Recode Media with Peter Kafka
What happens when media, entertainment, and technology collide? Peter Kafka, one of the media industry's most acclaimed reporters, talks to business titans, journalists, comedians and podcasters to get their take. Produced by Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Episodes
June 1, 2023 • 50 mins
It’s not just Ron DeSantis: All kinds of candidates are piling into the 2024 presidential race. New York Times national politics reporter Astead W. Herndon is covering the contest in audio form, via his show, “The Run-Up” — a weekly deep dive from the campaign trail. Herndon’s reporting is thoughtful and clear-eyed, and gives everyone he talks to — candidates, party leaders and, crucially, voters — the opportunity to really explain...
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May 22, 2023 • 32 mins
Succession — the HBO drama about a Murdoch-ish family of media moguls — feels authentic thanks, in part, to consultant Merissa Marr. Marr covered the Murdochs and other media titans for years at The Wall Street Journal, and she’s worked with the creative team behind Succession since the beginning. Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to Marr about Succession’s obsession with getting tiny details about Big Media just right; which non-Murdoch mog...
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May 15, 2023 • 44 mins
Live from New York, it’s Upfronts week, where TV networks sell billions of dollars of advertising with glitzy presentations. It’s also the third week of the writers’ strike, which means the people who make the shows that run in between ads are picketing those presentations. So it’s a good time to talk about the state of the post-streaming boom TV business. Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw drops by the studio to talk to Vox’s Peter Kafka abou...
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May 11, 2023 • 48 mins
Ken Jennings won 74 straight episodes of Jeopardy back in 2004. Somehow he’s turned that winning streak into a career, and now co-hosts the surprisingly resilient game show.
Peter Kafka talked to Jennings about his job and much more at the Crosscut Ideas Festival in Seattle. And while the sound quality isn’t pristine, the conversation covers a lot of ground. Jennings, for instance, talks about the tension between Jeopardy’s produce...
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May 4, 2023 • 53 mins
AI is amazing… or terrifying, depending on who you ask. This is a technology that elicits strong, almost existential reactions. So in the final episode of our special series about AI, we dig into the giant ambitions and enormous concerns people have about the very same tech.
Featuring: New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose (@kevinroose), who tells me why his viral conversation with Bing’s AI chatbot changed the way he thought a...
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May 2, 2023 • 36 mins
It’s our first four-way pod, featuring BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, Gawker founder Nick Denton, and Semafor founder (and former editor-in-chief of the recently shuttered BuzzFeed News) Ben Smith, who wrote a book about them both. Peter Kafka talks to all of them in conjunction with Smith’s new book “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.” What lessons did Smith learn from Peretti and Dento...
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April 27, 2023 • 47 mins
Silicon Valley needs a new thing and AI is that new thing: investors are supposed to pour 43 billion dollars into AI this year. But will individual startups cash in on the boom, or will the real winners of AI be the same handful of big, established companies?
Featuring: Renate Nyborg (@renate), a tech veteran who is launching an AI startup, and got a firsthand look at the AI funding frenzy. (00:00)
Then: Dror Berman (@drorberman), ...
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April 20, 2023 • 51 mins
AI has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley seemingly overnight. And in all this excitement, it's hard to tell what's really going on. What is this technology, how does Silicon Valley plan to change our world with it, and what exactly has a bunch of smart people very worried?
I'm doing a special series to figure that all out. Over the next three weeks, I'll talk to true AI believers and its sharpest detractors to get the rea...
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April 19, 2023 • 30 mins
Fox News, accused of repeatedly and knowingly spreading lies about Dominion Voting Systems, opted Tuesday to fork over $787 million rather than find out what its correspondents had to say under oath in a court of law. Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to NPR's David Folkenflik about what, if anything, this will change when it comes to Fox News and the wider media.
Featuring: David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik), NPR Media Correspondent & Aut...
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April 13, 2023 • 50 mins
It’s a TikTok double-header!
Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to ‘Chef Reactions,’ the semi-anonymous TikTok star whose hilarious culinary critiques skyrocketed him to viral fame in less than a year.
After that, The Washington Post’s Will Oremus catches us up on the controversy over TikTok - the debate over national security issues, and how likely it is the platform could actually get banned in the United States.
