a kind of a spectrum there. Epstein invited me to lunch once. I was good.
I did not. His PR person called me and said he was very into talking tech. He was always present at tech events. I was at a dinner I didn't even know he paid for at one point at TED. And he was very into meeting tech people. So obviously he'd come my direction, and his PR person called me and said, 'Jeffrey would like you to come to lunch at his place in New York.' He had that big house. And I said, 'Oh God, I would love to do that, except he's a pedophile.' And the guy's like, 'Kara, that's not very nice.' I go, 'Yeah, it's not very nice to be a pedophile. I agree.' And that was the end of that lunch. So...
I also kept him out of my conference that I had. And I found the actual... we had a long wait list at it, and on it it said he was on the wait list for my conference, which a big... everyone wanted to be there, and he desperately wanted to be there and tried to get in and...
The Code Conference, I think it was the Code, it might have been All Things D, and on the thing it said no, like I wouldn't let him off the wait list. It says, 'No, Kara says he's a pedophile.' I forgot.
Yeah. I think he's a complicated person, I would say. I think he's quite awkward socially. I think he is the best business person of all of them, I have to say.
Absolutely. I just muse...
Yes. By far. By far. I think his product sense is excellent. He's a little... and I'm not... he's not anti-Semitic, obviously, he's Jewish, but he's like Henry Ford, I think. Like, he's not... you know, if Gates... if Jobs was Thomas Edison, the creator, you know, more creative, he is much more like a Henry Ford character. Not in the... Henry Ford is a terrible person, was a terrible person and a racist and an anti-Semite. Not in that... he's not like that at all, actually. I think he is ignorant of history. He's ignorant of power initially. Now he gets it. And he doesn't understand why we can't have society be governed by him, right? Like, he... one of the things he used to call, and, you know, he'd write these long essays about community and this and that, and he would call sometimes, I know he goes, 'What do you think?' I said, 'I think you're in desperate need of an editor, but no one will tell you that because you're the rich guy in the room.' But what I worry about is that you think this is a community and you're the king, and you don't realize you're the king. Like, I don't understand how we... he was always like, 'Oh, we all can decide together.' I'm like, 'Well, if we all can decide together, why are you the controlling shareholder?' Like, he's very into kingship in a way that he... and of course his great... he loves Augustus Caesar. And he utterly misreads the reign of Augustus Caesar. He's like, 'He brought organization to Rome. He fixed everything.' I'm like, 'He murdered people across Europe to do so.' Like, he misses that part. I'm like, 'Hey, come over here. I'll tell you how he did it. It was through incredible terror.' Which might have worked. It certainly does work when you do that for a time at least. Anyway, he... I find him to be completely uneducated given the power he has, and that's problematic for me. I don't like... there was one time he was talking about the First Amendment at a speech at Georgetown, and I nearly rushed the stage and made him read it because I was like, 'That's not what it says.' Like, he's like, 'We can't make any rules around hate speech.' I'm like, 'No, the First Amendment says the government. You're not the government. Or though maybe you think you are.' You know, it was... he woefully misreads so much of history that it bothers me. It annoys me from an educated level because he's smart, and it annoys me that he has... he's coalesced so much power under him in advertising and everything else, and he doesn't realize the damage he's done. They also deny all the various... and they're always on the end of a lie somewhere, or shading of the... it's more shading of the truth about privacy, about the harms that they do to people. I think he does, and he constantly plays the victim. That's my... that exhausts me about all of this.
This is... I was going to ask you about that, but you point out that all of these incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful men, and I use the gender advisedly...
Consider themselves to be victims. Victims of what? Victims of whom? I mean...
Right. They do. They... I get... I'm so much... No, like Elon, you haven't mentioned Elon, but whatever.
We're going to do Elon and Thiel are the next, the final two. I want to get a...
The victimization thing is really interesting. And one of the things I did in this book is I hate blurbs for books. I don't want to ask people for favors like that. So all I did was print all the insults that these guys have of me on the book. And one of them called me and said, 'I didn't give you permission.' I said, 'You literally publicly on Twitter said I had a heart full of hate, so I'm going to use it. Sue me. Go ahead and sue me.' You know, like you defamed me in public, you son of a... Anyway, they... I got somebody called, 'You're so mean. You're so mean to me.' And I'm always like, 'Get a dog. I don't know what to tell you. What do you want?' Like, you know, I'm sorry you weren't hugged as children enough, but it's not my fault. Like, I hug my children and they're very loving, so I feel good about themselves. But they have this idea that they are so brilliant and that we don't understand their brilliance... is they don't understand it. We... they brought us so much joy, like how could we not lay down our... lay down our everything to them.
Okay. One of the less joyful personalities, I suspect, is Peter Thiel.
Yeah. He was never joyful. There's a very funny video of me arguing with him 20 years ago. That's pretty funny. He's brilliant. Brilliant.
Truly brilliant. Of all of them, I think he, by the way, he's a very good writer. He's written some interesting books. I don't agree with everything, but certainly he has rigor now. He's moved...
Into this weird religious quagmire. I was going to say the... I know the Pope is the Antichrist, which is good to know. But he's moved into a religious realm that I haven't seen him in, so I don't know. But I've seen some of these lectures and they seem insane. I mean, he's moved into that religious thing happening. And you know, I'm Catholic too, but sir, what is happening is what you think about. Calling people the Antichrist feels a little much. But Peter deals with more.
He was always a Trump supporter, always conservative, more overtly political. And yeah, and you know, there's all these issues around him being gay, of course, and he was closeted for a long time. He's a man of a certain age. But always sort of angry at the world kind of person, but I will say quite brilliant. Like really interesting to talk to. I think he's gone off the rails now with this religious stuff, but always consistently...
When he supported Trump, I was not surprised at all. He was very clear about his feelings about libertarianism. He doesn't believe in democracy. He thinks essentially there's an Ubermensch. He really does have that point of view, and if you read it, he says it. He doesn't hide it. And so he is who he is.
And do you think that he sees JD Vance as a potential cipher towards political power?
I think he already has political power, but I mean he backed JD Vance when he was sort of... JD Vance was a... I knew him as a venture capitalist and he was quite anti-Trump. I was at an event where he was so anti-Trump. I was like, 'Just a second. There are some good things about Trump.' I was the one that said it. I was like, 'Stop it.' He was so anti-Trump, it was crazy. This JD Vance has a real...
Something wrong with him. There really is. He really is. And one of the things that I actually... I'm good friends with Rachel Maddow and she had the best line. She said, 'JD Vance is Peter Thiel's failed intern.' Because he didn't make money in venture capital at a time when a squirrel could make money. Like seriously. But he's sort of... he's not stupid. I'm not saying he's stupid, but he's a vessel for them. And I think he's... I think he needs... he's in desperate need of psychological help. Like he needs to sit and talk with someone about things, but he's not going to.
So this is where I want to get on to.
He's not stupid, by the way. And I think he must hate what Trump's doing in Iran. He won't do it because he's such a suck-up. So like Marco Rubio, also smart...
What the tech bros really want. Now we've got of course the additional factor of artificial intelligence and a new generation of tech bros coming in, in particular with Altman and...
Altman's been around a while.
And since the sort of mid-sixties, mid-teens... Musk and Altman... and Demis as well, sort of slightly came out of nowhere with DeepMind from 2012 and so on and so forth. But they are a sort of... they look a bit like a new generation.
A little bit. Well, some of them are different. I mean, Elon's taken a crazy journey he's been on. He was quite fascinating and interesting to talk to. Brilliant. Not as brilliant as he thinks he is. Certainly I've seen the Musk documentary. I highly recommend it.
Oh, is this the Gibour one?
Yeah, there's an intermission. There's a lot to say about him. He was, you know, he's good at taking other people's ideas and businessifying them. You know, he didn't invent Tesla. He didn't invent SpaceX. He didn't invent... but he's really good at taking advantage of... He's also a bit of a flimflam man, stock promoter, a little like P.T. Barnum, lies incessantly. You know, I can tell there's like 20 interviews with him telling me next year autonomous cars are going to be... He just makes it up. I don't really care, like if you're stupid enough to believe that. He certainly is able to keep those stocks alive despite the... I mean, the math and value of his stuff is really at cross purposes, but that's people if they want to... that's the market. If markets want to buy it, they can buy it. There's certainly an argument to be made that if you invest in them you do really well even if the numbers don't add up. He has undergone the most radical transformation of all of them, largely because... well, a number of things as has been well reported. He uses drugs quite a bit. Ketamine particularly. This is the Wall Street Journal, New York Times has written about this. He sort of denies it, not really. But it's clear that he enjoys himself. And he thinks that he is a greater being. He has all these sort of weird ideas about humanity that have now sort of curdled into this hatefulness. That again has a lot to do probably with his... it's not an excuse, it's an explanation... his upbringing and his really awful parents, both of them. I don't think either... I think the mother's just as bad as the father. I think people tend to blame the father because he's such a rampant racist right to your face. I think she's just as nefarious in many ways. But you don't blame the parents. He's an adult. He can do what he wants. And he's sort of shifted... he became extremely online and started to really get into cons. He really ran down the rabbit hole of hate.
Yeah. So, and this is having a big impact in Europe, certainly in the United Kingdom and in Germany as well.
