Newcomer Podcast
113 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 20 ratingsA podcast about Silicon Valley, hosted by newsletter writer and independent journalist Eric Newcomer. Listen in for interviews with the dealmakers and builders who matter. Subscribe to newcomer.co for summaries of the episodes plus tech industry news, scoops, and analysis.
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Episodes
Why Software Is Eating The Banks | Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Then Lead Bank CEO Jackie Reses
March 26, 2024 23:19 - 48 minutes - 44.1 MBToday we’re highlighting two fireside chats from the Newcomer Banking Summit on March 14. First up is Mercury CEO Immad Akhund. He talked about how the Silicon Valley Bank crisis sent customers rushing to his digital banking service. He pitched a world where software — not human bankers — solve most of customers’ problems. Akhund told me, “My experience with relationship banking was I need to send a wire and I literally cannot figure out to do it, please help me. Which to me never felt l...
Lessons Learned From a Bank Run (Peter Hébert & Laurence Tosi) + SVB's Marc Cadieux
March 21, 2024 20:43 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MBWe’ve got two great sessions from the Newcomer Banking Summit for you: * First up, WestCap Group founder Laurence Tosi and Lux Capital co-founder Peter Hébert. They give an unvarnished account of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank with the benefit of hindsight. “It was like the banking equivalent of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Hébert said. “It was absolute sheer terror.” * We follow that up with Silicon Valley Bank President Marc Cadieux, who talks about where SVB is today and...
Two Titans on the Future of AI (with Reid Hoffman & Vinod Khosla)
November 30, 2023 17:51 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBToday, we have a double episode for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Reid Hoffman was fresh off a meeting with President Joe Biden when Hoffman and I sat down on stage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit Nov. 15. On stage, he told us that working to get Biden elected next year is one of his top priorities. Then, I sat down with the ever-feisty Vinod Khosla. The investor called for a TikTok ban and more welcoming immigration policies while warning against open-sourc...
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi & MosaicML Founder Naveen Rao Speak at Cerebral Valley
November 21, 2023 19:47 - 22 minutes - 20.2 MBWe were delighted to kick off the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit with Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, and Naveen Rao, co-founder of MosaicML. Their encounter at our debut event in March led to Ghodsi buying Rao’s company, which had little revenue, for $1.3 billion. At our event on Nov. 15, the two discussed how the deal came together quickly after meeting at the conference dinner. Thousands of enterprises around the world rely on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to power applications tha...
The Artificial Intelligence Startup Draft
November 14, 2023 19:46 - 1 hour - 59 MBIf you could amass any five artificial intelligence startup bets right now, which companies would you pick? My Cerebral Valley co-hosts and I took a stab at answering that question with an artificial intelligence startup draft. Our startup draft starts at 27:35 after a discussion of some of the biggest themes going into this week’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit. The draft gave us a chance to dissect some of the most promising startups in artificial intelligence right now. The goal was to...
Chip War (with Chris Miller)
November 10, 2023 19:06 - 1 hour - 84.4 MBFor this week’s episode, I spoke with Chris Miller, the author of Chip War, about the rise of Nvidia. While OpenAI gets the lion’s share of the public adulation for the sudden excitement about generative intelligence, Nvidia’s H100 chips are powering much of the generative AI frenzy. Nvidia’s stock has climbed over 200% over the past 12 months. And the company has become a key investor in generative AI startups. Miller (who comes on the show around the 41-minute mark) talks through Nvidia...
The AI Personal Stack (with Joshua Browder)
November 01, 2023 19:48 - 1 hour - 76.8 MBI’m back from my honeymoon in Japan. Thanks for sticking with the newsletter as I celebrated my wedding this year. Expect more of my newsletter writing soon. If you have tips or story ideas for me, you can always reach out at [email protected]. I hope you’ve been enjoying the Cerebral Valley podcast series while I’ve been gone. If you missed the first three episodes, you can check them out in the links below: * The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality * AI Kil...
Someday That NPC Could Be More Alive Than You Are (w/ Amy Wu & Keith Kawahata)
October 24, 2023 11:35 - 1 hour - 86.8 MBVideo games often represent the frontier of any new technology. Many of the most popular applications in the initial iPhone app store were games. Today’s virtual reality devices are dominated by video games. Artificial intelligence seems poised to upend the video game business and entertainment more broadly. On the third episode of our six-part Cerebral Valley podcast series, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I game out how artificial intelligence could reshape the media we consume. It h...
