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Hi, everyone from New York magazine in the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swischer, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're still on endless tour this week for my memoir, Burn Book, A Tech Love Story, which came out in February. I'm chatting at live events about my 30 years of tech reporting with some major figures in tech and many people I wrote about in the book. For this episode, we're heading to Los Angeles for a conversation with Ted Serandos, the Netflix co-CEO who runs The Behemoth with Greg Peters. Ted joined the business back in 2000 and is really the one who drove the content business. He made Binge Watching a Thing when in 2013, he made the call to drop all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once. He also was one of the four studio CEOs who brokered the deals with the WGA and SAG AFRA to end the Hollywood strikes last fall. I've interviewed Ted a number of times, but this time he got to interview me at Live Talks LA in front of a sold-out room on March fourth. We'll have that conversation after a long flight and a short break.

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I'm going to interview somebody who is a journalist, but not just any journalist. Cara freaking swish him for crying out loud. That's my name. That's yes. I thought, how do you go into this if you're an amateur at it? The beauty of this book is you gave the answer in the book. Oh, okay. What is it? I'm going to quote you a little bit here. He said, First, make it a conversation. We're going to try to do that. That's easy for us.Yeah. Second, do not be afraid to ask the question everyone is thinking. Yeah, good. Third, conduct the discussion as if you were never going to interview this person again. Yikes.

Yikes for you, really. Not me.

I'm going to keep your advice in mind. It'll be in the back of my head the whole time. Okay, But I want to talk about this first. The book, the title, Burn Book, it's obviously a nod to mean girls. Right. So I thought this was going to be a trashing of a bunch of people. A little bit. It's a little bit. But it also sounded a lot like a Taylor Swift's Breakup Song. Yes. So when you think about your relationship with these folks who you built on over the years, what would be one thing? If you could have one do-over. Do-over. With any of them, and only one. You only one, you only get one. What would you do?

Well, if you go back in time travel, I guess probably go back and get Mark Zuckerberg interested in something other than tech. But I think probably if I had to go back, it's called a tech love story, right? That's the second part. I wanted to make clear that I don't hate tech, and I don't think you think I do. No. I think in a lot of ways, I joke about it, I don't like some people have done to the place, right? In terms of tech can be a real gift to humanity. And what I think is at the heart of the book is the idea that really irritated me from the beginning, I think, and not with companies like Netflix, because it was very clear what you were doing. You were selling something, right? I don't think I ever heard from Reid Hastings, We're Here to Bring Humanity Together. Here's a CD. Watch it. I think that was pretty much-We did use the word connect too much, though, too.

We did that, too. Did you?

Yeah. Anyway.

It's a very attractive word. Yes, it is.

But it was like, movie watching. Got it. Okay. Instead of going to my video store, I went to Netflix, right? But a lot of these people tried to pretend that they were doing something other than money making. And I don't mind money making. I'm like, fine. And so that's why the first line of the book is, So it was capitalism after all. And it was. And one of the things, if they had done that, I think I would have rather heard that from them versus a lot of the nonsense. And that they took what was a public thing, which was the Internet, which was built by the US government. They took advantage of it, did not have any guardrails, got to do whatever they want because of having this Section 230 to protect them from being sued, and then didn't have the respect to worry about safety, worry about implications, worry about propaganda. And I'm using the word propaganda rather than misinformation because that's what it is. That's all that it is. I think that's the only word you can have for it. And the lack of accountability and the lack of care for safety really started to really get on my nerves.

The slides and the need to act like children was just weird and performative, but it was a disappointment.

The first time I went up to Silicon Valley, to Netflix, to the headquarters for the very first time, 1999, and it wasn't exactly the same. They didn't have a slide. They did not. No, there was no slide. But it was interesting. There were mountains and mountains of boxes. And I noticed that they were from places I never heard of, like drugstore. Com and razorblade. Com. Everyone was buying everything at the whatever it was. Com. And they were really living their life very differently than I was in LA. And this notion... I don't know why offices had to be playgrounds, but that was pretty prevalent.

Netflixes wasn't. Netflix's was not. No, we never did that. No, it was interesting because there was a dichotomy between the apples of the world and Microsoft, which were unfun, right? They had chairs, like crazy. Then you would So then you would go to... I mean, Google was the absolute worst. It was crazy. I don't want to go on your fucking slide. I'm not. I was 36 years old. I'm like, I'm not.

You didn't like slides when you were a kid.

