 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark Uptegrove, president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. Good evening, everybody. On behalf of the LBJ Foundation and more perfect, our partner on this conference, it's my privilege to welcome you to Trust News Democracy at the LBJ Presidential Library. You'll be hearing from the founder and co-chair of more perfect, the singular John Bridgeland later this evening as he introduces our guests, Kara Swisher and Larry Wilmer. I want to thank you all for being here, thanks to our participants in the conference who you'll be seeing over the next couple of days. And many thanks to our sponsors without whose support this event simply wouldn't be possible, including our presenting sponsors, the MacArthur Foundation, Donald E. Graham, Lucy Johnson and Ian Turpin, and Linda Johnson-Robb and family. Reflecting the views of so many of our presidents, Ronald Reagan said during his presidency, there is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong and independent press to our continued success in what the founding fathers called our noble experiment in self-government. Trusted news and information are the lifeblood of a thriving democracy. Without them, our noble experiment will fail. And the challenges we face with our current media environment are as deep as the stakes are high. Over the next two days, we'll examine our fragmented media landscape and the propagation of misinformation and disinformation, their adverse effects on our democracy and solutions for a stronger, healthier ecosystem. We couldn't begin more auspiciously as we welcome Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Beacons of Journalistic Excellence, whose Watergate-related archive is housed at the esteemed Harry Ransom Center on the other side of this campus. And we are deeply grateful to the Harry Ransom Center for partnering with us on this program tonight. Now to introduce the legendary Woodward and Bernstein is my friend, the Executive Director of the Harry Ransom Center, Dr. Steven Ennis. Good evening. It's a pleasure to welcome Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein back to the University of Texas at Austin for Trust, News and Democracy. My name is Steven Ennis, I'm Director of the Harry Ransom Center. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward became forever linked very early in their careers, when still in their 20s, they broke the story of a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters, leading eventually to the national crisis we know as Watergate and ultimately to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Together they co-authored two best-selling books, All the President's Men and the Final Days, deeply researched accounts of those events, the first of which has been burned into the consciousness of an entirely new generation by the popular film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. In 2003, Woodward and Bernstein placed their Watergate files at the Ransom Center, which contain more than 250 of their reporters' notebooks, first drafts of history, if you will, drafts of stories that they developed during those tumultuous years, collected source materials and photographs, as well as materials related to the writing of all the President's Men and the Final Days. As a result, the Ransom Center will forever remain a primary destination for the study of this crisis in our nation's history. For many people, such extraordinary history-making so early in one's career might be sufficient. But for nearly five decades, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have been chronicling our ongoing national story through insightful reporting and a string of histories, each of which has itself made news. Carl Bernstein is the author of three additional best-selling books, including recently The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. He currently serves as a political analyst for CNN and as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. He was born and grew up in Washington, D.C., and began his career in journalism as a copy boy for the Evening Star, before becoming a reporter at the age of only 19, a history he has recently recounted in the memoir Chasing History, a Kid in the Newsroom. Bob Woodward remains a close observer of the American presidency and of current affairs. He is the author of numerous books, Chronicling the Deeds and Sometimes Misdeeds of Eight Presidents, including The Agenda, Inside the Clinton White House, Bush at War, and Obama's Wars. Most recently, he has given us a series of books, each of which has offered a shocking inside perspective of the Trump presidency, the titles of which, if you'll forgive me, read something like The Seven Stages of Grief, Fear, Rage, Peril. I can think of no better voices to engage on tonight's theme, trust, news, and democracy. Joining them and moderating this conversation is Dr. Mark Lawrence, director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum. Mark is also a historian of the United States and taught as a professor here at UT in the Department of History, before coming to the library in 2020. With each passing year, it becomes clearer that Watergate was not a distant historical event, but one that raises still relevant questions about the extent of presidential power and the resiliency of our constitutional system of government. As recent history reminds us, our founding constitution doesn't work on its own, but instead requires our constant care and attention. It requires an informed citizenry, full participation in our political process, and a system of representative government that is accountable to the people. Few have been as attentive to the role of the press in advancing these obligations as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Please join me in welcoming them to the stage. Well, thank you, Mark Up to Grove and Steve Ennis for those terrific introductions and welcome to all of you. What a great sight it is to see this pretty big auditorium filled up, and I think that attests to the exciting program that we have ahead of us both today and all day tomorrow, and certainly the stars of our show who are up here with me on the stage tonight. I am truly honored to be here with none other than, I don't think I should even use first names, Woodward and Bernstein. It's really a great pleasure to be here and there's so many things that we can talk about in the short time we have together tonight. Of course, I want to talk about Watergate. I want to talk about connections between Watergate and our present moment, but I want to start with... Oh, why would you wonder, you friend? Just in case anyone's interested. But I want to start with a little about the two of you. How did you come to journalism? How did you get involved in the journalism world, Carl? I was 16 years old. I had one foot in the classroom, one foot in the pool hall, one foot in the juvenile court, and it was doubtful that I was gonna get out of high school and my father had the foresight of recognizing that and he knew I could write a little bit and he knew somebody at the Washington Star, the great afternoon newspaper in the capital of the United States and he went to this friend and said, hey, could you get this kid a job? He's more or less an office boy, he's a copy boy and I got the job, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were running for president when I went to work there. Within two weeks I was able to cover Kennedy because he came to my high school and they used me as an old fashioned legman because I knew the territory. But I had the greatest apprenticeship, this 16 year old kid with the best seat in the country, learning from the greatest reporters in many ways in the country at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera and thank God my father had the foresight because I never did get out of college and I went to the Washington Post six years after I went to the Star. Bob, how did you get into journalism? I started in journalism looking at things I was not supposed to see. That's the job. I was the janitor and my father's law firm and I could not help but notice the papers on his desk and his partner's desk and I found them very interesting. And this was in Wheaton, Illinois which is where Wheaton College and Billy Graham reigned and so there was a kind of sense of we're doing things right and I then went up and I mean, one of the lessons is the janitor always knows. Don't think that the janitor is just being a janitor. And in the attic of the law firm were the disposed files in alphabetical order and I was able to just take the names of my classmates and look at their family history. And one of the basic lessons is the family history was one of propriety and everything's going fine and then you looked at the disposed files and you discovered that there were IRS problems, assault problems, sexual assault problems. And so immediately you see, not everything is as they are telling us. So fast forward to 1972, I believe it was a Saturday morning a call comes in to the Washington Post. There's been a break in at the Watergate complex, the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. How did you wind up working on that small story that no one wound up caring about? Well, real quickly, I'd been there at the post nine months and the city editor liked to give me assignments called me on that Saturday morning, woke me up and said go to the courthouse and I'd been covering night police for six months and went to the courtroom where the five burglars were being arraigned and they were all in business suits. Now, covering night police for six months I had never seen a burglar in a business suit. And that is electrifying. And then the lead burglar, James McCord, the judge asked where he worked and McCord said CIA. And the judge said, speak up so we can hear you, CIA. And I was sitting in the front row and I think I blurted out, holy shit. I was in the newsroom that morning, I was the chief Virginia reporter for the paper and I was doing a profile of someone running for governor and I saw this commotion at the city desk and I went up to find out what it was and was told there had been a break-in at Democratic National Headquarters and I thought to myself, well that's a hell of a lot better story than this thing that I'm doing on the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, that can wait. And I said to the city editor, I'm gonna make a few calls and just around that time Woodward had phoned in the names of the burglars and I got the names of the burglars and I began a series of, and I was kinda known for being able to work