After a historic strike that went on for almost 150 days, the studios and the Writers Guild of America have a (tentative) deal. What’s in the deal, and why did it take almost half a year to get there? And what does this mean for the Screen Actors Guild strike, still in progress? And what happened to the AI issue we were told was existential? Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw (@Lucas_Shaw) joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to break down what we know so far. Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Editor at...

One of the most powerful people of the 21st century says he’s retiring. Rupert Murdoch, 92, will hand over control of News Corp. and Fox Corp. to his son Lachlan, in November. What does that actually mean? And what happens next? Here to offer some very informed speculation is longtime Murdoch family watcher Brian Stelter, who wrote one book on Murdoch and Fox News and has another one on the way. Up for discussion with Vox’s Peter Kafka: How active has Rupert been at the top of his company?...

Once the domain of the nerdiest of sports fans, these days fantasy football analysis is on primetime TV. Matthew Berry (@MatthewBerryTMR) comments on fantasy football for NBC Sports (and before that, ESPN) and founded the website fantasylife.com. It's the culmination of a career that, for many people, would have already been a fantasy: serving as George Carlin’s assistant and writing for Married with Children. Berry joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to talk about the business of fantasy sports and what...

Wait a minute. For a couple of years there - 2020 through 2022 - everyone acted like bitcoin and even weirder crypto things were worth trillions of dollars. And cartoon apes were on Jimmy Fallon? And now none of us want to pretend that happened at all? Zeke Faux (@ZekeFaux) wants to talk about it with Vox’s Peter Kafka. Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg, and his new book Number Go Up chronicles the crazy crypto bubble, and Faux’s worldwide hunt to uncover the truth behind one...

Taylor Swift is on one of the most successful concert tours of all time, but what's her secret? Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding (@charlieharding) sits down with Peter to discuss the business of Taylor Swift. How her music, her fans, and her industry expertise catapulted her to being one of the most profitable singers of this generation. Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Editor at Recode More to explore: Subscribe for free to Recode Media, Peter Kafka, one of the media industry's most...

The US and China are in a sort of cold war, and the tech industry is caught in the middle. But it’s complicated: Ask TikTok, the Chinese-owned app that dominates entertainment in the US. Or Apple, which couldn’t exist without the Chinese supply chain that makes the iPhone. Here to explain the state of play to Vox’s Peter Kafka is The Information’s Jessica Lessin (@JessicaLessin) who just returned from a trip to Beijing and Shanghai with “tech’s favorite politician,” Commerce Secretary Gina...

David Zaslav sent up the white smoke, marking the selection of a new CNN CEO. Mark Thompson comes from The New York Times and the BBC, and has his work cut out for him to dig CNN out of the hole dug by his predecessor - but really, the hole that every TV news operation is in. Puck’s Dylan Byers (@dylanbyers), who broke the news of Thompson’s hire, returns to tell Vox’s Peter Kafka all about Thompson and CNN’s second big streaming play after the quickly-abandoned CNN+. Host: Peter...

Born at BuzzFeed in 2014, The Try Guys make online videos where they try all sorts of things: earwax extractions, baking pie without a recipe, getting kidnapped, the usual. Since then, they’ve become their own independent media company, wrote a bestselling book, hosted a Food Network show — and broke up with one of their founding members in a public cheating scandal that was even parodied on Saturday Night Live. Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to one of the titular guys, Zach Kornfeld (@korndiddy),...

A movie made for peanuts and distributed by a studio far outside the Hollywood system has done better box office numbers than both the new Mission Impossible and Indiana Jones movies. Sound of Freedom is about a rogue federal agent who goes to Colombia to break up a child sex trafficking ring. The conservative media love it. Faith-based groups love it. QAnon loves it. But how did this movie get made? And is the guy the movie based on the hero the movie makes him out to be? Recode Media sister...

This week, a quick update on Disney’s deal to get into sports betting. Then, we’re bringing you an episode of The Verge’s latest season of Land of the Giants, The Tesla Shock Wave. This episode tells the story of how Elon Musk joined the electric car company - and how he eventually led a coup against the original founders. Musk went on to make the car company’s brand synonymous with his own, which was great for Tesla… until it wasn’t. Hosted by Tamara Warren (@tamaratam) and Patrick George...

Black Mirror isn’t just a hit TV show: It’s a window into the not-too-distant future. Creator Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) has an astonishing track record of consistently imagining what we’re just about to see - whether it’s Donald Trump, the downside of social media, or AI-generated TV shows. And he’s made something that’s pervaded pop culture - when someone says “That’s like a Black Mirror episode” we know exactly what they mean. Brooker tells Vox’s Peter Kafka that, despite what you...

Joe Biden wants to stop big companies - especially big tech companies - from buying or merging with other companies. FTC boss Lina Khan is supposed to be his enforcer, but… it’s not going well. In fact, it’s possible Khan’s struggles have made it easier for big companies to bulk up, or at least more likely to try. Vox’s Peter Kafka talks about all this with Cecilia Kang (@ceciliakang), who covers tech and regulation for The New York Times. Host: Peter Kafka (@pkafka), Senior Editor at...

This is a very good week to make a Recode Media episode: Hollywood is reeling from two different strikes. Disney CEO Bob Iger has hung a For Sale sign on parts of his company. And Steven Soderbergh just made a TV series and is selling it directly to consumers, like it’s 2012 or something. First up, Vox’s Peter Kafka runs all of his Hollywood strike theories past Matt Belloni (@MattBelloni), founding partner of Puck News. Is AI really that big of a hangup for writers and actors on the picket...

We’re one week into the Threads era. How long is that going to last? What does it mean for Twitter, really? And what do Threads and continued chaos at Twitter say about the future of social media? That’s maybe a lot to talk tackle, but we’re going to do it anyway. NYT tech reporter Mike Isaac (@mikeisaac) joins Vox’s Peter Kafka to get us up to speed on Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to depants Elon Musk — it seems to be going pretty well, for the moment. And we’ll try to answer one big question:...

Former head of ESPN John Skipper has produced an ambitious new project. Now he has to figure out how to get it in front of you: Sports Explains the World is a series of films featuring well-known personalities (like Curt Schilling) and people you’ve never heard of (like a group of skater girls in Ethiopia). What it doesn’t have, yet, is a deal to get them on a TV screen near you — a condition that may or may not say a lot about the streaming industry in 2023. Skipper and executive producer...

Comedian Nimesh Patel was grinding it out in the stand-up mines for years with middling success. And then the stage changed. Patel tells us how TikTok changed everything and what it’s like to live at the whim of the algorithm. Then, host Peter Kafka catches up with former stunt coordinator and current filmmaker Sam Hargrave about the secret sauce of making action films for Netflix. It’s a lot of punching, a little Chris Hemsworth and a dash of stabbing the crap of people. His new movie,...

Mosheh Oinounou worked his way up through the TV news ranks and ended up running CBS Evening News. Now he’s starting over - this time on Instagram - with Mo News, a platform he says is a more responsive way to deliver news to an engaged audience. Oinounou talks to Vox’s Peter Kafka about the maladies affecting conventional news, the challenge of bootstrapping a news outlet in 2023, and why CNN’s former boss Chris Licht may have gotten at least one thing right. Then, Peter talks to his friend...

For some people that’s a dystopian vision. But for Cristóbal Valenzuela, it’s a mission statement: Valenzuela is the co-founder and CEO of Runway, an AI startup that wants to radically change the way movies and TV are made. Right now the buzzy company - currently valued at $1.5 billion - helps TV shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once create special effects at a fraction of the traditional cost. But Valenzuela has much bigger ambitions...

After just over a year of questionable leadership and on the heels of an unflattering Atlantic profile, Chris Licht is out as the head of CNN. Vox’s Peter Kafka talks to Puck’s Dylan Byers, who not only covered Licht, but became part of the story. Then! Apple revealed its long-rumored mixed-reality headset this week. It’ll cost $3,500 when it goes on sale sometime next year, and will allow people who aren’t you to see your eyes while you use it. Wired’s Lauren Goode went face-on with the new...

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 how the world looks from their perspective. Vox’s Peter Kafka...

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 moguls influence the show’s depiction of the Roy clan; what...

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 about challenges facing the networks as they sell ads, and the...

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 producers, who want to refresh the show in the hopes of bringing in...

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 about the new tech. Then: Google has everything to lose here,...

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 Denton’s mistakes? If Disney offers to buy you out for hundreds of...