As companies head back to the office, and communities try to figure out the right Covid mitigation measures, data from sewage can help them get it right. Newsha Ghaeli and Mariana Matus are the co-founders of Biobot Analytics. Their company uses data from wastewater to alert companies and communities when they’re in the early stages of Covid outbreaks. Then they can adjust appropriately. Founded out of MIT, Biobot initially took on the Opioid epidemic, helping communities figure out the right wa...
Dec 01, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 76
Inflation is skyrocketing and everyone’s quitting their jobs. What does it mean? Liz Young, the head of Investment Strategy at SoFi, and Ranjan Roy, the co-author of Margins, help us figure it out in this week’s Big Technology Podcast . Come for an exploration of the source of the price hikes (Turkeys are 14% more expensive this year!) and a wild theory connecting interest rates with quitting. Stay for where to find savings (Hot Dogs!). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi...
Nov 24, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Horacio Gutierrez is Spotify's head of global affairs and chief legal officer. He's a relentless critic of the way Apple treats smaller companies, testifying before the Senate in April that the company is abusing its power and harming competition. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how Spotify has experienced Apple's behavior, why it's decided to speak up, and whether anything will come of this latest round of antitrust scrutiny for the tech giants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Zach Coelius is the managing partner of Coelius Capital. He's participating in an unprecedented moment where venture capitalists like him simply can't lose. There's so much money flooding the private markets that, as he put it, "any idiot with a checkbook looks like a genius right now." Coelius joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss why this is happening, where it will lead, and who gets hurt when the party ends. Stay tuned for the third segment where we read his tweets and mostly talk about Sa...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 73
Lawrence Lessig is Frances Haguen's lawyer and a Harvard Law School professor. He joins Big Technology Podcast to address the various questions about Haugen's motivations, backers, and intent that have percolated since she came forward. We start by addressing whether the the leaked documents should be available to all and move into the conspiracies about her. A lively discussion follows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Nov 03, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 72
Farhad Manjoo is an opinion columnist for the New York Times. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether the criticism of Instagram's impact on kids is overblown, the subject of a recent column. Stay tuned for the third segment, where we discuss Farhad's views of virtual reality, his Thanksgiving column, and his cats. Subscribe to Big Technology: https://bigtechnology.substack.com/ Farhad's story about Instagram: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/opinion/instagram-teenagers.html Learn m...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 4Ep. 71
Join us for a 'mega' episode with three guests! The Markup investigative reporter Adrianne Jeffries leads off with a discussion of Amazon's self-preferencing in search. Stanford Internet Observatory's Renee DiResta joins for our second segment to discuss her story on bottom-up propaganda on social media, something she calls 'ampliganda.' Verge Reporter Zoë Schiffer rounds out the week with a look into the state of worker activism at Netflix and Apple. Check out Adrianne's story on The Markup , R...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Charlie Warzel writes the Galaxy Brain newsletter on Substack, a publication he started after a career at The New York Times and BuzzFeed. Warzel joins Big Technology Podcast in a live recording at Unfinished Live to discuss what a nuanced conversation about social media's harms should look like. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Warzel's views on post-Covid workplace culture, the subject Out of Office, a forthcoming book for which he is a co-author. Learn more about your ad choice...
