Decoder with Nilay Patel

CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about her new series, "Sex and Love Around the World." Speaking in front of a live audience at South By Southwest 2018, Amanpour says the show convinced her that women won't be "totally satisfied," in all aspects of their lives, until men have shed obsolete attitudes about gender roles, power and sexuality....

Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook and former owner of The New Republic, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his new book, “Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn.” In it, Hughes argues that working people should receive a guaranteed income, paid for by the top one percent of earners in the U.S. He cites an “immense amount of evidence” that cash improves health, education and mo...

Chuck Schumer, the senior U.S. Senator from New York, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen about a range of tech-related issues, including immigration, net neutrality and Russian election meddling. He hopes to enlist tech companies like Netflix in the fight to bring net neutrality back after it was overturned by the FCC last year. Schumer also talks about his “sy...

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher at the 2018 Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco, Calif. Sandberg talks about how Facebook is responding to reports of Russian election-meddling on its platform, why people are lashing out at tech companies this year, and how much responsibility Facebook has to help those people. She also discusses the good and the bad of the #MeTo...

GLG President and CEO Alexander Saint-Amand talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about running a learning platform for investors and business professionals. Saint-Amand describes the company as "Uber meets Harvard" because it facilitates on-demand and one-on-one conversations between customers and experts from a wide range of subjects, including faculty of universities like Stanford, Harvard and Duke....

Journalist Katie Couric and Recode’s Kara Swisher talk about their careers in journalism, as well as social media, job automation, tech addiction and the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. Couric, who previously hosted the “Today Show” and “CBS Evening News,” opens up about why her tenure at Yahoo was short-lived, and her concerns about the ability of tech companies to advance high-quality journalism...

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Ein talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his recent purchase of the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C. Ein says he’s been inspired by the revitalization of The Washington Post under Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, but a local paper like his has to think differently in some aspects. He also talks about his investment firm, VentureHouse...

Aspect Ventures co-founder Jennifer Fonstad talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about how venture capital works in 2018, when Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have access to more money from more sources than ever before. But that that money is not spread out evenly, Fonstad says: There’s a lot of very early “seed” dough, and a lot available to help succeeding companies grow bigger, but not enough to help...

Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and Teddy Schleifer about her career in tech companies and venture capital. Her resume includes stints at Pinterest, Bessemer Venture Partners and Greylock Partners, but last year she became the first woman partner hired at Benchmark, where one of her focuses is cryptocurrencies. She explains why the field is interesting even though it...

Lydia Polgreen, the editor in chief of HuffPost — the website formerly known as The Huffington Post — talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka at the 2018 Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, Calif. Polgreen explains what she has been changing since taking over the top editor role in December 2016, how she's trying to reach a broader audience that includes Donald Trump supporters and...

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki talks with Recode's Kara Swisher at the 2018 Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, Calif. She explains why YouTube opted not to ban one of its stars, Logan Paul, despite a recent string of controviersies including a video he filmed of a dead body in Japan. She also talks about how the site has dealt with revelations of Russian political meddling, why it still doesn'...

Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his new book, "Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do." Bailenson came to Stanford to study how people can communicate with each other in a virtual world, but now his focus is on how VR can motivate us to eat less, help the homeless...

Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about her new book, “Forged In Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.” In it, Koehn chronicles the lives of five leaders who had to overcome a crisis: President Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, explorer Ernest Shackleton, clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer and author Rachel Carson. Pe...

Bloomberg Technology executive producer Emily Chang talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about her new book, “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley.” Chang says the idea for the book originated when venture capitalist Michael Moritz suggested that bringing more women to Sequoia Capital might mean “lowering our standards.” However, in between then and now, Donald Trump was elected pres...

New America fellow Dipayan Ghosh and senior advisor Ben Scott talk with Recode’s Kara Swisher about their new policy paper, “Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet.” Both alumni of the Obama administration, Ghosh and Scott say we need to fundamentally reevaluate how digital platforms collect data on their users, and how advertisers can use that information. Al...

NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about how he's evolving what it means to be the host of the longest-running series in TV history, "Meet the Press." Todd discusses how a childhood interest in politics led him to Washington, D.C., and how a lucky break at the pioneering digital service Hotline led him to NBC. He also talks about how technology accelerated tren...

Alexandra Petri, who writes the Compost blog for The Washington Post, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Chorus CEO Dick Costolo about making fun of politics. Petri says some politicans have a sense of humor about her columns, but others don’t like it or don’t get the joke — the Trump White House once distributed one of her satirical pieces to journalists, mistaking it for earnest praise. She ex...

"How to Fix the Future" author Andrew Keen talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his new book, which examines reasonable solutions to the social and political disruptions created by the digital revolution. Keen says tech is neither the solution nor the scapegoat for all problems, urging Silicon Valley to look to history for answers. In the book, he examines four categories of things that need fix...

JibJab CEO Gregg Spiridellis talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Chorus CEO Dick Costolo about how the company has adapted to the ever-changing internet over the past two decades. JibJab was on the verge of shutting down when it released “This Land,” an animated viral video sensation that parodied the 2004 U.S. Presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry. JibJab later moved into perso...

David Friend, Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his new book, “The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido.” Much of today’s social and political unrest can be traced back to the sea change in who Americans voted for and how they consumed entertainment in the 1990s — and it’s no accident that the world wide web was born in that decade...

Comedian Sarah Cooper talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Chorus CEO Dick Costolo about why she left a career in the tech industry to become a stand-up comic. Cooper has made tech a central part of her comedy and has written a book based in part on her time at Yahoo and Google called “100 Tricks To Appear Smart in Meetings.” The group debates whether people who work in tech are funny (on purpose)...

Patty McCord, the former chief talent officer at Netflix and author of that company's famous "culture deck," talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about her new book, "Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility." McCord recalls how CEO Reed Hastings convinced her to work at Netflix and how they developed the principles of the company's culture over many years — which Hastings unilateral...

Chorus CEO Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about why he loves comedy and why his peers in the tech community are so infrequently "in on the joke." Before he was a tech entrepreneur, Costolo wanted to be a comedian, taking improv classes at Second City in Chicago in the hopes of one day making it to "Saturday Night Live." Today, he explains, more people tha...

The host of the Longform Podcast, Evan Ratliff, interviews Recode’s Kara Swisher in front of a live audience in San Francisco about how she got started in journalism and how she does her job today. Downloading a book for the first time convinced Swisher of the power of the internet, which led her to cover AOL and countless other early digital pioneers. Plus: How she convinces sources to keep talki...

Recode's Kara Swisher and The Verge's Casey Newton talk with Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, the editor in chief and managing editor of Into — a queer lifestyle magazine published by the dating app Grindr. They talk about why LGBT people have historically been early adopters of tech, why Grindr was more readily adopted by men than women and how the company is trying to change that as it branches o...