SBF Sentenced, OpenAI's New Voice Tool, and Guest Ari Wallach

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Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher, live from Buenos Aires in Argentina, where I'm visiting my beautiful son. Scott is off this week, and today we have a very special guest host, one of my favorite people, New York Times opinion columnist, and a co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast, Lydia Polgreen. She also was a recent expert on my Tracy Chapman episode of On with Kara Swisher. Hi, Lydia.

Lydia Polgreen: Hi. It's great to be back with you, Kara.

Kara Swisher: You know, anytime the Militia Etheridge can get together and plot taking over the world, it's a great day as far as I'm concerned.

Lydia Polgreen: I agree.

Kara Swisher: For those who don't know the Militia, there's a loose group of lesbians who run the media. So stop with the George Soros stuff, right wing. It's actually a group of lesbians. I used that phrase on Bill Maher that I was on recently, and he loved it. He thought it was hysterical. Anyway, we're funny. Lesbians are funny. So how are you doing?

Lydia Polgreen: I'm doing great. We're all sort of seesawing between despair and hope, looking forward to getting into both extremes today. But it's Monday morning. I'm in beautiful New York City. I'm just really, really happy to be here with you.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I had a giant steak dinner last night with my son, Louis, here, who's studying at NYU. He's at NYU's campus here for the year. We've been wandering around Buenos Aires, which is quite a beautiful city. And interesting because it's run by a guy who has Trump-like qualities.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, Javier Milei.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he's got very Trumpy hair. He does. So does my son. No, my son does a lot. I've never been to Argentina, but I hear that the steak and the red wine are really incredible, which is one of my favorite combos.

Lydia Polgreen: So that's real good.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I think you would like it. It's very much like Europe. It feels a little like San Francisco and Paris got together and had a baby. But it's nice. It's very familiar if you travel in Europe. We're going to run around today and see what we can get into trouble with. But it's nice to visit. I'm just mostly visiting my son, which is the best part of my day.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, I'm just curious, before we get into everything, because we've got a lot to talk about, is there anything you're thinking about writing about now? What most occupies your time on both the podcast and also in your column, which I adore both?

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, I know your podcast is called Pivot, and I'm big on the pivot. I love to try and highlight the things that other people aren't writing about and talking about. So I spent a lot of time writing and talking about Gaza, for example, which is important and will continue to do that. But actually, next up on my radar is probably elections in India and in South Africa. Those are two places that I have lived and that I've spent a lot of time.

Kara Swisher: And you've been a foreign correspondent.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think a lot of what I spend my time focused on is thinking about the perspective of the world from the global south. The era of the global north, us rich, wealthy countries, is ending and the global south is ascending. That is one of the big subjects that I care most about. So I'm hoping if the Indian government sees fit to give me a visa that I'll be able to go and travel around India. I haven't been there in quite some time.

Kara Swisher: Would they not see fit?

Lydia Polgreen: Well, this is part of the story of what's been happening in India. We think of it as the world's largest democracy, as this kind of celebration of openness and freedom. But in fact, the country is becoming more and more autocratic under its prime minister, Narendra Modi. So they've really been cracking down on independent journalism in a lot of ways. It's become much harder for international journalists to get access to work there. So I'm hoping I'll be able to go and travel and see. That's a real shift because India has always been a pretty open place.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I've been there as a journalist. I've been there a number of times.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, no, I know you have.

Kara Swisher: I've been critical of him, of Modi. It's interesting because we're going to maybe talk about it in a little bit. But what happened to Erdogan in Turkey? Speaking of democracy with a dash of autocracy.

Lydia Polgreen: Totally. A lot of autocracy there.

Kara Swisher: Explain for the people what happened there. It was quite a thumping. And let me just say, I'm the person that says Trump's going to get a thumping like you can't believe. Everyone else doesn't agree with me.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah. Turkey is fascinating. I was actually there last year in the aftermath of the earthquake. There was a massive earthquake. Thousands upon thousands of people died. The government clearly had a slow and incompetent response. Everybody thought Erdogan, who's been in power, this guy who has increasingly centralized power, taken over the courts, taken over all these things. They thought, okay, finally, he's going to lose. His popularity is going to go down and he's going to lose the presidential election.

Kara Swisher: A Trump favorite. Real strong man vibes.

Lydia Polgreen: He cruised to reelection. He stays in power. Everybody thought, well, that's it. Democracy over in Turkey. But they just had local elections and they got totally thumped in the biggest cities. The opposition, which has been kind of battered and down, sort of came surging back. I think that's a good analogy for what happened in the 2022 midterms. Everybody thought the Democrats were going to get creamed. But in fact, there was this reservoir of anger. In Turkey, obviously, the issues are different. It's inflation. It's the economy. It's earthquake recovery, all kinds of things.

Kara Swisher: The reaction to the earthquake still. That's part of it.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah. So I think that democracy dies in darkness, but it dies slowly. I think that there are places where it can come surging back. I definitely would not count democracy in Turkey out. Not for a minute.

Kara Swisher: Not for a minute. I would agree. It was really interesting. I'm not surprised, though. People are slow burns.

Lydia Polgreen: Slow burns.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. And then you also, besides being a great New York Times opinion columnist, you're also co-host of Matter of Opinion podcast. Explain what the podcast is. We know your columns and everything else, but explain what you do there.

Lydia Polgreen: Matter of Opinion is a show that I co-host along with three of my brilliant colleagues. We just talk about the issues that matter, the things that we're writing about, the things we're thinking about. We try to have smart discussions across a range of different political perspectives and talk about the big issues that are in the news. It's a lot of fun. I would love for your listeners to check it out.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it's a great show. And it appears what day? So people can...

Lydia Polgreen: It comes out on Friday mornings.

Kara Swisher: Friday mornings. Excellent. All right. Just like Pivot, except 100% less penis jokes, I'm guessing, because it's the New York Times.

Lydia Polgreen: Anyway, Lydia, but it's implicit. It's implicit in there.

