Kara Swisher Takes on Big Tech

This week on the Next Big Idea Podcast: NBI producer Caleb Bissinger talks with Kara Swisher about her prick to productivity ratio. Listen on Apple or Spotify , and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Today's newsletter is written by my favorite podcast producer, Caleb Bissinger.

A few years ago, when I was working at a podcast network in Los Angeles, I got word that a celebrated journalist-turned-podcaster was in town and looking for a place to record. “Could she use your studio?”

We weren’t easily impressed by celebrities at this network. Oscar nominees had slurped our acrid coffee; Marvel superheroes had sat in our snug soundbooth. And we weren’t in the habit of letting strangers record in our space. But this woman was different. She wasn’t some poreless wonder with a Netflix series to promote; she was a podcaster, one of us, except better, a bona fide star in our young industry, famous for her no-bullshit interviews and anyone-who-is-anyone Rolodex. “Of course she can use our studio,” I said. “We’ll even waive our fee,” because to make her pay would be like Abbey Road Studios billing the Beatles.

She appeared a few days later, rushing into our office like an ambulance, and like a good motorist, I got out of her way. I did notice, as she sped past my desk, that she was short, shorter than I’d imagined — I’ve since learned that she is five-two but “writes tall” — and she was wearing aviator sunglasses, her trademark. She went straight into the recording booth, conducted her interview with some mover and shaker who was patched in by phone, and an hour later, she left just as quickly as she’d come.

Have you guessed who she is yet? No? Okay, then, I’ll tell you: it was Kara Swisher.

If you did guess correctly, well, good for you, but I think it says less about your remarkable familiarity with 21st century media and more about Kara Swisher’s remarkable ubiquity. For the last few years, she has been everywhere: hosting hit podcasts , writing columns for the New York Times, and antagonizing billionaires . She has appeared as herself on HBO’s Silicon Valley and The Simpsons. She once made Mark Zuckerberg sweat , literally. When she interviewed frenemies Bill Gates and Steve Jobs , people cried.

Like many celebrities, Kara Swisher seems to have come from nowhere to be suddenly everywhere. But as I learned from her smart, dishy, acerbically funny new memoir, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, that’s not really the case. Her love affair with tech began all the way back in 1994 when she was a reporter at the Washington Post. Her editor sent her to Tysons Corner, VA, to interview an entrepreneur who’d set up shop in an office park behind a car dealership. That entrepreneur was named Steve Case; his company, AOL.?

“I had been aware of the internet,” Kara told me when we spoke recently . “But it was quite technical at the time and difficult and glitchy. And then I saw AOL and I was like, Oh, I get it!”

She decided, then and there, that the internet would be her new beat. A few years later, she left the Post, moved to San Francisco, and became the Wall Street Journal’s first ever internet reporter. “Parachute in with your cleats on,” a mentor told her. “Be fair but cover them hard since they’re going to run the world.”

She took his advice. Her scoops were legion. By 1999, Industry Standard, the self-proclaimed newsmagazine of the internet economy, was calling her “the writer who has most influenced public opinion about the internet economy” — a kingmaking role that would only grow when Kara and Walt Mossberg, the aforementioned mentor, co-founded All Things Digital and Recode Media, staging buzzy conferences, attendance at which was a rite of passage for tech leaders.

I have sometimes wondered, in moments of professional envy, how Kara manages to book the guests she does given that her interview style has been described as “hazing.” (I like to think of it as a good-cop, bad-cop interrogation — except without a good cop.) One answer is that Kara is tough but fair. Another is that her platform is so big she simply cannot be denied. But the explanation to which I’m partial is that Masters of the Universe all talk to Kara because they’ve known her since before they were Masters of the Universe, known her since they were practically in diapers — and, in fact, Kara has seen a few of them in diapers, a surreal experience we discussed in this week’s episode. She met the founders of Google when they were working out of a garage, Jeff Bezos when he still only sold books, Elon Musk pre-Iron Man, and Mark Zuckerberg when he was just a hoodie-wearing teenager.?

Kara has covered on these tech titans with reliable accuracy and relentless energy, and while she has a penchant for brutal honesty, her work has long been infused with optimism. After all, she loves tech — it’s right there in her memoir’s subtitle. Lately, though, that love has gone sour. She now warns that the founders with whom she has long rubbed shoulders are no longer harmless geeks: they are powerful, dangerously egotistical grown-ups whose companies play an outsized role in everything from politics and war to the global economy and our mental well-being.

In Burn Book, Kara quotes the French philosopher Paul Virilio: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. ... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”

What negative consequences has this brood of tech CEOs invented? That’s something Kara worries about a lot these days, and it’s something we discussed quite a bit in this episode.

Take a listen to this episode on Apple or Spotify , and then jump into the comments and let us know what you think!