Protecting Kids from Big Tech: Kara Swisher, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan

Hi there and welcome to "Which Side of History?" I'm Jim Styer, the founder of Common Sense Media and a longtime professor at Stanford University. Thanks so much for being here and please make sure that you press that follow button wherever you listen and subscribe to my YouTube channel. In this episode, we're going to talk about big tech and how it is all around us in every aspect of our lives. Quite simply, big tech and the implications of technology are hard to ignore in all of our lives. So, what impact is big tech having on our democracy and most of all on our kids and youth? Joining me today are three great guests: first, the pioneering tech journalist Cara Swisher; second, the very thoughtful CEO of Pinterest, Bill Ready; and finally, Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom. So, let's head now over to Stanford University and enjoy this very lively conversation.

Welcome Cara Swisher, Bill Ready, Eric Yuan. It's going to be a great night. Okay, can you guys—the tech guys—please bring up our dear friend Cara Swisher because she's going to get the first question. There she is.

Hi.

Hi. Okay, you guys, me. Okay. And one this is hilarious. I'm going to tell you this. This is hilarious. So she has a special camera. So there's a reason there's the little thing up on Cara's thing because she has such a high level camera for the work she does, and even the CEO of Zoom probably cannot fix it because she's on a Zoom screen. Having said it, so Cara, a handful of mostly male-led tech companies have come to have extraordinary dominance in shaping our economy, our culture, our information flow. Has big tech, in your opinion, become a form of an oligarchy? What are the consequences for democracy for kids? Sort of the overall question about the dominance of big tech.

They're all there sort of ponyied up to the trough like pigs at the trough and they want the things they want and Trump is a coin-operated president so he's willing to provide that for them. So they're getting what they want and therefore it requires them to slavishly compliment him, which he requires. I find it really interesting that the richest and most powerful people in the world have to do this. I don't know what you have money for if this is the result. It was a grotesque display. The women there were wives, just so you know. I think Lisa Sue might have been there. I think she's the only woman involved in any of this who runs AMD. I just did a long interview with her recently. But otherwise, it is all men. I don't know, oligarch's the right word. I don't know what it is. I can just use pigs at the trough. I think that works for me.

Okay, Bill, how could you top that response? And Eric, you're going to get a shot at it, too. But also, let me just follow, but you should respond to what Cara said. But also, look, you run really big tech companies, both of you, but they're not like the five or seven biggest tech companies. So, I'm interested to know how you see that and if you think that's healthy or not healthy, but also the impact on the economy and culture of that much power in that few hands. And also anything you heard that Cara said.

Yeah. I mean I would say a few things. For us specifically we're a nonpolitical platform. So like our focus is completely nonpolitical, and our focus has really been on youth mental health. How do you tune AI for positivity? I actually think it's one of the few not only bipartisan issues here in the US but I actually think has some real global traction. But I do think that no matter where you go in the world, I think you have political leaders that are very interested in what's happening. I think largely because you do have tremendous influence happening from a handful of platforms. I think it's a little bit of a misnomer when people talk about the creator economy and things like that. One lens you could look through is to say, well, there's been this huge democratization of content. And through one lens, you could say that's true. Like anybody with a phone can go make content now, right? And they can publish it. Another lens you can look through is to say, well, the distribution of that content really comes down to just a few platforms. So, you know, when I was growing up, I'm 46, so when I was growing up, I remember pre-cable TV when there was like three or four TV channels, and then there were 30, then there were 100, then there were 200, and then you get the internet. And in a lot of ways, it's really concentrated back down because those few companies through their algorithms really decide what you see. And so when we were growing up, if we didn't like what we watched, we could just change the channel. Well, now with most of the platforms that are distributing this content, the only active choice you get, which is really not an active choice, is how long you looked. And if you look at something, you're going to see more of it. So anyway, I do think that the reason you have political leaders really paying attention to what's happening with big tech is not just the dollars that are flowing, but just the huge amount of influence over what the populace of any country is going to see really rests with a few platforms. What are those algorithms? How are people getting to choose what they see and don't see? And I would put forth that people have lost a tremendous amount of choice because even though there's a million creators on most of the platforms, it doesn't really matter who you follow anymore right? It's what the algorithm thinks you should see. And so these algorithms have been tuned to—and really AI behind them have been tuned to—maximize your view time, and in doing so it figures out you look longer at things that trigger you, whatever your triggers are, whether it's that politician that gets you really fired up or someone else's fake perfect life that you can't possibly live up to. And you don't really get a choice. You don't get to change the channel the way that we got to change the channel growing up. It's, "Oh, you looked at it. I'll show you more of it." And I think that is a good reason for politicians and policy makers to really want to understand what's happening with these platforms. I think with the coming of more powerful AI, that's even more important. So the political world starting to take interest and care about this, that's a global phenomenon. And I think rightly so because there's such tremendous influence. I think the way that influence manifests, obviously there's something to be desired in any place you would go around that. But what I'm hopeful of is that there is interest in how do you win in AI. I do think there is a lot of discussion around how do you do AI the right way.

