Channels with Peter Kafka
Media and tech aren’t just intersecting — they’re fully intertwined. And to understand how those worlds work, and what they mean for you, veteran journalist Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers - and gets them to spell it out in plain, BS-free English. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Episodes
July 2, 2025 • 45 mins
"Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker knows that everyone thinks his show is about tech-fueled dystopias. But he says it's really about humans, not their tools.
I loved this chat back when we recorded it in 2023, when Brooker was promoting the sixth season of his Netflix show. Now there's a new season - and Brooker's vision of the world is as relevant as ever.
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Mark as Played
June 25, 2025 • 51 mins
What's the best way to describe what Emily Sundberg does?
Substacker? Influencer? Journalist? Brand-builder?
Let's go with "yes". And she does a much better job of describing herself in our conversation, where we talk about how she went from being a laid-off marketer at Meta to a one-woman business with a devoted following and a revenue line that’s up and to the right.
A very quick primer for those of you haven't heard of Sundbe...
Mark as Played
June 18, 2025 • 68 mins
If you want smart, nuanced insight into Apple’s products and would-be products, you turn to John Gruber, who’s been blogging about this stuff for more than two decades at his Daring Fireball site.
So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri service with state-of-the-art AI — lots of people paid attention. Including, apparently, f...
Mark as Played
June 12, 2025 • 30 mins
Here’s one where we try to do two things at once:
Have a convo about green shoots in media with two smart guys who know media really well — Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey.
Try to find new audiences for our respective podcasts, by cutting up that conversation into 3 parts, and distributing those parts to our respective feeds.
Which is to say: You can hear more of the this conversation by heading to ...
Mark as Played
June 11, 2025 • 47 mins
Scott Frank used to write great movies, like “Out of Sight.” Now he’s a Netflix guy, and a super successful one: he made “Godless,” a horses-and-everything Western for the streamer, then had a pandemic-era phenomenon with “The Queen’s Gambit.” Now he’s back with “Dept. Q”, his take on the British mystery genre. You can find that one on Netflix’s top 10 lists in the U.S. and around the world.
I like talking to Scott on this show — ...
Mark as Played
June 4, 2025 • 38 mins
I admit it: I most definitely rolled my eyes in 2019, when Twitter announced vague plans to build an "open and decentralized standard for social media".
At the time I didn't really understand what then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was trying to do — or why the head of a social media company with plenty of problems was messing around with plans to create more social media companies.
I get it now: Bluesky was a science project that aime...
Mark as Played
May 28, 2025 • 51 mins
Today we’re talking about how you take a media property that’s been around for a long time, and find a way to bring in new eyeballs — and new revenue.
That property is Wired — the place that told you about the internet before the internet even existed — and the person who’s reviving it is Katie Drummond, who has been running the property for a couple of years.
As we discuss, Wired has always done interesting and important work — ...
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Adam Mosseri's official title is head of Instagram, Meta's massive photo and video app. He also runs Threads, the Twitter clone the company launched two years ago.
Unofficially, he's become one of Meta's chief explainers, frequently jumping on social media to defend and proselytize on behalf of his employer.
So when I got a chance to interview Mosseri, I had a long list of questions about… lots of things: I wanted to know how Mo...
Mark as Played
May 14, 2025 • 71 mins
The iPhone you’re reading this on was made in China.
For a long time, that fact was a huge part of Apple’s success story: Working hand-in-hand, Apple and China built a sophisticated supply chain that let Apple manufacture very complicated technology at an enormous scale.
Now that relationship seems like Apple’s achilles heel, says Patrick McGee.
McGee covered Apple for the Financial Times for years. Now his new book “Apple...
Mark as Played
May 7, 2025 • 68 mins
I wanted to talk to Ian Rogers about his fascinating career. He wanted to talk to me about Ledger, the crypto wallet company he’s working at now.
So we did both things.
Background: Rogers was an important figure in the digital music business, back when the music business was being fundamentally reshaped by digital. He helped the Beastie Boys get on the internet, long before every band did that. Then he helped bring digital mu...