AI Kills Us All (with Daniel H. Wilson)
October 17, 2023 19:08 - 1 hour - 68.8 MBWhat’s so crazy about this moment in artificial intelligence is that many of the most credible voices in AI think there’s a real chance that this all turns out really, really badly. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pegged his “chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization” between 10% and 25%. That’s comforting. Applications to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit close TODAY October 17. Apply right now to be considered for an inv...
The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality
October 10, 2023 19:15 - 1 hour - 56.5 MBIn the past 12 months, it has felt like “AI” transformed from a pair of letters that companies affixed to their latest product announcements to get some extra marketing luster to the shorthand for a genuine technology revolution. ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and more showed the world what artificial intelligence is now capable of doing. Then, the funding started pouring in for every startup that had anything to do with those two letters. Every venture firm needed to bet on their own foun...
Life Extension Innovations, Moonshots & Snake Oil (with Celine Halioua & James Peyer)
September 27, 2023 19:04 - 1 hour - 55 MBI brought two top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs working on extending lifespans on the Newcomer podcast this week. One of them is trying to help people live longer. The other, their dogs. James Peyer, the CEO of Cambrian Bio, is acquiring majority stakes in drugs that could combat a particular illness while showing promise for broader use among healthy humans. Meanwhile, Celine Halioua, the CEO of Loyal, is developing drugs to make dogs live longer. Fundamentally life extension, or longe...
Fighting for Pro-Crypto Legislation in Sam Bankman-Fried's Shadow (with Chris Lehane)
September 13, 2023 19:37 - 1 hour - 60.1 MBChris Lehane was once the consummate Democratic spin man and campaign wonk. He introduced the world to the vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons. In 2015, Lehane dove into the high-growth startup world. He joined Airbnb to run policy and communications. He taught the home sharing company how to fight nicely with cities, dishing out data and tax cooperation in exchange for favorable local regulations. Unlike Uber’s confrontational approach that had it going to war with Bill de Bla...
He Helps Rich Tech Founders Part With Their Money (with Rey Flemings)
August 29, 2023 23:31 - 59 minutes - 54.4 MBI spend most of my time here talking about how people earn their money. Rey Flemings, the chief executive of the YC-backed startup Myria, is an expert at helping people spend it. For several years, Flemings ran a luxury services consultancy for family offices. In other words, he threw parties in Las Vegas, introduced billionaires to celebrities, rented out private mansions, and helped people acquire things money can’t usually buy. These days, Flemings is building a startup around the sa...
Hydrogen Space Balloon (with Jane Poynter & Ali Rohde)
August 22, 2023 23:36 - 1 hour - 76 MBJane Poynter spent two years and 20 minutes in a biosphere back in the early 1990s. (There’s a documentary about it.) Later, Poynter set her sights on a mission to Mars. Wired wrote in 2014, “Meet the Couple Who Could Be the First Humans to Travel to Mars.” The story was about Poynter and her husband, Taber MacCallum. These days, the duo is working together on building a hydrogen balloon that will take tourists to space for $125,000. Poytner came on the podcast to talk about her startup,...
Spaceman Explains to Earthman How Things Work (with Delian Asparouhov)
August 15, 2023 22:06 - 56 minutes - 51.7 MBLast time I remember writing about Varda co-founder and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov, I was giving him a hard time about his subdued impromptu Clubhouse run-in with then San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin who he’d been flaming on Twitter. But since then, Asparouhov has mellowed out online. When I texted him after our podcast recording session and mentioned that his Founders Fund colleague Mike Solana was sassing me on Elon Musk’s social networking platform, Asparouhov w...
Scaling People (with Claire Hughes Johnson)
August 08, 2023 20:50 - 59 minutes - 54.4 MBClaire Hughes Johnson writes in her book, Scaling People, about a moment early on in her time at Stripe when an Irish journalist shouted to her, “You’re the lady! You’re the lady with the lads!” Hughes Johnson, who joined Stripe in 2014 as the payments startup’s chief operating officer, works closely with two of the most iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Patrick and John Collison. During her tenure as COO, she helped bring her management know-how from Google and experience working for Sh...
Staying Global (with Bejul Somaia)
August 01, 2023 22:30 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBLightspeed Venture Partners can sometimes live in the shadow of its noisier rivals. Andreessen Horowitz has a massive war chest, sprawling payroll, and insatiable appetite for attention. Meanwhile, Sequoia Capital is, well, Sequoia. But Lightspeed has established itself as one of the top multi-stage technology investors of this era. In July 2022, Lightspeed announced that it had raised more than $7 billion to invest in startups. Now, as Sequoia spins off its Chinese and Indian venture ca...
Psychedelics, Micro Nuclear Reactors & Venture Turbulence (with Rebecca Kaden)
July 25, 2023 21:50 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBUnion Square Ventures has some of the best performing funds in the venture capital industry. As I’ve reported, USV-backer UTIMCO disclosed in a recent filing that USV had delivered the public investment fund an internal rate of return of 59%. And that number will likely go up over time. (For instance, USV portfolio company Casetext sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million after the UTIMCO performance update.) I invited USV managing partner Rebecca Kaden onto the Newcomer podcast to talk ...
Talking Threads With the Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen
July 18, 2023 23:37 - 57 minutes - 52.2 MBElon Musk is the liberal elite’s enemy of the moment. How quickly the bad blood for Mark Zuckerberg is forgotten. When Zuckerberg’s Meta released Twitter rival Threads, reporters and left-leaning types (myself included) flocked to the new app as a potential refuge from Musk’s Twitter. The enemy of my enemy is my friend seemed to be the logic of the moment. I invited Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen onto the podcast to discuss the sudden embrace of Threads, her ongoing criticisms ...
Musk & Zuck Go Head to Head, Vying to Rule Global Online Discussion (with Katie Notopoulos & Tom Dotan)
July 11, 2023 22:19 - 57 minutes - 53 MBFormer BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos spent the first few days posting on Meta’s Twitter copycat, Threads, as if she were the editor-in-chief of the new app. “As EIC, it’s a lot of work! I’m personally curating the feed for users based on all of Meta’s information on them to bring each person a hand-curated feed that I’ve approved,” Notopoulos posted on Threads. While Meta tolerated the ruse, the company censored one of her more roguish posts. “At Threads, our expectation is for al...
Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet Talks Pre-Seed Deals, YC, SoftBank & `Zombie Mode' Funds
July 06, 2023 11:30 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBMaëlle Gavet and I first crossed paths about a decade ago when she was the CEO of the Russian e-commerce company Ozon. Then, we met up again when she was working as the chief operating officer for the SoftBank-backed real estate tech company Compass. A couple of months ago, I ran into Gavet at a networking dinner in New York City. I interrogated her about her two-and-half years so far as the chief executive officer of Techstars, the global pre-seed investment firm. I invited Gavet on the Ne...
Not Exactly AR And Not Exactly VR (with Lauren Goode & Anand Agarawala)
June 13, 2023 21:40 - 53 minutes - 36.6 MBThe metaverse had been left for dead. The massive hype for virtual worlds that we saw during the pandemic dissipated once we could all see our fellow humans in person again. But last week Apple finally revealed its augmented reality device, the Apple Vision Pro. The tech giant that rarely misses the mark with its carefully thought through product releases revealed that it wanted people to strap on ski goggle-like devices, direct a computer with their eyeballs, click with their fingers, and...
Rug Salesman Turned Valley Insider Raises a $432 Million Seed Fund (with Pejman Nozad)
June 06, 2023 23:33 - 48 minutes - 33 MBI couldn’t help but spend the first few minutes of my conversation with Pejman Nozad fishing for the story of how a rug salesman built one of Silicon Valley’s top institutional pre-seed and seed funds. Nozad has such a fascinating and inspirational story; it reflects what is possible when Silicon Valley is at its best. Nozad told me how Sequoia’s Doug Leone gave him a shot. “We connected [as] both really good salespeople,” Nozad recalled. “I said Doug, ‘I can help you invest in some amaz...
The Gossip Economy (with Kyle Harrison)
May 31, 2023 18:26 - 1 hour - 43.7 MBFor this week’s Newcomer podcast, I talked with Contrary general partner Kyle Harrison. We spent the first part of the episode talking about his piece VC Contagion: Is Venture Capital Killing Itself? I just published the essay exclusively in Newcomer. Then, on the podcast Harrison talked about Contrary and its research strategy. The firm has published reports on Stripe, OpenAI, Databricks, and many other private companies. We also discuss whether, when it comes to the private markets, i...
