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(603)

Larry Ellison’s Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI’s Biggest Gamble

Larry Ellison bought his son a media empire. What does he want from it? Vanity Fair’s Tom Dotan joins me to talk about the billionaire behind Paramount and Warner Bros., his connection to TikTok, and ...

7 Okt 1h 1min

David Ellison's Paramount-Warner Empire & The Fight That Comes Next

David Ellison has won Warner Bros. Discovery. Now he has to figure out what, exactly, to do with it. LightShed analyst Rich Greenfield joins me to talk through the next version of the Paramount-Warne...

30 Sep 44min

Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI

I went to Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters to try Mark Zuckerberg’s newest face computer: a $1,300 pair of virtual-reality glasses that are much lighter and cheaper than Apple’s Vision Pro, and stil...

23 Sep 40min

AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?

AI companies have spent years telling us that we’ll be able to use them to go shopping for us, or book us airplane tickets, or get us awesome restaurant reservations. None of that ever materialized.Bu...

16 Sep 40min

The Atlantic’s CEO on AI, Billionaire Owners, and Moonlighting as a Creator

Nicholas Thompson runs one of the few media companies that can say things are going pretty well: The Atlantic is profitable, growing, and boasts 1.6 million subscribers.But that's today. What comes ne...

11 Sep 54min

Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the New Politics of Tech, with David Weigel

Not long ago, most Americans had never heard of data centers. Now most Americans are actively opposed to them.It’s a head-snapping change — one that is befuddling tech bosses, and forcing some politic...

2 Sep 53min

The Weird, Big Business of Microdramas

Microdramas are the new phone-first soap operas: stories chopped into dozens of one-minute episodes: Low-budget productions filled with romance, werewolves, secret babies, and cliffhangers—and, eventu...

26 Aug 48min

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