The Season Finale of TBPN
On the show, the meta-show, and cultural power.
People have been sending me TBPN headlines to opine on because I’ve been thinking about the consumer-tech-media-complex for a long time. I've been friendly with John and Jordi, and Dylan, for years via the Twitterverse and their string of culture-first companies and media experiments, and occasional near-misses working together. Last year I wrote an essay about the duality of our era, Media and Machines, and it’s timely once again.
I published a version of this essay on Twitter, the native home of TBPN. (If you’re not familiar with TBPN, this NYT profile should get you up to speed.)
Watching the show get made.
It’s become a cliché to call for a sequel to HBO’s Silicon Valley, but the stories we want to watch are now indistinguishable from how company building and content creation is playing out on YouTube or X or whatever new platform’s being built. It’s the new television and TBPN is a new kind of show.
I’ve tuned into TBPN more to spectate than to voraciously consume. To see what new segments they were testing, which big-deal guests they’d courted, what life-sized tchotchkes they’d added to the set — and what new tricks John and Jordi had up their suit sleeves. Digesting the news itself felt secondary.
TBPN the podcast is great. But the story of John and Jordi creating TBPN and making it undeniable — that’s the best tech content we’ve seen in a long time. We’ve been watching a news show, but the better show has been watching it get made. That’s the show founders and investors and executives fell in love with and have been dying to guest star in, and that’s the show OpenAI acquired. In a sense, the meta-show was the main show.
Casting is everything.
Was the content that good, or was the biggest draw watching the thing get built? The same question lingered around Clubhouse’s generational run.1
There’s a kind of universal rule I’ve seen a few times now: when your audience is mostly composed of high-value insiders, they’re almost certainly watching the meta-game as much as they’re using the product. This is why “going viral on X” is valuable but not indicative of PMF with ‘normal’ people. Even still, it’s a strong signal of the producer’s taste, tact, distribution instincts, and cultural fluency.2 You just need to know which PMF matters for you.
My analogy has been that guesting on TBPN is less like going on a tech podcast and more like being featured in Rolling Stone — if Rolling Stone published a new issue every day. The ‘ESPN for tech’ framing captures the live energy and the play-by-play, but the show is also doing prestige TV and magazine profile work all in one. I’ve always said smart people want to be cool and cool people want to be smart, and TBPN found a way to deliver on that desire.
A consistently popular narrative on X is that TBPN succeeded because of their “clips” strategy, despite few people watching the live shows 3 hrs/day. Clips are a great distribution mechanic, and TBPN is doing it well enough, but that's not their claim to fame (clipping is big outside tech media) nor their X-factor. TBPN’s prowess is less algo-hacking and more arts & culture.
A big part of TBPN’s success is that people love the characters.
Jordi is the nerdy jock and John is the jocky nerd.
They have a meme-able height gap yet neither is insecure (they’re both still tall). They were already credible talents in startupland, and now they’ve proven to be star communicators and likable in a way we rarely see in tech. They’re that likable because of their personality, passion, positivity, and because of their golden-retriever-good-looks (the first part their own admission, the second the audience’s). Tyler the intern, equally likable, is the equivalent of the late night talk show host sidekick. One intangible on top of it all is they’re good at improv.
They’re having fun and letting us play along. (Fun includes TBPN trading cards, coveted merch, gong hits, guest polaroids, absurd soundboard, studio horse, et al.)
The details matter, because, as I’ve been repeating lately — casting is everything. Tech has access to some of the most impressive people on earth, and somehow keeps featuring the same few faces that aren’t great at storytelling or the format.
A great cast still needs a great script.
The most compelling Silicon Valley stories used to be about generational software companies that took a decade to make it and convinced you they’d last for decades, as the acquirers and not the acquired. The most impressive stories now are all about momentum and spectacle, about the ride from founding to exit (ideally in under two years). Any guilt or shame around ephemerality is gone. Joining one of the big AI ships, especially as a standout talent or team that was courted, is the smart, sexy, high status Silicon Valley play right now.
The next storyline.
Even before the OpenAI acquisition, I’d been wondering how TBPN would make 2026 as big as 2025. Staying indie and grinding for more mainstream relevance didn’t strike me as ideal. And greater ambitions are expensive to deliver. Something I’ve repeatedly observed is that the relentless energy of the first two years of any enterprise is very hard to sustain in later years. One way to re-up that energy is to take a crazy leap of some kind. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely outcome because it’s often the most energizing one.3
Rebrand, partner, pivot, buy, sell. Good or bad reactions matter less than maintaining energy and with that, relevance, for yourself and the audience.
All else equal, I’m a bit less excited to tune into TBPN now than I was a few weeks ago, and I’d bet a big chunk of the tech insider audience feels the same.
This is an example of how the sophistication of TBPN’s audience cuts both ways. Insider audiences who made the show valuable are also the ones most sensitive to ownership changes and meta-story cycles — an exit reads like an ending.
