Decoder with Nilay Patel

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and CEO Jeff Glueck talk with Recode's Kara Swisher about how the location intelligence company is generating sellable data for partners like Apple, Uber and Twitter based on its users' check-ins. Glueck, who took over as CEO for Crowley in January 2015, compares the company's new business model to "Robin Hood" because it simultaneously helps small businesses a...

Revolution Growth founder and partner Ted Leonsis talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about being a longtime executive at AOL and how the company changed dramatically when it merged with Time Warner in 2000. Leonsis says AOL correctly anticipated the social nature of the internet, but left several windows open for Google to beat it at its own game. After the merger, it had to turn its energies toward...

"Mr. Robot" creator Sam Esmail talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his hit TV show, whose star Rami Malek recently won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a drama. Esmail says he grew up loving both movies and technology, and was disappointed by Hollywood's seeming inability to portray hackers in TV shows and movies authentically. The secret to the success of 'Mr. Robot,' he says, is that he'...

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about cooperation between government and the tech industry and the new challenges of the digital economy. Secretary Pritzker says artificial intelligence will upend many jobs, but the solution is to focus on retraining workers for new industries like cybersecurity, where American companies have hundreds of thousands of open...

Actor, producer and investor Ashton Kutcher talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his life as both a TV star and a tech obsessive. Kutcher, who starred in shows like "Two and a Half Men" and "That '70s Show," has invested over the past five years in companies like Uber, Airbnb and Square. But he passed on Snapchat — twice — because he hated the app's design and feared what would happen when it go...

Jon Favreau, the actor and director known for films such as "Swingers," "Iron Man" and "The Jungle Book," talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his new efforts in virtual reality, starting with the interactive short film "Gnomes & Goblins." Favreau says that VR is a powerful artists' tool, but advances in digital filmmaking won't replace actors, or the need for fundamental storytelling skills. He...

James Corden, host of "The Late Late Show" on CBS and viral video star, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about redesigning a talk show for the YouTube generation, built around segments like "Carpool Karaoke." Corden has a complicated relationship with technology, and worries that the internet's appearance of freedom of choice is making us all more narrow-minded. He also chats about encounters with...

Cowboy Ventures founder and managing partner Aileen Lee, previously a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about being one of the few female venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. After leaving Kleiner Perkins in 2012, Lee set out to amass data about the small percentage of startups that become breakout success stories, and she coined the term "unicorn" to...

Tusk Holdings CEO Bradley Tusk talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his unique political consulting firm Tusk Ventures, which trades equity in companies like Uber, FanDuel and DraftKings for regulatory guidance. Tusk previously worked for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and explains in detail how Uber undermined the city's current mayor, Bill de Blasio, with a series of blistering...

In this special bonus episode, Margrethe Vestager, Europe's Commissioner for Competition, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about the high-profile cases she has brought against Apple and Google for alleged unfair tax breaks and antitrust violations, respectively. Vestager says "there is a limit to everything," including the assistance successful companies should get from the government, and their a...

Niantic CEO John Hanke talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and Ina Fried about the company's hit mobile game Pokémon Go and what happens now that the initial hype around it has "stabilized." Future updates to the game will include new types of Pokémon, trading with other players and possibly battling with your friends. Hanke also reflects on his first company Keyhole, which was bought by Google and b...

Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about life as a venture capitalist and why he's still worried about a bubble, a topic he has written about extensively. Great entrepreneurs could raise money at any time, Gurley argues, but when funding is easy to come by, it invites in entitled and less talented startup founders, as well as unwanted government regulation. He a...

TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot chats with Recode's Kara Swisher about how her company and others are changing the definition of work. During her previous stint as TaskRabbit's COO, Brown-Philpot oversaw a major shift in how the company defines itself and made its service far more reliable, at the cost of a yearlong restructuring and employee layoffs. She discusses what's next for the sharing e...

Quip CEO and Twitter board member Bret Taylor talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner about the reality of trying and sometimes failing as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. A former Facebook CTO, he reflects on how Mark Zuckerberg's company culture balanced good execution with a willingness to fail. Taylor also discusses Quip's $750 million acquisition by Salesforce, how Twitter is respo...

Walker & Company Brands founder and CEO Tristan Walker talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about how technology can disrupt the health and beauty industry. Walker & Company's shaving brand, Bevel, is aimed at people of color who are underserved by the big cosmetics companies, and Walker says he plans to focus even more on personalized products those competitors can't deliver. An alumnus of Twitter, F...

Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about co-founding an enterprise software company in Sydney, Australia, in 2002. Cannon-Brookes reflects on Atlassian's successful American IPO and the differences between his team and tech companies that start in other parts of the world. Rather than trying to beat Silicon Valley at its own game, he says, the right approach for...

Sallie Krawcheck, formerly the CFO of Citi Group and the CEO of Merrill Lynch, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about launching Ellevest, a new online investment platform for women. Krawcheck says the male-dominated world of finance overlooks the needs of female customers, and that women invest differently. She also discusses the 20-20 hindsight of the 2008 financial crisis, the danger of another...

Eric Jackson, a longtime activist investor in Yahoo and the managing director of SpringOwl Asset Management, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about the momentous deal that will sell Yahoo's core business to Verizon for nearly $5 billion. Jackson reflects on how he came to be a champion, and then a critic, of Yahoo's final CEO, Marissa Mayer, and whether saving the pioneering internet company was d...

Antonio García-Martinez, author of the new tell-all book, "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley," talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about starting a company, getting acquired by Twitter, and defecting to Facebook one year before its IPO. García-Martinez knew from the start that he wanted to write a book, and the end result doesn't mince words with its subjects. He say...

Peloton CTO Yony Feng talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about how the indoor cycling company is trying to shake up in-home exercise programs with its custom fitness bike, which sells for $2,000. Peloton broadcasts 12 live spinning classes to those bikes every day and challenges its bike owners to compete for a spot on its global leaderboards. Feng discusses how the bike compares to other techie fit...

"Hamilton" lead producer Jeffrey Seller talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about how the hit Broadway musical goes forward now that three of its stars — Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr. and Phillipa Soo — have taken their final bows. Seller says he avoids or doesn't understand much of Silicon Valley's tech obsessions, and praises the power of live theater as an antidote to gadget addiction. He ex...

NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel talks with Recode's Ina Fried about how the network is building on the digital reach of the Summer Games via livestreaming, virtual reality, Snapchat and more. Zenkel says NBC and Samsung expect to produce two to three hours of virtual reality content per day throughout the Games. He also addresses concerns about the Zika virus and politics in Rio de Janeiro, but...

Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins — the co-founders of Palm, Handspring and Numenta — talk with Recode's Kara Swisher about their efforts to decode the human brain. They say everything that makes us human, from language to art to engineering, derives from the same learning algorithm, and Numenta hopes to ultimately teach that algorithm to a machine. Dubinsky and Hawkins explain why we shouldn't be a...

Coursera president and co-founder Daphne Koller talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about how she helped build the popular online learning platform after a successful early experiment at Stanford University. Koller says the future of higher education is a mixture of online and offline learning, with people continually going back to school in some form throughout their lives, rather than stopping in t...

Chelsea Handler, the host of Netflix's new talk show "Chelsea," chats with Recode's Kara Swisher about going digital after seven years on the cable channel E! She runs "Chelsea" like a normal TV show, just not a late-night one, because her viewers might watch at any time, in any order. Handler says re-entering the public eye meant adjusting to changes in social media (hello, Snapchat!) and discuss...