Sunday Pick: Unlocking Your Power at Work: Kara Swisher on how to get what you want | from Fixable

Hosts Anne Morris and Frances Frei introduce a special Fixable series on “Unlocking Your Power at Work.” They say many listeners either do not recognize the power they already possess or spend their time reacting to other people’s power and workplace dynamics. The series will examine how to identify, build, and become comfortable with power, then use it “for good.” Frances adds that genuine power often appears as swagger: a person’s confidence in how they carry themselves and relate to others. Their first guest is journalist Kara Swisher, whose career has centered on holding powerful people accountable. They identify her reporting since the early 1990s, work at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, bestselling memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, and podcasts On with Kara Swisher and Pivot. Frances recalls meeting Swisher at breakfast on her first day at Uber, where Frances had joined as senior vice president of leadership and strategy during the company’s public crisis. There was no small talk: Swisher immediately began asking direct questions. Swisher jokes about whether she is a “fixer,” distinguishing her willingness to fix things mentally and institutionally from being a “tool-belt lesbian.”

Asked about her emotional life, Swisher says she generally does not experience anxiety and does not spend much time regretting the past. She describes herself as a “can-do lady” who tends to respond to problems by asking what the solution is and how to fix them. She says this can frustrate her wife, Amanda, who is more of a processor, while Swisher wants to move directly from identifying a problem to acting on it. Swisher connects this outlook to her father’s death when she was two. Referring to the book The Loss That Is Forever, she says children who experience that kind of loss can become highly functional. She and her brothers developed a “next, now, fix” mentality; one brother became an emergency-room doctor. The experience also gave her an early sense of mortality and therefore of time. She says she would take anxiety and her father back in an instant, but having learned so young that the worst thing could happen and life would continue, she cannot become very upset by ordinary setbacks. The hosts treat this as both a functional adaptation and a source of Swisher’s unusual urgency.

Anne asks what Swisher learned from watching technology entrepreneurs evolve from awkward young people into some of the most powerful people in the world. Swisher says some people begin badly and remain bad, while others grow. She names Mark Cuban as someone who was initially somewhat of a jerk but became “couldn’t be more interesting and delightful,” and cites Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Netflix leaders Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, and others as people who handled power in grounded ways. They do not lord over people, and Swisher says their behavior remains connected to who they were before they became wealthy. Swisher argues that power itself is not inherently bad; the danger comes when it coalesces in one place. Then, she says, history repeatedly produces a “mad king.” Wealthy leaders are surrounded by people who agree with them, whose agendas they may not understand, and who can isolate truthful critics. Her advice for future technology leaders is to cultivate interests outside technology. She encouraged her mechanically inclined son to study history, ethics, philosophy, and public policy, as well as work with his hands. She also questions why technology programs do not require serious ethics courses. In her view, rushing young entrepreneurs toward money and idolatry creates “half-formed people” and can produce disastrous results.

Swisher resists the idea that she has power because she does not care. She says she gives a “big fuck,” meaning she has strong values and cares deeply about what technology could do for society. Her responsibility, as she sees it, is to push for technology to be deployed fairly, warn about its negative effects, and point out the good that could happen if power were not concentrated among a small group. Her knowledge of history reinforces the lesson that when power gathers around a narrow, homogeneous group, society is in danger. The conversation then turns to how Swisher and Frances take up space without permission. Both say their confidence is not a performance and does not involve apologizing for their intellect or bodies. Swisher says people often tell her that seeing her speak directly gives them courage to speak themselves. She describes her self-confidence as factual rather than boastful, pointing to her track record and joking that she is “beachfront property in Malibu.” She also says she is willing to let people change: although she may judge someone quickly, she welcomes them if they actually evolve. Frances and Swisher suggest that their identities as openly lesbian women have made their comfort with themselves a visible challenge to expectations in a patriarchy.

When Anne asks how listeners can take up more space, Swisher recommends understanding leverage, goals, and the real worst-case scenario. People should ask what they want from life—money, status, independence, or something else—and what they are actually willing to pay for it. She says women in particular are often trained to overestimate the cost of speaking directly and underestimate the cost of remaining silent. Her own approach is to calculate the actual consequences and then ask for what she wants. She illustrates the point with a woman who had spent years as “number two” in Silicon Valley and wanted to become a CEO. The woman listed several opportunities that had been offered to her, but Swisher stopped her: being offered a menu of choices is not the same as deciding what you want. Swisher compares this to entering a restaurant where chicken, pork, and steak are listed while she wants duck. When told duck is not on the menu, she insists, “They have the fucking duck,” and says that if the restaurant truly does not have it, the answer is to go to another restaurant. The woman eventually became a CEO, and Swisher still texts her, “Did you eat the duck?”

Swisher says she gives frequent informal career advice, especially to women in media and technology. Her main recommendations are to take calculated risks, understand one’s own attributes, and recognize that there is no guaranteed safety. She describes herself as a bad employee because she cannot comfortably “get in line,” so she tries to build a career structure that fits rather than forcing herself into situations where she and the employer are mismatched. She treats persistent dread as a decisive signal. When she begins saying that she hates a workplace, she stops and leaves; even preferring to watch Law & Order over doing the job is, jokingly, a warning sign. She left a New York Times column despite others saying nobody leaves the Times because she no longer wanted to do it. At the same time, she distinguishes her leverage from that of people with fewer options. For workers at organizations such as 60 Minutes who cannot easily move because of money, family, health insurance, or a weak market, she advises waiting, improving their skills, and planning a careful exit rather than simply “flouncing.” Anne and Frances add that people often become an “unfreaking believable” version of themselves during the 30 or 60 days after deciding to leave, because they stop acting as if they are trapped.

Asked for one action listeners can take that week, Swisher says: tell someone the truth, and tell yourself the truth—the second is harder. Her major reporting lesson was a shift from asking, “What are they lying to me about?” to asking, “What are they lying themselves about?” She says people often repeat whatever they need to believe each day in order to get through it, even when it is not true. A reporter or colleague who can gently identify that false story may help reveal what is actually happening underneath it. For her final question, Swisher describes what currently occupies her outside work. She and her family bought an apartment in Brooklyn, and while visiting a Blick art store she saw a paint-by-number set. She bought it despite never considering herself artistic and now paints alone, without music or another distraction. She says the activity gives her an unusually happy escape from the addictive phone and from the constant need to occupy herself. The hosts call it their best answer ever. The episode closes with Anne and Frances encouraging listeners to subscribe to Fixable and share it with a friend.