Senator Amy Klobuchar has been legislating on Capitol Hill for 18 years. She recently won reelection and is now the number three Democrat in the Senate. And even though Big Tech has blocked her attempts at reform, at every turn, she is determined to keep pushing forward bills on everything from antitrust to privacy, competition, kids' safety and revenge porn. Kara and Klobuchar talk about Trump’s nominations, January 6th and the upcoming inauguration (Klocuchar was one of four members of Congres...
Jan 09, 2025•49 min
After MAGA rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, many people thought Donald Trump's days as a political force were over. A notable exception was Maggie Haberman – senior political correspondent for the New York Times, political analyst for CNN, and author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America . Four years later, as the country prepares for President-elect Trump's second inauguration this month, Kara talks to Haberman about initial actions he'...
Jan 06, 2025•56 min
We’re kicking off the year with a deep-dive into AI ethics and safety with three AI experts: Dr. Rumman Chowdhury , the CEO and co-founder of Humane Intelligence and the first person to be appointed U.S. Science Envoy for Artificial Intelligence; Mark Dredze , a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who’s done extensive research on bias in LLMs; and Gillian Hadfield , an economist and legal scholar turned-AI researcher at Johns Hopkins University. The panel answers questions ...
Jan 02, 2025•49 min
Samantha Bee is a comedian, author and former late-night host who hosts the podcast Choice Words with Samantha Bee and co-hosts The Daily Beast Podcast with Joanna Coles. Her weekly late-night comedy series, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee was nominated for over 70 awards — and she has personally been nominated for 18 Emmy awards and won for both writing and executive producing. Full Frontal was explicitly, and hilariously, political and left-leaning so it’s a bit surprising that Bee has declared...
Dec 30, 2024•37 min
Happy Holidays! We have a special episode from our friend Adam Grant and the folks at the TED Audio Collective. Sarah Silverman is a comedian, actor, and writer who doesn’t shy away from saying what she thinks. In this episode of ReThinking with Adam Grant, Sarah shares stories from her bold, distinctive career that has taken her from Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld to Broadway, late-night TV, plays and Disney animated movies. Adam and Sarah also discuss defusing anger, finding courage, and for...
Dec 26, 2024•35 min
Which subpar books actually warrant writing a bad review? Do best sellers usually live up to the hype? And how does our relationship with technology affect the publishing industry? Kara sits down with two of her favorite book critics, Dwight Garner of The New York Times and Becca Rothfeld of The Washington Post, to discuss the best and worst books of 2024. The trio debates standout books and notable disappointments, the craft of book reviewing, and the best way to experience a great book. They a...
Dec 23, 2024•58 min
Kara sits down for a live interview with Yann LeCun, an “early AI prophet” and the brains behind the largest open-source large language model in the world. The two discuss the potential dangers that come with open-source models, the massive amounts of money pouring into AI research, and the pros and cons of AI regulation. They also dive into LeCun’s surprisingly spicy social media feeds — unlike a lot of tech employees who toe the HR line, Yann isn’t afraid to say what he thinks of Elon Musk or ...
Dec 21, 2024•55 min
RFK Jr. was on the Hill, on Monday, working to persuade senators he’s capable of running the Department of Health and Human Services and its almost $2 trillion budget. Ever since the news his lawyer has petitioned the federal government to revoke the approval of a polio vaccine broke, that job has gotten a little harder — but it doesn’t mean he won’t get confirmed. And so could a number of other highly unorthodox candidates that Trump plans to nominate for key positions in the HHS. Kara talks to...
Dec 19, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Canadian chef Matty Matheson has been a force in the culinary world for over two decades, but the non-foodies of the world recognize him as Neil Fak, the goofy, handyman-come-waiter-in-training on the FX/Hulu hit series The Bear . Aside from being the show’s much-needed comic relief, Matheson is an executive producer and a culinary consultant on set. Matheson first became chef de cuisine in his early 20s and now owns over a dozen restaurants. He also runs an incredibly popular YouTube channel wi...
Dec 16, 2024•45 min
Representative Ro Khanna represents the wealthiest congressional district in the country, but he wants to show Democrats how to speak to the working class. And perhaps surprisingly, he’s pretty good at it. But although Khanna was one of Bernie Sanders’ co-chairs in 2020, the “progressive capitalist” from Silicon Valley (don’t call him a democratic socialist) also hobnobs with tech titans. Because according to Khanna, the way to reindustrialize and revitalize the economy is by mobilizing both uni...
