Recode (with Kara Swisher)

In this special episode Ben & David head to Recode’s SF office and sit down in the red chair with the one & only Kara Swisher! Kara tells the story of Recode, from the beginnings of her partnership with Walt Mossberg in the late 90’s at WSJ to the launch of the D Conference and the All Things D blog, to starting Recode and ultimately being acquired by Vox Media in 2015. Kara is someone we’ve long looked up to at Acquired, and it was really special to have her join us on the show. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did! Sponsors: Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegoraStatsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26 More Acquired! Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the Slack http://acquired.fm/slackSubscribe to ACQ2 https://pod.link/acquiredlpMerch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! © Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC Links: Kara interviewing Stewart Butterfield, CEO of… Glitch? https://www.wsj.com/video/a-look-at-glitch-a-new-online-game/657B892C-C122-46BA-A973-D58E3FE1839A.html

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  That's different. That's just a bunch of white guys talking. Apple, apple, apple. Oh, that damn Google. Facebook. Bah.

• 0:19Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to season three, episode four of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 0:25David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 0:26Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:38Ben Gilbert?

  We're here with one of the greatest people, actually probably the greatest person that we could imagine to help us tell this story.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  All right, okay.

• 0:45Ben Gilbert?

  The one and only Kara Swisher.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Nice to meet you.

• 0:48Ben Gilbert?

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  This is not really the Recode's. It's just a studio. We're all, just so you know. We're not fancy here at Vox Media. That's why I'm here.

• 0:54Ben Gilbert?

  Listeners don't know that.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. It's really impressive.

• 0:57Ben Gilbert?

  We're in suits.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  We had a really nice view of the Bay, of the Bay Bridge before in our other office, but it was too expensive. So here we are, looking at the Transbay Terminal, which is buses.

• 1:07Ben Gilbert?

  Beautiful on its own, right?

• 1:08David Rosenthal?

  This is what happens after you get acquired.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  And then the, no, no, that was before we had the, before we acquired, we started the company in my backyard. So this is much nicer than anything else.

• 1:18Ben Gilbert?

  Well, we'll get into that.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:20David Rosenthal?

  Well.

• 1:20Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners, Kara needs no introduction, but I'll do one anyway because it was fun to put one together. Kara is the executive editor and co-founder of Recode. She is the illustrious host of the Recode Decode podcast. She's an absolute legend in the technology industry, previously founding the All Things Digital Conference and blog at The Wall Street Journal, which was a pioneer of legitimizing blogging and creating an actually good technology conference. Kara has been called one of the greatest 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

• 2:03Ben Gilbert?

  Illuminati hoodie onstage. She's an amazing storyteller and a renowned author, and we are so, so lucky to have her with us today. So thank you.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Gosh, that's nice. I think we'll stop now.

• 2:13Ben Gilbert?

  And it's a wrap.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Unseen.

• 2:17Ben Gilbert?

  No, you won't get off that easy.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  All right, okay.

• 2:19Ben Gilbert?

  All right. Well, if you're new to the show, you can check out our Slack at acquired.fm. It'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 a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 2:51David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature, or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this "shadow AI" running with no security review at all.

• 3:12Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's Governance, Risk and Compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half.

• 3:34David Rosenthal?

  In half, which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment.

• 3:52Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of Acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off. And just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right.

• 4:20David Rosenthal?

  Well.

• 4:21Ben Gilbert?

  Can we dive in?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 4:22Ben Gilbert?

  All right.

• 4:22David Rosenthal?

  Let's do it. Okay. So, Kara, you have a super interesting, personal story that we won't get into here today.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  All right.

• 4:30David Rosenthal?

  But listeners, of course, should go listen to you on The Ezra Klein Show.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 4:33David Rosenthal?

  Great interview, where you talk all about that. Seriously, I think it was one of our carabouts a while back.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:37Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  It was a great, Ezra's a great interviewer.

• 4:39David Rosenthal?

  It was great. The Cliff Notes version is, out of school, you work in print journalism to start, you're a reporter in DC, 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.

• 4:55Ben Gilbert?

  And David's not just saying that, like, so we can save time or something.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:58Ben Gilbert?

  It's one of my favorite podcast episodes I've listened to in the last year.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really good.

• 5:02Ben Gilbert?

  You should go listen to it.

• 5:03David Rosenthal?

  None of that sounds like tech blogging.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  No.

• 5:05David Rosenthal?

  Because you basically invent tech blogging after that.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:09David Rosenthal?

  But you do meet, during that time period, your partner, Walt Mossberg.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 5:15David Rosenthal?

  How did you first meet Walt? And, of course, he was also a DC resident.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:34David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, CompuServe Prodigy.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  CompuServe Prodigy, yes. And so, he said, "Those suck, and please use AOL." And this was a big, giant boost, the reason Steve Case owns half of Hawaii, is, I think, because of Walt Mossberg today.

• 5:57Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, but did AOL invent the GIF? That's the...

• 5:59Speaker 00

  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 was, he's the beginning of a chapter of a book. So, and then we just hit it off. And both saw things, the way print was going, the same exact way.

• 6:20David Rosenthal?

  And so he then tried to convince the Wall Street Journal to hire you away from the Post.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  He did, he did. He got me and my job at the Post and at the Journal and they didn't have anyone covering the Internet. There wasn't the Internet.

• 6:31David Rosenthal?

  Which is crazy.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  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 of years ago. There wasn't anyone covering that.

• 6:39David Rosenthal?

  But this was, it was 97 when you joined the Journal, right?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  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, it was barely, Netscape had gone public, but it wasn't very big. You had Microsoft, really. And that was more computing. It was not Internet computing. And so very few people were using the Internet. And Marc 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.

• 7:19David Rosenthal?

  Hmm. Wow. So, did the Journal have a tech bureau already, or did you start?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  They did. They 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. It was all about the hardware, essentially, and also the chips and the innards and stuff. And 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, these, these people. Excite, there was Excite, you don't remember that company?

• 8:00David Rosenthal?

  No, definitely. John Doerr.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, John Doerr was in that one. And, you know, they just didn't have people. They just didn't. That was it. That was it. And people made fun of me, as I've said many times.

• 8:10Ben Gilbert?

  Well, Carol, what do you think it was about you that, you know, this weird corner of society that's clearly not a thing yet, but you're all in on it. You're saying the internet's

• 8:17Speaker 00

  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 eighty computers that we used. I used to write party stories about Washington for the style section and I used the trash eighty and we'd put the couplers on telephones. It was crazy that we did this, like payphones, 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 and nobody was interested in it. And I kept saying, this makes total sense. Why aren't we using this? Why doesn't everybody have it? Why do we have a day? 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,

• 9:01Speaker 00

  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 gonna be, gonna change everything. And I covered retail for the Washington Post and you could see classifieds, we're gonna get screwed. You could see, I remember being mad at deadlines at one point. I'm like, why do we have deadlines? That's stupid. People should get news anytime. And I don't, 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. And even though people made fun of me. Until they started to be worth something in the nineties, in the mid to late nineties. And that was a boom. That was one of the first boom.

• 9:46Ben Gilbert?

  The pre crypto boom.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  No, it was a boom. It was several booms. That was one of them. The ninety, early nineties, in the late nineties, I'm sorry, not the early nineties, were a time when all these companies started to be worth a lot. And there was like Marc Andreessen was on the cover, I think he was in his twenty.

• 10:01Ben Gilbert?

  Time, yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  The king, the king of something. He was on a throne and he had hair at the time and was barefoot and like this guy's gonna rule the universe. And so there was lots of attention to it. And then Bill Gates got very wealthy. And that was a big deal. He, when I met him, he was wealthy, but not that wealthy. And Steve Jobs was making his comeback, so.

• 10:20David Rosenthal?

  So you mentioned deadlines.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:22David Rosenthal?

  You and Walt, together, I believe, went to the Wall Street Journal.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:27David Rosenthal?

  After you've been there for a while and you're like, we should do a blog.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:31David Rosenthal?

  Why?

• 10:31Speaker 00

  I got, I got pregnant and I had a baby and when I came back, I was just fat. I read a lot of blogs when I was away and I, especially Andrew Sullivan had one. 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, they suck at journalism. Why can't we?

• 10:51David Rosenthal?

  But they don't have deadlines.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, they don't have deadlines. Why can't we do this? 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.

• 11:00David Rosenthal?

  Was it, was it the edit side? Was it the business side?

• 11:02Speaker 00

  They were both.

• 11:02David Rosenthal?

  Both?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  They were just ignorant. We just kept saying, this is like the way of the future. And they didn't agree with us. They were interested in the 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, you know, it was a money-making thing from the start. And so it's a good way to get in. And we started with a conference in the early 2000s and then we moved to the website, I think in 2007.

• 11:27David Rosenthal?

  2007, yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:28David Rosenthal?

  So this was a question.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  We had five years of the conference going on.

• 11:31David Rosenthal?

  Right. The, did you always intend the conference to be the way to bring management of the journal around?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, 100%. Like, here's some money, here's some millions for you, you know, and profits. And what reporter brings millions and profits in? And, you know, they don't bring $10 in. If you bring, you know, more than $1,000.

