Channels with Peter Kafka

Amir Bar-Lev, the director of the new documentary "Long Strange Trip," talks with Recode's Peter Kafka. The four-hour film, which traces the history and cultural impact of the Grateful Dead and its fans, will be released in theaters and will stream via Amazon Prime Video. Bar-Lev says it's accessible to both Deadheads and non-fans alike and that he made it in part as a reaction to how Instagram culture has made people believe they are "mini celebrities." He also argues that mainstream observers have neutered the Dead's legacy by trying to cast them as tech or business geniuses, when in fact they always put art ahead of commerce.

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The Information CEO Jessica Lessin talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about why her news site, which reports on tech and business, puts its content behind a $400-per-year pay wall. Lessin says the default assumption should be that news is paid for because it provides value to people's lives. She also talks about why she left the Wall Street Journal in 2013, what most people get wrong about Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and why sexual harassment at companies like Uber is the toughest story in tech to crack.

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Comedian, author and TV host W. Kamau Bell talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the second season of his podcast, "Politically Re-Active," and his CNN show, "United Shades of America." Bell explains why his podcast persona is seemingly different from the Kamau that people see on TV, and how both of those things compare to being a stand-up comic. He also talks about the misconceptions that follow him as a comedian who is "always talking about racism" and why he doesn't mind too much if he bombs at a big, broad comedy club.

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Journalist Nick Bilton talks with Recode's Jason Del Rey about his new book, "American Kingpin." It tells the story of Ross Ulbricht, the programmer and "criminal mastermind" who founded the Silk Road, a notorious online black market where everything from drugs to guns could be bought and sold anonymously. Bilton, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, also talks about why he left the New York Times in 2016 after more than a decade there, saying he didn't feel challenged by the newspaper's predictability and rigidity. He also argues that, contrary to what the Facebook CEO claims, Mark Zuckerberg is likely running for president — or perhaps planning some other major change that necessitates a heavily photographed tour of the United States.

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Doree Shafrir, a writer at BuzzFeed News and the author of "Startup: A Novel," talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about updating the coming-of-age-in-New-York story for the modern media scene, where working at a print magazine is not the holy grail. "Startup" satirizes what happens when a tech reporter uncovers a scandal involving the 28-year-old CEO of a mindfulness app. Shafrir says one of the weirdest ways she has promoted "Startup" is on "Matt and Doree's Eggcellent Adventure," a podcast about in vitro fertilization she hosts with her husband, Matt Mira. She also talks about working at the New York Observer under Jared Kushner and at Gawker when it was a largely obscure, New York-specific website.

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Author Neil Gaiman talks with Recode’s Peter Kafka about the TV adaptation of his novel ‘American Gods,’ which debuts April 30 on Starz. Gaiman says ‘American Gods’ is a ‘big, sprawling’ story that could have never been made when the book came out, in 2001 — the rise of prestige TV and consumers’ online binging habits made it possible. He also talks about working in comics, what he thinks of President Trump, and why he’s fascinated by — but not making content for — VR.

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Axios co-founder Mike Allen talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about demystifying the chaotic news of the world in his daily newsletter, Axios AM. Allen says the palace intrigue in the White House is more complicated than it may seem at first blush and explains how he has kept his access to the Trump White House even as coverage of the new administration has soured. He also chats about his previous job writing for D.C. insiders at Politico and how Axios is trying to reach the much broader audience of busy people everywhere who want to be smarter.

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Studio71 CEO Reza Izad talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how the business of online video has changed in recent years. Izad came to Studio71 when the German TV station ProSieben bought an earlier company that he co-founded, Collective Digital Studio, and he has worked with YouTube celebrities such as Fred, Lilly Singh and Roman Atwood. He believes "everything that’s successful in entertainment is an outlier" and talks about how digital stars can make the jump to other online platforms and traditional TV. Izad also chats about why Facebook's video ascendancy is a question of when, not if.

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Angel investor Jason Calacanis talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his media company Inside, and why it plans to launch a new email newsletter every week in 2017, for a total of more than 60 by year's end. He also chats about his past companies, including Mahalo and Weblogs Inc., and how he became one of Uber's first investors. Calacanis explains his angel investing philosophy, which favors founders who have built something over those who just come to meetings with an unrealized idea.