Oct 13, 2021•41 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Michael Sayman was 16 years old when Facebook recruited him to join the company. The overture arrived as he was sitting in math class, and the teacher promptly took away his iPad. Sayman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss why and how Facebook builds products for kids and teens (something he has intimate knowledge of) and the reasons why it won't stop. You can find Sayman's new book, App Kid, here: https://amzn.to/3uNDazI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 68
Wired senior writer Lauren Goode was on hand this week as Amazon introduced Astro, a home robot, and a Ring home-monitoring drone. Goode joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss her reaction to the products. And in the second half, stay tuned for a discussion of how Apple and Amazon are on a collision course even though they build products very differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 30, 2021•45 min•Season 1Ep. 67
Max Chafkin is the author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, which debuts this week. The book is a fascinating, inside look into the life and rise of Silicon Valley’s most powerful and controversial venture capitalist. In this interview, we discuss whether Thiel is representative of Silicon Valley or an anomaly, and dig into who he really is and what motivates him. You can find the book here: https://amzn.to/3AwAKHB Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 66
Jeff Horwitz is the Wall Street Journal reporter who unearthed a trove of internal Facebook documents that reveal a damning disconnect between what the company says in public and its actions inside. Brian Boland is a former Facebook executive who spent more than 11 years inside the company. The two come on to discuss Horowitz's bombshell series of reports, unpacking what they tell us about Facebook, dissecting the company's responses, and looking at potential solutions. Enjoy this bonus episode!...
Sep 18, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Erin Griffith is the New York Times reporter at the trial for Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. She joins Big Technology Podcast to bring us inside the courtroom, explaining why Holmes is on trial and whether she'll be a rare founder to face consequences for misleading investors. We also discuss whether Holmes is emblematic of the venture capital world's downsides, or an outlier. You can find Erin on Twitter, @eringriffith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Sep 15, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 64
Zack O'Malley Greenburg is a music journalist who's spent time with everyone from Katy Perry to Kanye West. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the music industry seems to go through every major technology-driven shift before everyone else, including the decline of brick-and-mortar retail (see: Tower Records), to the rise of streaming content (Spotify), and even NFTs (WuTang's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin). Greenburg also discusses how he's applied lessons from some of the world's most...
Sep 08, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 63
Jonathan Knee is a professor at Columbia Business School and senior advisor at the investment bank Evercore. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss The Platform Delusion , his forthcoming book about how the term "platform" has become overused to the point that it has little meaning. Is Sweetgreen really a platform. Well, Sweetgreen thinks so (c'mon now). Listen for a discussion covering what should actually be called a platform, the fundamentals of the tech giants' businesses, and whether st...
Sep 02, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a spirited debate over whether we're actually addicted to our phones, the ethics of app developers who use tricks to keep us coming back, and what to do about it. You can find Nir's books here: http://geni.us/Indistractable and http://geni.us/hooked Here's an Indistractable summary article: https://www.nirandfar.com/skill-of-the-future/ And a distraction guide: https://www.nirandfar.com/distracti...
Aug 26, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Scott Heiferman is the founder of Meetup, a website that connects people online and gets them to meet each other offline. Heiferman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether the internet can still bring people together vs. tear them apart, the latter of which it's done plenty of recently. This wide-ranging conversation gets into people's declining faith in institutions, our friendships and loneliness, Facebook's role in all this, virtual reality's potential, and the new company Heiferman i...
Aug 18, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 60
Sheera Frenkel is a New York Times reporter and author of the best-selling book, An Ugly Truth . She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss her hit book and her reporting process. We address critics's claims that Facebook reporters are harsh to the company because they’re mad Trump won, and they’re also upset that social media is eroding their gatekeeping power. Frenkel listens to these critiques and shares her perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Aug 11, 2021•43 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Shelly Banjo is Bloomberg's New York Bureau Chief. She's also the host of Foundering , a podcast mini-series that documents TikTok's rise. Banjo joins Big Technology Podcast for a conversation about how TikTok's massive global reach creates serious data security risks and also opens up rival countries to influence operations from the Chinese government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Aug 04, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 58
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wants to provide internet access to the people in Cuba so they can document and share the abuses of their government without censorship. Commissioner Carr, who rose to his rank after initially serving as an FCC intern, joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his plan, how the technology would work, and the ethics and advisability of accelerating regime change by providing internet access to a population. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Jul 28, 2021•47 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Eliot Brown And Maureen Farrell are the authors of The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion . The new book digs into the rise and fall of Adam Neumann's WeWork. And though it's the story of one company, it's really a lens through which you can see all the markets' irrationality. The authors join for a macro discussion of the factors that led WeWork — a real estate company — to become the world's most valuable "tech" startup. And why it couldn't keep the show rolling. Check out the ...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Chris Best is the CEO of Substack, an email newsletter platform that lets writers send newsletters and charge subscribers a monthly fee. The platform — which I use for my Big Technology newsletter — is squarely in the middle of the battle over online speech, looked at by some as an alternative that will displace professional media. Best joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his company's position in these speech battles, how he personally feels about the professional media, his investor Andres...
