The Newcomer Podcast

Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at the Washington Post, has helped to popularize “cheugy,” “OK Boomer,” and, most recently, “nimcels.”She wrote about “niche internet micro celebrities,” or nimcels:While influencers use their online followings to make money, “for a niche internet micro celebrity, the goal is purely to entertain, versus an influencer,” said Da. “I think this term emerged to distinguish people doing a similar thing to influencers, but for completely different motivations. Being a niche internet micro celebrity feels less capitalist, less ‘I’m a brand.’ ”On this week’s Dead Cat, we used Lorenz’s latest story as a jumping off point to talk about the evolution of the terms “creators” and “influencers,” the rise of podcasting, and Lorenz’s various Twitter scrapes. Lorenz is a language obsessive and is writing a book called Extremely Online. She doesn’t like the name for the beat most people associate her with — internet culture reporter — since she doesn’t see a sharp line separating the real world and digital life. We covered a lot of ground in this week’s episode. We talked about Lorenz’s recent tweet dismissing Dimes Square and her online beef with Marc Andreessen. “All these billionaires are so fragile,” Lorenz told us.“I love debating tech. I love it,” Lorenz said. “Andreessen had me on their podcast twice and didn’t release either of the episodes.”We also discussed Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan’s latest story on YouTube’s accidental podcast ascendancy. He wrote over the weekend:Two recent surveys, one by Cumulus Media and one by Voices, showed that YouTube was the most frequently used podcasting platform, edging out Spotify and Apple's podcasting apps.…Last year the entire podcasting industry made $1.4 billion in ad revenue and is set to surpass $2 billion this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It’s a quickly growing industry but still a drop in the bucket compared to the $29 billion that YouTube made in ad revenue in 2021, or the $209 billion that Google ads made.So befitting the provincial, self-referential nature of the podcast industry — we talked about a tiny industry, on an insider-y podcast, with a guest who herself says she’s looking to get into the podcast game.Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Will Marc Andreessen dogfood Adam Neumann’s new real estate startup? Will Andreessen be willing to run the same playbook for Flow, Neumann’s new rental real estate company? When is the last time, Andreessen — who called “renting a soulless experience” — actually lived in a rental? Is he willing to give up his $177 million Malibu compound for the shared amenities of a Flow? Andreessen doesn’t seem willing to embrace urban density in Atherton — he and his wife wrote a letter expressing their “IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton.” On this week’s Dead Cat, co-host Tom Dotan observed that much of Silicon Valley’s upper crust seems unwilling to put their values into action when it comes to residential real estate: “They’re not going to dogfood it, right? They’re not going to be using their own products in order to fix this larger issue.”Co-host Eric Newcomer replied, “The whole tech philosophy is dogfood your product — suffer through your terrible tech product that you’re trying to force on the world, and they won’t even dogfood the world that they want, which is a dense urban life.”Eric's former open office neighbor at Bloomberg, Ellen Huet, came on Dead Cat to talk about Neumann’s new company and Andreessen’s nimbyism. Huet wrote about WeWork for Bloomberg, hosted a podcast about Neumann, chronicled housing opposition in Atherton, and now is writing a book about an alleged sex cult called “OneTaste.” She also spent many years living in an intentional living community in San Francisco. So you can fairly say that she has stared deeply into Neumann’s soul.We start off the episode talking about the Andreessens’ opposition to new housing in Atherton. Then about halfway through, we get into Flow. Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

This week on Dead Cat, hosts Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer dive into social media wedding bans. The evolution of authenticity on BeReal. The state of TikTok. Media self-absorption. Dimes Square. Andrew Tate. Then we delve into Sam Bankman-Fried’s case against the startup world — what he calls “the financial circle-jerk.” Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Amazon proved that it’s willing to enter any market with its 2017 announcement that it would buy Whole Foods for $13.4 billion. What other tech giant would buy a grocery store?Now Amazon is moving into — robotic vacuums? Amazon said it wanted to buy Roomba-maker iRobot for $1.7 billion. The acquisition raised all sorts of questions about what exactly Amazon wants from the suctioning rover manufacturer. Is the company trying to make a map of your house?Paranoia about Amazon’s data hoovering went into overdrive when Amazon announced that it intends to buy a virtual doctor’s office. Amazon said it would purchase telemedicine-powered doctor’s office One Medical for nearly $4 billion. (That acquisition comes after Amazon purchased pharmacy company PillPack in 2018 for $753 million.) My former boss