Newcomer Podcast

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

While I was in Lisbon for Web Summit, Dead Cat co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner kept the podcast going without me. They brought on my old colleague Aki Ito, who is now a reporter at Insider, to talk about her reporting on coasting culture, which helped to spark the global discussion of “quiet quitting.”The trio discuss how a recession will yet again change society’s relationship with work.You can read Ito’s stories here:* How hustle culture got America addicted to work* 'My company is not my family': Fed up with long hours, many employees have quietly decided to take it easy at work rather than quit their jobs* Everyone's talking about “quiet quitting.” Here's what it means — and how the term got its start.And here’s her latest on how the trend is reversing: RIP, quiet quitting — layoff fears have workers back to the grindShe writes,One of the first documented cases of quiet quitting was a recruiter I'll call Justin. Deep into the coronavirus pandemic, after working 10- to 12-hour days for much of his career, Justin had decided to dial it back on the job. When I spoke with him in February, he had whittled his workweek down to 40 hours. In the ensuing months, he went even further, working as little as 30. Every week he worked a little bit less, freeing him up to spend more time with his wife and their newborn baby.It was Justin, in fact, who helped spark the national debate that's been raging over quiet quitting. After speaking with him and other recovering overachievers, I wrote about how hustle culture, thanks to the job security granted by the roaring economy, was giving way to coasting culture. When a popular career coach on TikTok riffed on my story, the phrase "quiet quitting" became something of a new cultural dividing line. You either loved the Justins of the world for striking a reasonable work-life balance, or condemned them as slackers and cheats.But by the time the US was furiously debating his new approach to work, Justin was already shifting gears. Over the summer, as the economy began to slow, he noticed his clients were scaling back their hiring plans. Performance reviews seemed to be getting tougher. Some of his colleagues were let go. "It made me nervous," he told me. "It hit me that I'm the only one who works in my family." So he decided to "play it a little more safe." Today Justin, the OG Quiet Quitter, is back to going above and beyond. He's working 50 hours a week.Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

This week, we invited Tim Miller — the repentant former Republican operative and author of Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell — on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the upcoming midterm elections. Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I talk with Miller about Peter Thiel-backed Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. (FiveThirtyEight gives Vance a 78% chance of winning and Masters a 33% chance.)We discuss the populist future of the Republican Party and mourn the languishing low-taxes-at-any-cost wing of the Republican Party. Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Nathan Benaich, the lone general partner at Air Street Capital, has long been on my radar as an artificial intelligence obsessive. And so now that the artificial intelligence is suddenly the fixation of the venture capital world, I invited Benaich on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about generative artificial intelligence. With my co-hosts, Tom Dotan and Katie Benner, we talked about the promise of generative AI and the ethics of a machines borrowing from the vast depths of human creativity. I pay homage to the AI overlords, cheering for the triumph of generalized artificial intelligence while Benaich warns us that the conversation about generalized artificial intelligence is a bit of a distraction.Benaich is the co-author of the State of AI Report that came out this month. It’s worth a read. At the 42:40 mark, Nathan departs and Katie, Tom, and I change topics dramatically. Tom reads from the former Mailchimp CEO’s email to the email marketing company discouraging employees from stating their pronouns at the beginning of a meeting.The article in Platformer, which first published the email, carries the headline, Did this email cost Mailchimp's billionaire CEO his job?Here’s an excerpt of Mailchimp’s then CEO Ben Chestnut’s message to the company: I am noticing that whenever new employees introduce themselves in Zoom before asking their question, they’re also announcing their pronouns. This is completely unnecessary when a woman (who is clearly a woman) to tell us that her pronouns are “she/her” and a man (who is clearly a man) to tell us that his pronouns are “he/him.”Tom, Katie, and I weigh in on the conversation around pronouns in the workplace, heavy-handed HR policies, and embarrassing CEO emails. Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Insider’s anonymous first-person account of a ghostwriter for venture capitalists’ tweets captivated tech Twitter last week. Everyone wanted to know who exactly was paying $100,000 for a tweetstorm.How could anyone make $200,000 writing thought leadership. Why would anyone pay for that?So on this week’s episode of Dead Cat, hosts Eric Newcomer and Tom Dotan talked with Redpoint Ventures managing director Logan Bartlett who is a bit of a VC Twitter expert. Last November, Eric wrote about Bartlett's analysis of VC media output in a piece called A Twitter Troll’s Take on the Future of Investing.Since then, Redpoint hired a TikTok creator to help bolster the firm’s brand and Bartlett launched a podcast called Cartoon Avatars.On this week’s episode of Dead Cat, Bartlett insists he’s writing his own tweets, but he explains why VCs are so interested in building a Twitter following. Also Bartlett cast doubt on whether there’s a real market for people ghostwriting tweets for VCs.Later in the episode, we spitballed a ranking of some of the most important accounts on VC Twitter.Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe