![[33-TBPN.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode 33: TBPN (John Coogan & Jordi Hays) - Inside Tech's Water Cooler - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/15T5NZzuT5c7jcBqRmZQKI?si=SULEYoIART2G12bt6J4rKA), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/33-tbpn-john-coogan-jordi-hays-inside-techs-water-cooler/id1780282402?i=1000737042965), and [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIaXSQOHrmU), and all podcast platforms.* <iframe data-testid="embed-iframe" style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/15T5NZzuT5c7jcBqRmZQKI/video?utm_source=generator" width="624" height="351" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe>  <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/33-tbpn-john-coogan-jordi-hays-inside-techs-water-cooler/id1780282402?i=1000737042965"></iframe> # Description [John Coogan](https://x.com/johncoogan) & [Jordi Hays](https://x.com/jordihays) are the hosts of [TBPN](https://tbpn.com/) ([X](https://x.com/tbpn), [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00), [Substack](https://tbpn.substack.com/)), a daily live show covering the technology business. TBPN was launched only about a year ago, but has become a mainstay in tech culture and a center of gravity forterminally online technologists. John was previously an EIR at [Founders Fund](https://foundersfund.com/) and [tech YouTuber](https://www.youtube.com/@JohnCooganPlus). He co-founded [Lucy Nicotine](https://lucy.co/) and [Soylent](https://soylent.com/). Jordi has co-founded and invested in many business including [Party Round](https://x.com/partyround?lang=en)/[Capital](https://x.com/capitalxyz) and [Branded Native](https://www.brandednative.com/), a podcast and youtube ad network. We cover the origins of TBPN, or the Technology Business Programming Network, from its beginnings as "Technology Brothers" to the interplay between John's love for technology and Jordi's for business. They share how they've built a media business in an era of infinite competition by leaning into high volume and constant iteration, all while treating media as the "main thing." We discuss brand building and innovating on form by borrowing ideas from outside the tech industry—from Formula One and SportsCenter to Hollywood films—to avoid tech's tendency toward circular references. We also talk about their focus on X/Twitter and a niche, highly informed audience, rather than trying to go too wide. We also chat about what makes their partnership work and how they take the work incredibly seriously while not taking themselves seriously at all. # Timestamps - 00:00: Opening Highlights - 03:18: Intro & Background - 06:08: Technology vs. Business and the Strategy behind TBPN - 12:08: Building a Media Business when Distribution is not Scarce - 22:26: Being Entrepreneurs _and_ Talent - 30:33: Avoiding Audience Capture - 35:57: Why Advertising is a Good Model - 44:04: Technology's Circular References and Borrowing Ideas from New Places - 53:20: Narrow vs. Wide Appeal - 59:44: X (Twitter)-First Content and Other Platforms - 1:14:35: Making Content People Want to Share and Taking Yourself Seriously and Unseriously - 1:20:28: Valuing Brand - 1:30:10: Balancing Focus and Iteration - 1:35:25: Endurance & Evolution - 1:40:34: A Day in the Life of TBPN & Learning to be Newscasters - 1:49:59: Jordi & John as a duo, Will Manidis, and the beginnings of TBPN - 2:02:57: Grab Bag: Bias to Action, 15 Minute Interviews, Not Journalism, Talent, and Domination of Spirit # Links & References - [Venture Capital Just Changed Forever (ep1)](https://youtu.be/CgRPY2vgBlI?si=qBbrm-XJQSXlYuJE) - [Zuck Just Killed the Apple Vision Pro (ep2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUT285lsWbE&t=356s) - [Special Situations in Private Markets - Colossus](https://joincolossus.com/episode/giffon-special-situations-in-private-markets/) - [Feadship](https://www.feadship.nl/) - [Branded Native](https://www.brandednative.com/) - [Soylent](https://soylent.com/) - [The Morning Show](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morning_Show_(American_TV_series)) - [The Newsroom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Newsroom_(American_TV_series)) - [EagleEye \| Anduril](https://www.anduril.com/hardware/eagleeye/) - [What if SportsCenter and LinkedIn Merged? - NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/technology/tbpn-silicon-valley.html) - [THE METIS LIST](https://www.metislist.com/) - [History of Donald Trump](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZYqnEK4-2Y) - [History of Xi Jinping](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrxrIH5zhBc) - [Roy Lee](https://x.com/im_roy_lee) - [Avi Schiffmann](https://x.com/AviSchiffmann) - [2020 Founder's Fund Opening Video](https://youtu.be/Gvf547kGOXs?si=ch74E3m9iZzjRw6c) - [31. Gabe Whaley - Playing the Crowd & Outlasting the Hype](https://dialectic.fm/gabe-whaley) - [Technology Brothers launch trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On3SXnMe5bI) - [Lucy](https://lucy.co/) - [IShowSpeed](https://www.youtube.com/c/ISHOWSPEED) - [Andrew Ross Sorkin - TBPN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTtbCg2HLl0) - [TBPN Crypto Day](https://youtu.be/YHaT1gwbTpU?si=dWliNRErTiQh119n) - [Will Manidis](https://x.com/WillManidis) - [Roon](https://x.com/tszzl) - [Bucco Capitall](https://x.com/buccocapital) - [Day Job](https://dayjob.work/) - [Lulu Cheng-Meservey](https://x.com/lulumeservey) - [Jason Carman](https://x.com/jasonjoyride) - [Rorra](https://rorra.com/) - [Tyler Cosgrove](https://x.com/tylercosgrove) # Transcript ## [00:00:00] Opening Highlights ## [00:03:18] Intro & Background ## [00:06:08] Technology vs. Business and the Strategy behind TBPN **Jackson:** John Coogan, Jordi Hayes, we're here. Thank you for having me. Or I guess... **John:** Thank you for having \*us\*. **Jordi:** Coming to the Ultradome. **Jackson:** Physically and spiritually. We're going to start really serious. You've spent the last year building a show about technology and business, so I need to know: what do you love more, technology or business? **Jordi:** I think John loves technology more, and I love business more. **John:** That's fair. **Jordi:** That's why we're a good duo. John gets deeper and nerds out on the technical stuff. John has started multiple companies, but I've done a lot more deals—investing and helping put companies together. That's what I'm bringing to the table. When we're doing an interview, John hits them with a question that they're not expecting from two non-technical podcasters, and it just opens up an interview so much more. I think it's really powerful. **Jackson:** Was that clear coming in? Or when you first started talking about this, was that part of the calculus at all? **Jordi:** No, not at all. The story of TBPN is two guys who decided they should do a podcast. It's not much deeper than that. We had talked about doing something together and what the right format would be. John had figured out the format, and at one point I texted him—-it would be really hard to find the original text—-but I said, "The name of the podcast is Technology Brothers." We ended up recording the [first episode](https://youtu.be/CgRPY2vgBlI?si=qBbrm-XJQSXlYuJE) within a couple of weeks from there. **John:** If you go back and look at the first or second episodes, it was a crazy full-circle moment. In the [second episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUT285lsWbE&t=356s), we reviewed two products: one was an energy drink from our friend John Fio, and the second was the Meta Ray-Bans from Meta. Within a year, we were at the Meta campus at the SportsCenter desk, interviewing Mark Zuckerberg and the entire Meta team about the latest Ray-Bans at the Meta campus . It was very different from the second episode, which was recorded in a tiny conference room with just two people. I don't think any team members were there. No one was watching it... **Jordi:** Except David Senra. **John:** Ben was sick that day, so I had to push the button to hit record. It was just me and you in the studio that day. But if you look at the nature of our discussion about the Meta Ray-Bans, we weren't tearing it apart from a technical perspective and looking at the specs. From a business perspective, you weren't pulling up the company's financials to do a deep dive. It was more of a fluid conversation about the lineage of the tech, the technology decisions that were made, and the branding, marketing, and business decisions on who they partnered with. You made a very strong bullish case for the Luxottica partnership. We went back and forth on personal experiences, our thoughts on the technology, and how this fits in with Apple and other companies. We just noodled on it for about 35 minutes. It was a lot of fun. **Jackson:** It's also funny to go back—the pacing is a little different on those early episodes. **Jordi:** Was it more rapid-fire? I don't remember. **Jackson:** No, it was literally like you guys were just hanging out. John has this energy too. John didn't actually climb all those mountains, right? I've known him for a long time [Laughs]. **Jordi:** No. **John:** Oh you mean the 14ers? **Jackson:** [Laughs]. **Jordi:** Early on, we had a lot of bits that were just really extreme, and that was part of what made it magic. We had a handful of our very close friends that would listen to it, so we were really just making it for a group chat, basically. Over time, we realized we had to dial some of these bits back. We're both very sarcastic. A lot of people appreciate that, but there are certainly thousands of people out there that didn't understand sarcasm in a specific moment. **John:** Do you remember the story of Figma? We have a really good story. Figma launched a normal, somewhat modest product update. I don't even remember what it was. The ability to dynamically resize modals or certain UI elements. You could say, "I want this to be 30% of the screen," and it would dynamically resize the things. **Jordi:** It was a feature that people had wanted for a long time, and they finally shipped it. We were riffing on how there had been protests in the streets of Brooklyn for weeks, demanding that Dylan Field and the team release this update. Somebody crashed out harder than I've ever experienced. We published it, and by that evening--and this was when we had very little attention on the show--there were hundreds of posts and comments from one person. **John:** I was still working at Founders