Channels with Peter Kafka7 Mai 2025

Ian Rogers tells me I need a crypto wallet

I wanted to talk to Ian Rogers about his fascinating career. He wanted to talk to me about Ledger, the crypto wallet company he’s working at now. So we did both things. Background: Rogers was an important figure in the digital music business, back when the music business was being fundamentally reshaped by digital. He helped the Beastie Boys get on the internet, long before every band did that. Then he helped bring digital music to millions of people in the MP3 era - first at AOL, then Yahoo — and then in the streaming era — first at Beats, and then Apple Music. Then he did digital stuff at LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate. Now he’s chief experience officer at Ledger, a French company that has sold 7 million physical storage devices for crypto. I remain confused and skeptical about crypto, but I’m always open to hearing from folks who are passionate about it — to see if they can convince me that I’m missing something. And the most persuasive argument I hear is usually from folks like Rogers — people who were around when the internet was novel and exciting in the 90s, and think they’re seeing the same kind of tectonic shift this time around. It’s a pitch that’s part FOMO — you wouldn’t want to be one of the people who thought the internet was a fad in 1995, right? — and part blue-sky optimism: What if it was 1995 and you could get in on the ground floor of the internet? Take a listen and let me know what you think. Help us plan for the future of Channels by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Episoder(586)

Brian Stelter on the 60 Minutes Mess; Nilay Patel on Apple’s AI Problem

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...

10 Jun 1h 6min

How Dhar Mann Turned After-School Specials Into A Billion-View Business

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 busi...

3 Jun 37min

Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour Explains Why Boring Data Is a Great Media Business

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...

27 Mai 46min

Vox Media's Jim Bankoff Explains Why He's Selling to James Murdoch

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 - ...

20 Mai 28min

Versant CEO Mark Lazarus is Running a Post-Cable Cable Company

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...

20 Mai 40min

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala and His Secret Succession Plan

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 disappear...

13 Mai 53min

The Internet’s Let-It-Rip Era, With The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel

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, jo...

6 Mai 1h 4min

AI Can Make Software Now. That Changes Everything, with Paul Ford

Learn to code, they told us. 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 exc...

29 Apr 53min