Recode (with Kara Swisher)

00:00That's different. That's just a bunch of white guys talking. Apple, Apple, Apple. Oh, that damn Google. Facebook. Ah. 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. 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 greatest people, actually probably the greatest person that we could imagine to help us tell this story. All right. Okay. The one and only Kara Swisher. Nice to meet you. This is not really the Recodes. It's just the studio, just so you know. We're not fancy here at Vox Media. That's why I'm here. Listeners don't know that. Yeah. Okay. It's really impressive. We're in suits.

00:58We had a really nice view of the Bay Bridge before in our other office, but it was too expensive. So here we are looking at the Trans Bay Terminal, which is buses. Beautiful on its own right. This is what happens after you get acquired. And then the... No, no. That was before we had the night. Before we acquired, we started the company in my backyard. So this is much nicer than anything else. Well, 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.

01:42Kara has been called one of the greatest interviewers 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. 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. Gosh, that's nice. I think we'll stop now. And it's a wrap. And scene. No, you won't get off that easy. All right, okay. All right, well, if you're new to the show, you can check out our Slack at Acquired.fm.

02:22It's the place where David, myself, and 1,600 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, now is a great time to tell you about longtime friend of the show, Vanta. Yeah. So, David, I want to paint a picture that many founders listening will recognize. You're about to close your biggest customer yet. The product team has hit a bunch of milestones. The sales team built this fantastic relationship. Everyone at the potential customer is fired up. Your legal team has the contract done. But then an email comes in from the security team. Ah, yes. It's usually a very polite email asking something like, Before proceeding, could you share your SOC 2 report? Or do you mind sharing your ISO 27001?

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04:56And just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right. Well, can we dive in? Yes, please. All right. Let's do it. Okay. So, Kara, 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. Seriously, I think it was one of our carve-outs a while back. Yeah. It was a great – Ezra's a great interview. It was great. So, 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 in TV in between. Again, go listen to The Ezra Klein Show. 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.

05:42None of that sounds like tech blogging. No. Because you basically invent tech blogging after that. Yeah. But you do meet, during that time period, your partner, Walt Mossberg. Absolutely. How did you first meet Walt? And, of course, he was also a D.C. resident. Well, 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 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 in the Wall Street Journal, 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. And he picked it over two very big efforts by Sears and IBM. CompuServe. CompuServe. Prodigy. Yes. And so, he said those suck and please use AOL.

06:30And this was a big, giant boost. The reason Steve Case owns half of Hawaii is, I think, because of Walt Mossberg today. Yeah, but did AOL invent the GIF? I don't know about that. I don't know. In any case, he was the person who did it. And so, he got what was going on way before other people. And I had already been very much interested in digital stuff. And so, he was just in my book. He's the beginning of a chapter of a book. And then we just hit it off. And both saw things the way print was going the same exact way. And so, he then tried to convince the Wall Street Journal to hire you away from the Post. He did. He did. He got me my job at the Post, 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 didn't exist. Like, you know, it just didn't exist. It's like covering cryptocurrency a couple years ago.

07:17There wasn't anyone covering that. But it was 97 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 96, actually. Somewhere in there. But it was barely, Netscape 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. Mark Andreessen was a teenager, I think, in creating the Mosaic browser at the University of Illinois. And so, there wasn't. It wasn't that big. People think it was, but it wasn't. But it was real small. And Yahoo, when I met them, they had just a few people working there. And Amazon, just a few people. So, no, it wasn't big. Wow. So, did the Journal have a tech bureau already? Or did you start it?

08:04They were covering things like Intel, like the chips. They had chip coverage. They had Microsoft coverage, obviously, because that was software. They had Apple coverage, mostly downward, the downward-facing Apple, essentially. And they had, you know, they had stuff like that. But it was all about the hardware, essentially, and also the chips 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, per se, like what it was in online services and Yahoo. And so, there was no one covering these people. Excite. There was Excite. You don't remember that company. No, definitely. John Doerr. Yeah, John Doerr was in that one. And, you know, they just didn't have people. They just didn't. That was it. I was it. And people made fun of me, as I've said many times.

08:49Well, Carol, what do you think it was about you that, you know, there's this weird corner of society that's clearly not a thing yet, but you're all in on it. You're saying the Internet is not you. Yeah, 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 Trash 80 computers that we used. I used to write party stories about Washington for the style section. And I used the Trash 80, and we'd put the couplers on telephones. It was crazy that we did this at, like, pay phones, if you remember those. And then I started liking the phones that we had. We had a portable phone that was in a suitcase, and I was obsessed with it, and I carried it around. Nobody was interested in it. And I kept saying, this makes total sense.

09:28Why aren't we using this? Why doesn't everybody have it? Why don't we have it? It just started, 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 browser and the World Wide Web, which you called it the World Wide Web. You have to spell it out all the time. You knew. You saw, oh, oh, oh, just a minute. And so there was all this experimentation going on. Like, there was AT&T had this thing called Interchange. There's CompuServe and Prodigy. There was all kinds of stuff. But I remember thinking, this is going to be going to change everything. And I covered retail for the Washington Post, and you could see classifieds were going to 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.

10:08And I met a lot of people that thought like I did, you know. So there weren't that many, but Walt was one of them. And so I just kept pursuing it, even though people made fun of me, until they started to be worth something in the 90s, in the mid to late 90s. And that was a boom. That was one of the first boom. The pre-crypto boom. No, it was a boom. It was several booms. That was one of them. The early 90s – the late 90s, I'm sorry, not the early 90s – were a time when all these companies started to be worth a lot. And there was like – Mark Andreessen was on the cover. I think he was 20. The king of something. He was on a throne, and he had hair at the time and was barefoot and like this guy is going to 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. When I met him, he was wealthy but not that wealthy.

10:56And Steve Jobs was making his comeback. So you mentioned deadlines. You and Walt together, I believe, 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 got pregnant. I had a baby. And when I came back, I was just – I read a lot of blogs when I was away, and especially Andrew Sullivan had one. There was – suck.com, if you recall, suck.com. 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, well, they suck at journalism. Why can't we do this? But they don't have deadlines. Yeah. They don't have 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 edit side? Was it the business side? They were both. They were just ignorant.

11:43We just kept saying this is like the way of the future, and they didn't agree with us. They were interested in a Saturday journal 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 – 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 2000s, and then we moved to the website, I think, in 2007. 2007. Yeah. So this was a question. We have 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. Yes, 100%. Like, here's some money. Here's some millions for you in profits. And what reporter brings millions in profits? And they don't bring $10 in if you bring more than $1,000. And I can confirm.

12:28I was actually a spreadsheet monkey at Dow Jones before I became a BC. They made a lot of money. Yeah, like, you guys made, like – Millions. Millions. Like, 20% of the journal's profit. Yeah, at some point. Yeah, we were, like – we called ourselves Mr. and Mr. 20%, but they weren't making any money, so that's a low bar. I can confirm that. It was a low bar. We did call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. 20%. But the problem the journal made is they made a deal with us where we got a percentage of the profits, so they didn't make that much money. So – which is good for me and good for Walt. Walt does a nice TV set and everything. But – 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 is that? I don't like working for people. I don't like – I'm a bad employee.

13:10So 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 employee. 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 – my head against a wall. And 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 going to go away. This was not uncommon at newspapers.

13:50When I was at the Washington Post, they had – when they started – they had a separate division 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 – and I didn't want to be in management. That was the other part. That was sort of anathema. So is that why – I'm curious. I was going to save this question until later. But you sort of become a half-entrepreneur with all things D. Totally. But it wasn't until much later that you fully become – No, but we were an entrepreneur. 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 box. They're like VCs. Just here's the bag of money. Leave us alone. Like that kind of stuff. And they kind of did.

14:31And Walt had a really big reputation then and was making a lot of money for them in the print publication because his 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 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 it also brought attention. And then it brought great attention because the first year we had Gates. We had jobs. Then we had 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 what's to argue with? Except they did. Except they did. Did you guys consider, though, doing it fully independently to start?

15:13Yes, all the time. Or do you think the timing was wrong in the beginning? We should have. We should have. But it wasn't – you know, we could have and we didn't. You know, Walt had a great franchise there. I think I was a contractor so I didn't mind as much to be – a lot of reporters need to be at a big – that's their identity as being part of the blank. And 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 Mike Larrington. And I don't think much of him still to this day. He got a – Or Angie Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan, 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.

15:59Like if you do good work, it has to be good work. It has to either make money or cause attention or something. It has to have some value, whatever that value happens to be. If you do the work, nobody can hurt you ever. Like 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 perform, you tend to get rewarded for it. You tend to. And again, women are constrained. Or at least you get licensed to do whatever you want. Yeah. And you also have to not care. You have to also not care. I didn't care to be in management. I didn't care to climb the ladder. I didn't care if they liked me.

16:42And 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 going to be successful. Oh, yeah. They would hate that. They would hate that we succeeded without them. But I don't, you know, OK. And by the way, also the important thing, which I hate to do, there's such a trope of Silicon Valley, I didn't care if we failed. I didn't care. And I was older at this point. I was much older. You were in your 30s already, right? 40s. Wow. Yeah. I'm old. You had a profit sharing with them where you guys took most of it. Did they ever try and renegotiate that? Well, they originally, you know, it was interesting. The first year we made, I forget what it was. It was a good sum of money. It was a million bucks or something like that. We made a lot of money. We didn't even try, but nobody was trying at all and we'd made money.

17:20And I remember calling Walt and I said, I think I said this on the other show, did you get the flowers? Because I didn't get the flowers. Like, I'd send you fucking flowers if you made the money. And the next year we're like, you're giving us money. And so I think they gave us $40,000 extra. They thought that was like a big deal. And then they didn't want to give us- They're like, I'm giving you millions. Yeah. Like, I know. And we were like, oh, that's not very much. And so I think it was $40,000 sticks in my head. And then the next year they just didn't want, they were like mad about the $40,000. 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. And I remember being in a cab, right?

18:00Oh, no. It's exactly what you guys realized is that you don't need to be part of the X to forth. 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 Quartz. 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 going to do it. And so that was the great part. So you started the trend. 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 did. I mean, you're just naming a couple of names now, but you look around the internet. Oh, at the Journal. At the Journal. That was Kevin.

18:43And they weren't at All Things D. But 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. But then he did. Even to come into D, which was nominally part of the Journal. He knows that. He knows. He knows. We talked about it the other day. But there was, I mean, everybody was there at that time. Yeah, we were. You know, I mean, it was, like you said, Jessica Lesson. She was Jessica Vassilar at the time. Yeah, yeah. At the Journal. Yes, that was at the Journal. Not at All Things D. We had great. We've had amazing. Like, Mike Isaac is amazing. Nellie Bowles is amazing. They're all the time. All Good was there. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody was there. Everybody was there. Yeah. We had a lot of people coming through. What was that? We were good at training people. Were you in Walt, like, were you out there identifying people? Were you recruiting? Yes. Yeah.

19:21Because 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, who's still at Recode. We were doing, like, hey, this Comcast deal sucks, and here's why. Like, we had that kind of tone. That was a big part of why you wanted to do the blog. Right. You wanted to have an opinion, and you didn't, you have this line and another. No, we wanted to have an informed opinion based on reporting. That is very different than mouthing off about something. We knew, like, when I write columns, Dave, I do checking. 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

20:03that had, whether it was great features that we did, or, like, look at this, or this is a mess over at Yahoo. We would have narratives, the whole Yahoo things, and we'd have great graphics, too. John Pachkowski, who now works for BuzzFeed, did amazing graphics. Raised the Yangtanic, which was, you know, the Titanic for Yahoo. We would put a red sex. Did you call Jerry and tell him you were going to? Oh, he laughed. He didn't care. Most people, some people cared, 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 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, a little flip cam that I would, like, shove in people's face. That was a precursor to a lot of stuff.

20:51So we would, I'd stick in there and I'm like, hi, hi, how you doing? How you doing? Like, to whoever I was around. And you posted on the site. I just would post them full on the sites. And I think people liked that. It was fun. And it sort of, it was, we were trying everything different. One time I did a whole story that just said, Apple, Twitter, Apple, Twitter, Apple, Twitter, just to see how many likes we, not how many likes, how many is stupid, because nobody cares about anything. And so we were, and then you would just, it would just be honest. And I think that's what was great about it. Like, Peter Kafka 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 they gave us access. Great. If they didn't, fuck you. Like, you know what I mean?

21:34Like, that's the kind of thing we feel like, don't give a great. I'm good without you, your help. I'm good with, with your help. But we didn't, we didn't cultivate that accessy 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, we're going to give it to you first as an exclusive. I kind of hated that. I like, I don't mind it, but I'm like, ugh, what am I leaving? Well, it comes with strings attached, right? It always does. And you also, you mentioned this on the Ezra Klein podcast, but your strategy is already know everything that's going on. Yes. And then go talk to them. Yes. And then they have to tell you. Yes. Or they think you do. Like, there's a whole thing. Okay. I always know everything that's going on, but sometimes I don't. No, I actually do these days. It's really kind of sad. I've forgotten things.

22:17Like, 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, in the old days, just typed it right up and shoved it out there. But, you know, things have changed in that way. 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, BuzzFeed 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. So, I think people have caught up to a lot of our tricks. Who reminds you today of the pioneering you back then that was breaking all the rules?

23:00You know, Jessica a little bit. But she's doing a different thing. So, you know, she has those long stories. And I, you know, some of what Axios is doing, kind of. But I think it's, I think it's formulaic. And I think it'll get tired after a while. I think that one's going to exhaust you. Although certain people, like, I like Mike Allen. And I like some of the newsletters that Casey Newton has a newsletter called The Interface that I love recently. I thought he was, I just, I've always, like, tried 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 funny or insightful. And 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 going to come back.

23:45Okay. All right. All right. Okay. In any case, we just decided, we just decided, we just decided to do things. And that's the environment I want to be in. Like, I just, now I'm going to do this. Like, too bad. Same thing with the New York Times. I'm going to do it. Like, did I think about that I work for 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, I think, a few amazing op-eds. Yeah, I have one a week. Recently at the Times. I have one a week now. Yeah, there's about five now. I'm going to have two this week. Last week was on Trump mouthing off on. Yeah. That ludicrous. You know, about Twitter and Silicon Valley. Oh, God. It's very good. Whatever. They're unfair to him. They're unfair. By the way, well, we were going to ask you, but the Mooch. Yeah, the Mooch was great. That was a great interview. That was so great.

24:26Well, 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 what I had done, like, I think that's what I, like, I'm having a big fight today on Twitter about Bannon. They're like, you can't interview him. I'm like, yeah, I can't. No, you can't. Well, I'm going to. So whatever. Like, I get your problems with him, but I'm going to still interview him. But what was interesting. That's what people told us about you. What? You can't interview her. What? You can't. And we said we can. Yes, you can. Like, whatever. She'll swear on your show. Right, exactly. Fuck you. So is that what the lie? Our clean iTunes rating is. Oh, come on. You don't want to. Is there a clean iTunes? No one's listening on. Tim Cook ain't listening. And by the way, he did a great interview with me recently on MSNBC. But what was I talking about? Oh, Mooch.

25:07Oh, so what happened was I trolled him on Twitter all the time. He just made me laugh. 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 stupid thing he had said. And I forget. There were a lot of them. They went on and on, like hundreds of them. They were terrible for me to do. And then I was at this event that John Battelle had in Silicon Valley at a restaurant. At this restaurant, there was a thing. And I don't wear my glasses. I don't see very well. And this person was like coming over. And this tiny little man was like headed by way with a lot of hair. And I'm like, who is that? And he comes right in my face. And it's 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. She's Italian. I'm Italian. It was great.

