It's on. Twice a week, award-winning journalist Kara Swisher gets to the heart of the story through no-holds-barred interviews with power players across busines...
Director Jon Chu on Wicked, Silicon Valley, and Defying Hollywood’s Gravity
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, and Chu explains how growing up in Silicon Valley shaped his understanding of technology — and how the industry’s switch towards data surveillance has changed his relationship with it as an artist.
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram/TikTok as @onwithkaraswisher
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
--------
1:04:46
Ta-Nehisi Coates On Trump, Palestine and Journalism as a “Contact Sport”
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 America. Kara and Ta-Nehisi discuss how the Democrats lost the “rainbow coalition” in the 2024 election, why America’s “special relationship” with Israel compelled him to rally against Palestinian oppression in his latest book The Message, and why he thinks journalists will need to embrace a new and not-so-safe normal during Trump 2.0.
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
--------
1:04:59
Trump’s Second Term: How He Did It & What to Expect
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, founding partner of Echelon Insights, author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up) and a CNN political contributor
Isaac Arnsdorf, a national political reporter for The Washington Post and author of Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy.
Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, and author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy
Abby Phillip, anchor of CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
--------
1:03:45
Trump vs Democracy: Two Historians’ Perspectives
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 it: Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Timothy Naftali.
Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her newest book is Making the Presidency, John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Naftali is a senior research scholar in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and the former director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram/TikTok as @onwithkaraswisher
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
--------
59:13
The “Elon Election”: What It Means For America and Musk
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, Starlink) stand to gain, no matter who wins.
Guests:
Tim Higgins, The Wall Street Journal columnist and author of Power Play, Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry at Wired and author of Extremely Hardcore, Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
Eva Dou, The Washington Post Tech Policy Reporter
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find Kara on Threads/Instagram @karaswisher
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
It's on. Twice a week, award-winning journalist Kara Swisher gets to the heart of the story through no-holds-barred interviews with power players across business, tech, media, politics and beyond. So why do her guests show up? “Smart people,” says Kara, “like difficult questions.”
Mondays and Thursdays from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.