Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric and this is Next Question. Hi everybody, welcome. Once again, it's Katie plus one. As you guys know, just to switch things up, I'm inviting a friend to co host the podcast from time to time, and my date today is the one and only Kara Swisher. Now, Kara is the ultimate multi hyphenate, as they say these days, writer, podcaster, author, rock conteur, stripper. Oh sorry, you're not a stripper overall
that ass So, Kara, thank you so much. We are both under the weather, so I think we need each other today. You've got a cold.
You sound better than I sound terrible, and I had to do four podcasts today.
Oh my god, how did you do it?
I didn't know we were dating. This is so exciting for me as a lesbian that we're finally finally admitting our deepen abiding affection and really lust for each other. It's fantastic.
Well, I am very happy to have you here because, seriously, not to gush, you're one of my favorite people. You're one of the smartest people I know, thinks, an incredible reporter. I think everyone in the business respects you so much. Kara, and you're really fearless, which is what I love about you. And you know, I thought you'd be the perfect person to write Shotgun with me, although I can't imagine you're
willing to give up the driver's seat. But we're going to be chatting with Kevin Sistrom, who you know well. But before I just want to give our listeners a little bit about us, Kara. How did we meet? I was trying to remember when I first met you.
When I broke the story about you going to Yahoo?
I think, oh, is that when? Yes? But I was reading your stuff all the time.
We sense because you were thinking about going to Yahoo, you had to, right, Yeah.
But so that was I guess in around twenty twelve.
Yeah, I guess, yeah.
And who were you writing for back then?
My own thing, Recode? Oh, that's right, Recode. Yeah.
And you were breaking stories right and left, including the one about me.
I was and I thought it was intriguing. I thought it was super intriguing that someone like you, you'd been at all the broadcast networks. It was a big moment for people to make that crossover. You were one of the few and the early ones. Now it didn't work out quite the way you wanted to, but it still was pretty brave to do something like that and to try something out, and you know, you kind of got snowed by Merissa Mayer.
I did. And I think in retrospect, not only was it a bad fit because I don't think her goals and my goals aligned right in terms of turning Yahoo into a really major digital news network, but you know, I also think I might have been a bit too early.
Kara, Yeah, because you're not unlike what you're doing now with podcasting. You know, you were kind of doing That's what you were kind of doing, but you did it in more traditional sense, which was interviews and things like that. What was your title? It was so big? It was like global news anchor.
Yes, my husband made fun of me and said, why don't they call you intergalactic news anchor? I know it was a blood news anchor. It was a little a little much.
But it was early, and it was really important for people who who didn't understand what was happening in news on the internet to for have someone like you to go over and very few people did that. You know, I'm trying to think. I think it was you and
nobody else. Yeah, there were a couple, you know, but mostly what happened is later people that were on networks did podcasts or they did you know, it's different things, but podcasts and newsletters, which was an impairy thing, or else ape here has an influencer on TikTok or Instagram and stuff like that, and so you were early to all those things. As I recall, you were very early to Instagram, you were on Twitter early. Yeah, you were
very embracing of the digital part. You didn't make fun of it the way most media people did.
Well.
I think I saw early on. Honestly, I think part from my own experience at CBS. You know, there was the decline of linear television. It was going steadily declining year over year, and I realized that, you know, in two thousand and eight. It was two thousand and eight when the iPhone came out. I mean that totally changed the game. And care I remember being at CBS and having somebody say to me, I forget who he was. He goes, the future is mobile, But I remember thinking,
what is he talking about? And he was so spot on, but whatever was going to happen, I knew something was changing. And meanwhile, you have been on the forefront of everything.
Well mobile, you know Walt and I called Mobile Web two point zero. I think we were very when we saw the iPhone, and you know, Jobs had denied he was making it to us the year before he introduced it. No, I'm not working on a phone but an interview, but he was. The minute that happened, the iPhone changed everything, including you know, for Kevin System, you wouldn't have had Instagram, you wouldn't have had Uber, you wouldn't have had a lot of Airbnb. There's so much you wouldn't have without
the apogonomy. And of course that's when companies likeness came into being, really because of the iPhone.
It's amazing how much things have changed when you think about when we got into journalism and the things that have tanked as a result of the Internet and things that have exploded. Well, you've got a lot going on in your life. I'm excited to have you back on this podcast when your new book comes out in twenty twenty four. It's called burn Book, Right, you'll like it.
Kaaney, you're in it.
Oh God, I hope you're nice to meet Kara.
I am. It's a low bar though it's a low bar for people in the Internet.
Well, I know you're not a fan of a lot of people in Silicon Valley, but you are a fan of our guest, Kevin Sistrom.
I am very much.
So well, let's let him in so you can talk about him and he can his ears can actually burn in person.
Kevin, Hi, how are you guys? How are you wonderful?
What a coincidence, Kevin? We were just talking about you, and I was saying to Kara there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley she's not crazy about, but one of the people she really really likes Kevin is you. You're in rare company. Now, what is it about Kevin, Kara that you like?
Well, you know, I really do admire you know, there's a lot of people I had a lot of wrangling with, like Steve Jobs, who I actually did like too. I like people who love products. I love people who have a design sense, have a real tear about products and designing them correctly. I like someone who's thoughtful and is willing to change their minds. You know, Kevin was always open to criticism in a way that didn't It wasn't hurt all the time.
