Journalist Kara Swisher explains the increasingly challenged relationship between the media and big tech and the critical need for journalism to adapt in the age of AI.
Transcript:
SARA SILVERSTEIN: I want to get right in and start with your book, Burn Book. And a lot of it you talk about a lot of the predictions you made in tech that have been right over and over again. Which of those are you most proud of that was most shocking to the industry that you were right about?
KARA SWISHER: A lot of them I don’t remember because we had a lot of scoops and things like that. But I think the one thing is the very base fact that everything that can be digitized would be digitized. I think it’s kind of an obvious thing. But 25 years ago, it was not, right, the idea that every industry would be changed by what was happening in tech.
But I think more recently when I wrote that column in the New York Times sort of predicting the insurrection and how it was not sort of I was, I talked about the lies Donald Trump would tell. It would shoot up and down the ecosystem, the digital ecosystem of the right, and then he’d ask them to do something to stop the election. And when I did it, I got a lot of pushback from social media sites because I said, I called them handmaidens to sedition eventually. And I think I felt good about being right about that. Though, I wish I was wrong, I guess.
KARA SWISHER: You know at first, when eBay, when I when they visited me and I went to look at what they were doing, I thought it was a stupid idea. I just was like, I don’t get this. I don’t get it at all. And I think I was wrong about that. And now, look, eBay is not doing as well, but the idea was a great one, the idea of marketplaces. And for some reason in that case, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. So I was really wrong about that, though, I certainly quickly came around.
I was not a supporter of Amazon, but I thought they would do a lot better than most of the press thought at the time when they called them amazon.bom. I thought Jeff Bezos was a great entrepreneur. And directionally, it was correct. Others, you know, Webvan, so many others failed. But I did believe in commerce after that. But marketplace was something I missed, I think.
Valuations, I didn’t think when Facebook got a $15 billion valuation after the Microsoft investment– I forget what year that was. Maybe 2008 or 2009, I don’t remember. I was gobsmacked and I thought it was stupid. And I said so, and I was wrong. Because what they did is they grew into it. They sort of faked it till they made it kind of thing. And I just didn’t think that the market would sustain these crazy valuations. But I should have known because they did it before.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: And a lot of that it seems like narrative economics is you know– since I know Shiller wrote a book about it. But how much do you think storytelling is driving the value of tech assets right now?
KARA SWISHER: I think it’s two things. I think– you know, look, there’s lots of good stories for businesses and they don’t seem to get the kind of lift that others do. There’s a mania around some of it, like you saw with the gamestop thing or anything else that has nothing is divorced from value obviously. I think tech gets a pass where they divorce value with– some tech, not all of it because some of it’s really big. But it gets divorced from value.
And so sometimes the story is a good one and it sells it more than it should. Other times, it is a significant business. I think a lot of these in a bad case the currency, the cryptocurrency stocks got hit more because the story was not quite filling in the case of AI. We’ll see. The valuations are very high in the private markets. We’ll see if they have actual businesses and whether that matters.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: And you did predict that the internet was going to ground media as we knew it into dust.
KARA SWISHER: Yes, I did. That was a good one.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: That was a good one. And we work in the media space, so you were really right about that.
KARA SWISHER: It’s still doing it. Let me just say, it’s not over. But go ahead.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: Well, no, yeah. I was going to say, we need to shift again. What are we still doing wrong, and then we could get to what’s happening next with AI? But what are we still doing wrong?
KARA SWISHER: I think it’s too late. The media doesn’t have technological chops that they need to do to beat these companies. At the time they were coming in, a lot of tech media companies– first of all, they thought they’d go away because these valuations wouldn’t be sustained. Well, they were. So they had the money to do it, right? They have the money and they have the means to do it. And anyone who has the money and the means tends to win in many markets.
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