Decoder with Nilay Patel

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...

Recode's Kara Swisher talks with former attorney general Eric Holder, who led an investigation into Uber's management earlier this year, and the company's new Chief Legal Officer, Tony West. They discuss how Uber is evolving in the wake of the Holder Report and what it can do to empower lawyers, as well as employees and riders. Holder explains why non-disclosure agreements are common, arguing that...

Christine Brennan, the sports columnist for USA Today, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about the February 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, which will be Brenann’s 18th consecutive Olympics. She previews what events she's most interested in seeing — and what will be happening on the sidelines. She talks about the fallout from Russia's sophisticated doping system, why that's d...

Spark Capital General Partner Megan Quinn talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and The Verge's Casey Newton about the evolving balance between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Quinn, an investor in the cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase, explains why she believes digital currencies like bitcoin are here to stay and what needs to happen before we start treating them like real money. She rec...

Author and former New York Times columnist Noam Cohen talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his new book, "The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball." In the book, Cohen argues that a libertarian philosophy that is hostile to outsiders and resistant to regulation is negatively affecting our society and communities. He diagnoses the problems wi...

Andrew Mason, the founder and former CEO of Groupon, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Casey Newton about his latest startup, Descript. The company bills itself as a “word processor for audio,” making podcasts and other spoken word recordings easy to edit for non-technical content creators. Mason also talks about the “surreal” rise and fall of his career at Groupon, why he regrets p...

Recode's Kara Swisher talks with Crooked Media's Jon Lovett, Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer, appearing as a guest on a live taping of their podcast, Pod Save America, in Oakland, California. The group talks about the regulatory challenges facing tech companies today, the future of jobs and how Facebook has defended itself in the wake of mounting evidence that Russian agents used its pl...

Y Combinator Partner Daniel Gross talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and The Verge's Casey Newton about why he returned to the startup incubator that gave him his start in Silicon Valley. Gross co-founded the personal search engine Cue, which Apple bought in 2013 for a reported $35 million and integrated into iOS. Hailing from Jerusalem, Israel originally, he says YC is vitally important for bringin...

Leslie Berlin, the historian who oversees Stanford University's Silicon Valley Archives, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about her new book, "Troublemakers: How a Generation of Silicon Valley Upstarts Invented the Future." The book traces the rise of seven men and women who were pioneers of the tech industry in the 1970s and early 1980s, including ASK Group founder Sandy Kurtzig, Pong designer Al...

Margrethe Vestager, Europe's commissioner for competition, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher in front of a live audience at Web Summit 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal. Vestager explains how the E.U. is trying to make tech companies more transparent and accountable for their dealings and why a "free" market needs government intervention to function. She says the algorithms that control what content gets su...

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a general partner at Greylock Partners, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher in front of a live audience at the Anti-Defamation League conference "Never Is Now" in San Francisco. Hoffman says the people who work at social media giants like Facebook and Twitter want to do the right thing when it comes to abuse or political attacks on their platforms, but the...

Former cable news anchor Greta Van Susteren talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and SKDK's Hilary Rosen about her new book, "Everything You Need to Know about Social Media (Without Having to Call a Kid)." Van Susteren spent long stints hosting shows at CNN and Fox News and says she still doesn't know why her last TV employer, MSNBC, fired her after six months. In addition to the new book, she’s now a...

Tina Brown — the former editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the Daily Beast and more — talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about her new book, "The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 - 1992." In the book, she looks back on the tell-all diary she kept at the time, dishing on the 1980s New York social scene, managing a print magazine in the medium's heyday and dealing with media bigwigs like Conde Nast's S.I...

Stacey Abrams, a candidate running for governor of Georgia and former minority leader of its general assembly, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and SKDK's Hilary Rosen about the early stages of the campaign. Abrams explains why everyone needs to be talking a lot more about the automation of jobs, why she's wary of blank-check tax incentives written for tech companies and why Democrats learned the...

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about how the century-old nonprofit is evolving to fight antisemitism and other forms of extremism in the digital age. Greenblatt explains how online platforms have helped white supremacists inject their beliefs into the mainstream conversation and why companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google have so fa...

MSNBC anchor Katy Tur talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and SKDK's Hilary Rosen about her new book, "Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History." While she was at NBC News, Tur was the first reporter assigned to cover the Trump campaign full-time, and one year since his unlikely electoral victory, she says many in the media who considered him a joke before haven't...