You can’t air a season finale on Friday and immediately premiere the next season on Monday. You need to reset the stakes, rebuild tension, and give the audience a reason to return. You need new slow-burn plotlines, new bits, and even fresh characters, to keep the audience hooked. We’re in what really should be the off-season, the hiatus — they’re just posting through it because so much good has come from their relentless forward momentum these past 18 months.
Still, people keep saying no one will want to come on the show anymore, and I don’t buy that. If you would have taken a call from OpenAI — which the vast majority of people would — you’d still be willing to go on TBPN, maybe even more so now. Competitors and their allies will be wary, but the thing to pay attention to is less who’s a little less likely to be a guest and more why and with what sentiment in tow. The longevity of the show depends on sentiment, and how the show adapts in a no-longer-underdog environment. More on this later.
Buying up cultural power.
Everyone has their own theory on why OpenAI acquired TBPN. It’s a marketing and comms play or ‘they bought distribution’ — all too literal. It’s a soft power play. Or it’s agitprop. Of all the takes on X, this tweet felt most efficiently true:
They wanted to acquire @johncoogan, @jordihays, @DylanAbruscato and the team. These guys are some of the smartest, most experienced marketers on the internet right now. They understand how to win the vibe war, while making everyone love them. Luxury positioning with down-to-earth approachability.
My intellectualization: OpenAI is buying up cultural know-how personified, and cultural power itself. Yes, OpenAI bought a podcast, but they really acquired the writers, showrunners, and stars who already function as a powerful cultural production unit — with a successful testing ground for public discourse. (I say this with great respect because my heroes have always been closer to writer-directors than traditional tech founders.)4 Cultural power is something like magic than can be applied to people, products, and of course, more podcasts.
Pete Steinberger, Riley Walz, TBPN.
This string of acqui-hires is brilliant casting for OpenAI’s special teams. This is a pattern of talent that understands how to move culture and operate inside the feed economy getting poached by the machine-makers — because competition between AI labs is increasingly cultural, not just technical.5
Impressive feats of almost any kind now double as a job application to the biggest labs. The term “unicorn” has been worn out as far as companies go, but these are “culture unicorn” hires. All the better if what you’re doing is even tangentially related to AI. The comp package is just whatever it takes.
ChatGPT has a billion weekly active users, so OAI doesn’t need ‘distribution’ in the literal sense, but aura and know-how you can layer on top of that is worth infinite dollars. Anthropic has been gaining on OpenAI with tech insiders, market analysts, and TikTok generations alike. Paying “low hundreds of millions” for TBPN is a cheap move in the culture war against a rising competitor. Winning this war is just as consequential for hiring as it is for sales, funding, and policy.6
What does it mean that the most consequential AI companies are now hiring for charisma and communication alongside competence that captures attention?7
There’s a deeper reason charisma now matters more at an AI lab than anywhere else: AI is an inherently difficult protagonist to root for. It’s abstract, threatening, moves fast, and doesn’t have a face. John and Jordi have proven they can make people feel okay, good even, about AI progress. They’re likable faces for an unlikable protagonist that needs to win over the world (while sociopolitical dissent keeps rising). It’s a personhood play — for John and Jordi’s uniquely human presence to soften an inhuman one.
Most tech thought-leaders have shouted that they don’t get it and it makes them question OpenAI’s judgment. Legacy-new-media is writing that “the vibes are off at OpenAI” and Ronan Farrow just dropped a lukewarm hitpiece on Sam Altman.
But most people want John and Jordi to win, and that’s a superpower. Is there a transitive property of good vibes and good will? If everyone wants two guys to win and you hire those two guys, maybe they’ll want you to win too — or at least lose less?8
The critics and the risks.
It’s hard to deny TBPN has taken an aura hit — it’s no longer a scrappy upstart, and no longer default-neutral. OpenAI buying the brand dilutes it, which is why TBPN is smartly signaling it’s independence as much as possible. ‘Everything will stay the same’ is the politically correct party-line for this kind of acquisition, but something must change, and it will.
As far as all the media folks’ opinions on the acquisition — my intuition says most of them, both the clowners and the celebrators, are quietly relieved. Those criticizing TBPN for selling are secretly pining for an offer in hand too.
The top spot for indie tech media startup of the year feels open again. Anyone who’s been ostensibly playing for second place has renewed hope. Many will try to replicate the success of TBPN, and many will struggle.
There’s already a question about whether Twitter/X is shadow banning TBPN now that it’s owned by OpenAI (Sama and Elon are less than allies right now). Is this happening or is the audience taking a post-sale break from the show, is the show itself on soft-hiatus, or all of the above?
The wildcard to consider: TBPN has grown on X and Elon is known to throttle competition. If distribution is squeezed, YouTube is the natural next home — TBPN has ~100K subs there. Substack is an option but video podcasts haven’t popped there yet and the audience skews less tech. Or bolder — leverage their own platform, or build one? TBPN x OAI. Elon throttling Substack links on Twitter incentivized Substack to launch a competitive product with Notes … For TBPN’s meta-show, this would be a new underdog plot. For OAI, owning the culture unicorn could be an uno reverse card.9
(Fwiw, It’s been denied, and even if it were happening, I think the public discourse would become loud enough that it’d have to be walked back some.)