Kara Swisher: It's implicit. Yeah. We've got it speaking.

Kara Swisher: So we've got a lot to get to today, including OpenAI's newest technology, Sam Bankman-Fried's sentencing, which I was surprised by what you had to say about it. And the New York Magazine essay that lit up social media. Plus, our friend of Pivot is Ari Wallach, the host of the new PBS series, A Brief History of the Future. But first, we have to talk about Beyonce's Cowboy Carter album, which dropped Friday. It's already Spotify's most streamed album in a single day in 2024, and Amazon Music's most first-day streamed country album by a female artist. Thoughts about this, because everyone has thoughts about this, including really shitty takes by reviewers who don't like it, think it's too commercial. I can't get a read on what... We last talked about Tracy Chapman.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, no. I'm a fan of Beyonce. I would not say that I'm a super fan. I'm definitely a super fan of Tracy Chapman, but I'm a fan of Beyonce. I love her work. I think she's great. I've actually never seen her live. But I don't really love those big stadium shows. I find them very stressful. I think this album is terrific. I think it's got a number of fantastic bangers on it. Beyonce is one of our great national treasures. I haven't quite picked out a favorite song on the album yet, but I love a lot of the duets and particularly the one that she does with Miley Cyrus. I think it's just absolutely fantastic. I am loving the little glow up that Miley Cyrus is having right now. "Two Most Wanted," fantastic song. I have had "Texas Hold 'Em" on repeat. I think it's a fantastic banger of a song. Very fun. I think "Blackbird" is beautiful.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I don't know. What do you think? "Blackbird," she had Black country women artists sing that, which is just a beautiful song. It's a Paul McCartney song. And it's about Black women.

Lydia Polgreen: Exactly. As it's turned out, I didn't know that.

Kara Swisher: So the reaction, I'm just curious why you think the reaction is thus. There's so many people, some of them have a point. It's very commercial. It's a lot of fun. The genres are all over the place, which Beyonce talks about. But I'm sort of like, what's the problem with a really fun album? I'm fascinated by the reaction. And then the reaction to the reaction is quite strong. And it's not just the beehive. Let me just say it's a lot of people. The Take Factory never closes. There are three shifts. I feel sorry for the person on the lobster shift in the Take Factory, but everybody's got to get paid.

Lydia Polgreen: It's interesting. I think there's something about a Black woman having an opinion and something to say in a genre that is dominated by white men. We're living in a society right now where white men feel that they are under attack and aggrieved. Country music is the traditional readout of almost exclusive white male power. If you look at the country charts, it's man after man after man. Country radio, man after man after man. There was that famous quote from a country music executive who said that the girls are like the tomatoes on the salad of country music. So women in general are...

Kara Swisher: They don't eat a lot of salad.

Lydia Polgreen: They don't eat a lot of salad. So if the meat and potatoes are white men, then the idea of a woman stepping into this space, and not just a woman, but a Black woman... It's interesting because country music is obviously huge. It's an amazing global phenomenon. People all around the world listen to country music. I think of it as the most universal form of music, just like Bollywood is the most universal form of cinema. It's sentimental. But the reality is, in terms of its cultural power, I feel like country music feels a little bit marginal. Beyonce is one of the biggest stars in the world. And country music, like all American music, its roots are in Black culture. That is just a fact.

Kara Swisher: Correct, which people are talking about in the React, like she's taking it back. I don't know if she's doing that, but she's definitely claiming. Whether she's taking it back or not.

Lydia Polgreen: What is there even to take back? This is just the history of country music. Ray Charles, country and western. That's where this music comes from. It's been deracinated. It's been put in the hands of white men. But it's funny because it does feel of a piece of this kind of sense of grievance that a lot of white men have. That they're being pushed out of the culture, pushed out of the frame. We don't matter anymore. Women don't want to marry us. They don't want to have our children. So I think there is this sense of being invaded. And when it's a Black woman, it's particularly intimidating.

Kara Swisher: Yes, particularly on a white horse looking like a Trump rally, which was interesting. For those who don't know the picture, there's so much going on in that photo.

Lydia Polgreen: So much.

Kara Swisher: It's a rich text.

Lydia Polgreen: It's a rich text.

Kara Swisher: It's a rich text of information, of symbolic. And she's the queen of symbols. You had New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom on the podcast Matter of Opinion to talk about the role of celebrity in politics. Talk a little bit about that conversation.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, it's fascinating. Tressie's amazing. If your listeners aren't reading her, she's totally fantastic. She is a sociologist and she often focuses on how popular culture works and its meaning. It was a fascinating conversation because we think about the role of celebrities in politics and we think that celebrities have all of this influence. People have been freaking out about Taylor Swift. Is Taylor Swift an op? Is she going to endorse? Is her relationship with Travis Kelce just a plan to set Biden up to win re-election? We had a really fascinating conversation that dug into how little celebrity endorsements really matter.

Kara Swisher: Hers might. Hers might. I have to tell you.

Lydia Polgreen: It depends. It's funny because at the end of the conversation where we landed was that the only endorsement that we think could actually make a difference in this election is Dolly Parton. If Dolly Parton were to give up her lifelong refusal to get involved in politics, which I think has served her very, very well. She talks about things like she endorsed vaccines because she thought that was really important.

Kara Swisher: She winks at Democrats.

Lydia Polgreen: She winks at Democrats. She's a queer icon, obviously. She's a great friend to our LGBTQ community. But she studiously has avoided electoral politics. I think if a figure like Dolly Parton, who is just so universally beloved, were to step away from that tradition and endorse in this election, she won't.

Kara Swisher: She won't.

Lydia Polgreen: But if she did, it would be a sign that this is a DEF CON, whatever the highest number is. That this was an election that was really do or die. I don't think it would actually make as much difference as people think it would. But in Taylor Swift's case, I think the press around it would be so massive, it would matter and it would get people talking and discussing.

Kara Swisher: It could. It could.

