PODCAST · news
Newcomer Pod
by Eric Newcomer | newcomer.co
Hi, I'm Eric Newcomer. With this podcast, I dive straight into the heart of the tech industry, interviewing top investors and founders. I’m bringing my sensibility as someone who understands the inside story of Silicon Valley but who is happy to poke and prod as to why the tech world operates like it does.If you want first-person and insider information delivered to your newsletter, subscribe to my podcast at newcomer.co on Substack.
Episodes
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Alex Kantrowitz on OpenAI, Nvidia & What Could Derail the AI Boom
OpenAI’s revenue confusion, Apple’s AI missteps, and Nvidia’s investments raise a bigger question: how much depends on the AI boom continuing?Big Technology founder Alex Kantrowitz joins Eric Newcomer to examine OpenAI and Anthropic’s businesses, the market’s sensitivity to their growth, and the...
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Reid Hoffman on ChatGPT, Data Centers & Why America Needs AI
Reid Hoffman on ChatGPT, the future of jobs, and why he believes the AI boom is keeping America out of a recession. The LinkedIn co-founder joins Eric Newcomer to explain why America needs to keep building AI while being careful about how powerful new systems are released. He shares why nobody…
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Josh Elman on Apple, AI Agents & Why Startups Can Still Win
Why did Josh Elman leave Apple, and where can AI startups still win against OpenAI? The former Siri and Apple Intelligence team member explains why he’s betting on a new wave of consumer companies. Josh joins Eric Newcomer to discuss his move to Andreessen Horowitz, what held Siri back, and how...
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Former SEC Official on FTX, Crypto & Silicon Valley’s Fraud Problem
Renee Jones on how billion-dollar startups escaped public scrutiny, why founders became more powerful than their boards, and what happens when private markets operate in secrecy. Renee Jones, Boston College Law School professor, former SEC official, and author of Untamed Unicorns, joins Eric...
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Zavain Dar on Hugging Face, NVIDIA & Why Silicon Valley Should Pay Attention to China
What does NVIDIA really get from Hugging Face—and what is Silicon Valley missing about China? Zavain Dar, co-founder of Dimension and an early Hugging Face investor during his time at Lux Capital, joins Eric Newcomer to unpack NVIDIA’s open source strategy, the competition with OpenAI and...
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Sam Parr on The Hustle, Hampton & Why the OpenAI-TBPN Deal Was a Mistake
Sam Parr on getting fired by Airbnb the day before he started, selling The Hustle, and why $10 million in revenue changes everything. Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle and Hampton and co-host of My First Million, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about how he went from an Airbnb firing to an eight-figure...
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This AI Was Trained on a Billion Video Game Clips. Now It Controls Robots.
How can billions of video game clips train AI to control robots? General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte explains why gaming data may be the missing ingredient for the next generation of robotics and AI agents. Pim de Witte built the world's largest RuneScape private server as a teenager before…
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John Coogan on Selling TBPN to OpenAI, Sam Altman & the Future of Tech Media
John Coogan, co-founder of TBPN, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about the acquisition that shocked the tech media world. John breaks down how TBPN went from two guys in suits to one of the most-watched live tech shows on the internet, why OpenAI came calling, what an editorial independence clause...
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Taylor Lorenz Unfiltered on Social Media, Free Speech & the Surveillance State
Taylor Lorenz on why the social media panic is overblown and who's actually driving it. Taylor Lorenz, journalist and author of Extremely Online, joins Eric Newcomer to push back on the moral panic around phones, social media, and screen time. Taylor argues there is no such thing as social media...
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The Goldman Sachs Exec on AI, Wall Street & the Firm That Went Bankrupt in 40 Minutes
The Goldman Sachs exec who automated Wall Street on what AI agents actually do to jobs, companies, and the future of enterprise software. Marty Chavez got his AI PhD in 1991 when there were exactly zero AI jobs. So he went to Goldman Sachs and spent decades building the machines that took over…
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Ben Smith on Trump, Anthropic & the Collision of Government and Big Tech
Semafor's editor-in-chief on why Washington has decided Anthropic needs to pick a side. Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, joins Eric Newcomer to break down the collision between the Trump administration and Anthropic, and what it reveals about the new relationship between...
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Aidan Gomez Unfiltered on AGI, China & AI's Biggest Risk
Aidan Gomez on AGI, China, and the Biggest Risk Facing AI. Cohere co-founder and Transformer co-author Aidan Gomez joins Eric Newcomer to discuss whether we've already reached AGI, why Chinese AI models are being underestimated, the future of enterprise AI, sovereign AI, and why relying on a...
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Christina Cacioppo Unfiltered on Fake Compliance, AI Security & Building a $4B Company
The CEO of a $4 billion compliance company on how her biggest competitor was faking it, and what that means for AI startup culture. Christina Cacioppo, co-founder and CEO of Vanta, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about the scandal that shook the compliance world. Her $4 billion competitor Delve was...
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Ed Zitron Unfiltered on OpenAI, Anthropic & Why the Whole Thing Is a Con
Ed Zitron is back, and he's making his strongest case yet that OpenAI and Anthropic are running a deliberate con on the public. In his second appearance on the Newcomer Podcast, Ed Zitron sits down with Eric Newcomer to break down why he believes there is no real ROI in AI, how Sam Altman and…
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How Tech's San Francisco Values Gave Way to the Right
How San Francisco's tech culture went from countercultural idealism to right-wing power, and what it means for the rest of us. Jonathan Weber, editor at large at The New Yorker and author of City on the Edge, joins Eric Newcomer to trace the 30-year arc of how San Francisco became the center of…
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WIRED's Editor on Elon, Trump & Silicon Valley's War on the Press
WIRED's global editorial director on why Silicon Valley wants to control the press and what she's doing about it. Katie Drummond, global editorial director of WIRED, sits down with Eric Newcomer to talk about the simmering war between tech and media. From surviving the Gawker bankruptcy to now...
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The Man Who Helped Destroy Gawker Is Coming Back For The Rest of Media
The man who helped bring down Gawker is back, and this time he’s coming for the media industry. Eric sits down with Aron Ping D’Souza, the Oxford law student who first pitched Peter Thiel on the idea that would eventually bankrupt Gawker. Today, Aron is building the Enhanced Games, a PED-legal...
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Vinod Khosla on the End of Jobs and the Future of Capitalism
Vinod Khosla on Why AI Could End Human Labor and Change Capitalism Forever Vinod Khosla joins Newcomer to discuss AI, capitalism, freedom, education, religion, and why he believes technology will fundamentally reshape how humans live and work. The legendary venture capitalist behind Sun...
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OpenAI Code Red: The Drama Before the Next Big Drop
OpenAI has entered what insiders are calling Code Red!In this episode, we unpack why Sam Altman is suddenly sounding the alarm.Is this a genuine internal crisis, or a calculated move to set expectations ahead of a major product cycle next year?We explore:-What “Code Red” actually means inside...
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Katie Jacobs Stanton on Elon, Trump & Why Silicon Valley Won’t Speak Up
Silicon Valley has more power than ever, so why won't it speak up? Katie Jacobs Stanton, former Twitter executive, Obama White House alum, and founder of Moxxie Ventures, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about what's really happening inside the Valley right now. They get into why tech leaders stayed...
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Amanda Askell on AI Consciousness, Claude & Silicon Valley’s Biggest Fear
Amanda Askell, AI safety researcher at Anthropic, joins Eric Newcomer to break down one of the biggest and most uncomfortable questions in tech right now: could AI systems like Claude become conscious, and if they do, what do we owe them? They discuss why treating AI systems poorly might matter...
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Kara Swisher — "I'd rather have Ted Cruz make decisions about AI"
Kara Swisher has spent decades as the most feared journalist in Silicon Valley. She predicted the January 6th insurrection in 2019. She called out Zuckerberg on hate speech years before it became a mainstream conversation. She warned about techs drift toward right wing politics before anyone…
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Jim Lanzone — "They Had a Chance to Sell for $44 Billion. They Didn't."
Jim Lanzone has spent his entire career betting on companies the internet forgot about and making them matter again. CEO of Ask.com, Tinder, and now Yahoo. Eric sat down with him to find out how he pulled off the turnaround nobody thought was possible, what single decision handed Google the...
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The Startup That Crashed Its Own Servers Because of Open Claw
VCs surveyed across the industry ranked their most exciting enterprise tech companies and the #1 early stage pick was a name almost nobody had heard of. Eric sits down with Han Wang, CEO of Mintlify, the knowledge infrastructure platform that quietly powers the docs for Anthropic, Lovable, and...
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Matt Mahan — "California's Failure Is the Best Ammunition Trump Has Ever Had"
Matt Mahan is the Mayor of San Jose and a candidate for Governor of California. He is one of the only prominent Democrats in the state willing to say out loud that California's failure to fix housing, homelessness, and energy costs has handed the MAGA movement its best ammunition. It isn't a...
