Channels with Peter Kafka

In this special bonus episode of Recode Media, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey talks with NYU professor Jay Rosen about how Twitter is thinking about its responsibilities to society at large. In this episode:01:08 - Technological change02:42 - Dorsey’s outreach to conservatives09:43 - How Twitter employees think about news14:33 - Fluid conversations, threads and "edit” buttons18:56 - Why Twitter isn’t “ne...

Roku CEO Anthony Wood talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how the TV streaming company went public, embedded itself in a slew of TVs and shrugged off competition from some of the biggest tech firms in the world. In this episode:01:55 - Why Roku is not a “hardware company”02:50 - Roku’s history with Netflix06:42 - Putting the Roku platform on smart TVs11:27 - Working with obscure Chinese TV brand...

Chris Best, the CEO and co-founder of Substack, talks with the Verge's Casey Newton about how and why writers are starting paid email newsletters. In this episode:01:40 - What is Substack?03:00 - Why email is better than social media06:55 - Readers are nicer on email09:09 - The pioneers of paid email newsletters12:05 - How email compares to podcasting13:54 - How much will people pay for an email?1...

Judd Legum, the founder of the left-wing political blog ThinkProgress, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about why he left that site to start a political newsletter, Popular Information. In this episode:02:27 - Legum’s background and early blogs05:09 - Starting ThinkProgress08:58 - Working on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign12:59 - The Steele dossier and “who’s the messenger?”15:35 - Have we stopped...

Jason Hirschhorn, the CEO and chief curator of Redef, returns to the podcast to talk with Recode's Peter Kafka about media moguls, the virtues of taking time off and how Netflix outsmarted the TV guys. In this episode:02:50 - Viacom and YouTube09:51 - Big media on the internet vs. digital-first DNA11:51 - How Netflix outsmarted the TV guys, part one14:48 - The non-Netflixes and “traditional relati...

Brian Morrissey, the president and editor in chief of Digiday Media, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how the digital media and marketing business is pivoting toward live events and away from Facebook growth-hacking. Morrissey says he's happy to see the end of "flimsy, overly engineered media brands," many of which were overly dependent on outside platforms to make money. Those publishers wer...

Discord CEO Jason Citron talks with Recode's Kurt Wagner about how the chat app for PC gamers has grown to 150 million registered users, nearly 20 million of whom use the app every day. Citron says Discord has been "pre-revenue" for the past three years, but now it's starting to think about how it will make money; first up, a games store aimed at recommending new titles to users based on what thei...

Ryan Hoover, the founder and CEO of Product Hunt, talks with Recode's Kurt Wagner about running a popular online community for startup founders and other tech enthusiasts. Hoover explains how Product Hunt, now owned by AngelList, is expanding beyond its social media roots into tech news curation and features to help entrepreneurs ship their products to the world. Plus: Why redesigning your app is...

Comedian Bo Burnham talks about his new movie "Eighth Grade" with Recode's Peter Kafka. Burnham says that although the movie's characters are depicted facing issues shared by real eighth graders, he wrote "Eighth Grade" to reflect how he feels now, as a 27-year-old in the public eye, and "how I handle anxiety" in the social media age. He also talks about how he accidentally became a teenage YouTub...

Writer and filmmaker Brian Koppelman talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about co-creating the hit Showtime series "Billions." Koppelman has made a habit of engaging with the show's fans online, but says that when he's writing new episodes, he has to completely unplug from the rest of the world and not think about how Twitter will react to the latest twists and turns. He also talks about the show's in...

Stable Genius Productions co-founder Manoush Zomorodi talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about her decision to leave public radio juggernaut WNYC for a two-woman startup. Stable Genius is one of 20 companies in the journalism marketplace Civil, which is hoping to leverage the emerging technology blockchain to save media; later this summer, Civil plans to sell 100 million digital coins, which it hopes...

Eugene Wei, an early Amazon employee who went on to work at Hulu, Flipboard and Oculus, talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka about “Invisible asymptotes,”a post on his personal blog that went viral. In it, Wei wrote that all companies have a ceiling to their growth, but the ones that can figure out what that ceiling is can adapt and keep growing beyond it. For example, Wei’s old employer, Amazon, recog...

Wall Street Journal media reporter Keach Hagey talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka about her new book, “The King of Content: Sumner Redstone’s Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire.” Hagey says that, like the Murdochs, Redstone’s family is embroiled in “soap opera drama” as they work out what happens to a company once dominated by a single patriarch-mogul. She talks about...

Daniel Ek, the CEO of music-streaming company Spotify, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka at the 2018 Code Conference. Ek explains why Spotify temporarily banned R. Kelly from its playlists and why it backed off of that ban. He also talks about the company’s recent public listing and how Spotify plans to grow while losing money every quarter based on normal accounting standards. Plus...

Former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, now the co-host of the popular liberal podcast Pod Save America, talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka about his new book, “Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump.” Pfeiffer outlines the ways in which the political media landscape has been profoundly warped and upended since he went to work for Barack Obama in 2009, a...

Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber, the founders of podcasting network Gimlet, talk with Recode's Peter Kafka about trying to create the "HBO of audio." Gimlet's first show was StartUp, a podcast about the creation of Gimlet itself that exposed the "myth of being an entrepreneur" — although entrepreneurs might say things are always going great, the reality is that everything always feels like it's "abo...

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2018 Code Conference. Stephenson discusses the company’s pending acquisition of Time Warner, which the U.S. Justice Department has attempted to block. Stephenson explains how — if the deal goes through and AT&T therefore owns content — he would deal with public controversies like the racist tweet that got Roseanne Barr fired. He al...

David Chang, the chef and founder of culinary brand Momofuku, talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka and Eater’s Amanda Kludt at the 2018 Code Conference. Chang — who’s also the host of “Ugly Delicious” on Netflix — says “there was no strategy” for Momofuku’s first decade of growth, but now he’s thinking more strategically about scaling up. Food is now a blue-collar profession with “white-collar values,”...

On this special episode of Recode Media, you get two interviews for the price of one: First, Recode's Peter Kafka talks with Jessica Pressler, a New York Magazine staff writer whose longform story about a New York City high society grifter, Anna Sorokin, became a viral hit online. Pressler explains how she reported that story in a matter of months, and why Sorokin's con worked so well. Later in th...

21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2018 Code Conference. Murdoch, the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, says he’s focused on “land[ing] the plane” as Fox plans to merge with Disney in the coming months, but doesn’t expect to be a part of either the merged entity or the remaining Fox properties, such as Fox News, which won’t be sold. Murdoch also talks about...

Facebook executives Sheryl Sandberg and Mike Schroepfer talk with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka at the 2018 Code Conference. Sandberg, the company’s COO, and Schroepfer, the CTO, talk about the continuing fallout from Cambridge Analytica and other scandals, including “fake news” during the 2016 elections. They retrace the timeline of the Cambridge Analytica affair and talk about what they’...

Roman Mars, the founder of Radiotopia and host of the hit podcast 99 Percent Invisible, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the state of podcasting in 2018. Mars talks about why he started Radiotopia, how it works within the nonprofit PRX and how it thinks about translating its audio shows into live productions. He also explains why the podcasting industry isn't ready to be divvied up into paid...

Vox.com editor-at-large Ezra Klein talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about Vox's new Netflix series "Explained." The first season of the show, which debuted May 23, will feature 20 mini-documentaries about topics such as monogamy, cryptocurrency or the racial wealth gap. Klein said these topics are too big to be tackled in a three-minute YouTube video, and that one of his team's metrics of success i...

YouTube global head of music Lyor Cohen talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka about the launch of YouTube Music, a $10-a-month music subscription service that will replace YouTube Red. Cohen says giving the consumers the choice of paying with money or “paying with your eyeballs” by watching ads is the right direction for the music industry, and will liberate artists to make music on their terms. He also...

New York Times reporter Dave Itzkoff talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his new book, "Robin: The Definitive Biography of Robin Williams." Itzkoff traces the history of the manic comedian and actor, whose stardom spanned more than four decades in roles in TV shows, such as "Mork and Mindy," and movies, like "Good Will Hunting." After Williams' death by suicide in 2014, Itzkoff says fans and the...