And Kevin I mean, it seems like you have a lot of humility, which is a quality that's probably hard to come by in Silicon Valley. How have you been able to maintain some openness, some humility as you've approached your work.
I was having dinner with the Promise site and we were talking about Artifact and my current project and how it's going and the future of it, and I said, I think the difference between the people that succeed in the long run and the people that continue to fail are the people that do their best to recognize their
blind spots and that everyone has them. And the problem is, at least in Silicon Valley, that these companies grow to be so large that if you stay in charge, you can ignore your blind spots because you've got your moat, you've got your defense, and you can ignore all of the things you don't know about yourself because you're successful, and you continue to be successful, and you have all this money. The problem is, let's imagine you sell your company.
You're no longer in charge of your company, and you have to go face the real world. You have to get in touch with your failings and your weaknesses pretty quickly, otherwise you get chewed up and spit out the other side. That's what every entrepreneur has to do at some point in their life. The problem is that people that cares talking about, I believe, are the people who get to the point where they don't have to really think about those things because they're just riding the wave that they
caused maybe ten or twenty years ago. Have that wave anymore? You have to create a new wave. And in order to create that wave, I think you need to understand where you're good, where you're not good, and sometimes that can be a painful process.
Well you know, Kevin, it's also a question of maturity, right, I sort of link I split people between adults and toddlers. Really, I don't know what else to say, is adult toddlers who get enabled and coddled. And you know this from having money. You don't know who's your friend. You have people in violent agreement with you almost all the time, and the ability to take feedback is very hard when everybody is enabling you not to not to do so, and I think it makes you a lesser executive in
my opinion. And you don't hear let me tell you who you don't hear from about that who doesn't complain when you have a good about their product is the people from Apple. You don't hear Tim Cook belly aching about anything because he's an adult, and so I think, and I don't think you have to be old to be an adult. I think you were an adult from very early on. I mean that was my feeling at the time.
I appreciate that.
Well, let's talk about early on, Kevin, because I know we have so much to cover, But I do want to start with Instagram, just because I'm addicted to it and I've been going down endless rabbit holes, much to my estegrint. I mean constantly. It's really hard. It is addictive. But where did the idea from Instagram come from?
It came from We were working on a different app, not Instagram, called Bourbon, and it was spelled b u RBN and the name doesn't matter. It was funny, but it was a check in app. It led you share your location, so you could say I'm at a restaurant, I'm at a bar, and all your friends would see where you were. And it was kind of riding this wave of check an app.
Poor Square was the popular yeah.
Or Square Goala Hot Potato there were a bunch of them.
Was looped in.
There was looped yep, yep. Here's the thing people forget that maybe they don't forget, but it's easy to forget that. We see these waves of like everyone's doing generative AI all at once, everyone's doing Web three. My version of that when I started was check and apps. Everyone was doing check and apps. And we started this check and app. And the one feature that we had that no other check and app had was the ability to add photos.
And you can attach a photo to your check in, so you could say, I'm at the beach, here's me at the beach. And no one really liked our check and app. No one really wanted to use it. I mean, we had a small group of people playing with it, and you know, we took a step back, Mike Kreeger and I and Mike cofounder, we took a step back and we said, why and what is it about the thing we've built that people do love? So we crossed
everything out. We had a whiteboard and we wrote everything that people used on the app up on the whiteboard and crossed everything off, and we ended up basically with one thing circled, which was photos. We said, okay, what if we threw away literally everything about this app and repositioned it around photos. So we did that. But that's not the end of the story. A very quick addition
to the story is we did that pivot. We built this app, we didn't call it Instagram yet, and I was I decided I needed a week off because I was exhausted. I was like, I don't think this pivot's going to work. So I'm going to go to Mexico for a week to a little little seaside town with who would become my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, Nicole. And we we're walking along the beach and I said, do you think you'll use this new
version of this app called Bourbon that's photos only? And she said, no, I don't think I will because I don't like sharing my photos. My photos aren't good enough. I said, why aren't your photos good enough? And she said, well, because all your friends take these amazing, beautiful filtered photos. And I was like, yeah, that's because they use filter apps. And she's like, well, you should probably add filters to
the app. I said, that's a brilliant idea. So we finished that walk on the beach I went back to the little hotel room we were staying in and I researched how to make the first filter. And if you look way back on my profile, the first photo on my profile, the first photo ever on Instagram, is a square photo of a very small dog in Mexico when we went out to lunch after I built the first
filter on Instagram because of that walk on the beach. Wow, I'm proud to say she is now my wife and I love her dearly.
Well did you pay her? Did you pay her for it?
I was gonna say, but I think I don't think she has a good prenup.
Yeah.
Well, I think we're both very, very happy with the situation. I'm very happy to be married to her, and we just we have this great life now. So it's awesome. But how do we knock down on that walk?
I remember I was at Yahoo, you guys when when Instagram came out, and somebody on my team says, you need to be on Instagram. You know, it's this great new thing, and I was like what, But I was I kind of got into it pretty quickly, and it just grew so fast, Kevin, to the point you sold it to Mark Zuckerberg for one billion dollars, which is a nice chunk of change.
Actually, Katie, it was cheap, you know, are really Oh yeah, really, Zuckerberg got the bargain of a century getting that fantastic.
Oh, you're right, I've read that. How much do you think you could have sold it for in retrospect, Kevin? Or do you hate that question?
