Opinion | Is Mark Zuckerberg a Man Without Principles?

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I’m Kara Swisher, and you’re listening to “Sway.” Facebook has been taking a spectacular beating lately — deservedly.

It’s been a bad month for Mark and his minions. But Facebook has had rough periods before. Nobody knows that better than me. Well, nobody except for maybe my dear friend and mentor, Walt Mossberg. Walt is the reporter who laid the framework for personal tech journalism in the 1990s. He taught me how to drop a truth bomb.

And by 2010, we were grilling Mark Zuckerberg so hard in an interview that he started to sweat. And by the way, he sweat a lot. So I couldn’t think of anyone better than Walt to drag out of retirement to help contextualize Facebook’s disastrous month and to discuss where Facebook and, really, all of tech goes from here.

Walt Mossberg, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of tech, welcome to “Sway.”

Hello, my young Padawan.

And I, of course, am Luke Skywalker, obviously. Hello. And so I want to talk about history, our relationship, and, obviously, the Facebook news. So The Wall Street Journal publishes the Facebook files, internal files that show the platform knew it causes harm from teen girls to polarization and potentially lied to public shareholders, its oversight board, et cetera. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, former product manager, has testified before the Senate. She’s going to testify in Britain. She’s going to talk to the Facebook oversight board. And then, of course, they had their global outage, et cetera.

So I’ve previously called Facebook a menace. You’ve called them cancer. So that was before these revelations came out. So I think we don’t mince our words, but how would you describe the company today?

Well, I think the company is toxic. Let’s find another synonym for menace and cancer. They’re toxic. First of all, they don’t follow their own terms of service, which is the minimum. In other words, things they said would not be allowed, they don’t even enforce that. They’re basically lying. They’re doing stuff and denying they’re doing it. And then it comes out. One way or the other, somebody leaks it, or in the case of this whistleblower, she has all these documents. And it’s exhausting, and it’s terrible for the social media industry.

We do have an oligopoly of five giant tech companies. But I think all of the sins of Facebook and all of the controversy around Facebook is really mostly particular to Facebook. And I just think Facebook is the most poorly run of these big platform companies. A long time ago, I was very close to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They both were happy to be bazillionaires. They both were megalomaniacs, in certain ways. They could be very unpleasant, but they had some principles. They had a red line. In my encounters with Mark Zuckerberg, I’ve never been able to discover any principles.

Oh, wow. That’s a big thing to say. Doesn’t have principles — it doesn’t have a red line, presumably, then. There is no red line.

Right.

So you covered Facebook in the early years, and it’s faced scrutiny before. I’d love you to talk about those early years, talking to him. And then I want to compare them to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who you just talked about.

Well, I don’t remember my first meeting with Mark, but I do remember, to tell one story. I think it was in my office in D.C., and he was there to tell me about that they were going to start the news feed, which meant they were going to start the algorithmic shaping of what people saw, although I don’t remember either of us using the word “algorithm” in that conversation.

And we had a big argument for about an hour, in which I said it was bad for privacy. And I concluded from that that he just — it was like ships passing in the night. I kept saying privacy. He kept not knowing what it was. And you know, Kara, that later, we had another privacy discussion in which he couldn’t put together a clear sentence about it.

Right, we’re going to get to that in a minute. It was in 2006 they launched the social news feed. They launched the algorithm in the news feed in 2009. But the idea of using algorithms to determine this, explain what that means.

Look, I’m not an expert in this, but what they really do is amplify headlines that get people emotional and angry because they care about growth, and they care about — I don’t know any other way to say it, but greed. Every corporation wants to grow and have better financial results, but not over everything else. Even if it’s over 90% of everything else, there’s some line. And I just haven’t found it in Facebook.

He thought connection was the most important thing, especially on Facebook.

Yeah, and I think connection is a great thing. I mean, I quit Facebook a couple of years ago before the pandemic. And then I went back on it when the pandemic got serious because people I knew were dying or were getting sick. And Facebook was the best way for me to keep in touch with that. I am going to get off Facebook as soon as I think the pandemic, if it ever happens, is not a big concern anymore. And the reason that I’m going to get off it and the reason I quit it the first time is, I think the company is fundamentally unethical. And I don’t want anything to do with it.

All right, the whistleblower behind these revelations is Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook’s civic integrity team, which it put together to try to deal with election issues. During a hearing before the Senate panel, she took on Mark and the C level of Facebook. Let’s play this clip.