Dec 12, 2024•1 hr 7 min
How will AI agents change the economy and the workforce — and are Americans ready? Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has some thoughts. After a stellar quarter boosted by the customer resource management company’s new AI autonomous agents, Agentforce, Benioff explains to Kara how employers and employees will be impacted by a new era of digital workers; why he thinks investing tens of billions in AI capital expenditures (like his competitor Microsoft) is a “race to the bottom”; and what he hopes will c...
Dec 09, 2024•58 min
How does an ad-based streamer compete with subscription-based models like Netflix, Hulu, Max, and all the rest? By charging nothing. At least that’s what Tubi is doing. And despite being seemingly less prestigious than premium streamers, Tubi is used by millions of Americans and outranks Peacock, Max, Paramount Plus, and Apple TV+ in total viewing time. For those who are fatigued by subscriptions fees and monoculture viewing, Tubi offers an enormous catalog of nostalgia and “newstalgia” movies, ...
Dec 07, 2024•54 min
What if the worst fears around AI come true? For Megan Garcia, that’s already happened. In February, after spending months interacting with chatbots created by Character.AI, her 14-year-old son Sewell took his own life. Garcia blames Character.AI, and she is suing them and Google, who she believes significantly contributed to Character.AI’s alleged wrongdoing. Kara interviews Garcia and Meetali Jain, one of her lawyers and the founder of the Tech Justice Law Project, and they discuss the allegat...
Dec 05, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Nathan Myhrvold likes to challenge conventional wisdom. When the founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures (and former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft) isn’t running one of the world’s leading invention businesses, he’s busy doing norm-defying research on topics like dinosaur bone density, asteroid sizing, and the proper way to knead dough. Kara and Nathan talk about everything from AI, politics, nuclear power, and global warming to “splash shots” — photographs of colliding wine glasses. Qu...
Dec 02, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Happy Thanksgiving, On listeners — today, we’re featuring a special episode of Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus , one of our favorite podcasts! On Wiser Than Me , Julia shares funny, heartfelt conversations with iconic older women who bring the unapologetic wisdom and confidence that only comes with age. On this episode of Wiser Than Me, Julia chats with 80-year-old tennis pro, activist, and LGBTQ+ icon Billie Jean King. Billie Jean delves into the nature of leadership, visualization, and ...
Nov 28, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Elon Musk’s social media platform X lost more than 280,000 global users the day after the US presidential election. Meanwhile, sites like Threads from Meta and newcomer Bluesky have seen huge surges in signups. Kara talks to a team of social media experts about the “X-odus”; who is migrating to Threads and Bluesky and why; how those federated protocols (or “fediverse”) differ from X’s algorithmic platform; and if the social media “town square” giving way to a more fragmented communities is a goo...
Nov 25, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Lenard McKelvey is a best-selling author, entrepreneur and media mogul, but you probably know him as Charlamagne Tha God: host of The Breakfast Club . It’s an insanely popular and influential radio program that reaches millions of listeners daily. Charlamagne has been behind the microphone for over a decade, and he's not one for playing by the rules of traditional media. In recent years he’s gotten vocal about the state of politics in the US and interviewed a raft of powerful politicians at the ...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr
Jon Chu grew up in Silicon Valley, in the shadow of Apple Park. His father, Chef Chu, still runs his eponymous restaurant there, and Jon worshiped Steve Jobs as a kid. As a teen, he used Apple products to learn how to make movies. Now he directs some of the biggest movies in Hollywood, but his relationship with the tech industry is much more complex. Kara and Jon discuss his “new view” trilogy: Crazy Rich Asians , In the Heights , and his latest film, Wicked . They unpack his memoir Viewfinder ,...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 1 min
What role will writers play as we head into a second Trump term? Author, journalist and Howard University professor Ta-Nehisi Coates has some thoughts. The man who has been called “one of the most important writers on the subject of America today” came to the fore during the Obama era as one of the preeminent writers on race, among other things, for his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations” and his book Between the World and Me, an open letter to his son about growing up as a Black man in Americ...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 1 min
What does a second Trump presidency mean for America? Kara hosts a panel of experts and reporters to reflect on the results of the election and to find out what we can expect going forward. They discuss the issues that mattered most to voters; what Democrats got wrong; the parts of our democracy that are broken beyond repair; the apparent shift in our country’s sense of self; and the role of social media versus traditional media in the digital age. Guests: Kristen Soltis Anderson, a pollster, fo...