I don't hate the question because I'm so used to getting it now. I think I hated it the first couple of times, but now now I feel like I've come to terms with my answer, which is, at the time, do you know how many people, Katie, we had at the company when we sold it for a billion dollars?
Seven?
Right?
Seven? Maybe more?
It was nine? I think maybe nine or ten. It's okay. You imagine you have a group of kids in a room working on a photo app and someone comes along and says, how about a billion? You know, I don't know many people that would turn that deal down?
Yeah, and you.
Know, Listen could have should have would a had we stayed the course been independent. I don't know. I mean, how many examples of people, maybe I know more of them personally have turned down acquisition offers Facebook for one hundred billion dollars. Well, you know, Facebook's the easy one. That's the one we all talked about. Let's talk about
the one is that didn't work out. Yeah, you're right, hundred that turned down one two hundred million dollar offers saying you know what, we're going to stick the course. Now you literally never heard of these companies.
I think my point, Kevin, was that you were making something that was special and different. Having seen everything, I think while I think they did help you grow quickly, I suspect you could have done it by yourselves, because your product was quite magical in a way that not a lot of them are. How much do you imagine they helped you grow? I don't think I've ever asked
you that. How much do you think they being within the juggernaut of Facebook, which was at that moment still is really did you think they really did help you? I assume you did.
I think they helped us in a bunch of ways, and we helped them back in a bunch of ways. And there's a little bit of this dynamic of we and them, which I find so strange. By the way, Yeah, because you know, like sure, we had a little building on campus and had a little Instagram logo on the outside, but we were all part of the same company. And I'm bringing this up not to point out the way you're talking about us, but rather the way we talked
about ourselves internally. When I was there, it was such an US versus then dynamic, and it was very strange in my head always because I was like, here, we are now producing billions of dollars, years in billions of dollars, but it's as if we're like two siblings fighting over who gets the remote and we're not.
Well. It sounded like that to me, though, Kevin, because everything I read it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong that Mark Zuckerberg was kind of threatened by you and your success and the fact that a lot of resources were going to Instagram, and I don't know, it sounds like his ego got in the way. Is that accurate.
I don't know that I can speak on his bath for that. You'd have to ask him directly.
I mean, is that how you felt.
The way that I felt was that nothing made sense logically about the way we were running the two companies. Logically. It was amazing that we had lightning in a bottle, and we were producing, you know, a product that was growing all over the world and you know, double digit growth rates per month and then on top of that, producing billions of dollars. Yet for summer reason, internally, the dynamic was that we were disappointed. Yeah, and that was
very strange. And like, basically the reason I left, by the way, and I've said this to friends, and I'm not sure I've ever said it to anyone else, but like the reason I left is because the more I felt that I put in and the more that we won, the harder my job got. The more difficult the more and not that like not that jobs don't get harder as things go on, But it wasn't like that's that success was a good thing. It was almost as if that success was a bad thing because we had this product,
Facebook Blue, which was going through some tough times. And I get that I probably, you know, could have been a better you know, I don't know, sibling or whatever in terms of understanding how challenging that must be for those people and for those teams and for the brand. And at the same time, I found it so strange that we didn't look at our situation as holy crap. We are the luckiest people on earth and maybe the luckiest company on Earth. That feels like a real tragedy in retrospect.
Yeah, well, I read that you were on I Guess doing some interviews and Mark and Cheryl said basically you couldn't do interviews without getting permissioned from them. So it does sound like a bit of a power struggle. What's your take on that, Kiara.
I think they were jealous of I know they were jealous of Kevin largely because of creativity. And the knock on them was that they stole ideas, that they were shoplifters, essentially of other people's theories and ideas. Now, as it turned out, Instagram became an enormous engine for Facebook. As Facebook started to wane in usage, in excitement in young people,
being especially young people, it was critical. To me. There's certain purchases in technology that are critical that really changed them. I think Google buying you Tube was one of them. And I think there are certain purchases where it's a real turning point. I think it wasn't a critical critical thing, and it's sort of as rich and famous as you get, it doesn't matter if it wasn't you who did. And I think Bill Gates suffered from this, you know, probably
more towards Steve Jobs. Is like Bill Gates before he did all the philanthropy when he if he had died then it would have been the world's richest man died today. And if Steve Jobs done, which he later did, the world's greatest tech visionary died today. And I think Kevin was more in the visionary part of that. And Mark, you know, he's like a Henry Ford character. And so
that's what makes it hard. And again let me I'd love to ask you getting back to the product, and that's really what you have to get to is the product itself and the iterations you make around it, including as I've talked with Kevin about doing stories that was a snapchat thing that then Instagram did. Now Kevin's quite smartly and very cleverly. Is said to me, well, they made a radio in a car, and we just made a better radio in a car. And I kind of accept that now. I accept that now, Kevin.
It's funny, by the way, Kara for a second that you know you'll say that Facebook or shoplifters, but like to be clear, story was a very direct. You know, it wasn't a replica because I think we added some really neat features to it.
You did.
But I do believe that, like you know, as much as Facebook might have invented the Facebook news feed. Yes, now you can't see a social product without a news feed, but that wasn't a given back then.
That's true.
So these things are not property the founder. Yeah, it's about who actecutes best on them. And now we're seeing that play out with the Twitter feed effectively across multiple products.
