The AI power grab, explained by Kara Swisher

Well, I don't not like him. I don't really care about these people whatsoever. I have a family and friends like...

Hi everybody. Today I've got a special episode for you. It's an interview I did with journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson. Walter actually interviewed me a few weeks ago in front of a live audience at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. I like talking to Walter. We disagree on a lot, including Elon Musk. And Walter, I was right. In any case, we have a great conversation about a lot of things like AI, where the future is, where power is. It's always an interesting conversation with Walter. Let's get into it.

Thank you. Hi, everybody.

Wow, that's a rather broad question. Let's talk about oxygen. Um, what do you want to talk about? What's going on with the Pentagon? They're illegal.

Well, okay.

Pete Hegseth, who is a [__] in general, uh, is, um...

The bubble above his head. [__] Um, so, uh, he has gotten into his head. Well, I don't want to pursue that person because he's a waste of our time, but although he's in charge of things that are very serious, um, they have decided... Anthropic is an offshoot of OpenAI, as everybody knows. A group of people left, uh, led by Dario Amodei, um, because they felt the safety issues around AI were so significant, they didn't like where it was going under Sam, and so they created Anthropic. It was funded by, among others, you know, Amazon and many, many others. They're all sort of doing cross investments in each other. Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, everybody's doing it. It's sort of like a roundelay of... some might call it a Ponzi scheme, some do. Um, and so they're doing...

I don't know. Was the early internet a Ponzi scheme? In some cases, yes. In others, no.

I have no idea. I mean, it happened in the internet. There's certainly a lot of spending and no revenue. So, that's always an issue, but it didn't hurt the internet. You could say, you know, all these internet companies that died in the 2000 crash, well, they were all a Ponzi scheme. But Google, but Meta came later, actually, many years later. So, it's a Ponzi scheme in that one of them is going to survive, one or two, and they're going to be enormous companies, or maybe several. In any case, it's an important business and also a Ponzi scheme, if that makes sense. And so, Anthropic is backed by big people in Silicon Valley, and the money they need is so enormous because of the cost of compute and data and energy and no revenue. I mean, there's revenue, but not compared to the costs. And so, um, they got lucky because the Trump administration never, you know, the coin-operated Trump administration, never to miss an opportunity for corruption, understood that this is going to be an enormous spend, and, you know, whether it's data centers, whatever, because it's both physical and not. And so, Anthropic, um, is sort of the dark horse of this group and actually the best, and that's why the Pentagon was using a lot of their technology. They used it in Venezuela and elsewhere, and I think most people who use it understand it's the Apple of this group, essentially, and compared to OpenAI, which is more like the Microsoft. And Microsoft actually, I think, has an investment, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just backed Anthropic in this ridiculous fight, which was great for him. Um, so they wanted to, when they're deploying these things, they want to be able to do whatever they want. And Pete Hegseth, because he never met a metaphor he didn't mangle, was like, 'We buy a plane and we can do whatever we want with it.' It's not quite the same thing with this technology. And so Anthropic says, 'Okay, you can use our technology, but if you're going to surveil Americans, we don't want to be part of it. Or if you're going to do drone attacks, which is going to be more and more prevalent in warfare going forward, they cannot be autonomous. They need to have a human interaction,' which seems perfectly reasonable, and they should be allowed to use their products the way they want to use them. And it seemed to have, you know, chapped Hegseth's ass, and he has declared them a supply chain risk. Now, we have never done that in the history of the United States with an American company. Let's be clear. It's usually a foreign company. And so, it's unprecedented to try to make an example of this company to do so. Now, into the breach, as always, Sam Altman anxiously floated himself in and said, 'We'll do it and we'll agree, you know, we'll get that,' but it's not clear what he has agreed to. And of course, there's a huge backlash. Um, they are under enormous pressure given that they're going to go public this year. They need more money, etc., etc. And so there's this sort of... all the beefs of Silicon Valley are all being played out with the government. And so Anthropic has sued the government. It will win, but it will hurt its business in the meantime.

Well, I don't not like him. I don't really care about these people whatsoever. Or I have a family and friends like... I'm sorry. Um, I like them. I don't think about them once I stop talking about them. But, um, you know, I think I met him when he was 19, when he had a company called Loopt, L-O-O-P-T. They always had these stupidly clever names for companies, and it failed. And then he went on to do a number of things, and he's a really interesting character. And there's part of... I mean, compared to a lot of people I cover, he's well-educated, he has a sense of history, he reads, um, which is always a plus. Um, and so he's very... he's a very complex guy, and some of it, as many people have chronicled, he can be very manipulative. He can be very anxious. He can be very tricky and mendacious, too, but maybe not. And so there's a lot of, like, angling that he does all the time. And so I think that's the issue here with a lot of people and Sam. And, you know, you've read stories about people who have left. Um, you know, and Dario's no imperfection. He's got the arrogance of a technologist, as you can see from his typing. He writes a lot of, like, manifestos every five minutes, um, which are pretty good, actually. Um, and so, you know, you have all these personal things playing out in this very serious theater of war. Um, and it's not an excursion, by the way, which is Trump's latest word for this. I think he meant incursion and...

