Channels with Peter Kafka9 Okt 2024

Behind the scenes of the Trump movie you almost never saw

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 — and which almost never got released in the U.S. As Sherman tells us, this is a movie that’s a sort of Trump creation myth, centering around his relationship with Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer/fixer. It’s not an anti-Trump movie in the vein of “Vice”, but it’s also not a flattering story. That makes it hard to understand why Trump-backer Dan Snyder initially backed the production — but less hard to understand why Snyder reportedly wanted to block it once he’d seen it. Sherman walks us through the whole backstory, which is wild even by Hollywood’s standards. And then we switch gears completely, to talk about the surprisingly troubled state of the video game business, with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. I’m used to seeing conventional media industries struggle in the face of digital disruption — but one of the reasons they are usually struggling is the rise of video games. Yet that industry is undergoing multiple years of brutal layoffs and consolidation. Schreier, whose new book “Play Nice” follows the twisted path of legendary games studio Blizzard Entertainment, tells us how the industry got itself into trouble, and whether it can play its way out of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Episoder(596)

The $12.5 Billion Lakers, the NFL’s TV Fight, and Sports Media’s Big Split

Sports teams keep selling for more money because, in theory, their media rights keep becoming more valuable. But the companies that actually pay for sports TV are starting to push back. John Ourand o...

19 Aug 42min

Joanna Stern on the New Siri, OpenAI’s Weird Gadget, and Life After the Wall Street Journal

Joanna Stern spent more than a decade explaining technology to Wall Street Journal readers. Now she’s doing it on her own — with a new media company, New Things, and a new book, I Am Not a Robot, abou...

12 Aug 48min

Oliver Darcy on Status, Bari Weiss, and Why Media Reporters Are Too Soft

Two years ago, Oliver Darcy left CNN and launched Status, a paid newsletter focused on the media business. The basic bet was that readers would pay for the scoops and insider reporting he had been pro...

5 Aug 52min

Lucas Shaw on Warner Bros' Limbo, Netflix's Anxiety, and Hollywood’s Sort-of Comeback

When I last talked to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, Netflix was buying Warner Bros. Discovery. Six months later, Paramount has the deal — but, surprisingly, it’s on hold while a group of states tries to blo...

29 Jul 44min

Substack Wants To Become A Social Network; Beehiiv Wants To Stay Invisible

You are a normal person, so if you think about “people writing their own newsletters” you probably think: “Substack”. But just as Xerox isn’t the only way to make photocopies, Substack doesn’t own th...

22 Jul 42min

Inside Podcasting’s Fight Over Netflix, YouTube, and Creator Control

Chris Balfe is the CEO of Red Seat Ventures, the company behind some of the biggest names in podcasting, including Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and, more recently, Kill Tony. Since we l...

15 Jul 45min

"We’re in a Race Against Time," Joe Kahn on Running the New York Times in the Age of AI Slop

Joe Kahn runs the New York Times newsroom, which means he runs the most powerful news operation in the world. He joins me to talk about what that power is for — and why he thinks the Times’ next big t...

8 Jul 1h 4min

Encore: Inside Joe Weisenthal's brain

We originally published this interview with Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal on Feb. 11, 2026, and it's one of my favorite chats of the year. We'll be back with a new conversation on July 8. If Joe Weisent...

1 Jul 58min