Land of The Giants Season Three Begins -- The Google Empire

Land Of The Giants podcast, a collaboration between Vox Media and Recode, examines 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 commerce correspondent Jason Del Rey traced how Jeff Bezos transformed Amazon from an online bookseller to one of the largest companies in the world, and what that means for how we shop, work, and live.

From Prime and HQ2, to the growing adoption of smart speakers and home cameras, to increasing scrutiny of Amazon's power and its role in the changing nature of work, Land of the Giants: The Rise of Amazon, addressed it all with detailed, thought-provoking, measured reporting from host Jason Del Rey. Season one ran from July 2019 until November 2019.

 Season two tackled the streaming giant Netflix. In that season – The Netflix Effect -- which began in late June 2020, hosts Peter Kafka and Rani Molla examined how Netflix got where it is today and whether it can maintain its streaming supremacy. 

During season two, listeners heard from Netflix’s founders and top executives as well as its competitors, critics, and more — covering everything from its unusual internal culture to its battle with Blockbuster, its disruption of Hollywood, and the upcoming streaming wars.

Now comes season three.

In Land of the Giants: The Google Empire, Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary and former Buzzfeed senior tech reporter Alex Kantrowitz explore how a company that began with idealistic goals of creative experimentation and making useful products has evolved into a worldwide power with enormous impact on the way we live. 

Google's dominance in everything from search and online advertising to YouTube and Android gives it tremendous power and responsibility. But with multiple antitrust cases against it and its own employees rebelling against company decisions, is Google too big for its own good?

Season three co-host Shirin Ghaffary is a reporter for Recode. Prior to that, she worked for BuzzFeed News and Elementum, an enterprise software startup, and interned for the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Shirin was raised in Silicon Valley next door to Apple headquarters, and attended UC Berkeley where she was executive news editor of the Daily Californian, the university paper.

Season three co-host Alex Kantrowitz is the founder of Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. His book Always Day One: How The Tech Titans Plan To Stay On Top Forever debuted in April 2020. His work has been referenced by dozens of major publications, from The New Yorker to The Wall Street Journal to Sports Illustrated. Kantrowitz is a graduate of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.






In the last few years, we’ve all discovered that enormous tech companies often decide how we communicate, how we interact with the world around us, how we think about the world and what we watch on our video devices.

The Land Of The Giants podcast investigates companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, and others and explores their creation and creators, translates their unique culture for listeners and then evaluates how these giants impact us – sometimes to make our lives better and at times to make our lives more complicated.

Orchestrated in a command performance by co-hosts Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary and former Buzzfeed senior tech reporter Alex Kantrowitz, Land Of The Giants treats listeners to the hidden levers and buttons that transform Google distinctive corporate culture into a successful media and tech leviathan.