Ring's Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime

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 publicly announcing that he was fired as CEO and why he once brought a horse to Groupon’s office as a gift for Michael Bloomberg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

13 Dec 20171h 5min

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? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

11 Dec 201719min

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

6 Dec 20171h 7min

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

4 Dec 201759min

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

29 Nov 201718min

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

27 Nov 201742min

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." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

22 Nov 201759min

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

20 Nov 20171h 13min