Season 3, Episode 4: Recode (with Kara Swisher)

0:00 That's different. That's just a bunch of white guys talking. Apple, apple, apple. Oh that damn Google. Facebook. Welcome to Season 3, Episode 4 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert, I'm David Rosenthal, and we are your hosts.

0:28 We are here today to talk about the acquisition of Recode by Vox Media. And in fact, broadcasting live from the Recode Podcasting Studio in the red chairs nonetheless. We're here with one of the uh the greatest people. Actually probably the greatest person that we could we could imagine to help us tell this story. All right, okay. The one and only Keris Wisher. Nice to meet you. It's not really the recodes, it's just a st stupid. We're not fancy here at Vox Media. That's why I'm here. Listeners don't know that. It's really impressive. We're in suits. We had a really nice view of the Bay uh of the Bay Bridge before in our other office, but it was too expensive. So here we are looking at the trans bay terminal.

1:06 Beautiful in a ten, right? No, no, that was before we had the night. So this is much nicer than anything else. Oh, we'll get into that. Yeah. Okay. All right, listeners. Kara needs no introduction, but I'll do one anyway because it was fun to put one together. Kara is the executive editor and co-founder of Recode. She is the illustrious host of the Recode Decode podcast. She's an absolute legend in the technology industry, previously founding the All Things Digital Conference and blog at the Wall Street Journal, which was a pioneer of legitimizing blogging and creating an actually good technology conference. Kara has been called one of the greatest interview of our time by Ezra Klein and once interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. in their only ever combined interview actually in the chairs we're sitting in.

1:53 I actually vividly remember where I was when I watched this for the first of many times. She's interviewed President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the mooch, and famously made Mark Zuckerberg sweat through his Facebook Illuminati hoodie on stage. She's an amazing storyteller and a renowned author, and we are so so lucky to have her with us today. So that's nice. I think we'll stop now. No, you won't get off that either. All right, well, if you're new to the show, you can check out our Slack at acquire.fm. It's the place where David, myself, and sixteen hundred of our favorite listeners discuss episodes right after we release them, along with real-time hot takes and some of the biggest tech news of the day. All right listeners.

2:34 Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora. The agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Lagora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do. operate with obsessive customer focus.

3:08 They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legor's Bet Here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work. and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time. And they recently launched Lagora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

4:00 And Lagora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Lagora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head to head pilot with their top competitor, they win seventy percent of the time. Lagora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from twelve hundred legal teams in fifty countries. And crazily they went from one million

4:27 Eighteen months. truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client.

4:43 If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, You can learn more at Lagora.com slash acquired And just tell'em that Ben and David sent you. All right. Well can we dive in? Yes, please. All right. Let's do it. Okay. So

4:59 Carrie, you have a super interesting personal story that we won't get into here today, but listeners, of course, should go listen to you on the Ezra Klein show. Sure. great interview where you talk all about that series. I think it was one of our carve outs a while back. Yeah. Yeah. It was a great Ezra is a great interview. It was great. The Cliff Notes version is out of school You work in print journalism to start, you're a reporter in D C first at the Washington City Paper. Then at the Washington Post, brief detour and TV in between. Again go listen to the Ezra Klein show. Um

5:30 And and David's not just saying that like so we can save time or something. It's one of my favorite podcast episodes I've listened to in the last year. You should go listen to it. Trevor Burrus None of that sounds like tech blogging. No. Because you basically invent tech blogging after that. But you do need. During that time period, your Partner. Walt Mossberg. Absolutely. How did you first meet of course he was also a decent part of the I was writing a book because I was working for the Washington Post and I started covering AOL when it was tiny. It was a tiny little company, which I think I talked about in the Ezra's show. And so he was an integral part of the early success of AOL. He had a very powerful column in a print column.

6:06 In the Wall Street Journal and Personal Technology. And he wrote a very positive review of AOL. And so I interviewed him for it because he sort of got a lot of people to use it for the first time. Um and he he picked it over two very big efforts by Sears and um IBM. Yeah computer. Computer Prodigy. Yes. And so he said those suck and please use AOL. And this was a big giant boost. The reason Steve Cayst owns half of Hawaii is I think'cause of Walt Mossburg. Mm-hmm. Today. Yeah, but did A well invent the gif that's the Uh I don't think about that. I don't know. In any case, he was he was the person who did it. And so he he got what was going on way before other people. And I had already been very much interested in uh digital stuff. And so he I he was just in my book. He was he's he's beginning of a chapter of a book. So and then we we just hit it off and both saw things the way print was going the same exact way. And so he then

6:56 tried to convince the Wall Street Journal to hire you away from the post. He did, he did. He got me in my job at the post and in the at the journal and they didn't have anyone covering the internet. There wasn't the internet. Which is crazy. Well, no, it wasn't because it w didn't exist. Like you know, it just didn't exist. It's like covering uh cryptocurrency a couple of years ago. There wasn't anyone covering that. But this was it was ninety seven when you joined the journal, right? Yeah, but it really wasn't it was online services. You can't you know, there was no Google, there was barely an Amazon I think I joined in ninety six actually, somewhere somewhere in there. But it was uh it was barely uh Netscape had had gone public, but it wasn't very big. You had Microsoft really, and that was more computing and it was not internet computing. And so very few people were using the internet. And you Mark Andreessen was a teenager, I think, and creating um uh the mosaic browser and and at at the University of Illinois. And so there wasn't there w it wasn't that big. Uh people think it was, but it wasn't. But it was real small and Yahoo had j when I met them, they had just a few people working there on Amazon, just a few people, so

7:54 No, it wasn't big. Hm. Well so w w did the journal have a tech bureau already or did they were covering things like Intel, like the the chips, they had chip coverage, they had Microsoft coverage, obviously, because that was software. They had um Apple coverage, mostly downward, the downward facing Apple, essentially. Um and they had you know, they had stuff like that. It was all about the the the hardware essentially and also the ships and the inerts and stuff like that. It was very technical. And so I was the first person hired in that bureau to cover the internet

8:26 Per se. Like what it was in online services and Yahoo. And so there was no one covering these these these people. Excite. There was Excite. You don't remember that company. I was it. And people made fun of me, as I've said many times. Well, Carol, what what do you think it was about you that You know, this weird corner of society that's clearly not a thing yet. But you're you're all in on it. You're saying the internet is made. Well I got it right away. It's sort of like seeing a movie and going, Oh, like you know I think I just saw it and I was very interested in it before when I was at the Washington Post. I was very interested in we had these little uh trash eighty computers that we used. I used to write party stories about Washington. For the style section, and I used the trash eighty and we put the couplers on telephones. It was crazy that we did this at like payphones, if you remember those. And then I started liking the phones that we had. We had a we had a portable phone that was in a suitcase and I was obsessed with it and I carried it around and nobody was interested in it. And I kept saying, This makes total sense. Why aren't we using this? Why doesn't everybody have why do we have a it just started

9:28 like making connections. And I think I just made connections on just this one thing. And the minute I saw it, when I saw the the browser and and the World Wide Web, which you called it the World Wide Web, you have to spell it out all the time. y you knew you saw oh oh just a minute. And so there was all this experimentation going on. Like there was A T and T had this thing called interchange, um there's CompuServe and Prodigy. There's all kinds of stuff. But I I remember thinking this is gonna be gonna change everything. And I covered retail for the Washington Post and you could see classifieds were gonna get screwed. You could see I remember being mad at deadlines at one point. I'm like, Why do we have deadlines? That's stupid. People should get news any time and I I don't I met a lot of people that thought like I did, you know, so and there weren't that many, but Walt was one of them and and so I just kept pursuing it and even though people made fun of me.

10:13 And until they started to s be worth something in the nineties, in the in the mid to late nineties. And that was a boom. That was a one of the first boom. Yeah. No, it was the boom. It was several booms. That was one of them. The the ninety early nineties, in the late nineties, I'm sorry, not the early nineties, were um a time when all these these companies started to be worth a lot. And there was like the Mark Andreessen was on the cover, I think he was in his twenty. The King, the the king of something. He was on a throne and he had hair at the time and was barefoot and like this guy's gonna rule the universe and so there was lots of attention to it. And then Bill Gates got very wealthy. And that was a big deal. He when I met him he was wealthy but not that wealthy. Um and Steve Jobs was making his comeback, so

10:55 Deadlines. Mm-hmm. You And well Together, I believe.

11:00 went to the Wall Street Journal after you've been there for a while and you're like We should do a blog. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was I got I got pregnant, I had a baby and When I came back, I was just fat I read a lot of blogs when I was away, and I especially Andrew Sullivan had one. Um there was uh suck.com, if you recall. Suck.com

11:18 It was great. I forget what that guy's name is. Anyway, it was very funny. I saw some others like TechCrunch and others and I thought w they sh They suck at journalism. Why can't we do deadlines? Why can't we do this? We should do this. We should have an ongoing conversation. And we couldn't convince the management of the Wall Street Journal to do it. Was it the business side? They were just ignorant. We just kept saying this is like the way of the future. And they didn't agree with us. They were interested in a Saturday and things like that. But they did understand conferences and they had a conference division that was just terrible. And we said we'll do a conference the right way. And so we you know, it was a money making thing from the start. And so it's a good way to get in. And we started with the conference in the early two thousands and then we moved to the website I think in two thousand and seven. Yeah. We had five years of the conference going on. Right. Did you always intend the conference to be the way to bring management of the journal around? Yes. One hundred percent. Like here's some money, here's some millions for you know, and profits. And what reporter brings millions and profits in? And you know, they don't bring ten dollars in if you bring, you know, more than a thousand dollars and I can confirm I

12:24 I was actually a spreadsheet monkey at Dow Jones before I became a V C D. Yeah, like you guys made like Millions. Millions. Twenty percent of the journal's profit. Yeah, at some point. Yeah. We were like twenty we called it ourselves and mister Twenty, but they weren't making any money, so that's a low bar. It was a low bar. We did call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Twenty percent. But but but the problem the journal made is they made a deal with us where we got a percentage of the profit, so they didn't make that much money. So uh which is good for me and good for Walt and Walt has a nice T V sit and everything, but um Were you an employee of the journal then? I was originally and then I went became a contractor. I did. I didn't want to work for them anymore. And why's that? I don't like working for people.