Correct, and and I think fortunately that is not only again not only bipartisan but I think cutting through around the globe. There's a lot more to talk about there but I do think there's not only interest but I think a clear need for thoughtful regulation around these things. So, we're going to come back to that and Eric, I'm going to ask you in a sec, but I just want to because today, right? So, California is the center of the law when it comes to tech and has been. Thank you very much, Common Sense Media. In all seriousness, for about 15 years they know that and Washington is basically missing in action no matter how effective Cara and Scott Galloway and other people are talking about it. This is why California matters and it's why New York is now becoming important and why Europe matters and why Australia matters. But it's really here. But Eric, let me ask you a question because you are an immigrant from China, right? And you also run this big company, very well-known household word company, Zoom.

I think so. But you aren't—and same thing with Pinterest. These guys run really significant, very successful tech companies, but you're not one of the five or seven giants, right? You worked at Google. You came out of Cisco, which in those days was so dominant. So do you think that there's—you can answer, I know some of these are tough questions—you can answer however you want. You think there's too much of a concentration of power and also is there any comparison to what you saw in China which is completely different system but do you think there's too much of a concentration of power and in a weird way fewer choice like Bill was saying?

So you're an application company in the broader world of AI.

And we're in the infrastructure phase right now for AI.

But let me ask you this and then Cara, I really want you to comment. These are we have two technology CEOs but do you think that there's too much power in the hands of a small number of companies right now? Do you think that because there's been very little regulation other than what we've done in California, very little regulation?

So Cara, your overall take on what they said and also do you agree or disagree with them about saying look, this is the reality have five or seven really large companies that have the resources to build this out whether you like it or not. And they have to work with the government.

