The Newcomer Podcast

Generative artificial intelligence is sweeping the nation. People are turning themselves into animated characters, drafting their essays with ChatGPT, and illustrating with Stable Diffusion. Or, as was the case with the tiny special effects team on the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, they’re using it to help edit a movie.On the latest episode of Dead Cat, Cristóbal Valenzuela, the chief executive officer at generative artificial intelligence company Runway, talked about how he discovered that his AI-powered video editing software was used to help make the award winning film. When I wrote about generative AI burning white hot back in October, I talked to Valenzuela for that story and called him “among the most compelling founders that I’ve come across while reporting on artificial intelligence.” So I thought it would be fun to have him on the podcast and discuss some of the most pressing issues facing generative artificial intelligence. To help me interview Valenzuela, I invited Non-Technical podcast host and viral comedian Alexis Gay to guest host the episode. You’ll probably recognize her from some of her viral tech parody videos. (Listen to my guest appearance on Non-Technical if you want to learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about the man behind the newsletter.)On the podcast, Valenzuela predicts that “very soon,” in “a couple of years,” artificial intelligence software will be able to create the sort of TikTok videos that people flip through online. “We’re heading towards a world — where a lot of the content that you consume online will be generated [by artificial intelligence],” Valenzuela said.“There’s definitely an exponential progress rate that you can see and perceive more clearly now,” Valenzuela said. “What took years of progress is now taking months. And what used to take months is now taking weeks.”Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

I always enjoy talking with Taylor Lorenz, a deep thinker about the internet who infuriates certain pockets of tech Twitter. Last week, she published a look at the crypto social media accounts that broke news on the fall of FTX. She wrote about how accounts like Coffeezilla and AutismCapital have become media figures in their own right. She wrote for the Washington Post:All this coverage of the FTX implosion is the most prominent example of how “citizen journalism” is battling legacy publishers for online attention, catapulting a fresh class of independent journalists into the mainstream while also giving rise to a group of social media influencers who optimize for attention rather than accuracy.For years, drama channels and tea accounts — so called because the word “tea” is slang for juicy information — have been first to break news related to pop culture and influencers. Business news is late to undergo this trend.So in classic fashion, I broke one of my only New Year’s resolutions — to pay less attention to “the media” — and invited Lorenz on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about how these accounts are changing how information reaches the public.In my mind, our conversation was really about reputations — and how they’re built and maintained online. Later in the episode, we talk about how Twitter and rightwing media has shaped Lorenz’s own reputation online. Some of her critics might be surprised to hear her speak out against Instagram’s harsh content moderation policies.At the 27:30 mark, we shift gears and talk about the downturn in the creator economy. At 40:10, Lorenz and I debate whether we should be worried about Chinese influence over TikTok.Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Before the rise of crypto investing, venture capital careers seemed to be divided into two buckets: consumer and business-to-business. If the goal of venture capital investing is to pick winners, American consumer investors generally picked wrong. There just hasn’t been another Facebook. The biggest consumer startup of the moment is ByteDance, a Chinese company. While I’ve generally dedicated more time to writing about software investing since that’s where the money and exits have been, I’ve tried to chronicle consumer investing to the extent that it exists. I was the first to report BeReal’s seed and Series A funding round. I’ve scooped some of Discord’s valuation ascent. In December 2020, I wrote about investors’ effort to will a consumer renaissance into being. Sure, there weren’t any obvious new platforms but consumer investors weren’t going to let that get in their way.I invited my good friends Max Child and James Wilsterman onto the Dead Cat podcast. They’re the co-founders of voice games company Volley. The NFX, Y Combinator, and Lightspeed-backed startup — which they tell me is the largest voice game company — started off as a chatbot games company. So Child and Wilsterman know consumer trends. Chatbots once burned red hot before evaporating only to be revived with the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, few VCs have been bullish on voice as a platform.Child, Wilsterman, and I dig into the struggles of the QVC for startups trend. Popshop looks to be on the rocks and Whatnot may be peaking. We interrogate whether marketplaces were ever really a thing. And we wonder if AirPods as the next platform was really just a statement about Clubhouse. Then we look to 2023 and consider the pockets of hope for consumer investing: the rise of generative AI startups and the possibility that Apple announces an augmented reality device. And we ponder whether this crypto winter will ever thaw.Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I became friends in San Francisco back in 2014 when we all worked as technology reporters at The Information. But we didn’t achieve that core pillar of modern friendship until August 2021 when we started a podcast together. Insider generously let Tom co-host the podcast with me — and Katie, a reporter at the New York Times, came on every few episodes as a regular special guest.A year and a half ago we kicked off the show with an interview of Rippling CEO Parker Conrad. Since then, publishing most Tuesdays, we’ve pumped out 69 episodes and have built up a loyal following of listeners for our niche tech media podcast. With our intense focus on how the media covers technology stories, we’ve become a must-listen for newsrooms, tech public relations shops, startup world movers and shakers, and tech industry onlookers. We’ve had a variety of guests on the show. We’ve featured venture capitalists, startup founders, political operatives, and security experts. In our most popular episode, we took a look at the media’s coverage of the rise and fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick with the old Uber CEO’s former top deputy, Emil Michael. Reporters, especially our reporter friends, have been a regular fixture of the show. We’ve talked with reporters like the New York Times’ Erin Griffith and Mike Isaac, the Wall Street Journal’s Deepa Seetharaman, Rolfe Winkler, and Kirsten Grind, Semafor’s Ben Smith and Reed Albergotti, Insider’s Aki Ito, Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, and Puck’s Teddy Schleifer.Now the show — at least as we’ve come to know it — is coming to an end. Tom is taking a job at the Wall Street Journal and he’s stepping back from his co-hosting duties. Today’s episode is our last together. The episode is a fun look back at some of the themes that we’ve explored over the past year and a half. I’d encourage you to DM Tom on Twitter with your Microsoft story ideas and tips. Hopefully Tom will come back on the show as a guest and this memoriam will look overblown.This iteration of the Dead Cat show is going out on a high, apparently ranking number two among tech news shows at this moment.Going forward, I plan to continue podcasting and would love to get your input on the future of the show. I might keep the name “Dead Cat,” or I might not. I’m rather fond of it. (By the way, I explain the origins of the show’s name here.)Leave a comment or send me an email with your thoughts on what the future of the podcast should be. I’m open to suggestions for co-hosts, interview subjects, topics, show names, etc. As I talk about on this week’s episode, I’m inclined to align the show more closely with Newcomer newsletter content, meaning going forward it will probably be more focused on the business of technology and less about how it’s covered. In January, I hope to experiment with different formats and see what works. I think the podcast will continue to be free, meant to draw people into the newsletter and to attract a broader audience. I might pause the show in February for a relaunch or might decide that I can keep my stride. We’ll see!Anyway, this was a really enjoyable last episode to record. I hope you’ll give it a listen and help us wish Tom farewell.Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

