Land of the Giants
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Disney is a Tech Company?
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Streaming didn’t just change the way consumers watched movies and TV shows, it reconfigured how media giants operated, and how they saw themselves. ...
Disney is Bob Iger's Company
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Walt Disney Company has been led by eight different men in its century of existence. But few would object to the idea that only three have really ...
Disney is a Cinematic Universe Company
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Marvel and Star Wars are the crown jewels of Disney’s empire. They’re the highest-grossing movie franchises in history, with devoted fan bases and...
Disney is an Animation Company
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Disney’s soul is arguably its animation studio, which has a 100-year track record of creating iconic characters and stories, and a distinct brand ce...
Disney is a Theme Parks Company
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
These days the Walt Disney Company is mostly a theme parks company. About 70 percent of its operating income comes from its parks and other experience...
Disney is a TV Company
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When you think about Disney, your first thought isn’t “cable television giant.” But Disney’s broadcast and cable television holdings, especial...
The Disney Dilemma
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past 100 years, the Walt Disney Company has grown from a small animation studio to become one of the largest companies in the world, with an ...
Elon Saves Humanity
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In October 2022, Elon Musk made the world’s most expensive impulse purchase. His reasons for buying Twitter were murky at best, but in the story he ...
Havoc On the Platform, and Off
08 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Twitter employees had always imagined the platform would be used for social good. Their idea was that free expression on the internet would lead to go...
A Million Different Twitters
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Twitter was created by its users, who invented features like the retweet and hashtag. These features helped create vibrant communities like Black Twit...
What We All Got Wrong About Twitter
25 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Twitter began life as an accident. In the beginning, even its founders weren’t sure what it was: the internet’s town square, a real-time informati...
The Twitter Fantasy
17 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A year ago, in what was essentially the world’s most expensive impulse purchase, Elon Musk bought Twitter. That made him Twitter’s most important ...
The Global Race for EV Adoption
30 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tesla has spurred the EV revolution around the world, most notably in China. So why is the US so far behind on EV adoption, when it's the birthplace o...
The Self-Driving Experiment
23 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Seven years ago, Elon Musk stood on stage and said he “would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem.” He also said Teslas co...
The Human Cost of Ultra Hardcore
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have ever experienced before,” Elon Musk once wrote in...
Tesla vs. The Competition
09 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago Tesla owned roughly 80% of the EV market. But now, the company’s share is down to 60%. And some projections whittle it down even fur...
How Tesla Became the Elon Musk Co.
02 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Not many people can name the original founders of Tesla. So how did two guys who wanted to build an electric car create a company synonymous with Elon...
The Electric Car Goes Mainstream
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before Teslas were everywhere, they were playthings for the rich and famous. Building its first affordable car made Tesla a breakout success, but it n...
‘The Tesla Shock Wave’ Has Arrived
19 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
About a decade ago, Tesla did something extraordinary: it started making electric cars people actually wanted to drive. They were fast. They were high...
AI to IRL: The Future of Dating
15 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Looking ahead, where is dating headed? Is it leaning into artificial intelligence or dating chat bots? Or is it unplugging and trying to meet people t...
Can Niche Dating Apps Save Us?
08 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the wide world of niche dating apps. There's an app for almost every group -- Muslims, vegans, the kink community, cat lovers, farmers, roc...
Bumble, the Girlboss of Dating Apps
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bumble is the second most downloaded dating app in the U.S., behind Tinder. Dubbed the "feminist dating app," the "anti-Tinder" was designed to make d...
The Secret Algorithms That Control Your Love Life
25 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dating app execs don’t like to explain how their matchmaking algorithms work– they’ll claim it’s too hard to explain, or that they just can’...
The Hidden Hand Behind Your Swipes
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, The League. If you’ve ever wondered why using these different dating apps feels similar, it may be because they’re all own...
Tinder Changed the Game
11 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When Tinder launched in 2012, it changed dating culture and our expectations around dating forever by leveraging the iPhone and gamifying the dating e...
Dating Games
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This season, The Verge and New York Magazine's The Cut trace the evolution of the multi-billion dollar dating app industry. Through conversations with...
Zuckerberg's Biggest Bet
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for the future -- that in a few years, we’ll be living our digital lives in a blend of augmented and virtual reality. T...
It's A WhatsApp World
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Meta’s most expensive acquisition ever and one of the most used communication apps in the world: WhatsApp. With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is em...
Facebook's Plan To Be Cool Again
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Facebook defined an era of social media built on our connections, our social lives. We’re watching that era come to a close. Now, your main feeds of...
The Facebook Election
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Facebook used to brag about how its tools helped politicians swing elections. Now, the platform’s relationship to politics is much more complicated....
Why Instagram Broke Its Square
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram in 2012, he promised he would be hands-off with the company’s curated aesthetic and simple features. But as Fa...
Don't Be Afraid To Break Things
20 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If our first episode brought you into the beginning of Zuckerberg’s vision for connecting at scale, this story is about the consequences of pursuing...
"Facebook Gets A Facelift"
13 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Long before Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and made an unprecedented pivot into the metaverse, he invented a feature that turned Facebook into ...
The Facebook / Meta Disruption
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption explores how the social media juggernaut has arrived at this unprecedented moment of transition. Se...
One App Store to Rule Them All
27 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Apple has always maintained it knows what’s best for its customers. But now governments and developers are trying to change the way Apple runs its h...
Apple Saved Music. Why Not TV?
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Back in the early 2000s, file sharing services like Napster devastated the music industry. Steve Jobs threw it a lifeline with the iTunes Store, offer...
Apple's China Problem
13 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Much of Apple’s success is built around its relationship with China, which is both one of Apple’s largest markets as well as where most of its pro...
"He's No Steve Jobs"
06 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple and infused it with his love of product design and attention to detail. His successor, Tim Cook, is widely perceived as la...
How Apple Got Its Groove Back
29 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1997 Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy and falling far behind its biggest competitor, Microsoft. But that all changed when Apple started buildin...
This Changes Everything
22 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2007 Steve Jobs took the stage and introduced something that would change our lives forever -- a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutiona...
'The Apple Revolution' is here
15 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
From its beginnings as a niche personal computer company, Apple became the preeminent maker of consumer tech products, a cultural trendsetter, and the...
The Virtual Future of Restaurants
13 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There's a secret world of restaurants that you can only find when you open up the delivery apps. This brave new world of ghost kitchens and virtual br...
Who's Driving Whom?
06 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Without delivery workers, there is no DoorDash or UberEats or Grubhub. And workers in this slice of the gig economy get access to a level of flexibili...
The Race for Your Dollars
29 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The restaurant delivery industry is worth more than $100 billion. But none of the major apps are profitable. In this episode, the key battles that ha...
The Cost of Convenience
22 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Restaurant delivery apps have made it possible for many of us to order pretty much anything we want to eat with the click of a button. And during the ...
Delivery Wars
15 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Big tech is changing every aspect of our world. But how? And at what cost? In this special four-part series, Recode teams up with Eater to unbox the e...
Should We Break Up Google?
30 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Google is now facing antitrust scrutiny at a level it's never experienced before, from both sides of the political aisle. Which means we’re in an un...
Googlers vs. Google
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On December 2nd, 2020, Dr. Timnit Gebru - co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team - got an email that said Google had accepted her resignation. A resign...
A Military Contract Tests Google's Open Culture
16 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of Google’s long points of pride was its open, collaborative, and transparent company culture. But many Googlers feel like that's slipping away....
The Moonshot Factory
09 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Since they were Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have had big ideas for technologies that could change the world. Only now, they ha...
Planet YouTube
02 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Google bought YouTube, it went from being a company that helps users search the Internet, to a company that shapes the Internet itself. With 2 bi...
Chrome and the Android Wars
23 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today, nearly all of the world's smartphones are powered by Android. Which means Google is the gatekeeper to the Internet for billions of people. The ...
The Search Begins
16 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Some of the core values that built Google's runaway success — innovative technology to the max, an intellectually playful and open culture, and a co...
The Google Empire
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Land of the Giants: The Google Empire, Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary and Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz explore how a company that began with ideali...
World War Stream
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The "streaming wars" are here, but they're not what you think—or rather, where you think. While competitors are duking it out in the US, Netflix wa...
Money to burn; why Wall Street loves NFLX
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Netflix owes around $15 billion, yet it continues to spend money billions each year to fund its original programming. Is this a brilliant move to set ...
Netflix is Hollywood | Part 2
21 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Netflix hasn’t just disrupted Hollywood, it has become Hollywood. How has that changed the lives of studio executives, movie producers and creators ...
Netflix vs. Hollywood | Part 1
14 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Loaning out shows and movies to Netflix used to be a great way for studios to make a little money on the side, until they realized they were training ...
Did the algorithm make you watch Tiger King?
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Netflix’s recommendation algorithm is supposed to find you TV and movies that you’ll like — and that will keep you paying for Netflix. But is N...
Who really killed Blockbuster Video?
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Netflix killed our trips to the video store and ushered in the streaming era. But when Netflix started out, it was a fraction of the size of Blockbust...
“Netflix is a team, not a family”
23 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Is working on a team of all-stars, excellent pay, and unlimited vacation worth the stress of constant criticism from co-workers and the knowledge that...
The Netflix Effect
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect, Recode’s Peter Kafka and Rani Molla examine how Netflix got where it is today and whether or not it can m...
Amazon's Middlewomen
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Why do so many Amazon packages take a pitstop in the small town of Roundup, Montana? Find out in this episode of Reset, the new tech podcast from Rec...
'I love Amazon. Let’s break it up'
12 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the final episode of our season on Amazon, NYU professor and “Pivot” podcast co-host Scott Galloway tells Jason Del Rey that Amazon needs to be...
Is Amazon Too Big? We Ask Its Sellers
27 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Small businesses and major brands alike rely on Amazon but are increasingly ambivalent about selling on the platform. The Amazon Marketplace is a batt...
How Amazon Charmed Wall Street
20 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When Amazon became a publicly traded company in 1997, it was losing money. And it wouldn’t turn a profit for years. So how did it convince Wall St...
Why the Robot Revolution is Our Fault
13 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years Amazon has quietly become one of the leaders in automation, reshaping its workforce of nearly 600,000 workers, and the way humans work...
When Amazon Leaves Your Town
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1999, Amazon opened one of its first warehouses in the small town of Coffeyville, Kansas. Fifteen years later, it closed. We visit Coffeyville to l...
Alexa, What's Amazon Doing Inside My Home?
30 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant can tell you the weather, operate home appliances, and video chat family members. Alexa aims to be the centerpiece of...
Why You’ll Never Quit Amazon Prime
23 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
With over 100 million members, Prime is the engine that’s made Amazon a retailing juggernaut and one of the largest companies in the world. Jason De...
The Rise of Amazon
22 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Examine how the biggest tech companies rose to power, and what they're doing with that power. In season one, The Rise of Amazon, Recode's senior comme...