It's not the point. Everybody works. You think airlines don't work with the government? You think pharmaceutical companies don't work with the government? That's just the excuse they always use. They've used it since Bill Gates when I first met him at the Washington Post in the 80s. Like, you know, we don't need you. We don't need to do anything. It's a group of people who have exactly zero laws governing them. And then they complain about the slightest amount of pushback from whatever administration they don't like or they can't buy essentially. So they're very interested in politics because it smooths things for them. And what they've been doing for a long time is slowly owning all the levers of power. Now, media is their latest acquisition essentially. So they don't get any pushback whatsoever. If I was a bank I'd feel pretty irritated if tech gets to do whatever it wants and make decisions that have actual societal impact. If I was a pharmaceutical company, now look, all these people also use the levers of power, but they certainly have regulations they need to pay attention to, and they probably would like not to have any. I mean, you think a chemical company loves to clean up and make sure it doesn't soil the water? I suppose they think they make more money without it. The thing is we've been here before. We've been here with the railroads. We've been here with phones. We've been here over and over and over again where coalitions try to coalesce into a small group of usually the same people essentially. Please by all means go watch "The Gilded Age." It's also enjoyable and the costumes are fantastic, but it's the same. And so acting like they're magicians or special or China's going to get us—they always have some stupid excuse to do that. I don't believe in a lot of regulation. I certainly don't. And I believe in innovation and everything else. But it's "for me, not for thee," right? I've heard every one of their stupid excuses and it's always about how they need to be free to do whatever they want. What about when there are safety issues? What about all kinds of issues? You can track it so closely: the way our country is with the rise of social media. It's true. Any person who has children understands this. Any normal person does. And they want to make you feel crazy for saying so. Same thing when we had too much sugar or there was whatever in certain things. Same thing. It's the same thing, and they just happen to be now in a really good position to control that. If I was a small company, I would hate it. Like, so you have to rely on the magnificent seven. They're not that magnificent. I like small companies. I like innovation. Who knows what Google they killed? If Microsoft had been allowed to do this without any kind of stopping it. And that was just one company. This is six or seven of them that control everything. Notice where they're going now. Bezos is at the Washington Post. Ellison's are trying to buy up every bit of cable properties. This is the next move because, you know, it's sort of like that play. I forget the play it was called, but like "Get this thing out of my eye"—he wanted to kill the guy who wouldn't let him divorce, right? We're irritating to them. We're irritating to a Mark Andreessen, and therefore we'll just buy it or shove things down people's throats. So what's happening at CBS is laughable on so many levels. But this is what they'll do. They've got politics, they're going to have media, they've got communications. They don't have any opposition that I can see of. And therefore, they're not as good. They're not going to be as good if they don't have feedback and new companies nipping at their heels. When they control all the power and it's so expensive, nobody can do anything. To me it hurts all small companies, which I think are the heartbeat of our country: small entrepreneurs. That's my feeling. And they're finished in AI—if they, you can't do anything. And that's a real shame because we don't know what they could have done. So, by the way, for the class, you're going to hear a lot from me next week or the week after about AI. We're going to talk about it some and about the regulatory stuff that we think—the bill that was vetoed, the one Gavin signed a couple of really important bills today, but he vetoed our AI companion bill. And what I was going to ask Bill is you've been, as I said in the intro, we have to deal with all the tech CEOs including all the AI company CEOs a lot right now. You've been the unquestioned leader on the kids and family stuff. So in the world that Cara is describing and to some extent Eric is laying out too, how do you protect kids and families? You all nodded when you talked about social media and its extraordinary impact. We've been railing about this for 15 years, wrote a book about it almost 12 years ago. How do you think that growing up with this constant connectivity—your daughter Eric, your kids, Cara's four kids, my four kids—how do we regulate this? How do we come in and not let this just be a total free-for-all in the way that Cara's describing it?

Yeah. So, a couple things I'd say. I came in as CEO of Pinterest a little over three years ago, right? And this was one of the primary opportunities I saw was to try to prove a more positive alternative to social media. And like everybody else, I had seen what was happening with engagement and sort of not just the addictive nature of the algorithms but also the kind of content that was being surfaced to fuel ever-greater view times. And I think two things need to happen. One, I'm a capitalist, but there are market failures and to Cara's examples, we've seen this before where you've got to make sure that even in a capitalist system, you don't have a race to the bottom, right? You can't just dump toxic pollutants into the waterways. And I think we need to have a baseline around safety. It's good to see some momentum around that. But also as a capitalist, my hope is that we can start to prove consumer demand for safer alternatives as well. So this was, when I came in as CEO of Pinterest, Pinterest like a lot of other companies was sort of cloning TikTok, racing towards short form video. And while it had been a more positive platform historically, as soon as it started to go down the short form video path, a lot of the same toxic triggering content was rising to the top. A lot of the same issues as other social media platforms. And we set out to say, okay, let's prove we can tune AI for positivity. Let's prove that we can go build a different kind of platform. And our hope was that we would surface that there would be consumer demand for it. To give the punchline, at that time when I came in the platform was in a state of decline, sort of bleeding out users. The narrative on Pinterest was it was aging up and aging out. Fast forward three years, we've had eight straight quarters of record high users. Gen Z is now our largest, fastest-growing demographic, more than half the platform.

What percentage female versus male?

Uh, so we don't publish that specifically. We do skew towards women. Shopping is a big use case on the platform, so we skew towards women, but actually we're growing across every generation and every demographic that we track around the globe, and men are now one of our fastest-growing demographics as well. So we wanted to prove there was a good business in positivity, and we're seeing this resonating really broadly. At the core of that was investing not only in tuning AI to show you more things that would leave you feeling better but actually investing in safety. So we were the first and still the only social media platform to do private only for under 16. So what does that mean? Effectively we turned off the social features for users under 16 because as a parent, you know, I looked at what was happening and it makes sense when you just say it out loud: it's not safe for kids to be contacted by strangers online. And so when we did things like that, when we did private only for under 16, we had not yet won with Gen Z. People thought it would ruin us with young users, right? After I came in as CEO, our stock dropped by over 20% when we did that.

It's compact now.