You just said this, essentially, putting profits before people. I’m going to play devil’s advocate. Would you expect them to do anything differently? You did say people are interested in money. They’re publicly traded companies maximizing shareholder value.

Yeah, I expect every company to want to maximize its financial success. But Facebook is about the only company in the Valley — I mean, it’s not a criminal enterprise in the traditional sense, like Theranos may be. We’ll see what the court says. But I just have never detected a moment when they gave up profits to do the right thing for people.

So one of the things that Facebook’s strategy seems to be is to discredit Haugen or diminish her role at the company. They essentially called her a nobody, not in the room, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Another is to be flip around verbal gymnastics. For example, Nick Clegg — you and I have been through all their spokes people — coming out with a memo, arguing that Facebook is not the primary cause of polarization or violence. No one said they were the primary. They just — we were talking about being a contributor.

And then Mark Zuckerberg had a response, which, by the way, it’s probably the best one today, although it’s a very low bar, in which he said, “Many of the claims don’t make any sense. If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn’t care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space, even ones larger than us?” What do you make of these defenses?

Well, I think the defense you just read could be read as kind of a positive spin on a sort of self-defensive thing they’re doing privately inside the company, which is, we’re being attacked. Let’s make sure we take a look at exactly how much violence there is or how much harassment there is or how much hate speech there is on our platform. Not so we can correct it, but just so that we know and if we get in a court fight or a fight with the F.T.C. or whatever, we’ll have some numbers to fight with. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing this research in order to cure the problem.

Right, so he said this after January 6th, kind of saying it’s everyone’s fault, the people who attacked Trump, et cetera, rather than saying, hey, we had some part and here’s what we can do. Even the oversight board, Mark, seems to be absolving himself of responsibility at every turn. You and I have covered entrepreneurs for years. They do tend to say, move fast and break things, which was one of Facebook’s posters they had up, which had to do with software development. But nonetheless, it’s kind of their rallying cry.

Well, yes, everybody wants to move fast and make changes. Break things is what stops me in that. It depends what things. If you’re breaking kind of a stultified older company, that’s disruption, and that’s what tech has done and in other areas, other kinds of companies have done to older companies.

But my recollection is that at Apple, which, again, I want to say, it’s not like there’s no problems at Apple, but at Apple, they always talked about making a dent in the universe. And that’s a much different thing than break things. They literally — literally thought they were making life better for people or easier, at least, for people. And I think they did.

So after reading Mark’s latest responses, do you think he’s evolved since the last time you spoke to him?

I’ve been retired now for four years. I haven’t spoken to him. But I think the results we’re seeing out of Facebook, to the extent you can assume that he and Sheryl Sandberg and maybe a couple of other people are responsible, would lead you to think he hasn’t evolved, at least on these kinds of issues.

Mm-hmm. Who else is responsible there? We know that you mentioned Sheryl Sandberg. She’s the C.O.O. There’s several other executives there who are very prominent.

Well, I think particularly Mark and Sheryl. I mean, you may remember that when we first invited Mark to come to our conference to speak, he wouldn’t come without Sheryl because Mark was very young when he started it. I mean, I remember talking to him when they were still in a small building in Palo Alto — hadn’t even built their campus in Menlo Park.

And I saw him walking down University Avenue, just alone with a backpack. And he stopped and said hello to me. And I said hello to him. And I just had my wife with me. And she said to me, how do you know that Stanford freshman? And I said, he’s Mark Zuckerberg. He’s the head of Facebook. So he was young. I think Sheryl was supposed to bring some business knowledge and discipline and kind of be the adult in the room. And I think actually, I’m more surprised that she hasn’t quit or didn’t quit long ago and has apparently been complicit in all this.

Mm-hmm, why are you surprised?

You know her better than I do, but to me, she presents a more mature, a more well-rounded view of the world. I mean, she was in the government. That doesn’t mean you’re great if you’re in the government. I mean, my god, Lindsey Graham is in the government, but —

Let’s put him in the private sector.

But I think being in the Treasury at least gives you a view of the world that is a little broader than just being in Silicon Valley. She’s done other things. And it just surprises me that she goes along with this.

At the time, if you recall, she was quite smooth. She was quite reasonable. And the times you spend with her, she is like that. And she’s very polished, I would say, correct? I mean, I think that’s —

That’s right.