Yeah, everyone's doing a version of Twitter, including you and your new you know, a version of But the idea of it is a feed, isn't It really is a feed when you think about it. But one of the things that I think is important to remember is that not just from a creative point of view, it gave Facebook and enormous amount of credibility to own a product like this, it also was financially enormous, like enormous, and a safer place than what was going on at Facebook.
I think that was really important, a pleasant place. Facebook had started to get different right as they got criticized. But Instagram, even though there are lots of problems on Instagram around lots of problems. You know, it still was a place of product of enjoyment. I guess. I don't know else to put it, but a product of enjoyment more than anything else and delight. And I think that's hard to do and sustain. Twitter has never been enjoyable.
It's been funny, it's been vexing, it's been addictive, But enjoying I don't think so. I don't, you know, I guess in a broader sense, and that's very hard to do.
After this break, we dive into how tech companies can build products that select for something other than outrage. Kevin has some great ideas on how to do just that. I want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture. Sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com. And we're back with our guest, Kevin Sistrom and my co pilot Kara Swisher. I wanted to ask you about the negative
side of Instagram, Kevin. Obviously, there are a lot of negative impacts on girls, on mental health. On the comparison that it encourages, and is that just part of the deal. I mean, can anything be done about the psychosocial impact of some of these platforms, and specifically Instagram, and is as you saw it having this impact. I'm curious what went through your mind.
I think it all comes down to leadership, the idea that you have a school and that tool take nuclear energy can be used for amazing things. It can produce clean, sustainable energy, but also, if used not in the right way, can create massive destruction. Tools themselves rarely have a very
clear positive or negative effect. It's when you put that tool in someone's hand and that person decides to start making rules around it, in judgments about what's allowed what's not allowed, the way they decide to moderate things, their community guidelines, the tone they set as a leader with their own posts. If we're talking social media, and as a leader at Instagram, early on, I decided that we should focus on being the nicest place on the Internet.
And nice is like a really lame word, but let's move past that to maybe dness. So, for instance, we were one of the first, if not the first, major social network to use machine learning to detect bullying and intervene in bullying situations. Most people were worried about spam
at this point. So if you went to any other network, they'd had spam filters and spand detectors, and we were focused on interactions that didn't qualify as spam, but were human to human interactions that were negative, and we would intervene and try to stop those things. Those are the types of decisions that I think made Instagram such a great place early on, because we didn't We used to have caro. We used to have this phrase internally called
prune the trolls. Yeah, and we used to just get rid of We used to block accounts of people who were causing issues very very early on, and that was getting rid of the negative. But then we would also host these community meetups called instamets, and we would bring together people on the platform in person, in a to meet each other, to put a face to a name, and those types of interactions very early on, I think set an amazing tone for the community that lasted well
beyond my tenure. But as you get bigger and bigger and you get into the billions, the law of large numbers says that you get just about everyone on the platform, every type of person, so it becomes much harder to make these decisions. So maybe in one country something is well accepted, will in another country it's not accepted. You have to make these really hard choices about what's allowed and what's not allowed, and you start to make people
angry with these choices. But it all comes down to leadership. It all comes down to those fundamental decisions you make as a human holding that tool in your hand, with the control which.
I think is lost for a lot of people. A lot of tech people try to abrogate. I don't want to have anything to do even as they built it, like I didn't mean to build this city.
Right, Well we're a platform, we're not a publisher, right.
Yeah, but they built it in the first place, and they think one of the things is important Keavn can talk to this about a new thing is you have to have a set of rules. And it's okay. You know this whole canard that it's a public square. It's not a public anything. It's a private money making company. I mean, I don't know, Kevin. I think that I think these are these are companies and you know company as it's rules and so should this.
Are there any things that you see Kevin when you go on Instagram today that you wish wasn't happening, or changes you think, Oh, I'm so pissed there letting this happen, or if I were there, I would do X, Y or Z.
At the end of the day, the question is how you incentivize people and who's in control? And I think what we've seen so you asked, you know, what do
I wish was different? Yeah, I'm not sure it's an Instagram problem specifically, but you know, products like reels and product like like YouTube shorts or even TikTok, they're so optimized on engagement that they will show you things that you are not actually interested in, but they will make you stare at them forever, and then you wake up one day and you look around you go, god, I just spend an hour. Was that like a useful hour of my life?
Right?
And part of why I started Artifact was the belief that you could use some of the same technology to personalize, but do it in a way that actually showed people things that made their life more informed, maybe a little bit better.
Kevin's talking a little bit. If you want to make an analogy to sugar, right, isn't this doughnut delicious, what a delicious done? And you may even not want it. You may want something healthy, or you might want something different, but it's hard to resist.
But it's sitting in front of you.
Well, it's how you architect things. And Kevin's a designer. If you architect for virality and speed, you're going to get a different thing. And if you architect for context and content, like really good what you're looking for right, absolutely, And so it's a question of what architecture you put into place and so many of these things, or else you don't put anything into place. And people generally trend towards shitty stuff. Look at the shitty stuff, look at
the accent. And that's what's going on on Twitter right now. He's just removed everything, and so people who are bad can come in and really attract you in a way that is just the human brain. It's it crawls down your cerebral cortex.
Really, Kara, I have an example. Sure, I love coffee, okay, and I go to Starbucks and by the way, like you know people who I claim on a coffee er, and then I tell people I go to Starbucks and they're like wait what, But like I do.