13:05 I'm a bad employee. So I'm doing a thing for Forbes on this, being a bad employee. Like I'm a bad employee. I hate bosses. I think they're stupid. I'm rude. I'm just not a good employee. And so I'm a pretty good point. Well, Vox is great. They never bother me and they're smart enough not to. But like they were making decisions about the internet that I thought were stupid and I knew more and I just was I just was tired of banging against a my head against a wall and and they They just didn't want to do they were not very into online stuff. They were later and they had some early stuff. Bill Gruskin did a lot of really cool stuff. But they didn't they weren't interested in it. They just they thought they saw it as an adjunct, they saw it as something to beat. They thought it was gonna go away. This was not uncommon at newspapers. Um when I was at the Wa Washington Post, they had they when they started it, they had a separate division in in Virginia. They kept the online people over there and I was like, This has to be fully integrated and you know, I just didn't I didn't I w I and I didn't want to be management. That was the other part. That was sort of anathema. So is that why

14:02 I'm curious I was gonna save this question until later, but Um You sort of become a a half entrepreneur with all things D. But it wasn't until much later that that you Fully become a lot of people. We were from the beginning. We got to do what we wanted to do. And the way we kept them at bay was we made money, right? So if you make money, they shut up. They like just bring us the bugs. Just here's the bag of money, leave us alone. Like that kinda stuff. And they kinda did. And Walt had a really big reputation then and was making a lot of money for them in the print publication because his

14:32 Thursdays when his column appeared, that's where all the big ads were. That was the big ad day for the Wall Street Journal, one of them. he was important for their business from a print perspective. They would do what he wanted, essentially, and and should have because he made them a lot of money. And so they indulged us in this thing and by the way it made money. So why and and also brought attention. And then it brought great attention'cause the first year we had gates, we had jobs, then we had

14:55 Gates and Jobs. Then we had this person and that person and did these amazing interviews that got a lot of attention. And then we had Gates and Jobs. And so W what's to argue with. Except they did. Except they did. Did you c did you guys consider though? Doing it fully independently to start? Or do you think the timing was w wrong in the beginning? We should have, but it wasn't you know, we could've and we didn't. I you know, Wald w had a great franchise there, I think I I was a contractor, so I didn't mind as much to be a lot of reporters need to be at a big th they that's their identity as being part of the blank and

15:28 I felt like it was the first time I realized you didn't need the giant mothership to be famous. Like you could do it on your own. And I'd seen others do it. There's a lot of people on the internet who became You know, whatever you think of Michael Arrington, and I don't think much of him still to this day. Uh he got a he got a Andrew Sullivan, great. And who seems to have gone a little crazy too, but they got their own thing based on their own work. And so one of the things I always say to people is If you do the work Nobody can touch you. Like if you do good work, it has to be good work, it has to either make money or cause attention or something. Has to have some value, whatever that value happens to be. If you do the work

16:03 Nobody can hurt you. Ever. Like I a lot of people they come to me with political issues at the company, I'm like, do the work and they're like, Yeah, what about this guy who doesn't like me? I'm like, Do the work. Like trust me when I tell you if you do the work Aside from various issues of sexism and ageism and things like that, which do exist at every single company I've worked at. If you actually Performing.

16:23 You tend to Get rewarded. Or you tend to. And again, women are at least you get license to do whatever you want. And you also have to not care. You have to also not care. I didn't care to be in a management. I didn't care to climb the ladder. I didn't care if they liked me. Um and so that helped. That helped a great deal. And you had the leverage that if you go do it on your own, that's also gonna be successful. Oh yeah, they would hate that. They would hate that we succeeded without them. But I don't you know. Okay. And by the way, I also the important thing, which I hate to do that's such a trope of Silicon Valley, I didn't care if we failed.

16:53 I didn't care. And I was older at this point. I was much older. So it's You're in your thirties already, right? Fourties. No. Yeah. You you did uh you know profit sharing with them where you guys took most of it. Did they ever try and renegotiate that? Well, they originally w you know it was interesting, the first year we made I forget it was, it was this good it was a good sum of money. It was a million bucks or something like that. We made a lot of money, but we didn't even try but w nobody was trying at all and we made money. And

17:16 I remember. Calling Wald and I said, D I I think I said this on the other show. Did you get the flowers? Because I didn't get the flowers. Like I send you fucking flowers if you made a money. And and the next year we're like, You're giving us money and so I think they gave us forty thousand dollars extra. They thought that was like a big deal. And then they didn't want to give us. Yeah, like I know. And we were like oh that's not very much. And so I think it was f Firty thousand dollars sticks in my head, but And then the next year they just didn't want they were like mad about the forty thousand dollars and we're like, Well give us part of the profits. Like I don't know why they did it. Like they just did. And so they gave us a third of the profits and it was a lot of money. And they hated it. They hated it, but they couldn't. It was like a three or four year contract. Well, this is the thing. And I remember being in a cat, that is now like it's

17:58 It's exactly what you guys realize. No, exactly. No, they hated it. I remember one guy is like we never should have done that. That was our error, and I'm like, You were so greedy for the short term, you didn't understand. What it did is it unleashed the idea that reporters could go on their own like Jessica Lesson at the information or Kevin Delaney at courts. Yep. Absolutely. Both great Wall Street Journal reporters, but they all of a sudden were like, Kara made a break for the border, now I'm gonna do it. And so that was the great part. So you started the trip. Yes, I did. No, we did. We did. It was like you could, you could. It's worth calling out just how much talent you cultivated there, too. Yes, we do. At the journal, that was Kevin and they weren't at All Things D, but we we tried to get Kevin to come to All Things D, but he wouldn't take the risk at the time. He didn't want to leave the journal. He knows that he knows. He knows. We talked about it. But there was I mean everybody was there at that time. Yeah, we were.

18:55 Like you said, Jessica. Lesson she was. We had uh great we've had amazing like Mike Isaac is amazing, um Nelly Bowles is amazing. Yeah, yeah, everybody was there. Everybody was there. Yeah. We had a lot of people coming through. We were good at training people. Were you and Walt like Were you out there identifying people? Were you recruiting? Yes. Yeah, because people wanted to work for something exciting. You know what I mean? And we were doing one of the things we also were doing, which other places weren't doing, is we were running exciting journalism. We were doing like personality like Peter Kafka and who's still at uh at at Recode. We were doing like Hey, this Comcast deal sucks and here's why. Like that we had that kind of tone. Trevor Burrus That was a big part of why you wanted to do the blog, but you wanted to have an opinion. We knew like uh when I write columns I've done Dave, I do checking. I do I called Mark Zuckerberg when I ask when I'm about to say something terrible about Mark Zuckerberg. But you know, we spent a lot of time doing reporting and so a lot of we had a tone of voice

20:00 That had um whether it was great features that we did or like look at this or This is a mess over at Yahoo. We we would have narratives, the whole Yahoo things, and we'd have great d graphics too. Um John Pachkowski, who now works for BuzzFeed, uh did amazing graphics. raise the Yang Tanic, which was you know the Titanic for Yahoo. We would put a uh we put a red um you were gonna No he laughed. He didn't care. Most people some people care, but we don't care about them. But we put a ball gag in Eric Schmidt's mouth when he kept saying stupid things. So every time he said stupid thing, we'd say, Eric Smith Eric Schmidt said a stupid thing again today and embarrass Google, the ball gag goes up. And so we don't do that now. But it was great. And then I had a little camera, little flip cam that I would like shove in people's face. That was a precursor to a lot of stuff. Yeah. So we would I'd stick it there and like Hi, hi, how you doing? How you doing? Like to whoever I was around. And then you post it on the sites. I just would post them fold on the sites. And I think people like that. It was fun. It sort of it was we were trying

20:58 Everything different. One time I did a whole story that just said Um Apple Twitter, Apple Twitter, Apple Twitter, just to see how many likes we not not how many likes, how many uh stupid how because how nobody cares about anything. And so we were and then you would just it would just be honest. And I think that's was what was great about it. Like Peter Kafk is a perfect example of that. Great reporting, because he always got the scoops. That's right, we always got the scoops. That was critical. But at the same time. And we got the scoops whether we had access or not. Like if they gave us access, great. If they didn't, fuck you. Like You know what I mean? Like that's the kind of thing we feel. Like don't give great. I'm good without you your help. I'm good with with your help.

21:36 Um but we didn't we we didn't cultivate that access y journalism and yet we got a lot of access, which is which I think having worked at The Wall Street Journal. It was all about access. Like then we're going to give it to you first as an exclusive. I kind of hated that. I like I ha I don't mind it, but I'm like, uh, what am I leaving with. Well it comes with strings attached, right? It always does. And and you also you mentioned this on the the Ezra Client podcast, but Your strategy is already know everything that's going on. And then go talk to them. And then they have to tell you.

22:07 Okay, I always know everything that's going on, but sometimes I don't. No, I actually do these days. It's really kinda sad. I've forgotten things. Like I literally have a list of tips people have told me that I've forgotten about. Like there's a I have a really good tip on Facebook that I literally am waiting for Kurt Wagner to get back from his honeymoon. Because I know no one will get it. Like I'm just just sitting there. But I would have but in the old days just typed it right up and shoved it out there. But No, things have changed in that way. Th the the stuff we pioneered, everybody else copied or and we copied from other people, et cetera, et cetera. But everyone iterated on a little bit of our model and you know, BuzzBeague has a similar tone. Everybody's done a lot of the stuff we did and now Jessica's doing these long stories, which people are now iterating on her innovations. Um So so I think people have caught up to a lot of our tricks. Who who reminds you today of the pioneering you back then that was breaking all the rules? Uh you know Jessica a little bit. Um but she's doing a different thing. So you know, she has this long stories and I I I I you know Some of what Axios is doing kind of, but I think it's I think it's formulaic and I think he'll get tired after a while. I think that one's gonna exhaust you. Although certain pe like I like Mike Allen. I like some of the newsletters. Casey Newton has a newsletter called The Interface that I love recently. I thought he was it I just

23:18 I I've always like try to bug him about access journalism, but this thing is great. It's totally insightful and useful. What I'm interested in is journalists who make products that people find useful and helpful to their lives. Or insightful. Whatever format it takes, I don't care. Like same thing with podcasts. We started this four or five years ago. I forget it's four years ago. Well hold on. We're gonna come back to the third. Okay, all right. We just decided we just decided we just decide to do things. And that's the environment I wanna be in. Like I just now I'm gonna do this. Like too bad. Same thing with the New York Times. I'm gonna do it. Like did I think about that I work for a Vox? Sure, but I don't care. Like I have a plan, like why I'm doing it that way. For folks that haven't checked it out, you had a uh I think a few amazing op eds times. I have one a week now. Yeah, there's about five now. I have gonna have two this week. Last week was on uh Trump mouthing off on ludicrous.

24:13 So it's they're unfair to him. They're unfair. By the way, we're well we're gonna ask you later, but the mooch. Yeah, which was great. That was a great. That was so great. Well, here's a good example of that. So everyone's like, Oh, you can't interview him. I'm like, why not? Sure I can. So I I what I d what I had done like I think that's what I like like I'm having a big fight today on Twitter about Bannon. They're like you can't interview him. I'm like uh yeah, I can. No you can. Well I'm going to. So whatever, like I get your problems with him, but I'm gonna still interview him. Um but w think people tell us about you. What you can't interviewer. And we say we can. Yes, you can. Like whatever. She'll be on your show. Right, exactly. Oh come on. Is there a clean IT? No one's listening on it. Tim Cook ain't listening. And by the way, he did a great interview with me recently on MSNBC.

25:03 Oh, so what happened was I trolled him on Twitter all the time. I just he just made me laugh. Like but I also thought it was appalling in many ways. And so I just kept writing Hey Scaramucci and then I would make a joke about whatever he had stupid thing he had said. And uh I I forget there were a lot of them. There went they went on and on like like hundreds of them. They were terrible for me to do. And then I was at this event that John Battel had in Silicon Valley at a restaurant, um at this restaurant, there was a thing and this and I don't wear my glasses, I don't see very well. And this person was like coming over and his tiny little man was like headed my way with a lot of hair and I'm like, I don't know, who is that? And he comes right in my face and Scaramucci and he's like, Oh you, I know you, you're mean to me on the internet. I'm like, Oh my God, Scaramucci And we ended up talking all she's Italian, I'm Italian. It was great. We had a great bunch of drinks. We laughed and I said, You gotta come on my podcast And he goes, Are you kidding me? I'm like, Absolutely not. And we did it at his office, his crazy office in New York and it was fun. And I think he was surprised that'cause I'm super liberal on Twitter, obviously, and anti Trump and He thought, Well, why wouldn't she talk to me? Like

26:06 But of course I would. Why wouldn't I? He was really interesting. And actually it was a good podcast. It was it was good. I've been Uh, my favorite interview you've ever done. Yeah, it's one of them. He's the mooch. He's he's like caricature. He's not a human. He is a but he's also a caricature. Well yes. Yeah. But you can tell in your interview that like There is a method to his madness. There is. There is. But he's still the mooch. He's still the mooch. Hey you're in New York. Come to my club. I went to his club. Like why wouldn't I? Like, are you kidding?

26:38 Yeah, it's a giant steak. All right, I'll eat it. I'm a vegetarian, but I'll go for it. I did I ate a steak. Did you break your rule for Sure, why not? It was a good steak. He's the mooch. All right, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

27:06 Yep, your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT. And your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Banta's own research found that around seventy percent of companies have this quote unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all.

27:27 Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep.

27:43 It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half. Which is exactly why more than sixteen thousand companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake are. All stay audit ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor. Every AI tool.

28:06 The whole environment. And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get$1,000 off vanta at vanta.com slash acquired. That's V A N T A.com slash acquired for$1,000 off. And just tell'em.

28:32 That Ben and David sent you. So D. Yeah. You're Mr. and Mrs. Twenty percent, you and Walt. We get to towards the end of twenty thirteen. Yeah. The contract for D is up. Yeah, we had signed another one with Rupert Murdoch, much to my chagrin that I did that. But when he bought the company, he loved Walt Mossburg, I'll tell you that. He didn't know my name for a long time.

28:56 He uh we signed a first contract with them and then the things just everything at Dow Jones. Was that another three years? Yeah, something like that. Right when they bought it. Oh that was two thousand seven. So you signed the couple with them. Yeah, I know. We did. We were there a long time. Total of seven. Maybe two contracts. Yeah. But we're go ahead. So I never actually met him when I worked there, but uh my desk on the eighth floor in in twelve eleven. was when I was hired, there was headcount allocated for my job, my boss had hired me. And um

29:30 Wendy Dang, his then wife. I knew who She wanted her personal assistant to take my desk. So my my boss had to go and fight with News Corp Corporate and Wendy did. No no no. Oh Wendy? Oh, I mean I wasn't even there yet, but my boss won. Yeah. I like Wendy. It was it was a victory.

29:54 Just can't even go into it. It's quite a night. Yeah. I'm sure. Yeah. Um Alright, so when did you know that the tried and then after that, um First of all, they didn't want to invest. We had an idea of to do all things finance, all things whatever. We had a great idea. And John Miller, who was the chief digital officer at the time, loved it. Former AOL. And I knew him super well from writing books on AOL. And Uh, I liked him. I think he's super innovative. Uh has done very well since then. But he wanted to do all he liked the idea, all things, this, all things. Like we we you would have a conference, we thought about newsletters podcasts were not thought of at the time, but that certainly would have worked, or events, you know, finance, health. We

30:34 We were gonna women like we could have like owned a lot of categories and they just didn't want to invest. It was a second of the paper, you can't be our reporters who were well known. Like you make star they didn't want to make stars of reporters. I think that might I don't know why. Maybe they just were busy with whatever they were busy with, like sports rights. Phone hacking. Well, exactly. So that happened. So we had a lot of pushback. We got a lot of hostility from the journal people themselves'cause we often beat them. Um, and they didn't like that and we were We weren't that nice to them. Like like when they stole our stories, we're like hey you you shoplifters. They hated that. Like be collegial. I'm like, we're not your colleagues. So no. Um, I don't work for you. Like I don't have to be nice to you. And so

31:15 Um they it was j they just had an old school way of thinking that we didn't and they they were resentful. I think they were aware of how much money we made. I think they would say that wasn't an issue, but I'm sure it was. They didn't like us being pr famous also. And so it just was It was just they just wasn't ready for us, right? You know, today they're different. Um Or maybe they are. I don't I I don't care. I don't read the Wall Street Journal. So um

31:39 In any case. Exactly. I do read the New York Times, which is why I'm there. And then the phone hacking thing happened and we were like, oh God, these people. We're trying to pretend they're not satanic and they are right so what's the what's the phone hacking thing for us? What happened was the only good thing was Wendy swatting away the pie, you know, pretty much in that incident. But they hacked the phone of a dead girl. News Corp did. News Corp Internet. And it was run by this woman in the Times of London. And they and they did it. They did these terrible things that were just so unethical. And we're all there were like, Oh God, just can we hang out with these people anymore? They're not they're giving us a hard time. They're not gonna invest in us. We're too small to invest in, but if we want to get big, they won't give us the money to get big. It was just like they aren't gonna do what we want and we're too small And too big at the same time. You know what I mean? And so they just like it wasn't going anywhere. And so We d we went around and interviewed a bunch of people. We wanted to not have a venture capitalist, so we interviewed media companies and we had a list and

32:36 We had you know A, B, and C people we'd love to invest in us and we talked to a lot of them. Um Bloomberg, her, everybody. What was your hang up with taking V C I just didn't want to listen to a V C. Like eventually they'd screw me. Eventually they screw me, right? Like like I know them, I covered them. I'm like eventually they screw you. So no thank you. And Um and so we wanted to be careful about it. We wanted a media investors. We wanted media investors who understood media because we weren't gonna make a ton of money. Like there just wasn't. You know, we did we could do okay, but it wasn't a massively scalable business. And so we wanted someone who cared about it and who we could experiment with. And so we went with NBC because we like the television thing.

33:14 And we went with Terry Semmel, who had worked for Yahoo, but actually was originally a media investor and he had a media company called Windsor. He did. And he had a w he was retired and he had a venture not a venture firm, it was an investment firm. that invest in media. So you guys raise twelve million dollars. Yes. January twenty fourteen, you launch All things. All things D. Well, the general keeps all things D. They do. They wouldn't sell it. We tried to buy it from them, but Rupert wanted thirty million dollars for it. They were going to sell it to us. We offered them a million, which was insane at the time. Trevor Burrus Because you took every single employee came with New De Rica. Yes, they do. And what would that have even gotten you? Did people like was there RSS feeds that people would sell it? Just was a name. We had a lot of we had a lot of Yeah, we had everything.

33:55 It would have been nice to have it. Yes, we would have kept all things C and would have kept the brand name, but they never used it is the thing. They did WSJD, whatever that is. So uh but they they never used it. I was like it's just pure peak that they did that. It was insane. That was a waste of their money. They could have had a million bucks from me, but And that was way too much to be. That would have been meaningful to their operating property for the I. Yeah, I was like, it was so dumb. And he wanted thirty million dollars. And I remember thinking I I you know, I c I could buy fuck you rupert dot com for that much money, right? Like come on. Like which would have been funny and I don't know. It just was a it was not a good parting. It wasn't they were obnoxious to us on the way. They tried to say they fired us, which was crazy. But you know, whatever. Okay, so

34:37 Oh, originally it was re slash code and then it's capital R, capital C capital. No, it's just Rec. I don't know. The mast head is all lowercase. It's all lowercase. Dan Fromer came in and cleaned it up. Uh, I don't like the slash. I don't know why I just did. It was stupid. It was uh you should never let me design anything. But um but Recode takes. And this and that. And I li I d we just liked it. The minute we saw it we're like, Oh yeah, that they're a bunch of really crazy names. Like Oh God, I can't remember wacky. Yes, that was because we were

35:22 What was that for that was that Paul Revere? Paul Revere. Yeah, Paul Revere. Yeah. It was Walt it was Walt was from that from that area. And it was I forget there was a r there's an obnoxious reason. It was originally called Shut Up and Listen. L L L C that was the original. think it was called Shut Up and Listen. That's good. Yeah, that was my art. Even you couldn't go with that. No, we did. We went with it for a it was Shut Up and Listen for a long time and I forget why we changed to Revere. It was something with Paul Revere. I now I've forgotten. Is the Wall Street Journal like the Red Coats or something? It was like something like that. Something like that. I forget. We everything we do is based on obnoxious tendencies. And so we we had a naming group and they came up with that. And then the guy who owned Recode.com It was a German guy wouldn't give it to us. He wanted a lot of money. And so we went with we decided to make Net sexy.

36:07 Um and then you and John Gruber. What the hell. Who nobody cares, but nobody's like, you can't do that. We're like why? Who cares about this? Nobody types. And nobody types, right? Exactly. Hello, Google, like just put recode. And so then um And then then the guy we we're trying to get code dot com. And it's owned by the kind bar guy. That guy? Yeah, I think so.com story. Yeah, he has it. He I think he still does. But anyway, ran him to a party and like give me your URL and he's like If you do a site.

36:41 A conference about peace. I'm like no fuck you, I'm not doing conference about peace. I know. I was like, if you met me, we do actually, but without by choice. Um and I he wanted I don't forget what he wanted to lend it to us. It just He was very nice. He was very sweet, but I wasn't going to be doing a peace conference and I did not want to rent his U R for any reason. Anyway, we didn't get that and it was fine. It doesn't matter. Like it d it's a great name. It's a great name. It's a great name. It's a great name. And then it has a code conference and then recode decode. It works perfectly. It's fine. So you said something well back.

37:15 That I wanna pick back up on. You said you you and Wall knew Like this was g y you'd make money, you were already making money, but you knew this wasn't gonna be like Uh V C scale business.

37:26 At the pretty much the same time you start recode. All of these new media sites get started. There's of course VAX, which you know we're sitting in VAC's headquarters right now. Which has a fun story to itself, but there's BuzzFeed, there's you know, all these companies are raising tons of money, VCs are jumping in. Yes, all the content companies. What were you thinking when you saw this? Oh no. Like because I've seen it before. Like I and it always ends in tears, you know what I mean? And not good tears. So I was like oh damn. And they were like a a a business insider, they raised a bunch of money. Then they started getting my they tried to poach my employees for ridonculous salaries. I was like You know, and one point when I was trying to hire someone, they were I was offering them a lot what I thought was a lot of money and then they

38:08 wanted a lot more and I'm like, I didn't even want to pay you the first one. I'm not gonna pay you the second one. I really don't want to pay in fact, I'm not paying the first one anymore. And so it was that was that you saw that happening and these and then um that that one Univision one, what are they those guys? Kevin Roos went there, a whole bunch of Alex Madrigal, Alexis Madrigal went there. Fusion. Fusion. They came in and offered like here's three million dollars reports. It was craziness. It was craziness. And it it was I just saw that.

38:37 Moneymaker for D And now the podcast make a lot of money. Jeff Zucker quote, you know, for all of Jeff Sucker. He was right. Like digital dollars turn into you know or analog dollars dimes turn into digital. Now he thinks it's a quarter or more. It's actually doing okay for some people. It was once a good thing. It was just like come on, this isn't gonna work. I'm not an idiot. And so I was sort of and then we would have had to turn to VC money and I just was like I can't fundraise, I can't do my journalism, like I can't like do the things that make us great. And so I thought we gotta sell. Like I I I immediat I was like pushing hard, pushing walled hard. And how how far into the business was this? Six months.

39:16 I was like, no, no, no. This could go very wrong for us with the money we have. And so uh, you know, if there wasn't that fundraising, we probably would have stayed independent, but that was it was crazy m it was the money was being thrown around and it wasn't gonna stop and it could really hurt us. And so I think one of the great things I did learn from tech people was that You move. Like you move and you don't like stand on ceremony, you don't go, Oh, this will work and then you'll you just panic. By move you mean you don't make decisions. You don't just say no, only the paranoids survive. Like wait a minute. And I had seen this story before and so I was worried. And I also didn't think it had any economic underpinnings. And so it was just it was a race to the bottom as far as I could tell. But there were but in a bigger scale even if it's hard, you have to be bigger. That I just I I felt that. And so I looked around and talked to a bunch of people who were like us. Um there were several. Um and

40:03 Did you talk with any of those that didn't raise crazy money to sort of combine with that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there were offers all the time. It was crazy, like reporters deal making. Like it's that that you know you've got to get off the train if that's happening. Kara, I got a deal for you. I'm like No, you don't and I'm pretty good at deals, but I'm not that good and you're really bad. And so um you know, really, serious think of you know what I'm saying. Like more VCs. Like no thank you. Like even VCs are stupid, right? Like I'm not gonna have a reporter make a deal with me. So Jim Bankoff had talked to me about using their ad system, and I'd known Jim forever because he was an AOL.

40:37 And chorus. I forget which course. I guess it was course. No, it was course is their content management systems. They had an ad system too. In any case, he wanted he wanted concert. He wanted it wasn't called that then, but he wanted us to uh be part of their ad group. Like they they sell our ad one of those deals. And I was like, Well, why don't we just merge? How about that? And you don't have anything fancy, like we're fancy, we're another revenue stream. Uh we got ideas. We're well known. It brand it adds We're like your other brands. We're like Vox. We're like uh Eater. We're like we're we're in the same zone.

41:10 Um and but you guys have a very different. Right. Walt went over there. We moved. I think it moved as well. But we moved him. Like we weren't dumb about it. We were like that's and the consumer stuff really wasn't working on Recode. Walt's consumer stuff, it wasn't we were a tech news site and it adding the consumer stuff just didn't like we couldn't attract it just wasn't right from a from a journalism point of view for the product. And so we were doing all this scoop breaking news business stuff and then we had Walt there. And so he was better to give him a bigger audience, the Verge made more sense. And By the way, we do it a g we do anything again if it makes more sense. Like we're not stupid. Like we like if things change, we change. Nothing is sacred. Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And so And and so Jim wanted to do some kind of commercial deal where he said, Let us take this ad sales off your hands, we've got this great technology platform. And you're like nah.

42:00 What about this? And he thought of it too. Like he thought he understood how famous Walt and I were and how it did add to his br it it adds to it. It adds to advertiser interest. It adds to buzz, it adds to all kinds of things. And he's a pretty conservative media mogul. Like you know, if you can compare him to Shane Smith or even um uh The guys over at uh BuzzFeed. And who's Shane Smith? Shane Smith runs Vice. Uh who now is not running vice, because They have some issues'cause of Shane Smith. Um and so uh Nancy Dubuque runs it, they get the lady to come in and clean it up. So anyway, so they it was a good match. It was a good match. We've been thrilled. It's been you four years almost now. W so it was May

42:40 May I think it's a We announced it at Code. Yeah, we announced it a year later. May twenty fifteen, you announced your selling device. I'd like to the deal was done, you announce it a year later. Yeah. Wow. I know. Oh wow. How'd you keep that under your head? No, no, no. We didn't we didn't come to the conclusion until close to the So you spent a year sort of figuring it out. No, we were running it for a yeah, it was eight months. But it really was six months when you started. Yes, absolutely. It was pretty soon. It was pretty soon. And you know, it was I thought about the employees, I'm like, Oh, I promised them this, now I'm doing this. You know I don't know It's fine. You know what I mean? Like all of them do well. You know what? They'll all do well. They'll all do well. And so they understood that this was an entrepreneurial effort. And again, I don't think there's nothing wrong with saying

43:20 Uh. We're gonna change our tune. Like there's nothing wr I think you know, journalists are super risk averse and they're very uh s ri rigid, and I'm not. So I will literally change at any moment. I I was gonna save this for our tech team section, but I but I wanna bring it up now.