I didn't like slides when I was a kid. I hated slides. I was It's like, not again. And it's not happening when I'm still... And they had the performative garage door, which was sad to me. I was like, what are you doing? The performative nature of so many of these people was... I didn't know where it came from. It was a rested development of their childhood or something. And it got in the way of what they were doing, which was a much more killer instinct, rapacious information thief, as Walt Mossberg called them. That's what they were.

I I think of you as pretty tough, and you're pretty cynical. When you think back... I mean, in a good way, in a good way, in a positive way. I'm good. But I think, so why do you think, in retrospect, that you believe that these folks were going to be anything other than capitalist, ultimately?

I believe that the technology was groundbreaking. When I first... I have concerns like everyone else about where a world's going, not just from a climate change point of view, but how do you get as much information out to people as possible? How do you keep democracy So you're going. And one of the things in the book was the Star Trek, Star Wars dichotomy that I sketched out, which was, Star Wars is very confusing, and it's a dark tale. And in Star Trek, Like I say, it's a United Beneton commercial where everyone gets along and it's so diverse and the villains become good and they shift them. And, oh, I didn't realize I shouldn't have tried to kill people. Everything works. And the idea is learning bold places you go where you haven't been before. And that's my version of it. And broadly enough, I had forgotten that Steve Jobs had said the same thing to me in an interview where he's like, I want Star Trek. We don't have Star Trek. And I had that idea of Star Trek, and maybe because I grew up with Star Trek or you have this idea that you could use technology for good, and you still can.

You absolutely still can. What happened was that it shifted rather dramatically to privacy violations, selling you stuff, selling your data for their advantage, for when you get nothing back. That was the thing, is that you got a dating service, you got a map. By the way, guess who paid for all the maps? The US government. They just took our maps that we paid for and then did more with them. That was disappointing because I do think technology has the capacity to do amazing things.

You were excited about what they were doing and assumed that everyone would be doing good with Why not?

Why wouldn't you? I assumed that it would be equal. I didn't think that they weren't going to make money from it. I'm not naive. I just thought the quote in the book that's critical, I think is the center of the book is the Paul Virilio quote about when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash. What I got worried about was after all this time, so many ships, if you live in the northeast, especially, so many ships, wrecks everywhere across there. But the minute they put the lighthouse in, great, everything works. We don't want shipwrecks. But we have not put in lighthouses after all this time. And they're the richest people on Earth. They're literally the richest people the most. They've benefited the most. And we say thank you for what we've done for them. I just feel like it's just not a good trade, particularly good trade.

I'm going to get back to those guys in a bit. I do want to talk about the book itself a little bit because it's really, first of all, beautifully done, which is a bit of a biography intertwined with 30-I didn't want to put the personal stuff in. Yeah, I'm going to get to that because it's really intertwined with 30 years of tech history and a little bit of personal stuff, a little bit. You give us a little bit. And early in the book, you talk about tragically losing your father early. Your dad certainly had a big influence on you, it seemed to, in the little bit we covered in the book. And in what ways was he able to influence you?

Well, I think when your parent dies at a young age, you recognize time is so precious, like very precious. My dad got out of the Navy, got his first job, bought his first house, and he killed over from an aneurysm, just dead. Three kids. He was starting his life. And so I think when that happens, one, it upends your entire life. And then it says, you don't have time. Nobody has time. It could happen. It gives you urgency. Yes, you have urgency. And so you don't tend to waste time. And I was like that from very early. I tell a story in the book where I was in third grade and I walked out of class. I'm like, I've this now. Let's move on. Come on, let's go. Next. And so I'm often like that. I don't have a lot of patience for wasted time. Yeah.

You only put a couple of even photos of your family in your early days in the picture. You don't mention your mom too much. No. She's still with us.

She's with us? Yes, she is. Someone's laughing. He knows her. Yes, she's still with us.

Any reason we don't give her a lot of ink in the book yet?

She's the next book. Yeah. My brother and I are writing it. It will contain multitudes, let's just say. She's a difficult person.

So you say, and you said in the past, there's many examples in the book of the best way to live your life is to plow through, say what's on your mind, deal with the consequences.

What do you think of that? Have you liked that?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's not easy. It's not easy to do. And I think a lot of... Again, this goes back to this tech ideas of things like radical candor and those things. And there's real radical candor and there's the things like- Which you can't do, really.

I one time saw him in the Polo Lounge. I was there meeting the Tinder guy. I don't know if you saw me, but you were with, I think it was Jeff Katzenberg. I saw you trying to convince... You must have been trying to convince him to put stuff on Netflix or something. I'm sure I was full-court press going on. You were so charming. I could hear it. It was really funny. I was laughing and I thought, Oh, man, I would never be able to do his job.

