On with Kara Swisher

Her new book, Burn Book, is an unflinching, sometimes scathing examination of the tech industry and the founders who built it.

She doesn't shy away from confronting the consequences of tech titans race to scale.

For people who don't know, David was a great boss, but he really did, as I attribute in my book, Burn Book, to sending me covering the internet.

I always subtitle a tech love story.

And the beauty of this book is you gave the answer in the book.

First make it a conversation.

Second, do not be afraid to ask the question everyone is thinking.

Third, conduct the discussion as if you were never going to interview this person again.

So I'm going to keep your advice in mind and really being the back of my head the whole time.

That's the first line of my book.

As it turns out, it was capitalism after all.

It says a love story.

This is Byrne book. At the top, it's bigger.

It was so funny. Wait, I'm off-thing. What was your question? Why do I love it? Oh, OK.

If you haven't heard already, my latest book, aptly titled Burn Book, a tech love story, came out earlier this week.

So you couldn't say, like, what got to me is I kept seeing all this ridiculousness in terms of valuations and everything else. It was way ahead of its're gonna run out of money. And it was too early. It wasn't directionally wrong. It was executionally wrong at the moment. And so I wanted to say that, and the editor actually said to me, can you get someone to say what you said? And I said, no, why would I do that?

Well, we need to put it to be sure. Some people think Webvan is great.

And I was like, to be sure, they're stupid if they say that.

And this was me as an employee. It was really not good.

She worked on my book with me.

I didn't know she worked on Burn Book?

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

She saved it because I wasn't turning it in and she kicked my ass until I got it in.

She worked on my book with me.

I didn't know she worked on Burn Book?

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

She saved it because I wasn't turning it in and she kicked my ass until I got it in.

the book is coming out it's called Burn Book the cover art came out yes yes it's a picture of me with fire sunglasses and the aviators yeah

They're making the TV show of my book, Burn Book. Wow. And they said, what do you need for this? The production company. And I said, all I want is a believable lesbian playing me. That's all I have to do. Just a believable lesbian.

I thought that in Hillbilly Elegy, and his statements around the time, he was very strong in his anti-Trump views. Very.

But he clearly moved over time. And he can explain that to voters. I'm not going to try to explain it to voters. He can try to explain it. But obviously, I agree more with the 2016 version of J.D. Vance than I do the 2024 version of J.D. Vance.

J.D. Vance clearly has a daddy problem from his book, if you read it, and you can buy it here, by the way, I'm sure.

our current American struggle along these lines, it turns out has a Prequel.

it's a bestseller Prequel An American Fight Against Fascism.

I just finished reading...Prequel by Ray Charmedowe about fascism in the 20s and 30s in America...the similarities are off the charts.

There's some rather stunning parallels between your brilliant new book Prequel and Takeover.

I left academia 30 years ago and I've never looked back. I loved it when I was there but no, no, no. Tim is great.

Hitler was very much viewed as a buffoon. He was absolutely a political outsider but he was incredibly determined and his calculation on this with his 37% and there is a bit of method to this madness.

I would not blame Trump and I don't blame Hitler. I basically using that equation, the quote about Weimar Germany died twice. I actually would fault in a democratic system. I fault the public at large.

I would say, and I cut it off the day Hitler was appointed chancellor, we know everything that happened there. I would say, you don't even have to read my book to see what happens, but if you read the book, you would be going, oh my God, there were so many alternatives that the Germans could have taken.

I think for the voter, I'd say take Trump at his word and is this a country that you wanna live in? Is this what you want your country to become? Our 250th anniversary is in 2026. What kind of country do you wanna be living in in 2026? Just get out there and vote.

Anne Lamott, whose first big hit was a confessional memoir OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS about the trials and tribulations of being a single mother.

And this week we have one from a guest we had on recently who wrote a book called OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS about having a baby as a single parent. It's Anne Lamott.

Hi, Alana. This is Anne Lamott and I love, love, love your work.

I want to ask you a question about being a single mother and preface it by saying I'm someone who loves to be alone and I loved my baby Sam literally more than life itself.

But there were periods of time, usually after he had gone to sleep when I would relish the quiet and the peace.

In her first bestselling memoir in the 1990s called OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS, which also happens to be one of my favorite books, Lamott journaled about her first year as a single mom, but she's probably most famous for her 1994 memoir slash writing manual, Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, also important to me.

He plays the lead role in Monk in American fiction.

American fiction is based on Percival Everett's Erasure.

It felt like somebody had written a novel specifically for me. Like somebody sat down and said, I'm writing a gift for Cord Jefferson.

It was very, very early into the read. I don't know if you've ever had this feeling but it felt like somebody had written a novel specifically for me.

And so I was just picking up a book to read for fun over the holidays. So you got it yourself at the bookstore? Just to-

No one had recommended it. No, no. I was reading a book review actually for a different book called Interior Chinatown. And that book review said that it referenced Erasure as having a similar style of satire.

And so I had never heard of Erasure and I went and read a synopsis and it sounded intriguing. And so I bought it and with no auspices just read it because I was looking for a new thing to read over the holidays and instantly fell in love.

The subtitle of the book Oath and Honor is A Memoir and a Warning.

Orange Jesus was one of my favorites

Ted Cruz is an idiot and a suck up. You know, Mike Johnson is a suck up.

He's the one that would upend democracy.

I supported his policies. I think over 90% of the time. Yeah, 93.

So the book I imagine will scoop some of Liz Cheney's memoir, Oath and Honor that's coming out, which is a different title. It's set to come out later this year.

My husband flipped through it and he gave me his review and he said, you use a lot of profanity.

Walter Isaacson describes him as having a quote demon mode.

Sad and smart son, solely Morrison to mentally abusive father, he abhors except with rockets, cars and more money. Often writes sometimes wrong, petty jerk always might be crazy in a good way, but also a bad way.

In the beginning, I talked to his mother, May Musk. And she says, here's the issue for your book. The danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.

One of the things every biographer knows is it's all about the parents.

demon mode causes a lot of chaos, but it also gets a lot of shit done.

sometimes they're crazy ones but then you say crazy enough to change the world.

I was inspired by reading Bill Gates' book and, um, from what I understood, the imperative is that we reduce our greenhouse gases dramatically by 2050 or so, or else we go over this, this, this tipping point.

The last interview we did was about climate change which is a book that he wrote and it's actually coming true today. A lot of the stuff he was talking about.

Hi, I'm Ben Mesric, I'm the author of the Anti-Social Network, the book that was made into the movie Dumb Money.

Dumb Money, which was a movie that came out about the meme stock thing around GameStop and others.

Franklin is a staff writer for The Atlantic and author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future.

Franklin, before President Biden announced that he wouldn't run, you had written that he had stepped down in order to quote, avoid the long term indignity of being remembered as one of history's great fools. Were you concerned?

Totally. It was like it was a he has a psychological set of armor that he built up over many years in order to deal with humiliation and with episodes where he falls flat on his face and over the course of his career, he'd fallen flat on his face many, many times. And the story he told himself was that he always rebounded, that he had the ability to grit his way through.

I think that there's a reason why everyone's using the word consequential and not saying best, which is subjective in a different way. I think that there's no two ways about it. It's always going to be marked in the story of who he is, that he is a president who stepped away after one term.

I mean, I think we have to say that everything will be seen through the lens of this election. So if the bungled transition to Kamala Harris and the bungled process of Sinatra and culminates in a Trump presidency, that is the lens through which he is judged full stop.

Sarah Lewis and I are talking about her stunning new book, The Unseen Truths,

Breaking Twitter is populated by outsized personalities with polarizing ideologies. I believe it is one of the most important and thrilling stories I've ever told. The incredibly public, sometimes darkly comic battle between one of the most influential men of our time and the platform that sits at the center of our shared conversation.

scenes and comments from Elon's perspective are triangulated from various inside sources and are based on speculation as well as deep reporting.

We speak with Kyla Scanlon, educator and author of In This Economy.

It describes how smartphones and social media have led to a mental health crisis among teens especially among teenage girls.

In the book, I acknowledge gender dysphoria is real.

This is exactly what happened to her.

So now the debate has shifted from, oh, it's all correlational to okay, fine. You've got experiments, but they're not very good experiments.

The story for girls in social media was so clear in the data from the time I started working on this.

And I said, you know, parents don't, you know, don't freak out about this, you know, but because we really didn't know it's just correlational, mostly correlational then.

One of the things your dad has quoted in a biography is by Walter Isaacson was that your interest in biotech was a silver lining of his getting sick. What did you think when you read that? You don't have to comment on the book, but in general, do you think that was the case to get you here?

It is a silver lining. I don't think that's a bad way to put it at all. Again, most people who work in cancer do it for very personal reasons.

Bill's new book titled What This Comedian Said Will Shock You consolidates these editorials from the past 20 years.

This book is a collection of all the editorials I've done on the end of the show for the last 20 years.

So basically, it took me 20 years to write this book.

And so people have told me, it's just, and when I read it over, it's like, it is. It's funny on every page. I mean, LOL.

I mean, LOL. When I was reading them over, they're all very funny.

There's a really interesting book that I read a couple years back Power and Progress and what it's an interesting study where I think we've always been adapted. I'm a pro technologist. Me too. I you know started my career out in the Bay Area and but we always assume that just technology for technology's sake will be beneficial to society.

That's what we've been fed and that's what we have been taught and their study really looks at technology over a thousand years and whether it is innately beneficial to society or whether society needs to put some level of rules around it in order to make it net beneficial and you know you go back to industrial revolution and basically you know the first hundred years of the industrial revolution were not beneficial to society as a whole they've been a benefited a small number of individuals but largely gave society nothing more than you know disease and you know it took things like regulations on limiting work weight, regulations on child labor. It took certain organizations like labor unions etc to ultimately get that you know technology leap forward to be something that was broadly beneficial to society and I think that is something that we need to think a little bit more about is not how do we stop AI, not how do we I'm not trying to put this technology in a box and kill it.

Your second book, The Righteous Mind, shows our morality is usually shaped by our emotions, not by rational inquiry.