Yeah, it’s hard to get through. And she’s quite impermeable, too, which I think is — she’s sort of the professional executive kind of personality. Did you ever have an argument with her the way you did with Mark?

No, because I never spent as much time with her. I mean, that first interview that I’m referring to onstage, I did it and you did not, although I think you came in from backstage.

Yes.

One of the things they said was, we only want to be interviewed by Walt, and that was because they had more of a thing with you going on at the time.

And the reason they didn’t like me is because I was stressing their issues around the same stuff we always talked about — privacy, et cetera. And one of the things about Silicon Valley and the reason Walt didn’t live there — and Walt, you can talk about your theories on this — was because you spent time with them, and they thought you were their friends.

Well, remember that I was a columnist, not a reporter. And really, most of the time, I was at the Journal. I was reviewing products, and I wanted to review them from the point of view of an average consumer. And I figured if I move to Silicon Valley — which, by the way, The Wall Street Journal wanted me to, and I had to talk them out of it — that I would be in the PTA meeting with these people. And I would meet them in the supermarket.

And I would just have social relationships with them, which would cloud my ability to separate my thinking from being in the inside. And I wanted to stay a little bit on the outside. And I was able to do a lot of it off the record because my job wasn’t to report the next day on whatever I heard. And so, with people like Gates and Jobs, I had long talks. And sometimes they veered into other areas.

So they called you late at night, correct? I mean, people — it’s kind of an interesting thing to think about they would call you and disagree with you, or they’d be angry at you at something you wrote.

There’s apparently a new Twitter account that is going through all the documents, all the emails that have been revealed in discovery and court cases. And somebody put up an email exchange between me and Bill Gates, just yesterday on Twitter from ‘97 or ‘98. And people on Twitter were amazed at how civil it was. But basically, it was him complaining that I’d given a bad review to one of his versions of Windows. And he was obsessed with his antitrust case.

And I just said, look, I’m not covering the antitrust case, but personally, this is what I think is wrong with your argument. And then I went through a whole response. But it was pretty much civil, which did not mean that in private, we didn’t have — I’m not kidding — arm waving arguments. It did not mean that Steve Jobs, who a lot of people think was my friend, I never had a meal with Steve Jobs.

We did have a decent — a good relationship, but he yelled at me. He called me, and he would say, Walt, I’m not calling about your column this morning. That meant he was calling to complain about the column. But by the end of the phone call, he had said, you’re wrong on this. You’re too hard on us on this. What about what Microsoft does? Aren’t we better? You know, whatever. But I can’t explain it. It wasn’t bitter, you know?

It wasn’t bitter. No, it was professionals. I would agree with you. So one of the things, you didn’t have a meal with Steve Jobs, but you did have one with Bill Gates, which you keep paying for, right? He never carried any money.

Well, he offered to take me to Taco Bell, the takeout window, at, like, 10:00 PM one day, and I declined.

But he didn’t have cash on him, correct? He would tell you that —

Right, we were walking down the hall on our way out. We’d been talking for three hours. And Melinda called him and said, weren’t you supposed to take Walt to dinner? That was the plan. He said, I’m just going to stop at Taco Bell. But I’ll buy you something there. And that way, we can say we had dinner.

And we get out in the hallway and he says, oh, shit. And I said, what? And he says, I don’t have any money on me. I said, I’ll give you 10 bucks if you need it for Taco Bell. He said, no, no, no, no, I’ll get it. And he goes in his office, he comes out with a $10 bill. And he was the richest man in the world at that point.

Ha, ha, ha. That’s really funny. So let’s talk. I want to go down this trip on memory lane and the Microsoft case, which mentioned in a lot of stuff we write Gates was resistant about antitrust back then, but he changed over time. And Tim Wu and Richard Blumenthal later said Microsoft became a gentler giant. Can you talk about those days and how it compares to today? Because antitrust is on the mind of everyone, not just with Facebook, with Google, and Apple even.

Well, in my conversations with Bill, he was just obsessed, and he thought it was almost a personal attack on him. One time, he took me for a walk around the hallways in the building where he had his office. And there were these boxes stacked up along the wall of the hallways as far as you could see. And he said, look, look, these are all the documents the Justice Department wants from us that we have to send to them. This is ridiculous. Why are we having to do this? It was like he was being persecuted.

And as you know, they eventually came to a settlement, where Microsoft couldn’t do all the things they were doing, which were trying to control the way Windows was sold and what was on Windows and what couldn’t go on Windows.

And then who got to participate, yeah.