Lydia Polgreen: The other thing is that celebrities follow. They don't lead. They are not there. They're listening. Both Taylor Swift and Beyonce are billion dollar brands. They are huge, huge multibillion dollar brands. So they're not going to be out on the leading edge of anything. They're going to be small C conservative and going where their fans are leading them. So I think that what you're seeing, and for Taylor, it's bodily autonomy, caring about trans people and things like that. In this election, and this was another point that Tressie made, race is less of a factor. We have two old white guys. So for Beyonce as a Black woman, she sang at Obama's inaugural ball.

Kara Swisher: I don't know if you remember that.

Lydia Polgreen: I do. But I think they're both quite conservative. So on what is, I think, truly the most explosive issue right now, which is Gaza, she really hasn't said anything. Beyonce hasn't said anything. I won't expect her to say anything. So it's interesting. What you're seeing is that sort of small C conservatism of essentially a mega brand.

Kara Swisher: Fair point. That's really smart. I hadn't thought about it like that.

Kara Swisher: Speaking of another controversy, you wrote a column about the drama surrounding one of President Biden's judicial nominees. I think it's Adeel Mangi. He was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last November. If confirmed, he'd be the first Muslim American appellate judge in the U.S., which is astonishing. At a nomination hearing in December, he was questioned by several GOP senators about his thoughts on Hamas terrorist groups and 9/11. A number of conservative groups have also voiced their opposition, claiming Mangi is anti-Semitic and anti-police. The White House called this a cruel Islamophobic smear campaign. The nomination appears to be in jeopardy with at least three Democratic senators now saying they won't vote to confirm in addition to the GOP opposition. Talk about why you wrote about this. And you note in the piece that Democrats' behavior here concerns you as much as the Republicans. Explain.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, I think this is an absolute outrage. Adeel Mangi is a bog standard, highly qualified nominee. He's got the endorsement of the American Bar Association. They tried to smear him as anti-Semitic essentially because he's a Muslim. Then when a bunch of mainstream Jewish groups came out very strongly in support, saying there's nothing about this guy that's anti-Semitic, the Anti-Defamation League and others, he's in fact worked on issues of religious freedom with Jewish groups and with Christian groups. This guy is a classic American success story. He comes to the United States from Pakistan, rises to the pinnacle of his profession, has a family, devotes tons of time to charitable work and pro bono cases. This is America. This is what the Democratic Party, honestly, this is what every American should stand for. The Republicans just took everything that this guy has done and tried to turn it into a smear. When the anti-Semitic thing failed, then they tried to pretend that he was somehow in league with cop killers through some tenuous connection. None of this surprises me. Ted Cruz is Mr. Bad Faith. Of course, he's going to say that any Muslim is anti-Semitic. Tom Cotton, those kinds of people. It doesn't surprise me. The Republicans are very cynical about this stuff. What drives me absolutely crazy and which I think is absolutely unacceptable is the Democrats fall for it. They allow themselves to be co-opted by these bad faith attacks by Republicans. You've got senators who are in front line battleground states. You have right wing conservative judicial groups that are running attack ads against these Democratic senators basically saying this guy is Hamas's favorite judicial nominee. And Democrats are falling for it.

Kara Swisher: It's Jacky Rosen who's up for reelection in competitive Nevada and Catherine Cortez Masto. They're saying he's anti-police. And who's the third one?

Lydia Polgreen: It's Joe Manchin who is leaving the Senate. So he's got no reason. It's just a middle finger. He refuses to vote for any nominee who can't get a single GOP vote. He calls it his little filibuster. I'm just like, how monstrous is that? The thing that drives me insane, those three senators, all three of them voted for a Trump nominee. A guy who was a Florida judge who literally represented a cop killer. This is a guy in 1999. He represented somebody in the death penalty phase. The irony is not dead. And these three senators all voted for this guy. So Adeel Mangi, who never defended a cop killer ever in his legal career.

Kara Swisher: What's going to happen?

Lydia Polgreen: The White House, to its credit, I think has continued to fight for this nomination. Cory Booker, who's the hometown senator for Adeel Mangi, has also given passionate speeches. He's not giving up. I think a lot of people expected that once it was clear that there were some defections that he would just roll over and withdraw. And Adeel Mangi, to his credit, has not done that. He sent a strongly worded letter explaining his position. So we'll see. When the Senate is back from recess, will they bring him up for a vote? I want to see some leadership from Chuck Schumer on this.

Kara Swisher: Well, they're worried about the Senate.

Lydia Polgreen: But you don't win by compromising on your core values. You just don't. It's ugly. It's politics. It's ugly. There are places to compromise. I just don't think this is one of them. We have a great story about who we are as a country that Democrats can tell about freedom, about religious liberty, about all of these things. It just drives me nuts that they fold.

Kara Swisher: I get it. Sometimes about timing with what's going on in Israel. It's just a perfect time to try one of these.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, but it's also right now. Think about Michigan. Biden could lose Michigan over the Muslim vote. So if Democrats are basically saying we are going to cave to an Islamophobic smear at this moment when they desperately need to reassure not just Muslim voters, but Black voters and others who care about Gaza... The White House is sticking with it.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, let's move on. An essay in New York Magazine's The Cut titled "The Case for Marrying an Older Man" has stirred up a lot of conversation on social media. You pointed this out. The writer, Gracie Sophia Christie, tries to explain why an age gap in a partnership can be a good thing, or at least why it was for her. Though, as Slate put it, that viral essay wasn't about age gap. It's about marrying rich. I am the older man in my relationship with my wife, which let me, for people who don't know, Lydia's wife fixed us up, put us on a blind date, through a text.

Lydia Polgreen: I think it was actually through a Twitter DM. It's back when we were all still on Twitter.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, you're right. I think it was Twitter. I think that Candy got into your wife's, your now wife's DMs and said, "Hey, how would you feel about being fixed up with Kara Swisher?" Candy's just intuitive like that.