Brad Stone smartly argued yesterday that the acquisitions are part of Amazon Chief Andy Jassy’s effort to build a “fourth pillar” for the company that moves it beyond Amazon Web Services, Prime, and Amazon Marketplace.He wrote:The deals are also emblematic of Jassy’s hunt for a so-called fourth “pillar,” beyond AWS, Prime and the Amazon Marketplace. Jeff Bezos described the features of such a business in his shareholder letter in 2014: “Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time—with the potential to endure for decades.” Eight years later, Amazon’s pursuit of this coveted fourth leg of the stool has been largely fruitless. Video has been an important part of Prime but is free for members and generates a nebulous return on capital. Advertising spews cash for Amazon ($8.76 billion in the last quarter alone) but is tolerated, not embraced, by customers.The deal raises questions, not just about Amazon’s strategy, but about how big we want these tech giants to get. Stone described the acquisitions as reflecting “an almost breathtaking disregard for the trustbusters.”On Dead Cat, the tech podcast I co-host, this week we grapple with whether we’re comfortable with Amazon’s size, especially as the e-commerce giant saunters into our medical lives. Katie Benner and I are both One Medical customers — patients you might call us — so on the latest episode we debate whether we would cancel our subscriptions once One Medical is officially under new ownership. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has been playing defense as Instagram’s product goes on offense. Mosseri released a video explaining recent changes to Instagram and defended Instagram’s pivot from a friend-oriented, social graph-sorted photo sharing app to a creator-driven, AI-powered content machine.Meanwhile, the broader Meta employee base has been feeling the pain. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is bringing down the hammer, signaling that the company is trying to manage out weak performers. The company has started a campaign against coasters.But Meta employees are passing around memes suggesting that Zuckerberg is the coaster-in-chief.I talked with Verge reporter and social media savant Alex Heath about the turmoil at Facebook on the latest episode of Dead Cat, along with co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner.Heath recently recounted a contentious vignette inside a recent Meta all-hands:“Hi there,” the first prerecorded employee question started. “I’m Gary, and I’m located in Chicago.” His question: would Meta Days — extra days off introduced during the pandemic — continue in 2023?Zuckerberg appeared visibly frustrated. “Um… all right,” he stammered. He’d just explained that he thought the economy was headed for one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.” He’d already frozen hiring in many areas. TikTok was eating their lunch, and it would take over a year and a half before they had “line of sight” to overtaking it.And Gary from Chicago was asking about extra vacation days?“Given my tone in the rest of the Q&A, you can probably imagine what my reaction to this is,” Zuckerberg said. After this year, Meta Days were canceled.We talk about employee unrest at Meta, Instagram’s strategy shift, the state of the metaverse, and Snap’s oscillating stock price on the episode. At the end of the lively episode, the conversation devolved into an argument about antitrust. We end the podcast a bit abruptly in order to avoid recording Tom’s son dashing into the room. Enjoy.Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

This is definitely an episode you’re going to want to listen to. It’s been a long time coming. It’s a sequel of sorts to my interview with Bill Gurley that ran a few months after launching this newsletter and my conversation with Dara Khosrowshahi after that.I finally convinced Emil Michael, a central player in the Uber saga, to give me an on-the-record interview. Michael was once Travis Kalanick’s top lieutenant. He raised about $15 billion for Uber during his nearly four years at the company. Finally, he came on Dead Cat to talk to Tom Dotan and me. It’s been five years since Kalanick and Michael acrimoniously departed the company they helped build into a juggernaut. While Michael isn’t Kalanick — who I would love to interview again someday — he was probably the second most important person at Uber during the period, understood the company and Kalanick intimately, and is a lot more willing to publicly reflect on what Uber got right and wrong than his old boss. We covered a lot of ground in our hour and a half long conversation. Michael didn’t shy away from much. Whether you’re interested in the inside baseball behind Kalanick’s ouster, or if you want to learn from Uber’s mistakes, or you just want to hear how they raised so much money, you’re going to want to give this episode a listen.* He talked about his infamous visit to a shady Korean karaoke bar that led former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to recommend Michael’s dismissal. (In my mind, probably the biggest unreported information from the Kalanick era is the Holder report itself. If anyone ever wants to leak it to me, you know where to find me.)* We discussed the latest media Uber obsession — “The Uber files.” The Guardian and other outlets reported on Uber’s influence campaign in Europe and the “kill switch.” It was a trip down memory lane that helped convince Michael to give his side of the story. Michael quipped about the “kill switch,” Uber’s tactic of locking down computers ahead of government raids: “I do think one of the bad things we did at Uber was naming things terribly.”* Michael inveighed against Benchmark partner Bill Gurley’s crusade to push out Kalanick. But he also reminisced about how he and Gurley used to talk multiple times a day. * Michael criticized current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s management of the company, today worth $44.2 billion — about a third less than when Michael helped the company raise at an approximately $70 billion valuation. “When does the buck stop at Dara’s desk?” Michael asked us. But Michael also kicked himself for letting the merger with Lyft slip through his fingers. * We talked about the media coverage of Uber past and present, what the press got right, and what it got wrong. But Michael also admitted that he’d never really figured out how to talk to the press. * Together, we analyzed the Uber TV show, Super Pumped. * Michael engaged with core questions about Uber’s existence: Was the independent contractor model an inescapable original sin? Should investors ever have given Uber so much money? Was the Saudi round that valued Uber at about $70 billion a fair benchmark by which to judge Uber’s current CEO? * Given the many twists and turns of the Uber saga, there’s always more I wish that we’d dug into. We could have dedicated a whole episode to the Susan Fowler saga, for instance. And for every scandal that we examined, there’s another that we left out. Still, I think it’s as in-depth a public reflection as there has been from Kalanick’s camp since Kalanick resigned almost exactly five years ago.Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Michael: “Did you push back on Travis enough? Or did he like having people who are sort of like—”And he filled in the blank for me. Was he a “yes man”?Michael said, “I would at least say this on a relative basis: I did more than anyone else in history of giving him feedback. Whether it was investors or other leaders, whatever, because we had a relationship that allowed for that. And I cultivated that on purpose because I wanted to be someone who is able to be a counter voice there. And he listened to me.”Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

I’m in Italy right now for my first extended vacation of the year. I spent yesterday bopping around Siena, taking in another beautiful Duomo, eating a sandwich with lardo, and hunting for the frescoes that provided the grist for my girlfriend’s mom’s art history thesis. After stopping in Rome and Florence, my girlfriend and I are staying in rural Tuscany for a friend’s wedding and then are headed to Cinque Terre in a few days.I’m doing my best to disconnect from the newsletter for these two weeks — though not as much as my girlfriend might like. I left my podcast co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner to their own devices with Dead Cat this week. Listening to the episode, they’re clearly feeling a little more pessimistic than I am. Tom proposed for the subject line of this email, “No ideas. No joy. No money” or “the summer of despair.” Both struck me as a little too dour.In the latest episode of Dead Cat, Tom and Katie take stock of some of the top stories in tech this week via Techmeme headlines: The implosion of Apple’s self-driving car program, the Uber files, and Elon Musk’s fight with Twitter. They ask why tech seems to be stuck in a rut. But mostly they seem to have a fun time, sardonically dissecting the tech world and puzzling out what the latest stock downturn means for our favorite tech storylines. It’s an enjoyable listen if you’ve got some time to kill as vineyards and hay bales pass you by.Their discussion hinges in part on The Information’s latest reporting on Apple’s self-driving car program. Apple just can’t seem to figure it out.The Information’s Wayne Ma reported on the perils of demoware:Engineers waste precious time choreographing demonstrations along specific routes using technology that works there but almost nowhere else, a phenomenon known as demoware. Some people who have worked on Titan say Apple fell harder into the demoware trap than some rivals, despite the fact that an automated car with no steering wheel needs to drive almost perfectly everywhere or few people would feel safe buying one.“If you spend enough money, you can get almost any fixed route to work,” said Arun Venkatadri, who previously worked on self-driving cars at Uber and now runs Model-Prime, which makes software tools for robotics companies. “But what isn’t shown is whether you can build your self-driving software in a scalable fashion and whether you can operate in a reasonably broad area.”And if Apple can’t figure it out, who can? Despite constant promises and over-optimistic projections from self-driving car researchers, the driverless cars don’t seem to be coming to the masses anytime soon.Even while on vacation, I couldn’t help myself from reading Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk. The suit convinced usually skeptical Hindenburg Research to buy Twitter shares, believing that Twitter had a compelling case on its hands.It’s hard not to feel bad for Twitter. They never wanted Musk to try to buy them in the first place. Then Musk gave them an offer too good to refuse. And since then, he seems to be trying to do everything in his power to further erode Twitter’s value without paying them the premium he agreed to.Tom and Katie break down the drama on the latest episode.Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Sam Bankman-Fried, “SBF,” is bailing out failing crypto companies. The question is whether he’s trying to stymie contagion risk from further roiling the crypto world or if he’s simply shopping for deals. Or maybe it’s both.SBF’s crypto currency exchange company FTX gave crypto lender BlockFi a $400 million credit facility and struck a deal that allows FTX to buy BlockFi for as much as $240 million.Meanwhile, SBF’s investment arm Alameda Research provided Voyager Digital $500 million in financing in June. (Voyager Digital suspended withdrawals and deposits on Friday.) SBF also kicked the tires on crypto lender Celsius before raising questions about the company’s finances. (Celsius has frozen accounts and hired restructuring attorneys.)The Block reported last week:FTX began talks with Celsius about providing financial support or making an acquisition but decided against proceeding after looking at Celsius's finances, the sources said. Celsius had a $2 billion hole in its balance sheet and FTX found the company difficult to deal with, one of the sources said.FTX has also reportedly considered buying Robinhood after buying up a 7.6% stake. These days it seems like the crypto industry is eager for any sign of an SBF bailout:On this week’s Dead Cat, Tom Dotan and I called in two experts. We brought on Jeff John Roberts, the author of Kings of Crypto and the crypto editor at Fortune, and friend of the show Teddy Schleifer, who is a reporter at Puck and an SBF obsessive.We argued about SBF’s bailout strategy, his political ambitions, and the state of crypto regulation. Roberts accused me of being a “nocoiner” and I assured him that I was contentedly losing money on crypto currencies.Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript.Background readingThe Notorious S.B.F.Inside S.B.F.’s $12 Million Long ShotA 30-Year-Old Crypto Billionaire Wants to Give His Fortune AwayCan Crypto’s Richest Man Stand the Cold? Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

I got back from Collision, the 35,000-person tech conference in Toronto, Sunday night. Everyone is worried about falling valuations — but the tech world keeps on spinning. Listen to this week’s episode of Dead Cat, Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I catch up, talk about my conference-going experience, and argue about what tech executive we’d most like to see as president. (Katie picks Tim Cook but I’m going with Jeff Bezos.)Then, Tom and I talk with Bloomberg reporter Lauren Etter. She’s the author of The Devil’s Playbook. We discuss the FDA’s surprise decision to ban Juul starting at around 32:30.Etter wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek:In 2019 almost 30% of high school students reported using e-cigarettes, mostly Juul. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned that e-cigarette use had become an “almost ubiquitous—and dangerous—trend among teens.” Since then, the portion of high school students vaping has dropped to 11%, and the most popular product is a newer entrant, Puff Bar, not Juul.Yet it apparently wasn’t the company’s appeal to young people that led the agency to pull Juul off the market. A 2016 rule gave the FDA the authority to grant or deny “marketing orders” to e-cigarettes and other alternative tobacco products based on whether they met the standard of being “appropriate for the protection of the public health.” The agency found that Juul didn’t meet that standard because the company failed to provide sufficient evidence “to assess the potential toxicological risks of using the JUUL products”—even though Juul spent more than $150 million and hired an army of scientists to make its case.On Friday, a federal court stayed the FDA’s ban to give Juul time to appeal.Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Are we nearing a time when we are going to get to have real, meaningful conversations with artificial intelligence?Nitasha Tiku got the world wondering just that with her story in the Washington Post about a Google engineer who believes that the company’s LaMDA artificial intelligence might be sentient. Google engineer Blake Lemoine carried out a series of seemingly personal conversations with the artificial intelligence and walked away believing that there was a sort of person behind the messages he was receiving.Artificial intelligence expert Gary Marcus thinks the idea that artificial intelligence systems are anywhere close to sentience is patently absurd. He wrote on his Substack:Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient.On Dead Cat, Tom Dotan and I talked to Marcus about artificial intelligence, how tech companies should frame these text generating machines to their users, and the media’s failure to cover speculative technologies skeptically. (In the post we make reference to Marcus’s post Does AI really need a paradigm shift?)Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe