Newcomer Podcast

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 grind

She 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

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.

As much as insiders might bristle over their portrayals, television and movies shape how the world sees Silicon Valley.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network defined how people thought about Mark Zuckerberg. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short sold arcane financial stories to the masses.

So Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I were interested to see how New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s propulsive book about Uber from 2019 — Super Pumped — would be translated to our television screens.

Since we can’t watch the show yet (the first episode airs Feb. 27), we spoke to Isaac — who has played an integral role in making sure that the show’s writers know the true story behind what went down in the Uber saga. We’ll soon see how closely they hewed to reality.

But ears will be burning. Despite only running seven episodes, the show features a long list of tech characters. They might not be famous outside of Silicon Valley but they are the stuff of legend to Silicon Valley obsessives. That includes people like David Drummond, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington, Emil Michael, Rachel Whetstone, and Jill Hazelbaker. That’s not to mention the headline conflict between Travis Kalanick and Bill Gurley.

Isaac gave us a spoiler-free behind the scenes look at the making of the show. We talked about Hollywood’s obsession with tech. Isaac gave us a preview of the questions he’s asking going into his in-the-works book on Facebook — which is already slated to become the sequel to the Uber series. And we concluded our conversation with a brief discussion of Isaac and his colleagues’ latest reporting on Spotify, which revealed that Spotify had committed to paying Joe Rogan a stunning $200 million-plus.

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 listen

Read the automated transcript

Patreon CEO Jack Conte took the stage at my first ever SXSW event with a beer in hand.

With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, we discussed crowdfunding, OnlyFans, Substack, NFTs, Ukraine, and whether creators are brands.

Speaking from the stage at the Volley Game Room at SXSW, Conte explained why his company wouldn’t compete with the likes of Twitter and YouTube to build audiences for the creators that it works with. “Patreon set out to solve a very specific problem. The specific problem we were solving was, there are creators who are getting millions of views, creators who have incredible reach, but they’re being undervalued by society,” Conte said.

Conte said that he didn’t think Patreon could compete directly with large social media companies. “I actually don’t know that that’s a war that we would win. Those businesses are solid businesses. They have moats. They have network effects that make it very difficult to break into those worlds. I think Patreon’s best bet at solving this problem of creator payments is focusing very specifically on the problem of creator payments.”

Conte seemed to be interested in exploring NFTs but was reticent to say that the company was specifically considering embracing them after receiving backlash on another podcast for even asking a question about NFTs.

Toward the end of our conversation, Conte disagreed with journalist Taylor Lorenz’s stance that reporters should worry about their brands. Conte objected to the idea that creators of any sort should be thinking too much about their “brand.”

For context, earlier this month, Insider quoted Lorenz in a much-discussed article.

“When you think about the future of media, it’s much more distributed and about personalities," said Taylor Lorenz, a former Times tech reporter who recently left for The Washington Post. “Younger people recognize the power of having their own brand and audience, and the longer you stay at a job that restricts you from outside opportunities, the less relevant your brand becomes.”

A bunch of political reporters — including the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany — seized on Lorenz’s comments to take issue with the notion that journalists should shape their “brand.”

Conte seemed to agree with Lorenz that journalists can increasingly operate independently of newsrooms, but he took issue with the idea that journalists should mind their brands.

“Can journalists develop independent followings?” Conte asked rhetorically.

“Of course they can.”

“Do journalists need to be a part of larger institutions and leverage those institution’s historical reach?”

“No, obviously, that is changing.”

“But the more interesting part of what you just said is the distinguishing characteristics between this concept of a brand and the concept of a creator,” Conte said.

“What I would argue is that those are very f*****g different things. Very different.”

“A brand is consistent. It has brand values. It builds trust. It has decks of like its style and its voice and what it sounds like. And if it were a person, what kind of jeans would it wear?”

“Like that’s what brands are.”

“Brands are not human beings,” he continued. “They’re not.”

“Creators are f*****g people. They’re inconsistent. They’re human. They're beautiful. They’re frail. They’re smart. They’re stupid. They’re strategic. They’re impulsive. They’re human beings.”

Conte said, “We’re all trying to behave like brands today. And brands are corporations. Like we don’t have to behave like brands.”

“When you watch a Prince music video — that f*****g guy is just himself, no matter what. And I don’t want him to behave like Walmart. I want him to be Prince. And my favorite creators, I want them to be themselves and I want them to feel human and I want them to not feel trapped by their brand values. I think it’s a mistake for everybody to think, ‘I need a personal brand. I need to create a brand.’”

“Just be yourself.”

Next week, look forward to VC Jeopardy with Deena Shakir, Julian Eison, Charles Hudson, and Steve Brotman.