Kara Swisher interviews Joseph Gordon-Levitt (NYTimes), who has signed on to play Travis Kalanick, co-founder and former CEO of Uber, in an upcoming movie.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: We haven’t started shooting it yet. And I’m about to dive into fully researching it and doing the proper prep that I will do. In the last few years, I’ve really made a lot of friends in the tech world. And when it was announced that I was going to play this part, a whole bunch of people with a lot of personal knowledge, and who know Travis or knew Travis, were calling me and saying, like, hey, do you want to talk? And that’s really wonderful. Mike Isaac’s book, of course, that you mentioned is going to be a valuable resource.
What attracted me to this — I think that it is fascinating and important to tell a story about who we reward, as a society, and what we reward. And I think Uber is a good example of the incentives of our whole economy and society being off, and us getting these results where people who are very talented in certain ways, but then are maybe stunted in other ways, are being given tons of power that is not necessarily good for humanity, as a whole.
Kara Swisher: Or they’re ill-suited to handle — or they have bad intentions. It’s interesting because I wrote a big, long piece in Vanity Fair on how I spent a lot of time with his parents, including his mom, who died sadly, tragically. I spent a lot of time with him since the beginning. And I would say we have a testy relationship at this point.
But one of the things was, the overdrive of all the toxic things about Silicon Valley were all present in Travis. And at the Code Conference many years ago when we were talking about autonomous vehicles — it was the most telling moment of this guy — we were talking about autonomous vehicles, and they were having financial problems. And he did things so carelessly — carelessly about drivers, carelessly about everybody, in lots of ways. He goes, you know what? When we get rid of the guy in the front seat —
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: [CHUCKLES]
Kara Swisher: — that business model will work. I’m looking forward to autonomous cars. As soon as we can get rid of that guy, it’s great. And I said, thank you very much for telling the truth about how Silicon Valley feels about everybody. As soon as —
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: About humanity.
Kara Swisher: Yeah.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I do find —
Kara Swisher: [CHUCKLES]
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: — that a troubling thread throughout a lot of Silicon Valley. There’s a lack of love for humanity and an overblown almost deification of technology —
Kara Swisher: 100%.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: — in a way that — and I think deification is the right word because I think it borders on religious zealotry, at times, when people deify technology in a way that takes humans out of the equation and empowers, of course, the companies who are making the tech. And they can say, oh, this is what tech wants. This is evolution. Tech will inherit the Earth from humanity.
And I feel like it’s, in a lot of ways, a parlor trick, because really, technology is only as powerful as humans make it. And every technology can be incredibly positive or incredibly negative. It’s not about the will of the technology. There is no will of the technology. It’s the humans that are using it.
This particular point, about Silicon Valley being somewhat blind to human beings, speaks to my concern about visions of a high-tech future. There's no sense of the perfectibility of man. That's been scrapped in favor technology. It's the technology that bears the burden of future perfection.
They talk of other things, too, many other things. Like this, the good stuff, the juice:
Kara Swisher: But when you think about someone who’s coming up like you right now, a lot of them want to be — one survey in 2019, 83% of people from 13 to 38 said they’re willing to give influencing a try — becoming an influencer. But only a tiny percent of those people actually build a business. And much of those businesses — they’re really quite yuck, you know what I mean?
When you look at that, if you were a young person now — you obviously went through a network. And then now you’re moving on to streaming and things like that. What is the evolution plan for people’s careers now?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I love getting to talk about this with someone like you who is really tech-minded and future-focused, because if we zoom out a bit, which is where I think it gets really interesting, I am really worried about the possibility that all of that art and creativity is framed within this attention economy, because that is not the way to happiness.
And I say this as someone who has enjoyed some amount of fame and high attention. And I feel very grateful for that. But I can also feel like I can say, with some confidence, that’s not the shit that’s going to make you happy. That stuff is more like a drug. And so I love the idea of a lot of people being interested in art and creativity and expressing themselves. But how can we reorient our minds around that art and creativity away from, get as many followers as you can, get as much attention as you can?
My most meaningful and joyful experiences don’t come from the red carpet or from the box office or anything like that. They come from being in the middle of making this little thing work or making it funny, making it good, and doing it together with other people. And that is the juice. That’s the really good stuff. And so I would love to see art and creativity oriented around that as a goal.
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