• 11:48David Rosenthal?

  And I can confirm, I was actually a spreadsheet monkey at Dow Jones.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:52David Rosenthal?

  Before I became a VC.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  They made a lot of money.

• 11:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, like, you guys made like.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Millions, millions.

• 11:57David Rosenthal?

  Like 20% of the journal's profit.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  At some point, yeah, we were like 20, we called ourselves Mr. and Mr. 20%. But they weren't making any money, so that's a low bar.

• 12:04David Rosenthal?

  I can confirm that.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  It was a low bar. We did call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. 20%. But, but, 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, uh, which is good for me and good for Walt. Walt has a nice TV set and everything, but.

• 12:19David Rosenthal?

  Were you an employee of the journal then?

• 12:21Speaker 00

  I was originally and then I went, became a contractor. I did, I didn't want to work for them anymore.

• 12:27David Rosenthal?

  And why's that?

• 12:28Speaker 00

  I don't like working for people. I'm a bad employee. So I'm doing a thing for Forbes on this, being a bad employee. Like, I'm a bad employee. I hate bosses. I think they're stupid. I'm rude. I'm just not a good employee. And so I'm a pretty good 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 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, and they, they just didn't want to do, they were not very into online stuff. They were later, and they had some early stuff. Bill Gruskin did a lot of really cool stuff, but they didn't, they weren't interested in it. They just, they thought, they saw it as an adjunct. They saw it as something to beat. They thought it was going to go away. This was not uncommon at newspapers. When I was

• 13:12Speaker 00

  at the Washington Post, they had, they, 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, I, and I didn't want to be in management. That was the other part. That was sort of anathema.

• 13:26David Rosenthal?

  So is that why, I'm curious, I was going to save this question until later, but you sort of become a, a half entrepreneur with all things D.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yes, totally.

• 13:35David Rosenthal?

  But it wasn't until much later that, that you fully become.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:47David Rosenthal?

  Like VCs.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Just here's the bag of money, leave us alone. Like, that kind of stuff. And they kind of did. And 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, 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 would, what's to argue with? Except, they did. Except, they did.

• 14:31David Rosenthal?

  Did you, did you guys consider, though, doing it fully independently to start?

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Yes, all the time.

• 14:34David Rosenthal?

  Or do you think the timing was wrong in the beginning?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  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 is 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 Larington, and I don't think much of him still to this day, he got a, he got a- Or Andy Sullivan, great example. Andy 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. Like, if you do good work, it has to be good work,

• 15:22Speaker 00

  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- Or at least you get licensed to- Yeah. 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. And so, that helped. That helped a great deal.

• 16:05Ben Gilbert?

  And you had the leverage that if you go do it on your own, that's also going to be successful-

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, they would hate that. They would hate that we succeeded without them. But I don't, you know, okay. And by the way, I also, the important thing, which I hate to do, 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, so- You were in your 30s already, right? 40s. Wow. Yeah. I'm old.

• 16:24Ben Gilbert?

  You had a, you know, profit sharing with them where-

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, we did.

• 16:27Ben Gilbert?

  You guys took most of it. Did they ever try and renegotiate that?

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Well, they originally, you know, it was interesting, the first year, we made, I forget it was, it was a good, 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. And 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 a money. And, and the next year, we're like, you're giving us money. And so I think they gave us forty thousand dollars extra. They thought that was like a big deal. And then they didn't want to give us-

• 16:58David Rosenthal?

  They're like, I'm giving you millions.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, I know. And we were like, oh, well, that's not very much. And so, I think it was forty thousand dollar sticks in my head, but, and then the next year, they just didn't want, they were like mad about the forty thousand dollars. And we're like, well, give us part of the profits. Like, I don't know why they did it. Like, they just did. And so they gave us a third of the profits and it was a lot of money. And they hated it. They hated it. But they couldn't. It was like a three or four year contract.

• 17:19David Rosenthal?

  Well, this is their worst nightmare, right?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  And I remember being in a cab, right?

• 17:21David Rosenthal?

  Is that, is that like, it's, it's exactly what you guys realize-

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Reporters have broken loose from the prison.

• 17:26David Rosenthal?

  Is that you don't need to be part of-

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:27David Rosenthal?

  The X to-

• 17:28Speaker 00

  No, exactly. No, they hated it. I remember one guy's like, we never should have done that. Like, that was, that was our error. And I'm like, you were so greedy for this short term. You didn't understand. What it did is unleash the idea that reporters could go on their own. Like Jessica Lessin at The Information or Kevin Delaney at Quartz.

• 17:43David Rosenthal?

  Yep, absolutely.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Both great Wall Street Journal reporters. But they all of a sudden were like, Kara made a break for the border, now I'm gonna do it. And so that was the great part.

• 17:51David Rosenthal?

  So you started the trend.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Yes, I did. No, we did. We did. It was like, you could, you could.

• 17:55Ben Gilbert?

  It's worth calling out just how much talent you cultivated there, too.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Yes, we did.

• 17:59Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, you're just naming a couple of names now, but you look around the internet-

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Oh, she, oh, at The Journal, at The Journal. That was Kevin and they weren't at All Things D. But we, we tried to get Kevin to come to All Things D, but he wouldn't take the risk at the time. He didn't want to leave The Journal. That was, but then he did.

• 18:11David Rosenthal?

  Even to come into D, which was nominally part of The Journal.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  He didn't, he didn't. He knows that. He knows, he knows. We talked about it the other day.

• 18:17David Rosenthal?

  But there was, I mean, everybody was there at that time.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were.

• 18:19David Rosenthal?

  You know, I mean, it was, like you said, Jessica Lessin, she was Jessica Basilar at the time.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. At The Journal, yes. That was at The Journal, not at All Things D. We had a great, we've had amazing, like Mike Isaac is amazing, Nellie Bowles is amazing. They're all the times.

• 18:32David Rosenthal?

  My goodness, there.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, everybody was there.

• 18:34David Rosenthal?

  Everybody was there.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. We had a lot of people coming through.

• 18:36David Rosenthal?

  What was that-

• 18:37Speaker 00

  We were good at training people.

• 18:38David Rosenthal?

  Were you and Walt, like, were you out there identifying people? Were you recruiting?

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Yeah, because people wanted to work for something exciting. You know what I mean? And we were doing, one of the things we also were doing, which other places weren't doing, is we were running exciting journalism. We were doing like personality, be like Peter Kafka, and who's still at, at Recode. We were doing like, hey, this Comcast deal sucks and here's why. Like, we had that kind of tone.

• 19:01David Rosenthal?

  That was a big part of why you wanted to do the blog. You wanted to have an opinion and you didn't, you have this line in another-

• 19:06Speaker 00

  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-

• 19:13David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, David.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  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 that 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 Pachkowsky, who now works for BuzzFeed, did amazing graphics. Raised the Yang Tannic, which was, you know, the Titanic for Yahoo. We would put a, we put a red-

• 19:47David Rosenthal?

  Did you call Jerry and tell him you were gonna-

• 19:49Speaker 00

  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, Eric Schmidt said a stupid thing again today and embarrassed 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.

• 20:12David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  So we would, I'd stick it there, I'm like, hi, hi, how you doing? How you doing? Like, to whoever I was around.

• 20:16David Rosenthal?

  And you posted on the site.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  I just would post them, full, on the sites. And I think people liked that. It was fun. 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, not how many likes, how many, stupid, because how, nobody cares about anything. And so, we were, and then you would just, it would just be honest. And I think that's 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, if they gave us access, great. If they didn't, fuck you. Like, you know what I mean? Like, that's the kind of thing we feel. Like, don't give a, great, I'm good without you, your help. I'm good with, with your help.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  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 don't mind it, but I'm like, ugh, when am I leaving?

• 21:18David Rosenthal?

  Well, it comes with strings attached, right?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  It always does.

• 21:21Ben Gilbert?

  And you also, you mentioned this on the Ezra Klein podcast, but your strategy is already know everything that's going on and then go talk to them, and then they have to tell you.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  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. Like, I literally have a list of tips people have told me that I've forgotten about. Like, 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 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, and we copied from other people, et cetera, et cetera. But everyone iterated on a little bit of our model, and 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.

• 22:14Ben Gilbert?

  Who reminds you today of the pioneering you back then that was breaking all the rules?

• 22:19Speaker 00

  You know, Jessica a little bit. But she's doing a different thing. So, you know, she has those long stories. And, you know, some of what Axios is doing, kind of, but 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. I like some of the newsletters. God, 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.

• 23:04David Rosenthal?

  Well, hold on. We're going to come back.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Okay, all right, okay.

• 23:07David Rosenthal?

  You're jumping the gun here.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  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 worked for Vox? Sure, but I don't care. Like, I have a Plan like why I'm doing it that way.

• 23:22Ben Gilbert?

  For folks that haven't checked it out, you, I think, a few amazing op-eds.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have one a week. I have one a week now. Yeah, there's about five now. I have, gonna have two this week.

• 23:31Ben Gilbert?