Featuring: Chef Reactions ...
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April 6, 2023 • 61 mins
Endeavor started out as a traditional Hollywood talent agency - CEO Ari Emanuel, famously, was the model for Jeremy Piven’s character on “Entourage.” But suddenly, it’s become a giant media company focused on real and fake fighting, by merging its UFC business - featuring people who are really fighting each other - with the WWE - the one where the fights are scripted. Journalist Ariel Helwani, who knows both worlds very well, joins...
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March 30, 2023 • 40 mins
We’ve had questions about Apple’s new VR headset — supposedly set to debut in June — for some time. Starting with: Who’s going to pay $3,000 for these things, and what will they do with them? Turns out some Apple employees have the same questions — which is very unusual for a Big Deal Apple Debut, to say the very least. The NYT’s Tripp Mickle joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to explain. Then Peter checks in with Men In Blazers co-founder Ro...
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March 23, 2023 • 41 mins
Jesse Thorn has been podcasting for so long it was called radio. Over time he turned his career into a business - Maximum Fun, a network of eclectic pop culture shows like Bullseye; My Brother, My Brother and Me; and Judge John Hodgman — and relied primarily on listener donations to fund it.
But, as Thorn tells Vox’s Peter Kafka, running a business was running him down, and he didn’t want to sell the company to a Spotify or Sirius....
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March 16, 2023 • 64 mins
First: A Silicon Valley Bank check-in with Dan Primack of Axios. Why, exactly, did so many tech companies (and, um, media companies) bank with SVB, and what happens next?
Then, Peter Kafka has a great, wide-ranging conversation with tech analyst / thinkfluencer Benedict Evans. They talk about artificial intelligence, Amazon’s ad business (or whatever we should call it), YouTube’s place in the streaming wars, and what the metaverse ...
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Mark Zuckerberg wants to build the metaverse. Neal Stephenson created the meta verse three decades ago.
The author’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash popularized the use of the term “avatar” in a digital context, inspired the makers of Google Earth, and, of course, imagined (and named) the dystopian metaverse that Silicon Valley is racing to make a reality.
Stephenson has also tried his hand at actual science - helping Jeff Be...
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March 3, 2023 • 37 mins
De La Soul was legendary for their trail-blazing approach to hip-hop. But in recent years the trio become notable for another reason: You couldn’t hear their music on any streaming platform. This means that generations of fans - including Recode’s Peter Kafka - couldn’t find them on the likes of Spotify, and potential new fans would never hear them at all.
Today that’s changed, thanks to Reservoir Media's CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi, w...
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February 23, 2023 • 37 mins
Veteran business journalist James B. Stewart specializes in getting behind the scenes to tell the stories of rich, powerful, and complicated subjects. He has a doozy with “Unscripted”, the new book he co-wrote about the last days of media mogul Sumner Redstone, who at one point was one of the most powerful men in the industry, and whose decline fueled years of fighting between his family, his employees, and his mistresses. If you l...
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February 14, 2023 • 26 mins
It used to be that a human would have to write a BuzzFeed quiz about “Which Fictional Artificial Intelligence Are You?” But now, BuzzFeed writers are using real artificial intelligence tools — from Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT — to help craft the site’s famous quizzes. Investors love the idea. Not all of BuzzFeed's employees are quite sure about it, though. Recode’s Peter Kafka talks to BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti about the n...
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February 9, 2023 • 44 mins
Tech and media companies (including the one that brings you this podcast) are laying off workers left and right. Meanwhile, the latest national jobs report is shockingly strong. So… why? Do the excuses make any sense?
First, Recode’s Peter Kafka talks to Vox’s Emily Stewart about the overall economy, the likelihood of a recession, and when we’d actually know if one is happening. Then, New York Times correspondent Mike Isaac is back...
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February 2, 2023 • 39 mins
This week, we bring you an episode of The Cut and The Verge’s latest season of Land of the Giants: Dating Games.
This episode is all about Match Group, the company that went on an acquisition spree and now controls two-thirds of the dating apps market. To hear more stories about how dating apps became a billion-dollar industry and the algorithms that control your love life, subscribe to Land of the Giants wherever you subscribe to...
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