Welcome to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That is me sweating in Brooklyn. I hope everyone is well and safe. This is a special episode of Recode Media because I have a special guest. It's my co-worker Ronnie Mola. Welcome, Ronnie.

Hey, Peter. Thanks for having me on your podcast. Oh, I have no choice. I'm delighted, I mean, to have you on my podcast. I'm going to turn the squad cast so I can see you. You are also sweltering. You're in upstate. I'm upstate New York in a cabin. It's still hot. I don't know why it's the same as you and Brooklyn. I wanted to be better off than you. This is the best reason, by the way, to work in an office because they have air conditioning. They have really good air conditioning and you don't pay for it. Yeah. Well, you pay for it in the end, plus it's COVID. So enough about the weather. I want to talk about two projects that you've been working on. Yeah. Over the last nine months. What do you got? One of them I worked with you on. One of them I had nothing to do with. Do you want to tell us about one of them? Yeah, so one of them. I'm going to start with the more important. I have a baby, which is why you're doing, I just gave birth to a baby. Yay! Yeah, and which is why you're finishing up the rest of this other thing, Land of the Giants, Season 2 podcast about Netflix by yourself, mostly. Yes. So,

you're still working, though. You just had a baby less than a week ago, or a week ago.

Exactly a week ago. Yeah, now you're potting with me. I'm just talking. The reason Ronnie is here,

like she said, is because she and I have been working on this project, the Netflix effect. It is a seven-part series about Netflix.

The first episode is available today.

You can go get it wherever you find this podcast, another fine podcast.

Look for Land of the Giants.

You'll see both our episode and then another series of episodes about Amazon,

our colleague Jason Del Rey made. Like this podcast. It's free. Like this podcast. It's great. You'll like it. What should we talk about, Roddy? Should we talk about the making of the podcast? Yeah, we'll talk about the podcast. We'll talk about what's in the podcast. We can talk a little bit about Netflix. And then we're going to give you guys a free sample of this free podcast where we're done. Right. So making the podcast, right? We made it in a way that you can't make podcasts right now.

We got on planes?

We got on planes. We traveled. We talked to people in the same room without masks.

Shook their hands except for Reed Hastings. It was kind of ahead of the curve and refused to shake our hands, smart on him.

Yeah, so we got to, we got to Netflix March 5th, and it is impossible to remember what the world looked like March 5th, but I have a pretty clear memory of it. We were in L.A. We were concerned about flying. Remember, people were wiping down the seats on both sides of me on that flight there. I think while we were there, LA just declared a state of emergency.

It was unclear what that meant. But people were starting to send their employees home. I think the tech companies were working from home. When we were there at Netflix, people were still coming in. But they were in. They were still coming in, but there was signage everywhere and they had like, you know, antibacterial hand stuff. And yeah. Yeah. So I went up to read Hastings and tried to shake his hand. And he did not want to shake hands. Had nothing to do with coronavirus? Yeah. The other executives did. Anyway, but yeah, had that interview been scheduled for a few days later, that interview would not have happened in person. with this podcast maybe? No, it would have happened. We're just fortunate there, I think.

And yeah, I really do like talking to people face to face. And it's something I'm not able to do and won't be able to do for a long time. So all things considered that, we're still pretty lucky. What was surprising to you about making this podcast? Neither of us have made a long-form project like this. But what was surprising, are they about the podcast or about Netflix as we figured this out? Like one of the episodes, the first episode we did, is about their culture. And, you know, it's really easy to be very critical about this culture. You know, every company in Silicon Valley is like, oh, our culture is special,

and this makes our work special. You're required to talk about how, yeah, how important your culture is.

Vox Media has its own. It's obnoxious. No. No, every, every culture that you're supposed to talk about.

And there are people in the company who take it seriously, generally people who are in charge of making up that list, right, I think. Right. And maybe, you know, we were talking to a lot of people at Netflix, a lot of higher-up execs, but like, but even people who'd been let go, who weren't there anymore, so many of them, like, really took the culture seriously. and seriously and they you know they didn't have the

level of like I don't know cynicism that I would have about a culture like that like and maybe

you know that's just the response we got but they it seemed to be like they're like even if

they had bad things to say they're like well you know the culture was important the culture

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