Kara Swisher, Ads, and Wellness
A journalist with big podcasts swerves out of her lane, crashes into a grift or two
Kara Swisher is a strong tech journalist and media personality known for her sunglasses, coverage of Silicon Valley’s denizens, and impatience with bullshit.
As Big Tech billionaires like Ellison, Zuckerberg, and Bezos have aged, they’ve used their massive fortunes to try to find ways to fend off aging or death. It’s not working, but it has spawned a movement due to their well-funded irrationality.
Tech’s new focus on health and longevity has drawn Swisher out of her lane and into the wellness industry, where her coverage is on less sure footing and her contacts are less robust. (Swisher also currently has a series on the wellness industry running on CNN.)
Swisher’s industry-leading podcasts naturally run ads, with many of them voiced by the hosts — either her or, when it involves her Pivot podcast, her co-host Scott Galloway.
Podcasts get a premium for these host-read ads.
- The new RFK, Jr., podcast might not, for obvious reasons.
Yesterday, for her On podcast, Swisher discussed various aspects of the wellness industry with Katie Couric, Amy Larocca (a fashion journalist who saw that industry pivot to wellness so she wrote a book called How To Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure At A Time), and Swisher’s brother, Jeff Swisher (an anesthesiologist).
It’s not the best panel one might imagine for the topic, especially after they spend a little time decrying a lack of respect for expertise, but there you have it. All I can say is that having become quite familiar with the space over the past two years, there are better options.
During the discussion, which veered from anecdotes to speculation and back again, further muddying the waters in ways that benefit health misinformation itself, an ad ran for IQ Bar, a food company predicated on the notion that there are “brain nutrients” and “body nutrients” while pushing the idea of intelligence and IQ in its branding and copy.
Swisher read the ad, complete with a custom “K-A-R-A” discount code:
IQ is a problematic topic for a variety of reasons in both Silicon Valley and the MAHA movement. It is tied to eugenics, it is not a valid measure of anything except perhaps as a proxy for an SAT or ACT exam (and they a proxy for it), and is not a vital sign physicians use.