Decoder with Nilay Patel

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't see itself as a media company and what she thinks of rivals like Facebook that are pushing more and more into video: "They should get back to baby pictures."

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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 or have empathy with a person of another race, gender or age. He discusses why the technology has not yet taken off among consumers and why tech and media companies are wrong to think we should be spending hours at a time in a VR headset. Plus: Why telling a story in virtual reality is so much harder than telling one on a 2-D screen.

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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. People in Silicon Valley, Washington and beyond can learn a lot from history, she says — for example, how Lincoln used his writing and speeches to unite people around a broader purpose, and why not acting was often the right decision when tempers were flaring. Plus: How “real leaders” can unlock the potential of the people around them.

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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 president and the #MeToo movement arose, which “changed dramatically” how many women would speak on the record. Plus: Chang discusses the impact of Ellen Pao and Susan Fowler, and her much-discussed Vanity Fair story about sex parties and “cuddle puddles” in Silicon Valley.

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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. Although they acknowledge that figuring out how Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election is important, they argue that there are much deeper questions that need to be answered, and possibly problems that need to be regulated. They also discuss what responsibility they and others who worked for the Obama White House have for the rise of tech companies to their current level of power over the past decade.

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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 trends of political polarization that began during Watergate and why social media has "peaked" in politics. Plus: Why the "best and the brightest" don't come to Washington anymore, and should anyone in Silicon Valley run for office?

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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 explains how she became a humor columnist, how she comes up with ideas and where she finds the funny in the Trump family and the Trump White House. Plus: Petri’s pitch for a romantic comedy about a Supreme Court justice.

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"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 fixing: Economic inequality; the "imminent crisis" of jobs; the rise of surveillance capitalism, in which consumers pay for free products by trading away their personal data; and a cultural crisis of incivility, divisiveness and "fake news." Plus: Why Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is best positioned to set an example for the rest of the industry and why Keen believes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is "re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."

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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 personalized greeting cards and apps for messaging platforms, which Spiridellis says is a low-risk way to make comedy scale. He says it’s harder than ever to justify the production costs of “mass funny” digital videos, because creators are now competing against the entire history of comedy, available for free on YouTube.

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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. He explains why today’s #MeToo movement owes a debt to Anita Hill, who unsuccessfully tried to stop Clarence Thomas’s nomination the Supreme Court in 1991, and how everyone from Bill Clinton to Lance Armstrong ushered in an “age of lies” that paved the way for Donald Trump.

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