But what you're doing right now and what you did in the book is, I think a lot of people watch it, say, with envy because people do walk around not able to or feel like they're not able to say what's on their mind as clearly and directly as you do.

Yeah, it's down to me and Elon Musk.

But these things come with a cost, right? So what does it cost you over the years?

With really smart people, not nothing, not a thing. I interviewed Steve Jobs. We had lots of beefs, or Tim Cook, or lots of people. Mark Cuban and I used to beef all the time about lots of things. There's a list of a dozen people like that. I really believe smart people do not mind having smart debates, and they like it, right? Because talking points get exhausting, right? And so I think they really like that. The other thing is it's really hard when you're in a position of authority, like if you're you or Bob Iger or Tim Cook, you have everybody telling you everything, and you don't know everything, right? I do talk to everybody. And so I have insights that maybe you don't know or might say something. And so most adults welcome that, I've noticed. I mix the adults with the adult toddlers, essentially. And those who don't like it, I don't know what to say. If they want to be surrounded by people who they pay all day and be told they're really smart, that will make them less good at what they do, and they make bad decisions. Another thing that helps is being right a lot of the time, calling it right.

I know. I'm sorry, but I have been. You've done it.

You've done a lot. Back to your parents for a second. Is that willingness to... I know you don't like the talk truth to power line, but your willingness or your ability to do that, was that at home? Was that a home practice?

I think you have to in an Italian family. You have to push back like a super... And you know what it's from? It's from being gay. I honestly is. Because one of the things was I knew I was gay from very early on, and I sought out books, and I was like, okay, this is what it is. This is a very unattractive viewpoint of gay people. This I don't believe this. And I used to read a lot of stuff that I didn't agree with. And I was like, that's not me. That's not how I feel. And there's a great book called The Celluloid Closet. And there's also a movie and it's depictions of gay people. It was narrated by Lily Tomlin. I highly recommend it by Vito Ruso. They made this doc of it. And it's better as a doc because you see these scenes. And when you start to see it collectively, you see why people hated gay people. You just saw it. You saw the propaganda building. I was riveted to this movie. And so I was always like, that's not how I am. And it made me furious. And so when people tell me things that aren't true, I'm like, that's not true.

My brother told me about the movie years ago. Being gay in Phoenix was very tough. I bet. And he called me every once in a week, Hey, I'd like to come to LA and hang up for the week and be gay. What do you mean? He goes, We can't. His partner in him could not hold hands walking down the street. Phoenix was dangerous.

Yeah, not again, by the way.

Yeah. And he told me about the movie because he said, and which was fascinating to me, there were so few gay characters that you would actually look for other characters that seemed gay to identify what they were.

Right. Also, they were always... It's a great film. Lesbians were always trying to get straight ladies. I'm like, That's not the definition of a lesbian. Thank you, ladies. No, thank you. I'm not interested. Honestly, it's the opposite. Let's be clear. It's 100%. Then guys were always either really fae, very prissy. Some are, some aren't. It just depends. Or else they were conniving. But it was always very negative, and everyone was suicidal in the end. I have to say, it was the first time I was like, I cannot believe these idiots are saying something that isn't true. And I'm putting up with this. I think AIDS was one of the... I don't know how old you are, but I'm 61. And it was Very much the AIDS crisis, I think, really, I wasn't an activist, particularly. I definitely did marches and everything else. But I was just like, this is bullshit. This is bullshit. We're dying, and they're just doing this out of discrimination. It's really crazy.

And your turning point into professional journalism was around the same thing. It was. Seeing the Washington Post cover something badly and then calling them on it.

Yes, I stole pictures. They wanted to print pictures that were wrong about gay people, and I just hid them. That's all.

She says it with great pride. I'm with you on the real value of a free press and why it's so important. Good. I don't know if you knew this, but I was a want to be journalist. Really? Yeah. I was a high school editor of the newspaper. What? What was it called? And Junior College. The Voice was our college paper that I was the editor of. Where? In Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona. I stumbled into it. I signed up in high school to be on the yearbook, and it was full, so they dumped me into the newspaper. It was called the Cimitar, that newspaper. Cimitar. My high school crush, who I've had for two years, was in the class where I stayed. That was my attraction to journalism. But then I really fell in love with it, and I really admire. I think that I see journalists as heroes and continue to be. I don't know if you know this case or not, but when I was young in Phoenix, it was an investigative reporter named Don Bowles, who was investigating mob influence in Arizona and was blown up in his car. Oh, my God.

He was about to expose the truth, to your And so it just felt like a very virtuous thing. I didn't go on with it because I discovered my second year at junior college, I was not a very good writer. So I went to Plan B, I went to business. Oh, good.

Well, it worked out well for you. Yeah, thanks.

So what do you think is the risk or possibility of a free press given what's happening?

Oh, it's under massive attack. Now look, I don't think the press can't make mistakes. But from the very beginning, this country, the strength has been the ability to speak truth to power in some fashion by whoever, not just the press. But I think one of the things that happens is when you become a post-fact society, it's very dangerous of what happens. And one of the problems we've had is that for a while, we were in an information desert, right? I think Most people just didn't read the media, right? There just wasn't. And people just didn't engage in it. And they had a very small group of things, whether it was a nightly news, which is just three shows, essentially, or one newspaper. It still was the attitude of one group of people who owned it. But people had not too much information. And what happened, the opposite, is now there's too much information, right? It's an information flood, and people believe whatever is written in a lot of ways. And so now with Facebook being the distributor of information, without any editorial control whatsoever. And I get their arguments why they don't want to be, but there is an irresponsability with letting any piece of shit roll over.

So this is an impractical trade, but do you think the world, or let's say the country, was a better place when there was one source of truth, which was maybe Walter Cronkite, even if he was wrong.

No. I have always welcomed the internet. That was one of the things I liked. I had a big argument with a bunch of people, We need gatekeepers. I'm like, Well, because they're going to protect everyone. I'm like, Well, as far as I can tell, all the gatekeepers are straight white men on the Upper side of New York running the networks or the New York Times or something like that. I don't think... Same thing with Hollywood. It's much better when it's more diverse. I've always believed in the diversity of the press. It's just that if there's no ability to pull the lies and the malevolent players out, it really... I am the one person who pays attention to Steve Banon. He talks about flooding the zone. Flooding the zone with bad information, drowns out the good information. It's just a classic propaganda move. So that's why it's not diverse anymore. It's just it's malignant. And that was the big interview I had with Mark many years. I mean, everyone focuses on the sweat interview, which I felt bad for him. I honestly did. But that interview about anti-Semitism was troubling for me for him to not recognize, which he later did.

But that amount of anti-Semitism going over the transom With no stopping it. They're going to do it. Antisemitism has existed since the beginning of time. It is going to be supersized in a way that is impossible to control.

It doesn't need a new spreading tool. Yeah. Well, on a much lighter note, I did learn something else in book about you that I did not know. Was this your impact from Calvin and Hobbes? Yes. I thought that you were in a very class of your own in terms of this, but there's a whole documentary about Calvin and Hobbes worship.

I don't know. Do you know this? I don't worship them, but Dear Mr.

Waterston, there's a doc about it.Oh, well, was it on Netflix? No, it's not. I watched it. It was on Prime.

Prime?

That's why you haven't heard of it.

Did Well done. I'm sure Jeff Bezos is somewhere crying on his yard. Yes, I'm sure he's upset about this. Do you love his midlife crisis like I do?

I'm about to turn 60, so it makes me very nervous.

You have a lovely wife. Don't, don't. You have a lovely wife.

What's your question about Calvin and Hobbes? Can you share with folks about Calvin and Hobbes, how it influenced your thinking?

That's where I got to understand what was happening, which is the The heart of the book is this everything that can be digitized will be digitized. And I recognize that, I think, a lot earlier than other people. And it was because I was on a fellowship, I downloaded Calvin and Hobbes into my... It must have been a compact computer, maybe a Dell of some sort. But I was amazed that I could download the book. That was something special. And it was like one of those moments where you were like, oh, whoa, whoa. And I remember looking at everything around me. I was thinking the news, and then I saw Craigslist. It was a And a lot of those moments were... Netflix, too. When you guys started putting things digital, I was like, oh, this is what people are going to do once the piece has come into place. And so I downloaded this Calvin and Hobbes book, and it was so clear to me that everything would go on this worldwide network. It was like a light bulb moment. It was a light bulb moment. And I kept saying it to people. And I was also obsessed with cell phones, even the big ones.

I had a big one. I had the Gordon Gecko one. I had all the cell phones. And I kept saying to people, You're not going to be in the office. I was also remote 10 years before everybody else.

You were O-G, work from home?

I was. Mostly because I was such an unpleasant person.

No one was trying to force you back to the office?

I didn't like the office. It was a lot of talking. I'm busy.

