You want up-to-the minute election analysis? Sorry, not on this episode. But: If you want smart thoughts about politics and media and tech all merged together? We got you here, courtesy of The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, who came on to discuss how we should think about Elon Musk, Donald Trump supporter, being the same person as Elon Musk, guy who ow…

Jon Lovett and his cofounders at Crooked Media are a good story - former Obama aides who started their own media company after the 2016 election, and are now generating 25 million podcast downloads a month. But for a few weeks this summer, after they became prominent voices in the push to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, their story got …

Emma Tucker became the Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief in 2023, and she’s been moving fast ever since. For starters, there are punchier, more provocative stories and headlines. Just as important: She’s been making a series of cuts and staffing changes. That approach has its critics, but it also seems to be working: Subscriptions are up 7% in th…

What if you could watch shows and movies on a screen, for free, in exchange for watching some ads? In olden times, we called that “TV”. Now the industry term is “advertising-based video on demand,” and it seems to be growing quite quickly. This is good news for Tubi, the AVOD/streamer Fox bought back in the spring of 2020, and for Anjali Sud, who h…

What do Donald Trump and the video game industry have to do with each other? Nothing! Yet we’re combining them into a single podcast, anyway. First up: A chat with Gabriel Sherman, the longtime Vanity Fair reporter who wrote and produced “The Apprentice.” That’s the new Trump biopic that isn’t what you think it is, and is very much worth your time …

The last time I talked to Matt Yglesias, we were co-workers at Vox.com, and Joe Biden had just been elected president. Now Yglesias runs Slow Boring, a tremendously successful Substack, and I wanted to check back in. Discussed here: What a policy nerd does in an election that’s awfully light on policy; why hating the media is now a popular pastime …

Mark Zuckerberg, along with most of the men running big tech companies, has spent many years and tons of money trying to put a computer on your face. Now it looks like he’s getting very close to making it a reality: He’s just debuted Orion, a pair of bulky — but not too bulky — glasses that are also a computer. You can’t buy these things yet - they…

YouTube turns 20 next year, which makes it positively ancient by internet standards. Yet the world’s biggest video site is still incredibly relevant for huge swaths of the globe, even if it doesn’t get the media attention other sites generate. It’s also the only major social platform that routinely shares revenue with the users who create the stuff…

When David Remnick got to the New Yorker in 1998, it was very much a capital M Magazine — it existed on ink and paper, and that was about it. Now it’s still a Magazine, but it’s also everything else you need to be to survive as a media company in 2024 — a robust online publisher, a podcast machine, a video operation, conference host and more. Along…

What happens when you mash up media, tech and business? You get a million things to talk about, and that’s what we’ll be doing on this show: Talking to people who run big tech and media companies, the people who are doing some of the most interesting work in those worlds, and people who can help us understand all of it. And by “we” I mean “me” - I’…

Peter Kafka, soon to be formerly of Vox, reviews the year in media with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw. What did we learn from the strikes? Is the bundle back? Are movies back? What’s going on with whatever the NBA is doing right now? And what’s up with Bob Iger saying he didn’t say something he definitely said on live TV? This is the last episode of “Reco…

After a wild series of events, Sam Altman is back as CEO of OpenAI… with more power than ever before. The Verge’s Alex Heath worked sleepless nights covering every twist and turn of this saga. He updates Vox’s Peter Kafka about where we are now, what all of this means moving forward, and how tech journalism can drive someone to mistake alcohol for …

The board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, ousted CEO Sam Altman on Friday. Since then, the board has appointed not one, but two, interim CEOs. And Altman and his OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman got snatched up by Microsoft. The New York Times’ Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to talk about what we know and what we don’t abou…

SiriusXM makes money by beaming music and talk radio - especially Howard Stern - to your car using satellites and selling monthly subscriptions. That turns out to be a surprisingly resilient business: The company has 34 million subscribers and $9 billion in annual revenue. But CEO Jennifer Witz knows she has to adapt to the streaming world, so she’…

It’s a double shot of media business takes, with conversations about the Walt Disney Corporation and Fox News, with references to “Succession” in both. First, CNBC’s Alex Sherman (@sherman4949) joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to talk about Disney’s strategy, or lack thereof. What does it want to do with ESPN? ABC? Marvel? Star Wars? And although it plans t…

This week, an episode of the latest season of Land of the Giants: The Twitter Fantasy, hosted by our own Peter Kafka. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe! Twitter began life as an accident. In the beginning, even its founders weren’t sure what it was: the internet’s town square, a real-time information source, or the next Facebook, mayb…

When Sam Reich bought CollegeHumor from Barry Diller’s IAC for pennies in January 2020, the comedy site was long past its heyday. A few months later, the pandemic hit. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if CollegeHumor had vanished entirely. Instead, Reich pushed the company to lean into Dropout, the subscription streaming part of the business, and c…