When you make your holiday travel plans this year, don’t forget about podcasts. They’re perfect for long car trips and plane rides, and the end of the year is a great time to catch up on the biggest and most interesting interviews you might have missed the first time around.

With that in mind, we humbly suggest checking out Recode’s three weekly podcasts: Recode Decode, Recode Media and Pivot. You’d have to have really bad traffic to get through every show we released this year, so here are just a few of our favorite episodes, which you can listen to in the embedded players below or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like these interviews, browse through the past episodes in your app of choice, or just subscribe for more! It’s all free.


Recode Decode

Publishing two or three times per week, Recode Decode with Kara Swisher features candid interviews with tech execs, politicians, celebrities and more about their big ideas and how they’re changing our world.

John Carreyrou, “Bad Blood” author

“I think the Theranos story is a cautionary tale about how not to go about it, and how not to model yourself too much after the computer industry. I’d like to think this was an outlier, that this was a lot of bad things that were extreme that aren’t going to be common going forward in Silicon Valley … At the same time they were committing fraud, they also had convinced themselves that their malfunctioning prototype was the greatest thing that humanity had ever worked on.”

Originally published May 21, 2018

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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO

“I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think it’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent … I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, ‘We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.’”

Originally published July 18, 2018

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Anand Giridharadas, “Winners Take All” author

“These people love to ask what they can do, they never ask what they have done. How am I involved in this problem? How have my work practices been involved in this? How am I the product of a system of taxation and labor and all these other things that allowed me to make this fortune?”

Originally published October 3, 2018

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Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO

“There are good journalists and there are bad ones, and unfortunately the feedback loop for good versus bad is inverted, so the more salacious that an article is, the more salacious the headline is, the more clicks it’s gonna get. Then somebody is not a journalist, they are an ad salesman. … Count how many negative articles there are and how many I respond to. One percent, maybe. But the common rebuttal of journalists is, ‘Oh. My article’s fine. He’s just thin-skinned.’ No, your article is false and you don’t want to admit it.”

Originally published November 2, 2018

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Recode Media

What happens when media, entertainment and technology collide? On Recode Media, Peter Kafka talks to business titans, journalists, comedians and fellow podcasters to get their take.

Jay Rosen, NYU professor; Oliver Darcy, CNN reporter; and Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed reporter

Rosen: “The whole premise of an interview of a sitting president is that you can find out about their thinking. You can illuminate their policy choices. You can dig a little deeper into what they plan to do. And that assumes that the president has policy ideas and has a strategy … With Trump, none of that applies, because in an interview situation, he’s just saying what, at the moment, makes him feel like the best, the biggest, the greatest, the brightest, the richest, the most potent.”

Originally published January 18, 2018

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Emily Steel, New York Times reporter

“We had created this foundation of evidence and really hardcore reporting that allowed women to stand on top of that and tell their stories, and not only tell their stories, but people believed them. In previous stories, a lot of the people being accused were very powerful, prominent men. But with the Harvey Weinstein story, he was a powerful, prominent man, but a lot of his accusers were famous, famous, famous, famous women.”

Originally published April 26, 2018

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Eugene Wei, startup “thinkfluencer”

On Twitter: “Your most vocal and heaviest users may be the ones that prevent you from making the types of changes you need to to reach a broader audience, whether that’s on the same product itself or on derivative products that better serve another audience.”

Originally published July 5, 2018

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Jason Hirschhorn, Redef

On Netflix: “This is the greatest land grab in the history of media ever. It happened because those guys are brilliant and they ultimately figured out and made great shows, and they did like any other media business, which is they started out curating other people’s stuff. But really, they also succeeded because of the laziness and this silly laughter out of the people that were licensing stuff from them.”

Originally published August 23, 2018

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Pivot/Too Embarrassed to Ask

The first show below is the penultimate episode of our since-retired podcast Too Embarrassed to Ask, but it’s an excellent interview, so don’t miss it. And below that, we’ve shared an episode of our newest podcast Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway; every week, Kara and Scott offer sharp, unfiltered insights into the way technology is shaping business and culture across media, advertising, politics and more.

Jaron Lanier, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” author

“If you are actually in a position to quit [social media] and you don’t, you’re making yourself part of the problem. You’re not doing anything to free those who are more trapped. You’re only enslaving them more by entrenching the system. As an affluent or valuable person to the system, you’re the one that the whole system is being funded by.”

Originally published July 27, 2018

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Kara and Scott talk about Facebook’s dirty tricks

Galloway: “Winston Churchill said at the outset of World War II, ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few,’ and it got me thinking. Can you think of any individuals who have made so much money doing so much damage? I mean, they make tobacco executives look like Mister Rogers.”

Originally published November 16, 2018

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