25:52We had a great bunch of drinks. We laughed. And I said, you got to 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 because I'm super liberal on Twitter, obviously, and anti-Trump. And he thought, why wouldn't she talk to me? But of course I would. Why wouldn't I? He was really interesting. And actually, it was a good podcast. It was great. Everyone has a story. It's my favorite interview you've ever done. Yeah, it's one of them. Because the narrative on him was he's the mooch. He's like caricature. He's not a human. But he is and he isn't. But he's also a caricature. Well, yes. Yeah. But you can tell in your interview that there is a method to his madness. There is. There is. But he's still the mooch. He's still the mooch. Of course. He's the mooch. Hey, you're in New York.

26:38Come to my club. I went to his club. Like, why wouldn't I? Like, are you kidding? He has 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 her? Sure. Why not? It was a good steak. He's the mooch. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. So, David, here's a question that I do not think most enterprise CIOs or CEOs could actually answer today if they were asked. How many agents actually run inside your business? Yes. I don't think anybody really knows. And, of course, then there's the harder questions like, what can they access? And who gave them that access? And is any of this paying for itself? ServiceNow has an answer to all those questions. The super intelligence control tower. As friend of the show, CEO Bill McDermott says, it's the one place to see, secure, measure,

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28:28run on ServiceNow. And now they're running their AI there, too. If you're trying to turn AI ambition into real outcomes, just go to servicenow.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right. Let's pick this back up. So, Dee becomes very successful. Yeah. You're Mr. and Mrs. 20%. Yeah. You and Walt. We get to towards the end of 2013. Yeah. The contract for Dee 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 Mossberg. I'll tell you that. He didn't know my name for a long time. But we signed a first contract with them. And then the things, just everything at Dow Jones. Was that another three years? Did you sign it in 2010? Yeah. Something like that. Right when they bought it, we did. Oh, that was 2007. So, you signed a long time. Yeah. We signed a couple with them. Seven years. I know. We did.

29:17We were there a long time. Total aside. Maybe two contracts. But we're... Go ahead. I was getting my favorite story from my favorite Rupert story. I never actually met him when I worked there. But my desk on the eighth floor in 1211 was... I was hired. There was headcount allocated for my job. My boss had hired me. And Wendy Dang, his then wife, she wanted her personal assistant to take my desk. Oh. And so your desk was taken. And so my boss had to go and fight with News Corp Corporate and Wendy. No, no, no. I won. I mean, I wasn't even there yet, but my boss won. Wendy's a tough lady. Yeah. I like Wendy. It was a victory. I scored a victory before I started. I was one time caught between the two of them at dinner and I just can't even go into it. It was quite a night. Yeah. I'm sure. Yeah. All right. So when did you know that the separation was coming? You know, we tried.

30:09And then after that, first of all, they didn't want to invest. We had an idea 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 president, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I knew him super well from writing books on AOL. And I liked him. I think he's super innovative. He's done very well since then. But he wanted to do all. He liked the idea, all things this, all things. Like, 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 were going to, women, like, we could have, like, owned a lot of categories. And they just didn't want to invest. Every section of the paper, you could have your own. Exactly. And then you pick out reporters who are well-known. Like, you make stars.

30:51They 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 scandals. 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 because we often beat them. And they didn't like that. And we weren't that nice to them. Like, when they stole our stories, we were like, hey, you shoplifters. They hated that. Like, be collegial. I'm like, we're not your colleagues. So no. Here's my contract. Yeah. Like, I don't work for you. Like, I don't have to be nice to you. And so they just had an old school way of thinking that we didn't. And 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 famous also.

31:34And so it just wasn't ready for us, right? You know, today they're different. Or maybe they are. I don't care. I don't read the Wall Street Journal. So in any case. Case in point. 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. So what's the phone hacking thing? 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. In the Times of London. And they did it. They did these terrible things that were just so unethical. And they were like, oh, God, can we hang out with these people anymore? They're not. They're giving us a hard time. They're not going to invest in us.

32:22We'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 going to do what we want. And we're too small and too big at the same time. It sounded, you know what I mean? And so they just like, it wasn't going anywhere. And so we went around and interviewed a bunch of people. We wanted to not have venture capitalists. So we interviewed media companies. And we had a list. And we had, you know, A, B, and C people we'd love to invest in us. And we talked to a lot of them. Bloomberg, her, everybody. What was your hangup with taking VC? I just didn't want to listen to a VC. Like, eventually they'd screw me. Eventually they'd screw me, right? Like, I know them. I covered them. I'm like, eventually they screw you. So no thank you. And so we wanted to be careful about it. We wanted media investors. We wanted media investors who understood media.

33:08Because we weren't going to make a ton of money. Like, there just wasn't. You know, 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 liked the television thing. 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. Warner Brothers, right? He did. And he was retired and he had a venture. Not a venture firm. It was an investment firm that invested in media. So you guys raised $12 million. Yes. January 2014, you launch Recode. All Things D, yep. Recode. You take All Things D. Well, the journal keeps All Things D. They do. They wouldn't sell it. We tried to buy it from them, but Rupert wanted $30 million for it. They were going to sell it to us.

33:49We offered them a million, which was insane at the time. Because you took every single employee. Yes, we did. Came with you to Rico. Yes, they did. And what would that have even gotten you? Did people, like, was there RSS feeds that people would have? Just was a name. We had a lot of, we had a lot of, yeah, we had everything. SEO. It would have been nice to have it. Yes, we would have kept All Things D and would have kept the brand name. But they never used it is the thing. They did WSJD, whatever that is. Yeah. And so, but they never used it. I was like, it's just pure peak that they did that. It was insane. It was a waste of their money. They could have had a million bucks from me, but, and that was way too much to pay for. That would have been meaningful to their operating profit. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I was like, it was so dumb. And he wanted $30 million.

34:25And I remember thinking, you know, I could buy fuckyouRupert.com for that much money, right? Like, come on. Like, we should have been funny. And I don't know. It just was, it was not a good parting. It was. And they were obnoxious to us on the way. They tried to say they fired us, which was crazy. But, you know, whatever. Okay. So we're curious. We got it. I don't know. Recode. Where did the name come from? Oh, we had the edit. And originally it was re-slash-code. Yes, I know. And then it's capital R, capital C. What happened? Are we all lowercase now? Is that the. No, it's just recode. I don't know. Yes. The masthead is all lowercase. It's all lowercase. Dan Frommer came in and cleaned it up. But I don't like the slash. I don't know why. I just did. It was stupid. I was like, you should never let me design anything. But, but recode came from. Are you Marissa Mayer who's like on the weekend designing the Yahoo logo?

35:09No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. No. We hired a branding firm and they came up with lots of names. And I just found the deck the other day. And this is what recode means. And this and that. And I, I, we just liked it. The minute we saw it, we're like, oh yeah, that. There were a bunch of really crazy names. Like, oh God, I can't remember. Some of them were wacky. What was it? I'll find it. The parent company was Revere Digital. Yes. That was because we were, what was 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, there's an obnoxious reason. It was originally called Shut Up and Listen, LLC. That was the original. I 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.

35:50And I forget why we changed it to Revere. It was something with Paul Revere. Now I've forgotten. Is the Wall Street Journal like the Redcoats or something? Something like that. We're getting out. It was like something like that. Something like that. I forget. Everything we do is based on obnoxious tendencies. And so we had a naming group and they came up with that. And then the guy who owned Recode.com was a German guy. He wouldn't give it to us. He wanted a lot of money. And so we went with, we decided to make NetSexy. And then. You and John Gruber. Like the Daring Fireball. The two.net holdouts. What the hell? Nobody cares, but nobody. Everyone's like, you can't do that. We're like, why? Who cares about this stuff? Nobody types. And nobody types, right? Exactly. Hello, Google. Like just put Recode. And so then. And then the guy. We're trying to get code.com. And it's owned by the Kind Bar guy. That guy. What? Why?

36:36I think so. Something. He just had it. He just. I don't know why. He has it. He wanted to start. This is like the Rover.com story. Yeah. He has it. I think he still does. But anyway. I ran him to a party. I'm like, give me your URL. And he's like, well, if you do a site. A conference about peace. I'm like, no, fuck you. I'm not doing a conference about peace. You think he would have said, have time bars at the conference? We do, actually. By choice. And he wanted. I don't forget. He wanted to lend it to us. It just didn't work. 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 URL for any reason. Anyway. We didn't get that. And it was fine. It doesn't matter. It's a great name. It's a great name. It is a great name. It's a great name. So you said something a little while back. And then it has a code conference. And then Recode decode. It works perfectly.

37:20It's fine. So you said something a while back. That I want to pick back up on. You said you and Walt knew. You'd make money. You were already making money. But you knew this wasn't going to be like VC scale business. However, at pretty much the same time you start Recode, all of these new media sites get started. Ridiculous. There's, of course, Vox, which we're sitting in Vox headquarters right now, which has a fun story to itself. But there's BuzzFeed. There's all these companies. They're raising tons of money. VCs are jumping in. Yes. All the content companies. Mike.com. What were you thinking when you saw this? Oh, Jesus. Oh, no. Because I've seen it before. 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 business insider. They raised a bunch of money. Then they started getting my – they tried to poach my employees for ridiculous salaries.

38:08I was like – VC money. You know, at one point when I was trying to hire someone, I was offering them a lot – what I thought was a lot of money. And then they wanted a lot more. And I'm like, I didn't even want to pay you the first one. I'm not going to pay you the second one. I really don't want to pay you. In fact, I'm not paying you the first one anymore. And so it was – that was that – you saw that happening. And then that one Univision one. What are they – those guys? Kevin Roos went there. A whole bunch of Alex Madrigal. Alex Madrigal went there. Fusion. Fusion. They came in and offered like, here's $3 million reports. It was craziness. It was craziness. And it was – I just saw – And again, I mean, the moneymaker for D and – It was the events. It was the events, right? Yeah, now the podcasts make a lot of money. It's the old Jeff Zucker quote. You know, for all of Jeff – like he was right.

38:53Digital dollars turn into – or analog dollars, dimes turn into digital pennies. Now he thinks it's a quarter or more. It's actually doing okay for some people. It was once a good – It was just like, come on. This isn't going to work. Like 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 – And so I thought we got to sell. Like I immediately – I was like pushing hard, pushing Walt hard. And how far into the business was this? Six months. Huh. I was like, no, no, no. This could go very wrong for us with the money we have. And so, you know, if there wasn't that fundraising, we probably would have stayed independent. But that was – it was crazy money. It was – the money was being thrown around. And it wasn't going to stop. And it could really hurt us.

39:37And 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 you just panic. By move, you mean make decisions. You don't just stand there and say – No, only the paranoid 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 you know. But there were – but in a bigger scale, even if it's hard, you have to be bigger. I just – I felt that. And so I looked around and talked to a bunch of people who were like us. There were several. And – Did you talk with any of those that had raised crazy money to sort of combine with them? None of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There were offers all the time. It was crazy. Like reporters deal making.

40:19Like it's – you know you've got to get off the train if that's happening. Kara, I've 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, you know, really serious. Think of – you know what I'm saying. Like no. I mean, we're VCs, so. Like no, thank you. Like even VCs are stupid, right? Like I'm not going to 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 at AOL. And I loved him. Is this Chorus? Chorus. I forget which – yeah, it was Chorus. I guess it was Chorus. No, it was Chorus as their content management system. They had an ad system too. In any case, he wanted – it wasn't called that then. But he wanted us to be part of their ad group. Like they sell our ad. One of those deals. And I was like, well, why don't we just merge? How about that?

41:03And you don't have anything fancy. Like we're fancy. We're another revenue stream. We've got ideas. We're well-known. We're like your other brands. We're like Vox. We're like Eater. We're in the same zone. Especially The Verge. But you guys have a very different – The Verge is like – Different. Right. But it's like – Walt went over there. We moved Walt's – Exactly. That's what I think of The Verge as like Walt's part of. 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 adding the consumer stuff just didn't like – We couldn't – It just wasn't right from a journalism point of view for the product. And so we were doing all this breaking news business stuff. And then we had Walt there. And so he was better – Give him a bigger audience. The Verge made more sense.

41:51And by the way, we do anything again if it makes more sense. Like we're not stupid. Like if things change, we change. Nothing is sacred. Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And so – And so Jim wanted to do some kind of commercial deal where he said let us take this ad sales off your hands. We get this great technology platform. And you're like nah. It's combined. What about this? And he thought of it too. Like he understood how famous Walt and I were and how it did add to his – 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 if you can compare him to Shane Smith or even the guys over at BuzzFeed. And who's Shane Smith? Shane Smith runs Vice. Got it. Runs Vice. Who now is not running Vice because they have some issues because of Shane Smith, et cetera. And so Nancy Dubuque runs it.

42:39They get the lady to come in and clean it up. So anyway, so it was a good match. It was a good match. We've been thrilled. It's been four years almost now. So it was May 2015. We announced it at Code. Yeah. We announced it a year later. May 2015. You announced it. You're selling to Vox. Wait. So the deal was done and you announced it a year later? Yeah. Wow. I know. Oh, wow. How did you keep that under your head? I just did. No, no, no. We didn't come to the conclusion until close to the deal. So you spent a year sort of figuring it out. Because it was 18 months. Yeah, we were running it for – yeah, it was 18 months. Before you sold. But it really was six months when you started. Yes, absolutely. Interesting. It was pretty soon. It was pretty soon. And, you know, I thought about the employees. I'm like, oh, I promised them this. Now I'm doing this. And, you know, I don't – it's fine. Like, you know what I mean?

43:18Like, 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, ah, we're going to change our tune. Like, there's nothing wrong. I think, you know, journalists are super risk-averse and they're very rigid. And I'm not. So I will literally change at any moment. I was going to save this for our tech team section, but I want to bring it up now. Facebook. Yeah. That was – I think if I had to rewind back to that time and justify all the VC 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. New media was in every article. Yeah. What is new media? What is new media? Yeah. Yeah.

44:07But the way that's kind of played out is it's great for Facebook. It's great for Facebook. Not great for – It's great for racists and anti-Semites. It's great for people – Russians, the Russians it worked out well for. But not so much for the rest of us. No. They didn't come up with a business plan of how to – 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 about. And they tried everything. We'll get to podcasts in a minute. Well, at one point, I remember 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, oh, it seems like a perfect way to kill someone and then show it 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.

44:45Now you're going to unleash a video platform. All right, you incredibly irresponsible people. Go right ahead. But I remember them saying, you should do Facebook Lives. Remember that? All the journalists were doing Facebook Lives. Oh, yeah. And I go – and it was like from the top. They were like, Kara, you should know Cheryl or whatever. You should do 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's my money? Where's my sack of money? Because it's a waste of my time. You'll get more users. I'm like, I don't need it. I have 700,000. They're not making me money. Those also aren't your users. They're Facebook users. Right. They're your users. And where's my money? Like I kept saying, where's the benefit for Kara Swisher? But it's also – it's like a head fake, right? Because – Yeah, you'll get more famous. I'm like, I am famous. Thank you.

45:23But really what was going on was – Yeah. Build users. Build users. For all these new media platforms, they're all just coming from Facebook. Exactly. I just never saw – I literally never saw – I was like, I'm not wasting. I'd rather watch Law & Order because that would give me pleasure. 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? Is that Twitter followers? I don't even know. Fans. No, Twitter is 1.3. It actually dipped when they did their cleaning, their culling, and now it's back up. The purge. When they did the purge. Right. And now it's up again to 1.3 or so. Something like that. I don't know. But again, it's like Twitter selling ad dollars, selling ad units against your 1.3 million followers. Yeah. I guess – I'm sure half of them are bots. I'm guessing half of them are bots. I was just there early.

46:08That's all. I was a recommended user. You didn't intentionally buy them? I didn't buy any of them. I was an early user, and I was on the early recommended list, and I think I just was put on everybody's thing. I don't think half the people know who the hell I am. All right. So speaking of audience size, so when you got bought by Fox Media, what did your audience look like on Recode? How big it was? Yeah. Small. Small. A couple million. Has it grown since the acquisition? You know, we're not as focused on the website. I'm not – again, we haven't been as focused. 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. Right. They all feed on each other. Some kind of flywheel or something. That's the way you think about it. Yeah. It makes sense.

