Land of the Giants

By The Cut & The Verge

Technology Business

What's Land of the Giants about?

Big tech is transforming every aspect of our world. But how? And at what cost? In Land of the Giants: Dating Games, The Verge and New York Magazine's The Cut trace the evolution of the multi-billion dollar dating app industry. Hosts Sangeeta Singh Kurtz and Lakshmi Rengarajan explore the modern dating landscape forged by companies like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and their impact on our hopes for connection. Through conversations with industry leaders, experts, and users, this series will look at the past decade of dating and ask the question: are the business goals of dating app companies aligned with users' romantic aspirations?
New episodes every Wednesday. From The Verge, The Cut and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Can Niche Dating Apps Save Us?

02.08.2023

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, rock climbers, and many more. All aimed at helping specific communities find "their people." But ...

Land of the Giants episodes:

02.08.2023 Can Niche Dating Apps Save Us? 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, rock climbers, and many more. All aimed at helping specific communities find "their people." But ...
02.01.2023 Bumble, the Girlboss of Dating Apps 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 dating feel better, safer, and less creepy for women. But does Bumble deliver on its promise? ...
01.25.2023 The Secret Algorithms That Control Your Love Life 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’t talk about it, Fight Club style. But critics say that if daters really knew how basic ...
01.18.2023 The Hidden Hand Behind Your Swipes 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 owned by Match Group, the company that helped start online dating in the 90s, and now owns ...
01.11.2023 Tinder Changed the Game When Tinder launched in 2012, it changed dating culture and our expectations around dating forever by leveraging the iPhone and gamifying the dating experience. But did the rise of dating apps make finding romance easier or harder, and what are ...
01.04.2023 Dating Games 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 industry leaders, experts, and users, hosts Sangeeta Singh Kurtz and Lakshmi Rengarajan explore the modern dating landscape ...
08.31.2022 Zuckerberg's Biggest Bet 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. The metaverse. To pursue that vision, Zuckerberg’s renamed his entire company and ...
08.24.2022 It's A WhatsApp World 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 embedded in the social, economic, and political infrastructure of countries across the globe. For better and ...
08.17.2022 Facebook's Plan To Be Cool Again 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 both Facebook and Instagram will use AI to start increasingly recommending content from ...
08.10.2022 The Facebook Election Facebook used to brag about how its tools helped politicians swing elections. Now, the platform’s relationship to politics is much more complicated. Today: the story of how one politician again and again forced Zuckerberg to confront his own role in ...
07.27.2022 Why Instagram Broke Its Square 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 Facebook scaled the startup into a social media juggernaut, tensions flared. Instagram’s founders would leave, and it’s ...
07.20.2022 Don't Be Afraid To Break Things 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 that vision at full speed. In the 2000s, Facebook made a big bet to become a ...
07.13.2022 "Facebook Gets A Facelift" Long before Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and made an unprecedented pivot into the metaverse, he invented a feature that turned Facebook into a social network behemoth. The News Feed, which put your friends’ status updates onto your homepage, changed ...
07.06.2022 The Facebook / Meta Disruption Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption explores how the social media juggernaut has arrived at this unprecedented moment of transition. Senior reporters Shirin Ghaffary of Recode and Alex Heath of The Verge speak with top Meta executives and ...
10.27.2021 One App Store to Rule Them All 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 highly profitable iPhone App Store. What happens if Apple can no longer hold its tight ...
10.20.2021 Apple Saved Music. Why Not TV? Back in the early 2000s, file sharing services like Napster devastated the music industry. Steve Jobs threw it a lifeline with the iTunes Store, offering people an easy way to download songs legally. That saved the music industry and made ...
10.13.2021 Apple's China Problem 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 products are manufactured. It’s a complicated relationship that has seen Apple make compromises with ...
10.06.2021 "He's No Steve Jobs" 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 lacking Jobs’ vision and innovation. But he managed to do something Jobs never could: make ...
09.29.2021 How Apple Got Its Groove Back In 1997 Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy and falling far behind its biggest competitor, Microsoft. But that all changed when Apple started building revolutionary new devices that strayed from its roots as a computer company. The iPod and ...
09.22.2021 This Changes Everything In 2007 Steve Jobs took the stage and introduced something that would change our lives forever -- a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator...aka, the iPhone. Now we live in a world ...
09.15.2021 'The Apple Revolution' is here From its beginnings as a niche personal computer company, Apple became the preeminent maker of consumer tech products, a cultural trendsetter, and the most valuable company in the world. And along the way, it changed the way we live. Hosted ...
07.13.2021 The Virtual Future of Restaurants 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 brands has allowed traditional restaurants to access new revenue streams. And these new ...
07.06.2021 Who's Driving Whom? 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 flexibility that most people in traditional employment situations can only dream of. But how ...
06.29.2021 The Race for Your Dollars 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 have shaped the delivery wars from the point of view of founders, company executives and ...
06.22.2021 The Cost of Convenience 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 pandemic that convenience became even more valuable. But at what cost? ...
06.15.2021 Delivery Wars 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 evolving world of food delivery. Find out how the rise of investor-backed ...
03.30.2021 Should We Break Up Google? 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 unprecedented moment that could define the company, our economy, and our daily lives for years ...
03.23.2021 Googlers vs. Google 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 resignation she didn’t think she made. Her exit is just the latest sign of ...
03.16.2021 A Military Contract Tests Google's Open Culture 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. Over our next two episodes, we’ll tell the story of a breakdown of trust inside Google — ...
03.09.2021 The Moonshot Factory 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 have Google's nearly limitless resources to turn those ideas into reality. Some of Google's projects ...
03.02.2021 Planet YouTube 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 billion users, YouTube generates its own gravitational pull on society and culture worldwide. And ...
02.23.2021 Chrome and the Android Wars 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 story of Android is the story of how Google became so big. And it started ...
02.16.2021 The Search Begins Some of the core values that built Google's runaway success — innovative technology to the max, an intellectually playful and open culture, and a corporate aspiration to do good ("Don’t be evil") — set it up for the existential questions ...
02.09.2021 The Google Empire 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 idealistic goals of creative experimentation and making useful products has turned into a worldwide power with enormous ...
10.15.2020 Go For Broke: Inside the Dot-Com Bubble While you wait for the next season of Land of the Giants, we have another podcast we think you'll like. Go For Broke is a new series from the Vox Media Podcast Network and Epic Magazine exploring the frenzy of ...
08.04.2020 World War Stream 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 wants to take over the world. Hosts: Peter Kafka & Rani Molla This podcast is ...
07.28.2020 Money to burn; why Wall Street loves NFLX 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 it apart from the competition or a house of cards ready to collapse? Hosts: ...
07.21.2020 Netflix is Hollywood \| Part 2 Netflix hasn’t just disrupted Hollywood, it has become Hollywood. How has that changed the lives of studio executives, movie producers and creators in the entertainment industry? A lot. Hosts: Peter Kafka & Rani Molla This podcast is a production of ...
07.14.2020 Netflix vs. Hollywood \| Part 1 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 audiences everywhere to watch Netflix. In this episode, we look at ...
07.07.2020 Did the algorithm make you watch Tiger King? 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 Netflix really showing you stuff you want to watch, or just stuff that Netflix made? ...
06.30.2020 Who really killed Blockbuster Video? 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 Blockbuster. It should have been crushed, and almost was. What went wrong? Hosts: ...
06.23.2020 “Netflix is a team, not a family” 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 your boss is considering whether to replace you? Netflix execs will tell you that their internal ...
06.15.2020 The Netflix Effect 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 maintain its streaming supremacy. Hear from Netflix’s founders and top executives as ...
11.26.2019 Amazon's Middlewomen 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 Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Jason Del Rey and Reset ...
09.12.2019 'I love Amazon. Let’s break it up' 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 broken up - and which parts of the company should be spun off first. ...
08.27.2019 Is Amazon Too Big? We Ask Its Sellers Small businesses and major brands alike rely on Amazon but are increasingly ambivalent about selling on the platform. The Amazon Marketplace is a battle royale of millions of sellers and declining profit margins. Meanwhile, Amazon is building its own branded ...
08.20.2019 How Amazon Charmed Wall Street 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 Street to do something unprecedented: Turn a blind eye to profit? And how ...
08.13.2019 Why the Robot Revolution is Our Fault 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 with robots. We fear robots taking over the world, but do we understand just how ...
08.06.2019 When Amazon Leaves Your Town 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 learn what Amazon can bring and what it can take away, and what lessons Coffeyville ...
07.30.2019 Alexa, What's Amazon Doing Inside My Home? 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 the “smart home” connected to the Internet. It can lull us with the convenience, but what’s ...

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