George W. did it.

No, no, he said excursion. I know.

Right.

Seems reasonable.

Because it's a person who takes responsibility for it. That's why we can't look at... Right now we're in the midst of another thing that's related, which is all these chatbots, which I think is a very sweet term for synthetic beings. We have to stop calling them chatbots like they're adorable little plush toys, right? They can be malicious and malevolent, and they create these things. And I've been spending a lot of time over the past couple of years interviewing all the parents of kids who have died using these chatbots and getting into these synthetic relationships. These people have started to become analysts, lawyers, doctors, these technologists without the guardrails. The rest of us are, you know, as Scott says, they are not bound by the law, but they're protected by it. And we're bound by the law and not protected by it. And so, one of the things that's really terrifying is like these... if you go read the... if you read these text exchanges between kids and these chatbots, you are going to want to find a tech person and strangle them for putting this stuff out. I mean, as a parent, I have four kids. Even with the stuff with adults, it's even terrible, like this psychosis that happens. And so it's the same thing. It's like we're relying on this AI, and it's fine if you're making a decision how to complete an email of an event, of another conference event I don't want to go to. Like, 'Thank you so much.' Like, they do a beautiful job declining for me. Um, but it's that... not this one. I love you, Walter. Um, but these are life-and-death decisions, and they may be better at, say, finding cancer, or that... those are the good things, and we should try to find what... we should take things that they do well and supersize them and find a way to mitigate against the dangers. But when there's a person involved, there's someone accountable. There's no one accountable right now. All these companies, whether it's, uh, Character.AI, which is a Google-affiliated thing, Gemini, ChatGPT, nobody's home when you go to say this person died.

There is a big lawsuit going on right now in California around the impact of social media, but they've been largely protected by Section 230, as you know. That was my point. And so you can't displace them or fire them because they have full... they have monarchical control of their companies.

I don't know. It's too complicated. It has to be reformed in an intelligent way, but they have... they have... they have captive our Congress. They used to hate Washington, as you know, like, 'I don't care about,' you know, Bill Gates, that was his famous thing, 'I don't care about lobbyists.' They are running the government right now, and they were standing front and center of Trump's inauguration, and so they have complete control over our elected officials. They absolutely do. Someone like Amy Klobuchar has not been able to pass a privacy bill, an antitrust bill, uh, you know, a transparent algorithm bill. They don't let you. They're doing it right now in California. They've created this super PAC that's going to try... California has been the most aggressive about, um, regulation. These rich people have just created another PAC because they figured out they hated the government. 'Oh, we're so smart. We don't need the government.' And except the problem is the government is full of ex-student body vice presidents with subpoena power. So that's a problem. Um, and so they decided to buy it. And they went, 'Oh, we could buy it. Oh, that's easy.' And then they plant their people in these positions of power, like someone like Emil Michael, who's the one fighting with Anthropic.

David Sachs. I have a lot of experience, and of course the reporters who cover this actually don't. I have experience with Emil Michael. I wrote this... I and other people at my website wrote the story that got him fired, which was there was a rape of a woman in India, and one of his minions, um, took the medical files trying to prove she was lying. It was all illegal, and he got bounced out of there. And I know these people.

He's the one who's the deputy director of whatever the [__] at the Pentagon, you know, but essentially he's been writing tweets. This is a government official writing tweets about a company. They start... Sachs started it because they have beefs that have nothing to do with our safety. These are Silicon Valley beefs that they have decided to move to Washington, and they're pretending they're here to protect us. They're here to protect themselves and their interests. Same thing with Jeff Bezos. Same thing. All of them. All of them. And of course your good friend Elon Musk, who is the original OG of...

Everybody was right.

I'm not going to... I am going to officially declare a moratorium on giving Walter a hard time for Elon Musk. It's done today.

Unless you write another book where you say he's a genius.

Oh, yay. A dead person.

And I like... I like her work. I thought it was good.

Yeah. I'm excited for that book.

Have you on my podcast. We will only talk about radioactivity.

Uh, no, no, no, Walter, you're not keeping up with the Swisher family. Um, no, one is four.

Uh, one is 23. So I have a 23-year-old, a 20-year-old, a six-year-old, and a girl.

Oh, I love the word 'allowing.' Um, yeah, I didn't know how to say... doing a lot of work there. Um, my sons actually kind of missed a little bit of the social media age. They're a little older, 20 and 23, but both of my sons have taken social media... it's a real trend among young people, I think... off their phones. They use... because they find it... My son took, like, the dating stuff. They both have girlfriends. My son's living in San Francisco now with his girlfriend. Um, but he's a great kid. Um, he took it off, and I remember him telling me... I was like, I don't ever... they can do what they want in that regard. And I said, 'Why'd you take it off?' And he goes, 'It makes me feel bad.' I was like, 'Excellent reason.' You know, just what Salman Rushdie just said. Um, you feel so much better when you remove it. Um, my other son, I mean, I think they both use YouTube as television. I think YouTube is television now, but they're not that engaged in social media and not that engaged in their phones. They're very... they're not... My son just went ice climbing. The other was hiking in Berkeley yesterday. So, they find it very debilitating to use that stuff, and they'll use it for work and YouTube, definitely for television. They stream. Um, so, and the little kids, all they do is watch K-pop Demon Hunters on repeat.

In the age of Trump.

No. What?

Oh, okay. That wouldn't be bad. Hillary Clinton has run out of [__].

Empire.

Um, I was talking... we were talking about Simon & Schuster, your publisher, and Priscilla Painton is sitting there being the... and we...

She owes you a book. She said... But instead of owing them a book, we were talking last night about how publishing companies are trying to get into this space where Vox is and you are, and I don't even know what the word is for it because 'podcast' minimalizes it too much.

You know, I think about it a lot because Walt Mossberg, who is... actually, I try to do a lot of different things, and I don't usually take people's word for, like, 'media is dying.' I don't believe it. It's just not true. I just think the way it was is dying, and then something else always takes its place. That's historical, right? As you know, with most... you've written about innovation so many times, things supplant each other, and, you know, there's nothing new under the sun, which is an old phrase. But what I try to do is... a decade in... that 2002, we started the All Things D conference, and the only reason we started the conference first was because The Wall Street Journal wouldn't let us invest in what they called a blog at the time. I said, you know, kids are using the internet. I was a young person then, and I was like, you know, the youngs kind of like the internet, so you might want to stop printing... you know, they wanted to do a Saturday Journal, and I was like, fine, but give me a million dollars to do this, and they wouldn't. And so we did the conference, which was instantly profitable, um, which was the famous conference where you had Gates and Jobs and stuff like that. And they didn't give me money for doing the site, the All Things D site, for five years, um, and it was just one of these struggles with these old media institutions. And so Walt and I spun off, you know, even after making millions. And one of the things that happened there is, um, they didn't give us any money initially for making the millions of dollars in profit, but then they gave us a percentage of the business, which was stupid on their behalf. One executive came up to me like, 'I wish we had given that salary raise to you,' and I'm like, 'I'm thrilled that you didn't.'

But...

We moved on to get our own money. We got our...

Yes. You know, Martha Stewart called it 'omnimedia,' and they made fun of her many years ago. That's exactly what it is. It's a... I don't know if you want to use the word 'omni,' but, um, you know, one of the things I think about, like when I did my last book, Burn Book, which did very well as a book, but I missed... what I did on the book tour was, instead of doing the regular book tour, I had people in the book interviewing me at every single venue, and we sold out. They were crazy, like, popular, and I thought I missed an opportunity to get a sponsor for this, but I did put everything on my podcast, all the interviews, because they were all different. Whether Sam Altman did one, Ted Sarandos did one, Laurene Powell Jobs did one. I should have thought strongly about that. It was more than that, and I should have done more in the video space on that at the time. And so when you're making a book, or I just announced a series called Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever on CNN. Everyone's like, 'Why are you doing cable?' I'm like, 'I'm not doing cable. I'm doing something else. You don't understand that it's going to live online. It's going to be a podcast. There's going to be a podcast. I may do an event. There's going to be a book.' I'm sure I'll deliver it soon, Simon & Schuster. Um, but there's going to be... I think about everything, and not necessarily all of them, but just depending on what the product happens to be like. It may be a podcast. It may be this.

I haven't gone into merch yet.

Yes, you kind of do. I'm going to make a lot of money at it.

If I have Scott saying, you know, it's good, it'll work. We have plans.

People in Silicon Valley, in particular, want to live forever, type of things.

It's a six-part... it's already done. The CNN series is done, and the original title before all this happened was 'Peter Attia Is a Schmuck.' Um, and...

Oh, yes, it did.

You need to pay attention to what I'm telling you. Um, what I was irritated with was one, Silicon Valley people lecturing me on all manner of things they didn't know about, including health. And because they are godlike, they think they should live forever or they should hack death. And I think it's just nonsensical. And they're way, you know... and what I was referencing was this amazing speech that you know about with Steve Jobs, which was Steve Jobs had a very good sense of death and understood that mortality is what creates innovation. And he gave this amazing speech, I recommended, which really inspired me about, you know, live every day like it's your last. That's...

And so that was my inspiration, the Steve Jobs mentality versus, say, a Bryan Johnson or an Elon Musk idea of, like, we should live... we're so amazing, godlike creatures, we should live forever. And part and parcel to this is my obsession with the conspiracy theories all over the internet, politically and otherwise. But in the healthcare area, it's really awful. Like all this nonsensical [__] that's there. And so the charlatans bothered me especially online because they had weaponized health. And then at the same time, there's this astonishing blossoming of science happening right now. Whether it's someone you wrote about, Jennifer Doudna at CRISPR, the cancer research, mRNA vaccines, like they're going to have a vaccine for cancer, all this incredible use of AI to detect illnesses, GLP-1s... there's all this astonishing stuff happening, and then there's all these charlatans. And so I go and try all the charlatan stuff and try to blow it up. And then I try to focus in on people that are doing the real work that is... so it's substantive and silly at the same time. And then I'm going to do podcasts around it. Then I might do an event. Um, you know, there's going to be a book. I'm going to try to focus in on the people that are doing the amazing work, but also slap the charlatans wherever I can, slap them out of the picture.

I didn't work with these people, but it's a series that... it's interesting. The Times wrote about this yesterday, but the shift of tech people from very silly and you kind of root for them and they end up at the end of Silicon Valley, they do the right thing, they have a technology that could really hurt people, to today you have Mountainhead and this, where the technologists are the villains and really ridiculous drug-taking, sex-having villains, essentially.

Oh, I don't know if they're right-wing. I don't think they have any...

Yeah, I think they're not right-wing. I think they're just people, as I joke with you, they're people who weren't hugged enough as children, um, that now are taking it out on the rest of us. Um, I think they're... whatever is in their financial self-interest is what they do. Or they're, you know, even down to Tim Cook, who I happen to like, you know, bringing that golden statue to Trump. I mean, what an embarrassment. There's... to me, there's a level of... if you have that much [__]-you money and not saying [__]-you seems kind of ridiculous, like, on some level. Um, now he can do damage to them. That is 100% true. But for how long? Not much longer, I suspect. Um, and so I think some of them very much real. I think like David Sachs was conservative. He was conservative-ish, and I think they tried...

Libertarian, I would call it libertarian. Peter Thiel, honestly, is the only one who was always like this and deserves, you know, his ridiculous stuff is something he has... he's consistently, uh, heinous, essentially, but he's consistently... and very smart person, very, you know, has consistently sort of espoused this idea that democracy doesn't work and that the ubermensch should be running everything. You know, you've read all their stuff, is that the unitary executive theory and, 'Ugh, these women are so irritating, and when they got the vote, that sucked,' um, that kind of stuff. And then you have people who have come along to it and sort of entered the picture. Um, I would, you know, Elon was never... I never knew Elon was somewhat liberal, as I remember him. He called me when they were going to do this anti-trans and anti-gay thing in the first Trump administration, 'What can I do, Kara?' And now today, couldn't be worse on the topic, you know, and really terrible. Uh, I don't... lots of things happened with him, including ketamine. Um, but among other things, he just morphed, I think, because the woke mind virus... it's actually not a woke mind virus that affected him. It's a Twitter mind. It's an X mind virus. You know, this Nazi porn bar, he's been hanging in it too much, and therefore he's become...

I made the mistake of going on it the other day for a second, and I was like, 'Oh god, this place again.' Um, I love Twitter. I did... I was one of the first people. I had one... I still have 1.6 million followers on there, and I am not on it. Like, that would be good for my marketing, like, but I just can't. It's like a really...

How come those didn't work? They didn't catch on.

You never then hear... Well...

But Instagram and Threads is bigger than X right now. Okay. And growing.

Oh, absolutely. Actually, you know, listen, I ain't no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but it's a nice product. I have to tell you, like, it doesn't... like, one of the... I shouldn't... I'm not going to say the word. They always call me on Twitter, but, uh, it starts with C and ends with T almost regularly. Um, it's a really good place. I have... it's a really interesting... you know, sometimes it's not great, but it's sort of a version of what Twitter used to be for me. Um, and actually, I'm doing a lot of news discovery on it. I like... again, I'm not one who loves to compliment Mark Zuckerberg, but it's a good product, and there's all kinds of issues with it, like a lot of things. I think Bluesky has reached... they've just... the founding CEO just stepped down. They need to do more, uh, that kind of stuff. But it's... I have both of them. I have half a million people on each of them. That's pretty good. And I'll tell you, the response rate is great. Um, but Twitter is so... X is so polluted with, uh, bots and malignant figures that it's useless.

Yeah.