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Singer, songwriter and The Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his new solo album, "We All Want the Same Things." Finn still enjoys the life of a touring musician but explains why it's unlikely that The Hold Steady will do another big multi-city tour in the near future. Even though the world is politically divided, he says, music can still play a big role in building communities and friendships among strangers. Finn also discusses working with Bruce Springsteen, opening for The Rolling Stones and adapting lyrics written by George R.R. Martin into a song for the "Game of Thrones" TV show.

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Former Fox News commentator and TheBlaze founder Glenn Beck talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about being a conservative media personality at a time when a Republican he hates, Donald Trump, is president. Speaking in front of a live audience at South by Southwest 2017, Beck says he doesn't care if Trump supporters no longer listen to him, because "right is right, wrong is wrong." He also weighs in on how Breitbart became a "platform for the alt-right" under Steve Bannon after the passing of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, and says that politicians need to put aside party labels to talk about big issues — such as how the rise of robots and artificial intelligence could lead to "50 percent unemployment" in the next 40 years.

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The Huffington Post's new editor in chief, Lydia Polgreen, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about turning the liberal news site founded by Arianna Huffington 11 years ago into a destination for a larger audience — including some of Donald Trump's supporters. Polgreen, who spent 15 years at The New York Times before joining HuffPost late last year, said she wants to help liberals, conservatives and everyone in between see how much they have in common. She also talks about why she left the NYT, the gaps between "have and have-not" media consumers, and how she reacted when HuffPost was barred from a White House press briefing.

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Mashable Executive Editor Jessica Coen talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about taking the reins of the 12-year-old site last year and how she's working to focus its writers on the stories it can do best. Coen previously spent two years editing Gawker.com and five in charge of Jezebel, Gawker Media's feminist site. She chats about bringing a bit of the Gawker voice to Mashable's writing, where the site is investing the most (video and Snapchat) and her advice for young journalists trying to break into the media business. Coen also discusses the most dramatic moment of her tenure at Gawker: The publication of a sex tape starring Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst.

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Screenwriter and novelist Scott Frank talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about writing a superhero movie for people who don't like superhero movies: "Logan," an R-rated sendoff for Wolverine, Hugh Jackman's iconic "X-Men" character. Frank explains how he lucked his way into a job at Paramount at age 24 and what he learned from writing films like "Get Shorty," "Malice" and "Out of Sight." He also discusses his next project after "Logan" — a western miniseries for Netflix called "Godless" — and why, after a long career in Hollywood, he decided last year to write his first novel, "Shaker."

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Wired contributor Gabriel Snyder talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his recent cover story for Wired magazine, "The New York Times Claws Its Way Into the Future." Snyder profiled how the storied newspaper is trying to adapt to the fast-failure-friendly M.O. of a tech company and says it's now betting on one big Netflix-like digital subscription, rather than the multiple smaller subscription products it previously attempted. He also explains why it's so difficult for new ideas to make it up the chain of command inside the NYT and why so many young digital stars have left the company.

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Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of "Hit Makers," talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his new book, which explores the "Science of Popularity in the Age of Distraction." Thompson says contrary to conventional wisdom, content is not as important as how you distribute it, and things don't "go viral" the way an actual virus does — instead, they benefit the most from existing social networks and distribution channels that preceded them. He also says ESPN, which is struggling to make as much money from TV as it used to, needs to re-orient its strategy around the smartphone lock screen, rather than the television screen.

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Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about why he sold the company to German publisher Axel Springer and why BI is moving toward paid newspaper-like subscriptions. Blodget says digital media is "as different from print and TV as they are from each other" and explains why cloning a newspaper for the web will never work. He also talks about why he took Donald Trump seriously from day one and says that despite a smart campaign, the new president is now advocating "un-American and anti-American" policies.

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Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about why the digital advertising world is due for a shake-up. Schafer says he's skeptical of the branded content studios being created inside big media companies because he doubts they can compete with Google and Facebook for the same business. He argues that the online ad economy has grown too big and the future must entail "fewer, better ads" that may be more individualized to consumers and placed on new, unconventional platforms.

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NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how the media, and the reporters who cover the White House in particular, should react to President Trump, who has frequently been hostile to their profession. Rosen says media organizations need to rethink their structures and individual journalists will have to establish a more transparent relationship with their audiences. He also talks about why journalists shouldn't interview Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway and what everyone can learn from Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold.

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Fox Networks ad boss Joe Marchese talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about why he, an online advertising executive, encourages consumers to use ad blockers. Marchese argues that the relationship between advertisers and the public needs to be reset because people see ads as interruptive and advertisers are paying up for smaller and smaller slices of the pie. He also says all of Fox's ads on Hulu and its own websites should be skippable, and talks about the one time of the year when everyone wants to see advertising — the Super Bowl.

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Choose Yourself Media founder James Altucher, an entrepreneur and author of several advice books, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the importance of learning from failure in life and business. Altucher twice went from being a multimillionaire to nearly broke, and currently does not own a home even though his company grossed $11 million last year. He says people should consider the alternatives to things like buying a house, going to college and reading the news, focusing instead on the things that will directly affect their lives.

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LinkedIn Executive Editor Daniel Roth talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about overseeing the editorial branch of the career-networking site. Roth says LinkedIn users police themselves in ways they don't on Facebook because they know their bosses and colleagues can see them. Hailing from the world of magazine and digital journalism, he also discusses his initially rough transition to working at a tech company and what happened when he wrote a 5,000-word cover story about Donald Trump for Fortune in 2004.

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Recode co-founder and Executive Editor Kara Swisher talks with Peter Kafka about why the media needs to be tougher and more skeptical in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Swisher says journalists too often behave like "stenographers," lazily relaying what people say without interrogating their ideas. She also discusses the rise of fake news on platforms like Facebook, how she worked her way up from the mailroom at the Washington Post and why she and Recode co-founder Walt Mossberg sold the site to Vox Media in 2015.

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Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, formerly the public editor of the New York Times, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the effect of the incoming Trump administration on the world of political journalism. Sullivan says she initially thought, after Trump's win, that the media had completely failed, but has since moderated that position, and expects "a new kind of journalistic inquiry" will arise. She also discusses how she came to the New York Times, why she left the paper after three and a half years and why she still wants internet comments to have a place on media outlets' websites.

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Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how the early viral video hit "Red vs. Blue" evolved into a thriving media company. Burns says Rooster Teeth, which predated the launch of YouTube by several years, has succeeded because it goes deep and talks honestly with its young, geeky, video game-savvy fans. He also discusses how YouTube helped the company release its first feature film, "Lazer Team," and explains why he considers the 2014 harassment campaign Gamergate a prelude to Donald Trump's presidential win.

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Journalist and "Freakonomics" co-author Stephen Dubner talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how behavioral economics can explain Donald Trump's victory, arguing that racism and xenophobia are symptoms of a deeper-felt economic resentment. He also discusses widespread misunderstandings about probability and offers a partial defense of poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver. Later in the show, Dubner explains how "Freakonomics" became a mini media empire, why he's now almost all-in on podcasting and how Bruce Springsteen convinced him to quit rock and roll.

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Observer editor-in-chief Ken Kurson talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about running the online newspaper published by Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kurson says Kushner has no day-to-day influence on the Observer. He argues that reactions to his alleged ethical lapses — such as his sitting with the Trump family at the Republican National Convention — are overblown or misguided, and says Hillary Clinton's supporters are overreacting to their loss. Kurson also says some journalists and pollsters who mis-called the election should resign or be fired, and explains why staying off Twitter has been good for his psyche.

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Bob Lefsetz, author of the influential music industry newsletter the Lefsetz Letter, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the winners and losers in the modern music business. Lefsetz says the traditional music label model was one of artificial scarcity, and there's no going back now that streaming services like YouTube and Spotify have arisen. He also argues that Netflix is doomed and VR is being mis-sold to the public. Later in the show, he reflects on the election of Donald Trump and why he's skeptical of the New York Times' ability to challenge the incoming U.S. president.

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Jim Lanzone, the CEO of CBS Interactive and chief digital officer of CBS, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the balance between free broadcast TV and paid online subscriptions. CBS has so far convinced more than a million people to pay $6 a month for its online service, CBS All Access. Lanzone says the company hopes to court even more subscribers with digital-only shows, including a spinoff of "The Good Wife" and a reboot of "Star Trek," which won't have to play by traditional FCC rules around nudity and swearing. He also makes the case for CBS' tech site CNET and discusses how he came to the company, via a digital TV guide site called Clicker.