I'm surprised. I'm surprised you went to Starbucks. I'm surprised.
Listen, I'm a busy guy with like two kids. Sometimes you need a great, great quick cos.
He's kind of a coffee snob. You are a coffee you were.
Here's the thing. I've been going to Starbucks for god knows how many years, and like, Starbucks is a milkshake company. Guys, it's a milkshake company. Go into any Starbucks and just sit there and watch people ordering. They're not ordering dripped coffees, maybe once in a while a latte. People walk out of there with huge milkshakes with whipped cream on top. And yes, there's caffeine inside, but think about what machine produced,
what set of incentives produced that milkshake shop. It's like, well, okay, if people like our coffee, but like, how can we have them have coffee during the day, not the morning. Well, let's blend up some ice with it, Let's add some sugar. What do people like, Oh, okay, we'll do summer drinks. And before you know it, like one of the most original coffee companies in the world now like primarily sells milkshakes, right, And if you think about it in terms of social media,
that's exactly what happens. You start off about being this time square and ideas and everything, and then you say, oh, well, actually what gets people to stay around and what you end up with is like fight videos and car crashes and silly animal dances like.
And dunking and not new. But I would argue though, that news is important that people are still on Twitter because news is there. It's the best place to get the most up to minute news because the people on it so there are you can move people towards quality things very easily, even if you can sort of do this with the jazz hands with the milkshake.
I think I just I want to be clear that like I still love Starbucks, I still go there. It's just you got to look at what incentives produce at the end of the day in your business, what do they produce, and if you chase profit, if you chase margin, if you chase expansion, you will get to a point where what you end up with are products that are purely engineered for that rather than maybe the original mission.
But I think I'm curious Kevin with artifact explain what it is for people who do know. And also you're going in a much more vegetable direction. Really, you're going for full vegetable or full news junkie.
Essentially, I'll challenge that we're going full vegetable, but I'll get there first by explaining what it is. Artifact is a fully machine learning driven personalized news reader. So the idea is that you show up and we're going to
show you a bunch of things. Because you told us you're interested in technology in NFL and cars, we're you're interested in fashion, and you're from San Francisco, and we will crawl the Internet, not the entire Internet, but what we deem is the trustworthy Internet, and we'll bring all that content together and then we'll serve it to you in a feed, and depending on what you tap on and what you engage with, we'll try to learn what your actual interests are, and then we'll customize that feed
over time. So what's happened for me personally is when it started, it was just a bunch of tech news, and now it's a mix of Japanese architecture and travel recommendations, parenting tips because I have two young kids, and local San Francisco politics, and that's great for me. It's a mix of wonderful publications that I never would have heard of otherwise and helped me discover local publications like the
San Francisco Standard. Things like this bring content to you rather than having you get served content because someone decided to post about it.
Or searching for it across a million different platforms. But Apple News does the same for me, Kevin, how's this different?
I'm going to say this and it's going to sound like a non answer, but you have to see it
to know the difference. Like my pitch would be that we focus on high quality, non trashy publications that aren't so intellectual that they feel out of touch, but that aren't like kind of one of the you know, content mills that just show you more celebrity photos and that it's like, thank you, someone finally built a news recommendation service that understands me as someone who is and when I say me, I mean someone who loves tech, who loves things that are on the bleeding edge, wants to
learn about AI, maybe that have a budding interest in crypto, like those types of things. It's like we go beyond just the major publications too. We find interesting substacks we find interesting recipe authors. So you're not going to find that on a place like Apple News. You're not going to find that on Google News. And that's okay because they're focused on different things. But I think we go a little bit more intellectual, and we go a little deeper in terms of unique sources, and then on top
of that the competitive angle. I do believe our machine learning is better than a bunch of these, so we will personalize better for you, or at least that's our goal. So that's how we're different.
You name four areas you're interested in, you know, you said local San Francisco politics, parenting articles, Japanese architecture, and I forget the fourth one. What was the fourth one, Kevin? I?
I remember, I don't either.
But what about like someone like me and care I imagine you're like me. I'm interested in probably twenty five different things. You know, I'm interest I'm a generalist. I want to know what's happening from Megan and Harry to Tom Friedman's latest column about the Middle East to what Richard coss might have written in Foreign Affairs, to what the economist is saying about Israel, to everything to how
it'll affect you. I mean, obviously I'm heavy on foreign policy right now, given everything that's going on in the world, But how can you serve me up over such a broad area of interest things that I want to see without completely overwhelming me.
They're a couple of ways. The first thing that I think is really interesting to talk about here is you just discussed revealed versus stated preferences. And if we ask you to name all your preferences and we put a piece of paper in front of you, For most people, that's actually very, very difficult. It's very hard to say
all the things that you love without seeing them. But if a system learned, and this is called exploration in the machine learning verbiage, if you can explore potential topics for someone and then just note Katie spend a bunch of time on foreign affairs. She loves Thomas Friedman. Whenever Thomas Freeman writes, she spends a bunch of time reading this article. But she also loves like the latest Harry and Meghan gossip. Those things are not mutually exclusive, but
they are on major publications. When you open up a major publication, you have sections, you have the front page, Harry and Meghan are not on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post most of the time probably ever, but for you, maybe they should be. And that's really the dream here is that via exploration, we can make that front page sing for you, that it can feel like it was designed literally just for you.