“Half-media, half-machine.”
Every organization will now operate as half-media, half-machine. Every media company will have a head of machines and every machine company will have a head of media. Call it the media-machine singularity of business — the hybrid imperative.
The duality of our era is Media and Machines. As the technical side of tech splits into automation or genius, the media side only gets more competitive. As I keep saying, tech is becoming the center of culture and so ambitious people from adjacent fields are flocking to it — both young people inside tech (shadow artists in trad roles) and outside tech (film and internet creatives) alike.10
Every big tech company, and especially the big AI labs are trying to figure out the best mix of investment and effort into media alongside machines. A great machine strategy with a poor media strategy will lose to someone with a better media strategy, or be beholden to them.
VC firms are scaling their “new media” efforts, and I keep waiting to be impressed. There are glorified minor changes to set design and post-production and more launches. More stuff is being made but nothing has truly imprinted on my mind. There’s a foundational tension in making media to market founders, companies, and narratives you need to sell— it’s rarely conducive to making art. It’s hard for me not to conclude something poetic:
The best stories don’t depend on their owners to tell them; the best stories find their own tellers.
The center of gravity is moving toward things that look less like companies and more like production sets you can invest in.
There are very few writers’ rooms so close to the center of everything happening right now — TBPN’s is one of them. And every internet native knows the gold standard for a show’s run is six seasons and a movie.
TBPN just aired its season finale, but which one? Season 1? Season 2? Season 3? I guess we’ll get the answer once we see what comes next.
Thanks for taking the time to read, and thank you as always to my generous patrons. If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing with a friend or community, or on X. DMs welcome. // P.S. If you wanted this essay to be longer, give me a prompt.
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The story, with all its inner workings and crazy context, could still make a great script.
And this signal matters when you’re trying to drive bottom-up demand, top-down legitimacy (with government, politicians, media), and horizontal affinity across peers—investors, founders, tech media, and other builders in the ecosystem.
The promise from John & Jordi is that nothing will change and they’ll continue to operate independently. ‘Everything will stay the same’ is the politically correct party-line for acquisitions. But with this massive a context shift, it has to change—TBD.
The only other podcast that has done that at scale in recent years is the All-In Podcast.
I’m willing to bet we see more of these hires that fit the pattern. My bet is on Farza next — he’s launched hit after hit prototype using the latest AI tools / features and is already a competent, charismatic communicator well-loved in the SV ecosystem.
The wildcard to consider: TBPN has grown on X and Elon is known to throttle competition. If that distribution gets squeezed, YouTube is the natural next home — TBPN is already near 100K subs there though live viewership is low. Substack is an option but video podcasts haven’t really popped there yet and the audience skews less tech. Or maybe build their own platform? TBPN x OAI. Elon throttling Substack links on Twitter incentivized Substack to launch a competitive product with Notes …
The underlying 2x2 is competence and charisma, with public proof. The archetype is the quirkily agentic generalist star who builds and speaks. The higher-value the person’s collaborators and audience, the stronger the signal — winning over the hard to win. The meme “OpenAI is nothing without its people” is makes so much sense for the next phase.
An emotional read: it’s the tech equivalent of a billionaire acquiring an incredibly expensive painting or producing a movie or buying a sports team. It’s a trophy, a competitive signal, and a cultural asset. It’s a “win” against Elon given that TBPN grew up on X (see footnote 8…). It’s less about the spreadsheet math and more about possessing something that makes you happy and makes you feel cool.
In another life, what would you have wanted to accomplish? Who would you want to have been? “Strategy” often justifies instinctual desire.
It’s still unproven, I don’t think the TBPN team signed up to become X competitors and product founders all over again, and I think they’d have known the risks — yet all this discourse is just another reason the meta-show is the main show.
From my recent essay “Dreams of Stability,” on serving the frontier, not owning it:
Serving the frontier instead of trying to own it is sexy now. More people seem to be building around tech than inside it. Most of my friends used to be founders, operators, or investors. Now many are fractional executives, freelancers, writers, podcasters, filmmakers. Instead of joining the race, they’re selling shovels to the gold rush, and selling the polish too. Selling into an industry swimming in capital is good business …
The corporate-artist straddle is the new creator bet … It looks like a hedge and plays like a shot. I expect a generation of rich creatives and strong brands made here.
The arbitrage on being early will last a few months, maybe a year or two for more mainstream roles. Then the geeks give way to the mops and sociopaths. For now you can sell your skills, but very soon you’ll need to know your edge — the why you.
My theory is that acquiring TBPN is a news and ideology layer from which OpenAI can build training data. Who needs to pay for IP from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg when you can buy a podcast that summarizes the best business stories and adds more conversational context?
likable faces for an unlikable protagonist! Half media, half machine wow! This is an amazing read