the phones pretty well and I got the names of the burglars who most of whom lived in Miami and I started calling their wives down in Florida and in Pigeon Spanish and English I was able to find out, yeah, they worked for the CIA as well as a good number of other details about them and Bob and myself were two of six reporters whose names were listed in the story that went into the next day's paper based partly on what we were doing. And there was an important sentence in that first story which is it was not known who might have sponsored this and what the purpose was of the burglary. And if you think about it, the next two years were answering that question. The sponsor was Richard Nixon and the purpose was to destroy the other political party and its candidates, the Democratic Party. But through an illegal massive campaign of political espionage and sabotage he intended to undermine the very system of democracy, the free election of the President of the United States and now we find ourselves with two criminal presidents involved in undermining the most basic aspect of democracy, the election of the President of the United States. So you dug into that story in those first weeks following what the White House characterized as a third rate burglary. At what point did you know that you were onto something that would lead to Richard Nixon and to the consequences that the scandal would ultimately have? Well, it was incremental to tell your story about the thunder clap. Yes, we had found a bookkeeper. First of all, we decided it was necessary not to talk to people who worked for Richard Nixon in their offices and try to learn things from them, but to go to their homes at night. But it's like you figured out that. I kind of thought, let's go to the offices and you said that. No. Yeah. So we went and banged on these people's doors at night and very quickly learned from a bookkeeper who saw the books, the finances of Richard Nixon's reelection committee that they were paying for undercover activities, illegal activities. And from that, we learned that one of the five people who controlled the funds that paid for the burglary at Watergate and other undercover activities against the Democrats was the former attorney general, the manager of the Nixon campaign, Nixon's former law partner, John Mitchell. And so we wrote a story that, as Ben Bradley, the editor of the Washington Post said to us, you better be right because there's never been a story like this before. And the story was that John Mitchell controlled these secret funds. And it was a matter of putting the money and connecting the money to the operation and the individuals. And what's this about? And we finally put it together in an October 10, 1972 story. I remember sitting by your side at your typewriter and we had information. And you said that Watergate was only part of a massive campaign of sabotage and espionage. And it was kind of, yeah, we had it, but it was a very creative reach. But also, we learned something very early. And that was that the Nixon White House was out to make the conduct of the press the issue in Watergate, our conduct in particular, rather than the conduct of the president and his men. And it was nowhere illustrated better than in that first story about John Mitchell, which made it obvious, Nixon's campaign manager, former law partner. And yet the White House, we would call every time we did a story and they would give us what we called non-denial denial. They would attack us without addressing the facts in the story. And I called the White House that night on the Mitchell story and I asked the deputy press secretary after reading the story, would he respond to it? And he called back and he said, the sources of the Washington Post are a fountain of misinformation. So I typed that out as the White House response. I said, yes, go on. He said, that's it. And I said, well, aside from this geyser that's going off in our backyard, is the story true? Did the former attorney general of the United States control these illegal secret funds? The sources of the Washington Post are a fountain of misinformation. He repeated it. But I had a phone number for John Mitchell in New York where I thought I could reach him. And so I called Mitchell in New York about 11 o'clock at night, 10 30 at night. And he answered the phone, I identified myself and said we had a story on him in the next day's paper. I'd like to read to him. He said, go right ahead and get your response. He said, fine. And I got as far as John and Mitchell while attorney general of the United States controlled a secret fund. And Mr. Mitchell said, Jesus. Now I kept reading. By which time the drift of the story was unmistakable and Mr. Mitchell said, Jesus. And he said it a third time and he paused and in a really aggressive voice says, Jesus Christ, all that crap you're putting it in the paper. If you print that, Katie Graham referring to the publisher of the Washington Post, Catherine Graham is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat ringer. And then there was a pause and to this day the most chilling moment as a journalist was a reporter I've ever had. Mitchell said to me, you wait. And when this campaign is over, we're gonna do a little story on you two guys. And he slammed the phone down. And it was a kind of threat as well as indicative of the Nixon presidency's view of the press and I called Ben Bradley, the editor of the paper at home and he said, he really said that? And I said, you have good notes? I said, yeah, I'm Bradley said, all right, put it all in the paper, but leave her tit out. Couldn't resist, couldn't resist. Couldn't resist. One of our missions tonight and tomorrow certainly in the second day of the conference is to think about the state of journalism, the field of journalism. And I wonder in thinking back over the Watergate story, what was it that made you so effective, that made you successful in pursuing that story? Well, it was the culture of the Washington Post. It was go get good stories. And Ben Bradley was the editor and he never, he had a way. And finally figured this out many years later. They had two modes and one mode was you go in, we've got this, we're working on this. Oh, good, be patient, dig into that. And then the other mode was you tell him something and he'd say, where's the fucking story? I mean, no ambiguity. He wanted it at that moment. And so it was a sort of a patience and sort of a, okay, deliver now. Carl, you've spoken a lot, it seems to me about just the sheer shoe leather that went into it. You've talked about knocking on doors. Talk about that part of it, the maybe less glamorous piece of the investigation that obviously paid enormous dividends. I think it's what you see today when you see good reporting is that same technique of you have an idea of who has information that you wanna seek. And you go seek that person out and you do it in a place and an environment where you're liable to be able to establish some kind of notion for the other person that you're there with no preconceived notions of where this story is going. You're there to find out what Bob and I have sent to the stationery go started calling the best obtainable version of the truth. And really it works. That's the lesson. You can have an internet which facilitates all kinds of mechanics that would have saved us a lot of time, not spend all the hours we did looking up addresses in green phone books. Dave, you see, I think the internet would have been an obstacle in a way. I'm just saying to get us out there. Yeah, but you know, it's okay to use the phone book. If anyone remembers what they are. And that essential notion of one of the problems of the press now is people spend time in the office. They send emails out to the White House and say, will you comment on this story and then three deputy press secretaries sit around in a computer and say, now how can we answer that without saying anything? And they're very good at that. And so. The same sentence. The sources that Washington posts are a fountain of misinformation. Yeah, well, and but it's get out. You know, knock on doors, show up, use the phone. It's amazing in this story where we could track people down on the phone. You're down in Florida finding this $25,000 check that wound up in the Nixon campaign. And you're calling me and saying, it's made out to Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Well, who's Kenneth H. Dahlberg? We had no idea. We checked the morgue, you know, and there was nothing in the clippings. And somebody said, well, let's look in the photo file. And in the photo file, there was a Kenneth H. Dahlberg pictured with Senator Hubert Humphrey. And just so, oh, let's go to the library and get the Minnesota, St. Paul phone book and look up. And there's a Kenneth H. Dahlberg. So I just called him and said, you know, there's this check in your name where, you know, tell me what happened. And he literally said, well, I know I shouldn't tell you this. And you learn silence. You don't say yes, you let the silence suck out the truth. And he said, so okay, I'll tell you. And I gave it to Marie Stanz on a golf course. Now, Marie Stanz was the chief fundraiser for Nixon. What? And I remember, you know, we're putting the story together. You're still down in Florida doing the legwork and Barry Sussman, the city editor of the post turned to me and he said, we've never had a story like this, the idea that $25,000 in campaign money would go to the burglars. And I mean, just, it was astonishing. Follow the money. Here we sit, right, in 2024 on the 50th anniversary of President Nixon's resignation later this summer. I wonder with all of the thinking and writing that the two of you have put in the enormous number of other histories of Watergate. Is there a question though that still lingers in your minds that keeps you up at night puzzling over in connection with Watergate? What don't we know that you wish we knew? I think we know the most important thing of all, that one, we had a criminal president of the United States and that the criminality was vast and was intended to undermine democracy itself. And that not only did we have that criminality but that the system worked. I think that what we see now, the difference between that criminal presidency, one of the differences, and this present criminal presidency is that we have not seen the evidence that the system worked in the Trump presidency yet. And that we had, the press did its job in Watergate. There was a committee established headed by Senator Sam Irvin of North Carolina to, after we had done our stories, Irvin had called us, said he wanted to undertake this investigation. Would we tell them our sources? We said no but certainly seems to us worthy of investigation by the Congress. But Irvin thought about this and wrote about it in his final report and he asked the question, what was Watergate? And he said, Watergate was a systematic effort to destroy the system of selecting a candidate in the Democratic Party. And then he asked the question, why Watergate? And he had very good answer I thought and that is a lust for political power. And I think that you listen to the Nixon tapes and so forth, we have this one, right after Nixon won 49 states and Nixon's talking to Kissinger and he says, we will outlive our enemies. The press is the enemy. They just didn't want to say it once. He had to say, the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. And he said to Kissinger, this idea of enemy, we're gonna outlast and he said to Kissinger, write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it. I didn't know Kissinger had a blackboard. Talk about your emotions. What was going through your heads on August 9th, 1974? The date of Nixon's resignation, Bob and myself were in a little anti-room off the newsroom floor. There's a picture of the two of us that shows up every once in a while. And we're watching the television while he gives his announcement that he's going to resign the next day. And my feeling certainly, and Bob can tell you if it is consistent with this, was one of absolute awe. The idea that the system had worked, that we had done, the press had done its job, that the Congress of the United States, including courageous Republicans who had gone to Nixon that week led by Barry Goldwater, the former presidential nominee of his party to tell Nixon that if he did not resign, they would vote to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors in the Senate of the United States. All that the system had worked, that after these two years, and certainly an awareness of our own role, but that now maybe the country could move on as well. But, Catherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post and publisher. After Nixon resigned, wrote us a letter on yellow legal tab, dear Carl and Bob, you have the original of this, I just have a Xerox. And she said, now you did some of the stories and Nixon's gone, quote, don't start thinking too highly of yourselves. And let me give you some advice. And she said, and the advice is be aware of the demon pomposity, be aware of the demon pomposity. And she's so right about that. I mean, right not just then, but now demon pomposity infects so many institutions, certainly politics and Hollywood and Wall Street, even academia sometimes is shocking to hear. And pomposity, people don't like pomposity and for good reasons. So my approach to this is try to arrive at a point of self understanding to the extent that's possible and realize I'm a reporter. I'm not something else. I'm not an analyst or a theoretician. I'm trying to find out, do the basic laboratory work of a reporter and the laboratory work of a reporter is talking to people and listening. And you and I've talked about this so many times, the importance of listening. I actually have a little technique of doing an interview and taping interviews with people's permission and my wife Elson's saying, you sure talk a lot. And so, and she's right. So I take this finger and put it over my little finger and jam it in and it is a memory aid to remind me to shut the F up. And listen, and listen, I tell you that finger soar because it is just a habit to talk. Now you want to be, the silence is important in reporting. It can suck out the truth. That's right, but on the subject of Catherine Graham, the great publisher of the Washington Post and it goes to the question of in Watergate, Nixon people had made clear that they wanted to ruin the Washington Post. They knew that the broadcast licenses of the post stations, which were the financial lifeblood of the Washington Post company were up for renewal before the FCC and they were out to make sure that those licenses were not renewed. And right around the time of that John Mitchell story, I got a call from a security guard downstairs at the post saying there's somebody from the committee for the reelection of the president here of subpoena server who wants your notes under subpoena. And I said just a minute, don't let him upstairs. And I called Ben Bradley in his office and I said the guard's got somebody with a subpoena for our notes down there and Bradley said, well, don't let him upstairs. I'm gonna go talk to Catherine. And he ran upstairs to Catherine Graham's office and then he came back to my desk and he said, they're not your notes. Catherine says they're her notes. And if anybody's gonna go to jail, it's going to be Catherine Graham. It gives you a notion of what was at stake. And Ben was ecstatic. Yes, he was. And he said, just think of that. Catherine Graham, her limousine, pulls up to the DC Women's Detention Center. And out pops our gal, as he called her, going to jail to defend the First Amendment. And Ben got a little excited and said, you know, that picture will run on every, on the front page of every newspaper in the country. No, the world, it will be. And the end of that story is they backed down. They just, they folded when they saw that she was gonna stand up. And was in it for the distance. And was willing to go through whatever was required. Let me steer you a little bit toward the present moment in American politics. But I wanna call attention to the fact that the two of you teamed up recently on this really brilliant foreword to the new edition of All the President's Men that very skillfully weaves together the Nixon story and the Trump story. And it really highlights a lot of similarities really between the two men and the circumstances that surround them. Let me ask you to talk a little bit about some of those connections that you draw between the two. And frankly, also the limits on those connections. In what ways might these two men be quite different from one another? So many of the connections or the similarities are obvious, a secretiveness, a intentional distance from what the American people need. I mean, I think the job of the president is to figure out what the next stage of good is for a majority of people in the country and then develop a program. You found in Nixon and in Trump, the program was what's best for me politically, what's easiest. I did three books on Trump. And I mean, the extraordinary, after doing the first one, Fear, which said the Trump presidency is a nervous breakdown. He agreed to talk and I had an arrangement where he could call me at any time at home. I could call him at the White House any time. And so my wife, Elsa and I are at home and the phone would ring and you know, is it one of our daughters? Is it a friend? Is it a robo call? Or is it Donald Trump? And it would often be Donald Trump. And those are all published and you see again and particularly focused on the event of that last year of his presidency, 2020, the coronavirus. And I was able to establish from his national security advisors, he was warned that this was coming in January of 2020 and he kept blowing it off and saying it's not gonna go anywhere. And by summer, he's calling, Trump is calling me. Now he's five months away from the election and saying, I'm calling to see, just check in. And I said, well, how are things going? And he said, great. And I said, well, how about the coronavirus? 140,000 people have died in your country because of this. And you've been warned six months ago when there were no cases. And he said, don't worry, don't worry, it's gonna go away. And if you listen to the tape of this, I mean, I'm flabbergasted. And I said, you know, but what's the plan? What are you gonna do? And he said, oh, well, I'll have a plan in 105 days. Did the Calgary, that was election day. It was too late. He should have had a plan, should have stepped up. And of course, this is the problem with Trump. He does not identify with the needs of others. He's very intensely devoted to his own needs. And that's politically and personally. And I, you know, he look at, now he's back. He's running again. Night before last, I ran into Hillary Clinton of all people. And she said, what's going on in America? And it's a good question. Part of the answer to the question is, from this new forward, we did all the president's men because we sat in there for the first time. Donald Trump is the first seditious president in the history of the United States. And consider, you know, Jefferson Davis was seditionist, but he was not president of the United States. Donald Trump is the first seditionist. And that is what January 6th is all about. And that introduction begins with George Washington. In his farewell address, warning the people of the country that the one thing that our constitution, that our system could not grapple with is if we were faced by the character of men who would take it upon themselves to do things outside of the system. And Washington said, that's what's gonna come. That's what's not gonna, he didn't say it's a worry. He just forecast that it's gonna come. And of course, one of the great things that Washington said about the Constitution, he said the Constitution is an experiment. And it indeed is an experiment. And if you think back 50 years ago, the Constitution really did work. The experiment worked. And I listened to a talk that Stephen Breyer, the former Justice of the Supreme Court, 28 years he served, resigned two years ago and Breyer said openly. And he said, the question now is, is it gonna work again? And there's a doubt. A major difference it seems to me, one major difference between the Watergate period in our own moment is the media landscape. You were, it seems to me, young journalists in the Watergate era in what I might call a golden age of journalism. There was so much public confidence it seems to me in the media and journalists could become superstars. I think I wanted to be like you when I was growing up in the 1980s. That obviously has changed a great deal, right? I wonder if you could talk about, maybe you don't want to agree with my suggestion that this was a golden age, but perhaps you could talk about what has changed in recent decades that results in so much distrust for the media, making it much less likely that the media could play that role. I don't want to be too nostalgic. I think we can sugarcoat great reporting, really great reporting, I think has always been the exception, not the rule. But I do think that there was a more pervasive ethic in the period when I grew up at Washington Star to Washington Post of the best obtainable version of the truth to go back to that phrase that Bob and I used 50 years ago. But I also think we need to talk about consumers of news because what occurred and if you look at polls during the Nixon presidency, Nixon was supported through Watergate by most of the people in this country until the tapes. And once the tapes came out, people saw for themselves, heard for themselves the words of a criminal president and public opinion started to change. I think the biggest difference is not necessarily just they're not enough people doing this kind of bang on doors and go out at night and get the information that way, which is a big problem, huge problem, but also more people, and there's no metric that I can give you for this, but more and more people of all political persuasions are not looking for the best obtainable version of the truth. They're looking for information that will reinforce what they already believe, what their religious, political, social values are, and that is a huge, huge cultural difference. But the media reporting has changed. First, because of the internet, the impatience and speed, give it to me right now, summarize it. And so you talk to reporters and they are in the office. They said, why are you in the office? I asked some of them, because I have to update the story six times. I can't do it from a phone booth and I need my computer. And so we have a lot of office reporting and that is crippling to journalism. You have to go out. And I remember doing one of the books on one of George W. Bush's wars and there was a general who would not talk and sent emails, intermediaries, phone messages, nothing, so the old Bernstein method, I found where he lived. And I went and knocked on his door, but I did it just in the best time to knock on somebody's door is 8.17 on a Tuesday night, because if it's Tuesday, it's not Monday and it's not the latter part of the week, 8.17, 8.15, people will have eaten, so and this was a time when it was still light out so the bodyguards wouldn't get me. And so I knocked on the door and he opened the door and he looked at me and he said, are you still doing this shit? And I just was plain faced and now this is somebody who wouldn't talk to me, wouldn't answer an email, wouldn't answer the phone and just the silence and the presence I guess and he said, come on in. Talked for two hours and then I was able to come back and develop a relationship of trust with this person who was a no, he went from a no to a really important yes. Why? Gotta show up and it's awful when you do this and I still do it sometimes, I'm sure not enough to tell my wife else I'm going out to knock on somebody's door and then I'm back 45 minutes later and I say I got the door slammed in my face. That's it, but that's hard. So maybe you just answered this question but let me ask you, if you were giving advice to a young person who wants to follow in your footsteps to be that investigative reporter who has real impact, what advice would you give? I would say the first thing is respect the people that you're talking to and listen, be a good listener. Reporters tend to be lousy listeners. Look at how much you see on television that reporters think their job is to manufacture controversy. So you'll see a reporter with a microphone up on Capitol Hill running up to Mitch McConnell and asking a question that he knows is gonna provoke an answer that is just gonna be McConnell boilerplate and then he takes the microphone and goes up to Chuck Schumer and he knows the response is gonna be Chuck Schumer boilerplate and then he does a story about this Titanic war of words. Is that really getting closer to the best obtainable version of the truth? No, manufactured controversy is not our job. We haven't talked about social media incidentally, which has another huge presence in our culture and particularly among young people which has no pretense as a through line of the best obtainable version of the truth. Anybody can say anything they want and pretend that this is real news. But I think in terms of advice, back to what Bob is saying, use the old tools. I happen to think that some of the new tools are great in terms of saving some time to get you out. But once you're out there and that's the objective is to get out there and then keep going back, methodically keep going back. But what's the common characteristic most people have and that, well, we wish. And yes, often they do in the right circumstances, but I think you need to take people as seriously as they take themselves. You've got to go in a way and give yourself some time, not be impatient. Oh, I've got to run out to another interview or I have to, sometimes I try to leave four hours of time before I have to do something else. Now, I normally don't get four hours but sometimes you can get two and you don't want to be on a schedule and I think it's insulting to people if you're on a schedule. Oh, I'm sorry, I've got to go interview the speaker of the house or something like that. And it's not paint by numbers. It is get, I mean, and the best example is you going to the bookkeeper. And determine not to leave. And determine, you know, oh, can I have a cup of coffee? I mean, that's you, you won't leave. And here we are. Well, friends, let us hope that they don't leave and or at least make many return trips to the LBJ Library. This has been a fantastic conversation. I so appreciate both of you being here for this terrific event. I wish we had another hour or two to pursue a whole lot more questions. But thank you, Bob Woodward. Thank you, Carl Bernstein. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Bridgeland, co-chair and CEO of More Perfect. Good evening, Woodward and Bernstein. What a gift to the nation. And what a spirit of humility. You all have to remember that sign to listen more in this country. When my daughter asks me tomorrow what was the theme of that wonderful talk, I think I'll say, the janitors always know. And they continued to know. And trust, news and democracy, the role of the media in this country is really democracy's immune system. And they gave us a glimpse again on that wonderful history. I have the privilege tonight of introducing two other extraordinary leaders who you'll hear from. Cara Swisher is New York Magazine's editor-at-large, Silicon Valley Seer, and host of multiple podcasts including On With Cara Swisher and Pivot. Her new book, which is on sale, is Burn Book, a tech love story, which I hope you've all purchased. As she quotes in Burn Book, if you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. What we need is a lighthouse, and there's no one better than Cara to shed light on the threats and opportunities of tech, digital media, and AI for our democracy. She's joined by Emmy Award winner, Larry Wilmore, who has been a television producer, actor, comedian, and writer for more than 25 years. He hosts Larry Wilmore Black on the Air on the Ringer podcast network and can be seen on Netflix Amend, hosted by Will Smith. He also was brave enough to host the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2016, which is quite a ride for those of you who participated in it. As a child, Wilmore found interest in science, magic, science fiction, and fantasy. So part of me feels like he came into Austin to see the solar eclipse, and somehow we got lucky that he joined our summit. To moderate this discussion is one of our very favorite people and partners, and we're currently working with 31 of the nation's presidential centers across the United States. And I have to tell you, we shouldn't say this, but the LBJ Presidential Library and Foundation has just been such a privilege to work with, particularly because of their extraordinary leader, the president and CEO. Please welcome Mark Uptigrove. Cara, Larry, welcome. I'm gonna start off the conversation the same way that Mark Lawrence started off with Carl and Bob, and that is to ask you how you got into your chosen professions. Cara, let's start with you. How did you get into reporting? Why did you want to be a reporter? Before Cara goes, can I just thank Woodward and Bergenstein for opening for us? Yeah. I just thought that was nice. Wasn't that nice? Yeah. That was a nice thing. You did a good job. I did a good job. I thought they were all, I thought they did a good job. I think they have some promise. I think so too. I'm gonna keep my eye on those two. Yeah, I should, yeah. Me, how I started. How'd you start as a reporter? I wanted to be a spy, and I was the yearbook editor, which is a job of immense power in high school, but I was not in newspapers. I didn't work for newspapers, and I really wanted to be a spy, and I am gay, as obvious, as obvious, and it's true. Come on, let's stop. I'm glad you said it. There's not a lot of questions here. And I couldn't be in the, I wanted to be in the military in college to start with, and I wanted to do military intelligence, essentially. My dad was in the military, he was in the Navy, he served until he died early, and I couldn't, because I was gay, and it was pre Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which the Clintons did, but everybody had a terrible history of doing this, and so I couldn't be in the military without telling, essentially, and so I didn't, and I was going to do some other public service, but it was really hard at the time, when I, at that time, people don't remember that, but it was true, and so I got into reporting, which was similar, it was adjacent to it, to analysis, because I was gonna be an analyst, essentially, like on Homeland, but 100% less wacky, and I couldn't do what I really didn't wanna do, which was serve the country, and I would have been a fantastic admiral at this point, and would have been have a big boat, and things like that, but anyway, that was lost to me in the whole country, so sorry, and so I got into reporting, and I started writing for the student newspaper, the Hawaii Georgetown University, I wrote columns, I wrote all kinds of things, and my freshman year, I won the Journalism Award, which was usually won by a senior, because frankly, I was better than them, and I was, let's be clear, and so I went, I started working for the Washington Post really early, actually, it's where I met both of them, I was just, I worked in them, I was a news aid, and all kinds of small level things, and I did stories, I was a stringer from Georgetown University, which I got the job because they wrote a story that I wrote for the college newspaper, and it was full of errors, and I called them and told them they sucked, and they said, come down here and say that to our face, and I did, and they hired me, and I told them, there you go. This is always the best policy. It is, apparently. Larry, how did you get into the world of comedy? I also wanted to be a gay spy. I actually wanted to be an astronaut. It is true. What if I was now, what if I was actually a CIA agent right now? Well, you could be, and you could be throwing this off right now, by saying what if I was. Remember what if I was? Right, because that's the double speak of a spy, right? Man, they're so good. But I was always funny. I come from a funny family. My parents, they're not consciously funny, they're just funny. They don't know that they're funny. They're just funny people. And my brother and I used to always make fun of them, and I never thought it was a possibility to be in showbiz until I realized that it was the only thing I really wanted to do, and I first, I was theater major in college, and I started as a stand-up comic, and I was kind of trying to do acting and comedy at the same time, but I realized during that time in Hollywood, they didn't quite know what to do with me. I was a black comic, and I did political humor, and I did satire and stuff like that, and at that time, they were really casting, Hollywood Shuffle did a Robert Townsend's movie, did a good take on this. If you were from the ghetto, and it had a certain kind of feel, that's what Hollywood wanted. And I felt like I needed to carve out a space for myself, which is why I started writing and producing and went behind the scenes, and kind of did that, wrote for shows like I Live in Color, Fresh Prince, things like that, started creating shows. And then by the time the Daily Show came around, I was back to performing, and I wanted to create a space for myself, and that's how the Daily Show came about. Me coming back to performing, coming back to my stand-up roots and doing that, and now I've kind of done all kinds of things in showbiz, producing, writing, performing that type of thing. But I like being in front of an audience, it's probably the most fun. Obviously the theme of this conference is the news ecosystem, very complicated and fragmented media ecosystem in which we find ourselves today, which in so many ways compromises our democracy. I wanna go Larry to a quote that you, from the Guardian, an interview you did with the Guardian, in which you said, I think the term fair reporting is overused when it comes to journalism. I think saying they want to report evenly is more accurate. What do you mean by even reporting? I'm like, when did I say this? I must've been talking about CNN because I was always slamming them. Everything was breaking news and CNN at some point, and I'm like, at some point you're actually going to break the news, you know? And people like, a lot of news organizations like to use these slogans, like they're trying to gaslight us into how they're covering the news rather than covering it in. At the time that phrase was being used a lot, I think, that we're covering this fairly, you know? Which in my mind, they were really making an effort to cover it evenly. And by that, they were trying to appease the audience into showing that they were covering both sides of something which in their mind was fair. But I'm like, no, that's even fair is covering the story in the way in which it should be covered. That would be fair reporting, you know, in my mind. Right? Evenly, when you're covering something evenly, you're catering to the audience. When you're covering it fairly, you're catering to the story. And there was too much catering to the audience as far as I was concerned and not to the story. It's like, who cares if you agree with something or disagree with it? I said, I disagree with myself constantly. Right. You know, I may have an opinion, but the facts change my opinion about something. News should be as surprising by the people who deliver it, you know? I shouldn't be able to predict what a journalist is going to say, you know? You know, interesting you said that about CNN though, I think the best quote recently has been Christiane Amanpour, which is truthful, not neutral. Which I think kind of says that a little better, is that there has been this way that we have, I don't do it, it's sort of, it's called both sidesism for everything, right? That's how we're using it widely. But I think the press was so scared not to be reflective of another side, you end up going to that diner and asking unqualified people, unqualified question. You know, the diner thing. Like, what do they know? Why are we talking to them? We were talking to some normal people. Is it a waffle house or a denny's? Like, I wanna know. To me, like, who's... That makes a difference. You know, one of the things you get a lot when you're in the press is like, you know, why don't you talk to real people? And I go, well, I'm a real person. They're like, you're not a real person. I'm like, I'm a real person. Like, why don't you come to where I was living in San Francisco and come visit my neighborhood? Why do we have to go to your neighborhood? Why don't you know about us? And so I think the press gets nervous about that. And I think something that I've done and a lot of people have done lately is not do that anymore. In the journal, when I worked for the Wall Street Journal, they called it the to be sure statement, which drove me crazy, which is, I would say I was writing about Webvan and I did all the reporting and I knew it was a disaster. And so I wanted to write, it's gonna be a disaster and here's why. And they wanted me to get, when I went back to this and I said, this is gonna be a disaster, get someone to say that one, which is I think false reporting as far as I'm concerned. And then put in the to be sure statement. To be sure, some people think this is gonna be a success. And so I wrote it, I put it in, I said to be sure, some people think it's gonna be a success. They're all idiots. And they took it out. And I was like, but they are. It's not, and of course it's collapsed. So to be sure. Is journalism, are journalists in mass vehicles? The big responsible, is it better than when you started 35 years ago? What's a mass vehicle? Well, you know, the Washington Post, I mean, No, I'm not at those places. Well, Wall Street Journal. I was. 35 years ago. But is it? Yeah. But as an observer, as a reader, as a consumer. No, it's changed drastically. Those businesses are in distress. The business is yes. But the journalistic practices, are they more responsible now than when you started? You just said the business is yes. So it doesn't really matter if anything else matters. If it's not a good business, you're not going to survive unless you're at the behest of billionaires right now and several billionaires own publications. So that's an unusual thing to have to deal with because you never know if they're okay, maybe their kids aren't. You never know when they're going to say maybe lose their minds over after buying a social network, for example. But there's a church state. No, but they're not necessarily, not necessarily. So you're at the best of billionaires. If you don't have a good business, you don't have journalism. That's it. That's the whole enchilada, whether you realize it or not. It's the news business. It's like show business. Right. There was a time when the news wasn't part of the profit center of the networks. It was considered a different part of the network. There was a news division that was separate from the entertainment division. And I think when they combined this network, talked about that brilliantly. When now the news had to get ratings, and then it had to perform. Broadcast news too. And it just put it in a whole different performative category. God, you look at network. It's amazing. Everything came true. It's amazing. And he was writing about the past. That's what's fascinating about it. Patty Tarski was writing about what he had already observed. He wasn't predicting the future. Yeah. Let me talk about comedies. So there's record numbers of news avoidance today. People think the news is depressing and they're tuning out. So I assume that they're going to comedy shows to get there as many people are getting their news from comedy shows. Do you feel responsibility? When you relate the news in your comedy, do you feel a responsibility in getting it right? Of course not. No. No. I've never thought about getting it right. For me, it's always, what is the truth here? What is my point of view? Do I have something to say about this that is worth saying? But I'm not reporting on something. I have an observation of something, which is different. That, to me, is what the comedy is. I don't know if people get their news from comedy. The way people say they used to get it from John Stewart or something like that. I think they get their opinions confirmed by the shows more than anything else. I think John Stewart, or I should say John Oliver, just delivers this grand soliloquy to confirm what people are suspicious of in the first place. Yes. Puts it together in a beautiful way. Does a lot of research about things gives people a nice little meal of something that they've probably already agreed with or are suspicious of or that type of thing or illuminates them or something. But I don't think it's there. I don't think it changes people's minds about things which people sometimes think, or they want comedy to do that. It rarely does that. It's not a needle mover in that. I think occasionally, and by the way, here's what I'll also say this. I think funny goes farther than serious, quasi-funny commentary. So when people talk about like thinking that John Stewart or Oliver will change people's minds, not as much as Tina Fey just doing Sarah Palin would. Because that's just pure funny and just the ridicule of that. Just people go, oh, fuck, you know? Like, she might be president? No, you know. Because she got it the essential truth. That's lost. That's correct. And it was so funny, it's infectious. The same thing happened, I think, with Al Gore in 2000, Saturday Night Live. This was their best, the 2000 election of Saturday Night Live's best attack on the election, I felt. Because I felt they went after Bush and Gore with the same amount of fervor, you know? And the whole Gore thing was the lock box, if you remember that whole thing. You know, and Bush, Will Ferrell's Bush was so funny, too. And just completely just took the piss out of him also. But through laughing at that, people just had a different appreciation of that. They had insights into that. But no one remembers the commentary, the funny commentary about it. That's what I mean. But so... Well, I have to say, I push back. I have, you are kids, I have a lot of more kids than you do, I think, but it