43:35 Facebook. Yeah. That was I think if if if I had to rewind back to that time and justify all the V C money going into the space, it's that Social distribution is Eliminating the traditional media gatekeepers. You can build new, you know, timing for the digital age on the back of social distribution. But

44:00 The way that's kinda played out is it's great for Facebook. It's great for Facebook. It's great for racists and anti Semites. It's great for people Russians. The Russians it worked out well for. Um but not so much for the rest of us. No. They didn't ha come up with a business plan of how to do I'm not saying there isn't one. I just they haven't come up with it in a way that I think anyone feels happy. And they tried everything like podcasting. I remember that when they started Facebook I had all these issues with Facebook Live, including the fact that I thought people would murder each other on it. I was like, Mm, this seems like a perfect way to kill someone and then show it or or do suicide or something like that. And I expressed my reservations to them about that issue. Like, wow, you don't have control of the rest of your platform, now you're gonna unleash a video plat All right, you incredibly irresponsible people, go right ahead.

44:43 Um but they I remember them saying, You should do Facebook Lives. Remember that that all the journalists were doing Facebook Live. Oh yeah. And I go and it was like from the top. They were like, H you should know Cheryl or whatever. You should Facebook or Chris Cox or whoever and I was like, I'm not doing your Facebook lives and they're like, Why? I'm like Where do I where's my money? Where's my sack of money? Because I it's a waste of my time. You'll get more users. I'm like, I don't need it, I have seven hundred thousand. Right. They're your users. Where's my money? Like I kept saying, also it's like a it's like a head fake, right? Yeah, you'll get more famous. I'm like I am famous. But really what was going on was your seven hundred thousand users all the for all these new media platforms all just coming from Facebook. Exactly. I literally never saw I was like I'm not wasting I'd rather watch Law and Order because that would give me pleasure and but doing talking to people that put little like sometimes I'll do it to get people to read an article, but it doesn't help. What's the 700,000? I don't even know fans. No, Twitter's 1.3. It actually dipped when they did their The purge. When they did the purge. And then it's up again to one point three or so. Something I for I'd have to make. But again, it's like Twitter selling ad dollars, selling ad units against your one point three million followers. Yeah, I guess. I I'm sure half of them are bots. I'm guessing half of them are bots. I was just there early, that's all recommended to usually buy them.

46:03 I didn't buy any of them. I was an early user. Uh and that was on the early recommended list and I think it just was put on everybody's thing. I don't think half the people know who the hell I am. Uh what were your what'd your audience look like on on Recode? How s how big it was? Yeah. Small. Small. I'm not again we haven't been as focused on We have been focused on the website, but we don't see it as just the website or the podcast or the event. It's all a group of things. They all feed on the website. Some kind of flywheel or something. It makes sense. It's like all journalism is how we look at it. Whether we break news on our on our podcast

46:43 We broke plenty of news on the Mark Zuckerberg podcast like hello, that like drove a news cycle for two or three days. Um so is that Recode? Is that the Recode Podcast? I don't care. Again, the same thing. And then You know, then we had Cheryl on stage a code, and then we had It just we don't think of it like that. We don't think of it like that. And then the code interviews become news. Then they become podcasts. All our code interviews become podcasts. And then we break them up into pieces and then we make news stories. Yes. Yeah, we did. Like why not? It's all content. And I it's and however people want to consume it is really how I look at it. I think we definitely are rethinking what is the traditional web news site because it's changed really drastic.

47:23 Like Bloomberg is doing everything in the war. They hoover up every piece of information, vomit it out. Like so you know, they do, right? They have a lot of people and a lot of money to do that because they make all those money from the sheens. And so you have to think really hard is what is your value in each product you're making. Like I'm super interested in newsletters recently. I don't know why, because I think Casey's is so good. I'm thinking a lot about it. It's twenty eighteen we're talking about email newsletters. But I still think some of them are. You don't do all of them. So what is it about his that's great? What is it about like I mean, if you had one, I would read yours. I have a new thing I'm cooking up that I think would be interesting. I'm not saying that flattery, like I w I want your tone like in my head every morning. Yeah, but it's gonna be in a different way. I'm gonna I have a different I think newsletters are great, but they're they're heavy. Like I I find they pile up. Yep and so I'm I'm like I still like them. They pile up, they're like Sunday newspapers. How can I get this in a way that's

48:19 There's a way to do it that's different. You want to break news on the show. No, I don't. I just I'm still thinking about it. I'm thinking hard about it because I'm reading a lot of them and I'm like this is just the way when I started listening to podcasts, I was like, All right, this is what I think is good, what I think is bad. And so when we started the podcast, it was the same thing. Everyone's like, You can't do an hour. And it was two months after the acquisition you started the podcast. Yeah,'cause nobody was paying attention. Do you know how big it was gonna get? No. No, yes, yes, yes, because I knew we were because here m our bet is that people are smart. Peep smart people like smart interviews. Yeah. People like substantive things, it had become a twitchy

48:51 twitchy little universe of content, right? And so everyone's getting little pieces of information that made no sense. And I thought conversations mattered. I always thought c think conversations matter. It's what we do at code, but only a certain amount of people get to hear it, even though we put them in podcasts. At Code we have the big swinging, you know, dicks, essentially, right? You know that's what we have. And most of them are dicks. People have to pay the money to be able to do it. And then when you go down when you go down the stack a little bit, there's all these fascinating people uh you know who should get attention. We didn't have a lot of VCs at code, for example. I just we just didn't. And Andrew Mason may have been my favorite episode of Pre-Code Decode, so blunt, honest, amazing. Exactly. And so people feel more comfortable in that setting, but I could get to people like Chamath. Like he like we wouldn't have put Chamath on the code stage, but boy is he great in a podcast.

49:42 April Underwood. Like you don't know who she is, but she's critically important. Or like I had today Nicole Wong who ran le big legal teams at Google and Twitter and was very central to a lot of their early decisions. Talking about what's happening now. Like who I wouldn't put Nicole, you know, like I know who she is and now you will know who she is. And so I think what's

50:02 What's interesting is that you can do all kinds of with the medium. And I that's what I liked about it. But th my premise was that it you could do an hour. And everyone says you can't and I was like

50:14 Yes, I can. No, you can't. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna just do it and I'm not gonna listen. What was great about Vox is there was nobody here. To say we couldn't. Like they just didn't. They're like. Like it didn't cost them. You can do an hour and a half. Oh, we can do more. If they're good. We did ninety minutes with Mark. That everybody listened to that a hundred percent.

50:35 Why not? It was good. Like that's the only thing is it just has to be good. That is again do the work if you do the work, whatever format there's no everyone tries to make all these Hard and fast rules of Oh, this is gonna work. That's gonna I don't That's just bullshit. You know that. Like right. If it's good, if i if a product is I have like a criteria. It has to be useful.

50:55 Entertaining. And kind of a y ha must have. Like a must have. And if it makes money Fantastic. If it hits even one of these things, it's great. So

51:06 You know, I think about the podcast. It's useful. It's entertaining, it makes money. And you kinda can't get an interview with Mark Zuckerberg Sher's interview. Like I don't care how many people interview him, I did the best one. And so you can't get it anywhere else. So that's a perfect product as far as I'm concerned. You know, the conference Yeah, but it's also

51:28 I can get them talking like that. So it's just like so I I'm so that's the whole thing. It's like Mark Maron is only Mark Marin doing it. Replicate it. You can't it cannot be If anything that can be replicated you really have to not do. Like that kind of thing and so Mike Allen can't be replicated. Um lots of lots of things can't be replicated. To s to Snapchat's chagrin, a lot of their things can be replicated and quite well by Kevin Sistram and Instagram. That's a problem. Like

51:56 As delightful as I think Snapchat is, and my kids love it, it's it's replicable. And that's a problem. You have to create motes around yourself in some way. All right listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is uh no longer the hard part. Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making.

52:26 AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks Are real. Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why Service Now built the AI control tower. Yep, AI control tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with Any AI, not just theirs.

52:53 Every device on your network, every permission across every system. Every AI agent visible and secure in one place. And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise, the workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security. ServiceNow already runs more than a hundred billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than eighty five percent of the Fortune five hundred. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates. And in a future, that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is

53:41 Who's managing them all? So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely, at scale. Go check out service now dot com slash acquired and tell'em that Ben and David sent you. With podcasts in the future of Recode, h how important is it to the strategy? How much are you saying like actually this is kind of the way forward or not paying attention to the the website as much? I think well I'm not writing for the website right now. I don't think it's not important, by the way, we have great journalists doing an amazing job. Um I'm not that interested in that format right now. That's all. That's just me, Kara Swisher. It's not we have a great editor, Dan Fromer, and we've got a great staff and things like that. And they're figuring out what they think is the way to go. And they're trying different things. Recently they've been doing a lot of really substantive big articles. Um

54:23 We're doing less scoops, I think, but that should be the decision of whoever the editor is, not me. I have ideas of the way you would do a news website. I just am not interested it's like I I paint it over here in paint and now I'm interested in photography. And now I like that's how I look at it. And so whoever's making the website, the RECO website, it has to integrate into everything else we're doing, like our events and the podcasts, but it's part of the same branding idea. Like you have to think of that. The reason I'm interested in podcasts is I li and uh Peter Kafka has one and we're starting another one coming. is because We're interested in creatively.