That for me, it was interesting in those early days, meeting Reid in 1999. He described Netflix exactly like it is right now in 1999. The internet was so slow and so expensive for video. I remember remember him telling me, and I had this, where you saw it and said, Oh, my God, it's going to be everything. I thought, he might be crazy. I wasn't sure if that's really going to happen. But it was a very matter of fact about it. I said, Well, I just downloaded a South Park video. It took seven days. I don't think this is really going to happen. And he said, No, the internet's going to get twice as fast as after price every 18 months. It's called Moore's Law. Look it up. Yeah, look it up. And this was Reid.

So what convinced you? You believed it?

I went home and digested the meeting because I said, You know what? I I don't know that I've ever met anyone who really radically changed the world before. I bet they're a lot like this, very sure of themselves, very clear about-He's definitely sure of himself. Yeah, for sure. And so I said, I don't know if he's right, but if he's wrong, I'm going to learn a ton. We're just going to learn a ton.

Yeah, but it just seems so clear once you saw the World Wide Web. Anyone who saw Craigslist, it was so much better. And I think most people were in denial that it was better. But I think the Wall Street Journal, I was urging them as a young person to really use digital, and they want to do another Saturday print journal. And I was like, this is coming.

And we want to get the kids. Yeah.

Get going because this is over. And one of the things I think press did that they didn't do well was they didn't get the tech expertise they needed to transform themselves. Hollywood's the same way. Listen, that 300-mile thing, the difference between the tech people, so many... I would come down here all the time. It was so pronounced back then. There were only two people. I'm I'm leaving Netflix out of it because you were part of a tech company, I think. You had the mix of the two.

Well, because we were mailing Disk was the cheapest way to move bits around. It was a tech company, but I'm very-They liked you for that.

You were selling their content, right?

We were very low It was a tech company at the beginning.

But there were only two people in the entire... I visited every one of these people. I was a covered Napster, everything else was Bob Iger and Barry Diller, were the only people who absolutely we understood what was going to happen.

So when we were starting- Or had vague ideas of it. Back in 2000, the only Hollywood person that ever came to Los Gatos was Peter Churnan.

Oh, Peter Chernan, too. You're absolutely right. Yes. He was definitely... I think it was a real wanting not to believe it was going to happen. The music people were first. That was where it first hit. And I remember talking to Hollywood people, and I was like, This is coming. Are you kidding? This is perfect.

And I think for us, we always knew it was coming. When we got in, we said, The DVDs are going He's going to be dead soon.

What were they calling you? I just talked to him the other day, Jeff Bukas. The Albanian army? The Albanian army when he called you that.

Which, by the way, nothing motivates employees more than something like that. Yes.

He probably helped us. We're really worried about the Albanian army. I remember when he said it, I called him, I said, Oh, man, the Albanians are really good at war. I'm going to watch the frigging Albanians.

Our next company meeting, we had berets and dog tags.

Yeah, and he said that, and just recently, he goes, Well, I didn't quite mean it that way. I go, Stop it. Just own your Albanian, you see?

People forget that Jeff Bukas is funny.

He's very funny.Yeah..

I'm sure he thought it was really funny when he said it.

When he sold that company off to AT&T at the right time, so kudos.

Well done. Slow clap for him. We'll give him the Albanian army. Yeah, right.

He understood it.

But I think they had- But Bob said selling arms to third-world countries. Right. They're just giving us their licensing content.

He did know that. But then he did it, right? Then he did it, right? So what's happening now has to be done. Whether you like it or not. And economically speaking, it's really hard. Sometimes, I think one of the things I said, which made some people here angry, was your enemy is not the studios. It's not who you think it is. Now, I get the salaries, I get everything else. But your enemies are these tech companies. They just literally are going to eat everything in their path, and they have the means and the money to do so. And so this was years ago I was saying this. I think media really missed it. I mean, newspapers was that they thought these people were their friends, and they are not your friends. They want to eat you alive.

Is the book a wake-up call for this? I mean, honestly- Yes.

And this new AGI stuff, who do you think dominates AGI? Agi is going to be devastating for Hollywood. It's going to be devastating for media. It is there now before. There's this thing in the book where Larry Page is... We're in New York. He has to stay in my mom's apartment because of a blackout. And he was going around to publishers to try to get to... He was starting to put their books on his service without permission. And I was always like, IP, you might want to look it up. You can't take people's things.

He had to print books first.

And I kept calling him a shoplifter. It didn't work. He didn't care. And it wasn't even malevantly not care. He's like, of course I can do it. He had no sense of IP. And it was crazy. And he went to these meetings with these publishers, and he said, they're not cooperating. And I said, That's because they know you're here to kill them. You're here to kill them. But a lot of people didn't recognize that this was what... And they thought they were there for tools. They thought, We're going to help you. We're going to distribute you. They want to eat everything. And with AGI, they used to just point to it and control it by distribution. Now they're going to scrape everything they can, and then you're going to have to go get it back. That's the real issue. Anyone with IP should be suing those companies every single day until you get what you want.