Stuff like that. I think the gentler giant thing, though, does apply. I think they are almost — I’m going to get in trouble maybe by saying this, but I think they’re almost a statesman compared to some of the other guys. In fact, the irony is that the two big rivals, the companies that were always thought of as the two big rivals, Microsoft and Apple, they now agree on most of these hot button issues more than the other guys do. And they’re the old guard. You never thought of them as the old guard when their C.E.O.‘s were on the covers of Time and Newsweek. But they were famous, and they were rivals. And I think the irony is they’re now the old guard.

They’re are all the old guard. Brad Smith, who’s the president of Microsoft, called it the six stages of antitrust grief to me. Do you see that happening here with this next group of people? Because it feels like it’s the same thing. It’s the same idea of bigness, a group of people that aren’t regulated at all. But what do you imagine is different than then versus today?

Well, I mean, first of all, they’re way bigger. I think they’re more corporate, if that makes any sense to you. I mean, Microsoft was never, even then, portrayed as kind of a daring, you know, disruptive — they were disruptive, but they didn’t seem that way. And it had partly to do with Bill’s personality because the press focuses on a person. And that becomes the company.

And yet, in the old days, they had 3,000 employees. And that’s a lot of employees for a lot of companies in this country, but not for tech companies. And Apple had fewer, and Apple was almost out of business. So they weren’t corporate the way that, let’s say, G.M. was corporate even then. Or I don’t know — a railroad or something. They just weren’t corporate. And I think that’s one of the big differences now. They have built moats, and they have built walls.

And they have trouble, I think, expressing their views. I mean, if a hot button issue comes up, either in the industry or in society, they have P.R. teams and marketing teams that meet to try to decide whether to say anything about it. In the old days, I think it would have been Gates and one or two people, Jobs and one or two people, and they would have just done it or not done it, whatever they decided.

So I want to go back to this issue around one of the issues that people are concerned about, not just antitrust, but privacy. In 2010, at the All Things D Conference, you and I famously made Mark Zuckerberg sweat so much that he had to take off his hoodie. You particularly were grilling him on privacy controls. And I remember he was wiping his forehead with his sleeve. You did not recognize that he looked like he was going to faint, but let’s hear a clip from this.

Well, that was a moment.

Yeah, and you saw before I did that he was turning white. And that’s because you were sitting closer to him. And you and I couldn’t talk because we were on stage. But I’ll tell you that after that interview, he sent me an email saying he thought it was a great interview. But then their chief P.R. guy called me and wanted us to cut out all the shots that showed him sweating. And I just refused, and I said, even if I wanted to, we don’t have that kind of different camera angle.

He did the same thing to me. And I said it’s already all over Facebook, so I don’t know what to tell you. But away from the spectacle of it, because I did think he was going to faint and then I would have to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation, which was an uncomfortable idea on my part, but what do you think that was about? Because he had answered questions about privacy, but it sort of brought into sharp relief what a grilling looked like and that this issue still remained a big issue, privacy, which is now in the forefront.

Yeah, I mean, the amusing thing is that Sheryl plunked herself down next to me at dinner the night before and said, what are you going to ask him about? And you know that you and I, for listeners, you and I never gave the questions out in advance.

But I said, well, of course, we’re going to talk about privacy. There had just been one of their many privacy scandals just the week before, so we wouldn’t have avoided it anyway. And she said, oh, that’s no problem. He’s all briefed on that. He had a press conference last week. He’ll be great on that. But we couldn’t get him to kind of complete a coherent sentence on it. It was really amazing.

If you were in that interview again — it was today — what would you ask?

I would ask a lot more about the amplification of bad posts through the algorithm. We understand a lot more about what the algorithm does than we did in 2010 and hopefully wouldn’t go pale.

One of the things that people don’t realize, the reason Walt couldn’t see Mark sweating and almost fainting in that interview was because we always sat me in between whatever entrepreneur we were interviewing and Walt because if he was sitting next to the entrepreneur, always a male, they would focus on him and ignore me as the girl, essentially.

That’s right.

Yeah, that was a big favor you did me.

Even though you were tougher.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I learned was that it didn’t matter if I was tougher. There was still a lot of sexism in the way they thought of — I was an annoying gnat to them compared to sort of the august Walt Mossberg. But you did an enormous favor for me to do that. And it’s something that I thought about a lot and how to make people better at what they do by giving them space to do it.

Oh, I just think it was the right thing to do.

