Channels with Peter Kafka

The Rebooting's Brian Morrissey joins me from Cannes, where OpenAI is pitching advertisers, creators are becoming media brands, and thousands of people are still flying across the Atlantic to meet with people they could see back home. We talk about what's changed in advertising, what's changed in media, and why Cannes keeps getting bigger. We also get into why the ad industry's biggest gathering feels increasingly disconnected from the ads themselves; why CMOs are the real celebrities of Cannes; how creators like Emily Sundberg fit into the modern marketing ecosystem; and whether AI is actually transforming advertising—or just giving everyone a new buzzword to put on a slide deck. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today’s show is about money, and how to make it in entertainment. The streaming boom made Hollywood feel like it had solved its money problem: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney and everyone else wanted endless stuff. Top talent got paid, and so did everyone else. That boom is over, and now the industry is consolidating. And at the same time, lots of artifacts of old Hollywood that could generate a lot of money for some people — like syndication payouts in TV or backend deals for movies — don’t really exist in a world dominated by streamers. So how do actors, writers, directors, producers and creators make money in 2026? Peter Micelli, CEO of Range Media Partners, makes his money by representing talent like Bradley Cooper, Tom Hardy and Halle Berry. He’s been arguing for a while that stars shouldn’t just wait for work, but should be out there turning themselves into businesses. That certainly won’t work for everyone, but I think if you squint you can see a new economy starting up — especially for creatives who have meaningful followings online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brian Stelter and Nilay Patel are both covering big, powerful institutions that are undergoing real change, whether they like it or not. Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, joins me to talk about the mess at CBS News and 60 Minutes: What is Bari Weiss’s rationale for trying to remake Paramount’s news operations? And does owner David Ellison care about the very inevitable stumbles that have followed since she showed up? We talk about Scott Pelley’s public exit interview, what 60 Minutes might look like next fall, and why this has morphed from a media industry story to one normal people seem to care about. Also discussed: The fact that Stelter could end up working for Weiss in the near future. Then Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, joins from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple tried to convince everyone that it has an AI plan — and why that plan is different and better than the one it promised in 2024 and never delivered. A new Siri — if it works as advertised — sounds great. But what’s really important for Apple's AI strategy, Patel argues, is prepping for a future where the iPhone gets displaced by… something. Also discussed: The fact that Vox Media, the company that owns both The Verge and the podcast network you’re listening to right now, are about to split up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dhar Mann’s videos look simple, because they are simple: Someone acts badly, someone learns a lesson, everyone gets a moral by the end. You don’t have to be a kid to enjoy these, but it helps.The business behind them is complex. Mann has built a scripted-video studio that turns out TV-length episodes in weeks, generating billions of views a month. Now he tells me he’s expanding beyond YouTube and Facebook into places like Samsung TVs and Fox-backed microdramas, and he thinks the assembly line he’s built will work, there, too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I think of Dow Jones as The Wall Street Journal, because that’s the part I know — and the part I used to work near/around/inside. But Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour has built a much bigger business around the Journal: risk and compliance, energy data, Factiva, AI deals, and other stuff that sounds boring until you realize how much money companies will pay for it. So I asked Latour to explain why Dow Jones is doing well while so many other media companies are struggling, howEmma Tucker, the Wall Street Journal's editor-in-chief, is changing the Journal, what he’s trying to do with AI, and what it’s like to run a Murdoch-owned newsroom that covers Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jim Bankoff has spent nearly 20 years building Vox Media. Now he’s selling a big chunk of it to James Murdoch, who is acquiring Vox Media's Podcast Network - the same one that produces this podcast - along with New York Magazine and Vox.com. We do all the disclosures at the top of this interview, but let’s do it all here too: I’ve worked for Jim for a long time, and I work with the podcast network he’s selling, and I just like him as a human. So this one’s way more conflicted than a standard Channels chat.Still, I have some straight-ahead questions for him. Like: What does it mean when multiple buyers were interested in his podcast business, but much less interested in the rest of the portfolio he’s been assembling for years? What changes for the properties Murdoch acquires? And why is Jim staying on to work for Murdoch, when he can almost certainly do something else? And, because it’s Channels, we also gaze backwards a bit, and poke at some of the steps and missteps Vox Media took along the way. But if you’re looking for a wake for a digital media startup, this isn’t it. Jim is very optimistic about what comes next, and I have a vested interest in him being right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Versant is the new company Comcast created when it spun off CNBC, MS NOW, USA and other cable networks it no longer wanted inside the mothership. That makes Mark Lazarus’ job pretty simple to describe and very hard to do: take a business built around cable TV — an industry in obvious decline — and use the cash it still generates to build new businesses.I talked to Lazarus on the day Versant reported its first real earnings as a standalone company — and the day its stock bounced after getting hammered out of the gate. He says the early selloff was predictable; that Comcast didn’t “ditch” Versant; and that independence gives him the chance to invest in assets instead of kicking the cash up to the bosses in Philadelphia.We talked about what Versant is supposed to become, whether MSNBC -- now MS NOW -- can build a Fox Nation-style subscription business; why CNBC is getting into investor tools; how long NBCUniversal will keep selling Versant’s ads; what kinds of companies Lazarus wants to buy; and why he’s not buying the Vox Media Podcast Network yours truly works with.The bottom line: Lazarus says he needs about three years to prove this works. Let’s see if Wall Street is that patient. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Roger Lynch has spent the last seven years trying to turn Condé Nast from a magazine company into a profitable portfolio of global brands. Now he has a new set of problems: Google traffic is disappearing, AI companies want to use Condé’s work, and everyone in media is trying to figure out who still has leverage. I talked to Lynch about the end of Google search traffic, why Condé is doing deals with OpenAI and other AI companies, and how the company thinks about the Met Gala, independent creators, and The Devil Wears Prada 2. And if you're looking for news about who succeeds legendary editors Anna Wintour and David Remnick: Lynch says he has a plan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The internet is in its let-it-rip era: more AI slop, more video, more clips — and very little in the way of guardrails or rules. Charlie Warzel, who writes and hosts Galaxy Brain for The Atlantic, joins me to talk about what happens when the platforms stop trying very hard to separate the good stuff from the garbage. Do we actually care if a human made the LinkedIn post, the marketing copy, or the video in our feed? Or do we only care when the slop gets in the way? Then we get into the video-everything moment: Why every podcast is becoming a video podcast, why clips may matter more than the shows they come from, and what Charlie has learned from becoming a video person — as I mentioned, he has a podcast now — after years of writing about video people. That leads to a bigger media question: what can old-school media companies learn from creators, Substackers, and YouTubers — and what do they usually misunderstand when they try to hire or absorb them? Charlie has been one of my trusted guides to internet culture for years. I highly recommend starting your own podcast so you can invite him on to talk to you directly. And in the meantime, enjoy this one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Then the computers went and learned to code. Now anyone can do it, in theory, courtesy of Claude Code and other vibe coding apps.Tech people I talk to are very, very excited about this. But they often have a hard time explaining to me, a non-coder, why AI-powered coding is such a big deal. And whether it’s a big deal to everyone who already codes or deals with software for a living — or whether it’s a big deal for everyone who uses software. All of us, that is.Here to the rescue is Paul Ford, a guy who learned to code and who also learned to write and talk, like a human. Paul is the guy who wrote an entire issue of Businessweek dedicated to a single question — What is Code? — and blogs at Ftrain.com; but his day job is making software, which he does at Aboard.Paul is not the guy who can tell you what’s going to happen to Saas stocks, or if AI is going to wipe out all the jobs, some jobs or will create a gazillion new jobs. Anyone who tells you any of those answers with confidence, he says, is making it up.But he can tell you and me why the recent change in AI-produced software — something that really kicked in over the last few months — is changing his life, and why it’s going to change software for good. And he’ll help you think about what that means for you, a normal person. You’ll like this one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Blum built one of Hollywood’s smartest businesses: make low-budget horror movies, give filmmakers room, pay talent on the back end, and let the hits carry the misses. It worked so well that it became a Harvard Business Review case study.But the movie business that made that model work has changed: Theatrical is weaker, lots of people are making horror movies, studios are consolidating, and AI is the latest thing Hollywood is supposed to fear — or embrace.So I sat down with Blum at a live Business Insider event in San Francisco to ask what still works. We talked about why his new Mummy movie is a very different bet than the movies that built Blumhouse, why he thinks consolidation is bad for Hollywood even if new buyers like Amazon and Apple help offset it, why he’d make AI disappear from moviemaking if he could — while still insisting his team learn how to use it — and what he learns from flops. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sam Altman has spent years presenting himself as the face of AI: The guy warning that the technology could change everything, and the guy insisting that he should be the one to build it. Now we are facing some overdue questions: Can we trust Sam Altman with the massive power AI may generate? And should we trust anyone with that power? Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz join me to talk about their New Yorker profile of the OpenAI CEO, the internal fights around OpenAI’s mission, and why so many people who’ve worked with Altman keep coming back to the same concerns about trust. We talk about Altman’s talent for telling different audiences different things; why Silicon Valley’s usual tolerance for founder myth-making looks different when the product is AI; and how OpenAI went from warning about dangerous race dynamics to helping kick one off with ChatGPT. Then we broaden out: if the real problem is structural, not just personal, what kind of oversight should exist for the people building a technology they say could reshape all of our lives? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jonathan Glatzer has written for shows like Succession and Better Call Saul. Now he’s got his own: The Audacity, a new AMC drama set in Silicon Valley.So why make a Silicon Valley show right now — and what, exactly, is he trying to say about tech? Glatzer tells me he wasn’t interested in making a wall-to-wall “tech show,” or in doing spot-the-billionaire satire. Instead, he says, he wanted to focus on the people living inside that world: the strivers, service providers, almost-rich neighbors, therapists, and families orbiting vast amounts of money and power. We talk about why privacy and data collection still worry him more than AI hype; why he thinks tech has failed to deliver on many of its biggest promises; and why he’s more interested in the human consequences of Silicon Valley than in explaining how the industry works. Plus: what it means to make a prestige-style TV drama in a post-Peak TV market, why AMC was willing to take a swing on this one, and how you fake Silicon Valley by shooting in Vancouver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon Musk has spent the last year being quieter than usual — by Elon Musk standards.That may be about to change in a very big way, as his SpaceX moves toward what could be one of the biggest IPOs in history. So what, exactly, is Musk selling? A rocket company? A satellite internet giant? An AI play? Or just the latest, biggest version of Elon himself?Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin, who has been tracking Musk for a couple of decades, joins me to walk through what Musk has actually been up to lately. We talk about what SpaceX is now that it includes multiple businesses under one roof; why Musk might want to take it public after years of insisting he didn’t; and how much of the pitch is grounded in real operating businesses — rockets! Satellite internet! — versus the familiar promise of something much vaguer and hard to assess.Then we broaden out: Tesla’s drift from car company to AI-and-robotics story, whether X is still a business or simply a political and cultural weapon, and what changed after Musk’s break with Trump. The bigger question underneath all of it: has Musk built a coherent empire — or just a very effective machine for turning hype, power, and celebrity into capital? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prediction markets are suddenly everywhere: in sports, in politics, in the media business — and, depending on who you ask, they’re either a useful forecasting tool or just gambling with better branding. So what changed? And why is the federal government sounding more like a booster than a regulator? WIRED’s Kate Knibbs joins me to explain why she made prediction markets her beat, how Kalshi and Polymarket went mainstream, why Trump-world is so friendly to them, why some states are trying to stop them, and what happens when more and more of public life gets turned into a bet. We also talk about media companies cutting deals with prediction-market firms, the blurry rules around insider trading, and why this story is really about the casino-fication of everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lots of publishers are freaked out about “Google Zero” — the notion that one day, Google will stop sending them any traffic at all. That’s more or less already happened at People Inc., says CEO Neil Vogel. Vogel says Google used to account for 70% of his properties’ traffic, but dropped off quickly in the last couple years. Now Google represents about 25% of his mix. That decline is supposed to be an existential problem for people like Vogel, who built a series of sites designed to harvest search traffic. Instead, he’s growing at a double-digit clip. One reason People Inc. is doing well is that Vogel, backed by Barry Diller’s IAC, bought People, along with all the other titles owned by magazine publisher Meredith back in 2021. Turns out many of those brands still mean something to lots of people. Meanwhile, Vogel has been happy to sign deals with AI companies like OpenAI. Isn’t there a chance those companies will end up being unreliable partners, just like platforms of the past? Sure, Vogel says. But he’s willing to take the chance — and the money those AI companies are providing — and figure it out as he goes. “There is a chance we are a hundred percent wrong on all of this,” he tells me. “There's a chance that we're a hundred percent right. The truth is probably somewhere in between.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oscar season is supposed to be Hollywood’s lap. It is also, increasingly, a reminder of how shaky things are in Hollywood right now. And this one comes as one of the town’s most prominent players is about to be swallowed by a new mogul, backed by tech money. Here to unpack all of it is Puck’s Matt Belloni, who explains why we may never see an Oscars like this again; how the show will — or won’t — change when it migrates to YouTube in a couple years; how the movie business thinks about the upcoming Paramount/WBD deal; and some 100% not guaranteed betting advice for Sunday night’s show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The World Cup is coming to the U.S (and Canada, and Mexico) in less than 100 days. Perhaps you’re an American who doesn’t care about soccer, and has given this news zero thought. That won’t be an option when the games arrive, says Roger Bennett. The CEO of the Men in Blazers podcast network — and author of “We Are the World (Cup)”, a personal history of the tournament — tells me this won’t be like anything we’ve seen here; even for old timers like me, who can remember the 1994 edition, which the U.S. also hosted. This time around, Roger predicts, we are going to feel the “global eclipse” of attention the games generate, and will be astonished when places like Kansas City and Seattle turn into temporary versions of Argentina and the Netherlands. Even if you don’t watch a single second of a single game, you won’t be able to ignore it. The other thing you won’t be able to ignore: The fact that America is hosting the world at the same time it is telling much of the world to pound sand. What happens if/when “America First” politics, visas, and Homeland Security become part of the tournament’s story? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netflix shocked the world last year by winning a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. This week it shocked us by walking away.In this emergency bonus episode, CNBC’s Alex Sherman walks us through the whiplash: Why Netflix chose not to counter Paramount, what the market blowback signaled, and how much of this was about price versus the very real prospect of a long, ugly regulatory and political slog.Then we spin it forward: what a Paramount/WBD mash-up means in practice (translation: overlap, “synergies,” and a lot of job anxiety)? What happens to crown-jewel assets like HBO and CNN? And why this isn’t just another media merger, but a power shift. We don’t really know what David and Larry Ellison have planned for their newly acquired media empire — but we do know that they are now very big players. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brian Stelter puts its clearly: "All M&A runs through the Oval Office right now.” So how much does Trump matter in the Netflix/Paramount battle for Warner Bros. Discovery — and what does he want out of it? Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst and author of the newsletter Reliable Sources, walks us through the information vacuum around the deal, Trump’s habit of inserting himself as a would-be kingmaker, and the harder-to-prove question haunting every newsroom: not just what Trump says out loud, but what companies do (or don’t do) because they’re afraid to become his next target. Then we broaden out: Brendan Carr’s FCC and broadcast pressure, the Nexstar/TEGNA fight, and what’s going on in Murdochland when Trump can sue the Wall Street Journal and still break bread with Rupert Murdoch. Plus: the state of CNN — and what it’s like to work at a network that may have a new owner sooner than later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices