The Season Finale of TBPN
On the show, the meta-show, and stocking up on 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.
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 see fictionalized 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 was 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. I have learned things, but that’s 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 story founders and investors and executives have been falling in love with and dying to guest star in, and that’s the story OpenAI acquired.
In that sense, the meta-show was the main show. Was the content actually that good, or was the biggest draw watching the thing get built?1 This was the same question that lingered around Clubhouse’s generational run (~2020-2022).
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
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 passion, personality, positivity, and because of their golden-retriever-good-looks (the first part their own admission, the second the audience’s). They’re having fun and including us in the game.3
The details matter, because, as I’ve found myself repeating — casting is everything. And TBPN is an example of great casting. Tech has access to some of the most impressive people on earth, and somehow keeps featuring the same few faces that aren’t the best 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), and increasingly about likability leading to impact. 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.
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. 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. Pivot, buy, sell. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely outcome because it’s often the most energizing one.4
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.
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 story cycles — an exit reads like an ending.5 And 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 to keep viewers hooked.
stocking up on cultural power
Everyone has their own theory on why OpenAI acquired TBPN. It’s a marketing and comms play or ‘they bought distribution’ (both feel too narrow). Or it’s a soft power play. Of all the takes I’ve seen on X, this tweet felt most efficiently right:
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 and cultural power. OpenAI bought a podcast but they really acquired writers, showrunners, and stars who already function as a 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 founders.)6
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.
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.
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 and 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 a human story on top of an inhuman one. They’re likable faces for an unlikable protagonist that wants to win over the world (while sociopolitical tensions are already escalating).
What does it mean that the most consequential AI companies are now hiring for charisma and communication alongside competence? I expect to see AI labs assemble expansive rosters of skilled, culturally beloved figures.7
Impressive feats of almost any kind now double as a job application to the biggest labs, whether it was meant to be or not. All the better if what you’re doing is even tangentially related to AI. The comp package is whatever it takes.
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 less about the spreadsheet math and more about possessing something that makes you happy and makes you feel cool by association. Ownership is just power plus permanent association.
In another life, what would you have wanted to accomplish? Who would you want to have been? “Strategy” often justifies instinctual desire.
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?
My intuition says a lot of media people commenting on this acquisition, both the clowners and the boosters, are quietly relieved. The top spot for indie tech media startup of the year is open again. And anyone who’s been playing for second place, quietly hoping to be the next John and Jordi may have a path again. And people saying TBPN shouldn’t have sold are secretly pining after an offer too.
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 increasingly flocking to it—both young people inside tech (shadow artists in trad roles) and outside tech (film and internet creatives) alike.8
VC firms are scaling their “new media” efforts and I keep waiting to be impressed and it hasn’t happened yet. 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. Maybe I’m wrong about what to expect—it feels like most of the players aren’t playing to win but just to be loud and not forgotten. That, or they can’t tell good from bad (we don’t need to replay taste discourse).
There’s a foundational tension in making media to market founders, companies, and narratives for profit—it’s rarely conducive to making art.9 The best stories don’t depend on their stakeholders to tell them; the best stories find their own tellers.
The center of gravity keeps drifting 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, and this is one of them.
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? We’ll find out what season wrapped once we see what comes next.
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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.
Fun includes the TBPN trading cards, coveted merch, gong hits, guest polaroids, et al.
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.
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 be willing to go on TBPN, maybe even more so now. Competitors and their allies will be wary, but it’s hard to get to scale without aligning with some tribe. I think the thing to pay attention to is less about who’s willing to be a guest versus who’s watching and why and with what level of excitement.
The only other podcast that has done that at scale in recent years is the All-In Podcast.
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.
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—why you.
So far, the biggest winners of the new media efforts from VC firms and nascent podcasters tend to be the individual faces building their own brands. Stripe’s Cheeky Pint is the closest thing to a fresh video format I’ve seen in tech media—likable characters and conversations, even if a touch mellow for the moment we’re in. Writing has held its own as a format, which I half expected yet am still surprised by.