54:57 ultimately it's creatively interesting to us. And so therefore we create work that I think is laudable. If it wasn't, we'd stop doing it. Um and it also makes a lot of money. Like that's a gr that's and it makes a lot of money. You keep that Facebook doesn't. Exactly. It's our money and we make it fair and square. Pretty much. You know, that's how we it's a fair and square pretty much s business as far as I can tell. And it has all kinds of interesting

55:20 applications. We we're thinking we're doing a bunch of live podcasts. We're doing a bunch of all kinds there's all kinds of things you can do off of it. that are really interesting. We also give the opportunity for the Recode reporters to do podcasts. Like Kurt Wagner did a bunch for Peter. Uh Joanna uh Bouillon is doing one uh she's doing the who is she doing the the guy the auto guy Lawrence Burns. Um, you know, they get the opportunity to learn how to be better interviewers and stuff like that. So we it gives us gives that opportunity. Jason Delray is doing this, I can't say what it is, but he's doing a a a sh a multipart series which will be a short version. It won't be a show. Everyone wants, like, I want a show. Like, why do you want a show? Why don't you do four episodes like they do are doing on Netflix with certain shows. So he's doing one that's really gonna be great. He's doing two of them that are gonna be great. Two audio things that are just They're gonna be what they are. And we're gonna ha we have a sponsor for them and

56:09 That'll be great. And so it gives it gives them an opportunity to be cre the reporters of Rico to be creative. Why do they monetize so much better? J just do right now. They might not later. I think'cause people really listen to them and they like them and they download them. You could they're very, um quantifiable, I think. People can measure them. Um uh people talk about them, y you can see they get a lot of buzz. And I don't think I think the idea that r that The audience do thinks really hard about where they're getting their content is kind of an old school thing. Like if it's not on the website, it's like well, so what if it's in in podcast form? So what if it's on the event side? So what if it's in story. What if it's a tweet.

56:46 Yeah. Like I tweet a lot. Like I tweet a lot of stories kind of stuff. And unbelievably in this world, it's the place where you have a direct relationship with that person instead of this you know intermediate. Yeah, you remember I we got we famously got rid of comments six five years ago. Right. Everyone was like, How d how can you do that? I'm like, I hate'em. Like they're I don't have to be. Well, it was interesting'cause we when we took them up, first of all it was like, you have to have comments. I'm like, Do we? You know, and and of course you do. I'm like, Why? Like they I they take they're they're vile. They don't add to the the the the benefit they don't help the website. In fact, all we do is try to like knock things off. I'm w wasting time my copy editors taking off, you know, you faggot. Like I don't need it. Like, you know, what do you like awful. What what do I need these awful anonymous people saying terrible things. on a website that I run. And so we took it off and I remember there was one guy who was just just terrible vile, homophobic, anti-Semitic, uh race, everything like this guy was the whole package.

57:40 And he uh you know, he was he wrote me a no an email and they somehow find my email and they're like How dare you? End comments. I should it's a first amendment. I have a right to say whatever I want. You know that. Stupid trope. Get your own fucking website. It's my website. Get out of my bar. Get out of my bar. Get out of my bar. Guess what? I'm not giving you a beer. Like sorry. Uh you're an awful vile human being. And so it was really interesting. And I said Twitter was our comment section, really. Yeah. Um and so it that's where I engage with people a lot. I've recently not done Instagram as much. Well

58:15 I'm so glad we ended up podcasting this for you. How are you liking podcasting, boys? What do you think? It's fun. It's it not not only is like tremendously fun, I I I never thought It enables people who aren't in media and aren't I mean we're not journals and we have an ability to just say, right? You're smart, interesting people. Like why not? They don't know us. I'm just saying you seem so far. You haven't said anything too stupid, you know? No, you haven't said anything stupid so far. Um, but I mean it cr it's creative. Like a matter who you are, and I think again, conversation is really important and people like to hear. People love great conversation. The other thing is d Dave and I do uh the podcast for a variety of reasons. And even though we've a wonderful sponsor in Silicon Valley Bank, zero of it is to make any money on the show. And the number one th the reason that we do it is

59:01 because it allows us a creative journey in self-directed education. And we get to learn stuff that we otherwise would never learn about. And it's awesome to get to share it with people, but like it lets us quench this thirst of of, you know, we're not in school, we're not going to classes. We get to learn. Meet people you want to meet. I often like I'm having a point. I was just I just did a I did an event where I interviewed Sean Hayes. Do you know the guy who was on Will and Grace? He's so great. He's amazing. But he's also a very important producer in Hollywood. People don't realize he has tons of shows. And uh He was like, I love your podcast. I said, Come on it and I was and he's like, Okay, and so I'm going we're gonna do that, by the way, Sean Hayes. Um but I wanna talk about the entertainment business'cause he's doing all kinds of digital stuff and uh he's a producer and so it was just like I wanna talk to Sean Hayes and that would be wonderful. on lots of levels to talk to him on lots of things. And so that it gives you that opportunity to meet people and and

59:49 Have people surprise you with Thoughts. And I think that's my favorite part. Like today the Nicole Wong one was really good. She had some thoughts that I she said things and I was like Oh. I hadn't thought of that. Like you know what I mean? And I love that. I love that's my favorite part is learning from pe other people. Well that's the Yeah. Uh i in a lot of ways I think podcasts we're we're totally like doing tech themes now instead of later, but that's fine. We always do that.

1:00:13 I think podcasts are I really remove the gatekeepers from I mean like we're we're two guys. Like we're we're not journalists. You know, Tim Ferriss isn't a journal. He does a great podcast. It's Indies. Yeah, it is. It is in a lot of ways. And it's it'll be consolidated. Look, it's gonna be consolidated. You get that. Like you get the one of the things that I wouldn't take out print all the time. That's why I did the Times thing. Like people are like what are you doing? I'm like I think print is important. I think not just print, but the a a a global brand. Yep. The written word and a global brand. And I felt like one of the things that I thought was happening and a thing that I kept banging on for the past year was the irresponsibility of the tech sector and how they had misused their platforms and mismanaged them. And I've been talking about this for a long time. And so

1:01:01 It was fine to do it at Recode because but it's like the it's the house or you know, it's like the local newspaper. And I thought, you know what, I'm gonna get on a global scale and start whacking at these people. Like, you know what I mean? Like and they're gonna pay attention because I want them to do something about it. And fortunately there's still a global brand to be able to do that. Exactly. And but I but I I don't discount it because I've gotten a whole new bunch of people now paying attention to the messages that I think are important. And that's why it's important to think holistically about. It's not just podcasts, it's not just website like Rico website, it's not just events. It's it's not just speeches. It's all it's all of them together that gives you these m tools that you can reach people in different ways. And they each require a different skill. You talk about consolidation. I'm curious m more on why why you're sure that it's going to um gonna consolidate when right now we're sort of in this era of of Indies thriving. Because it always consolidates.

1:01:51 Everything I you know, it's interesting. I don't know if you notice I have two uh tattoos, many tattoos in my hands. So it's syntropy and entropy, and I could go into like all the ridiculous things about it, but it's essentially everything dissipates everything. organizes right so they're they're two opposite they they they exist within the thing. Right, exactly. And so i everything moves towards organization. Everything moves towards consolidation, and then it moves towards destruction, like in the same way. And so I think that that that's it's sort of a cycle you see that that will happen. And I think podcasts everyone's like, wait a minute, this makes money and then everyone's gonna pile in many we should be federate these and a bunch of federated media remember that was John Patel. So that didn't work out so well. It was a good idea. But you know these things are going to federate. They're gonna federate and then they're gonna unfederate and then the big companies will get into them and they will suck and then blah blah. Like

1:02:45 The reason Mark Marin's popular is only one reason it's a great podcast, right? You cannot make that. You cannot make You just can't. Like You can't replicate, you can't change it. And so that's so I think I'm not that worried about the consolidation, but I do think there's gonna be a few places that are gonna are creative at making them. And therefore. Box box. Box box, gimlet. There's a bunch of them that are really good at making them. And some will have a certain style.

1:03:09 You know, the the you know, like the daily with the New York Times and Michael Barbaro's a friend of mine and I think he's they're great. They're so creative there. Who would have thought that? Like talking about newspaper stories every day telling you how we put together stories. Nothing could be more boring. And I can't stand the ones they have in the newspaper, right? This is how we put together I'm like, I don't want to hear you, I wanna hear Michael Barbaro. But he goes beyond the story, right? So it just works. And the and the that team there is so talented, that team of people who put that not just in, but there's a whole pack of people there that are just so good and tell a story in a great way. So I think that's our Category.

1:03:45 Consolidation. We categorize each acquisition. In a way, I was going to go business business line. So the way that we do this for people new to the show, um we decide what category the acquisition was. Was it people, technology, product, business line, asset, or consolidation. I was gonna go business line because for me it's really like picking up a whole new PL and running that PL independently and hoping it expands and you know, uh realizing synergies. I'm saying that every episode now and is pissing me off. It's okay. But you know, with with wallet going across and and writing at uh at the verge. Um but it's effectively it's still its own business unit that you're buying for hopefully the sum of future cash flows. Yeah.

1:04:24 Yeah, but it's other things. There's more things to it. There's advertise your interest. Well you know, he came to me when he was starting it. We had done ours. No, he did it after quite a bit. So there you go. But he came and he said, What should I do? And he wanted to like interview like the deputy secretary of ag agriculture. I'm like, Can you do some interesting people? What about Corey Booker? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, like yeah, bring in Biden. Biden I kept saying Biden would be good and he's like, Well I'm like no Biden he'd be like a people would love to hear from Biden. Um and he's a very good interviewer and he's m he's a more wonky inter he's definitely a more wonky interview. He should, but there was already wonk et if you remember, and wonk blog and things like that. And that was at the I think that was at The Washington Post, where they were, I believe. I believe it was in adjacent to them. So I don't think they could take that. I was like trying to make a joke there. It landed flat. Oh sorry. Anyway, I love Ezra.

1:05:16 Ezra and I are of the same mind. I would say. Of lots of things. Mm-hmm. We'll be doing more together in the future, I think. He's really great. Yeah. He's great. That's consolidation. What would have happened otherwise you would have failed on your own. Yeah, tell speculate on that. I'm curious. Probably.

