I like small companies. I like innovation. Who knows what Google they killed. Microsoft had been allowed to do this, you know, without any kind of stopping it. Bezos is at the Washington Post. Ellison's are trying to buy up every bit of cable properties. 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. It hurts all small companies. You can't do anything. And that's a real shame because we don't know what they could have done.
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 Swisser. 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 Swisser, Bill Ready, Eric Yuan. It's going to be a great night.
Okay, can you guys, can the tech guys please bring up our dear friend Cara Swisser because she's going to get the first question. There she is.
Hi. Okay, you guys me. Okay.
Yeah. 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 sort of 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 sort of ponied 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. And 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 and 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. So, but also, let me just follow, but you should respond to what anything Cara said. But also, look, you run a really, both of you run really big tech companies, 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 were that Cara said.
Yeah. I mean I would say a few things. For us specifically, we're a nonpolitical platform. So 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, with sort of 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. And so, when I was growing up, I'm 46, you know, 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 the 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 ever more powerful AI, that's even more important. So I think 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 you could probably say there's something to be desired in any place you would go around that. But what I'm hopeful of is that there's, yes, there's 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. And I think fortunately that is not only again 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.
We're going to come back to that and Eric, I'm going to ask you in a sec, but I just want to, just 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 and 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?
Well, I think first of all, I'm an engineer so I better answer this question from an engineer perspective or from a technology product perspective. Because you look at the technology paradigm shift over the past many years, from mainframe to PC to mobile and internet, right? So every time whenever there's a huge technology paradigm shift, you have to look at it from, I do not think you should look at it from other perspective. You first of all should look at it from a technical perspective. In particular today, look at AI. We all know, right? So internet was significant to the economy, right? But today, AI is probably 10 times or maybe even 100 times more significant to the society, to the economy. So when it comes to AI, there's three layers. First layer is infrastructure. The second layer is a large language model like OpenAI and Anthropic, right? The third layer is application, like Zoom can play a role. So you're an application company in the broader world of AI. Because the foundation is very important. To have very solid infrastructure or large language model, you need a very, very huge investment to make the infrastructure and build a solid infrastructure and also build a large language model. I do not think any company, even a startup with VC backing, very few companies can afford investing. Take a large language model for example. First of all, you need to buy a lot of GPUs or maybe leverage the cloud. The GPUs, you need to accumulate a lot of data as well, right? So that's the reason why Sam over there at OpenAI, because a huge investment they can do that. Even Bill and I, we want to do that, we cannot get enough capital, right? So look at infrastructure layer, same thing, right? So only big company can do that. From that perspective, I think nothing is wrong, right? This is just purely from a technology perspective. So that's the reason why Apple can do that, Meta, all those, Microsoft, Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, they can do that. However, after the infrastructure layer was built up, after having a very good large language model foundation, at that time a lot of application companies can build all kinds of innovation. It's not there yet.
And we're in the infrastructure phase right now for AI.
We're in the learning stage.
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?
I don't think so because, you like it or not, actually that's kind of the way for technology innovation, right? You need someone to invest a huge amount of resources, capital, engineer time, right? To build the foundation, and then all other companies can innovate upon that. That's the reality.
I get it. 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 that it's not the point. Everybody works. You think airlines don't work with the government? You don't think musical companies work with the government? That's just the excuse they always use. They've used it since Bill Gates, 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 even the slightest amount of push back from whatever administration they don't like or they can't buy essentially. And so, you know, 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 push back whatsoever. And you know, I don't know, 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, that's what they would love. I mean, you think a chemical company loves to clean up, make sure it doesn't soil the water? I suppose they make more money. And so the idea, you know, 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 the coalitions try to coalesce into a small group of usually the same people essentially. And it's the same people then. It's the same. 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. And I would agree. 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? That kind of thing. And so I just, I've heard every one of their stupid excuses and it's always about how they need to be free, you know? They need to be free to do whatever they want. And what about when there's safety issues? What about when there's all kinds of issues? You can track it so closely, the way our country is with the rise of social media. It's true. Like any person who has children understands this, any normal person does. I want to make you feel like you're crazy for saying so. And you know, same thing when we had too much sugar or there was, you know, whatever in certain things. The 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 these like the magnificent seven. I would, you know, really like they're not that magnificent. I like small companies. I like innovation. I don't know who knows what Google they killed in, you know, a version of Google if Microsoft had been allowed to do this, you know, without any kind of stopping it. And that was just one company. This is six or seven of them that control everything. And so, and again, they're notice where they're going now. Bezos is at the Washington Post. Ellison's are trying to buy up every bit of cable properties. You know, this is the move next. 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 shitty things down people's throats. And so like what's happening at CBS is laughable on so many levels. But this is what they'll do. So this is the one thing that's in their way. They've got politics, they've got, they're going to have media, they've got communications, they've got, you know, 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 and 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, you know, if they, you can't do anything and that's a real shame because we don't know what they could have done. So, you're going to hear, 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 some of the regulatory stuff that we think, again, the bill that was vetoed, the one Gavin signed a couple of really important bills today, but he vetoed basically our AI companion bill. And what I was going to ask Bill is, you've been, as I said in your intro, and you know, we have to deal with all the tech CEOs, including all the AI company CEOs a lot right now. You've been the sort of the unquestioned leader on the kids and family stuff. So what kind of, and in the world that Cara is describing and to some extent Eric is actually laying out too, how do you protect kids and families? You all nodded when you talked about social media and its extraordinary impact. I mean 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 via engagement and sort of, you know, not just the addictive nature of the algorithms but also the kind of content that was being surfaced to sort of fuel ever greater view times. And I think two things need to happen. One, I'm a capitalist, but there are market failures and I think to Cara's examples, like 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 or things like that. 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. And to give the punch line, 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. And 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?
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 in 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. And at the core of that was investing not only in just 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, 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.
Yeah. And so, I really worry about both of these guys really in terms of their, but you know, 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 fewer 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 sort of the base of your brain stem, your unconscious choice, right? 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.
So, you know, 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.
We've proven it's possible to have people feel better after time spent on the platform. And we've proven that there can be a good business in it. And we're actually not technically open sourcing it, like we're sharing our results because I actually hope others will follow that more companies will compete on this and that there can be some free market solution to this as well.
Cara, let me ask you a question. So obviously we've been talking about we're going to talk more 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 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 sort of at a high level pro or con because obviously there's some significant concerns there.
Sure. Um one of the things you're mixing social media with AI. I don't think you should. Okay. Um, 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. Um, so I have a feeling it might take care of itself. I mean, I have two older I have four kids, but the two older ones don't use social media at all. They got off of it. And, you know, whenever I ask them, they're like, "It makes me feel bad." You know, 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 they want, the advertisers want. AI is a different thing. AI is a really interesting, you know, social media is a push business. If you remember the original point cast that was a problem initially and then everything was pull right, right? I think AI is a different kind of thing because it's more of a creative it can be a creative thing. It can be an abuse thing. Um, it can be 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're on except they people put it on social media. That would be it. Um, I do think kids should learn how to use it. That's for sure. Like how to use it. It's like denying people the use of the internet when it's first started, which people did. Like what do I need to use email for? They need to know how to use it and how to understand it and how to have media literacy about I think absolutely we should be teaching those things to kids um and the problem with me Melania is that she's saying use AI but none of the safety around it like that I didn't hear a lot about I sort of heard a little bit about safety but you know largely Trump her husband is allowing these companies to do whatever they want if whether it's character AI or um the one I recently I 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. That's of course that 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 chat bots. I mean for sure.
So that was by the way the
I thought your bill was way too far reaching honestly.
You thought our bill was too far reaching.
Good. I I understand why he vetoed it. Honestly, I would agree with him. I mean I think you have to really stick very closely to young people. Otherwise people want to go and have a relationship with a chatbot. It's their [ __ ] business. I'm sorry. It is.
But if they're under 18, don't you think it can be regulated?