46:46It's like all journalism is how we look at it, whether we break news on our – because we broke plenty of news on the Mark Zuckerberg podcast. Like, hello, that drove a news cycle for two or three days. 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 at 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. Yeah. And then we break them up into pieces, and then we make news stories. And you released one every, like, three or four episodes? Yes. Yeah. It looks like – Yeah, we did. Like, why not? It's all content. And however people want to consume it is really how I look at it.

47:26I think we definitely are rethinking what is the traditional web news site because it's changed really drastically. I mean, like, Bloomberg is doing everything in the world. They hoover up every piece of information and bomb 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 machines. And so you have to think really hard as 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. Like, that's an interesting – It's 2018 and we're talking about email newsletters. I know, but you know what? They're good. But they're good. But I still think some of them are terrible. Yeah, I start my day with Primack. Right. Except you don't do all of them. So what is it about his that's great? What is it about –

48:04Like, I'm interested. If you had one, I would read yours. I would have a different – I have a different idea. I have a new thing I'm cooking up that I think would be interesting. I'm not saying that flattery. Like, I want your tone, like, in my head every morning. Yeah, but it's going to be in a different way. I'm going to – I have a different – I think newsletters are great, but they're heavy. Like, I find they pile up. Yep. And so 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 – 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.

48:37And so when we started the podcast, it was the same thing. Everyone was like, you can't do an hour. And I'm like, yeah. And it was two months after the acquisition, you started the podcast. Yeah, because nobody was paying attention. Did you know how big it was going to get? No. No, yes, yes, yes. Because I knew we were – because our bet is that people are smart. Smart people like smart interviews. Yeah. People like substantive things. It had become a twitchy little universe of content, right? And so everyone was getting little pieces of information that made no sense. And I thought conversations mattered. I always thought – 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.

49:19But that's pretty much the – People have to pay the money to make their revenue. There is the formula for Code. And then when you go down – when you go down the stack a little bit, there's all these fascinating people, you know, who should get attention. We didn't have a lot of VCs at Code, for example. I just – we just didn't. Andrew Mason may have been my favorite episode of Free Code Decode. That was a great one. That was so blunt, honest, amazing. Exactly. And so people feel more comfortable in that setting. But I can 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. Or April Underwood. Like you don't know who she is, but she's critically important. Or like I had today Nicole Wong, who ran big legal teams at Google and Twitter and was very central to a lot of their early decisions, talking about what's happening now.

50:02Like 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 interesting is that you can do all kinds of different things with the medium. And that's what I liked about it. But my premise was that you could do an hour. And everyone says, you can't. And I was like, yes, I can. No, you can't. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to just do it and I'm not going to listen. What was great about Vox is there was nobody here to say we couldn't. Like they just didn't. They're like, okay, try it. Like it didn't cost them anything. And I think what's cool is everybody's realized you can do an hour and a half with podcasts. If they're good. We did 90 minutes with Mark. Everybody listened to that 100%. 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.

50:49Everyone tries to make all these hard and fast rules of, oh, this is going to work. That's going to work. I don't – that's just bullshit. You know that. Like, right? If it's good, if a product is – I have like a criteria. It has to be useful, entertaining, and kind of a must-have. Like a must-have. And if it makes money, fantastic. If it hits even one of these things, it's great. So, you know, I think about the podcast. It's useful. It's entertaining. It makes money. And you kind of can't get an interview with Mark Zucker except Kara Swisher'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 – You can't get people who guest on podcasts talking like they do on podcasts in any other format. Yeah, but it's also – I can get them talking like that.

51:36So it's just like – so that's the whole thing. It's like Mark Maron is only Mark Maron doing it. You cannot replicate it. You can't – it cannot be – anything that can be replicated, you really have to not do. Like that kind of thing. And so Mike Allen can't be replicated. Lots of things can't be replicated. To Snapchat's chagrin, a lot of their things can be replicated and quite well by Kevin Systrom and Instagram. That's a problem. Like as delightful as I think Snapchat is and my kids love it, it's replicable. And that's a problem. You have to create moats around yourself in some way. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Lagora, the agentic operating system for legal work. Yes. Most of you have dropped a contract into a chatbot by now. But as a lawyer, how far can that really take you? It's never seen your firm's precedents.

52:29It doesn't respect confidentiality. And you can't check where its answer came from. So Lagora's founders approached this the way that great founders do. Early on, the team moved into the office of a big law firm in Stockholm and learned, for months, how the work actually gets done. A couple of thousands of enterprise customers and 100,000 users later, they still work that way. They employ 100 legal engineers on staff. These are lawyers sitting inside of firms and legal departments to deploy Lagora onto live situations like the deal closing this week or the policy review due Friday. The product has gotten very powerful in a short period of time. A year ago, the goal was a good answer from a chatbot. With the Lagora agent, you hand it the work and it comes back with a plan.

53:17Tasks like running diligence on a data room or reviewing a new vendor contract get completed inside the tool you use every day like Microsoft Word and against your own precedents and playbooks. Every finding is sourced. The lawyer directs the work and signs off before the system executes any steps. Every legal team can get access to the same AI models, so the models themselves do not give you an edge. What you can do with your own data, people, playbooks, that's the whole game. Today, over 100,000 legal professionals at more than 1,800 law firms and in-house legal teams in over 50 markets use Lagora. And when Lagora goes head-to-head with its top competitor in a pilot, it wins 70% of the time. A demo is one thing, but what matters most is an associate who reaches for it at 2 in the morning during a closing or whether a general counsel trusts what it says before the board meeting.

54:09So if your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're at a firm or in-house, go to lagora.com slash acquired and be sure to tell them that Ben and David sent you. With podcasts and the future of Recode, how important is it to the strategy? How much are you saying, like, actually, this is kind of the way forward? We're not paying attention to 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. 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. We're doing less scoops, I think.

54:52But 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 painted over here in paint, and now I'm interested in photography. And now, like, that's how I look at it. And so whoever is making the website, the Recode website, it has to integrate into everything else we're doing, like our events and the podcast. But it's part of the same branding idea. Like, you have to think of that. And so the reason I'm interested in podcasts is – and Peter Kafka has one, and we're starting another one coming – is because we're interested in creatively. 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. And it also makes a lot of money. Like, that's – and it makes a lot of money. It's the money you keep that Facebook doesn't monetize.

55:38Exactly. 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 business, as far as I can tell. And it has all kinds of interesting applications. We're doing a bunch of live podcasts. We're doing a bunch of – 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. Joanna Bouillon is doing – she's doing the – who is she doing? The guy, the auto guy, Lawrence Burns. You know, they get the opportunity to learn how to be better interviewers and stuff like that. So it gives us – gives that opportunity. Jason Del Rey is doing this – I can't say what it is, but he's doing a multi-part 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?

56:23Why don't you do four episodes like they are doing on Netflix with certain shows? So he's doing one that's really going to be great. He's doing two of them that are going to be great, two audio things that are just – they're going to be what they are. And we're going to – we have a sponsor for them, and that will be great. And so it gives them an opportunity to be – the reporters at Recode to be creative. Why do they monetize so much better? Just do right now. They might not later. I think because people really listen to them, and they like them, and they download them. They're very quantifiable, I think. People can measure them. People talk about them. You can see they get a lot of buzz. And I don't think – I think the idea that the audience thinks really hard about where they're getting their content is kind of an old school thing.

57:05Like, if it's not on the website, it's like, well, so what if it's in podcast form? So what if it's on the event side? So what if it's in a story? In a print journal. What if it's a tweet? 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, interviewer. Yeah, and you remember – we famously got rid of comments six, five years ago. Right. Everyone was like, how can you do that? I'm like, I hate them. Yeah. Like, I don't have this down. My website is my voice. Like, get off it. Well, it was interesting because when we took them off, first of all, I was like, you have to have comments. I'm like, do we? You know, and of course you do. I'm like, why? Like, they're vile. They don't add to the benefit. They don't help the website.

57:45In fact, all we do is try to, like, knock things off. I'm wasting time. My copy editor's taking off, you know, you faggot. Like, I don't need it. Like, you know, awful. Why 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 terrible, vile, homophobic, anti-Semitic, race, everything. Like, this guy was the whole package. And he, you know, he wrote me an email. They somehow find my email, and they're like, how dare you? End comments. It's the First Amendment. I have a right to say whatever I want. You know, that stupid trope. And I was like, you know, get your own fucking website. It's my website. Get out of my bar. Build your own audience. Get out of my bar. Get out of my bar. Guess what? I'm not giving you a beer. Like, sorry. You're an awful, vile human being. And so it was really interesting.

58:32And I said Twitter was our comment section, really. And so that's where I engage with people a lot. I've recently not done Instagram as much because I don't like it. Well, I'm so glad we ended on podcasting this. How are you liking podcasting, boys? What do you think? It's fun. Not only is, like, tremendously fun. And I never thought it enables people who aren't in media. I mean, we're not journalists. We're not journalists. So what? You have things to say, right? You're smart, interesting people. Like, why not? You don't know us. I'm just saying you seem so far. You haven't said anything too stupid. Thank you. No, you haven't said anything stupid so far. That might be the best comment we've ever got. Yeah, put that on the website. You don't seem too stupid. No, but, I mean, it's creative. Like, no matter who you are. And I think, again, conversation is really important. And people like to hear.

59:17People love great conversation. The other thing is, Dave and I do the podcast for a variety of reasons. And even though we have a wonderful sponsor in Silicon Valley Bank, zero of it is to make any money on the show. And the number one reason that we do it is because it allows us a creative journey in self-directed education. Yeah. 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, you know. Why not? We're not in school. We're not going to classes. We get to learn stuff. People you want to meet. Yeah. I often, like, I'm going to have your own podcast. 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. Yeah, yeah. He's amazing. But he's also a very important producer in Hollywood.

59:53People don't realize he has tons of shows. And he was like, I love your podcast. I said, come on it. And he's like, okay. And so I'm going, we're going to do that, by the way, Sean Hayes. But I want to talk about the entertainment business. He's doing all kinds of digital stuff. And he's a producer. And so it was just like, I want to talk to Sean Hayes. And that would be wonderful on lots of levels to talk to him on lots of things. And so it gives you that opportunity to meet people and 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. That's my favorite part is learning from other people.

60:33Well, that's the, in a lot of ways, I think podcasts, we're totally like doing tech themes now instead of later. But that's fine. We always do that. I think podcasts are, have really removed the gatekeepers. I mean, like we're two guys. Like we're not journalists. You know, Tim Ferriss isn't a journalist. He does a great podcast. He does a great podcast. Like, you know, all of the top, with the exception of really Vox podcasts, which we'll get into in a sec. It's indies. Yeah, it is. It is in a lot of ways. And it'll be consolidated. Look, it's going to be consolidated. You get that. Like you get that. 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 a global brand. The written word and a global brand.

61:17And 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 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 going to get on a global scale and start whacking at these people. Like, you know what I mean? Like, and they're going to 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. But 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.

61:56It's not just website, like Recode website. It's not just events. It's not just speeches. It's all of them together that gives you these tools that you can reach people in different ways. And they each require a different skill. All right. You talk about consolidation. I'm curious more on why you're sure that it's going to, going to consolidate when right now we're sort of in this era of Indies thriving. Because it always consolidates everything. You know, it's interesting. I don't know if you noticed. I have two tattoos, many tattoos on my hands. So it's entropy 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 two opposite. They exist. Bundling and unbundling. Right. Exactly. And so everything moves towards organization. Everything moves towards consolidation.

62:40And then it moves towards destruction, like, in the same way. And so I think that that's sort of a cycle you see that will happen. And I think podcasts, everyone's like, wait a minute, this makes money. And then everyone's going to pile in. Many was shitty. We should federate these in a bunch of. I know. Well, Federated Media. Remember that? That was John Patel. Yeah. So that didn't work out so well. The Search was a good book, though. It was a good idea. But, you know, these things are going to federate. They're going to federate. And then they're going to unfederate. And then the big companies will get into them. And they will suck. And then blah, blah, blah. But I think no matter what, like, the reason Marc Maron's popular is only one reason. It's a great podcast. Right? Yeah. 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.

63:23So I think I'm not that worried about the consolidation. But I do think there's going to be a few places that are going to are creative at making them. And therefore. Well, like Vox. Vox. Vox. Gimlet. There's a bunch of them that are really good at making them. And some will have a certain style. You know, the. You know, like the Daily with the New York Times. Michael Barbaro is 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. What a media organization. Newspaper stories every day. Telling you how I 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 want to hear Michael Barbaro do his. But he goes beyond the story. Right? So it just works. And that team there is so talented. That team of people who put that.

64:06Not just him. But there's a whole pack of people there that are just so good. And tell a story in a great way. Well, I think that's our category. Consolidation. We categories each acquisition. In a way. I was going to go business line. So the way that we do this for people new to the show. We decide what category the acquisition was. Was it people? Technology? Product? Business line, asset, or consolidation. And I mean, I was going to go business line because for me it's really like picking up a whole new P&L and running that P&L independently and hoping it expands and realizing synergies. I'm saying that every episode now. It's okay. You can use it. It's a good one. But, you know, with wallet going across and writing at The Verge. But effectively, it's still its own business unit that you're buying for hopefully the sum of future cash flows. Yeah. Yeah, but it's other things. There's more things to it.

64:54There's advertiser interest. Ezra Klein started his show right around the same time you did, right? Well, you know, he came to me when he was starting it. We had done ours. No, he did it after. Quite a bit. After. 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 agriculture. I'm like, can you do some interesting people? What about Cory 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, you know, Biden. He'd be like a people would love to hear from Biden. And he's a very good interviewer. And he's more wonky. And he's definitely more wonky. He should call something wonk something. He should. But there was already wonkette, 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.

65:34I believe it was adjacent to them. So I don't think they could take that. He's like your. Did he start wonk blog? He is. Oh, I love. I was like trying to make a joke there. It landed flat. Oh, sorry. That's all right. Anyway, I love Ezra. Ezra and I are of the same mind, I would say, of lots of things. We'll be doing more together in the future, I think. He's really great. That's exciting. Yeah. He's great. All right. Well, that blows my acquisition category. All right. That's consolidation. What would have happened otherwise? You would have failed on your own. Yeah. Speculate on that. I'm curious. Oh, that's a good question. Probably. Maybe not. And what does failed mean? Sold to someone else for a different price later? We would have sold. We would have sold. I might have been smart enough to sell it to someone else. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was smart. I did. I sold it. There we go. Sorry.

66:15You would have failed to have meet the return thresholds of the $12 million you raised. I don't think they cared. Yeah. So I had investors who didn't care. That's why you don't have VCs. Hey, you get the investors you asked for. I got the money from Terry. I called him to thank him for, I think they gave us $5 million due to first. And I kept not being able to reach him. It was, he's such a lovely man. And I go, hey, I finally reached him. I figured he was in Sardinia or wherever the hell he was on his yacht. And he goes, I go, hey, Terry, thanks for the $5 million we got in the bank. And he's like, oh, good. Who are you again now? He goes, no, he knows who I was. And he goes, oh, good, good. Good for you. I hope you enjoy it. And it was like literally like uncle gave me $20. It wasn't a gift. No, he's like, good luck with that. And I was like, okay. And he goes, okay, bye. And I was like, all right, see ya.

67:00And it was really like, I was like, he's not going to bother me in any way for that money ever again. And he actually got his money. He got the stock in Vox. So anyway, he was a lovely guy. The sale to Vox, more or less than the 12. Investors all made their money back. Oh, yeah. Common. They all took Vox stock. They could have gotten cash. They took Vox stock. They did. I think. I don't know if all. I don't know what everybody did. But I'm pretty certain they did. Yeah. It was more. Cool. It was good. But it's all those like content valuations. So I don't know. I don't know. Right. Yeah. Well, speaking of, we've already covered a lot of tech themes. We'll see where it ends. We'll see where Vox ends too. That's like at least successful. Should we be grading? Yeah. All right. Carrie, do you want to be on the hot seat? I mean, you're not sure. Okay, go ahead. I will. I can try. I don't know a lot. I'm a big shareholder.

67:48This is how we grade in the show. But, 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? Yes, it was. Well, 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. Yes, I get it. There must be a pony in there somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, I got that. I would say a B plus at least, if not an A. Yeah, I would. But it benefited in lots of ways. Yes, yes. There's no downside. There's absolutely. Podcasts alone, right? Exactly. It made their money back. 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 acquisitions, it seems like. Although, you know, they ran into trouble with one, but it still was a great journalistic product, Racked, that they. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

68:41Still a great journalistic product. 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. Yeah. I do. I think just like any content company, they're going to run into the same issues of content companies. Like, they're in the same. They're not exactly in the same boat. BuzzFeed spent more money, but they're in the same content. Media is hard. Like, that's their problem. That's the problem they have. Media, she is hard. I'm going to get on my high heart. Real quick, just to throw up, like, do either of you know what the valuation of Vox Media was at the Recode acquisition and then what it is now? So they've raised it. Like, it's a unicorn now. I think they announced it. 1.1 billion? Yeah. It was in, like, several hundred millions when they acquired you. Yes. And now it's much higher.

69:27And who knows if they could ever sell for that. Like, all of them. I think BuzzFeed was 1.5. Yeah, right. Yep. Vox was 1.1, if I remember from the news stories. And then it was Mashable. Mashable was some ridiculous sum. And then it sold for, like, a song kind of thing. So to the extent that... Vice is also, I believe, in a billion-ish range. No, no, they're higher. They're up higher. Yeah, they're up higher. They're up way higher. I hope it's questions. I'm glad to be down in low lands with the Vox people. Although it still is. So what entrepreneurs know, you know, the lower your valuation, the more upside there is for you. Well, you know, I don't know who would buy. God, any of these companies. It's hard. Right now, it's not the greatest time for a content company. Comcast? I don't know. I guess. Yeah, they're a big NBC. Yeah, sure. But why? Like, if I had to go write a news... See, the way I think about...

70:09Like, I remember writing about Tumblr being bought. And they were on the edge of, like, death, essentially. And all the tip I got was it was being acquired by a company for a billion... I didn't hear it was Tumblr. A digital content company is being acquired by Yahoo for a billion dollars. That's just somebody intentionally encrypting it just enough so that... They just said that. That's all I got. And I was like, okay. And I call myself Sherlock Homo. And so I was like, all right, Watson. What do we have here? Who's your Watson? Just me. My cat. My cat. 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. And Tumblr was third on the list because she wants to be helplessly hip. You know what I mean? Even though she's not. Twitter was one.

70:54Twitter was on there. You know? And I started making calls as if I knew. And so I called up. I knew all the investors of Tumblr. And I knew they were in trouble. And I was like, she could possibly spend this amount of money on this. You couldn't be this stupid. But I will try it. And I literally went. I said, oh, so Yahoo's buying you. And they're like, how did you know? And I'm like, thank you. I have my ways. I know. I was like, I'm so smart. You're so good, Cara. I'm like, 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 fascinating. But all I did was I thought about it. Like, I strategized it. So I think about, like, Vox and those things all the time. Like, Vox, Comcast, yeah, but why? Like, what is Steve Burke like? Why would he need this? What would it add?

71:35Like, you know, same thing if you bought BuzzFeed or if you bought any of these companies or anything. That's how I think about everything. Like, 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 going to buy Twitter. I'm like, no, they're not. They don't want to buy that mess. Right. Like, but, you know, that's how you have to think. I could see, like, a Verizon. Yeah. Someone that has distribution who can marry great content with the distribution they have. Yeah, but look how those have worked out for the day. Well, Yahoo one didn't work out. That works in theory. In theory. Yeah. Or it will work one day. The platonic form of that will be realized. Okay. Sure. In some way. Like, look at that. We'll see. We'll see. Maybe Clear Channel. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. These are all dying to me. News Corp. News Corp.

72:16Back to Newt Rupert. How would, how? What would that have to be for you? Rupert isn't really running News Corp anymore. I think he's quite lively, I suspect. I've heard. We had James Murdoch on stage the other day. I don't think he's staying with that. I think it's going to be Lachlan and Rupert at the other place. All right. Well. James had become a VC, I think. That's what he said. I think that's what he said. Huh. Didn't he? You heard it here first. No, no, no. He said it on stage at Recode Media. I think he did. Scooped. He's doing investments. He said it. He said it publicly. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Well, there we go. Oops. That might be one of my scoops. I forgot. My little pie. It's like a bag. I'm like Hermione Granger. What's in it? That's amazing. I think it's an A- because this is my own narrative. My head has clearly been evident in the episode. But I don't think Vox.

73:02Vox is the biggest player in podcasts right now. No, NPR. No, no. NPR is not doing podcasts. Okay. NPR distributes radio shows on podcasts. Yeah, yeah. That's what they do. They're not making native podcasts. Not new ones. Everyone's trying to copy the daily is really pretty much what's going on. And they just announced one, I think. NPR just announced one. Plus, I think, as we've talked about a little bit on the show, the whole podcast business model is about to go through a lot of positive disruption where people are going to pay creators directly. And Vox now has probably the biggest aggregated audience of podcast listeners in America. Yeah. Outside of NPR, which already monetizes through direct payments. So, for whatever they paid for Recode, to help jumpstart that, I think it's fantastic. Yeah. Is it an Instagram? Sorry, Kara. I don't think so.

73:52No, but on a lot of levels, sometimes I think, should I have just done those on my own? Well, right. I would have had a lot. I'm thinking of that guy who does the Ben Thompson or other. That's what I was going to bring up. Yeah. Then some days it's like, oh, that would even be. I'd have more money. Could you write that much? How does Ben Thompson write that much every day? He writes a lot. He does. He lives in Taiwan. He lives in Taiwan. It doesn't give him more than 24 hours. It just gives him a jump in the morning. That's right. It gives him no distractions. I could do it. I could do it. I could do it. I just have to stop doing other things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you pay for a strategy? I do. Yeah. I think I do. Yeah. I do. I think we have one to recode. I think he's really interesting. I think all those people are interesting. I think about those things. What do you need? Anything.

74:33I always am trying to go for like, I'm not trying to Maria Kondo everything. And I'm definitely like, look, when I did the Times thing, I didn't leave Fox, did I? Right. There's ways to do it. I think what these tech, all these media companies have to think about is how do you keep really creative people interested all the time? How do you keep like an Andrew Ross Sorkin interested in the New York Times? How do you keep a star? Because they're stars now. Yeah. How do you keep them? But why not keep them creative? They create more great things that make more money. Like, how do you do that? Like, if you're Vanity Fair, anything. How do you keep creative people interested and reward them in the way that if they make money, how do you help reward them? I think that's an interesting thing. None of this is scalable, obviously, because it's all human. You can't AI this thing. Right. So. Right. That's the only issue.

75:16But if you're interested in media, I think it's going to be a lot more. I'm not a sports person. What's it called when someone is a free agent? There's going to be a lot more free agents. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll see contracts for, kind of like you and Walt had with the journal. Yeah. I have three contracts now. I have one with NBC because I do my MSNBC show. It's a periodic. Interviews I do based, like Tim Cook, we did the Google guys. I've got a contract with the New York Times and I'm employed by Vox Media. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. It's better than sports. You can play for three teams. I know. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. I just think about it. You wouldn't have been able to do that many years ago. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I find that fascinating. Ben, what's your grade? My logic isn't any different, but I can't be anywhere close to an A because we know of,

75:58on the show, A's mean insane multiples on billions of dollars. So I have a B. You have a high curve then. You're just grading on an Instagram curve? It's kind of a- Really? Well, none of us do. Then we're all F's. We're all frigging F's. Well, you got it. It's logarithmic. My son got a D. Speaking of grades, my son got a D in math a couple of years ago. And 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 I remember him saying to me, I go, Louie, a D? I'm not that hard on my kids about grades. And I was like, but a D? Come on. And he goes, well, at least it's not an F. 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 school just won't go to F, though D is like, you got an F, but I'm giving you a D. You can tell him we gave AOL Time Warner a D. D. Oh, a D. Yeah, we didn't actually give an F.