1:05:35 Maybe not. And what does fail mean? Sold to someone else for a different price later. We'd have so we might I might have been smart enough to sell it to someone else. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was smart. I did. I sold it. you would have failed to

1:05:50 Have meet the return thresholds of the twelve million dollars you raise. Yeah. So I had investors who didn't care. When I got money from Terry, I called him to thank him for I think they gave us five million dollars each at first. I kept c not being able to reach him. It was he's such a lovely man. And I go Hey, I finally reached him. I forget he was in Sardinia or wherever the hell he was on his yacht. And he goes I go, Hey, Terry, thanks for the five million dollars we got in the bank. And And he goes

1:06:20 Oh good, good. Good for you. I hope you enjoy it. And it was like literally like Uncle gave me twenty. Good luck with that And I was like Okay And he was like And I was like, All right, see ya And it was really like I was like he's not gonna bother me in any way for that money ever again. And he actually got his money we got it in the Tackin box. So anyway. Yeah, so the the sale to Vox uh more or less than the twelve. Um did investors all made their money back? Uh common They all took Voc stock. They all they could have gotten cash. They they took Vaux stock. I think all I don't know what everybody did, but I'm pretty certain they did.

1:06:57 Yeah, it was more. Cool. That's good. But it's all those. Yeah. Content. valuation. So I don't know.

1:07:04 I don't know. Right. Yeah. Well, Speaking of w we've already covered a lot of tech themes. We'll see where it ends. We'll see where box ends too. That's like it'll be successful. Yeah.

1:07:14 Nice. Do you want to on the hot seat? I don't know a lot. I'm a big shareholder, so This is how we great in the show. So we we decide you know, the acquirer with all their might and resources and interesting things they could do with their shares and their capital, was it a good use? to buy this company.

1:07:32 Yes, it was. Well A but you got a grade A to F. So A plus Instagram. One billion into hundreds of billions of value. F You're familiar with it. There must be a pony in there somewhere. Um

1:07:47 I would say I'd say a B plus at least, if not an A. Yeah, I would. It it benefited in lots of ways. Yes, yes. There's no downside. There's absolutely podcasts alone. Exactly. They've made their money back. They they there's no And also they get a good name, they get good journalism, they get I think they've done pretty good on most of their b of their acquisitions, it seems like all the you know, they it ran into trouble with one, but it still was a great journalistic product racked that they still a great journalistic product. Um

1:08:16 And I think they did the right thing with it. So I don't consider any of those a failure. I think they have very good taste in how they do things. I do. I think just like any content company, they're gonna run into the same issues of content companies. Like it buzz they're in the same Not exactly in the same boat, but you spent more money, but they're in the same um Contact media's hard. Like that's their problem. That's the problem they have.

1:08:39 Media she's hard. Real quick, just to just to throw it. Like d um do either of you know the what the valuation of Vox media was at the recode acquisition and then what it is now? So it's something they've raised it. It's a unicorn now. Yeah, it was even like several hundred million when they acquired you. Yes, it's it's much higher. And who knows if they could ever solve for that. Like all of them. I think Budsfeed was one point five. Right, yep. Vox was one one point one, if I remember from the news stories, and then It was mashable. Mashable was some ridiculous sum and then it sold for like a So to the extent that I believe it's not. No, no, they're higher. They're up higher. Yeah, they're up higher. They're up way higher. I'm glad to be down in lowlands with the with the box people. The lower your valuation, the more upside there is for the God, any of these companies. It's hard to

1:09:30 Right now it's not the greatest time for content companies. Comcast, I don't know. I guess. Yeah, they're a big NBC. Yeah, sure, but why? Like you have to like if if I had to go write a news see, the way I think about new like I remember writing about Tumblr being bought and they were on the edge of like death, essentially. Um I all the tip I got was it was being acquired by a company for a billion I d I didn't hear it was Tumblr. A content comp a digital content company is being acquired by Yahoo for a billion dollars. That's just somebody intentionally encrypting it just to I got and I was like, Okay. And I call myself Sherlock Homo. So I was like Watson. Who's your Watson? My cat. My cat. And um And I was like, Okay, and I made a list and I was like, This is what they would buy, this is what they'd be interested in, this is what I know she likes. Do you know what I mean? I know her tastes and stuff like that.

1:10:21 And Tumblr was third on the list'cause she wants to be helplessly hip. And you know what I mean? Twitter was on there, you know, and I started making calls as if I knew. And I so I called up I knew all the investors of Tumblr and I knew they were in trouble and I was like, She couldn't possibly spend this amount of money on this. You couldn't be this stupid. And but I will try it. And I literally went I said, Oh so yeah, who's buying you now? I got you now. I might. I have my ways. I know. I was like, I'm so smart. You're so good, Karen. I'm like, Mm-hmm. I'm not good. You're so stupid. Why did you tell me? Can you phrase that in a direct quote, please? Yeah, but it was really fast. But I I all I did was I I

1:10:56 I thought about it. Like I I strategized it. So I think about like box and those things all the time. Like Mm-hmm. Like Vox, Comcast, yeah, but why? Like w what is Steve Burke like? Why would he need this? What would it add? Like you know, same thing if you bought BuzzFeeder, if you bought any of these companies, or anything. That's how I think about everything. Who would buy when Twitter was the rumors were who would buy Twitter? This and this, would they want to buy this? And everyone was like, Google's gonna buy Twitter. I'm like, No, they're not. They don't want to buy that mess. Like Like but you know that's how you you have to think. I could see like a Verizon. Um someone that has distribution who can marry great concept of distribution they have. That works in theory. Uh in theory. Yeah. Or it will work one day. The platonic form of that will be realized in some way. We'll see.

1:11:41 We'll see. Clear channel. I don't know. Yeah. These are all dying. Newscorp. Newscorp. Back to New Rupert. What would that have to be for you that isn't really running News Corp anymore, isn't it? I think he's quite lively, I suspect, I've heard. Didn't he? No, no, no. He said it on stage at Recode Media, I think he did.

1:12:10 Scooped. Yeah, he said it. He said it publicly. I I think it's an A minus because I This is my own narrative. My head has has clearly been

1:12:32 Evident in the episode, but like I just I don't think Vox Vox is like the biggest player in podcasts right now. No, NPR. No, NPR is not doing podcasts. Okay. NPR distributes radio shows on podcast. Yeah, yeah. They're not making native podcasts. Everyone's trying to copy the daily is really pretty much what's going on. And they're they just announced one, I think. NPR just announced one. Plus I think. The whole podcast business model is about to go through a lot of

1:13:00 Uh positive disruption where people are gonna Pay. Creators directly. And Vox now has probably the biggest aggregated audience of podcast listeners in America. Yeah outside of MPR, which already monetizes through direct um payments. So

1:13:16 For whatever they paid for recode. To Help jump start that, like I think it's fantastic. Is it an Instagram? No, but on a lot of levels, sometimes I think should I have just done those on my own? Like as a I would have had a lot like I'm thinking of like um

1:13:32 That guy who does the uh Ben Thomson or other. That's what I'm gonna bring up, yeah. Then some days it's like oh that would be I have to do it. Could you write that much? How how does Ben Thompson write that much every day? He lives in Taiwan, doesn't it? It doesn't mean it give him more than twenty four hours, it just gives him a jump in the morning. I could do it. I could do it. I just have to stop doing other things. But yeah. Um Uh do you do you pay for Stri Techy? I do. Yeah. I think I do, yeah. I do. I think Ba we have one to record. Um I think he's uh he's really interesting. I think all those people are interested. I think about those things, like what do you need, anything? Like I always am trying to go for like I'm not trying to Maria Kondo everything. And I'm deaf like look, when I did the time thing I didn't leave

1:14:11 Fox, did I? Like there's ways to do it. I think with with these tech all these media companies have to think about it is how do you keep really creative people interested all the time? How do you keep uh like an Andrew Ross Sork an interest in the New York Times? How do you keep a a star'cause there are stars down. They create more great things that make more money. Like how do you do that as any like if you're vanity if you're anything, how do you keep creative people interested and reward them in the way that if they make money, how do you help reward I think that's an interesting thing. None of this is scalable, obviously,'cause it's all human. You can't AI this thing. So Right. That's the only issue.

1:14:48 But if you're interested in media, I think it's gonna be a lot more Um I I'm not a sports person, what's it called when someone is free agent? There's gonna be a lot more free agents. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll see contracts for but kinda like you had you and Walt had with uh the journal. Yeah, I have three contracts now. I have one with NBC because I do my MB MS MBC show.

1:15:07 Uh it's periodic interviews I do based like Tim Cook, we did the Google guys. Um I've got a contract with the New York Times and I employed by Vox Media, so There you go. Yeah. Yeah. It's better than sports. You can play for three teams. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I just think about it. You wouldn't have been able to do that many years ago. Yeah. That's interesting. I find that fascinating. So I you know I'm a B. You have a high curve then. You're just grading on an Instagram verse? Really? Well, Fs. We're all friggin' Frythmic. My son got a

1:15:45 Speaking of grades, my son got a D in math a couple of years ago, and uh he he got he's got an A's in math too, so it's kind of a he just didn't like this teacher at one point. And he remember him saying to me Um He go I go, Louie, a D re I'm not that hard on my kids about grades. I was like, but it Gee, come on and he goes, Well at least it's not enough. And I was like, it is an F. A D is an F. A D is an F in this household. A D is an F, period. The schools just won't go to F, though D is like you got an F, but I'm giving you a D. You can tell we gave AOL time warner a D. D. Oh D. We do with that. No, that wasn't enough. That wasn't enough.

1:16:19 I would just say some of the I've written an entire book on the side. Yes, exactly. But I'm telling you it was The right idea. It was absolutely the right idea, it was the wrong time and the wrong people. But it was certainly the right idea. But we're talking about media and the internet here.

1:16:34 So I wrote a book on it. They were assholes. All sides.

1:16:42 Uh Lightning Round. So we gotta we gotta know what's a day in the life of Keris Wisher like? Hm. I wake up Uh I wrote a I wrote a column this morning and then I uh uh came in here and uh did a whole bunch of podcasts.