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Shardul Shah — "I wired the money before knowing what they were building"
Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures, was one of the first checks into Wiz — the Israeli cybersecurity company Google acquired for $32 billion. It wasn't luck. It was a decade-long relationship with the founders, a willingness to wire money on conviction alone, and a philosophy that treats…
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Barry McCardel on Why Everyone Is Copying Palantir’s Playbook (And Getting It Wrong)
Barry McCardel spent years at Palantir before co-founding Hex, the AI data platform he describes as “Cursor for data.” In this conversation with Eric Newcomer, he breaks down Palantir’s business model, the truth about forward deployed engineers, how AI agents are changing data analytics and...
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Rick Heitzmann: The AI Boom Is Forcing a New IPO Wave
Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark joins the Newcomer Podcast to discuss the state of venture capital, the AI investment boom, and why the next wave of tech IPOs may be closer than many expect. Rick shares how investors are thinking about AI infrastructure, the role of data as the core advantage in the…
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Can Tech Work With Zohran Mamdani? | Julie Samuels
How does New York’s tech industry navigate AI, city politics, and a new mayor in the Trump era?Julie Samuels, President and CEO of Tech:NYC, joins the Newcomer Podcast to discuss the growing intersection of technology and politics. Samuels has spent years at the center of New York’s tech…
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Jeremy Levine on AI Hype, Market Cycles & Playing the Long Game
How does one of the most established venture capital firms in the world think about the so called “SaaS apocalypse”? Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners joins the Newcomer Podcast to discuss the SaaS repricing, the acceleration of AI, and why venture capital remains a long game.We unpack...
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Keith Rabois and Eric Newcomer's Heated Conversation on Tech, Trump, and Tariffs
Keith Rabois joins the Newcomer Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation that moves between tech, venture capital, and politics.On the tech side, we start with Brex being acquired by Capital One and what that means for Ramp. Rabois argues that banks won’t build the “finance organization of the…
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Yoni Rechtman Unfiltered on Trump, AI Roll-Ups & Why VCs Backed the Wrong Side
Today on the Newcomer Podcast, we're joined by Yoni Rechtman, a partner at Slow Ventures and one of the most outspoken voices in venture capital right now. Rechtman doesn't hold back on Trump, the tech industry's political reckoning, or where the real opportunities in AI actually are. We talk…
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Tony Fadell Unfiltered on Apple, OpenAI & the Next Big Device
Today on the Newcomer Podcast, we’re joined by Tony Fadell, one of the most influential figures in modern hardware design. Fadell helped bring some of the most important consumer electronics to life and has shaped how people interact with technology.We talk about where the next major tech device...
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What the AI Boom Means for Databases and Enterprise Software
Today on the Newcomer Podcast, we’re at MongoDB.Local for a series of conversations on how enterprise AI is actually being built. MongoDB CEO CJ Desai joins the show 65 days into the role to explain why San Francisco is “back,” how MongoDB is repositioning itself for the AI era, and why...
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Katie Benner on Meritocracy, Race, and American Education Reform
Today on the podcast, we’re joined by an old friend, New York Times correspondent Katie Benner.We look back on our days covering tech together at The Information and our old podcast Dead Cat, before diving into her new book, Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises.…
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2026 Predictions: AI Grammy Winner, OpenAI Buying Pinterest, and MORE
The AI boom is hitting real limits. In this episode, the Newcomer team breaks down why data centers are running out of power, what is really happening inside OpenAI after its latest shakeup, and why neocloud players like CoreWeave may be heading toward a financial crunch. Eric Newcomer, Tom…
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The Tech Quotes That Defined 2025
What do Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk actually believe about the future of tech? In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, we break down the quotes that defined tech in 2025. From OpenAI and Anthropic to venture capital, regulation, and Silicon Valley…
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The Secret to Raising $9B
How do you quietly raise $9 billion in a world obsessed with hype? In today’s episode, we break down the rise of Lightspeed Venture Partners: the ultra-successful, strangely under-the-radar mega-fund shaping the next decade of AI, enterprise, and consumer tech. Lightspeed has posted huge exits…
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IF NETFLIX WINS WITH WARNER BROS... They’ll STILL Lose to YouTube
The bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery is over…for now. Netflix shocked Hollywood by announcing a deal to acquire the storied studio and its crown jewel, HBO Max, beating out a massive $108 billion hostile bid from Paramount. But in this episode, we argue that the $87 billion mega-deal is...