  Last week was on Trump mouthing off on.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, ludicrous.

• 23:34Ben Gilbert?

  You know, about Twitter and Silicon Valley at large.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 23:38Ben Gilbert?

  It was very good.

• 23:39David Rosenthal?

  So it's just like.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Whatever. They're unfair to him. They're unfair.

• 23:42David Rosenthal?

  By the way, we're, well, we were gonna ask you, but the Mooch.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:45David Rosenthal?

  That's my favorite interview.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  That was a great interview.

• 23:46David Rosenthal?

  That was so great.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Well, here's a good example of that. So everyone's like, oh, you can't interview him. I'm like, why not? Sure, I can. So I, what I, 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, oh, yeah, I can. No, you can. Well, I'm going to, so whatever. Like, I get your problems with him, but I'm gonna still interview him. But what was interesting.

• 24:07Ben Gilbert?

  That's what people told us about you.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  What?

• 24:08Ben Gilbert?

  You can't interview her.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  What?

• 24:09Ben Gilbert?

  And we said, we can.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Yes, you can. Like, whatever.

• 24:12Ben Gilbert?

  Just swear on your show.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. Fuck you. So is that, by the way, that's why we're like, oh, come on. You don't wanna, is there a clean, 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. Oh, so what happened was I troll them on Twitter all the time. I just, he just made me laugh, like, but I also thought it was appalling in many ways. And so I just kept writing, hey, Scaramucci, and then I would make a joke about whatever he had, stupid thing he had said. And I forget, there were a lot of them. There were, they went on and on, like, like, hundreds of them. They were terrible for me to do. And then I was at this event that Jon Batel had in Silicon Valley at a restaurant, at this restaurant, there was a thing, and this, and I don't wear my glasses, I don't see

• 24:56Speaker 00

  very well, and this person was, like, coming over, and this tiny little man was, like, headed my way with a lot of hair, and I'm like, who is that? And he comes right in my face, and he'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 all, she's Italian, I'm Italian, it was great, we had a great bunch of drinks, we laughed, and I said, you gotta come on my podcast. And he goes, are you kidding me? I'm like, absolutely not. And we did it at his office, his crazy office in New York, and it was fun. And I think he was surprised that, because I'm super liberal on Twitter, obviously, and anti-Trump, and he thought, well, why wouldn't she talk to me? Like, but of course I would. Why wouldn't I? He was really interesting. And actually, it was a good podcast.

• 25:35David Rosenthal?

  It was, it was, I've been.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Everyone has a story.

• 25:38David Rosenthal?

  My favorite interview you've ever done.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's one of them.

• 25:40David Rosenthal?

  Because he, like, the narrative on him was. He's the mooch. He's like caricature. He's not a human.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  But he is and he isn't. But he's also a caricature.

• 25:48David Rosenthal?

  Well, yes.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:50David Rosenthal?

  But you can tell in your interview that like, there is a method to his madness.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  There is. There is. But he's still the mooch.

• 25:56David Rosenthal?

  He's still the mooch. Of course, he's the mooch.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Hey, you're in New York. Come to my club. I went to his club. Like, why wouldn't I? Like, are you kidding? Here's a giant steak. All right, I'll eat it. I'm a vegetarian, but I'll go for it. I did. I ate a steak.

• 26:08Ben Gilbert?

  Did you break your rule for?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Sure. Why not? It was a good steak.

• 26:11David Rosenthal?

  He's the mooch.

• 26:12Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

• 26:26David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like, the risks are real.

• 26:40Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI Control Tower.

• 26:50David Rosenthal?

  Yep. AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent, visible and secure in one place.

• 27:07Ben Gilbert?

  And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security.

• 27:23David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.

• 27:40Ben Gilbert?

  And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

• 27:49David Rosenthal?

  So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely, at scale, go check out servicenow.com/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, let's pick this back up. So Dee becomes very successful.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:05David Rosenthal?

  You're Mr. and Mrs. 20%.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:06David Rosenthal?

  And Walt, we get to, towards the end of 2013.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:11David Rosenthal?

  The contract for Dee is up.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had signed another one with Rupert Murdoch, much to my chagrin that I did that. But when he bought the company.

• 28:18David Rosenthal?

  So this was the second.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  He loved Walt Mossberg, I'll tell you that. He didn't know my name for a long time. But he, we signed a first contract with them, and then the things, just everything at Dow Jones.

• 28:26Ben Gilbert?

  Was that another three years, you signed in 2010?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Three more. Yeah, something like that. Right when they bought it, we did.

• 28:30David Rosenthal?

  Oh, that was 2007. So you signed.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, we signed, yeah, we signed a couple with them.

• 28:34David Rosenthal?

  Oh, seven years.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, we did. We were there a long time.

• 28:37David Rosenthal?

  Total aside.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Maybe two contracts, yeah. But we're, go ahead.

• 28:40David Rosenthal?

  I was, 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 Deng, his then-wife.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  I know her well.

• 28:59David Rosenthal?

  She wanted her personal assistant to take my desk.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Oh, and so your desk was taken.

• 29:05David Rosenthal?

  And so my boss had to go and fight with News Corp. corporate.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  You lost.

• 29:08David Rosenthal?

  And Wendy did. No, no, no.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Oh, Wendy.

• 29:11David Rosenthal?

  I won. I mean, I wasn't even there yet, but my boss won.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Wendy's a tough lady.

• 29:13David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  I like Wendy.

• 29:14David Rosenthal?

  It was, it was a victory.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:22David Rosenthal?

  I'm sure.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:23Ben Gilbert?

  All right, so when did you know that the separation was coming?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  You know, we tried, and then after that, first of all, they didn't want to invest. We had an idea of to do all things finance, all things whatever. We had a great idea. And John Miller, who was the chief digital officer at the time, loved it.

• 29:38David Rosenthal?

  Former AOL president, right?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  And then he left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I knew him super well from writing books on AOL. And I liked him, I think he's super innovative, has done very well since then. But he wanted to do, he liked the idea, all things this, all things, like, we 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, women, like, we could have, like, owned a lot of categories, and they just didn't want to invest. It was such a.

• 30:04Ben Gilbert?

  Every section of the paper, you could have your own.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. And then you pick out reporters who are well-known, like, you make stars, they didn't want to make stars of reporters, I think that might, I don't know why, maybe they just were busy with whatever, they were busy with, like, sports rights.

• 30:16David Rosenthal?

  Phone hacking scandals.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  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 were, we weren't that nice to them. Like, 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.

• 30:36Ben Gilbert?

  Here's my contract.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  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 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. And so, it just was, it was just, they just wasn't ready for us, right? You know, today, they're different. Or maybe they are.

• 31:01Ben Gilbert?

  Are they?

• 31:02Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't care. I don't read the Wall Street Journal. So, in any case.

• 31:05Ben Gilbert?

  Case in point.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  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 were trying to pretend they're not satanic, and they are.

• 31:14Ben Gilbert?

  Right. So, what's the phone hacking thing?

• 31:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 31:28Ben Gilbert?

  In the Times of London.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  In the Times of London. And they, and they did it. They did these terrible things that were just so unethical. And we're 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. We're too small to invest in. But if we want to get big, they won't give us the money to get big. It was just like, they aren't 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.

• 32:08Ben Gilbert?

  What was your hangup with taking VC?

• 32:10Speaker 00

  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 a media investors. We wanted media investors who understood media, because we weren't going to make a ton of money. Like, there just wasn't, you know, we did, we could do okay, but it wasn't a massively scalable business. And so, we wanted someone who cared about it and who we could experiment with. And so, we went with NBC, because we liked the television thing. And we went with Terry Semel, who had worked for Yahoo, but actually was originally a media investor. And he had a media company called Windsor.

• 32:45David Rosenthal?

  Warner Brothers, right?

• 32:46Speaker 00

  He did. And he had a, he was retired, and he had a venture, not a venture firm, it was an investment firm, that invested in media.

• 32:53David Rosenthal?

  So, you guys raised 12 million dollars?

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:56David Rosenthal?

  January 2014, you launch Recode.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  All Things D, yep.

• 32:59David Rosenthal?

  Recode. You, you take All Things, well, the Journal keeps All Things D.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  They do. They wouldn't sell, we tried to buy it from them, but Rupert wanted 30 million dollars for it. They were going to sell it to us. We offered them a million, which was insane at the time.

• 33:10David Rosenthal?

  Because you took every single employee that came with you to Recode.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Yes, they did.

• 33:14Ben Gilbert?

  And what would that have even gotten you? Did people, like, was there RSS feeds? That people would...

• 33:18Speaker 00

  This was a name. We had a lot of, we had a lot of, yeah, we had everything. Like, it was great. 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. And so, but they, 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.

• 33:39David Rosenthal?

  That would have been meaningful to their operating profit.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. I was like, it was so dumb. And he wanted 30 million dollars. And I remember thinking, you know, I could buy fuckyourupert.com for that much money, right? Like, come on. Like, which would 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.

• 34:01David Rosenthal?

  What, um, okay, so, we're curious.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  The guy who used to run it, that dumb editor.

• 34:04David Rosenthal?

  Recode. Wait, where did the name come from?

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Oh, we had it.

• 34:07David Rosenthal?

  And originally, it was re slash code, and then it's capital R, capital C, what happened?

• 34:11Ben Gilbert?

  Are we, are we all lowercase now? Is that the...

• 34:12Speaker 00

  No, it's just Reco, I don't know. Yes.

• 34:14David Rosenthal?

  The masthead is all lowercase.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  It's all lowercase. Dan Fromer came in and cleaned it up. But, I don't like the slash. I don't know why. I just did. It was stupid. It was, you should never let me design anything. But, but Recode came from...

• 34:24Ben Gilbert?

  Are you Marissa Mayer, who's like, on the weekend, designing the Yahoo logo?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  No, 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, 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.

• 34:44David Rosenthal?

  The parent company was Revere Digital.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Yes, that was because we were... What was that for?

• 34:49David Rosenthal?

  Is that Paul Revere?

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Paul Revere, yeah. Paul Revere, yeah. It was Walt, it was Walt was from that area.

• 34:54David Rosenthal?

  Ah.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:03Ben Gilbert?

  That's good.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was my art.

• 35:04David Rosenthal?

  Even you couldn't go with that.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  No, we did. We went with it for a, it was Shut Up and Listen for a long time, and I forget why we changed to Revere. It was something with Paul Revere. Now I've forgotten.

• 35:12Ben Gilbert?

  Is the Wall Street Journal like the redcoats or something?

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that. We're getting that. It was like something like that. Something like that. I forget. We, everything we do is based on obnoxious tendencies. And so, we, we had a naming group, and they came up with that. And then the guy who owned Recode.com, it was a German guy, wouldn't give it to us. He wanted a lot of money. And so, we went with, we decided to make Net Sexy.

• 35:33Ben Gilbert?

  You and John Gruber? Like the during Fireball, the two .net holdouts?

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell? Nobody cares, but nobody, everyone's like, "You can't do that." We're like, "Why? Who cares about this stuff?"

• 35:42David Rosenthal?

  Nobody types addresses in there.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  And nobody types, right? Exactly. Hello, Google, like, just put Recode. And so, then, and then, then, the guy, we were trying to get Code.com, and it's owned by the Kindbar guy? That guy?

• 35:54Ben Gilbert?

  What?

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. Something, he just had it. He just, I don't know why. He has it. He wanted to start-

• 35:58David Rosenthal?

  This is like the Rover.com story.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, he has it. He, 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."

• 36:10David Rosenthal?

  You'd think he would've said-

• 36:11Speaker 00

  I know! I was like, "Have you met me?" We do, actually, but with, 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. Like, it's a great name. It's a great name. It's a great name.

• 36:34David Rosenthal?

  So, you said something a little while back-

• 36:35Speaker 00

  And then it has the Code Conference, and then Recode Decode. It works perfectly. It's fine.

• 36:39David Rosenthal?

  So, you said something a while back, that I want to pick back up on. You said you, you and Walt knew, like, this was, you'd make money, you were already making money, but you knew this wasn't going to be like- VC scale business.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  No.

• 36:50David Rosenthal?

  However, at the, pretty much the same time you start Recode, all of these new media sites get started.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yes, ridiculous.

• 36:57David Rosenthal?

  There's of course Vox, which, you know, we're sitting in Vox headquarters right now, which has a fun story to itself, but there's BuzzFeed, there's, you know, all these companies, they're raising tons of money, VCs are jumping in.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yes, all the content companies.

• 37:07David Rosenthal?

  What were you thinking when you saw this?

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Oh, Jesus. Oh, no. Like, because I've seen it before, like, 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.

• 37:26David Rosenthal?

  VC money.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  You know, and one point, when I was trying to hire someone, they, 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, you saw that happening, and these, and then that, that one Univision one, what are they, those guys? Kevin Roos went there, a whole bunch of, Alex Madrigal, Alexis Madrigal went there. Fusion, Fusion! They came in and offered like, here's $3 million, reported, it was craziness, it was craziness. And it was, I just saw.

• 38:02David Rosenthal?

  And again, I mean, the moneymaker for D and.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  It was the event.

• 38:06David Rosenthal?

  It's the events, right?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, now the podcasts make a lot of money.

• 38:08David Rosenthal?

  It's the old Jeff Zucker quote, you know, for all Jeff, like, he was right.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Digital dollars.

• 38:13David Rosenthal?

  Like, digital dollars turn into, you know, or analog dollars, dimes turn into digital pennies.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Now he thinks it's a quarter or more. It's actually doing okay for some people.

• 38:19Ben Gilbert?

  It was once a good.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  It was, 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 great. And so I thought, we got to sell. Like, I immediately, I was like, pushing hard, pushing walt hard.

• 38:38Ben Gilbert?

  And how, how far into the business was this?

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Six months.

• 38:41Ben Gilbert?

  Huh.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  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 fund raising, 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. And so I think one of the great things I did learn from tech people was that you move, like you move and you don't like stand on ceremony, you don't go, oh, this will work. And you just panic.

• 39:04David Rosenthal?

  By move, you mean you don't make this, you don't just stand there and say.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, you just, 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, but there were, but in a bigger scale, even if it's hard, you have to be bigger. That 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.

• 39:29Ben Gilbert?

  Did you talk with any of those that had raised crazy money to sort of combine with them?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  One of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were offers all the time. It was crazy, like reporters deal making, like it's, you know, you've got to get off the train if that's happening. Kara, I got a deal for you. I'm like, no, you don't. And I'm pretty good at deals, but I'm not that good and you're really bad. And so, you know, really, sir, think, you know what I'm saying?

• 39:50David Rosenthal?

  I mean, we're VCs, so.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  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 Bankhoff had talked to me about using their ad system and I'd known Jim forever because he was at AOL. And I loved him.

• 40:04Ben Gilbert?

  Is this Chorus?

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Chorus, I forget which, yeah, it was Chorus, I guess it was Chorus. No, it was Chorus is their content management system. They had an ad system too. In any case, he wanted, he wanted concert, he wanted, it wasn't called that then, but he wanted us to 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? And you don't have anything fancy? Like, we're fancy, we're another revenue stream, we got ideas, we're well-known, it adds, we're like your other brands, we're like Vox, we're like Eater, we're like, we're in the same zone.

• 40:36David Rosenthal?

  Especially The Verge, but not, but you guys have a very different, like, The Verge is like.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Different, different.

• 40:41David Rosenthal?

  Right, it's, but what, but it's like.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Walt went over there.

• 40:43David Rosenthal?

  Right, exactly, that's what I think of The Verge as like Walt's part of.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  But we moved them, like, we weren't dumb about it. We were like, that's, and the consumer stuff really wasn't working on Recode, Walt's consumer stuff, it wasn't, we were a tech news site and it, adding the consumer stuff just didn't, like, we couldn't attract, it just wasn't right from a, from a journalism point of view for the product. And so we were doing all this scoop breaking news business stuff and then we had Walt there. And so he was better, to give him a bigger audience, The Verge made more sense. And by the way, we do it, we do anything again if it makes more sense. Like, we're not stupid. Like, if things change, we change.

• 41:15Ben Gilbert?

  Nothing is sacred.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing. And so...

• 41:18Ben Gilbert?

  And so Jim wanted to do some kind of commercial deal where he said, "Let us take this ad sales off your hands. We got this great technology platform." And you're like, "No, it's combined."

• 41:26Speaker 00

  What about this? And he thought of it, too. Like, he thought, he understood how famous Walt and I were and how it did add to his brand. It adds to it. It adds to advertiser interest. It adds to Buzz. It adds to all kinds of things. And he's a pretty conservative media mogul. Like, you know, if you can compare him to Shane Smith or even the guys over at BuzzFeed.

• 41:45Ben Gilbert?

  And who's Shane Smith?

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Shane Smith runs Vice.

• 41:48Ben Gilbert?

  Got it.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Runs Vice, who now is not running Vice because they have some issues because of Shane Smith, etc. And so Nancy Dubuque runs it. They get the lady to come in and clean it up. So anyway, so they, it was a good match. It was a good match. We've been thrilled. It's been four years almost now.

• 42:04David Rosenthal?

  So it was May, May?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  We announced it at Code. Yeah, we announced it a year later.

• 42:09David Rosenthal?

  May 2015, you announced you're selling the box.

• 42:11Ben Gilbert?

  Wait, so the deal was done and you announced it a year later?

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:14Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  I know.

• 42:15David Rosenthal?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:15Ben Gilbert?

  How'd you keep that under your hat?

• 42:16Speaker 00

  I just did. No, no, no, we didn't, we didn't come to the conclusion until close to the deal.

• 42:20Ben Gilbert?

  So you spent a year sort of figuring it out?

• 42:22David Rosenthal?

  Because it was 18 months.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were running it for, yeah, it was 18 months.

• 42:24David Rosenthal?

  Before you sold, but, but it really was six months when you started.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. It was pretty soon. It was pretty soon. And, you know, it was, I thought about the employees. I'm like, "Oh, I promised them this. Now I'm doing this." And, you know, I don't, it's fine. Like, you know what I mean?

• 42:37David Rosenthal?

  Every play, right?

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Like, all of them do well.

• 42:39David Rosenthal?

  Right, and every...

• 42:39Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 42:56David Rosenthal?

  I was going to save this for our tech team section, but I, but I want to bring it up now. Facebook.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:03David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 43:20Ben Gilbert?

  New media was in every article.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:23Ben Gilbert?

  What is new media?

• 43:24David Rosenthal?

  What is new media?

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:25David Rosenthal?

  But the way that's kind of played out is, it's great for Facebook.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  It's great for Facebook.

• 43:30David Rosenthal?

  Not great for...

• 43:30Speaker 00

  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 do it. 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.

• 43:46David Rosenthal?

  We'll get to podcasts in a minute.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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. And I was like, mm, 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, now you're going to unleash a video plat- all right, you incredibly irresponsible people, go right ahead. But I remember them saying, you should do Facebook Lives. Remember that, that all the journalists were doing Facebook Live?

• 44:14David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  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, I have 700,000. Like, they're not making me money.

• 44:30Ben Gilbert?

  Those also aren't your users, they're Facebook users.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Right, they're your users. And where's my money? Like, I kept saying, where's the benefit for Kara Swisher?

• 44:37David Rosenthal?

  It's like a head fake, right? Because...

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'll get more famous. I'm like, I am famous.

• 44:40David Rosenthal?

  Well, but really what was going on was, your 700,000 users for all these new media platforms are all just coming from Facebook.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  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, and, but doing, talking to people that put little, like, sometimes I'll do it to get people to read an article, but it doesn't help.

• 45:02Ben Gilbert?

  What's the 700,000? Is that Twitter followers?

• 45:04Speaker 00

  I don't even know fans. No, Twitter's 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.

• 45:12Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  And now it's up again to 1.3 or so, something like that.

• 45:15Ben Gilbert?

  But again, it's like Twitter selling ad dollars, selling ad units against your 1.3 million followers.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess. I'm sure half of them are bots. I'm guessing half of them are bots. I was just there early, that's all. I was a recommended user.

• 45:27Ben Gilbert?

  You're saying you didn't intentionally buy them?

• 45:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:37Ben Gilbert?

  All right, so, speaking of audience size, so when you got bought by Fox Media, what did your audience look like on Recode?

• 45:46Speaker 00

  How big it was?

• 45:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Small, small, a couple million.

• 45:50Ben Gilbert?

  Has it grown since the acquisition?

• 45:51Speaker 00

  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. They all feed on each other.

• 46:01Ben Gilbert?

  Some kind of flywheel or something.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  That's the way you think about it. It makes sense. It's like all journalism is how we look at it. Whether we break news on our podcast, 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 a Code, and then we had, it just, we don't think of it like that. We don't think of it like that. And then the Code interviews become news, then they become podcasts, all our Code interviews become podcasts.

• 46:32Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  And then we break them up into pieces, and then we make news stories.

• 46:35Ben Gilbert?

  And you sort of leased one every like three or four episodes?

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. Yeah, we did. Like, why not? It's all content. And however people want to consume it is really how I look at it. I think we definitely are rethinking, what is the traditional web news site? Because it's changed really dr- 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, a lot of money to do that, because they make all this money from machines. And so, you have to think really hard, is what is your value in each product you're making? Like, I'm super interested in newsletters recently. I don't know why, because I think Casey's is so good. I'm thinking a lot about it. Like, that's an interesting, you know, there's tons of-

• 47:11Ben Gilbert?

  It's 2018, and we're talking about email newsletters.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  I know, but you know what? They're good. But they're good. But I still think some of them are terrible.

• 47:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I start my day with Primak.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Right, except you don't do all of them. So what is it about his that's great? What is it about, like-

• 47:23Ben Gilbert?

  If you had one, I would read yours.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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.

• 47:29Ben Gilbert?

  I'm not saying that flattery, like I want your tone, like in my head every morning.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  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, they're heavy. Like I find they pile up. And so I'm, I'm like, I still like them. They pile up. They're like Sunday newspapers. How can I get this in a way that's, there's a way to do it that's different.

• 47:45Ben Gilbert?

  Do you want to break news on the show?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  No, I don't. I just, I'm still thinking about it. I'm thinking hard about it because I'm reading a lot of them. And I'm like, this is, just the way when I started listening to podcasts, I was like, all right, this is what I think is good, what I think is bad. And so when we started the podcast, it was the same thing. Everyone was like, you can't do an hour.

• 47:59Ben Gilbert?

  And it was two months after the acquisition, you started the podcast.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, because nobody was paying attention.

• 48:03Ben Gilbert?

  Did you know how big it was going to get?

• 48:04Speaker 00

  No. No, yes, yes, yes. Because I knew we were, because our bet is that people are smart. Smart people like smart interviews.

• 48:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  People like substantive things. It had become a twitchy, twitchy little universe of content, right? And so everyone's getting little pieces of information that made no sense. And I thought conversations mattered. I always thought, think conversations mattered. 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, decks essentially, right? You know, that's what we have. And most of them are decks. But that's pretty much.

• 48:39Ben Gilbert?

  People have to pay the money to make their revenue.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 48:53Ben Gilbert?

  Andrew Mason may have been my favorite episode of ReCode Decode.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Oh, that was a great one.

• 48:56Ben Gilbert?

  He was just so blunt, honest, amazing.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Right. Exactly. And so people feel more comfortable in that setting. But I could get to people like Chamath. Like he, like, we wouldn't have put Chamath on the Code stage, but boy, is he great in a podcast. 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. Like who, I wouldn't put Nicole, you know, like, I know who she is, and now you will know who she is. And so I think what's, 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?

• 49:42Speaker 00

  I'm gonna just do it and I'm not gonna listen. What was great about Vox is there was nobody here to say we couldn't. Like, they just didn't. They're like, okay, try it. Like, it didn't cost them anything.

• 49:51David Rosenthal?

  And I think what's cool is everybody's realized you can do an hour and a half.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Oh, you can do more. 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. There's no, everyone tries to make all these hard and fast rules of, oh, this is gonna work. That's gonna, I don't, that's just bullshit. You know that. Like, right? If it's good, if 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 Zuckerberg except Kara Swisher's interview.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:47David Rosenthal?

  Well, you can't get people who guest on podcasts talking like they do on podcasts in any other format.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's also, I can get them talking like that. So it's just like, so I'm, so that's the whole thing. It's like, Marc Maron is only Marc Maron doing it. He 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, 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 and someone.

• 51:30Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 51:43David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 52:00Ben Gilbert?

  So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

• 52:15David Rosenthal?

  And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Logora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

• 52:39Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Logora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective, then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

• 52:58David Rosenthal?

  And Logora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Logora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Logora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 53:28Ben Gilbert?

  Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com/acquired and just 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? I'm not paying attention to the website as much.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  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, but that should be the decision of whoever the editor is, not me. I have ideas of the way you would do a news website. I just, I'm 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's making the website, the Recode website, it has to integrate into everything else we're doing, like our events and the podcasts, but it's part of the same

• 54:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:07David Rosenthal?

  Money you keep that Facebook doesn't monetize.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's our money, and we make it fair and square, pretty much. You know, that's how we, it's a fair and square, pretty much, 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, all kinds, there's all kinds of things you can do off of it that are really interesting. We also give the opportunity for the Recode reporters to do podcasts, like Kurt Wagner did a bunch for Peter. Joanna Bullion is doing one, 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.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Like, why do you want a show? Why 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'll be great. And so it gives, it gives them an opportunity to be, the reporters of Rico to be creative.

• 56:15Ben Gilbert?

  Why do they monetize so much better?

• 56:16Speaker 00

  They just do right now. They might not later. I think because people really listen to them and they like them and they download them. You could, they're very quantifiable, I think. The 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, that the audience thinks really hard about where they're getting their content is kind of an old school thing. Like if it's not on the website, it's like, well, so what if it's in, in podcast form? So what if it's on the event side? So what if it's in a story? In the print journal. What if it's a tweet? Yeah. Like I tweet a lot. Like I tweet a lot of stories, kind of stuff.

• 56:50Ben Gilbert?

  And unbelievably, in this world, it's the place where you have a direct relationship with that person.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  That's what I love.

• 56:54Ben Gilbert?

  Instead of this, you know.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you remember, we got, we famously got rid of comments six, five years ago. Right. Everyone was like, how, how can you do that? I'm like, I hate them. Like they're, I don't have this down.

• 57:03Ben Gilbert?

  My website is my voice. Like get off it.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Well, it was interesting because we, when we took them off, first of all, it 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 take, they're vile. They don't add to the, the benefit. They don't help the website. In fact, all we do is try to like knock things off. I'm wasting time. My copy editors taking off, you know, you faggot. Like I don't need it. Like, you know, what do you, like awful. What do I need these awful anonymous people saying terrible things on a website that I run? And so we took it off. And I remember there was one guy who was just, just terrible, vile, homophobic, anti-Semitic, race, everything. Like this guy was the whole package. And he, you know, he was, he wrote me an email. They somehow find my email and they're like, how dare you end comments. I should, it's a first amendment.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  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. 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. And I said Twitter was our comment section, really.

