On with Kara Swisher

On with Kara Swisher

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.

Episodes

January 26, 2026 46 mins
For the last few weeks, Minneapolis has been the epicenter of President Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, but tensions between residents and the administration exploded after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good earlier this month. And after the killing of Alexander Pretti by federal agents on Saturday, it's safe to assume the situation will only get worse. Approximately 3,000 ICE and...
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On Christmas Eve, Elon Musk’s X rolled out an in-app tool that lets users alter other people’s photos and post the results directly in reply. With minimal safeguards, it quickly became a pipeline for sexualized, non-consensual deepfakes, including imagery involving minors, delivered straight into victims’ notifications.  Renée DiResta, Hany Farid, and Casey Newton join Kara to dig into the scale of the harm, the failure of app s...
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Dr. Zeke Emanuel is one of the country’s foremost healthcare experts. An oncologist and the former chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, he was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act and now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Emanuel’s new book, “Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life,” offers practical advice on eating and living well at a time when A...
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Democratic California Representative Ro Khanna joins Kara for a wide-ranging conversation about the culture of impunity that’s taken hold in America during President Trump’s second term.  They discuss Khanna's visit to an immigration detention facility, the Trump administration’s reaction to the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, the Department of Justice investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and Khan...
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As the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed specializes in researching how hate and disinformation spread online. His work has made him a target of Elon Musk and the Trump administration — he’s one of five European tech regulators and researchers the White House wants to bar from the U.S. over claims of “foreign censorship.” Ahmed, who’s a British national based in the U.S., has sued to block his r...
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The arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, on Saturday, sent shockwaves across the globe. And although the targeted military operation was a success, the repercussions of ousting the authoritarian leader will be long-lasting and hard to predict.  To make sense of the new world order ushered in by President Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine,” we convened a panel of experts: an oil industry specialist, a national security journalis...
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As the principal contributor to The New Yorker’s “Q&A” interview series, Isaac Chotiner has earned a reputation as “the interview assassin.” His persistent questioning has made for some awkward — and revealing — conversations with high-profile guests over the years, but Chotiner also rejects the caricature of the “gotcha journalist” that’s often applied to him. Kara and Isaac talk about his interviewing style, how he prepares fo...
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Happy 2026 from all of us at On with Kara Swisher! We’re ringing in the new year with an episode of ACCESS, a new tech insider podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network that’s hosted by two highly connected tech journalists, Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. Each week, Alex and Ellis have revealing conversations with Silicon Valley’s most influential leaders, from the tech titans of today to tomorrow’s most interesting entrepreneurs...
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Kara sits down with Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of the autonomous trucking company Aurora, and Johnathon Ehsani, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University and leading road safety researcher, for a candid look at the future of AI-powered freight transport.  Recorded live at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, the three discuss the rapid rise of driverless trucking, what it will take to convince a skeptical public th...
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Happy Holidays from the On with Kara Swisher team! To celebrate, we’re gifting you a recent episode of a new national security podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network. “The Long Game” is hosted by Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s National Security Advisor, and Jon Finer, his Principal Deputy — both senior aides who sat in on the classified Presidential Daily Brief each morning and translated raw intelligence into policy advice. ...
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From an unenforced TikTok ban and a chatbot calling itself MechaHitler to mounting fears that we’re in an AI bubble, 2025 was another messy year for the tech industry. We watched billionaire CEOs fully align themselves with President Trump, Nvidia become the first $5 trillion company, and Elon Musk’s popularity tank, thanks to his DOGE antics (and yet he could still become the world’s first trillionaire).  Kara breaks down the b...
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Kara sits down with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to dig into how applied artificial intelligence works at scale.  At Uber, AI powers everything from pricing, routing, and customer service to autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots that deliver food. It has partnered with more than 20 autonomous vehicle manufacturers, and it’s moving aggressively into robotaxis. And although it may take many decades, Khosrowshahi believes society m...
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One of 2025’s most memorable images was of Silicon Valley’s billionaire CEOs lined up in the front rows at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was visual proof of the tech industry’s embrace of MAGA’s authoritarian-style of politics — one it has benefited from considerably over the last year. Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has been using his podcast, “Making Sense,” to talk about the ways tech moguls are corroding our p...
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Rachel Maddow is an author, podcast host and producer, documentary producer, and, of course, the anchor of her eponymous show on MS NOW. Her newest podcast, "Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order," unravels how the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants during WWII was planned and carried out. Shockingly, the full story behind one of the 20th century’s worst American human-rights abuses might nev...
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Margaret Atwood is one of the most famous and prolific authors of the modern era. Though best known for her 1985 hit “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her dozens of works span literary genres — poetry, novels, children's books, essays, short stories — and often defy neat categorization. Now, at 86, Atwood has written her first memoir. At roughly 600 pages, it’s an intimate look at the ways her personal life inspired and shaped her writing.  ...
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The tech billionaires of Silicon Valley and the Midwestern rural poor wouldn’t seem to have much in common. But somehow many of them have united under the MAGA umbrella. Kara brings together two reporters who have written about the opposite sides of the MAGA coin to talk about the role of social media in fueling enragement, why tech billionaires and poor Americans are coalescing around issues like education, the press and more; and...
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How do you grieve the impending death of a lifelong friend when you are a multi-hyphenate comedian, actor, director and producer? If you are Tig Notaro, you produce a film about their life and work — as she has done for the late spoken word poet Andrea Gibson with the documentary Come See Me In The Good Light. Best known for her dry-witted stand up comedy, Tig is also a podcaster (Handsome), actor (Star Trek: Discovery, The Morni...
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In the mid-2010s, television journalist and former chief White House correspondent Jessica Yellin left her job at CNN to go independent. A few years later, she founded News Not Noise, a multi-platform news outlet that publishes all across the internet  (mainly on Substack, Instagram and YouTube). It made Yellin one of the first journalists to ditch mainstream media for social media, and it’s given her a unique perspective on the ch...
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In the year since President Trump won re-election — thanks in part to capitalizing on sitdowns on friendly podcasts — Democrats have been looking for their own answer to the so-called “manosphere.” One of the top contenders has emerged from an unlikely place: bright red Oklahoma. That’s where Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan started their hit podcast, “I’ve Had It.” They’ve interviewed some of the biggest names on the left...
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Political commentator Scott Jennings has been called the “conservative explaining Red America to CNN viewers.” As the in-house Republican on CNN’s NewsNight With Abby Phillips debate panels, he often acts as a de facto Trump spokesman at the table. Jennings has been in Republican politics for more than two decades. In the mid-aughts he worked as a Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, and later advised Kentucky Senator Mi...
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