Newcomer Pod

There are a handful of genuinely interesting observations - particularly the cable-TV investor thesis explaining BuzzFeed's funding, and the claim that tech companies uniquely marketed their own dangers - but the episode is riddled with meandering half-thoughts, topic-hopping, and filler that dilute the useful content significantly. A B2B operator would extract a few usable framings but would have to wade through a lot.

“a lot of the early investors and BuzzFeed and Vice in particular had come out of and had their formative experiences in the cable area... their bet was that these companies would in their competition with one another, wind up licensing professional content”

“the companies behaved in ways that really no American company has ever behaved, which is like our product is terrible and dangerous. It's going to put you out of work and poison your children's minds. And so people believe that.”

A few genuinely non-obvious takes surface - the 'creator' label as a platform strategy to prevent media-company agglomeration, and the podcasting-to-blogging professionalisation arc - but most of the political and media commentary is standard-issue pundit fare that circulates widely. The cable-TV investor analogy is the strongest original contribution.

“creator is a word that was invented by these platforms to turn to make sure that, that content creators couldn't actually agglomerate into media companies or any other organization. Like they want to deal with Uber drivers, not with taxi fleets.”

“if you look at the list of top podcasters, five years ago, it was a bunch of, like, our weirdo podcast friends. If you look at the list of podcasters now, it is almost without exception entirely. Um, the cable news lineup of the 2020.”

Ben Smith is a genuine practitioner - ran BuzzFeed News at scale, co-founded Semafor, has real DC and tech-world access - and his insider sourcing occasionally shows. However, the episode's relevance to B2B operators is indirect at best; he's a media executive commenting on politics and press, not an operator who has built revenue-generating products at scale.

“I talked about this, not in detail, but that he. He's worried that, you know, he wakes up one morning and one of the big banks has been hacked in some novel way”

“when I had lunch, he took me out to lunch. He gave me advice that I was like, oh my God, this is good advice. And I'm personally unable to accept execute on this.”

The episode name-drops real people and institutions freely - Scott Bessant, Ashley Golden, Maggie Haberman, Josh Hawley, Jake Auchincloss - and the BuzzFeed section has some concrete numbers, but a large share of the substantive claims rest on vague anonymous sourcing ('a senior government official said to me,' 'people I know talk to Trump') with no verifiable data behind them.

“why did anybody put $500 million? And didn't Chris 100 million? He was on the board. He was Andreessen rep on the board.”

“Spencer Cox in Utah, you see Josh Hawley, you see Jake Oppenhloss in the House, a Democrat starting to push regulations around kids and technology”

Newcomer occasionally pushes back with genuine friction - pressing on Trump corruption characterisation, challenging the media's 'savvy' framing on Anthropic, nudging on Biden administration origins - but the conversation repeatedly wanders without resolution, and large stretches are pure affirmation ('yeah,' 'right,' 'interesting') with no meaningful follow-up.

“it's important to say the Trump administration, with regard to sort of its handling of business, is the most corrupt administration in modern history. Or like, do you think there is an objective review”

“I want to push back Just on one of the points you made, which I largely agree with what you're saying.”