Mark as Played
May 6, 2025 • 37 mins
Today's podcast is an in-depth discussion of Apple's App Store rules and how they... wait! Don't leave!
I could try to tell you why Apple's App Store rules are important to both Apple and the digital economy (sadly, I just realized I've been covering them for nearly 15 years, so they better be important). But a better messenger for that task is Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games - the company behind Fortnite.
Sweeney has spen...
Mark as Played
April 30, 2025 • 58 mins
There are all kinds of ways to measure the health of an economy. The one I rely on is ad spending.
One reason for that is simple: I work in ad-supported businesses, so I want to know about things are going to affect me personally. A less self-interested reason: The health of the ad business is tied directly to the way companies feel about their overall health. So if things turn south, you’ll often see it in falling ad spend.
And ...
Mark as Played
April 23, 2025 • 48 mins
Every day some 85 million people - most of them kids - show up to play, chat and spend money on Roblox. That’s a massive audience just about any tech or media company would like to have. But David Baszucki wants more: He thinks his platform can eventually command 10% of the worldwide gaming market.
I spent time talking to Baszucki about those ambitions and what has to happen to make it a reality. But I also wanted to spend time ge...
Mark as Played
April 16, 2025 • 44 mins
Some people don’t want to pay for media. But lots of people are paying Jake Sherman and his team at Punchbowl News: The 4-year-old startup is thriving by providing super-insidery news and data about what’s happening in Congress. I chatted with Sherman because I wanted to get an update on his business (he says he’s not going to sell it anytime soon, despite lots of speculation to the contrary).
I also had a basic, outside the Belt...
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April 9, 2025 • 69 mins
The New York Times faces the same challenges every other news organization faces in 2025.
But it’s also in way better shape to take those challenges on: Thanks to a business model built on 11 million subscribers, it’s not nearly so worried about things like the fluctuations of the ad business, or changes in Google’s algorithm.
That comparative strength also gives NYT publisher AG Sulzberger the ability to do things his peers can...
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April 2, 2025 • 50 mins
The Trump 2.0 era is less than three months old. But it’s already creating havoc for journalists and the companies they work for.
In Washington, Trump and his team are demoting traditional media - or kicking them out of the White House entirely. In corporate boardrooms, he is forcing media owners to settle lawsuits they would normally fight, and to submit to investigations from newly aggressive regulators.
Again: We’re just at the...
Mark as Played
March 26, 2025 • 47 mins
Call it symbiosis. Call it co-dependency. However you want to characterize it, there’s zero debate that Big TV and Big Sports are deeply intertwined. So if the TV business is shrinking, what happens to sports?
That’s the main question I had for John Ourand, the longtime sports business reporter who’s now at Puck. But I had lots of related ones, like: Now that (some) college students are getting paid to play sports, how does that a...
Mark as Played
March 19, 2025 • 65 mins
Anyone who makes things thinks they could do it better if they had more. More money, time, headcount, infrastructure.
Some of us find there can be upsides to doing it with less, too.
That's not exactly PJ Vogt's story but I think it's directionally accurate: Vogt cohosted a huge hit podcast - Reply All - and when he decided to try again - with Search Engine - he had a lot less to work with. That shaped his thinking about the co...
Mark as Played
March 12, 2025 • 61 mins
Back when I first started covering the internet, the idea of broadcasting yourself for hours on end seemed like a pipe dream for weirdos. Now it's how some people make a living.
Twitch more or less created live-streaming in the U.S., which is why Amazon bought it for about $1 billion back in 2014. But now there are plenty of places to watch, and create, live streams. How does Twitch fend off competitors? How does it convince its mo...
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March 5, 2025 • 43 mins
We had to stop recording this one for a minute, because Matt Belloni got a text. More on that below.
Big picture: Matt is a longtime Hollywood reporter - and lawyer before that - who now has the industry's ear via his writing at Puck and his The Town podcast. I asked him to talk about what lies ahead for the Oscars, the out-of-step TV production that still has big audiences and prestige; and the current state of Hollywood, the busi...
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