was, how many kids do you have? I have two. I have four. Okay, Larry, try to keep up with the lesbians. That's a lot. Try to keep up, that is, that is, yeah. I've been trying, so, okay. There's a lesbian inside me trying to get out, you know that, yeah. It's a good life, it's a good life. Now I've forgotten what I was gonna say. I'm thinking of something else. Once I said there's a lesbian, she got all flustered. My kids do get their cues from it, though. They get their thinking moments. And I think bringing it together systemically is important. They love John Oliver. They love their 18 and 21. They get their news from lots of places, by the way. And a lot more substantively than you think of young people. I think that's the canard we have that young people only will watch news or tiny TikTok things or dances or makeup tutorials. I tell this story a lot of my son who I was doing an interview for Frontline for about, they were doing a Twitter one and I liked Frontline, so I was doing it. I don't do a ton of those. And my son called during it and he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm doing an interview for Frontline. He goes, I love Frontline. I was like, really? And I didn't know this. I was like, interesting. And he started to describe every show of Frontline that had been on over the past year. I know, I was like impressed. I was like, well done, Kara. And he, and so I put it on because all these people are like, oh look, a live 21 year old listening to all your content. And that loves your content, right? Here he is. It's a lie that young people don't like substantive things. And he goes, he describes a show, I love this show, I love this. This was interesting. I didn't know about this, about Chile or something like that. And he goes, and I said, gosh, Louis, I didn't know you watched PBS. And he said, I don't watch PBS. And I said, but you do. And he goes, I watch YouTube. Which is where he got all this. And that's how he related to it. Like through the distribution and the content and no longer the brand. So it's just a different way of receiving information. But it's no less substantive. I don't buy that about young people. I don't. I want to talk about social media in one sec, but let me just go back to comedy for one more sec. You said that one of the reasons Saturday Night Live did it so well in 2000 because they did both Gore and Bush, right? Sort of evenly. Do you feel a responsibility if you're doing a joke about Biden to do one about Trump? Do you feel like you'd have to be sort of even-handed in the comedy? No, not in that sense. Not the even-handed nature. I just, for me personally, I just have to make the point that is the relevant point. Like when I was covering Hillary Trump, right? And people were, some people were calling Hillary a liar, saying she a liar about this and some people were saying Trump was a liar, blah, blah. And my point was, look, both of these people are liars. The difference is Hillary lies like a politician, okay? You know, the way the politician's lies, she's very good at that. Lies like a politician. Problem is Trump lies like a crackhead. Yeah. I mean, he rambles, right? It's like, is he trying to sell me my own VCR? Like, what's going on? You know? I don't know whether he's like sleeping with whores on the street, you know? It's like, all this crackhead behavior. Yes, yes. So to me, I'm not both sides in that, I am using both comparisons to tell you what my real observation of this guy is a crackhead and is acting like that. And so that's why I'm giving you both examples to that, you know? But not to do it for its own sake, you know, I don't feel the responsibility of that, I guess, I guess you could say. Let me quote you from your excellent memoir, Burn Book, a tech love story, which by the way, Kara will be signing after the program, alright? Right, so if you haven't bought the best-selling Burn Book, you have a chance to do so after the program and Kara Swisher will sign it for you. But you write in the social media's, in social media's new paradigm, engagement equals enragment. And it is addictive. This is made worse by people who run these companies, whose first instinct is to let all through the gate, regardless of the potential damage of danger. And oh yeah, we paid for all of it by funding the creation of the internet with taxpayer dollars and then with our own data. They owe us, yet when the violence actually does harm, the companies respond with nothing more than apologies and persistent insistence that they will do better. Yeah, yes. Why aren't social media companies held responsible for the content they purvey? Because our government has abrogated its responsibility to do its basic job with the most important industry in history. So, it's astonishing. These are the richest people in the history of the world. They're most valuable. They're trillion-dollar companies, multi-trillion-dollar companies. They have unlimited power. They're in everything. They're ubiquitous in our lives, in our work, in our social life, in our kids' lives, in our own lives. It's addictive. It is. It's like cigarettes. It is. And you also have to use it. That's the thing. You must be on it or else you can't work. You can't communicate. There's not a choice, necessarily, unless you go full uddite. And people just don't do that. They just don't. And so here they are with all the advantages and our government has decided, and making all this money, based on a technology that we created, that the government created for lots of different reasons, and taking advantage of it, but not paying their fair share of the damage it causes. And it's a similar story to opiates. It's a similar story to cigarettes. And I use this example because it's the best one right now is Alaska Airlines. They blow a single door. There's several lawsuits. There's going to be dozens of lawsuits. The CEO was fired. There's congressional investigations. There's state investigations. There's so much liability attached. Meanwhile, there's all this evidence of problems with kids, for example. You could pick any one thing that they might have done or been part of. A good example of this sorry thing was Mark Zuckerberg was up on the hill again, where they again performatively deal with him and never do anything. They never actually pass anything. And Josh Hawley, one of my least favorite senators, who should know better, who happens to be very smart, said, apologize to these parents. And there were parents there whose kids had suffered due to social media stuff, and they all had pictures of their kids up facing Mark Zuckerberg, which was something else to see. And Josh Hawley said, turn around and apologize to them like that. And I personally said, you need to apologize to them for not doing anything, because who in this room could do something about it, right? You, sir, stop with your performative stuff that then you put online on Facebook to raise money, the most cynical act ever. So Mark did turn around and said, instead of apologizing, and of course, Hawley said nothing about this, he said, I'm sorry for what happened to you. What is that, Larry? Sorry for what happened to you. I'm sorry the weather here in Austin is warm. It's not my fault. That's what that's saying. It's not an apology. It's a how did this happen kind of thing when you're at the scene of the crime and you're one of the perpetrators. And to me, it's our government not, we're maybe about to pass the first privacy bill in 25 years. Some Senator Maria Cantwell, who used to be a tech executive, is doing it. I'm not so sure it's gonna pass. So this is the first one in 25 years. That's the only law that we've passed in 25 years. Larry was talking about TV news when, in its nascent stage, it was in the 1950s and there were 15 minute broadcasts. But at the time, television was the dominant medium and it was considered by the government to be a public trust. And the reason that you had news broadcasts was because it was in the public interest to do so, even though they didn't make money. They would later make money as their own entities. But why isn't the internet considered a public trust? Why was it not in its nascent days, in the 1990s, when you started covering it, considered a public trust? It was, I don't know. That's a good question. It did instead, it gave it broad immunity. They, instead of allowing it, by the way, it's a great thing to do. It's just the opposite. They protected it. Look, Donald Trump got sued and lost. Rupert Murdoch got sued and lost, paid a billion, close to a billion dollars and many is facing another lawsuit. These guys get a law that says you can't sue them. You can't, we're not gonna pass any laws. Also we can't sue you. Also you have total purview over our lives and make decisions from a small group of people in Silicon Valley, who are very homogeneous, by the way, making these decisions about everybody's lives that affects them. That more people are not, and by the way, you can't get off of this stuff. You can't leave, either. And so I have no idea why. I'm waiting for an antitrust bill. I'm waiting for an algorithmic transparency bill. I'm waiting for a, oh, there's dozens of bills we can have, hacking disclosure. I think one of the distinctions is the nature of the medium itself. Whether it was film or television and radio, you had gatekeepers in those mediums who presented something to the public. And mostly they were selling soap, is what I call it. They had sponsors who were also responsible for delivering something to the public. Those people were accountable to the people as entities of delivering something, product. When the internet, and these things came along, they presented themselves as a town square. As information that was crossing from one person to another, from people out to here, it wasn't looked at as broadcasting. So it was thought of differently. People thought, oh, this is democracy. We can say whatever we want. Why should- It's all private. It's all private. Why should the government get involved in these types of things? So I think they stayed away from that type of thing. That's what it feels like to me. Not realizing, but there actually are gatekeepers here. Someone actually is presenting this to you. It's whoever owns this buffer. They're modern media companies. I mean, to me, there's a big debate about TikTok and all of them are modern media companies and they should be governed the way modern media companies are, meaning you can sue them. Now there's a lot of protections of media companies, libel laws and everything else, which is appropriate. And they deserve similar protections. The argument they make, Elon did this recently