The State of Consumer Investing With Benchmark's Sarah Tavel
May 23, 2023 23:24 - 58 minutes - 39.9 MBIt’s been a sad state of affairs for consumer companies not named TikTok. Poparazzi just shut down. (At least some of the team went to Instagram.) Popshop is struggling. The venture capital firm Benchmark helped establish both companies as consumer startups to watch by leading their Series A rounds. Sarah Tavel, who led the investment in Poparazzi and has worked closely with Popshop, agreed to come on the Newcomer podcast to talk about the brutal state of consumer startups. “Our deep bel...
Substack's Index Fund of Culture (with Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie)
May 17, 2023 21:20 - 51 minutes - 35.7 MBI caught up with Substack co-founders and at Substack’s office in San Francisco last week. They’re fresh off raising a community fundraising round and launching their social network Notes. I wrote in March about my decision to invest $5,000 in Substack’s fundraising round, even though the company revealed that it had negative revenue in 2021: I’m already compromised when it comes to Substack. They’ve made my job possible. And while I already have plenty of financial exposure to Substack...
Traffic Jam (with Ben Smith)
May 02, 2023 22:34 - 54 minutes - 37.4 MBThe blitzscaling funding model failed news companies. Vice Media — which raised more than $1 billion from the likes of TPG, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Disney — is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy. BuzzFeed — which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, General Atlantic, and NBCUniversal — just shut down its news division and has watched its stock price sink 95% since going public via a SPAC. Meanwhile, Gawker, which successfull...
The World After Capital (with Albert Wenger)
April 25, 2023 22:54 - 58 minutes - 40.1 MBUnion Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger has been successful enough to write a techno-manifesto. Wenger made early investments in companies like Twilio, MongoDB, and Etsy. Now, he’s spending much of his time on USV’s climate investing out of the firm’s $200 million climate fund. Wenger has historically been a media recluse — but he’s started popping his head out. So when I got the opportunity to talk to him on the Newcomer podcast, I jumped. After all, Union Square Ventures has r...
Amazon Bedrock & BabyAGI (with Jon Turow)
April 18, 2023 21:34 - 49 minutes - 33.7 MBBefore becoming a partner at Madrona Venture Group, Jon Turow worked as the head of product for computer vision at Amazon Web Services. He spent nine years at AWS in the product organization. Since becoming a venture capitalist, he’s invested in promising AI companies like Runway and Numbers Station, along with the buzzy data company MotherDuck. So when Amazon announced a partnership, called Amazon Bedrock, with Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs, I asked Turow to come on the show to he...
Open-Source AI: Replit's Amjad Masad & Hugging Face's Clem Delangue
April 06, 2023 23:41 - 56 minutes - 39.1 MBToday, we have a bonus double episode of the Newcomer podcast for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. Part 1: Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Hugging Face Clément Delangue Together, they’re a charismatic open-source alliance. We talked about the threat posed by OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, the questions around Replit and Hugging Face’s business models, and where they would like to see more development in artificial intelligence. Charles Hudson, at Pr...
Cerebral Valley Double Feature: Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque & General Catalyst's Deep Nishar
April 04, 2023 21:12 - 49 minutes - 34.3 MBToday, we have a double episode for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. Part 1: My Conversation with Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque I didn’t know what to make of Stability AI and its CEO Emad Mostaque heading into my conversation with Mostaque Thursday at Cerebral Valley. Mostaque’s company has wrapped its arms around the wildly successful open-source artificial intelligence project Stable Diffusion. Last year, Mostaque’s company, Stability AI, raised ...
Venture Capital Gravitational Physics (with Ravi Mhatre)
March 29, 2023 01:01 - 43 minutes - 29.7 MBRavi Mhatre co-founded Lightspeed Venture Partners just before the technology industry unraveled in the dot-com bust. Lightspeed weathered the dot-com crash and became one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, known particularly for many of its enterprise software investments. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you ...
Peering Over the Edge of Death (with Jon McNeill)
March 21, 2023 22:11 - 53 minutes - 24.6 MBBehind the headlines, Jon McNeill has been a key operator and board member across many of the companies that you read about. He was the president of Tesla. Then, in February 2018, he left to take the role of chief operating officer at ride sharing company Lyft. At Tesla, he worked desperately to get the company to sell enough cars to hit Tesla’s sales targets. With the rest of the executive team, he said, “We were arm and arm to do the impossible.” This episode of Newcomer is brought to ...
A Wall Street Veteran & Investor Explains Silicon Valley Bank's Unraveling (with Laurence Tosi)
March 14, 2023 18:59 - 1 hour - 42.7 MBLaurence Tosi had a front seat for another banking crisis: He worked as a top banking executive and then private equity executive as the financial crisis swept up Wall Street. Tosi is someone I turn to when I want to get a sophisticated investor’s account of what’s really going on in Silicon Valley. His resume straddles Wall Street and Silicon Valley. He worked as the chief operating officer at Merrill Lynch, as the chief financial officer at Blackstone, and as the chief financial officer...
This Kicked Off With a Dinner With Elon Musk Years Ago (with Reid Hoffman)
March 07, 2023 21:50 - 57 minutes - 39.4 MBFor the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI’s board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk. “This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during co...
Newcomer, the Podcast
March 06, 2023 22:02 - 1 minute - 1.19 MBI’m pleased to announce that I’m introducing a new podcast and starting a YouTube channel. I’m calling it “Newcomer” — like this newsletter. What can I say? It’s a good name. The show kicks off tomorrow with an interview with LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman. Hoffman just stepped off OpenAI’s board of directors. We talk about that decision, AI sentience, the PayPal mafia, cloud compute spending, Joe Biden’s presidency, and much more. I think you’ll enjoy the episode...
A New Dimension (w/Nan Li, Adam Goulburn, and Zavain Dar)
February 01, 2023 00:09 - 51 minutes - 35.4 MBI was the first to report that Nan Li, Adam Goulburn, and Zavain Dar were setting out to create a venture capital firm back in August 2022. So when the trio finally announced their $350 million life sciences and technology-focused venture firm, called Dimension, I had to have them on the podcast. I wanted to hear why Goulburn and Dar, general partners at Lux Capital, and Li, a general partner at Obvious Ventures, decided to embark on the long, hard trek of building their own firm. The thr...
Another Shoe to Drop (w/Jeremy Levine)
January 24, 2023 22:52 - 1 hour - 49.8 MBBessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine is someone who keeps his head when others are losing theirs. He’s long been wary of tech exuberance while being a long-term optimist about the transformative power of technology. A board member at Pinterest and Shopify, Levine described his investing style to me for this week’s Dead Cat podcast: “I don’t like to go where all the cool kids are, where all the popular kids are. I like to kind of go off in the corner of the playground and find someone...
'I Fell in Love With an Algorithm' (w/Cristóbal Valenzuela & Alexis Gay)
January 17, 2023 23:43 - 56 minutes - 38.6 MBGenerative 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 dis...
Business Tea, the Creator Economy Downturn, Twitter Drama & TikTok's Chinese Influence (w/Taylor Lorenz)
January 10, 2023 23:05 - 1 hour - 41.4 MBI 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 p...
All Eyes Are on Apple's Augmented Reality Device As the Hunt for a Revolutionary Consumer Startup Continues (w/Max Child & James Wilsterman)
January 04, 2023 01:39 - 1 hour - 51.3 MBBefore 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’...
Does That Mean the Cat's Dead?
December 27, 2022 22:52 - 1 hour - 50.6 MBTom 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 Park...
'This Monolithic Other That Is Acting in Some Dark Confederacy Against What Is True and Good in the World' (w/Antonio García Martínez)
December 20, 2022 22:55 - 1 hour - 52.9 MBOn 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...
The Musk Bubble in Tech Is Going to Pop (w/Alex Stamos)
December 14, 2022 13:57 - 1 hour - 49.6 MBThis 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...
Hollywood As Told By the Former NBC Entertainment Chairman (w/Paul Telegdy)
December 06, 2022 22:24 - 1 hour - 48.9 MBFormer 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 succes...
Going All-In on the Tech/Media War (w/Jason Calacanis)
November 30, 2022 20:01 - 1 hour - 41.4 MBThere’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...
Taylor Swift Tickets, FTX & Twitter
November 22, 2022 20:35 - 56 minutes - 77.9 MBIf 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...
SBF in Shambles (w/Teddy Schleifer)
November 15, 2022 17:35 - 54 minutes - 74.8 MBOn 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 incli...
The End of Quiet Quitting (w/Aki Ito)
November 08, 2022 23:51 - 55 minutes - 76.4 MBWhile 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 compan...
Blue Checks & Semi-Fascism (w/Tim Miller)
November 01, 2022 19:57 - 1 hour - 89.1 MBThis 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 fut...