Decoder with Nilay Patel

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 platform to manipulate voters during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Plus: When are left-leaning techies going to get politically organized?

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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 bringing new outsider voices into the highly-networked tech industry and explains why it's important to remind those founders that success is a gradual, humbling process. Gross also talks about the promise of continued investment in artificial intelligence, why it's not a bad thing that "AI" has become a buzzword and what worries him about the algorithms on platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

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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 Alcorn and Apple's "adult supervision," Mike Markkula. Berlin says learning about their importance to the history of the tech industry is "like watching the Big Bang." She also talks about the challenges of preserving tech's history when some crucial documents may be stored in obsolete file formats; why the tech boom happened in Silicon Valley, and not some other part of the country; and why the risk of America's immigration laws becoming more restrictive is a great danger to the industry.

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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 surfaced on social media may "have to go to law school" before we can trust them again, and that Facebook or Snapchat's priorities cannot be allowed to supersede democracy's.

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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 they often move too slowly. He proposes that these companies should regularly report how they're trying to encourage "compassion, interaction [and] mutual understanding." Plus: How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman convinced him anonymity could be good and why VR might help create empathy in a corporate context.

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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 an internet entrepreneur: Her first product is Sorry, an app for apologies. Van Susteren talks about all of that change, as well as what Silicon Valley companies should do about Russia's election meddling; why Donald Trump retweeted her recently and why that's not as big a deal as people think; and why, despite all the trolling and other nastiness, "social media is here to stay."

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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. Newhouse, Jr. Brown says she saw Vanity Fair as a big circus, while the New Yorker was a "sleeping beauty" that had to be awoken, although she may be proudest of her lesser-known (and short-lived) work on Talk magazine. She also talks about working with Talk's financier, Harvey Weinstein; how she founded the digital-first Daily Beast and why she left; and why Facebook and Google should fund the future of local journalism.

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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 wrong lessons about the internet from Barack Obama's campaign in 2008. She also discusses how she is using technology and how she contends with some voters' reductive tendency to only think of her as "the black candidate."

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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 far failed to stop them. He says the ADL is now working directly with engineers at those organizations to confront the problem, and praises the potential of emerging tech like artificial intelligence and virtual reality for making social media — and society — saner. Greenblatt also discusses the right way for journalists to report on extremists like Richard Spencer and how Silicon Valley could make a big difference by having a “bias for good.”

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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 learned the right lessons from 2016. Tur explains how her parents' pioneering TV journalism gave her the resolve to weather threats during the campaign, and says journalists covering President Trump need to stop being indignant about little things, and focus instead on the big stories that matter.

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