That part of it, I'm more with you, too, on the notion of the human creativity is going to be very not likely to be replaced in this. Not likely. But the tool, like you said, there's going to be that piece that has to be settled, the ingestion of things and who pays for that and how does it get paid for?

They should pay you. It's fine if they pay you. It's just that...

Here's the thing. My hope is that these things are digitally fingerprinted so that you're able to identify.

That's correct. But YouTube, it worked out for YouTube. They ended up, initially, they put that stuff up, didn't do anything about it, and then they worked something out. Now, same thing with music in a lot of ways. So what are you going to do? Although, look, Universal, someone told me last night, Universal pulled their music off of TikTok. There are tons of fake Taylor Swift songs on there now made by AI, on TikTok. So what do they need that for? They will do anything to suck and scrape your stuff and remake it and mush it up in some way. They did that with me, which was amazing on this book tour. There are fake Kara Swisher books all over Amazon, with very attractive Cumly photos of me. Ai generated. They're terrible. I look really strange, Femi. And they were up there and my wife thought, she's like, what is this? Who is this? Who is this? In the search. And I was like, What is this? And I realized what it was. It was AGI. And I wrote Andy Jassie, who's running Amazon. And I essentially wrote, What the fuck? And he's like, Oh, no, it's you.

That it did it. Of all the people. He said something like, Of all the gin joints in the world, I had to AGIU. And it got some attention. But I was just with Savannah Guthrie, and they took something of hers. She has this faith in God book. They made a workbook, and it happened to your wife, too. They created a workbook next to it that isn't hers, but they didn't just do that. They didn't just take that down, which is a lie. And it's her brand next to it, your wife's brand.

To knock off of the cover. Right.

To knock off the cover. But then it said, Buy Samantha Guthrie's book and the workbook.

Oh, they put them together?

That's right. And they were selling my book with my fake lady books. You know what I mean? And I was like, Fake lady doesn't get sold with cash. But who gets the 1699 for that? And then the customer gets a crappy book. Which They're at your brand. They think it's my fault. Honestly, the whole thing is... But they still make the money, and they should have anticipated this 100%.

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Hi, I'm Taylor Lawrence.

I've been reporting on tech and online culture for over a decade, and My new podcast Power User just launched. This week on the show, we tackle the TikTok ban. Banning TikTok is blatantly unconstitutional, and frankly, a huge distraction for the types of real measures that would actually lead to a better internet. We also get into how shrimp Jesus took over Facebook, LinkedIn, gaming, and Mr. Beast's record-breaking new reality show. I'll be covering all that and more this week on Power User. Check us out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

I love your okay AR list for identifying a partner, your wife, and how you vetted your wife, I guess, through the list.

Yes, I did. It's objective key results.

Objective key results, yeah. But your wife would have to be kind and generous, emotionally available. Compromise, Ability, Intuitive, Guide, Kind to your Kids. As you go through life and you think about that list, which it seems like it served the list as well. It worked. A month. Yeah. If there were a similar list for a tech CEO, what would that be?

There are a lot. I have a whole chapter about it. I really like what Mark Cuban's done with himself. I really do. I think he's doing... Go watch him on Twitter. He's doing God's work, arguing with them all about diversity, equity, inclusion. He's trying to make considered arguments of his experience and say, This is why I like it. This is why I don't. This is what the good thing is. This is why it's a good thing. And he's a business person, so he's telling you from a business point of view why he's doing it. And then Elon's response is always, You're a moron. Fucking idiot. He doesn't want to have a discussion about it. He just wants to dunk on people. I think Mark Cuban is someone who's really... He was a real tech bro boy. Was he a tech bro? But he has changed And he's doing this stuff with cost plus drugs. I like anyone that moves forward as a person. Brian Chesky is another good example. He's made a lot of mistakes. I don't mind mistakes. Evan Spiegel is another person who really was a bro. What a bro he was. I've had an argument with him right near here at lunch where he blamed me for his college emails, which I was like, listen, dude, that was you.

That was all you writing terrible emails. So anyone who progresses is good on my... Or tries to do something and recognizes their responsibility.

I would put in your next version. I would nominate Reid Hastings to be in there.

Because on top of all those things, I think he has- I don't dumb Reid in with these people. He's an adult. Talk about an adult. He's an adult. Absolutely.

He orchestrated the succession of the company over about 10 years. He did. While he was a young man, left.

Yes, he did. He's got things to do. No, I wouldn't put your company in that. I don't find your company. It's hard to place Netflix. But yes, Reid is... I Reid as an adult. He is in the Tim... If I put him in a group, it would be Tim Cook, him, a lot of people like that.

You think very highly of Steve. Steve.

I love Steve. I know all his faults.

Yeah, I was going to say I love the prick to productivity ratio. In my limited interactions with him, he was pretty high on the prick scale. He was, yeah. Before he got to the productivity scale part.

Yeah, but the productivity was all the charge. The productivity got up. But I bet he was a prick, not about You'd never see him dunk on Twitter. It was about the product, right?

No. Always.

It was always about the product.

I got a call a Saturday morning when we were about to put Netflix on Apple TV, and someone called me and they said, I think you should get on this call. Steve Steve Jobs is on screaming at everybody about how ugly our red, our logo is. And all the people didn't know what to say to him. But it was about the product. But he was on with a bunch of junior engineers talking about the color in our logo, on how it looked like on his product.

I'm okay with that. It was about the product. See, that's the thing which is really interesting about him is it was never, literally, he would never... You don't know what Reid or Tim Cook thinks about Ukraine. We have to endure this venture capitalist. Why do I need to know? Let me tell you what to do in Southeast Asia. I'm like, Shut the fuck up.

Well, quick rapid fires. Someone you never get tired of talking to, interviewing.

It would have been Steve Jobs. He was really interesting to talk to, especially about products. I really like talking to Sachin Adela. He's really interesting. He's really a very complex human being, and I think he's done a terrific job there. I always like talking to Cuban. He's really fun. And he's a fun guy to go out with. I like talking to him.

He will answer a text in 10 seconds.

Ten seconds. But it's always interesting, and he doesn't always agree. We had a big debate about Elizabeth Warren and the wealth tax, which he was fun. I always like talking to Steve Case. I like Steve Case a lot. There's a lot of different people. I'm going to try to name a woman because they just aren't there in tech as many as there should be. Mary Meaker was really interesting. She's not really doing that. When she was an analyst, I really like talking to her. Lisa Sue, but you always end up talking about chips, and I'm completely out of my element with her. She's really cool. She runs AMD. A lot of people. Katie wants to know, your oldest kids are about to enter the workforce. If they wanted to work at a a company, which one would you tell them to apply to and which one would you tell them to avoid? Oh, wow. That's a good question. My 18-year-old is at University of Michigan, and he's a science engineering, so he's the most technical person of the two of them. I wouldn't recommend him going to any of them, actually, because they're not the future of what's really interesting in technology.

I think climate change tech, biotech, the stuff around health care is really astonishing. I think that's where he's headed For my other son, he just was in a movie, Ted. I think if... He wouldn't. He just wouldn't. He doesn't like social media. He took it all off his phone. He said it makes him feel bad. So he was good. He was like, I feel bad every time I use it. He does like YouTube. He watches stuff on YouTube. He does watch my Netflix, sorry. But he's going to be off soon. I swear to God. I just can't believe I said that. But we got an eye on him. Okay, good. I did kick my mother off.

Selective enforcement.

Selective enforcement. So I wouldn't recommend None of them. None of them. I wouldn't want them to work for any of them. Tj asks, It seems every few months there is a wave of panic about TikTok in Washington. Yes. Do you think the concern about TikTok is overblown, understated, or is it being given the appropriate level of concern? It is not overblown. I wrote a column a couple of years ago saying TikTok is the most exciting new product I've seen in a long time. It's entertainment. I think you think it's entertainment. I think you've talked about that. And I'm using it on a burner phone because Chinese Communist Party. This is a surveillance device, a surveillance or a propaganda device. And it's already bad enough when it's for capitalist reasons. But this is a country that has really... Everyone talked about that balloon that was over our country. By the way, there's many more balloons than you think, but I just talked to someone who's tracking all the... There's a lot of balloons flying over our country. It's crazy. We're so stupid. There's no balloons, our balloon is flying over China, but they're flying over us.

It's not the Chinese people. It's this government. This is a surveillance economy. And I very much like a lot of the people who work there. And I like the product. I think it's a great product. But if we can't have social media in their country operate without anything, they shouldn't be able to operate in this country. That's one. Two, I just think some of the people I've talked to who are really smart about this stuff, someone who's leaving Congress, Mike Gallagher is quite smart about it. Mark Warner, Bennett, all these people who've seen a lot of this stuff are very clear what's happening here. We cannot... This is a real problem. And it's not because kids love it. If they separated or somehow found a way to protect it, they just cannot assure us that the Chinese Communist Party isn't. And we can act all like, oh, they don't really want to beat us, but they really want to beat us. They really do. And we've got enough fascist problems in this country, authoritarian problems that we don't need to add on. And they've come in and done so much propaganda. And why wouldn't they?