Nov 11, 2024•1 hr
President-elect Donald J. Trump has won a resounding victory against Vice President Kamala Harris, and now, the man who promised political retribution and said he may use the military to go after “the enemy within” is headed back to the White House. Only this time, there will be no guardrails — only enablers. In order to understand the threat Trump poses to our democracy, Kara talks to two historians who know a lot about the birth of American democracy and the last time we came close to losing i...
Nov 07, 2024•55 min
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, isn’t on the ballot for the 2024 U.S. election, but he might as well be. Elon has become one of the Trump campaign’s top surrogates, top donors (over $119 million through the America Pac), and controls a main megaphone for pro-Trump propaganda at X. Kara and three other Musk experts discuss Elon’s outsized impact on the election, why Trump has been referring to him as the “Secretary of Cost-Cutting”, and why Musk & his businesses (X, Tesla, SpaceX, St...
Nov 04, 2024•52 min
Lying has always been a part of politics, but in recent years, political lies have come to dominate our elections and their outcomes. Even the notion that facts and truths can be objective and shared across the political divide has been put into question. As we head into a fraught election, Kara speaks with Bill Adair, professor of journalism & public policy at Duke and author of Beyond the Big Lie, and Timothy Snyder, Yale history professor and author of On Freedom , about which party lies ...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Reid Hoffman isn’t just one of the most influential entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley — he’s also one of the most important mega-donors supporting the Democratic party. A member of the so-called PayPal Mafia, Hoffman is a VC partner at Greylock Ventures and Microsoft board member who co-founded LinkedIn and InflectionAI and was a founding investor in OpenAI. He is one of the leading voices in tech fighting against former President Donald Trump, and he puts his money where his mouth i...
Oct 28, 2024•34 min
Has late-night TV passed its peak? Ticket sales for live comedy shows are booming and there’s no shortage of streaming stand-up specials, but the same is hardly true for late-night television. Is it the business model or the divisive nature of political comedy that’s driving viewership down? Either way, hosting a late-night show remains one of the most coveted jobs in comedy, and in this interview, Kara talks to one of the best. Seth Meyers, SNL veteran, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers on NB...
Oct 24, 2024•54 min
“Digital machines are not just remaking stories, they're remaking us.” So says Oscar-winning actor Robert Downey Jr. as the titular character in his Broadway debut, MCNEAL. Kara talks with Downey Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar and Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher about the play and the thorny questions it raises around truth, lies and power in the AI age. They also discuss who is responsible for creating a new “social contract” around AI. Plus: Kara and Robert get into the...
Oct 21, 2024•55 min
What do cybersecurity experts, journalists in foreign conflicts, indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Drake have in common? They all use the Signal messaging app. Signal’s protocol has been the gold standard in end-to-end encryption, used by Whatsapp, Google and more, for more than a decade. But it’s been under fire from both authoritarian governments and well-meaning democracies who see the privacy locks as a threat. Since 2022, former Google rabble-rouser and AI Now Institute co-founder...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Why, despite being the most advanced species on the planet, does it feel like humanity is teetering on the brink of self-destruction? Is it just our human nature? Israeli philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari doesn’t think so — he says the problem is our information trade. This is the focus of his latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Harari explores the evolution of our information networks, from the printing press to the dumpster fire of in...
Oct 14, 2024•59 min
After more than five decades in broadcasting, Chris Wallace has won almost every award in journalism, including three Emmy Awards, the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and the Peabody Award. The host of CNN’s Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace and The Chris Wallace Show (tune in on Saturday mornings to see Kara spar with Chris and the other panelists) is also an author. His latest book, Countdown 1960 , narrates the twists and turns of the 1960 presidential contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard N...
Oct 10, 2024•59 min
How did a Ukrainian-born hustler help former President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani dig up dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter to influence the 2020 presidential election – a scheme that ultimately led to Trump's first impeachment? That's the question behind ‘From Russia with Lev ’ , a new doc from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that follows Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American from a less-than-savory background, who paid his way into the former president’s inner circle in 2016 a...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr 2 min