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OF COURSE, Trump’s AI Czar David Sacks Has ALSO Invested In AI
In this episode, we break down the revelations around David Sacks, the venture capitalist now serving as the Trump administration’s de-facto AI czar, while simultaneously holding deep financial ties across the AI industry he’s helping shape.Following the New York Times’ recent reporting, we…
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Inside the Sex Cult That Fooled Silicon Valley
Investigative journalist Ellen Huet joins the show to discuss her stunning new book on OneTaste, the wellness startup that rose to Silicon Valley fame before spiraling into allegations of manipulation, coercion, and cult-like control. We unpack how a company selling “female empowerment” turned…
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Reid Hoffman on Epstein, Elon Musk, and why AI is NOT a Bubble
Reid Hoffman Breaks Silence on Epstein Emails & AI PowerToday on the Newcomer Podcast, Reid Hoffman joins me for a wide-ranging conversation on AI power, regulation, politics, and the future of the tech economy. We get into everything — AGI timelines, Sam Altman’s real competition, AI policy, and...
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Which $Billion AI Startup Would You Short?
MongoDB.local San Francisco is happening on January 15th. Learn more and register here → http://mdb.link/sf-dot-local At the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, we surveyed more than 300 founders and investors with one question:“Which billion-dollar AI startup would you short?” The answers were… blunt.In...
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Inside Anthropic’s Plan to Fix AI’s BIGGEST Problem
Buckle up—today's episode takes you inside the war on AI slop and Anthropic's bold plan to fix artificial intelligence's biggest problems. We kick things off at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, where Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger shares why AI needs to be truth-seeking and what their team is doing to...
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AI Predicts Its Own Rise (and Fall)
Everyone has predictions about AI, but what happens when AI predicts itself? In this episode of The Newcomer Podcast, Eric is joined by Cerebral Valley co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman to let AI map out its own 5-year plan. From AGI timelines to AI in healthcare, movies, and beyond.Can AI...
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Inside the AI Gold Rush (One Year Later)
Click here to learn more about MongoDB for Startups - https://www.mongodb.com/lp/solutions/startups/partners?utm_campaign=startup_partner&utm_source=newcomer&utm_medium=referral This is the leadup to our newest installment of the Cerebral Valley AI conference we're hosting on November 12th. In…
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Inside Amazon’s $100B Automation Gamble
Is the AI boom already peaking? In this episode of The Newcomer Podcast, Eric, Madeline and Tom take a hard look at the hype cycle driving Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush — from Andreessen Horowitz’s record-breaking $25 billion year to Amazon’s push to automate its entire workforce.We explore...
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Inside the $Trillion AI Money Machine
AI stocks are booming — but are we nearing a breaking point?This week on Newcomer, we unpack how OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and AMD are fueling what might be the biggest tech money machine since the dot-com bubble. From trillion-dollar valuations to volatile deals and hype cycles, we explore...
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The Coming AI Crash No One Wants to Admit | Alex Heath x Newcomer Podcast
This week on the Newcomer Podcast, Madeline and Tom are joined by Alex Heath to dig into some of the biggest questions in tech right now. We ask: Is the AI bubble about to burst? OpenAI is propping up huge partners like Microsoft, Oracle, and Broadcom — but what happens if their momentum slows?...
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Andreessen Horowitz’s Media Empire, Trump vs. Kimmel, Klarna’s $15B IPO Lessons
This week on the Newcomer Podcast, we dive into three stories that reveal how tech, politics, and media are colliding in unexpected ways. First, we look at Andreessen Horowitz’s expanding media ambitions, exploring why A16z wants to shape the narrative around everything from defense tech to…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Hi, I'm Eric Newcomer. With this podcast, I dive straight into the heart of the tech industry, interviewing top investors and founders. I’m bringing my sensibility as someone who understands the inside story of Silicon Valley but who is happy to poke and prod as to why the tech world operates like it does.If you want first-person and insider information delivered to your newsletter, subscribe to my podcast at newcomer.co on Substack.
HOSTED BY
Eric Newcomer | newcomer.co
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How many episodes does Newcomer Pod have?
Newcomer Pod currently has 209 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Newcomer Pod about?
Hi, I'm Eric Newcomer. With this podcast, I dive straight into the heart of the tech industry, interviewing top investors and founders. I’m bringing my sensibility as someone who understands the inside story of Silicon Valley but who is happy to poke and prod as to why the tech world operates like...
How often does Newcomer Pod release new episodes?
Newcomer Pod publishes regularly with 209 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Newcomer Pod on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Newcomer Pod?
Newcomer Pod is created and hosted by Eric Newcomer | newcomer.co.
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