on the Don Lemon interview we were just talking about where he said, well, the newspaper has, what, 20 articles a day. I'm like, no, it has hundreds. But okay, fine, fine. We'll go with your number, sir. He's breaking news. Breaking news, yeah, that's right. Now you've got me off again. So he said we only have 20 and we have 500 million or five million coming through in a day. And my answer to that, and Don did not go back in, and I said, well, why'd you build it that way? It's your fault that you have a system that's so toxic that it spews toxic waste out at an alarming rate that you make, well, he doesn't make money off of it, but other companies do. Twitter's never made money, by the way, at all. But like Facebook, it's allowed to spew toxic waste and do nothing about it. Like why, why is that, why do they get to do that? And then they get to make money off of your data. So they chart, what they do is they take in a platform you paid for, you then give them your data, they take it, eat it, vomit it back up and charge you and say, please say you're welcome. Like I don't get it, I don't get it. We're cheap dates to these people, we're cheap dates. Yeah, and it's like why are they spending, why do they want to ban TikTok? It's like Facebook is already doing these things that you're afraid that TikTok might do, you know. In this case, I'm gonna disagree with you because the Chinese government is always involved with every Chinese company there. In this case, Facebook wants to sell you socks on Instagram, the Chinese government, we don't know what they wanna do. And they are a foreign adversary, so I'm gonna say they. Well then I will take a slight disagreement. Okay. I will say that. But they're not a foreign adversary? No, no, no, no, no. I will say that the phone that you're looking at TikTok on is already made in China. So China already, that is 100%. Yes, China already is in your hands following you around. You can get rid of TikTok, but you know you're still being followed around, but. Allegedly. Yes, exactly. On Black on the Air with Taylor Lorenz from the Washington Post about TikTok. You were talking about TikTok. What I did not realize and realized during the course of that interview is that Metta has a lobbying campaign against TikTok. Yes, for years. For years. And has sort of demonized him, but. Right, of course. What should we think of TikTok? Bear bones it. What is, obviously they're owned by the Chinese and that in itself is a threat. It's a Chinese company. But we know what that means in China very often. It tends to mean that. Let me give you two examples very quickly and then Larry can weigh in on what he thinks TikTok means is every company that's in China has involvement by the Chinese Communist Party is just the way it is. That's that country. I'm sorry. They, for example, Jack Ma, one of the greatest entrepreneurs he started, Alibaba, he disappeared at one point for a while. It's like in this country suddenly Jeff Bezos disappearing and then being quiet and he's not quiet these days, but he, you know, just disappearing these people. Just like, I think we'll put Steve Jobs in the cooler for a while, that kind of thing. That happens in China. It's like Governor of South Carolina disappeared. Yeah, right, yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the issues. The other one is that it's, that Mark absolutely in an interview with me, he sort of put out this Xi or me argument where we are the national champions. Xi wants to run the Chinese internet, which is all true. But when he said that to me, he goes, well, it's Xi or me, I go, don't like the choice. I'm gonna take you obviously, but it's like a bad date. Like I have to take the bad or worse. And in the case of Facebook, they are, they're information, they're rapacious information thieves. That's what they are. But it is in a different interest than what's happening in China. And so I am concerned that we allow a foreign government to, they wouldn't be able to buy CNN. They couldn't buy CBS. They couldn't buy the Washington Post or anything else. So why should they be able to have a, and we can't go, the last one. Well, if the Washington Post started showing cats playing the piano, you know, I would be concerned that the Chinese company would be interested in buying that. I don't know what they're gonna do. Well, what is the worst thing that they could do with TikTok? What do you talk about everything? Like what would be the worst thing? What they've been doing forever on social media by buying ads, by creating Discord and partisan nature. Years ago on Facebook, and I believe it was the Russians who did this, but they had ads on there that Hillary Clinton was a lizard. Was an actual, and it worked, by the way. Let me tell you, a lot of people. Wait, you're saying she's not a lizard. She's not a lizard. I don't know. I have attempted to scratch her face and it did not work. Secret service intervened. I've seen a lot of dead skin when I've been around. Yeah, okay, fine. But I actually called them. I'm like, Hillary Clinton's not a lizard. Why is this showing up on your platform? They're like, well, everyone has a right. And I said, I think it's being bought by the Russians. And of course they were paying in rubles at this point. And they were trying to create an information war. And we have won the classic war, say, against Russia, but they have been able to more cheaply attack our democracy at its roots by partisanship. And so it happens domestically, too, by the way. I feel like we're just better at that, though, still. We're better at dividing ourselves than they're at dividing us. No, but it's been... We've been at it a lot longer. Yes, it is, but it's been fueled by this ability to part us. And I think the use of bots by these countries and not just other countries, it's domestic, too. It's now being used by domestic. And so these bots are constantly creating rage that then creates engagement, then then creates more rage. But those bots are on X, right? Not just X, it's all over the world. No, but X isn't the Chinese, you know? Well, we don't know who's they're doing. The problem is you can't trace it. But it's on that platform. Like, the things that you're saying can happen on Facebook, can happen on X, can happen on friends. Why let them have their own company that we don't have full insight into? That's all. They can't buy, and the other part of that equation is we can't be in China. No US company can be in China. So if we don't, and the reason why we can't be in China, is because we'd spy on them. That's why. And they know that. So if we don't have reciprocity, why are they allowed here? That's just my feeling. I would argue that we're already spying on China. Not be a social network is used by 170 million people. Well, because Chinese are already doing it to themselves. Yeah, that's true, that's true. Carol, why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? Some have talked about the decline of Twitter as being cultural vandalism. Clearly, it's deteriorated under his. It was such a fine product before. But it has changed discernibly. Yes, it's now a right wing bar. It's now a right wing bar. Right. What did he want to do? What was his intention? It is, it's a bar from Star Wars. Did he want to weaken it? It's a bar from Star Wars now. It really is. Cantina. Why don't you take that one? Why did he buy Twitter? No, no, no. You know this. I have no idea. I don't hear your thoughts. All right, well, for me, it feels like just an ego move. I mean, a lot of these billionaires are in bubbles, right? And part of being in a bubble is people going to kiss your ass all the time and all that type of stuff. This is the ultimate type of bubble to be in, where you just get to be, I mean, the 1,000-pound gorilla like nobody's business. You talk about controlling the narrative from this standpoint had to have been the allure of this. It wasn't just wanting free speech. Because he wouldn't be doing all that tweeting himself. I think he wants to be the object of the attention on X. So to me, it was self-serving. That's what it looks like to me, more than any kind of altruistic thing. And by the way, I'm a huge fan of SpaceX. I've loved a lot of the stuff that would SpaceX try to do. We talked about this before, Kara. Like when Tesla came out, they had some really great ideas. And what his mission was, when you heard Elon talking about some of his just green ideas and climate ideas and things like that, he has some really good ideas behind him. But something happened where he just turned and there's this attention grab that just became this narcissistic thing, and he chose a side in it as well. And a lot of that side that he chose, I think, is an ugly side too. So it's just not very appealing. He's got it pretty right. I mean, this is someone who, that was about 5% to 10% of his personality. The dank memes, the weird jokes, the sort of hateful stuff was about 10%. And the rest was really interesting for a long, long time here, and I've known him for a long time. And the stuff he did at Tesla was groundbreaking. No question, although very, they're in very much more trouble now because there's a lot of competitors and they haven't kept up with the products. And he's ruining the brand through his antics on Twitter. So that's an issue. SpaceX, another groundbreaking company. By the way, let me just say he didn't do it alone. There's an executive named Rebecca, I mean, Gwen Shotwell, who runs SpaceX. She doesn't get any attention. She's the reason it's doing so well. Very few women are in that sector, so I'd like to call attention to her. And there's a lot of other things. Starlink was really smart. But what happened, I think, as you get that rich and you're surrounded by enablers and yes, people who are, what I say, they lick you up and down all day and you're always right. And there's never- Wait, I have to get that image out of my head. Okay. I don't know. Well, some of them like that. That Elon on the yacht image, right? Okay, all right. You know that. Yeah, I've seen that picture. Yes, I have. He doesn't like it. So you have all these people doing this all day and then you get a sense of your own, like God, he already had those tendencies. You know, when he was in the beginning of the book, I talk about him saying, I can change Trump's mind. And I was like, well, thank you, Jesus, but you're not going to. This man's been a lifelong racist and all kinds of things. Really, you're gonna, I can do it. Like he had that kind of mentality and a lot of tech people do. I think COVID, something happened to him during COVID. He suddenly started talking, you know, the pedophile stuff started to pop up, which was odd. I think the- What was his switch? Do you think he made a switch? I think it was COVID. I think he, you know, they wanted to close down one of his companies. He's very much like, I'm my own man. I'm a man of the people, even though he's the richest man in the world, which is kind of funny. He started to get the victim complex that a lot of these people get. I call it grievance industrial complex. And they love to be agreed, because, you know, they're incredibly blessed, which is really astonishing. I think COVID did. We've read in the Wall Street Journal about his partying, which is everybody knows about. And I think that had an effect on him. And then he, and then this part of his personality just took over the rest of it. And a lot of people get, met people who've been radicalized, right? In different ways. What do you mean by radicalized? Well, just, look, like that suddenly, my mom's a good example. She hated Trump and then Fox News every fucking day. She's like, she loves Trump. And then she hated him for a while, and now she loves him again. Like it's, listen, that wasn't social media. That was just the persistent repetition of hate and misinformation. And I think he got pulled into that in a lot of ways. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, there are a lot of them are like that, but he's not alone. Quote you from a New York Times editorial that you did six years ago. Facebook, you wrote, as well as Twitter and Google's YouTube and the rest have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age. They have weaponized the First Amendment, they have weaponized civics discourse, and they have weaponized most of all politics. Yeah. If you could reform, I wanna ask you both, Larry will start with you. If you could reform social media, if you could put regulations in place, what would you do? That's a tough one. I may have to go second on this because I have to think about it. Because I don't think in those terms, I'm the opposite of that. I'm more freer in terms of speech and that type of thing in how I view things. So. You don't have to go to speech. It's a business model problem is what it is. And we tend to focus on as a speech problem and they use it as a fig leaf because they don't know it at all. I've been in speeches, the Mark gave a speech at Georgetown where he was misconstruing the First Amendment. So badly I wanted to rush the stage and hand him a copy which I keep with me. I was like, it's real short, it's first, it's easy to understand. Like government shall make no law, not Mark Zuckerberg, you can make any law you want and you do often. And so he does when it pleases him and when he doesn't, he says First Amendment which is interesting. But it has nothing to do with any of these companies, the First Amendment at all in many ways. And so it's a business model problem. It's an advertising business model that enragment equals engagement and they win by taking our data. So why not attack the data issues, the business model issues and the ways they capture our attention. It's not free speech, the model is made it so that you could, let me give you an example, Google. Google a search, right? Not as many people do search as they used to but they do, it's a big business. When you search, you don't linger there. You essentially are just searching for something. So it provides speed, context, and accuracy. That's the architecture of Google search. Uber, call the car, it comes. That's the architecture of it. The architecture of social media is virality, engagement, and speed. Guess what that ends up in? Rage, it just goes right to rage. And so their business model is rage. So start to pass laws about data privacy, about the business model itself, what attacks the business model and the data stealing and the need to create that. And then also hold them liable if things, have those parents be allowed to sue them. They might lose. But why can't those parents sue those companies and get disclosure on what's happening inside those companies? Yeah. Yeah. I do think rage gets a lot of the headlines but it really is only part of it. But that's the part that concerns people because a lot of bad things come out of that or whatever. But there's so much more. Here's an aspect of it that people don't realize because I'm in this business and I realize that people broadcast themselves. There's a cost of broadcasting yourself. People don't realize what happens as a result of that. You've made a public profile of yourself. You're putting yourself out there. Now you have created this avatar that isn't quite you, it's representative of you. But slowly, especially young kids don't realize that they are blurring the line between who they are and what this representative of them is. That sort of broadcast is representative of you, it's not you. And so when young people, especially children, are watching representatives of people, cause it's not real, they are getting a confusing sense of who they should be. So this isn't in the area of rage. It's not in the area of misinformation or that. This is more in the area of identity which is really a subject that, I don't know how to govern this type of thing. When I say I don't know how to govern that, how do you govern that? But this is a problem because there, I think it's suicide, like one of its highest rates now for young people. Especially men. Yeah, okay, so, and this is especially a man problem when, you know, not that I'm a doctor in this, but you know, as a boy who grew up to be a man, I think I've been allergic. Identity is very important to boys becoming men. Who am I, what's my place, all these things, we put a lot of stock in identity, right? You know, it's very self-centered and self-serving. When that is built on shallow ground and built on these false images, you are setting yourself up for some really bad stuff. But I think the girl problem is even, probably even worse because the presentations of women primarily have sex objects in a way that you could have never seen coming. Where it's, you know, they're doing this willfully, you know, this isn't like the exploitation of the early days of porn and that kind of stuff. It's presenting yourself in these sexual ways that, you know, are doing so much harm to kids that a lot of the Gen Z generation aren't even having sex that much because there's so much of this over-stimulist that's happening, you know? There's also deep, fake porn, there's actually a good stir in the entire state about that, which is another thing of using these tools. I think one of the things that I think about a lot, you know, you have the Washington Post symbol, I mean their motto, democracy dies in darkness, which is very dramatic, right? I think democracy dies in the full light of day. And that's what has happened to us. We can see it occurring in real time. And the greatest, let me pay him a compliment, the greatest role in history is Donald Trump. He knows how to use these things and he knows how to, every time we, every time the press always goes, it kills me. They're like, can you believe he said that? I go, I believe it. Because he does, he's doing it as a trick. It's a trick. He now has become the character that he played on TV. But, and now I think he really thinks it, like he's moved into some cognitive situation. Oh yeah, he could pass lie detector tests easily. Right, he's now full crack. Like any cracker, yes. He's full crack, thanks for that. But he was just playing one before. But I think you, the way he used social media, similar to the way JFK used television and FDR used radio or Hitler used radio. Like a lot, there's a great book. I just did an interview with Tim Ryback who talks about Hitler right before he took over. And the use of media is very similar. They're very similar ways to use it. And when that happens, you do get all those signals from people that never before could give you signals in the same way. And it affects you drastically because you aren't doing meeting in person. You're not doing bars, you're not doing church groups, whatever happens to be your way of community. And I think all of us are at a loss because of the lack of face to face contact. And what happened during COVID, which brings me back to Elon, is everybody then had to rely and live online during that period. And so everything was accelerated, including the values of these. Facebook has never been more valuable. Apple's never been more valuable. All of them, Microsoft, every single one of them. And so during COVID, it accelerated trends that were already happening. And now we're hooked, all of us. Presidents almost inevitably have fractious relationships with the press. But Larry, you participated. There's one day a year when the arms are laid down. And that's the White House Correspondents' Dinner. You were the host of the White House Correspondents' Dinner for what was Barack Obama's last appearance in 2016. What was that like? Well, their arms are down, but their middle fingers are up. And let's just say. It was a very surreal... I should, I should have gotten it. It's like you're at a family reunion, but you're not in the family. It's the phrase that I've always used. It's just very bizarre, because it's not really an audience there to see comedy unless it's the president, who was very funny, by the way. And I even told him that's not fair. He's that funny before me. You don't see me going around president everywhere, stepping on his toes, right? No, I don't do that. So stop doing that. Very surreal. I treated it as a roast. And I found out that many of the journalists are very prickly about, as you know, to care when you go directly and question some of the things, and I'm doing it in a roasty way, it did not go over well. Some people, actually, John Lemon, who I called on The Ledge Journalist. I'm sure he liked that. The Ledge Journalist. Gave me the finger, of course. But he gave me a nice, friendly finger, I should say. Whereas Wolf Blitzer, I think, probably one of my children killed. He was not very happy with what I said about him. He was not very happy about it. But that's okay. But I don't do it for the affection or for them to say, hey, we like you. It's like, there's something I need to say here. And if we don't agree, that's okay. I got no problem with that. But I think it's good that we say this right now. Kara Swisher will sign your book. And you can hear Larry Wilmore on Black on the Air. And it has been our delight to have you here tonight. Kara Swisher, Larry Wilmore, thanks so much. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Let's shake hands. Oh, yeah. Come on, Kara. Thanks a lot. Thank you. You're welcome. This one?