Lydia Polgreen: So, yeah.

Kara Swisher: So anyway, but did she think about the old, because I'm older, I'm 15 years or 14 years older than my wife? I don't think so, because at a certain age, the age gap doesn't really matter. That's what I think. I think that the difference between being in your early 20s and being in your early 30s is actually a pretty big difference. Your 20s are such a time of angst. Am I going to make it in life? And you see somebody who's just 10 years ahead of you and you're like, "Wow, they figured it out."

Lydia Polgreen: So the first thing I want to say about this essay is huge kudos to your colleagues at The Cut. New York Magazine is just so good. They're fucking killing it. Between Nepo babies, they love pulling the strings. I'm not really on Twitter anymore. My handle is still there, but I'm not active. But for the first time, I was like, I just got to see what the conversation is. It sort of made Twitter fun again to see all of people's hot takes about this insane personal essay. To me, the meta circumstances were really fun.

Kara Swisher: What was the one that you... I know when Twitter was good. When Twitter was really, really good.

Lydia Polgreen: My favorite tweet was from Caitlin Phillips. She goes by the handle YOLO Ethics. Her tweet was, "This is not about age gaps or marrying rich guys. It's about having red hair and how easy life is when you have red hair." I thought that was just hilarious. Everybody kind of had their angle and their funny thing to say about this piece. But what I thought was really interesting and my social media joke about it was... Do you know what redshirting is?

Kara Swisher: No, but you put it in.

Lydia Polgreen: It's basically when you hold boys back because they mature at a slower rate. Boys tend to mature more slowly than girls. So you hold a kid back and put them into kindergarten a year later. That's called redshirting. So I said this is redshirting, but for husbands. I think it makes sense. Women are more mature at younger ages. Men are...

Kara Swisher: Well, how do you explain the lesbian thing then? Because I think it works out great. I told Amanda, I'll die way before her and she has a chance to get married again and do the same thing. I never think about it as a thing once people reach a certain age.

Lydia Polgreen: I think that's right. Once you reach a certain age, it doesn't really matter. I don't even know how old you are. I don't know how old anyone is.

Kara Swisher: Well, so interestingly, I never give relationship advice because I always think, what do I know? I just got super, super lucky. I met my wife when we were in college. We were literally teenagers. We've been together since my senior year. She and I are actually the same age. We were born five months apart. I got hit by lightning. I'm very, very lucky. I married the right person and I managed to stay with them. I wish everyone happiness and love and good luck in all of those things. I'm not sure I have any wisdom to offer beyond that.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, well, I like it. I am. And thank you, Candy.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, I mean, listen, take love where you find it. That's all I got to say. Age gap, no age gap. What's wrong with marrying rich? I advocate marrying rich. Why not? As long as there's love. That's the thing that matters.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, as long as there's love. As long as there's love. In any case, it was a great essay. You should read it at New York Magazine.

Kara Swisher: All right, Lydia, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, OpenAI's newest tool and the safety warnings accompanying it. And our friend of Pivot, Ari Wallach, is going to tell us why we should be hopeful about the future.

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Kara Swisher: Lydia, we're back. Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison for 25 years following his sentencing last week, though prosecutors had argued for 40 to 50 years behind bars. Judge Lewis Kaplan also ordered Bankman-Fried to forfeit $11 billion in assets. The judge recommended the sentence be served at a low or medium security prison in the Bay Area near Bankman-Fried's parents. Bankman-Fried apologized to FTX investors and employees before sentencing, saying his decisions haunt him every day. Last week, we were predicting how harsh the judge would be. Thoughts?

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, I mean, listen, I am generally speaking against very, very long sentences for pretty much anything, but especially for nonviolent crime. I think that there are a lot of people who just can't stand Sam Bankman-Fried, who thinks that he's a privileged rich kid who has no moral compass and thinks that his shit don't stink. And because he had, quote unquote, good intentions, blah, blah, blah. I accept all that. But I just don't believe that the point of the criminal justice system is retribution. I think it should be to reform people. Is he reformable? I don't know. But 25 years seems like a long time.

Kara Swisher: Well, the judge didn't think so and said so explicitly. It's interesting because he got the middle. A lot of these judges tend to do the middle, right? He could have gotten 110 years. I'm trying to think, people similarly got 11. It was Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, I think that's right. But if you look at Madoff, he got a lot and he destroyed people's lives. Sam Bankman-Fried also destroyed people's lives. Don't get me wrong. But the United States is an outlier in terms of the length of sentences that we give people. I just think that as a general rule, that's a thing. And I'm a person who believes in consistency. So if Trump were convicted of any of his crimes, I would hold the same view, even though this is a person for whom I have utter and complete moral contempt. I just think that our prison sentences are too long.

Kara Swisher: I was surprised by this from you. I really was. I thought you'd say, throw the book at him.

Lydia Polgreen: No, no. I'm just not a person who believes in retribution and vengeance. The judge was making the point that he'll do it again. Like he's dangerous. He's not at all sorry for what he did. He's just sorry he got caught.

Kara Swisher: Absolutely.

Lydia Polgreen: But I think that we need to find other ways to reform and punish and to incentivize good behavior. I just don't know that locking someone up for 25 years at my expense is a great way to solve this problem. He'll be 50-some when he gets out, which is plenty of time to make trouble.

Kara Swisher: Right. I mean, I think the problem of Sam Bankman-Fried is a social problem. It's a problem of capitalism. It's a problem of the way that our economy and our society valorizes certain kinds of people. I think those are big problems that we need to figure out how to solve.

Lydia Polgreen: Right. But I don't think him sitting in prison is going to do it.

Kara Swisher: Well, what could he do? He'd be happy to come back. Mike Milken, they all have these comebacks. And he's certainly someone that Mark Andreessen would immediately back. The problem is capitalism, Kara. It's late capitalism in the way we practice it.

Lydia Polgreen: Late capitalism. I like that.

Kara Swisher: Speaking of early capitalism, OpenAI has announced its latest tool, Voice Engine. According to the company, it can recreate a person's voice within 15 seconds of that person talking. By the way, there's plenty of data on both Lydia and I in general and voice all over the place. The technology will not be released publicly just yet with OpenAI citing safety concerns about usage, particularly in an election year. The company said it's also worried about the tech being used for voice authenticators that control access to online bank accounts and other private applications. OpenAI unveiled its video generator tool, Sora, in February, which is being held off for public use while they read team how it could be misused, like every which way. Come on. Talk about the risks here. Talk about what you think about this. You're not a techie, just for people.

Lydia Polgreen: No, no. I'm just curious what you think about all this. Obviously, I could think of a hundred things as someone who covers tech. I could think of a hundred things about the other ones. When Facebook Live came out, I had a list of problems, all of which came to pass. Talk about what you think about here.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, I mean, I actually have to say, and this is maybe an unpopular view, I worry less about election interference and misinformation and fake news. In the grand scheme of things, when we look at what happened in 2016 and elsewhere, I think the quote unquote technology misinformation played less of a role than we think. What terrifies me, because this is a thing that happened to my grandmother, for example, is you get a phone call and it's like, it's your grandchild and they're like, I'm in trouble and I need you to wire me money. Those are the kinds of things that actually keep me up at night. It won't be that you're impersonating Donald Trump because there are lots of people who can already do that with their own voices quite persuasively.

Kara Swisher: Right. Yeah, Saturday Night Live.

Lydia Polgreen: No, totally. But that ordinary people, the bank account thing, the voice print verification thing, all of those things are just really, really terrifying. They just shouldn't do it anymore. They just shouldn't do it. I think that this is one of those things where it's just a basic issue of the safety of the public. This is like monkey's paw stuff. Pandora's box.

Kara Swisher: Except someone's going to do it. Someone is going to do it, no matter what. Even if OpenAI doesn't, it's available to people, these kinds of things.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah. No, I think that's right. But I think that if ever there was a case for government to take an aggressive stand and regulate, this is it.

Kara Swisher: You think they will?

Lydia Polgreen: Well, I don't have a ton of faith, no. But I think that they should.

Kara Swisher: Well, they certainly didn't do it around facial recognition. They haven't done it around privacy. They haven't done it around... The video generator tool is similar, but different. That's more of a risk to entertainment, although you could do all kinds of things. It just doesn't look quite right.

Lydia Polgreen: Totally. And deep fake porn. Listen, the dystopian possibilities here are just endless. But I don't know, what would you suggest, Kara? How do you think this should be handled?

Kara Swisher: Oh, I feel like Cassandra. I remember being in that room with Facebook when they were introducing Facebook Live and suggesting three or four things that I thought were dystopian. And they just dismissed them. They absolutely knew the government was going to do anything about it and be on the cool element of it. Like, what a tool. I think voice replication can go so many ways. Now, I do think people will then be onto it. Many people, but not everybody, will be onto the ability. I would assume banks would just change the authentication so you can't control access. That's all they have to do. You have to have another means of doing so. People have been cheating for centuries. This is not a new, fresh thing, but this certainly makes it easier. You can see this in the hands of Russians, particularly, who are particularly venal and taking people's money. That's how they use the internet. All these crime gangs. You don't need to kidnap people anymore to steal their bank account. That was the old thing. You've got their eyeball or their voice or whatever. You just need to replicate it. So I think the banks have got to decide what to do. That's one way of doing it. Other is getting into buildings. There's all kinds of ways you could use all these things. But that's any Mission Impossible movie on any year. They always do things like this. What I would suggest is people look at any Mission Impossible or any science fiction movie and there it is, what they'll do with the tools as they come available.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, but I think that's right. But I also think that people can insist on friction. The whole point of technology is to reduce friction. And you can, as a consumer, say, no, I'd like to introduce a little more friction into this transaction. I want it to be a little bit less seamless.

Kara Swisher: A hundred percent. But I think the voice generation, I don't see the pluses for it at all. I don't even see why you'd want it. And the video thing I do, if you're in entertainment and you want to save money. That could be a different thing, but it could equally be abused and together completely abused. I just think Congress has to act and they won't.

Lydia Polgreen: I mean, will they even understand it? In our gerontocracy, right?

Kara Swisher: They do, they do. They can do it. They regulate everything else, so they can do it. Somehow they'll figure it out. They can hire people, experts, expertise. Anyway, we'll see what happens. But let's bring on our friend of Pivot. Ari Wallach is a futurist and a host of the new PBS series, "A Brief History of the Future." The show examines the ways people are problem solving and working to improve the world for the next generations. I welcome it. I wish I was a futurist. So Ari, explain what a futurist is.

Ari Wallach: There are two different ways to think about what a futurist is. There's the way that people think about it in the common way, which is we have a crystal ball and we go into a room or we go onto a stage and we predict what tomorrow is going to be. The reality is it's a much more structured endeavor. A lot of what we do is we look at megatrends. We look at things that have been happening for several years, oftentimes decades. And then we start to extrapolate what those would be like moving forward the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. And within that, we build scenarios or stories about what might happen, not best case, not worst case, but probabilistically, what is likely to occur given these megatrends. So that's what professional futurists do.

Kara Swisher: Right. It's a profession. So in this series, you're really offering a positive view of the future. There's so much, especially in science fiction, you're trying to move away from doom and gloom and dystopia. Why did you feel it was important to explore? I'll just make a note here. It's one of the things I've been trying to do a lot more lately, look at where the good parts are. As you say in the show, we're currently at a sort of inflection point to decide our fate around the environment, but also AI and all kinds of things. Talk a little bit about why you did the positive spin and what the inflection point is.

Ari Wallach: For 20 years, I've been a futurist and I've been going into rooms. What happens more often than not is CEOs or government leaders will say the same thing. "What's the worst thing that's going to happen? And how do we position ourselves not to be part of the worst thing?" Not "How do we position ourselves not to contribute to it?" but "How do we avoid it?" It occurred to me, I have 15-year-old twin daughters. When I look at their bookcase in their room for young adult fiction, every single book that takes place in the future is dystopian. When we look at youth today, depending on which poll you look at, anywhere from 70 to 80 percent say they have dread towards the future. I think back about when I was their age in the 90s, and I was optimistic about the future. Obviously, there were very different trends happening at the time, but net-net, this goes back to sports psychology: if you can't see it, you can't be it. If all we're showing is doom and gloom, and this is not to take away from the doom and gloom of the current moment, that is what we are going to head towards. If we look back at the last time there were good stories about tomorrow that took place not in a perfect future, but in a better future, we have to go back to the mid-1960s to "Star Trek." There was the first interracial kiss on "Star Trek" decades before we actually saw it anywhere else on TV. That hasn't happened for quite some time.

Kara Swisher: For people who don't know, that was Uhura and Shatner, I believe. But go ahead.

Ari Wallach: It was them. The responsibility of a futurist isn't just to help your clients win the future. I don't begrudge folks who do that. I decided several years ago that that's not going to be the way that I'm going to do it anymore. For me, it's no longer client A wins and client B loses. For me now, I view this as a much larger homo sapien project. We either all win or we all kind of lose, and we have to enter into it that way.

Lydia Polgreen: It's really fascinating. I come at this from having been a foreign correspondent. I remember I wrote a piece many years ago when I was covering the crisis in Darfur. There was ethnic cleansing and all these horrible things were happening. I noticed that every interview that I did with someone who was living in a straw hut, having been chased from their home, was like, "Here's my baby and I'm hopeful for my baby's future." So I did some research about this and I found that Africa was actually the most optimistic continent on the earth. The Gallup polling showed that. One of the things that I think is really fascinating about the work that you're doing in this series is you really went all around the world and talked to lots of different kinds of people. It's often the people that you think have the least reason to be optimistic who have the most hope for what the future could hold. I'm curious, what did your reporting and research show about that?

Ari Wallach: It's interesting. I mentioned several years ago, I decided to make the switch into a more protopian or optimistic future. Not Pollyannish, but protopian. Where that came from was I was doing work for the UN Refugee Agency in the Horn of Africa. To your point, Lydia, more often than not, those were the most optimistic folks about the future, the people that were literally on the run for their lives. Whereas people in the global north or in America were the most dystopian, the most doom and gloom. That's what I found as I traveled the world. People could look at the future either as a noun that they were hurtling towards, or they looked at the future as a verb, a thing that they were making and that they were actually a participant in. That mindset was the key differentiator between folks and how they thought about tomorrow. In Morocco, four hours through the Atlas Mountains, I met with someone who was running one of the largest concentrated solar power plants in the world. He said, "We're going to be energy independent, and eventually, much like Buckminster Fuller talked about decades ago, we will link with other energy grids around the world." You don't hear that talk in America. You hear about the grid failing. There you hear about futures that we want to live in as opposed to futures that we want to run from.

Lydia Polgreen: Well, you hear about the grid failing, but you also hear about, "I don't want that solar array in my backyard." It's this combination of already having a certain amount of resources and power that you don't want to give up that prevents you from imagining futures that might involve change.

Ari Wallach: Every conversation was interesting around the world, but I met with a woman, Ytasha Womack, who wrote the book "Afrofuturism." In our conversation, she said, "We've been living in a dystopia for 400 years." She's talking about Black Americans, but in general, she was saying, we've now kind of gone through it, and we are looking at this on the other side about what futures do we want to build. So you don't necessarily have to travel to exotic places. You can go to Chicago and find people who understand that so much of the future is dictated by our past. She and I recently talked about Haiti in the same way. You can look about where we've come from as a harbinger, not just of where we might go, but also where we don't want to go. It's a subtle mindset shift, but I found that folks who were willing to go there, to say the past is not a past dependency, there is a different future. It's not a rainbows and unicorns future, but there's a different future that we can choose that centers humanity as opposed to centering technology or late-stage capitalism or Silicon Valley ethos. The most important thing that I found in the reporting was that people had to have a pretty good idea of where they wanted to go. Again, this wasn't a utopia, but it was a world that they were okay with themselves living in, but more importantly, with their descendants living in generations from now.

Kara Swisher: Let me ask you, you talk about meeting a bunch of interesting people in unusual jobs, including a circular economist, a futures generation commissioner, a death doula. Who really blew you away with their perspective? You just mentioned someone who obviously did, but name one or two who really blew you away.

Ari Wallach: I love going to Lawrence Livermore Lab and seeing the Fusion Center. I grew up on PopSci and Wired. But you just mentioned who really blew me away, which was Alua Arthur, who's a death doula. What's a death doula doing in a show about the future? A lot of what she and I talked about was the reality that until you can envision a world beyond your own lifespan, so you get over your own lifespan bias, it's very difficult to take actions for the far future. In the West, we have death anxiety. In more Eastern cultures, there's more death awareness. That's deeply tied into cultural and religious underpinnings of how they think about death. A lot of what she does, and we visited her in the high mountains of Arizona where she was doing a death doula training, is getting people to be comfortable with the idea of their own mortality. We know that as people go through that, as they move from death anxiety to death awareness, they are able to take better actions and decisions for the far future. That blew me away. This was going to be a show about monorails and jetpacks and quantum and nano. Why is there a woman wrapping people in death shawls? But that's partly how we get to where we want to go.

Kara Swisher: 100 percent. It actually informs everything I do. But what's interesting is the people I cover tend to be much more about, "How am I going to stop death?" That's where they're moving now. Life extension and everything else, which is kind of the opposite. It's quantity over quality.

Lydia Polgreen: It's fascinating. As it happens, my wife is a social worker and she focuses on hospice and end of life. At one point I asked her, what is it that you actually do in this work? She said a bunch of things that are obviously important. But the one that really stuck with me was that she helps people increase their tolerance for uncertainty. I think that that's what you're talking about with the death doula. It's partly creating this death awareness. But I think it's also being comfortable with the idea that we actually don't know. You don't know how long you're going to live. You don't know what the future is going to look like. Creating that sense of possibility and that ability to live with and be in equanimity with an uncertain future feels like a really, really important skill for living with the world in which we're living right now.

Ari Wallach: That's the moment. What we talk about in episode two is that we're in this intertidal moment right now. We're on the tail end, at least in the West, of this kind of enlightenment rationality thinking. If we can quantify it, if we can measure it, we can own it. Man over nature. And we're seeing that didn't get us as far as we want it to get us. In this intertidal moment between what was and what will be, that uncertainty leads to a heightened sense of anxiety, which then leads people to become more short-term in their thinking. They're less likely to go out 10, 15, 20 years, let alone hundreds of years, and they're going to think about the next six months. That's why being able to live with that uncertainty is so important in this moment.

Kara Swisher: Let me ask you a question. We talk a lot about AI in the future on this podcast, both the excitement and the dangers. You dug into both in the series. Talk about that. That's another inflection point, obviously.

Ari Wallach: One of the things that became very apparent as we traveled the world meeting both with experts in artificial intelligence and also folks who are kind of AI adjacent, is that what we are building, what we are coding right now, and this dovetails to what we were just talking about, are these immortal machines. It's not just about what we do right now, which is very important, but it's the fact that we are coding in either optimistic visions of tomorrow or significant bias that will be with us, much like the COBOL programming and air traffic control systems that's still with us 50 years later. That's what we're coding in right now. How we think about AI, what we do or do not do right now, isn't a six-month thing, isn't a two-year thing. It could be a 20 or a 200-year thing.

Lydia Polgreen: What is your favorite protopian piece of culture? Is there something that comes to mind that you're like, this is an example of, I wish that there was more of this? Because you talked about your daughter's bookshelves and dystopian books. I'd love a recommendation for something that could evoke that feeling of possibility.

Ari Wallach: Obviously, the first thing is a TV show, because that's why we made it, to evoke that feeling, that sense of possibility. I'm actually going to go a little bit backwards here. It was the old show on NBC called "Parenthood." My mother passed away a few years ago. My father passed away when I was 18. I had a loving, amazing family. That being said, I'm now a parent. It's like, how do you model the best behaviors that you want both in yourself and in your children? Because that is future making. In the TV show "Parenthood," it wasn't perfect. Those families weren't perfect. But the way the parents modeled a way of interacting with society, culture, and their children was protopian for me.

Kara Swisher: That's great. I'm going to go back and revisit that one. It's a great show. There was one called "Eight is Enough." You guys are too young. No, I used to watch "Eight is Enough." Remember? That was a great show. In any case, speaking of kids, you came out of this feeling optimistic about our future, our kids' futures. I have a lot of kids. You have kids. I think about the future a lot, almost constantly in everything I do. Not just my children, but their children and everything else. I think it's easier to be more positive. You have to kind of force yourself when you have children. But I don't know about that. Some people are quite dark. Did you come out feeling optimistic about our future? Point to one thing that makes you optimistic.

Ari Wallach: I went into the show a little bit down on the state of the Homo sapien project, to be totally honest, because like you all, I read the news. This is what I do. I'm like an anthropologist from the future looking backwards. Where did it go right and where did it go wrong? I tried to trim tablets towards the right. So I went into it a little bit less than where I wanted to be. I came out of it highly optimistic because every single individual that I met with had an optimism that was buoyed by a sense of pragmatic sensibility around where we are as a species and how much there is left to do. They weren't seeing this as chapter 10 of 10. They were all seeing it as chapter one or two of a 20-chapter book. Outside of Amsterdam, we visited a place called Hogeweyk, also known as a dementia village. Instead of putting people who are in a memory care situation with neurodegenerative disease in locked wards, they've actually built villages for them where they can shop, they can go to restaurants, all in a safe environment. It took a tremendous amount of willpower by the founders of Hogeweyk to convince people that this was a good idea. I came out of it optimistic, coming out of Hogeweyk, because I realized the technology stuff was fascinating in this show. Don't get me wrong. But seeing that people could come together and rethink their base assumptions about how we care for one another in the present and therefore in the future changed how I thought we could actually tackle some of our biggest, most wicked social problems.

Kara Swisher: Well, that's true. Someone who's dealing with this right now, it's got to change. It's got to change. And we saw the change there. It's crazy how bad it is. It's really for everybody at every level. It's really not good, at least in this country. Ari Wallach, thank you. "A Brief History of the Future," and I recommend you watch it, premieres on PBS this week.

Ari Wallach: Thank you very much for having me.

Lydia Polgreen: Congrats, Ari.

Kara Swisher: All right, Lydia, one more quick break and we'll be back for wins and fails.

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Kara Swisher: Okay, Lydia, let's hear some wins and fails. I know you wanted to mention Jonathan Haidt and his new book, *The Anxious Generation*, which is getting a lot of attention. Mostly positive from Scott and things like that. I have yet to interview him or anything else, but you had some thoughts.

Lydia Polgreen: Yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily a win or a fail. I just think it's a fascinating example of how our brains work. This book is getting a lot of attention. It's basically diagnosing that the anxious kids having all these mental health issues, the really big thing is phones and mobile phones. They're new, they've totally transformed children's lives. I get it.

Lydia Polgreen: But there was a fascinating review of the book by a scientist in the journal *Nature*, who basically said, "Hang on a minute, there's correlation here, but there isn't necessarily causation." The reality is that there are lots of other factors going on. I'm sure these are addressed in the book. School shootings, how must it feel for kids to be hiding under their desks? Climate collapse. There are lots of reasons for kids to be anxious.

Lydia Polgreen: To me, the thing that makes me feel uneasy about the thesis of this book is that we want to think that this one thing is causing all of our problems. But it's so multifaceted, so multivariate. It's hard to know what's actually causing something. The solution might be more global.

Kara Swisher: I think parents are also addicted themselves. They feel like maybe it's making them feel bad. Social media definitely makes you feel worse. When you're on your phone in a doom scroll, you feel worse. You can see it. Many of us who aren't addicted to anything—I've never smoked, don't take drugs, don't drink—but phone, for sure. I know when it makes me feel bad. One of the reasons I put Twitter away on the shelf is because it really made me feel bad. I think that's where they feel like if I feel bad, they definitely have to feel bad.

Lydia Polgreen: I had a great psychoanalyst that I saw for many years, and he had this thing he would always say. He'd say, "Lydia, 95% of what people tell you is about themselves, and so is the other 5%." It's very hard for us not to assume that what we think and feel is what other people think and feel.

Kara Swisher: Why didn't you just leave therapy at that moment?

Lydia Polgreen: I know, I know. Listen, that has gotten me very far. I left not long after.

Kara Swisher: I agree with you. I think the step now he puts all his stuff out there. That's what a lot of the fans say. "Look, he's out there. People can argue." But a lot of social scientists are like, "This is bullshit." They really are going at it because they think he's not making the case. It's sort of a silver bullet kind of thing. They're not discounting phones and everything else. What they're saying is it's a multifaceted reason, and if we simplify it, it's going to be a problem.

Kara Swisher: I'll do my fail. The new *Road House*. Now listen, people, as you know, I love myself some *Road House* and Patrick Swayze. It's one of my favorite movies. I'm not apologizing for it in any way. Go watch it. It's fantastic, especially when he's doing his jujitsu, whatever the heck Patrick Swayze does. The new one with Jake Gyllenhaal, and it's a great cast by the way, a lot of good people in it. There's that MMA fighter, I can't remember his name. Anyway, it's very entertaining in a weird way, but it's basically they just keep driving boats onto docks. That's really what it is, and some cars into bars. It's so stupid. It's so stupid.

Kara Swisher: And all I kept thinking—and by the way, Jake Gyllenhaal looks fantastic, I will say. And the fighting is...

Lydia Polgreen: His pecs, amazing.

Kara Swisher: His pecs. Oh my God. I think the fighting is uninspired. I think it's dumb. It's like dumb people doing dumb things. I know these movies are dumb, but the original *Road House* was not dumb. It was great. So it's really bad. I was sad that it was bad. I was on a plane and I was very disappointed in it. And I kept thinking, Jake Gyllenhaal is doing this movie, which is really a sad career trajectory for him. And then Taylor Swift. I kept thinking of that the whole time. I was like, wow, they parted. I don't care that she didn't get the red scarf back because he needs it. In any case, that is my fail. What is your win?

Lydia Polgreen: That's a bummer because that's the kind of movie I would really love to save to watch on a long flight. So I'll just pick something else. It was not pleasant.

Lydia Polgreen: So my win is—and I don't know if you checked this out, I don't stay up late enough to watch it live, so I just watch clips after the fact—Ramy Youssef on SNL. Just an absolute delight. He is a Muslim American comedian, and he is just really... we talk a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and people try to use it as a bad word. But there's something really wonderful about seeing a religion that is frankly underrepresented in our culture, right? As someone who is a believer and devout, hosting *Saturday Night Live* during the holy month of Ramadan, talking about how joyful a time Ramadan is. This is what America needs. It was delightful. We need to see that.

Lydia Polgreen: He was funny. He was self-deprecating. He's just an absolute cutie. That little mustache of his. "Xampic for Ramadan" was very funny. "Xampic for Ramadan" was great. So I think that was a big win. Really good job, SNL. Excellent choice of host. It was great. How about you? What's your win?

Kara Swisher: My win? I'm going to give it to my lovely wife, Amanda, this week. The reason I have the kids around is because of you and your wife. Mostly your wife, but you too. Because you hosted the party that we met at. I've been doing this book tour for weeks, and she has been incredible taking care of the kids. They're sick every five seconds. At one point, my son pulled my daughter's elbow out of her socket during one of our trips.

Lydia Polgreen: Oh, my God.

Kara Swisher: I know, she's fine. It popped right back in.

Lydia Polgreen: Kids are so resilient.

Kara Swisher: They are. It's amazing. Let me just say, she's just been great. This is the culmination of a lifetime of work for me, doing the book and everything. She is here for me, and I really appreciate it. And I appreciate you guys for introducing us together.

Lydia Polgreen: Also, you do know the reason that children exist is because of you guys. So just keep that in mind.

Kara Swisher: Well, you know, we have a number of things in common.

Lydia Polgreen: You are, of course, to be generous, Kara Swisher, an extraordinary media phenomenon all on your own. But I think that one thing that you and I have in common is that we're both wife guys. We're both really into our wives, and that's a thing that we share. So yeah.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, they're better than us. They're better than us.

Lydia Polgreen: Well, kind of. They're different than us.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, they're great. To all the wives, we say yay. We love all the wives. But I also just want to say one really, really, really big win, Kara, is your book. I mean, I haven't had a chance to see you and congratulate you on it. It's a bestseller. The audiobook is incredible. And there have been some really stupid, shitty reviews, and you have responded to them with your sword. I just love how you deal with the haters and the losers. You're just out there showing us how it's done. So congratulations on that.

Kara Swisher: Thank you. Most people are nice. That was just the *New York Times*. So anyway, most people have been lovely. It's been a real lovely ride.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, speaking of which, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show, or call 855-51-PIVOT. That's the show. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm one of your biggest fans, speaking of which. We'll be back on Friday with another special guest host and an appearance by someone you'll enjoy. I will read us out.

Kara Swisher: Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Endredat engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Mia Silverio. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to *Pivot* from *New York Magazine* and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back later this week with another breakdown of all things tech and business. And thank you, Lydia Polgreen.

Lydia Polgreen: Thank you. Thank you.