Yeah. And so I really worry about both of these guys really in terms of their—but that was the bet: that there would be demand for a safer, more positive space. And not only did it not ruin us with young users, if you ask Gen Z now why they come to Pinterest, one of the first things they'll say is they see it as an oasis away from the toxicity they experienced elsewhere. So I led with—we've had far too much less choice in where we consume media than what we used to have. Used to be when you had 300 channels, if you didn't like what was on, you just flip to a different channel. Now if you only have a few platforms distributing all your content, you don't really get a choice in what you see. The way that I describe this is that the way these algorithms work, we've all had the experience of sitting in a traffic jam, right? And we know when we get to the front of the traffic jam, we shouldn't look at the car crash. But what do we all do? We all sneak a peek at the car crash. The algorithm learns like, "Oh, you looked at the car crash. I'll show you another car crash. Oh, you looked at that one, too." Until eventually it's all car crashes. But there's a really important thing happening there is that it's really about conscious choice versus unconscious choice, right? These algorithms are being tuned to the base of your brain stem, your unconscious choice. Literally people are designing for how to maximize dopamine release. But if you ask someone after they see the car crash, "Would you like to see another one?" the vast majority of people would say, "No, that was terrible. I don't want to see another one of those." Conscious choice versus unconscious choice. So one of the things that we did to tune AI for positivity was instead of tuning for view time, started tuning more for the things that people said they wanted to see. Again, more intentional choice. So a lot of this is about not just safety, not just tuning for positivity, it's about agency and actually giving people more choice. Not just choice in other platforms they choose, but choice in the way they use the platforms and what they see. So coming back to your question around what's happening with all this, I think yes, we need a baseline of regulation so you don't have a race to the bottom, so you don't have people saying, "Well, the only way to compete in AI is you have to build chatbots that will have sexually explicit conversations with children," which was a real story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Elon's big new strategy.

So you need to make sure you have a baseline that doesn't allow for those kinds of things. At the same time, I'm hoping that we can prove that there's a free market solution to this as well, that if consumers actually have choice and if consumers understand more of what's happening for them, there will be a demand for it. And by no means can I say that we can declare victory, but we've proven it's possible. We've proven it's possible to build in a different way.

Cara, let me ask you a question. So obviously we've been talking about the power of AI and this, that, what you, which is basically social media and other platforms on steroids. So Cara, you saw and have written about and spoken about many times the impact of social media on democracy right at home and abroad, and you have probably spoken and written as eloquently about that as anybody. How much do you think, how do you think, as you say, the next couple of years of the AI evolution, again dominated by a handful of large companies clearly, how do you see that shaking out in the context of both American democracy and democracy around the world, and at a high level, pro or con, because obviously there's some significant concerns there.

Sure. One of the things you're mixing social media with AI. I don't think you should. Okay. By the way, if you notice, there's been some really interesting statistics. Social media usage is down. It's starting to decline, actually, especially young people. So I have a feeling it might take care of itself. I have four kids, but the two older ones don't use social media at all. They got off of it. And whenever I ask them, they're like, 'It makes me feel bad.' They don't want to use it. That's it. It's pretty simple. And so I do think there's a decline in social media usage among the demo that the advertisers want. AI is a different thing. AI is a really interesting... Social media is a push business. If you remember the original point cast, that was a problem initially, and then everything was pull, right? I think AI is a different kind of thing because it's more of a creative thing. It can be an abuse thing. It could be just fun. It could be good for teaching people things. It has a lot of different uses which I don't think are the same as social media at all, except they put it on social media. That would be it. I do think kids should learn how to use it, for sure. It's like denying people the use of the internet when it first started, which people did. 'What do I need to use email for?' They need to know how to use it, how to understand it, and how to have media literacy. I think absolutely we should be teaching those things to kids. And the problem with Melania is that she's saying use AI but none of the safety around it. I didn't hear a lot about safety. Largely Trump, her husband, is allowing these companies to do whatever they want, whether it's Character AI or the one I recently had the parents of the kid who committed suicide, and the AI was quite helpful in helping him commit suicide. It was very clearly not enough safety precautions. So much that I was like kids under 16 shouldn't use this stuff. But they should know how to use AI in general as a tool. It makes no sense not to have our populace uneducated about the critical digital tools going forward. It's just what are the safety things around certain populations and the applications, especially chatbots, for sure.