Which has been an old goal of everybody. Yahoo. You had personalization, Everyone's tried to sort of create this individualized news feed for everyone. That's sort of been a long time goal.
Yeah, and maybe what I could do quickly is just talk about where we've expanded recently, because the scope of the company has changed pretty significantly. And that's some of what Karen was talking about when she said we're building our own little Twitter. We've always believed that we wanted to build this personalized homepage for you that other people have tried and not done it very well. One of the realizations through this, I believe is that it's not
that it's necessarily hard to do. It's that I'm not sure people are that impressed, not necessarily with us, but just they need more. They need more than articles. They want spice, they want unique, interesting content, and where that typically comes from is user generated content when people actually post something that they're thinking that's unique that you can't find anywhere else. So we added this thing, this tab
called links, which now will let you. It lets you post links to things that you find interesting and say something about them, which could be not from a major publication, it could be a random blog that you found or maybe your own blog. But it also lets you post just on your own so if you want to write four or five paragraphs about something, you can and post into it. And this feed has been really fun to watch take off in the last few weeks. It's really
added a different life to Artifacts. Now you can get your news, which is fine, but you can get it to other places. But now you have these really unique posts and links that you can get basically only on Artifact on this other tab. But it's all part of discovering content using personalization. That's the dream here is that we can create this market where producers and consumers can get matched and their interests are matched.
So interest matching. There used to be a company called six degrees. Do you remember them. Yeah, Amazon ended up buying them, and the idea of putting interests together has always been another dream. And what's happened is to generate it into chaos, which is whatever is whatever bubbles up in terms of enragement is what wins versus because it's like a car traffic accident versus your interest. One of
the reasons TikTok is so successful. It does see your interests and it knows what you like and you know more. That's more media than social, right, And so the goal is to be more media than social because social has become so toxic in a lot of ways. And that's what's difficult about these businesses.
When we come back, what in the world is coming next for news and media online? Kevin and Kara have some ideas and there's real reason to be optimistic. We're back with Kara Swisher and Kevin's sistrom. How is business, Kevin? I mean, are you doing well? How are you getting people to download yet another app and want to kind of change their habits.
I think what we've done is create a beautiful product for some very passionate people, but nowhere near the amount of people that use Instagram right, And the question is how do you go from one to the other? Because Instagram started off very small at the beginning. I mean,
everyone likes to think, oh, was this overnight success. And don't get me wrong, the first day of Instagram we had twenty five thousand people sign up and it was great, and it continued to grow over time and it retained people. The question is not can you get attention? The question is can you retain people with a product that they love? And we have a group of people that love this product, and our main challenge is can we be mainstream? And
where's the white space? Where can people succeed? Because I mean, Carot, what's the last successful consumer startup you have seen? I'm curious here.
It hasn't been in a long time, right, Oh, not by a big company. It's been a long time. Someone's broken through, Right, it's been a long time. I can't think of one. You're very good. And also it also has the law of big numbers. Is that you know this is something Ben Horowitz of all people said to me. He's like, no one's going to create a search engine. No one's going to create a consumer commerce company because
of Amazon search engine, because of Google. No one's going to create all these various things because of the large players. And that's the real problem is how do you even break through. Now. The one example is I gotta say TikTok, right, came out of nowhere.
I actually I'll challenge I'll change, which is I think it's very easy as someone who maybe I was twenty five at the time something like that Instagram started, it's very easy to be optimistic and green and just believe there's all this opportunity and I and then it's very easy. Now on the other side, I'm about to turn forty, I'm thirty nine right now to believe that there's no opportunity or believe that maybe some doors have closed along
the way. But here's the wonderful thing about the Internet that it surprises everyone. I mean, when we found it Instagram, could you imagine that anyone would be able to have found an image sharing social network to compete with Instagram? And then snap came along, and then after stap do you believe could you believe anyone could compete with YouTube Instagram and snap in video and by the way, not even a US company like this is incredible, Like, of course,
there are always opportunities. So would you have to do I think in these situations is fite the urge to believe that all the doors have closed and instead look out and say, what are the opportunities that have changed because of some fundamental technology change, like, for instance, generative AI.
Oh, that's full of ideas because there's going to be general AI for insurance, for healthcare, all kinds of areas, so you can It reminds me a little bit of when the mobile phone came right that you couldn't have imagined Instagram before the mobile phone could do easily.
Now most people when they see companies start thinking, oh, that idea is too small.
Yeah, it's true.
And the question isn't is the idea too small at the beginning, it's what is the ambition of the person who's running it and what direction are they headed? Because if you can map out that mark is going to take it from Harvard to other Ivy League schools, to every school, to every other college, to high schools, et cetera, and then take over the world. Like then you say, okay, this is interesting.
But I don't know.
There are a lot of companies that get started and stay very happy with very small audiences. So it's not about the idea, it's about the direction.
I want to just spend a couple of minutes talking about the media landscape and the state of news, which is what prompted you to create Artifact, Kevin in the first place. And I'd love to get your take on what is happening on Twitter now or X and what Elon Musk has done to turn it into such a cesspool. Obviously, people can buy blue checks, so nobody is really verified. The ad model has changed, there's ai I think that's
creating a lot of dis and misinformation. But I'd love to ask you, Kara, what has X becommon Why?
Well, it's interesting because it's still a little necessary because it's so everyone's there and it's frantic, you know what I mean. And so if they're like, if there's I still go on it?
