Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair

Some say Hollywood is the weirdest, most-wasteful industry in earth. So what happens when Silicon Valley disrupts it? Will actors be replaced by CGI versions of themselves? Rob Fishman, a techie turned studio head, joins Nick to try to explain why Hollywood is so broken, and if it can ever be fixed. Plus: Vanity Fair’s special Wall Street correspondent, Bess Levin, explains why Jack Dorsey has truly lost his mind, what the arrest of Julian Assange means for Trump, and why no one can sit in a 220-degree sauna for 45 minutes without burning to death.

Has Donald Trump broken our minds, and is it possible to tune him out? Longtime White House correspondent Jessica Yellin joins Nick to discuss the 2020 horse race, why so much of the media sucks (on both sides), and how our collective obsession with Trump has destroyed our ability to make sense of what matters.

The airline industry is one of the most regulated in the world, yet a potential software bug on Boeing’s 737 Max may have killed hundreds of people. Should we be worried the same thing could happen with driverless cars, drones, and delivery robots in the not-too-distant future? Clive Thompson, author of the new book, “Coders,” joins Nick to explain what we can do to stop cyberterrorists or a rogue nation from using code instead of bombs to kill us all.

For two years, Americans have assumed Trump colluded with Russia. Did the media lead us astray? Or did the Democrats? Or perhaps we’re just asking the wrong question.  Emily Jane Fox joins Nick to explain why it’s actually a good thing that Trump isn’t a secret Russian spy, and how this actually might be the best thing to happen to the Democrats since the election of Donald Trump. And, finally, will the Mueller Report leak? And if so, when and by whom?

Will the countless Democratic presidential nominees destroy each other before Trump destroys himself? Will a Republican take on Donald in the primaries? And will we finally see our first female POTUS?  Jennifer Palmieri, the former White House Director of Communications for Barack Obama, joins Nick to talk about what’s going on in the race for the next President of the United States, and why she thinks the entire election will come down to one issue: abortion.

The Hive’s Abby Tracy visited AOC in her New York district and then spent some time with the freshman congresswoman in her apartment where she opens up about fame, Trump, and what’s next.

Facebook has gone from being a viral sensation to a virus people want nothing to do with anymore. This week, amid more bad news for the social network, Casey Newton of the Verge joins Nick to take him inside Facebook’s troubled moderator division, and later in the show, the venture capitalist Roger McNamee, who made his fortunes investing in Facebook, explains why he’s soured on the company that made him so rich. Nevertheless, he still believes its leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, can save themselves, and in turn, the company.

Emily Jane Fox, the Truman Capote of the Michael Cohen saga, swings by the studio to discuss the backstory behind Cohen’s remarks; the checks; and what lies ahead for Trump’s former lawyer during his remaining months of freedom.

In September 2017, Elizabeth Holmes was watching her company go up in smoke. There were government investigations, nightmarish legal bills, a dwindling bank account, and the evaporation of her credibility. Then she came up with an unorthodox plan to turn it all around....a wolf?

There is likely only one single issue the Democrats and Republicans agree on: the desperate need for prison reform. Jason Flom, the founding board member of the Innocence Project, joins Nick to explain what's currently happening with incarceration rates in America, and why so much of it is Bill Clinton's fault. 

“I am disgusted.”: Taped conversations reveal how money was being spent on Donald Trump’s inaugural events (a whopping $107 million), the general chaos of the process, the involvement of the Trump family, and how money was being funneled back to Trump’s own hotels.  Emily Jane Fox, a reporter for The Hive covering politics and the .001 percent, joins Nick to explain why Trump’s inauguration could be his downfall, and which of the Trump kids (and in-laws) could go down in this latest scandal.

Adam McKay, the Oscar-nominated director of Vice, offers his unfettered opinions on Cheney, Bush, Trump, when the American train fell off the tracks and why his next movie might be the most important thing he ever works on.

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stirred up the Republican Party when she warned that that if we don’t solve the climate crisis in 12 years, the Earth could be doomed. Peter Brannen, author of “The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions,” joins Nick to explain why Cortez is correct, and how the past 400 million years on Earth can explain how we might be heading towards an overheated world that we can’t cool down.

On the latest episode of Inside the Hive, Nick talks to West Wing supersleuth Gabe Sherman about Giuliani’s latest meltdown, if the painful shutdown will ever end, whether Trump will even make it to 2020, and what it will take for the Republicans to finally turn on their leader.

Are We Nearing the End of Human Civilization? Description: What if there was a simple calculation that could foretell when a company will go bankrupt, when artificial intelligence will become smarter than humans, and when human civilization will meet its eventual demise. William Poundstone, author of the upcoming book, The Doomsday Calculation, joins Nick to explain how such an algorithm does exits, can predict all of this and more, and why humans likely only have 760 years left in the universe.