On last week’s Dead Cat episode with ex-Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, we spent a lot of time trying to steel man the free speech moderation crowd’s argument — even though none of us seemed to hold it ourselves. The other week, we had Jason Calacanis on the show but he didn’t want to talk about Elon Musk. This week, finally we have someone on the podcast who is a defender of the so-called free speech regime and is also willing to talk to skeptical journalists about it on air. Antonio García Martínez, the author of Chaos Monkeys and startup CEO, came on the show. On his Substack The Pull Request, he defended the free speech argument in April — before Musk acquired Twitter. (I’ve written that no one, Musk included, was plausibly going to govern social media under a free speech standard so invoking free speech is a pure marketing ploy. I think that position has been vindicated by Musk’s recent actions.) More broadly, García Martínez, or AGM as he is widely known, is someone who has pushed back against the tech media and leftwing employees. With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, we set out to make sense of the culture war between tech “builders” and reporters. Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

This past Thursday Elon Musk accused Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer and the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, of running a “propaganda platform.” That’s the sort of upside down thinking we’ve come to expect from Musk, given Stamos is one of the most fair-minded and serious thinkers about content moderation and social media platforms today. So, on Friday, we had Stamos on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about Musk’s choreographed leaks about the old guard at Twitter.Last time Stamos came on the Dead Cat podcast, he explained why the media had underplayed its own culpability in enabling Russian disinformation while playing up Facebook’s failures. This time, Stamos helped Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I do our best to steel man Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss’s purported exposés on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, though none of us were particularly impressed by the seriousness of their reporting. Taibbi documented Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story. And Weiss reported on Twitter’s decision to ban Trump after the January 6 insurrection attempt. (Since we recorded on Friday, the gang has continued to pump out new iterations of the Twitter Files.)Stamos argued that the real essence of the critique that emerged from Taibbi’s reporting was the reality that governments across the world are actively trying to shape social media companies’ content moderation decisions.“Government interference on platforms is a real deal,” Stamos said.However, Taibbi didn’t show that in his tweetstorm. Joe Biden wasn’t in office, let alone the White House, when Twitter decided to briefly censor the New York Post’s story about the Hunter Biden laptop. “Musk giving very selective data to a couple of very politically biased journalists is not the kind of transparency we would need if we wanted to be confident that there was no interference on this platform by government,” Stamos said. “The kernel of truth is that every government on the planet, including ours in the United States of America, is trying to manipulate Twitter and all of the other major platforms. And so I proposed — here are things you can do if you’re Musk: You can have an open database of moderation decisions,” Stamos said. “You can commit to releasing — instead of just releasing emails from the Biden team, the DNC, not government actors — you could release all communications from all government actors globally. So the Modi campaign, the Indian government. I think it’s really important for somebody whose net worth is tied up in China, like Musk. Communications with the Chinese Communist Party is the kind of thing that if you really cared about this, you could release. But Musk apparently doesn’t like that idea.”On the podcast, we talked about Musk’s extreme exposure to China and Musk’s unwillingness to criticize the Chinese government. (Even as Musk has been vocally critical of the United States’ response to the pandemic, he hasn’t said anything about China’s far more restrictive Covid lockdowns.)“Tesla has a massive giga factory in Shanghai from which they will be producing cars to be shipped around the world,” Stamos said. “China is already 25% of the revenue. Clearly, if you look at discounted cash flows for the future, China’s going to be more than 50% of their stock price. And so yes, the [People’s Republic of China] has huge leverage over him. It’s like if Mark Zuckerberg, instead of having all his money in Facebook stock, his money was in a Chinese pharmaceutical company.”Ultimately, Stamos predicted that the Musk fever in Silicon Valley would break. But for the time being, he said, Musk was playing the same role that Trump did at many Thanksgivings across America — dividing friends and families.“I’m putting down a marker now. The Musk bubble in tech is going to pop,” Stamos told us. “Right now, it has become trendy to be seen as counterculture to be seen on Team Musk. And there’s a bunch of people who I used to work with, people who I’ve interacted with socially, who are smart, serious people who are now kind of waving the Musk flag. And just like with Trump. Just like with FTX. That bubble is going to pop. And you’re going to see all these people all of a sudden try to rewrite history.”Stamos argued that Musk is unraveling before our very eyes. Tesla’s stock is down 60% this year while most of the media attention has been focused on Twitter.“Musk is accelerating his breakdown here,” Stamos said. “If you end up with Twitter going out of business. Him having to give up Twitter to the bondholders or the debt holders. If you see him having to step down as CEO of Tesla. If you see some kind of massive moment — or you know, if there’s a horrible violent act that happens publicly. If there is, God forbid, something of the level of a Christchurch shooting or something that gets attached back to Musk’s moderation decisions — all of a sudden all these people who thought it was real cool to be on Team Musk are going to reverse themselves. And so I hope people are taking screenshots because it’s just a very scary. There’s a scary impulse in the Valley right now.”Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Former NBC Entertainment chairman Paul Telegdy once lorded over Hollywood as a titan of television as the industry around him was crumbling. The Netflix menace was on the rise and Hollywood media companies were struggling to respond. Telegdy was trying to hold it together while running an increasingly imperiled broadcast network. Before he was pushed out of NBC in 2020 amidst a nation-wide fever of recriminations, exposés, and public firings, Telegdy oversaw some of the world’s most successful reality television programming, including The Voice, American Ninja Warrior, and while at BBC Worldwide Dancing with the Stars. He also had the pleasure of overseeing Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. Telegdy regularly fielded calls from the future president. Trump always wanted to brag to Telegdy about the show’s ratings success, Telegdy told us. By the late 2010s, streaming had upended the television business, dislodging NBC from its prized perch and creating new media titans like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Apple. Disney proved most successful at answering the streaming industry’s money-burning onslaught — only for investors to suddenly change their tune this year and insist on profits rather than growth.We invited Telegdy — who Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan got to know covering Hollywood — on the show to talk about the state of Hollywood today. We start off the episode discussing Telegdy’s rise from his perch at the BBC and then his ascent to the top rungs of Hollywood at NBC. We talk about how the era of Hollywood “Jeffs” gave way to the reign of “Bobs.” Telegdy dissects Bob Chapek’s short tenure as the chief executive officer of Disney before his old boss Bob Iger returned to the role. Finally, we ask Telegdy about The Hollywood Reporter article that helped tank his job at NBC. The Hollywood Reporter accused Telegedy of “racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior.” The story’s headline read, “NBC Insiders Say Entertainment Boss Fostered Toxic Culture, Under Investigation.” He was ousted from NBC in a reorganization as the company investigated the allegations.We wanted to know what was it like being on the other side of a media exposé.We reached out to NBC and the reporters at the Hollywood Reporter for comment. NBC declined to comment and the reporters did not reply.In 2021, eager to make a quick comeback, Telegdy co-founded the entertainment company The Whole Spiel with his cousin. Telegdy has prodigious knowledge about the entertainment business and a sharp British sensibility, just the kind that might get someone in trouble with American office politics under a microscope. Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

There’s no one more perfectly situated between the tech media and the tech elites who loathe them.Jason Calacanis built his reputation in Silicon Valley as a feisty tech reporter, waiting in line to ask Steve Jobs questions at the Code Conference. An extremely early investment in Uber suddenly made him one of the most famous angel investors in the world (thanks also to Calacanis’s self-promotional megaphone). Today, Calacanis co-hosts All-In, the second-most popular tech podcast and one of the most popular podcasts in the world. The show is a must-listen in Silicon Valley and the envy of many wannabe thought leaders.We invited Calacanis on our much, much smaller tech podcast Dead Cat to interrogate what has made All-In so successful and where Silicon Valley’s roiling war with the media is headed. Calacanis, who is reportedly part of Elon Musk’s war room at Twitter, warned us that he absolutely would not talk about Musk’s Twitter. (We tried.)This was a fun episode that we recorded right before Thanksgiving with co-host Tom Dotan and regular special guest Katie Benner. I’m going to publish a companion article with my reflections on the conversation shortly. Enjoy! Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

If you’ve resolved that this Thanksgiving you won’t yield the conversation about tech entirely to your NFT-happy, crypto-pushing younger cousin, this is your moment to refresh yourself on the latest from the FTX saga. Give Dead Cat a listen. We catch you up on former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s latest messages with a reporter and on Elon Musk’s crusade to reform Twitter.In this hosts-only episode, Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I mourn my inability to get tickets to see Taylor Swift and we come up with some better strategies for making sure tickets only get in the hands of the Swifties with truest of hearts.Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

On the latest episode of Dead Cat, we examine how effective altruism’s crypto benefactor took the world — and the media and the Democratic Party, in particular — for a ride. Sam Bankman-Fried escaped much of the skepticism that rival exchange Binance has faced — yet it’s SBF’s FTX that has filed for bankruptcy.With the help of Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer, Dead Cat co-hosts Tom Dotan and I try to make sense of what exactly happened and explain the saga to the non-cryptographically inclined. Schleifer tells us what the midterm elections will mean for tech and Peter Thiel. Dotan confesses his deficiencies as a political forecaster.On this week’s episode of the podcast, I’m pretty open that I think the media had a blindspot for Bankman-Fried because of his effective altruism, pedigree, crypto skepticism, and Democratic politics. Yesterday, Stratechery quoted my tweets declaring as much. I assume my tweets caught the newsletter’s attention because I was willing to say something that most reporters won’t really admit publicly.I agree with the subtext of Marc Andreessen’s latest tweets. Bankman-Fried’s performative virtue now appears to have been an obvious cover for his private transgressions. And the left was more susceptible to Bankman-Fried because it shares many of his professed values.But I tweeted last Tuesday and recorded the podcast on Friday — and already the narrative is moving so fast. Republicans are clearly starting to spin up the Bankman-Fried criticism as an anti-Democratic talking point. I think it’s ridiculous to expect that the federal government should have suspected anything in particular was amiss at FTX relative to the other exchanges, when the company’s own investors didn’t seem to know anything was going on. Yes, I think that the Securities and Exchange Commission should have been more aggressive about regulating crypto broadly and not just waited for things to come undone on their own. But I don’t think Republicans were exactly cheering them on there. And while the media could have been more skeptical, you can’t expect reporters to ferret out every scandal (though CoinDesk certainly played a role in bringing FTX down). Ultimately, the company and major shareholders are responsible for the company’s behavior.So while I think that the mainstream media would have been more skeptical of Bankman-Fried if not for his persona and politics, I don’t think it was a corrupt or conscious act. Here’s a case where the left is guilty of the sort of implicit bias that it’s always talking about. It’s too easy to overlook someone’s shortcomings when he wraps himself in the very things that you believe in.Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe