Larissa Padden 00:06

Hello, and welcome to Cogcast, Cognito’s podcast where we talk to journalists and media pros on everything that’s happening in the world of media and PR. I’m Larissa Padden, your host, and a former journalist turned PR professional. For today’s episode, we are joined by Jon Swartz, reporter at TekStrong. Jon is a Silicon Valley expert.

 

He has seen the giants rise, and some fall, and he has interviewed almost all of them. Jon sat down with us to give us his insight on where the financial technology space is headed next, as we are now firmly in the next AI iteration of Silicon Valley. Please enjoy.

 

Larissa Padden 00:43

Hi, Jon. Thanks for being with us today.

 

Jon Swartz 00:46

Thank you for having me.

 

Larissa Padden 00:47

You’ve had a really long and impressive career. I don’t want to take on the responsibility of intro-ing you and your very illustrious past, which also includes multiple Pulitzer nominations.

 

So, I want to hand it over to you, and, have you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background as a reporter.

 

Jon Swartz 01:06

Well, as you said, and you are very correct, I’ve been doing this a long time, so eventually I’m going to get nominated for something, if I’ve done … 40 years. No, I’m just … I don’t really take myself too seriously. That’s probably good and bad. But, um, yeah, I’ve been doing this, uh, since the mid-eighties.

 

So I went to college in Georgia, and I started in the field … Actually, when I started in the field, it was like 1984, and I was kind of facing this, this industry that was, that was still thriving, like the newspaper industry. The, the broad mainstream industry was doing pretty well, but there weren’t that many jobs.

 

We had, had just had a recession. I was kind of desperate. I was a little scared, and I got a job at a small newspaper in Scotts Valley, California, which is near Santa Cruz.

 

And it was owned by a guy who was a millionaire who kind of used it as a mouthpiece for his development projects. So that was my first experience. I also … It had a lot of financial problems, so one of the first things I learned in journalism was, and I’ve, I’ve kind of experienced this everywhere I’ve gone.

 

There’s places … Every place I’ve worked that’s been in flux has either been acquired or it’s had a lot of layoffs, or a lot of restructuring. This place that I worked at, basically we would get our checks before this was deposit. We would race to the local bank and cash the check

 

… the money was depleted, because it would bounce. You know, the check would bounce if you waited too long. So that was my first experience. I ended, ended up working at a trade publication for a company based in Manhasset called CMP. I did that for a year, then I went away to England, and, or right before I went away to England, I worked at another trade magazine called MacWeek, which was around for a while.

 

It covered Apple, and it was … It had kind of a cult following. This was in the late eighties.

 

 

Then we moved to London. I won’t get into the reasons why we but they were political. So I moved to London, and worked, uh, at a trade magazine there, which was also a Macintosh magazine, which was just starting. But when I was there, I started writing for The Daily.

 

So I wrote for The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, and then The Times Supplement, The London Times Supplement. So fast-forward, I come back to the United States. I go back to MacWeek for a second time, the only job I ever had twice. So I go back to MacWeek, I come covering Apple.

 

I’m kind of getting deep into the coverage, and I get recruited by the San Francisco Chronicle, which at the time had like half a million subscribers. This was in 1996. So I worked there, worked there for a couple years, was recruited by USA Today. I said no, because I had just started The Chronicle and I thought it would be bad form to just leave immediately.

 

I worked there for about three years, three and a half years. Went to Forbes Magazine, worked there for year. I did not like it because, in my opinion, at the time, this is like the year 2000, 1999, thought Forbes completely misunderstood Silicon Valley. It pissed all over the industry. It was a New publication who just didn’t really quite get what was going on, or maybe resented it. Maybe that was more accurate. So, we did. Uh, Fortune at the same time was doing a bang-up job, and it totally got it. So, USA Today comes calling again, so I go there in 2000.

 

I stay nearly 20 years. As in, as I mentioned before, a lot of layoffs during this era. The newspaper industry’s going through all these all these kind of wrenching changes with Facebook and Google’s taking all, all of our advertising revenue, so … cutting back. I survived, I think, 12 to 13 rounds of layoffs.

 

I was, at the time, I, I was the Silicon Valley bureau chief, the San Francisco bureau chief for the paper. I was there for 17 and a half years, then I got laid off, and I immediately looked at a lot of options. I thought about going in-house. I turned down a job at NVIDIA.

 

I’m really smart, right? So Itturn it own. I ended up working at Dow Jones. Fast-forward six and a half years there, and then I joined Tech Strong, which is kind of like a new media company. It’s combination of journalism and, um, financial analysis by market researchers and, and analysts who are always on television and who are, experts in the field. So I, I’ve worked here for the last year and a half. So I’m going over this really fast, but along the way, I also wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, where I my stuff was published there, at least.

 

And, I worked at Barron’s. Some of my stuff was published in The Journal. So I’ve been … I did a lot of TV. There was a local show on NBC I did for like a decade as a, one of their semi-regular co-hosts. Did a lot of stuff with …

 

Oh, what is it called? Oh, different, different forms of media, like Fox, Fox Business, while I, was at Dow Jones. I did that quite a bit. Fox Live Now, which is the streaming service for Fox News, which is actually very moderate and very even-handed approach. I worked on Sirius for a while.

 

We did a monthly segment for about two years. That show just got canceled. So a lot of changes.

 

And, uh, you know, I’m glad I got in journalism near the end of the glory era, because I think as of, like, the early 2000s, things have kind of spiraled downward. That doesn’t mean journalism is dead, it just means the traditional legacy form of it is bad shape as, so obvious based on readership and based on circulation and what’s happened to a lot of these publications.

 

On the flip side, there are more media organizations than ever before, and I think these media organizations like Semafor, Puck, The Verge, what have you, are so specialized and so good at what they do, another one, that if you’re a reader and you really want to deep dive and really want to understand something well, go to those publications. Don’t go to the jack of all trades publications because they aren’t, probably most likely aren’t going to be as specialized. I mean, there will be exceptions like The New York Times and The Journal and, and Washington Post, but I, I don’t wanna pass judgment, but I just, I just don’t think it’s these, these publications with, are what they used to be across the board.

 

But I also think on the other hand, on the flip side that a lot of the young talent, and they’re, they are very talented, are working at these alternative. It’s kind of like, uh, we used to have the networks. Now we have all these cable outlets and streaming services, podcasts like yours, everything.

 

There’s so many outlets and they’re all very good at what they do, and there are more choices. I think that’s, in the end, that’s best for the consumer.

 

Larissa Padden 07:53

Yeah. It’s interesting. I feel so many reporters that I talk to, it doesn’t matter the generation that they’re in, their beginnings almost always start the same, which is, “I was kind of desperate for a job. I’m in this industry.”

 

We tend to view it from the current lens of what’s going on, you know, AI, how it’s changing, layoffs, but this is an industry that has always seen a lot of layoffs, a lot of change. you mentioned joining during the recession. I joined, uh, as a reporter in the 2009 recession.

 

And so it seems, you know, that it’s the same story in different eras, and you’ve coupled that with another industry that has gone through so much change, and that’s the tech industry, and you mentioned Silicon Valley.

 

Yeah.

 

I wanted to, you know –

 

Jon Swartz 08:36

I, grew up in it. Yeah. I mean, I, that’s something I left out. I should’ve told you that. So I grew up in San Jose, California. My dad was an engineer.

 

He was a hardware engineer who worked for IBM. He worked in the, uh, Cottle Road labs, which are really famous. It’s in south San Jose. They have a very, very high security, top secretive types of labs. They wouldn’t even let me in when I was a kid, right? My dad had access. He worked there for about 20 years, but what he did, I was imbued with a lot of what he, he did as a, as part of his job. He was a, he worked on the disc drive projects there. He’s a hardware engineer, and he traveled all over the world. He met a lot of famous people that I ended up along the way. But what he did after 20 years is he decided, “I don’t, I’m not going to be part of this IBM womb-to-tomb culture.”

 

“I’m going to go and, um, start a company. I’m going to, first I’m going to work with Al Shugart at Shugart Associates.” Al Shugart started Seagate.

 

“And then I’m going to go start my own companies.” And he started a series of them in the ’80s, at least three that I know of, and he did very well. He, he, he started one called Maxtor, which was sold to Seagate in a billion dollar deal, multi-billion dollar deal, and he, uh, eventually retired at a young-ish age.

 

He was in his mid-50s probably, which at the time to me seemed old, but now it seems young. So I was exposed to this, and I kind of lived among it, so it just, it it just was part of what I was used to, and I’d… And we can talk about this later if you want, but I saw this, this industry and this culture has progressed from the era of great discovery and achievement, and I’m thinking back to the Fairchild uh, uh, uh, Fairchild um, yeah, that, that, that industry.

 

I’m thinking about the origins of Intel, I’m thinking about what Apple did with the initial Steve Jobs era, then the second coming return.

 

Right.

 

I’m thinking about Larry Ellison. So all these people I used to interview all the time, and I, and I, I always was, like, felt so lucky to be able to talk to people like Jobs and Ellison and Gates. You could just walk up to them and talk to them.

 

Michael Dell was part of that for a while. There were all sorts of other companies, and I, now I look at it, the industry got so big, so powerful, so political, so rich that there’s so much more at stake now, and I also think they’ve become safer, and I think they’ve become so cautious and conservative in their approaches because they’ve got so much at stake now, right?

 

They’re trillion dollar companies. Like Jeff Bezos, you could talk to him, right? It was, it it wasn’t that difficult to, to meet with these people or have access to them. Uh, I, I mean, working at USA Today obviously helped a lot

 

Larissa Padden 11:25

Right.

 

Jon Swartz 11:26

… that was on their radar. But now I look at these companies and they’re so controlled and I, they think … so political, and I’m, I’m just like, this is kind of a corrosive culture of ultimately greed. I think social media had a lot to do with it. And I do blame Zuckerberg and people like, uh, Musk.

 

Zuckerberg, in a sense, is… I, think he’s kind of a really dark figure in this industry. I, I think it’s almost kind of like, it’s like a consciousness. I mean, it’s just, it, it’s utter grab for power, and I think the social network captured that well. I think it’s only gotten worse in his case.

 

Larissa Padden 12:01

Mm-hmm.

 

Jon Swartz 12:01

And even people that I admired before, like Marc Benioff, who I knew when he first started. Now, he’s… I mean, he’s… now, he’s backtracking from comments about his approval of the National Guard coming in to, quote-unquote, “clean up” San Francisco during, ironically, his own conference. You know, I just…

 

I find this so disappointing, but I’m not entirely surprised. It was… Marc Andreessen said something to me years ago, and he was very transparent about it, and I give him a lot of credit for saying that. He said, “You know what? It’s like what they say in The Godfather.

 

It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.”

 

Larissa Padden 12:36

Hmm. You’re the perfect person to ask this question, I think, too, because you grew up and saw so much change in this industry, as you just described. You know, we’re living in this AI hype right now, and I know you’ve seen other hypes before, but I just kind of wanted to get your current view of the time that we’re in, and people that compare this to the dot-com bubble, or people that compare it to we’re living in the future, and just kind of level set with what you’re seeing.

 

Jon Swartz 13:00

Okay. So uniformly, anyone I’ve ever talked to who’s been in this industry for even a short period of time or an extremely long, extended period of time agrees on this one point. They agree on two points, for the most part.

 

They think that what’s going on with AI now is a culmination of every era before except it’s bigger than all those previous eras combined. So you think about the PC era, the, uh, mobile era with the internet that kind of were twinned together. You think about the cloud era. If you combined everything, the mainframe era before all of it, if you combined all those eras together, AI is bigger than all of them combines.

 

It has more… it gives… it’ll change everything, for good and bad. But I also think it inevitably will be headed toward a bubble, because I’ve been through the bubble, and we knew it was coming with the internet, with the dot… we called it the dot-bomb era.

 

You knew the time bomb was going to go off. And I think it’s, it’s going to happen in AI. I think the vast majority of people believe in that, and there are, there are inklings that, of it happening. It’s just a question of when. There will be false warnings.

 

I went through this before.

 

I can’t tell you how many times I thought it was going to happen with the dot-com era and got it wrong, until it finally happened and I missed it. So that was, um, yeah, 2001. It was like, “Jesus,” you know? “Nice, nice, nice going.” I think it’s going to happen with AI, but I also think that there are, uh, bigger and stronger companies now than ever.

 

So for instance, here’s something. I haven’t heard much about this, but I just heard about this a couple of days ago. I was at the Oracle AI World conference. And by the way, do you notice at every conference now, every

 

Yeah.

 

… AI company now, and they’ve changed the name of their conference to include AI? But it used to be, okay, there’s FAANG, Facebook, Apple. I can’t remember, uh, let’s see, Google, and it was Netflix, I guess, technically. Then it was The Magnificent Seven.

 

Now I’m hearing something that’s called MANGO, which is Microsoft, Anthropic, NVIDIA Google still, and OpenAI. So Apple’s not part of that mix anymore. Apple’s kind of is an interesting story in and of itself. There’s gonna be a lot of changes going on at Apple.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I would not be surprised if Tim Cook is gone in a couple of months. He’s going to retire or he’s going to be encouraged to

 

Mm-hmm.

 

… company is kind of far behind. I think Salesforce is scrambling to keep up. I think ServiceNow has got its issues. Oracle’s pivoted quite well, but yeah, no, it’s the same major players, but they just change. It’s like musical chairs. They kind of change in who’s in the best position.

 

But that always happened in tech.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

This, this era, though, I think we’re going to Larry Ellison said this in a keynote speech in Las Vegas a couple of days ago. We’re going to live longer, we’re going to have better healthcare because of AI, we’ll live in better homes, we’ll have much more productive jobs, which I totally do agree with, if you don’t get replaced by AI.

 

There are going to be bad sides in terms of security exposure, in terms of personal data, perhaps. There will be major breaches that will be embarrassing and cataclysmic for some

 

Mm-hmm.

 

… and some of their customers. But I mean, that’s what happened throughout this whole history of, of the Valley. Companies adapt or they die. And new ones will spring up, not just OpenAI and Anthropic. There’ll be others, like Perplexity, of course. Might, it might become part of another company.

 

For, for all we know, could be part of Apple in the next year or so. But it, it’s, it’s exciting, though. I mean, I, I have to say, this is the most engaged I’ve felt about technology in quite some time, and I think that extrapolates to the general public, which cares more about technology and knows more about AI than almost any previous technology before it, because they know it’s going to be everywhere.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

It’s going to touch their lives in every manner, and I think people are… they’ve been exposed to it through science fiction movies, novels, television, what have you, and they’re intrigued by it. They’re also scared of it. But once, I think, they start using it like I have, I think they’re going to really appreciate it and find it fascinating.

 

It’s just, you know, like any type of technology, people are resistant to change until they embrace it, then they become the greatest champions of the change.

 

Larissa Padden 17:17

Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about being a reporter in this space, because it is such a broad space and it’s such a crowded conversation. You know, as, as you said, everyone’s an AI company now. So when everyone wants to talk AI, what gets your attention? What breaks through in a story for you?

 

Jon Swartz 17:35

Well, I was always interested…… full disclosure, I’m working on this book about working with robots. So the idea is my coworker is a robot, but I think of that as agentic AI or I think it’s physical AI, which is robotics.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So what I, I find that interesting because I always was intrigued by going back to the movie 2001, even before that, the idea of the interaction of the robots or the machine and the human. So what I wanna do is I want to figure, find out more about real-life examples.

 

Mm.

 

My frustration so far is that those examples haven’t percolated as quickly as I expected or I had hoped.

 

Hm.

 

So I’m working with some companies like Amazon, ServiceNow, and what have you, Oracle, to get examples, real-life examples, because what I want to do is I want to look at vertical markets. Like, I want to see how the medical industry is going to improve because there are a disparity or there are a shortage of doctors, optometrists, dentists, and this is going to hopefully avoid somewhat.

 

I’m also interested in manufacturing, but I’m, also incredibly interested in

 

Mm-hmm.

 

… because Jon Deere evidently has become one of the pioneers in terms of robotics use and in terms of not just creating crops, but collecting them and distributing them. All these industries going to be changed fundamentally. At this point right now, it’s only pretty much consigned to human resources or customer service, but I, this, this intrigues me because I, I look around me and I, I, like you, it’s like everything we do now is, is touched by this.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

mean, it’s going to reach the point where it’s going to be more convenient and easier to plan trips. Like, we’ll just talk to Claude or Gemini and say, “Look, I want to go here,” and they will not only give you options, but they will be empowered to make the purchase on your behalf after they get approval from you.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

You know, that’s not far away. It’s happening with some of these reasoning models where they’re going to give you three options rather than a human, and they’re going to look at the best possible deals for you through some airlines or hotels, and they’re going to plan your trip for you. I’ve actually seen advertisements to that effect on television lately about this concept.

 

And so I think it’ll be easier to travel. I think it’ll be easier to do financial deals. I think it’ll be easier to create content, you know, if you learn how to work with the model and not have it run your life and you kind of maintain some sort of strict complicit control.

 

I’m becoming more optimistic about this. Before I was somewhat skeptical and I still am. I mean, there was news that Amazon’s going to lay off 15% of their HR employees, which I think is going to happen to a lot of companies, by the way. Salesforce did the same thing. They got rid of 4,000 out of their 9,000 customer service reps, and they semi-gloated about it, which I’m not how smart that is.

 

NVIDIA does the same thing. NVIDIA’s going to do the same thing. They’re going to create these armies of agents, and I think the agents will be good. I think they’ll be useful. I think they’ll be highly specialized. So this does, this does excite me and it makes me, it motivates me.

 

I mean, I just, um, I don’t know. I think, uh, for a long time in the tech industry, there was no Hoover Dam projects. Everything was like incremental apps to make your life a little bit more convenient for you, and I always felt that was just kind of silly and it, it was, just didn’t, it lacked the scope or the sweep of what had been done before or now, but I think we’re kind of in that era where major industries will be changed fundamentally, and I think for the most part, for the good.

 

There’s going to be some carnage and there’s going to be some casualties, so to speak. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. A lot of companies are going to go out of business. A lot of them are going to have to pivot or do a hard turn to, to survive, but I actually think in the end, it, it’ll be much more productive and, um, interesting culture and life we live.

 

Larissa Padden 21:44

So it’s, it’s interesting because I get the same… at the heart of that, I get the same message from reporters that cover this space, which is the last two years, so much of the conversation has been about what’s possible with AI in tech, and now they want to get into what are companies actually doing?

 

What results are they seeing for their investment? So it’s moving on from these theoretical conversations.

 

Jon Swartz 22:08

Yeah, so when I was at Dow Jones, that was one of the frustrations that during the quarterly results, we couldn’t get any of the companies to divulge how much revenue they were gleaning from AI because they probably weren’t. If they were, they’d be, they’d be hitting us over the head with it.

 

But we, they were telling us how much they were spending in terms of capital expenses, so I was like, “We’re, we’re looking at like $600 billion in construction,” just this year, uh, data centers or, uh, that’s like the Singapore GDP. Like, just, just, just building the infrastructure, that’s the big, that’s the big test right now and it’s just getting it at the root level and the foundational level so that it works in, in not too risky an environment.

 

For the most part, these systems are being integrated or adopted, and this is coming from the board and C-level, level down, … they’re really pushing this, and they want results, you know, 30% productivity, efficiency, whatever metric you wanna use. They want the results now, and I think what’s happening is a lot of the vendors are scrambling to come up with some sort of idea or some way to rebrand or remarket their products to fit the AI world and the AI workflow, and I think we’ve kind of reached the point now where they’ve, we’ve gone through that phase.

 

Now, what we need to do is we need to see some tangible results because reporters are only willing, up to a certain point, to listen to all the hype, and then they’re eventually going to wanna see some sort of results or some sort of that illustrate all the promises that were made. And I think, like one of the examples, and it, it works both ways, OpenAI and Anthropic have a lot of interesting stories to tell, or examples. And on the flip side, you’ll have a company like Apple which, uh, which announces Apple Intelligence, which has not really amounted to much.

 

You know, Siri’s still as bad as it ever was, and, and we’re still waiting for them to kind of move, but but they, they have a, they’re in a advantageous position because they have all, uh, pile of money and they have always been a patient company in terms of going into markets, so they can, they have a little bit more leeway, or landing, landing zone.

 

But I think others don’t have that luxury, and that’s why you see a certain amount of panic from Salesforce, like they’re trying way too hard to, to push this marketing idea that they’re this AI company overnight, which is not really true, and I think you’re seeing it from others.

 

I think IBM’s actually, and Oracle and Google have done a pretty good job of making a transition, but then again, IBM has been through decades of these types of changes, so this is nothing new to them. So it’s all, you know, it’s just they’re all at different phases, but, I mean, again, it’s like, well, a colleague of mine said, after he heard these announcements from Oracle and Salesforce, he, he reminded me that old Wendy’s ad where he said, “Where’s the beef?” It’s like, you know, we, we need to see, we need to see something tangible.

 

Larissa Padden 25:07

Right. So I have a couple tactical questions for you when we talk about, you know, building these stories. First, I wanted to know, because, you know, everyone works a little differently and you’ve been doing this for a long time with a, um, sure very, uh, deep relationships with sources, but how do you find your stories, and do you accept pitches, and if so how do you like to be pitched to?

 

Jon Swartz 25:30

So one of the things, uh, companies that are really smart build relationships with and they know what you’re interested in, so they will pitch you things, and I, I do have a great deal of respect for the people who cultivate relationships. They know what I’m interested in.

 

And they will give me good ideas. There are some things I, I, they’re unavoidable that you have to cover, that are, that’s breaking news or some sort of, some sort of trend that you see in front of you that you think is obvious. Meeting people, I mean, a lot of the stuff I told you, uh, I kind of picked up in the last day or so when I was at this Oracle conference. I ended up sitting at lunch with a couple of guys who’ve used to work within the industry, and then they became analysts, and they were explaining to me kind of the dynamics of the market and where they thought it was headed.

 

So it’s like, it’s through meeting people. I just like to meet people and brainstorm with them. It also helps if you work with people who are really good at covering beats ’cause they will throw ideas at you all day.

 

Right.

 

Um, I work with a guy now who is, who’s been in tech, uh, tech journalism for a really long time, he really understands it well, and, and Mike will just throw all sorts of ideas at me.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

That doesn’t mean I have to do all of them, but they’re suggestions and some of them are, are obvious. At every newspaper I worked, I usually had a business editor who was pretty engaged in tech and really wanted to learn more about it, but they would ask me questions from somebody kind of on the outside looking in, which I find more interesting than the people on the inside telling you what you should write about.

 

It’s always more interesting to me to have someone who isn’t fully versed in an industry say, “Well, explain this to me. I don’t understand this.” And I think they represent the reader, you know, the, the smart reader. So I’ve never been, I’ve never been lacking for story ideas or themes.

 

My big, I guess, quandary is trying to organize it. So I, I, the, the one thing that I will say that I am good at is I’m good at multitasking. So I will be working on, like seven or eight stories at the same time, maybe even more, and I’ll create a number of files.

 

Some will have a couple paragraphs, some will have couple hundred words, and as things develop within those particular stories, I’ll I’ll prep them and get them ready, and if something happens, then that story is out, and it looks like, uh, it looks like I did it in one day but actually haven’t.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I’ve been, I’ve been and you know who taught me part of this, ironically, is, um, when I was at Forbes, this company, this is like in 1999, this company called Google kept pitching and they wanted this guy Sergei to come in and talk to me, and I was like, I reluctantly said, “Okay, all right.

 

I know I heard some good things about it, so I of course.” And when I was talking to him, the Forbes bureau overlooked the San Francisco airport, so the, the bureau was in Burlingame, it’s near the airport, and he and I were in this conference room, this big conference room with a bunch of windows, and he kept looking outside the windows and he was watching the planes land, and I said to him, why are you so fascinated by that?” He says, “Well, you know, the planes, this teaches you something.

 

It’s, you know, if you work on something, you work on projects, you work on projects of, of various lengths. There are some that you need to land within a day, some within a week, some within a month, and I’m watching how they’re all lined up, and it’s always good to work on multiple things with multiple timelines because you never know how they might intersect or when they might land.” And I, I, I kind of did that before but he really cemented in my, in my mind……

 

that approach, and I think it has worked. It really did work for me, um, at a newspaper. Because a

 

Mm-hmm.

 

… newspaper is like, you have to feed the beast constantly.

 

Right.

 

There, you know, once you’re finished with the story, it’s like the, the next question they say, “What do you got next? What’s next?”

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And you can’t rest on your laurels. Um, there, there is no gratification now. Before you could get a scoop and it would last maybe a day.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Now, it lasts maybe five seconds if that.

 

Right.

 

It’s like it’s all instantaneous. So again, it’s, it’s all about, it’s all about being curious, I guess, and about being willing to ask questions that you might, you might think are na√Øve or dumb. Whenever I whenever I say to somebody, “I’m gonna ask you a dumb question,” they never, they never pass judgment.

 

They always “There are no dumb questions. I’m glad you’re asking.” I was like, “You know what? I can’t I don’t understand this.”

 

Mm-hmm.

 

“Explain to me.” And they’d rather hear that than you nod your head and say, “Yeah, I totally get it,” and you don’t.

 

Larissa Padden 30:07

Right. Yeah, and that’s one thing I always tell people on, when I, now on this side. Reporters, they want to be correct in what they’re reporting. There’s no…

 

Jon Swartz 30:17

That’s the greatest fear

 

Larissa Padden 30:19

Missing,

 

Jon Swartz 30:18

I think AI has erased many of those fears. Like I used to, I used to like almost, oh God, this is a bad habit I had, but I would write a story and then I would, I’d be driving home and I’d say, “Oh shit, I I forgot about this thing I should’ve put in.” Like and so I would call the copy desk and drive them crazy with additions, and then with, with, WordPress, you can go in and you can constantly update.

 

But again, the fear is missing something or getting something wrong, so you, it’s not, it’s not terrible to say to AI, “Look, can you cite a couple of examples of, of something that I’m looking for?” Because I invariably will mention something that you forgot about or overlooked or, um, and it, just kind of eases, it, it’s, you can spend more time on the actually thinking rather than the rote mechanisms of writing a story, which can be very time-consuming, which doesn’t leave you much time to think originally or you know, think outside the box.

 

You, you’re just so you’re so focused on doing that format in a certain amount of time. Now it frees you up at least to, to be a little bit more creative or to go in and, and move things about in a story or, or think about somebody else you want to add to the story.

 

I think it’s, it’s like when, when the when the internet came along and, and Google search, I mean, that, that helped immeasurably. I think now we have like supercharged search in terms of looking things up, finding things instantaneously. I think it’s a godsend in many ways.

 

Larissa Padden 31:49

Yeah. Well, Jon, this has been very fascinating and I’m sure you and I could talk shop and industry for much, much longer, uh, but you’ve been very generous with your time.

 

I wanted to wrap up and ask you a question. In a recent article, you wrote, “Working side by side with robots carries with them as many promises of utopia as well as dystopian consequences.” So as someone that has had to ponder this question, right now looking at where we’re at, which direction do you think we’re leaning to at the moment, utopia or dystopia?

 

Jon Swartz 32:25

Overwhelmingly if I had to give a percentage, I would say overwhelmingly like 67%, 70% utopia, but we just don’t know what can go awry.

 

Right? It’s going to happen. It’s just we just don’t know quite yet. It was like going back to the HAL 9000 in 2001. Everything was hunky-dory until it wasn’t.

 

Larissa Padden 32:49

Right.

 

Jon Swartz 32:49

And the smarter these robots or these chatbots, whatever you wanna call them, reasoning models become, the more humanlike they are, and you know, humans are not perfect and neither are chatbots. And I think eventually there will be hiccups. Some will be minor or silly, but some could be quite devastating to a business model or to a person’s reputation or, um, personal wellbeing.

 

Larissa Padden 33:16

Right. It all always boils down to what goes up must come down.

 

Jon Swartz 33:22

Yeah. And also I think we, we probably need some sort of regulation or some sort of oversight because in this country it’s pretty right, right now it’s the Wild West. It’s a free-for-all.

 

The consequences aren’t really been thought through thoroughly. I think in Europe they’re much smarter about this. And in certain states like California and New York at least we have some sort of, uh, laws in place to protect ourselves. AI, California’s just signed, our Governor Newsom here has just signed a number of bills into law that take some of these consequences into account.

 

So, you know, it’s like, you know, the auto industry was the same way until we have a Ralph Nader-type figure come along, you know, there’s going to, there are going to be some accidents.

 

It’s just you know, how severe they are.

 

Larissa Padden 34:09

All right. Well, Jon, thank you so much for joining us and I hope that you’ll come back and when you write your book –

 

Jon Swartz 34:15

Yeah, thanks for talking to me.

 

Larissa Padden 34:15

– you’ll come back and talk to us about it. Great.

 

Jon Swartz 34:15

Oh, yeah. Cool. I look forward to it. Thanks so much for having me.

 

Larissa Padden 34:19

Great.