Tech journalist Kara Swisher has been reporting on the internet since electronic mail and the world wide web weren’t yet abbreviated. Randi recently had the pleasure of spending an entire Dot Complicated Radio Show hour with the Re/Code co-founder and correspondent.

Here are some of Kara’s choicest thoughts on trends, technology, and her favorite platform of all, Twitter:

On Burning Man: “Burning Man has always been a tech mecca. It’s a sexy headline to say they fly in chefs and models from New York. Our city of San Francisco is changing, too. Real estate is up and it’s pricing people out, so there’s justifiable rage, but this is what happens in cities. They go dancing in the desert and take ecstasy.”

On the new tech gadget sans the tech, NoPhone: “I have to tell you my relationship with my Blackberry was one of the best in my life. It was always giving me what I wanted. Information. And mail. It was always happy when I woke up in the morning. No judgment. It never told me anything negative.”

On mock play-date app, Kinder: “You should wait until your kids are at least 9 years old before organizing a serious play date.”

On becoming a journalist: “I liked the feedback. I liked writing. I thought I was going to go into something like the CIA or the State Department but I’m not particularly discreet so it wasn’t something I really wanted to do.”

On her first major writing gig: “The Washington Post had published a story with tons of typos. I called up and started complaining there are all these errors. At the time the publisher was Larry Kramer—now he’s with USA Today. He said, ‘Why don’t you come down here and tell me that to my face?’ I was so obnoxious that he hired me. I was a stringer.”

On her first interactions with the internet: “I went away to the former Soviet Union. There was email then. An editor wrote me asking if I wanted to cover a small startup called America Online. I was immediately drawn to it. It struck me how important this medium was going to be.”

On the possibilities: “The Washington Post had this cell phone in a suitcase. Nobody used it but me. I kept telling everyone this is going to be small, a computer in your hand. This is going to be tiny. Everyone thought I was crazy.”

More possibilities: “I was Duke University for a fellowship and I downloaded a Calvin and Hobbes book. I slowed down the whole school’s computer system! They were pissed but I said, ‘ I downloaded a whole book! Think of what this will do for the publishing industry!”

On other tech reporters at the time: “It was all dudes interested in the finer points of chips. Who cares? You can focus on the engine but what does a car do? Allows us to travel to other places. Who cares what’s inside the telephone? It’s revolutionizing communication. Others thought it was a fad. The [Wall Street] Journal kept calling it a CB radio.“

On the revolutionary All Things D Conferences: “We has Steve Jobs on eight times, and once with Bill Gates! That will go down in history. A hundred years from now people will watch that.  We hit every single person who is critical to the growth of this industry. The CEOs, the founders.”

On inviting Gwyneth Paltrow to an ATD Conference: “She gets attacked on the internet incessantly. I wanted her to talk about that. She’s a celebrity so she can take it but can a teenage girl take that?”

On rebranding All Things Digital to Re/Code: “I call it the Oldest Startup Ever. We wanted to make something separate from the [Wall Street] Journal. The business part is challenging… but if you create quality content no matter where you are, people will be able to find you because it’s a lot easier now.”

On whether their ATD followers would follow Re/Code: “People are dying for high-quality content that doesn’t speak down to them. A little bit of humor and personality, we give them that.”

On tech personalities: “Re/Code brought on a Culture Reporter because we needed people in our stories. What do they like? What do they eat?”

On freedom of speech: “All this information is readily available, it’s hard to imagine regulating against it. Twitter said they would suspend anyone’s account who posted the James Foley video. We [Re/Code] take down comments that are disgusting. You set the rules, it’s up to the different companies to decide… We have a responsibility to think about online speech. Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler have to think hard about what kind of environment they want.”

On SEO traffic: “It’s not the world I want to live in. I was meeting with a guy I was thinking of hiring and he kept telling me all about his SEO for his slideshows. How he’d mash up my stories to get more traffic. He thought this was a positive thing for me. I want to make beautiful things. SEO and tier 2 link building doesn’t matter to me, they’re just buzzwords.”

On making a cameo on HBO’s Silicon Valley: “I like Mike Judge, I like the quality of the show, and I like HBO. I had never acted so I thought, ‘I’m just gonna go for it.’”

Follow Kara @KaraSwisher

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