Ah, well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t do the right thing, Walt.

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We’ll be back in a minute. If you like this interview and want to hear others, follow us on your favorite podcast app. You’ll be able to catch up on “Sway” episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook, and you’ll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Walt Mossberg after the break.

So let me go through a couple of people. Now, unfortunately, most of them are men because you and I know we’ve been covering one of the issues we had when we were doing our conference.

Most of them are men? I mean —

All of them. Every now and then.

Well, I mean, there’s a few women, but most of those —

Yeah, it’s most. So I’d love to get — let me do a lightning round of how you look at these tech characters now. Tim Cook.

Tim Cook has taken what Steve Jobs left him and just built the hell out of it. On the other hand, Tim is not a product guy. It’s not like he didn’t know what was going on at the company. He knew everything. If the design guys said, let’s make a laptop out of a single block of aluminum, his job was to go through all of Asia and lock up every lathe that could make something out of a single block of aluminum and sign some contract —

So logistics. So Tim Cook, logistics. You think he’s done a great job.

And he’s done a great job on the finances of the company. Where he hasn’t done a great job is he hasn’t brought out a blockbuster Apple product that really changed things in the world since the iPad.

So you’re not impressed with AirPods or Watch or —

No, I’m very impressed with AirPods. I’m very impressed with the Apple Watch. They’re just not game changing blockbusters like the ones Jobs did.

What if they make a car?

Well, that would be a game changing blockbuster, particularly if it succeeded. I think if they make glasses that look like glasses, but that are A.R. — I mean, I know they have a lot of competition in that area — that would be a big deal.

Right, right. All right, Jack Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey is inscrutable to me. You’ve spent much more time with him. I think I interviewed him once alone at our conference. And he’s like a monk or something. He’s just inscrutable to me.

Do you like Twitter as a product?

Twitter needs a lot of change. They don’t seem to improve their user experience very much, very often. And they have some of the same problems as Facebook in terms of harmful content and enforcing their own terms of service.

How do you think it’s changed journalism, though?

I mean, the biggest change in journalism to me is you have to be on Twitter because you have to see what’s going on. And you have to see what people are saying about it and how fast. How much of it you believe and how fast you go with it varies on what I think is your own quality as a journalist. You want to confirm that —

But not as an old product reviewer, not a lot of innovation in the product.

No.

Right. Jeff Bezos.

I think he’s brilliant. I think he’s brilliant. I mean —

He just put William Shatner in space. I think he’s back.

William Shatner has been in space, even on the Earth, for a long time.

But I first met Jeff before he started Amazon. And I remember going to their first headquarters, where his desk was famously a door on sawhorses. And he was just really selling books. I’m very outraged about the working conditions in these warehouses. The people that work in Seattle, I assume, are paid well, although there’s also been stories about unhappiness in the workforce there.

But as a product?

As a product, I think it’s gotten a little too complicated, to be honest.

Yeah, but you do think he’s a product visionary, I think, correct?

I do.

Of all the ones around today, of all the ones existing.

Yeah, well, he’s not around.

Yeah, that’s right.

He’s no longer a C.E.O.

Yeah, he’s still around. He’s still flying around.

He’s probably still the boss.

He is probably still the boss, although Andy Jassy is a really interesting choice. All right, Elon Musk.

I think I did two interviews with him. And I also remember you dragging me down the main street of Austin to crash a private dinner. You said to me, I can’t get Musk to come to the conference, because you and I used to split who we invited.

Right.

And you said, I can’t get Musk. I need you. And we’ll double team him. And we crashed a private dinner. And we went over to a corner where he was sitting, and we told him he had to do the conference.

Yeah, we did.

He agreed.

Yeah.

And that’s when he said, we may all be simulations in a video game, during his interview. I’m not sure I like him personally. He’s done some things that have not made me like him. But it doesn’t matter. I think he has led the electric car revolution. I think he’ll be overtaken in size and scale by other people before too long. But he’s led it and started it, and nobody can ever take that away from him in the history books. And he’s revolutionized space travel.

Actually, one of the beefs we had was over you. You’ve tweeted something he didn’t like, and he didn’t talk to me for a year, just so you know.

The only thing I tweeted was —

I’m like, I don’t have a goatee. What are you talking to me for? Take it up with him. He was mad at me. It was a big beef. It was a beef, I have to say.

Yeah, but you know what I tweeted? I just tweeted that I didn’t think market cap was a good way to measure a company. And I think that tweet is what set him off —

Yeah, it did.

— to not liking me. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going to be the bigger man here and say, he’s a historical figure and he’s a disruptor and a revolutionary.

I want to talk about just a few other things. The metaverse — in your last weekly column for Recode back in 2017, you predicted the rise of what you called ambient computing, which sounds familiar. To quote you, ambient computing, the transformation of the environment all around us with intelligence and capabilities that don’t seem to be there at all. What do you think about this idea?

Well, I think it’s inevitable. I know Dave Limp talks about it. He’s the chief of hardware at Amazon, who I’ve known forever and ever. He’s a good guy and a smart guy. But I don’t think he’s really talking about it in the same way that I was writing about it. I was writing about a time, which I gave a 10-year time frame. I’m talking about you walk into your house. The walls have sensors, the floors have sensors, the ceilings have sensors. You don’t even see these devices. They’re just there. It’s like, I know you’re a big Star Trek fan, Kara.

Mm, no, I’m not.

It’s like the Star —

For those who don’t know, Walt dragged me to every Star Trek thing in the world, and I hated it.

I took you to the Star Trek museum —

Yes, you did. Thank you.

— in Las Vegas. But the captain of that ship could walk onto the ship and say, computer, where’s Lieutenant Swisher? Or computer, how far is this star? Whatever it was. And the computer could do it all. And they occasionally showed the computer. It was somewhere in a back part of the ship. And but they went about their daily lives, not thinking about it. And that’s what I mean by ambient computing. The title of that column was “The Disappearing Computer.” And I’m very glad I wrote it, and I still believe it. Mark, isn’t he trying to do sort of a V.R. thing?

Yes, it’s in that area. Yeah, it’s the metaverse.

But you’ll still have to wear something on your face. And I think maybe it’s a step toward ambient computing. But it isn’t really all the way there.

So you think someday it will be not a metaverse that you’re in a VR environment, but it’s everywhere.

Well, I think you can choose to be. But I don’t think people are going to live —

That’s the Holodeck, if I recall from your Star Trek —

Very good.

Thank you.

That’s a very good reference. Yeah.

So you think that’s going to be a big deal. This ambient computing is something you would pay a lot of attention to. Let me do some others. Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin.

Obviously, there’s a difference between the blockchain and the currency. I think the blockchain has a future, and it has a lot of uses. I think as we are recording this, there’s no reason to think cryptocurrency as a replacement for what they call Fiat currency, the dollar, the euro, whatever, I don’t think there’s any reason to think cryptocurrency is going to replace that.

Ah, interesting.

You owned it.

I still do. It’s in a box somewhere. Walt, I have a million dollars in a box somewhere. Do you have Bitcoin?

I don’t have any Bitcoin.

You don’t have any Bitcoin.

I think it’s just something you hold like gold.

Yeah.

I mean, nobody takes an ingot of gold to the supermarket to buy stuff.

I do. Almost.

You do. And I don’t think any time soon. Most businesses —

Oh, OK, the Bitcoin boys are coming after you, Walt Mossberg, just so you know. What about wearables?

I reviewed every wearable known to man up to the point I retired, but I think the Apple Watch is just way ahead of everyone else. They now are going to be able to do that pulse oximeter thing, where they put that springy thing on one of your fingers. Well, you can do that on the Apple Watch. And Apple has — I think they built a facility just to test health stuff.

You think they’ll be dominant in this.

They’re dominant now, but I mean, I think Google cares about it. I don’t know how much.

Amazon.

Amazon, they’re all going to be involved, and everybody can see that it’s a gigantic opportunity.

Yeah, all right, when you think, though, they’re sort of surrounding us, these tech companies. They’re at nobody’s mercy, and we’re at the mercy of them, in a lot of ways. How do you think about this group of people who you knew from their infancy has this much power over this? And what does that portend for the future?

Well, it’s not healthy. It’s not good. And what it portends for the future depends on — I’m sorry to say this, but it depends on the government. Look, the internet was invented here. And yet, we are the country in the world that does not have a modern comprehensive law on the books dealing with the internet.

And what we have to do — and I know this sounds like it’s impossible with this Congress, so maybe it’ll be the next Congress or the next one. But as soon as we can do it, we need to pass a comprehensive law about privacy and security and safety online that doesn’t micromanage these guys, but that puts up guardrails. That’s on those issues, including, by the way, transparency about the algorithms.

Then, there’s another category, which is antitrust. The antitrust doctrine that started with the Reagan administration is not working for these cases of these guys. And you and I both know that one of the problems with all five of the members of the oligopoly is that they snap up small companies that might compete with them. And sometimes they dissolve the company and they just take the engineers. Sometimes they run the company. But that has to be stopped for innovation reasons.

And so, we need a new antitrust law that addresses that and deals with that because I don’t think that was a problem at the time. These antitrust laws we’re working with are ancient, and the agencies are ancient. So I would have a new agency also. That was brought up at the hearings. I have written that before. We need a new agency or a special court or something to deal with this. I know this is one of the few bipartisan issues, but each party has a different bunch of things they want corrected.

Do you miss covering all this? You like retirement? I know you’re not writing a book. You were going to write a memoir, which you should.

I was going to write a memoir —

And you should.

Well, it wasn’t going to be a memoir, but I was going to write a book. I had two weekly deadlines. I don’t miss that. Occasionally, I miss writing an essay. And I say, well, I can do that on Medium or somewhere, but then I’m too lazy to do it, so I don’t do it. I spend much of my time on the news literacy problem, teaching kids, and very soon, the general public, how to tell the difference between fact and fiction online and fight disinformation and misinformation. And I think it’s a malevolent thing that is threatening our democracy. And I take it very seriously.

The News Literacy Project.

That’s right. Thanks for saying that. It’s called the News Literacy Project. It’s 13 years old, by the way, or 14 years old. And —

So you saw this coming.

Yeah, and I was on the board of it when I was still an active columnist, but I couldn’t do very much. One of the reasons I retired, to be honest, was that I would no longer have the ethical constraints of asking the companies I covered for money, even if it wasn’t money for me personally. And I have raised a bunch of money in Silicon Valley and Seattle. And I’m going to continue to do that.

So you’re worried about it. This would be something, if you were a young Walt Mossberg, this is what you’d focus on as a writer.

I would focus a ton on that, yes.

Are you now worried these companies have too much power over us? This is not something we thought about. I think I was started to get worried about seven, eight years ago. Are you worried as you look across the landscape?

Yeah, that’s why at least a couple of my columns that I wrote for Recode were about this. This is not healthy, this oligopoly. And whether you’re talking about the developers’ complaints against Apple or the question of whether Facebook should have been allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp and should we break it up, or why does Microsoft own LinkedIn? Why were they allowed to buy it? Why do they own Skype? I guess both of those things are considered business-ey, but I don’t know.

And why does Amazon own this big cloud company? Aren’t those really two different companies? They’re both quite good, but wouldn’t the cloud business have more competition if it was an independent company whose only product was the cloud?

Yeah, good questions. You know what they’re like? If I may use a Star Trek reference that you taught me, the Borg. They’re the Borg, Walt.

The Borg. They assimilate everything they come into contact with. You know a lot more Star Trek that you say.

I don’t. But I have to say, Walt Mossberg taught me everything I know about tech reporting.

Well, I don’t think that’s exactly right, but thank you.

Yeah, it’s accurate. And we could all agree that you are the best tech journalist in the history of tech journalism.

Well, I would say that about you, actually, but thank you.

Well, anyway, Walt Mossberg, thank you for coming on.

Thank you. This has only been our millionth conversation.

I miss you every day.

Oh, so sweet.

It is. I’m so —

I miss you, too.

I’m sweet. That’s what I’m known for — sweetness. Sweet.

Well, I think you’re sweet.

All right.

I’ve seen the sweet side of you. I’ve been hugged by you several times.

No, not — no, I don’t recall that.

I have it on tape.

OK. Anyway —

I have it recorded.

— everybody, you should go back and read Walt Mossberg. He is really a legend. And the things he’s saying are very important today. Thank you so much, Walt.

Thank you, Kara. [MUSIC PLAYING]

“Sway” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Matt Kwong, Daphne Chen, and Caitlin O’Keefe; edited by Nayeema Raza, with original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, and Carole Sabouraud; and fact checking by Kate Sinclair and Kristin Lin. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristin Lin, and Mahima Chablani.

If you’re on a podcast app already, you know how to get your podcasts, so follow this one. If you’re listening on The Times website and want to get each new episode of “Sway” delivered to you with a late night Taco Bell order paid for by Walt, download any podcast app, then search for “Sway,” and follow the show. We release every Monday and Thursday. Thanks for listening.