• 58:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 58:15David Rosenthal?

  I'm so glad we ended on podcasts in this.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  Podcasts. How are you liking podcasting, boys? What do you think?

• 58:20Ben Gilbert?

  It's.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  Fun.

• 58:22Ben Gilbert?

  Not only is it tremendously fun, I never thought, it enables people who aren't in media and aren't, I mean, we're not journalists.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  You're journalists. So what? You have things to say, right? You're smart, interesting people, like, why not?

• 58:32Ben Gilbert?

  You don't know us.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  I'm just saying, you seem so far, you haven't said anything too stupid, you know? No, you haven't said anything stupid so far.

• 58:38David Rosenthal?

  That might be the best comment we've ever gotten.

• 58:39Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, put that on the website.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  You don't seem too stupid. No, but it's creative, like, no matter who you are, and I think, again, conversation is really important, and people like to hear, people love great conversation.

• 58:50Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:05Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 59:13Ben Gilbert?

  You know, we're not in school, we're not going to classes, we get to learn stuff.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Meet people you want to meet.

• 59:15Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  I often, like, I don't have your, I was just, I just did, I did an event where I interviewed Sean Hayes, you know, the guy who was on Will and Grace? He's so great. He's amazing. But he's also a very important producer in Hollywood. People don't realize, he has tons of shows, and he was like, "I love your podcast." I said, "Come on it." And I was, and he's like, "Okay." And so I'm going, "We're 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?

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  And I love that. I love, that's my favorite part, is learning from other people.

• 1:00:05David Rosenthal?

  Well, that's the.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07David Rosenthal?

  In a lot of ways, I think podcasts, we're totally doing tech themes now instead of later, but that's fine. We always do that. I think podcasts are, have really removed gatekeepers.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:18David Rosenthal?

  I mean, like, we're two guys. We're not journalists, you know?

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21David Rosenthal?

  Tim Ferriss isn't a journalist.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, he does a great podcast.

• 1:00:24David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It is in a lot of ways.

• 1:00:34David Rosenthal?

  It's the promise of blogging.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Look, it's going to be consolidating. You get that. Like, you get that. One of the things, though, 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.

• 1:00:47David Rosenthal?

  The written word.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  The written word and a global brand. And I felt like, one of the things that I thought was happening, and a thing that I kept banging on for the past year, was the irresponsibility of the tech sector and how they had misused their platforms and mismanaged them. And I'd been talking about this for a long time. And so, it was fine to do it at Recode, because, but it's like, 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.

• 1:01:14David Rosenthal?

  Unfortunately, there's still a global brand to be able to do that.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. And, 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, it's not just website, like, Recode website.

• 1:01:30David Rosenthal?

  Not just events.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:01:39David Rosenthal?

  All right. You talk about consolidation. I'm curious more on why you're sure that it's going to consolidate, when right now, we're sort of in this era of indies thriving.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Because it always consolidates. Everything, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if you noticed, I have two tattoos, I have many tattoos on my hands. So, it's centropy 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 opposites. They exist with each other.

• 1:02:06David Rosenthal?

  Bundling and unbundling.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. And so, everything moves towards organization. Everything moves towards consolidation. And then, it moves towards destruction, like, in the same way. And so, I think that that's, it'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 with shitty products.

• 1:02:25David Rosenthal?

  We should federate these in a bunch of...

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  I know. Well, Federated Media, remember that?

• 1:02:27David Rosenthal?

  I do.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  That was Jon Batel.

• 1:02:28David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  So, that didn't work out so well.

• 1:02:30David Rosenthal?

  The Search was a good book, though.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  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 la la la. But I think no matter what, like, the reason Marc Maron's popular is only one reason, it's a great podcast, right? You cannot make that, you cannot make, you just can't, like, you can't replicate, you can't change it. And so that's, so I think, I'm not that worried about the consolidation, but I do think there's going to be a few places that are going, are creative at making them and therefore-

• 1:03:02David Rosenthal?

  Well, like Vox, right?

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  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-

• 1:03:17David Rosenthal?

  What a bad-

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  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 mm, mm hmm. But he goes beyond the story, right? So, it just works. And that, and that team there is so talented, that team of people who put that, not just him, but there's a whole pack of people there that are just so good and tell a story in a great way.

• 1:03:42David Rosenthal?

  Well, I think that's our category, consolidation. We, we categories each acquisition.

• 1:03:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. In a way, I was going to go business, 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 and L and running that P and L independently and hoping it expands and, you know, realizing synergies. I'm saying that every episode now and it's pissing me off.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  It's okay, you can use, it's a good one.

• 1:04:14Ben Gilbert?

  You know, with, with Walt going across and, and writing at, at The Verge. But it's effectively, it's still its own business unit that you're buying for hopefully the sum of future cash flows.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, but it's other things, there's more things to it. There's advertiser interests-

• 1:04:28David Rosenthal?

  Asma Klein started his show right around the same time you did, right?

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  Well, you know, he came to me when he was starting it. We had done ours. No, he did it after, quite a bit.

• 1:04:35David Rosenthal?

  After, so there you go.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:04:42Ben Gilbert?

  What about Cory Booker?

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, bring in Biden, Biden. I kept saying Biden would be good. And he's like, well, I'm like, no Biden, he'd be like, people would love to hear from Biden. And he's a very good interviewer and he's a more wonky interviewer. He's definitely a more wonky interviewer.

• 1:04:56Ben Gilbert?

  You should call something Wonk something.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  He should, but there was already Wonkette, if you remember, and Wonkblog and things like that. And that was at the, I think that was at the Washington Post where they were, I believe. I believe it was adjacent to them, so I don't think they could take that.

• 1:05:09David Rosenthal?

  He's like your doppelganger.

• 1:05:10Ben Gilbert?

  Didn't he start Wonkblog?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  He is. Oh, I love.

• 1:05:12Ben Gilbert?

  I was like trying to make a joke there and landed flat.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry. 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.

• 1:05:23David Rosenthal?

  That's exciting.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. He's great.

• 1:05:25Ben Gilbert?

  All right, well, that blows my acquisition category and then it's consolidation.

• 1:05:28David Rosenthal?

  What would have happened otherwise? You would have failed on your own?

• 1:05:31Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, speculate on that. I'm curious.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  That's a good, probably. Maybe not.

• 1:05:36Ben Gilbert?

  I know what has failed me. Sold to someone else for a different price later.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  We would have sold. We might, I might have been smart enough to sell it to someone else. Yeah, yeah. I think I was smart. I did. I sold it.

• 1:05:46David Rosenthal?

  But you wouldn't, I'm sorry, you would have failed to have meet the return thresholds of the $12 million you raised.

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  I don't think they cared. So I had investors who didn't care.

• 1:05:55David Rosenthal?

  That's why you don't have VCs.

• 1:05:56Ben Gilbert?

  Hey, you get the investors you ask for.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  When I got money from Terry, I called him to thank him for, I think they gave us $5 million each at 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.

• 1:06:17David Rosenthal?

  Who are you again?

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  He goes, no, he knows who I was. And he goes, he goes, oh, good, good. Good for you. I hope you enjoy it. And it was like, literally like Uncle gave me $25.

• 1:06:25Ben Gilbert?

  It wasn't a gift, like.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  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. And 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 it in the stock in Vox. So, anyway.

• 1:06:40Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, so the sale to Vox, more or less than the 12.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  More.

• 1:06:46Ben Gilbert?

  Investors all made their money back.

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:48Ben Gilbert?

  Common.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  They all took Vox stock. They all, they could have gotten cash. They took Vox stuff.

• 1:06:52Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:58Ben Gilbert?

  Cool.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  It was good. But it's all those, like, content valuation. So I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:07:05Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07David Rosenthal?

  Well, speaking of, we've already covered a lot of tech themes.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  We'll see where it ends. We'll see where Vox ends, too. That's like, at least successful.

• 1:07:12David Rosenthal?

  Should we grading?

• 1:07:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14David Rosenthal?

  All right. Carrie, you want to be on the hot seat?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Okay, go ahead. I will. I can try. I don't know. I'm a big shareholder, so.

• 1:07:20Ben Gilbert?

  This is how we grade in the show. So we decide, you know, the acquirer with all their might and resources and interesting things they could do with their shares and their capital, was it a good use to buy this company?

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Yes, it was.

• 1:07:33David Rosenthal?

  Well, but you got a grade A to F. So A plus Instagram, 1 billion into hundreds of billions of value. F, you're familiar with.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07:43Ben Gilbert?

  There must be a pony in there somewhere.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got that. I would say, I would say a B plus at least, if not an A. Yeah, I would. It benefited in lots of ways. Yes, yes. There's no downside. There's absolutely.

• 1:07:56David Rosenthal?

  Podcasts alone, right?

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. They made their money back. They, there's no, and also they get a good name. They get good journalism. They get, I think they've done pretty good on most of their, of their acquisitions. It seems like all the, you know, they ran into trouble with one, but it still was a great journalistic product racked that they.

• 1:08:13David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Still 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. I do. I think, just like any content company, they're going to run into the same issues of content companies. Like Buzz, 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's hard. Like, that's their problem. That's the problem they have. Media she is hard.

• 1:08:40David Rosenthal?

  I'm gonna get on my.

• 1:08:41Ben Gilbert?

  Real quick, just to throw, like, do either of you know the, what the valuation of Vox Media was at the Recode acquisition and then what it is now? So it was something they've raised it, like, it's a unicorn now.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  They announced it, 1.1 billion?

• 1:08:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it was in the like several hundred millions when they acquired you.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, it's, it's.

• 1:08:58David Rosenthal?

  Much higher.

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  And who knows if they could ever sell for that. Like, all of them. I think BuzzFeed was 1.5.

• 1:09:02Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:09:03David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  Vox was 1.1, if I remember from the news stories. And then, or it was Mashable. Mashable was some ridiculous sum, and then it sold for like a song, kind of thing.

• 1:09:11Ben Gilbert?

  So to the extent that.

• 1:09:12David Rosenthal?

  VISA is also, I believe, in the billion-ish range.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  They're way up. No, no, they're higher. They're up. Yeah, they're up higher. They're way higher. They're up. I'm glad to be down in lowlands with, with the Vox people. And that, although it's still.

• 1:09:23David Rosenthal?

  What entrepreneurs know, you know, the lower your valuation, the more upside there is for you.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  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 content companies.

• 1:09:33Ben Gilbert?

  Comcast, I don't know.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  I guess. Yeah, they're a big NBC. Yeah, sure, but why? Like, if I had to go write a news, they see, the way I think about, like, I remember writing about Tumblr being bought, and they were on the edge of like death, essentially. And. Um, I, all the tip I got was it was being acquired by a company for a billion. It's a, I didn't hear it was Tumblr. A content company, a digital content company is being acquired by Yahoo for a billion dollars.

• 1:09:57Ben Gilbert?

  That's just somebody intentionally encrypting it just enough.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10:08David Rosenthal?

  Who's your Watson?

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  I just made, my cat, my cat. And, um, and I was like, okay. And I made a list and I was like, this is what they would buy. This is what they'd be interested in. This is what I know she likes. Do you know what I mean? I know her tastes and stuff like that. And Tumblr was third on the list because she wants to be helplessly hip. And you know what I mean? Even though she's not.

• 1:10:26David Rosenthal?

  Twitter was one.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  Twitter was on there, you know? And I started making calls as if I knew. And I, so I called up, I knew all the investors of Tumblr and I knew they were in trouble. And I was like, she could possibly spend this amount of money on this. She couldn't be this stupid. But I will try it. And I literally went, I said, oh, so, yeah, I was buying you. And they're like, how did you know? And I'm like, thank you.

• 1:10:46David Rosenthal?

  I have my ways.

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  I know, I was like, I'm so smart. You're so good, Karen. I'm like, mm-hmm, I'm not good. You're so stupid. Why did you tell me?

• 1:10:51Ben Gilbert?

  Can you phrase that in a direct quote, please?

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it was really fast. But I, all I did was I, I, I thought about it. Like, I strategized it. So I think about like Vox and those things all the time. Like, like Vox, Comcast, yeah, but why? Like, what is Steve Burke like? Why would he need this? What would it add? Like, 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? And 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. Like, like, but you know, that's how you, you have to think.

• 1:11:24Ben Gilbert?

  I could, I could see like a Verizon, um, someone that has distribution who can marry great content with the distribution they have.

• 1:11:30Speaker 00

  Well, Yahoo one didn't work out like.

• 1:11:32Ben Gilbert?

  That works in theory.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  In theory.

• 1:11:35Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, or it will work one day. The platonic form of that will be realized in some way.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  Like, look, look, we'll see.

• 1:11:41David Rosenthal?

  Maybe clear channel.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. They're all dying. News Corp.

• 1:11:47David Rosenthal?

  News Corp.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Back to Rupert.

• 1:11:49David Rosenthal?

  How would, how?

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  What would that have to be for Rupert?

• 1:11:51David Rosenthal?

  Rupert isn't really running News Corp anymore.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  I think he's quite lively, I suspect. I've heard. We had James Murdoch on stage the other day. He's, I don't think he's staying with that. I think it's gonna be Lachlan and Rupert at the other place. All right. James is gonna become a VC, I think. That's what he said. I think that's what he said. Didn't he? You heard it here first. He had it. 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. Like, I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

• 1:12:15David Rosenthal?

  Well, there we go.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  Oops, that might be one of my scoops. I forgot.

• 1:12:18David Rosenthal?

  On your tip list.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  My little pile. I'm like a bag. I'm like Hermione Granger.

• 1:12:24David Rosenthal?

  That's amazing. I, I think it's an A minus because I, this is my own narrative. My head has, has clearly been evident in the episode, but like, I just, I don't think Vox, Vox is like the biggest player in podcasts right now.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. No, NPR. And, and NPR.

• 1:12:39David Rosenthal?

  No, no, NPR is not doing podcast. Okay. NPR distributes radio shows on podcasts.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. That's what they do.

• 1:12:45David Rosenthal?

  They're not making native podcasts.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Not new ones. Everyone's trying to copy The Daily is really pretty much what's going on. And they're, they just announced one, I think. NPR just announced one.

• 1:12:54David Rosenthal?

  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 gonna pay creators directly.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:05David Rosenthal?

  And Vox now has probably the biggest aggregated audience of podcast listeners in America.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11David Rosenthal?

  Outside of NPR, which already monetizes through direct payments. So, for whatever they paid for Recode, to help jumpstart that, like, I think it's fantastic.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22David Rosenthal?

  Is it on Instagram? I, sorry, Karen, I don't think so.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  No, but on a lot of levels, sometimes I think, should I have just done those on my own? Like, as a, yeah.

• 1:13:28David Rosenthal?

  Well, right, yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  I would have had a lot. Like, I'm thinking of like, that guy who does the, Ben Thompson or other.

• 1:13:34David Rosenthal?

  That's what I was gonna bring up, yeah.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Then some days it's like, oh, that would even be, I'd have more money. Could you write that much? How, how does Ben Thompson write that much every day? He writes a lot. He does.

• 1:13:42David Rosenthal?

  He lives in Taiwan, that's all.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  He lives in Taiwan. There's nothing. It doesn't, it gives him more than 24 hours. It just gives him a jump in the morning. I could see. I could do it. I could do it. I could do it. I just have to stop doing other things. But, yeah. Do you, do you pay for Stratechery? I do.

• 1:13:56David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  I think I do, yeah. I do. I think we have one through Rico. I think he's really interesting. I think all those people are interested. I think about those things like, what do you need, anything? Like, I always am trying to go for like, I'm not trying to Maria Kondo everything. And I'm definitely like, look, when I did the Times thing, I didn't leave Fox, did I?

• 1:14:12David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:14:24David Rosenthal?

  Because they're stars now.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  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 as any, 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.

• 1:14:45David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:14:46David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  That's the only issue. But if you're interested in media, I think it's going to be a lot more. I'm not a sports person. What's a call when someone is free agent? There's going to be a lot more free agents.

• 1:14:56David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. And you'll see contracts for, kind of like you had, you and Walt had with the Journal.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have three contracts now. I have one with NBC because I do my MSNBC show. It's 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, so.

• 1:15:15David Rosenthal?

  There you go.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:17David Rosenthal?

  It's better than sports. You can play for three teams.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:15:22David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  That's interesting. I find that fascinating.

• 1:15:25Ben Gilbert?

  My logic isn't any different, but like, I can't be in, I can't be anywhere close to an A because we know of like, on the show, As mean like insane multiples on billions of dollars. So, you know, I'm a B.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  You have a high curve then. You're just grading on an Instagram curve, really? Well, you have to. Then we're all Fs. We're all frigging Fs.

• 1:15:42Ben Gilbert?

  Well, you got, it's logarithmic.

• 1:15:43Speaker 00

  My son got a, speaking of grades, my son got a D in math a couple of years ago. And he's got an As 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, he go, I go, Louis, 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.

• 1:16:06Ben Gilbert?

  A D is an F in this household.

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  A D is an F, period. It's just the schools just won't go to F, though D is like, you got an F, but I'm giving you a D.

• 1:16:14Ben Gilbert?

  You can tell them we gave AOL Time Warner a D.

• 1:16:16Speaker 00

  D. Oh, D.

• 1:16:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we didn't actually give it an F.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  No, that wasn't an F. That wasn't an F.

• 1:16:19Ben Gilbert?

  Not for some of the shareholders.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:16:31David Rosenthal?

  Well, we're talking about media and the internet here, so.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:16:42David Rosenthal?

  Ben, do you want to do?

• 1:16:44Ben Gilbert?

  Lightning round?

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  Yes, lightning round. We'll finish up.

• 1:16:46Ben Gilbert?

  All right, so we got to know, what's a day in the life of Kara Swisher like?

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  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 some, the next MSNBC thing. I make a lot of calls. I call around. I talk to a lot of people. Now that I'm doing the column, I spend a lot more time talking to people. 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. 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.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  Often I'll fly places to meet different people. I'm going to meet some pretty well-known people, going to fly to see them. I try to ask people in person to come to Code a lot of times. They have a hard time saying no to me.

• 1:17:45David Rosenthal?

  That's great. We should steal that.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Hello. Hi.

• 1:17:50Ben Gilbert?

  Did you just show up?

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  They know I'm coming. I was coming for lunch. Few people turn down lunch. One of the things that I think is a big, because everyone's always like, how did you talk to him? I'm like, I called him. Like, people will talk to you. Like, if you get their emails and you write them, they will write you back.

• 1:18:04Ben Gilbert?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  Like, it's really interesting. Um, and anyone, anyone, if you get their emails, will write you back. And if you ask the question.

• 1:18:11Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, it's how we emailed you.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  Yes, did I write you back?

• 1:18:14Ben Gilbert?

  You did, right away.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  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 the next couple of days. It's a lot of podcasts in the next couple of days. Um, some events, a bunch of events. Like, next week, I'm interviewing Maggie Haberman at Lesbians Who Tech. We're gonna make a podcast out of that again. And we're doing, I'm doing Jane Lynch, who's a friend of mine, actually. We're gonna make a podcast out of that. So, a lot of events I do outside of Vox, I, we make into podcasts, because that's my, that's the price of admission for me doing it.

• 1:18:43Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  Um, we're doing a 92nd Street Y thing. So, we do a lot of live events. We go to, I do a lot of live events. And then, and I'll always do panels with, um, I don't even have to do with women's issues or, uh, 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.

• 1:19:04Ben Gilbert?

  So, not busy at all?

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Not busy at all. I'm real busy. I have a great family.

• 1:19:08Ben Gilbert?

  All right. You're running for mayor of San Francisco in 2023.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  No, I'm not.

• 1:19:11Ben Gilbert?

  Give us an update.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  I don't think I am.

• 1:19:12Ben Gilbert?

  No?

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  No. I think Lyndon Bree is good. I think she's good. I don't wanna like, I think she's good. I don't think anyone expected, uh, Ed to die. Um, and I think I'm gonna give her a chance. She seems like she deserves one.

• 1:19:24Ben Gilbert?

  That's a good reason for that.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  And not make trouble. I was just doing that, because my point I was trying to make is someone's gotta fix this friggin' mess here. It's a mess. And so, I think I was trying, and at the time, I really meant it. It was like, someone's gotta, you've gotta get away from all these, uh, career politicians. She seems, some of her stuff, I'm really interested in. We'll see, we'll see. I mean, it's an incredibly difficult job that she's got.

• 1:19:43Ben Gilbert?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  But I like some of her moves, visiting the homeless things. I like her whole PR thing. I like it, I like it.

• 1:19:48Ben Gilbert?

  She's bringing scooters back.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  She's bringing scooters. She seems sensible. She seems sensible. Just like, same thing with, like, Stacey Abrams in, um, Georgia. I'm really interested in politicians like that. I think she's really sensible, and she's, she comes to compromises. She's not, uh, angry. She's not, like, in partisan, I don't mean angry, I mean partisan, like, in a way that's inflexible. I like, I like politicians like that. So, we'll see. I'm hoping to have, uh, her, uh, Mayor Bree on the show. I would hope that would happen. We've asked.

• 1:20:18Ben Gilbert?

  Best of luck.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  Oh, we'll get it.

• 1:20:19Ben Gilbert?

  All right, one more.

• 1:20:20Speaker 00

  There's nobody we don't get.

• 1:20:21Ben Gilbert?

  Across your whole career.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Trump, I'm gonna get it.

• 1:20:24Ben Gilbert?

  You think? You trying?

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  I'm gonna try. Why not?

• 1:20:26David Rosenthal?

  Heard it here first.

• 1:20:27Ben Gilbert?

  Well, then we'll have an answer to this next question. Across your whole career, what work are you the most proud of?

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  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. 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 gonna be historic. I know it. Like, nobody's done those interviews. Our Elon Musk ones, although I think he did something crazy today.

• 1:21:07Ben Gilbert?

  But you had him, he was speculating on the multiple universes on stage.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  Yes, the simulation. Not multiple, simulation.

• 1:21:14David Rosenthal?

  Simulation.

• 1:21:14Speaker 00

  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, like, someone's like, you know, "Oh, you've gotta keep trying." I'm like, "I could retire right now." Like, we have a, like Walt did. He had a body of work that was so substantive and so important. And these interviews were gonna go down. Like, a hundred years, people are gonna look at those interviews, some of them, not all of them, but some of them. And they're gonna matter, they're gonna matter. And so, everything we do now is just gravy, as far as, you know what I mean? And so, that's a really good way to look at it, is there's no downside to anything we're doing, and so we can continue to push upward.

• 1:21:58Ben Gilbert?

  Your Jobs and Gates interview was so formative to me.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  It was, yeah.

• 1:22:01Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  We put that free on iTunes. News Corp. didn't want that. We snuck it up there. They came back later when we were using some of those clips for 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, Rupert just signed it away, and it was great. That was a great, and we wanted to put that on for all of humanity.

• 1:22:30Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, in lieu of doing carve-outs today, that, to me... I think you asked Steve about he and Bill's friendship.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Ben Gilbert?

  And he responded with the Beatles line.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  The Beatles at the end.

• 1:22:41Ben Gilbert?

  You and I have memories.

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Ben Gilbert?

  Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  Oh, that made everybody cry. That almost made me cry. Although I knew he planned it.

• 1:22:46Ben Gilbert?

  God.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  He was such a manipulative person. I've been a good way. But I like the one where I said, what what we ask good questions. Actually, there's two interviews. That one, we asked him, what is the thing you don't know about your relationship with Gates?

• 1:23:00Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  And he said, oh, we, for a long time, we've been married.

• 1:23:03David Rosenthal?

  Yes, I remember that.

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:23:24Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  And he was just skinny as can be.

• 1:23:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  And just emaciated and very weak. But I gotta 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's, she has to talk about it.

• 1:23:50Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  And, but that interview, I have to say, he was so vibrant and full of life about, 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 the, 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 real, 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 gonna do for the rest of your life? I think that's, I just, and you could see everyone like, did she just ask that? That guy's about to die. And I was, and I did it on purpose. What are you gonna do the rest of your life? And he started. He knew what I was doing and it was great because he couldn't believe I asked it, I think. But no, he couldn't. He didn't mind. He never minded, stuff like that.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  And he said, he was like, okay, this is what I do with TV. Like, as if he was gonna live for 20 more years. And I thought that was a great answer. He didn't go like, ah, in my waning days, I shall contemplate the universe, or whatever. Um, 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, 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. I thought I got him to say things we all knew he thought that he never said. And I think I wasn't unkind, and I don't think I snarked at him, and I thought I allowed him to speak, and he just, I thought that was a really good and revelatory interview, so.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  So that's, and the next one, whatever I do the next one. We'll see. Maybe Elon next. Elon, final day. I don't know. We'll see with him. I'd like to interview him again.

• 1:25:26David Rosenthal?

  He needs to get some sleep first.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  I don't know. Something's going on.

• 1:25:30David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Speaker 00

  Something's go, something, something. Who knows? I don't know. We all have our crosses to bear, right?

• 1:25:36David Rosenthal?

  I mean, I think that's the, like, the big thing is, like,

• 1:25:38Speaker 00

  They're people.

• 1:25:39David Rosenthal?

  They're people.

• 1:25:39Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39David Rosenthal?

  They're people.

• 1:25:41Ben Gilbert?

  Anything else you want to leave our, our listeners with?

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  Hmm, just do the work. Please, just do the work, and then you'll be just fine. Again, 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 antisemitism. You are absolutely gonna 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 always helped me, I think. That's it.

• 1:26:12Ben Gilbert?

  Thank you, Kara.

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:26:14Ben Gilbert?

  Thank you, Kara.

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  That was a great interview. I appreciate it. You guys are very talented.

• 1:26:18David Rosenthal?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 1:26:25Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:26:36David Rosenthal?

  Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 1:26:56Ben Gilbert?

  This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

• 1:27:09David Rosenthal?

  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/acquired to get started.

• 1:27:19Ben Gilbert?

  If you aren't subscribed and you want to hear more, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast client. You can follow Kara on Twitter. Kara, where can they follow you on Twitter?

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  They can find me @kara swisher.

• 1:27:30Ben Gilbert?

  Excellent.

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  Yep, I got one of the early ones. That was a good one. I have @swisher@gmail, I think, or one of them, one of those early ones. I think mine's @kara swisher.

• 1:27:38Ben Gilbert?

  Email tips to swisher@gmail.

• 1:27:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:27:45Ben Gilbert?

  Awesome. Well, if you like the show, review us on iTunes. Come join the Slack, acquired.fm, or don't, and enjoy whatever podcasts you listen to in the future.

• 1:27:54David Rosenthal?

  Thanks, everyone.