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Bustle CEO Bryan Goldberg talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about launching a site aimed at millennial women — and why having a man at the top made a lot of people wary. Goldberg bragged a bit too aggressively and had to spend several months explaining his words, but says "apologizing is great." He also talks about how Bustle rose to 40 million monthly pageviews, why it doesn't care as much about Facebook video views and why he'd rather hire young women out of journalism school than media stars who will bring attention to themselves.

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Brew Media founder Brooke Hammerling talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how she created a PR firm for some of the biggest names in tech and why she sold it to Sigmund Freud's great-grandson. Hammerling has no plans to leave Brew, however. She says she prefers to work with clients who don't think of her company as hired help, but rather as part of the team. She recounts her experience being verbally attacked by a prominent male tech blogger, but says sexism today is even worse in Hollywood than it is in Silicon Valley.

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Defy Media President Keith Richman, who oversees popular YouTube channels Smosh, ScreenJunkies, Clevver and others, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl inspired him to get into web video. Richman says Defy's ability to hop on video platforms early and figure out what makes them tick has helped the company reach 70 million YouTube subscribers who watch 800 million videos per month. But the ad dollars are still better on TV, so Defy is thinking about how its shows might work there, too.

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BuzzFeed Entertainment Group president Ze Frank talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how his newly re-organized video team is developing shows for YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat — and also TVs and movie theaters. Frank says online videos are crossing borders and boundaries that text and still images couldn't penetrate, but he acknowledges that some bits of culture may be lost as entertainment goes global. He also shares the behind-the-scenes story of Tasty, BuzzFeed Food's viral video juggernaut, which has attracted more likes on Facebook than Beyoncé.

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Jon Favreau, former speechwriter for President Obama and the host of The Ringer's podcast "Keepin' It 1600," talks to Recode's Peter Kafka about how he got to the White House and why he can never totally quit politics. He predicts Hillary Clinton will win the presidency on Nov. 8 but explains why her speaking style is so much less conversational than Obama's. Favreau expects that Donald Trump will launch a new TV venture for his followers after the election, and says he supports the GOP's "never-Trumpers" because he fears that a smarter version of Trump will run in future campaigns.

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Kurt Andersen, co-founder of Spy magazine and host of WNYC and PRI's Studio 360, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about branding Donald Trump a "short-fingered vulgarian in the 1980s and how Trump has changed (or not) since then. Andersen says the real estate mogul flirted with running for president as early as 1987, but that over time, the fantasy became more and more real. He also discusses the organizations Spy influenced — including Gawker and "Last Week Tonight" — and why he now likens podcasting to the rise of public radio 40 years ago.

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Josh Tyrangiel, executive vice president for content and news at Vice, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the company's new weeknightly TV show, "Vice News Tonight" on HBO. To distance itself from traditional newscasts run for decades by the likes of CBS, ABC and NBC, Vice is doing away with a central news desk and news anchor, focusing instead on finding visual ways to tell stories that may get short shrift elsewhere. The big goal: Get millennials watching, which Tyrangiel says can be done so long as "Vice News Tonight" adds value to young people's lives.

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"The Closer" host and former ESPN and MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the 2016 presidential race and the rise of Donald Trump. Olbermann says Trump is not a totally new phenomenon, noting that political demagogues like Huey Long and Joe McCarthy lived before the era of cable TV. He also discusses his past jobs in cable news, the Netflix-influenced future of media and how he cured his addiction to arguing with Twitter trolls.

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Aminatou Sow, who co-hosts "Call Your Girlfriend" with Ann Friedman, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about why she started podcasting: A man said that "women don’t make podcasts." Sow explains how she and Friedman leveraged their network of media influencers, including "Girls" star Lena Dunham, to climb the iTunes charts, acknowledging that "we kind of cheated." She also discusses why she's through with San Francisco, the future of "Call Your Girlfriend" beyond podcasting and why she enjoys the fact that Snapchat makes her feel old.

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Skip Bayless, the co-host of Fox Sports 1's "Skip and Shannon: Undisputed," talks about his recent decision to leave ESPN after 12 years on the air for its smaller Rupert Murdoch-owned rival in Los Angeles. He tells Recode's Peter Kafka that he needed to get out of his comfort zone — and out of ESPN's hometown of Bristol, Connecticut. Bayless also discusses the ways Fox is different from Disney-owned ESPN, the unlikely way he got into sports journalism and why he doesn't pay attention to the internet, even though he has more than two million Twitter followers.

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Brian Stelter, host of "Reliable Sources" on CNN, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about being a cable news host during the historic 2016 presidential election. He argues that the media needs to re-evaluate how it treats politicians' lies, pointing to the differing treatment of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Although CNN gets good ratings from his controversial statements and recently hired Trump's former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Stelter says the network has not given the Republican candidate attention because it's good for business. Instead, he wonders why more presidential candidates couldn't learn from and emulate Trump's media savvy.

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True Ventures partner Om Malik talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his varied career in tech journalism, including the launch and eventual shutdown of his eponymous site Gigaom. Malik describes himself as a workaholic journalist, but a heart attack in 2007 forced him to reconsider his priorities. He also discusses the macro trends of the startup world, his first stint as a venture capitalist in the late 1990s and why Apple should buy Netflix.

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New York Times associate editor Sam Dolnick and assistant masthead editor Clifford Levy talk with Recode's Edmund Lee about how the 164-year-old newspaper is modernizing for the web. Levy reflects on the now-defunct NYT Now mobile app, which showed the Times's staff the value of collaboration among departments. The paper must learn to experiment and sometimes fail, the editors say, much like a tech company in Silicon Valley. Dolnick, one of the potential heirs to the paper as a member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family which owns it, shares the behind-the-scenes story of the NYT's first foray into virtual reality last year.

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Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how media entrepreneurship has evolved since he launched his first company, PaidContent, in 2002. Ali left PaidContent after an acquisition by the Guardian (that went nowhere) and launched Skift to write about the travel business for people who work in the travel business. Today, Skift is a profitable boutique company with 29 employees, and Ali explains why he's happy to keep it small and let it grow slowly.

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Elizabeth Spiers, the first person to write and edit Gawker.com, talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about launching the site in 2003, and reflects on how it has evolved since then. Now that Gawker Media has been sold to Univision for $135 million, many wonder how it might change, but Spiers says Gawker has already changed plenty over its history. She also discusses her stint working for Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and her new company, The Insurrection, an agency focusing on virtual reality content.

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James Andrew Miller, author of the new book "Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency," talks with Recode's Peter Kafka. Miller says the Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, transformed the entertainment business forever, led by the "yin and yang" personalities of Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer. He also talks about one of his previous books, an oral history of ESPN, and what really happened to ousted Grantland founder Bill Simmons.

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Genius co-founders Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman talk with Recode's Peter Kafka about how they and their business are maturing. Genius, which started as music-annotating service RapGenius, is now striking deals with major media companies to let users and brands insert factoids into content across the web. Zechory and Lehman discuss how they're trying to make Genius annotations omnipresent, and address allegations that their platform facilitates abuse.

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Virginia Heffernan, author of the new book "Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art," talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the physical things we risk losing as we digitize more and more of our lives. She praises Snapchat's "brilliance" for preserving impermanent media and talks about what happened when critics of an article about creationism threw her into the "Twitter coliseum." To cope with the social media onslaught, she came to imagine her Twitter handle, @page88, as a tougher, wittier persona who could take the abuse on her behalf.

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Investor and VaynerMedia co-founder Gary Vaynerchuk talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about how he parlayed early success on Google AdWords and YouTube into an agency that helps other brands succeed online. A social media celebrity in his own right, Vaynerchuk calls himself an "entrepreneur through and through" but says tech and media are riddled with phony entrepreneurs who are heading for an "armageddon." He laments today's rising startup valuations as a worrying sequel to the early-2000s dotcom crash.

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Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his podcast Trumpcast, which obsesses over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and his following. Weisberg says Trump will leave a big mark on American politics even if he loses to Hillary Clinton in November. He also discusses how Slate has changed since it launched as a digital magazine in 1996, what social networks it is and isn't using and why media companies should be wary of Facebook's growing power.

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"Zero Days" director Alex Gibney talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his new film's focus on the Stuxnet virus, which sabotaged the Iranian nuclear program. He compares Stuxnet's attack to the first nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and calls for countries to open a dialogue about cyberweapons. Gibney also discusses his other documentaries, including "Going Clear," "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room."

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