I do.
Sure, it's useful. It's because everybody's there, everybody, But it's sort of like one of those clubs or a place a downtown that you know you still have to kind of go to. But it sucks now. It's like it's dirtier, there's really weird people hanging around.
No one says that about San Francisco. I'm not sure what you're talking about.
No, no, no, no, no. I love Sirence. Don't insult San Francisco to Karas for sure. So I find it really hard to use. I have to turn off comments now because of the really the flood of really crazy people. And I'm joking about Elon must but he also you know, it's really unpleasant, and so it's become an unpleasant experience. But you put up with it because of the benefits of getting instant, like there's no other place to go right now to watch the vote happening.
And didn't he fire everybody who was kind of evaluating content and flagging content.
A lot a lot, Well, they say, not everybody.
And then I keep getting these ads what doctors don't want you to do to your coffee? Like why why do they keep why do they keep feeding me that ad?
Because they're paying because the check is cashing. I don't know. I think it's really I think it could go for a while. These things can go for a while. Kevin knows that these things can hold on for and he's the richest man in the world, so he can afford. It's like having a one of these Megga yachts that's seeping oil out of it. He can keep doing it and paying the fines for it. For a long time.
What was frustrating to you, Kevin about the news environment and how did you say, Oh, I need to fix this or I need to fill a hole that's missing.
I want to be clear that I think Artifact is much more than just news. Like, of course we're in the news category in the app store, and that's the easiest way to talk about what we are. But I think by frustration actually is that people only think about news. When you talk about news, they don't think about all the amazing content out there that has nothing to do with the day as headlines.
We should probably call it a content app.
Really, Yeah, that's right, And I think people are thirsty for that type of information because they don't want yet another if it bleeds, it leads story. What they want is some value in their life, a discovery. Like there's this guy who just documented his trip throughout Japan in a photo assay and I found it on Artifact and it was this moment where I've been to Japan only a few times. It's one of my favorite places on Earth.
But I scrolled through and I was just like, Okay, I'm taken back and I'm not reading about some awful thing that happened in downtown San Francisco today because I can get that elsewhere. That's the opportunity is not necessarily the news industry, but rather what are people reading, what are people being served and why? And if you focus on these platforms that focus on the most insane stories being pushed to you, you're just going to get that
type of content I said I wanted to avoid. So the real opportunity here is and you learn someone's interests and can you delight them with content that doesn't make them want to shut the app and anger every single day.
I think the word delight you're using is absolutely the case. I mean, that's why I do have a good feeling about threads. I find it delightful sometimes. I was laughing at it the other day. They have some astronomy person right on there, and I'm not interested in astronomy, but I and I don't know why. Or they had a video that made me laugh, or cat videos or whatever.
And on artifact just now stuff I wouldn't have found, Like there's a piece that someone else discovered that then showed me, which was when was the last time Mark injuries and talked to a poor person. It made me laugh. I was like, probably never, you know, since he was a kid, essentially when he was poor, and that's the kind of thing you need. I think there's a real if there's a trend, Kevin, maybe you could answers there's a trend toward getting sick of crap, like everyone is
sick of crap. And I do think there is a trend towards And I think it's the same with voters. They don't want to hear anymore from screaming people, screaming angry people. They want to hear about things they like about their family. And I think that's kind of a secret, silent majority of people being delighted by things or discovering things that are of interest in them, even if they're hard stories or whatever.
But do you think they want to hear things that are not so partisan too, I mean anything, You know, I'm desperate to actually have someone explained to me what is going on with this committee that's investigating Joe Biden and claiming that his family has made ten million dollars in you know, it's on some right wing news site that I actually get their newsletter because I want to hear what they're saying. But I sent it to a friend and I said, I'm so confused. Is any of this actually true? Right?
Yeah?
I think verifying information is really hard today. You never know who to trust, even with large publications. You don't know if there's some ulterior motive or partisan angle. And I think one of the reasons why I'm excited about artifacts and the algorithmic approach is there's all these new advancements in balancing perspectives. So there's this thing called bridging algorithms.
The idea is like you can kind of lump people based on their history of reading into you know, right or left politically, and what you can do is look for articles that actually resonate with both rather than just deepen the divide. And this is well studied. It's actually used on Twitter today on acts ironically Kara for their
community notes product. That's how they decide which community notes actually get shown, because otherwise you have people on the right doing community notes, correcting the lefties and the lefties correcting the righting right. So like, the way it can be applied in mass to news and information is by noticing that certain things have a bias not in terms of content, but who they resonate with yeah, and then
finding content that brings people together. We're far too small and early right now for a lot of this to make sense.
Is anybody doing that, Kevin, I haven't heard of anyone else even considering it.
Yeah, it's hard.
Well, what's funny, care is it's actually not hard, meaning technically it's not hard. What's hard is to make the choice to do it. Because you are seen as somehow trying to push liberal content to conservatives or conservative content liberals.
You violate one of the groups. And I think that's very hard when you're very large and you know you're trying to balance whatever party is in power with legislation against your company and investigations and so it becomes a very difficult place to be as a large company, but not a difficult place if you're a smaller you're trying to grow.
It's anesthetical though, to what Kara often calls engagement through enragement, you know, like, if you want people you want to feed the dogs the dog food and you want affirmation instead of information, challenging people's worldview to me would work against the whole visceral connection. You have to content that makes you stay on the platform, right.
Well, in this case, I'm explaining something slightly different, which is you're looking for content that resonates with both sides, so it actually drives engagement on both sides because people see some common thread in it.
It's commonality.
Yeah, that's right.
Years ago a Well started. That's how it started. And the first thing I ever noticed it was when he had a group of quilters who had met on AOL and they had made a quilt of an AOL symbol and they finally met in person and met him, and they felt like they knew him. And it was so positive because these were people so different from each other that just liked to quilt and they managed to create
it online. And I remember thinking this could be used for such good things, and it could be used for such bad things, like I could see the opposite people that like to make bombs and blow up people they.
Don't like, or white supremacists.
Yeah, yoh no it listen. AOL was good for white supremacists early on too, So connection is what you're talking about.
Well, I'm excited to check out artifact and use it.
It's great.
I downloaded it. Appreciate that, Kevin, Thank you so much for doing this. It was really fun to talk to you. Good luck with your latest venture, Tevin.
I'll call you. I'll be in San Francisco soon. We'll walk around the Hellsgate, which is not a hellscape.
Okay, no, actually quite nice.
I feel like you two speak a whole different language than me. But I think I was able to keep them. You kept too, You kept up. Yeah, he's a nice guy, isn't he? What do you think quality guy? Do you think artifact is going to be successful? Kiara?
I think it's hard, Like it's just hard because people are attracted by terrible things, right, that's the problem. We've been trained in this. The internet went a certain way. It's not a good way. But I do believe when I use that or threads now, I'm very happy and I like it. And so maybe that maybe you can change your habits, your bad habits.
I guess what do you think is going to happen to the news business. I don't want to start this whole conversation, but it is a long one. But but how do you think it's going to shake out? Carara? I mean, it's just in a really difficult state.
I think it'll be just fine. You do, I think there are new economic models that everybody has to get adjusted to, whether especially in Hollywood for example, around streaming and cable news. But you know, I just did an interview with Perry Diller, and I think he's right. These are worldwide distribution networks of information. Still, you know, television is everywhere, and so the question is how do you
get people to engage in the content itself? And maybe we have to stop thinking less about how than the content itself. And I'll give you one example, which I've told this story before, but I was just in a frontline documentary about Twitter, and I had participated in their previous one when I think they do great work. And so I was doing it and my phone rang and my son called and he said, what are you doing, mom?
I said, I'm doing a frontline interview and he goes, I love Frontline and I said really, And then he started talking about all the frontlines he watches. I don't watch it as much as he does, and I put on the speaker because these people are like, look, it's a twenty one year old loves frontline. Look at this. And I said to him, I didn't know you watched PBS. And he said, I don't watch PBS. Why would I
watch PBS. I see it on YouTube. Well that's a win as far as I'm concerned, if we become adaptable to where people are. People are giving up cable for YouTube TV, and so that's where I'm work like, people are not listening, they're not watching. It's just it's just changed. And then the economics have changed, and that's the problem. That's what's happened.
And I think if you build quality, they will come, you know, I do think, yes, I do. I mean, and they might be in smaller numbers because I always say mass media is and oxymoron.
Now I think we started with you going to Yahoo. You're a testimony to this, right, you have much more control over your content.
Well, we have a whole different financial model where we work with companies and tell stories often in conjunction with them, because as trust in media and other institutions has declined, trusting companies has increased and employees are demanding it. So we actually our revenue model is to work with companies for you know, for year long or multiple year sponsorships and partnerships. Really in good storytelling.
Yeah, but I'm saying you're making as much money. It may not be the big organizations that are right. Maybe that's what it is. There'll be a whole bunch of media entrepreneurs like yourself, Like myself, I'm doing great. I just am not attached to a big, giant ocean liners all. I just have a little, speedy, little boat and it does really well.
And you love that and you love not being beholden to these big corporations. Yeah, because nobody tells Kara Swish or what to do.
Nobody tells Katie Kirk what to do.
Is it very awesome though, Kia.
Yes, we're always like this or not. This is the way we are, and I think it does appeal to our entrepreneurial natures. And I think any journalist is not entrepreneurial. It's going to have a harder time going forward. That's my definite feeling. You have to sort of start to think it's okay, like Kevin was talking about, if it's a small business, it doesn't have to be Instagram, right, It's okay. You can do very well with a very
small business. You can do very well, and you get to do what you want.
I get a smaller audience than I did when I was at the Today Show. But I also feel like I'm still serving a need. You know.
That's right.
The stuff that I'm doing is reaching people who want it, the people who find it useful. That's right, And that makes me feel like I have purpose.
That's correct. That's correct. It's just different, that's all. I don't think it's I think people are still desperate for information, good information, and new good news, and not just good news, but news done well. And I think this recent situation Israel sort of underscores it. People are very confused by bad information and they need good information to make good decisions about what's happening and what to do about it. And that's critical. It remains critical, Kara.
But I'll let you go because if you keep talking, you're never going to get your voice back.
No, Katie, I never take a break. I never take a break like you. I let you know. You're my year o. Katie. You never take a break.
Do you I like working?
I know you do. You're good at it.
Kara, thank you for being my plus one. This was so fun.
No problem.
Let's do it again anytime. Thanks for listening. Everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world reach out. You can leave a short message at six oh nine five point two five to five five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric,
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