1:17:00 uh I'll spend some time tonight thinking about uh some live events we're gonna do, um and some the next MSMBC thing. Um I make a lot of calls. I call around, I talk to a lot of people. Now that I'm doing the column, I spend a lot more time talking to people. Um I'm starting to plan, Peter and I just went to Phoenix to look at some hotels for code. We have to move the hotel. Um yeah. And then uh We So I'll work on that. I'll work on some hotel stuff and thinking about that, I'll work on code speakers.

1:17:30 We have a new list of who we want for next year. Um I'll often I'll fly places to meet. different people. I'm gonna meet some pretty well known people, gonna fly to see them. I I I try to ask people in person to come to code a lot of times.

1:17:43 They get they hard have a hard time saying no to me. Great. We should we should steal that. Yeah. Hello. Hi. Did you show up? They know I'm coming. I was coming for lunch. Very few people turn down lunch if you one of the things that I think is a big'cause everyone's always like, How did you talk to him? I'm like, I called him.

1:17:59 Like people will talk to you. Like If you get their emails and you write them, they will write you back. Like it's really interesting. Um And anyone.

1:18:08 Anyone if you get their emails, we'll write you back. And if you ask the question. Yes. Did I write you back? You did write it back. Thank you. There we have it. If you seem like not crazy, I will write you back. So I I'll I'll go visit people. I'll do a lot of lunches. I'm trying to think of the next couple of days. It's a lot of podcasts over the next couple of days. Um some events, a bunch of events. Like next week I'm interviewing Maggie Haberman at Lesbians Who Tech. We're gonna make a podcast out of that again. And we're doing I'm doing Jane Lynch, who's a friend of mine actually. We're gonna make a podcast out of that. So a lot of events I do outside of uh Vox I m we make into podcasts'cause that's m that's the price of admission for me doing it. Um we're doing a ninety second street Y thing. So we do a lot of live events. We go to a l I do a lot of live events. And then

1:18:50 And I'll always do panels with um It hadn't even had to do with w women's issues or uh young people. That's it. Then I have my kids. Hang out with my kids. Hang out with the

1:19:01 Different. People. Family, my mom. N busy at all. Not busy at all. I'm real busy. I have a great family.

1:19:08 All right. You're running for mayor of San Francisco in twenty twenty three. Give us an update. I don't think I am. No. No. I think Landon Breed is good. I think she's good. I don't want to like I think she's good. I don't think anyone expected uh Ed to die. Um And I think I'm gonna give her a chance. She seems like she deserves one. And not big trouble. I was just doing that'cause the my point I was trying to make is someone's gotta fix this. Friggin' mess here. It's a mess.

1:19:31 And so I think I was trying and at the time I really meant it. It was like someone's gotta we've gotta get away from all these uh career politicians. She seems some of her stuff I'm really interested in. We'll see. We'll see. I mean it's an incredibly difficult job that she's got. But I like some of her moves visiting the homeless things. I like her whole PR I like it. I like it. She's bringing scooter. She she seems sensible. She seems sense. Just like same thing with like Stacey Abrams in um Georgia. I'm really interested in politicians like that. I think she's really sensible and She's she m comes to compromises. She's not

1:20:02 Uh angry. She's not like in partisan I I don't mean angry, I mean partisan, like in a way that's inflexible. I like I like politicians like that. So we'll see. I'm hoping to have uh her uh Mayor Breed on the show.

1:20:15 I would hope that would happen. We've asked. Best of luck. All right, what one more. Across the Your whole career.

1:20:24 You think? You trying? I'm gonna try. Why not? Well then we'll have an answer to this next question. Across your whole career, what work are you the most proud of? The the Gates Jobs fit uh interview was great, I think. It's hard not to top that. Um I think it was great because lots of reasons. It was historic, it was important, it was a great interview. Um it was revelatory. I think it was emotional. Um

1:20:45 I think that was really great. I think some of our coverage of Uber was great, uh or what we did. Yeah. Getting him fired was if we were just one small part in that effort, I thought that was good. That was time well spent. A lot of the interviews of code or recode and all things deer gonna be historic. I know it. Like nobody has done those interviews. Elon Musk ones, although I think he did something crazy today. Um But you had you you you had him he was speculating on the uh multiple universes on stage. Simulation where were a pawn of other creatures. Um that was a great interview. That was a fantastic interview. That was a real insight to him when he You know, even our my Kim Kardashian interview was great. I you know, some of it just I think there's a body of work there. I was thinking the other day

1:21:28 Like someone's like you know, Oh, you've got to keep trying I'm like I could retire right now. Like I we have a I have a like Walt did, he had a body of work that was so substantive and so important Um And these interviews were gonna go down like if a hundred years people were gonna look at those interviews. Some of them, not all of them, but some of them and they're gonna matter. They're gonna matter. And so

1:21:48 Everything we do now is just gravy as far as you know what I mean? And so that's a really good way to look at it, is there's no downside to anything we're doing. And so we can c continue to push upward. So your your Jobs and Gates interview is so formative to me. It was something about it earlier, but I Watched it a dozen times, uh first in a bunch of tiny clips as it dribbled out and then eventually the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. Newscorp didn't want that. Uh we snuck it up there. They came back later when we were using some of those clips or something else and they're like, That's our IP. I'm like, No, you gave it away. We got you to give it away years ago. It was so great. such a moment. We got when Rupert just signed it away and that was it was great. That was a great and we wanted to put that on for all of humanity. I mean in in in lieu of doing carve outs today, that that to me

1:22:34 I think you asked Steve about he and Bill's friendship and he responded with the Beatles line. The Beatles at the end. He was such a manipulative person. But uh I I like the one where I said what what What I we ask good questions. Actually There's two interviews. That one when we asked him what is the thing you don't know about your relationship with Gates and he said, Oh, we for for a long time we've been married. Yes, I remember that. It was so good. And Gates was so disturbed by it. Oh my God, what did he just totally got him. That was a great moment. And then I have to say the last interview he did, Gates did I mean s Jobs did with Walt and I right before he died, it was

1:23:23 pretty close before he died. And he was just skinny as can be and just emaciated and very weak. But I gotta tell ya, go watch that interview. He go physically watch it,'cause it's you can't get it by the voice. He is so vibrant as a person. I know there's all these controversy about his daughter and everything else. He was a shitty father and Uh you know Everyone he's a shitty father, like it looks to her at least. I don't know about his other kids. And obviously she's that she has to talk about it. Um

1:23:51 And But that interview I have to say He was so vibrant and full of life about it he really exemplified all lot of the good things I like about Silicon Valley about uh like keeping going. Um and and the relentlessness of him was there and the he had more energy than anybody in the room and he was about to die. And I thought that was kind of cool. And he answered and I think I asked him I think one of the best questions I asked him

1:24:16 Ever was What do you do what are you gonna do for the rest of your life? I think that's I just and you could see everyone like Did she just ask that? That guy's about to die. And I was and I did it on purpose. What are you gonna do the rest of your life? And he started He knew what I was doing and it was great because he couldn't believe I asked it, I think, but no, he could. No, he he didn't mind. He never minded stuff like that. And he said he was like, Okay, this is what I do with T V like as if he was gonna live for twenty more years And I thought that was a great answer. He didn't go like Ah in my waning days I shall contemplate the universe or whatever Um

1:24:49 He knew he was He had to know he was dying. Maybe he didn't. I don't know. But it was a great that was a That was my favorite interview, I think. I thought that was in terms of but you know, just the recent Mo Zuckerberg interview I thought was very good. I thought it changed things. I thought I got him to say things we all knew he thought that he never said. And I think I wasn't unkind and I don't think I snarked at him and I thought I allowed him to speak and he just I thought that was a really good and revelatory interview. So

1:25:17 So that's even to And the next one, whatever I do, the next one. We'll see. Maybe Elon next. Yeah. Final day. I don't know. We'll see with him. I'd like to interview him again. He needs to get some sleep first. I don't know. Something's going on.

1:25:30 Yeah. Something's got something, something. Who knows? I don't know, we all have our crosses to bear, right? I mean I think that's the like the big thing is like They're people. They're people. Yeah. They're people.

1:25:41 Do you have anything else you want to leave our our listeners with? Hm, just do the work. Please just do the work. And then you'll be just fine. Aga again, there's so many ways that people get in your way, whether you're a woman, it's sexism, or person of color, it's racism, or anti Semitism, you are absolutely gonna face those things and don't pr don't let anyone tell you that's not holding you back. But If you keep doing the work, I do think you can succeed. You can succeed in a way and be very happy with your work. I think and I know that's easy to say.

1:26:08 But I think it's it's a it's always helped me. Thank you That's it. Thank you, Kara. Thank you.

1:26:14 That was a great interview. I appreciate it. You guys are very talented. All right listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on StatSig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI powered experiences at scale. Yep.

1:26:36 In the crazy speed of today's AI world. Shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next. This is where StatsIG comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed. to how users actually behaved.

1:27:09 So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. If you aren't subscribed and you want to hear more, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast client. You can uh follow Kara on Twitter. Kara where can they follow you on Twitter. Um you can find me at Kara Swisher. Excellent.

1:27:31 Yep, I got one of the early ones. I had I have ads. I have swisher at Gmail, I think, or one of them. One of those early ones. I think my type Kara Swish Gmail. Whatever. No, I'm not gonna answer that one. I never use it. But um but I have some a lot of the early everything, which was'cause I was there. Awesome. Well if you like the show, review us on iTunes, uh come join the Slack, acquire dot Fm or don't and uh enjoy whatever podcast you listen to in the future. Thanks, everyone. Mm-hmm.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.