Foundering

Before Mrs. Maisel was marvelous and Jack Ryan saved the world, Jeff Bezos was convinced that the internet would change how people watched TV shows and movies. His response to the opportunity was called Prime Video –a seemingly prescient bet to bring a selection of video programming into the bundle of perks for Prime members. Reporter Brad Stone tells the story of Amazon’s bumpy road into Hollywood.

After an early taste of success, the company navigated a public relations crisis around allegations of inappropriate behavior targeted at studio boss Roy Price. And then Bezos got his first significant brush with celebrity culture, sparking a personal reinvention that would have major consequences for the company and his own muted personal life.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One day in 2011, a small team of Boston-based AI scientists got an unexpected call: Amazon wanted to buy their company. Its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, was leading a secret team to develop a unique device, a voice-activated computer that could recognize and respond to user questions from across a noisy room. The world would soon know the device as the Amazon Echo, and its virtual personality as Alexa. Brad Stone tells the Alexa story and sizes up its impact on culture, and conventional notions of privacy. He also tracks down the actress who Amazon got to perform the voice that’s now in millions of homes worldwide.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today Amazon is an inescapable juggernaut. Back in 1994, it was just an idea, pitched by a former Wall Street banker named Jeff Bezos to disbelieving investors at the very birth of the internet era. Reporter Brad Stone, who has spent years chronicling the Amazon story, describes how the company almost flamed out the dot.bomb era and how Bezos rescued the company in part by ginning up two new lines of business – Prime shipping and its digital reader, the Kindle.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This season of Foundering reexamines a foundational story of the internet age: the rise of Amazon and its ingenious founder Jeff Bezos. Over the last 20 years, Amazon has changed the way we shop, what we watch on TV, how we interact with our devices and how businesses consume computing resources. But is Amazon now too powerful—and unaccountable? And how did Bezos, once widely admired, turn into a controversial figure of unfathomable wealth, whose personal pursuits are avidly covered by the tabloids? Following his best-selling book “Amazon Unbound,” Brad Stone continues his exploration of Amazon and its founder, presenting an unvarnished picture of a company that spans the globe and touches nearly every aspect of our lives—for better or worse.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Breakthrough, a new series from the Prognosis podcast, we explore how the pandemic is changing our understanding of healthcare and medicine. We start with an examination of long Covid, a mysterious new illness that has stumped doctors attempting to treat symptoms that last for months and potentially years. It has changed the way hospitals work and forced healthcare officials to prepare for the next pandemic. Covid has also opened the door to revolutionary technology: messenger RNA vaccines. It’s a technology that never could have been proven so quickly outside the crucible of that first pandemic year, 2020, and it holds big implications for the future of medicine. Breakthrough launches on Oct. 19. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the summer of 2020, amid a pandemic, historic unemployment and racial unrest, President Donald Trump developed a bizarre obsession with TikTok. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo and her colleagues take you aboard Air Force One and into the surreal tit-for-tat fight between TikTok and one of the most powerful men in the world.

Updated May 27, 2021 to reflect ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming's decision to step down.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After Donald Trump is elected president, tensions between the United States and China escalate. Several American politicians, security experts and even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg turn their attention toward TikTok. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo looks into the fundamental question facing TikTok: What user data does TikTok collect, and can that information wind up in the hands of the Chinese government?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While TikTok is known primarily as a breeding ground for funny memes, dance routines and lip-synching videos, there’s a dark side to TikTok that starts with the young children who populate the app. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo looks into the consequences of TikTok’s failure to safeguard its adolescent user base. Warning: This episode contains difficult and disturbing reporting, including stories about the sexual exploitation of minors.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

TikTok has redefined American pop culture and upended the music industry, advertising and the economics of fame. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo examines TikTok’s hands-on approach with its creators and artists, minting a new generation of social media stars and positioning TikTok’s parent company as the first Chinese tech giant to come out with a truly global consumer app.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

TikTok is powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence that predicts what users want to see next. This technology was developed at ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company and the most valuable startup in the world. In this episode, reporter Shelly Banjo explains how ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming fundamentally changed how a generation consumes media on their phones.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.