76:46No, that wasn't an F. That wasn't an F. Not for some of the shareholders. I've written an entire book on it. 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. Well, we're talking about media and the internet here. It was the right idea. It was just early and a bunch of assholes running the show. So I wrote a book on it. They were assholes. All sides. Ben, do you want to do lightning round? Yes, lightning round. We'll finish up. All right, so we got to know, what's a day in the life of Kara Swisher like? Hmm. I wake up. I wrote a column this morning and then I came in here and did a whole bunch of podcasts. I'll spend some time tonight thinking about some live events we're going to do and the next MSNBC thing. I make a lot of calls. I call around. I talk to a lot of people.

77:40Now that I'm doing the column, I spend a lot more time talking to people. 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. Oh. Yeah, and then we, so I'll work on that. I'll work on some hotel stuff and thinking about that. I'll work on code speakers. We have a new list of who we want for next year. Often I'll fly places to meet different people. I'm going to meet some pretty well-known people. I'm going to fly to see them. I try to ask people in person to come to code a lot of times. I think they have a hard time saying no to me in person. That's great. We should steal that. Yeah. Hello. Hi. Did you just show up? They know I'm coming. I'm coming for lunch. Few people turn down lunch. One of the things that I think is a big clue is everyone's always like, how did you talk to them? I'm like, I called them. People will talk to you.

78:30If you get their emails and you write them, they will write you back. It's really interesting. Anyone, anyone, if you get their emails, will write you back. And if you ask the question. I mean, that's how we emailed you. Yes. Did I write you back? You did right away. Thank you. There you have it. If you seem like not crazy, I will write you back. So I'll go visit people. I'll do a lot of lunches. I'm trying to think of them in the next couple of days. It's a lot of podcasts in the next couple of days. Some events, a bunch of events. Like next week, I'm interviewing Maggie Haberman at Lesbians Who Tech. We're going to make a podcast out of that again. And I'm doing Jane Lynch, who's a friend of mine, actually. We're going to make a podcast out of that. So a lot of events I do outside of Vox, we make into podcasts because that's the price of admission for me doing it. And we're doing a 92nd Street Y thing.

79:14So we do a lot of live events. I do a lot of live events. And I'll always do panels with anything that has to do with women's issues or young people. That's it. That's it. Then I have my kids. Hang out with my kids. Hang out with my different people, family, my mom. So not busy at all? Not busy at all. I'm real busy. I have a great family. All right. You're running for mayor of San Francisco in 2023. Give us an update. I don't think I am. No? Why not? 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 Ed to die. And I think I'm going to give her a chance. She seems like she deserves one. That's a good reason why that. And not make trouble. I was just doing that because my point I was trying to make is someone's got to fix this frigging mess here. It's a mess. And so I think I was trying, and at the time I really meant it.

80:01It was like someone's got to, you've got to get away from all these 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 thing. I like it. I like it. I'm going to have her. She's bringing scooters back. She's bringing scooters. She seems sensible. She seems sensible. Just like, same thing with like Stacey Abrams in Georgia. I'm really interested in politicians like that. I think she's really sensible. And she comes to compromises. She's not angry. She's not like partisan. I don't mean angry. I mean partisan, like in a way that's inflexible. I like politicians like that. So we'll see. I'm hoping to have her, Mayor Breed on the show. I would hope that would happen. We've asked. Best of luck. Oh, we'll get her. All right. One more.

80:48There's nobody we don't get. Across your whole career. Trump. Trump I'm going to get. You think? You trying? I'm going to try. Why not? Heard it here first. Well, then we'll have an answer to this next question. Across your whole career, what work are you the most proud of? The Gates Jobs interview was great. I think it's hard not to top that. I think it was great because lots of reasons. It was historic. It was important. It was a great interview. It was revelatory. I think it was emotional. I think that was really great. I think some of our coverage of Uber was great. What we did. Yeah. Getting him fired. 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 and Recode and All Things D are going to be historic. I know it. Nobody has done those interviews. Our Elon Musk ones, although I think he did something crazy today.

81:35But he was speculating on the multiple universes on stage. Simulation. Not multiple. Simulation. We're a pawn of other creatures. That was a great interview. That was a fantastic interview. That was a real insight to him. Even my Kim Kardashian interview was great. I think there's a body of work there. I was thinking the other day, someone's like, oh, you've got to keep trying. I'm like, I could retire right now. I have a, like Walt did. He had a body of work that was so substantive and so important. And these interviews were going to go down. And like if a hundred years people are going to look at those interviews, some of them, not all of them, but some of them, and they're going to matter. They're going to matter. And so 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.

82:23And so we can continue to push upward. So. Your Jobs and Gates interview was so formative to me. It was. Yeah. I think I said something about it earlier, but I watched it a dozen times. First in a bunch of tiny clips as it dribbled out. And then eventually the whole thing. You put that free on iTunes. Yeah. News Corp didn't want that. 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, well, Rupert just signed it away. And it was great. That was a great. We wanted to put that on for all of humanity. I mean, in lieu of doing carve outs today, that to me, I think you asked Steve about he and Bill's friendship. Yeah. And he responded with the Beatles line. The Beatles at the end.

83:08You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out. Oh, that made everybody cry. That almost made me cry. I knew he planned it. God. He was such a manipulative person. I've been in a good way. But I like the one where I said, 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, for a long time, we've been married. Yes, I remember that. It was so good. And Gates was so disturbed by it. Because you could see like flickering. I'm not anti-gay, but I am. But I can't. Like, oh my God, what did he just, he totally got him. That was a great moment. And then I have to say the last interview he did, Gates did, I mean, Jobs did with Walt and I right before he died. It was pretty close before he died. And he was just skinny as can be and just emaciated and very weak.

83:58But I got to tell you, go watch that interview. Go physically watch it because you can't get it by the voice. He is so vibrant as a person. I know there's all these controversies about his daughter and everything else. He was a shitty father. And, 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 has to talk about it. And, but that interview, I have to say, he was so vibrant and full of life about it. He really exemplified a lot of the good things I like about Silicon Valley, about like keeping going and the relentlessness of him was there. And he had more energy than anybody in the room. And he was about to die. And I thought that was kind of cool. That's a really, and he answered, and I think I asked him, I think one of the best questions I asked him ever was, what do you do? What are you going to do for the rest of your life?

84:47I 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 going to 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 now he could. Now he didn't mind. He never minded, stuff like that. And he said, he was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do with TV. Like, as if he was going to live for 20 more years. And I thought that was a great answer. He didn't go like, on my waning days, I shall contemplate the universe or whatever. 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 Zuckerberg interview, I thought was very good. I thought it changed things.

85:29I 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, so that's even, and the next one, whatever I do the next one, we'll see. Maybe Elon next. Yeah. Elon, 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. 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. Do you have anything else you want to leave our listeners with? Just do the work. Please just do the work. And then you'll be just fine.

86:15Again, there's so many ways that people get in your way, whether you're a woman and it's sexism or a person of color, it's racism or anti-Semitism. You are absolutely going to face those things. And don't, 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, but I think it's, it's, it's always helped me. I think that's it. Thank you, Cara. Thank you. Thank you, Cara. 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.

87:04In 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. 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 follow Cara on Twitter. Cara, where can they follow you on Twitter?

87:57They can find me at Cara Swisher. Excellent. Yep. I got one of the early ones. What was it going? I have Swisher at Gmail, I think, or one of those early ones. I think my type, Cara Swisher. Email tips to Swisher at Gmail. Whatever. I'm not going to answer that one. I never use it. But I have a lot of the early everythings, which is because I was there. Awesome. Well, if you like the show, review us on iTunes. Come join the Slack, Acquired.fm, or don't, and enjoy whatever podcast you listen to in the future. Thanks, everyone.