Jul 14, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 55
“Are you trying to fucking destroy the company?” That’s what Bill Gates told Microsoft board member Maria Klawe when she asked why Microsoft wouldn’t consider a single women out of 50 candidates it was evaluating to replace then-CEO Steve Ballmer. When Microsoft settled on Satya Nadella, he later joined Klawe at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women In Computing and told her that instead of asking for a raise, women should just have faith in the system to get it right. The incident caused an upr...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 54
Jim Lanzone is the CEO of Tinder. He took over the world’s most popular dating app last summer, in the heart of the pandemic, and is starting to evolve its product to give people new ways to connect. Lanzone joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how Gen Z wants to date online, how their behavior differs from millennials, and how that factors into his product vision. We also talk about the business of Tinder, whether Lanzone lets his kids use the app, and where its next challenger might come fr...
Jun 30, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Adam Kovacevich is the CEO of the Big Tech-funded Chamber of Progress. The former Google policy executive joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the origins of his organization and why Big Tech would rather fund him vs. stick their own necks out. Tune in for a revealing conversation of what happens behind the scenes in Big Tech's battle against regulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 24, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Marshall Kosloff and Saagar Enjeti host The Realignment, an excellent podcast about politics and tech in our fast-changing world. I joined the show his week to talk about the new set of bills in Congress aimed at Big Tech and asked them if we could air the show here on the Big Technology feed as well. Graciously, they agreed! So this week, we'll run this episode as a bonus on a Tuesday, and then we’ll be back on Thursday with our regularly scheduled show, with Adam Kovacevich, who runs a big-tec...
Jun 22, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Andrew Ross Sorkin is the co-anchor of Squawk Box on CNBC, founder and editor of Dealbook at the New York Times, and the author of Too Big To Fail. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the wild state of the market, the rise of meme stocks, the promise and drawbacks of bitcoin, SPACs, Big Tech antitrust, Elon Musk, and when the party will come to an end. Tune in for a wide-ranging interview about the world's most pressing financial and tech issues. Buy Andrew's book: https://amzn.to/3zFPTXp...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Andrew Callaghan is the force behind All Gas No Breaks, a hit YouTube show that featured Callaghan putting a mic in front of people and just... letting them talk. Callaghan's recently gone independent, taking his unique interviewing style to a new home, Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, and building a substantial following there. Callaghan joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss why his alternative to traditional news is hitting a nerve, what he's learned about the American people from his travel...
Jun 09, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 49
You've heard this story before: Two Stanford kids take on a big bad industry, one that harms people, and they disrupt it. Typically, these stories are portrayed as heroic in Silicon Valley. Yet the story of Juul is different. The company sells sleek e-cigarettes packed with nicotine to cigarette smokers looking for a less harmful solution. But flush with VC cash and determined to grow, the company ended up addicting millions of kids, leading to a serious backlash and decline. Lauren Etter, a Blo...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 48
Jack Nicas joins Big Technology Podcast fresh out of the Epic v. Apple trial, where the Fortnight maker is suing Apple over the 30% cut it takes out of every dollar we spend on apps downloaded from the App Store. Nicas takes us inside the courtroom, explains what’s at stake, and makes a prediction for where things net out. In the second half, Nicas breaks down his reporting on Apple’s questionable privacy practices in China, where the company stores user data in servers all but owned by the Chin...
May 26, 2021•52 min•Season 1Ep. 47