That's what they do.

Kare, do you think, way predating TikTok, do you think Steve Jobs understood the addictive nature of this?

He did. He talked about it. He did talk about it a lot. I think he thought the business plans of things like Facebook and others were by nature addictive and deleterious. And he said it quite... He hated the business plans. He hated the advertising nature of it. He hated the idea of virality. I'm not sure. There are elements you can do on this phone to make it less addictive. They haven't done nearly enough stuff to make it less addictive. These are by nature casino machines. And so I urge you to read Tristan Harris. But there are certain things they could have done, put things files below and not let it happen. Uber is not something you go on and sit there and stare at it. It's just a utility, right? Same thing with Netflix. You watch, you're watching the next thing. But people do have some control of their entertainment. They don't sit there endlessly. But a TikTok and things like that, you can't stop. It's addictive by nature. So, yes, I would say we're not doing. I think we have to think really hard. I agree with exactly zero things that Donald Trump does, including his just existence, really.

But he was correct on the danger of it. Executionally, as always, as he does with everything, it was wrong, and it wasted a huge opportunity to have a real bipartisan discussion about this. He wrecked what should have been a really important discussion in this country. Linda asks, Regarding the gender pay gap in tech, Mark Benioff at Salesforce recognized this about 10 years ago and tried to address it. What about the rest of the industry? Actually, numbers are getting better, but it's not more of a pay gap, it's a people gap that there's not enough people. It's just many years ago, one of the best leads I've ever written on a piece, and I edit it myself, myself, so I thought it was great, and I wrote it, and I approved it, was a thing... I used to write pieces that it was just one piece, and it wasn't really a written piece. There were three in a row. The first one was called The Men and No Women of Facebook, and I just put their pictures on. The Men and No Women. Yeah, it was just no one in the management. This is priest Sheryl Sandberg, even, and she ended up apparently representing eight women, I guess.

But it was really amazing how the very few people they had... This is early, early Facebook. And then I wrote the Men and No Women of the Web 2.0 Boards. Because boards you can get. You can really find a diverse group of thinkers. And not the same thing. It was all the same thing. And the one board that drove me crazy was Twitter, which early early on, had 10 white men. My lead of the story was on the board of Twitter, which has three Peters and a Dick, which was so good. I should have left journalism. I was I'm out.

Mic drop on that one.

In the head of it, Dick Costello called me and he's like... I said, First of all, if that's your name, that's your name. I don't know what to tell you. And he's like, Very funny, very good penis joke. I go, Thank you. He was a comedian, right? He was. He was a stand-up guy. He goes, But it's not fair. And he said something to me, and he's actually one of the better guys, goes, But we have standards. Always the word with women and people of color. Standards. And I was like, Well, let me look at your stock price and your results bolts and everything else because it looks like you're a clown car, which Mark Zuckerberg called it, a clown car that ran into a goldmine. You guys are fucking idiots. Was that the standard, fucking idiots? And he was like, Well, when you say it like that, and I was like, Well, when I say it like that. So there were no standards. And what's incredible is that it persists this idea. So it's either straight white men are the best people on Earth, or maybe they're wrong, that thing. And So I think the line I use in the book is they think it's a meritocracy, and it's a mirror-autocracy.

They really do like... Hang on. And I'll leave you on this. There's a reason why tech is unsafe for people. The unsafe parts happen because the people who created it do not feel unsafe. And they're never unsafe. And so they don't understand it. And this is not some whiny liberal talking about it. They don't think about implications. They don't think about consequences. And this book is two years late from my publisher, but it's actually on time. With AGI, we need to think very hard about the implications of what's going to happen. And we have to set guardrails, and we have to stop listening to them tell us that if we set guardrails on them, innovation will die. It will not die. It will thrive if we set some guardrails. It's like kids. And this is a bunch of kids who've been given sugar for far too long, and they have diabetes, and they're fucking nuts. That's it. Thank you.

On with Kara Swischer is produced by Naima Raza, Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yocam, and Megan Bernie. Special thanks to Mary Mathis, Kate Gallagher, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, and of course, to all the folks at Live Talks LA. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you can binge listen to my book. If not, I will not speak to you after I get on the New Times bestseller list. In any case, search for On with Kara Swischer and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag. Com/pod. We'll be back on Monday with more. But hey, we also have a special bonus episode coming tomorrow, Friday.

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