Fund as an entrepreneur in residence. The guy was messaging Peter Thiel saying, "You have to fire this guy because this is just not true." **Jordi:** He was saying, "I live in Brooklyn. This never happened." Jordi He thought it was fake news instead of a joke. People aren't protesting for better Figma tools. **Jackson:** [Laughs]. Maybe that's how you knew you were onto something. You were moving the people's spirits and souls. **John:** We were. It was a lot of fun. We were like, Man, we've got to lock down what we say and maybe our location. This guy seems kind of crazy. ## [00:12:08] Building a Media Business when Distribution is not Scarce **Jackson:** I want to talk a little bit about the business of media, which is more or less what this is. [Patrick O'Shaughnessy interview with Jeremy Giffon](https://joincolossus.com/episode/giffon-special-situations-in-private-markets/) a few years ago where they were talking about how podcasting is still low status. That's less true than it was then, but it's still partially true. You guys have talked a lot about how media is actually the thing. There's not a fund, there's not a bunch of other stuff. **Jordi:** Yeah. **John:** Yeah. Our key decision was making it even more low status. How can you be more low status than a tech podcaster? You can be a tech podcaster who also runs host-read ads constantly. That's incredibly low status. **Jackson:** [Laughs]. **John:** You can also livestream on Linkedin. **Jordi:** We love ads. We did ads before we had any sponsors. If you listen to the early episodes... **John:** The first time I did it, I ambushed you, right? **Jordi:** Yeah. John goes, "And now, I need to tell you about [Feadship](https://www.feadship.nl/). Feadship is one of the world's premier yacht builders." At no point did we ever say Feadship was a sponsor. We just read it. **Jackson:** It was aspirational. **John:** It was just, "Before I tell you about the next thing, I need to tell you because it's amazing." **Jordi:** We changed this now, but the YouTube channel originally had a section that said, "This wouldn't be possible without..." and it was Aman, Gulfstream, Feadship. **Jackson:** Maybe the next level is you get sued by somebody who's mad that you're pre tending they're a sponsor of you. **Jordi:** We dialed it back. We never said they were sponsors. **John:** No, we never did. **Jordi:** We just enjoyed talking about them. **Jackson:** I think media used to be a great business when there was a lot more scarcity. We live in a world where media is fundamentally abundant, and you don't get to lean on the fact t hat there are only so many channels and only so many hours. Having one of those channels was almost like having a taxi medallion. There was a lot of inbuilt scarcity. I think you guys have zagged, embraced the opposite, and leaned into abundance—quite literally. The feeling over the last year of your rise has been that you just flood the airwaves. There's so much TBPN. And yet, there's clearly a consideration around making sure there's trust, credibility, and quality. I'm curious what it's been like to balance that crazy volume, and ramping it up over the last eight months, while making sure you're not just thinking, "People know about us, so as long as we show up, it's fine." **Jordi:** One thing you said that's worth noting is that a lot of cable news anchors would not survive in a free market. If they tried to become content creators on the internet, they would not win. They win because they work for a company that has distribution they control. They have a network they can distribute content on. What you're getting at is that due to the internet and other factors, the cost of producing and distributing content went to basically zero. If you have a cell phone, you can be a media company, so it is hyper-competitive. What we noticed in tech specifically is that while there are a lot of podcasts, they were all almost the same. There weren't many different formats. We had a lot of interview shows, but not a lot of experimentation. John's initial insight was, "What if we did no guests? What if we just had a stack of papers and talked through topics?" That's why the show broke through originally. After that, another factor is that we show up every single day and try to put on a great show. If you look over the last year, not many people in the industry have put in the number of hours that we have. Part of it is just outworking. **John:** Yeah. Three hours a day is a lot, but about six hours of prep goes into every three-hour show, plus what the team is prepping. It's probably the same ratio of input to output as many other shows, so you can keep the quality bar high. There's also the fact of leaning back on authenticity. With how fast we've ramped the volume, we certainly are not as polished as a highly produced news show with commercial breaks and perfect graphics. All of that is the startup mentality: iterate towards it, make the overlay or the chyron a little bit better every single day, make the graphics better. But because the tech audience loves startups, growth, and iteration, everyone's really accepting of that. **Jordi:** With content, you don't have time to rest. If you're building enterprise software, you can build a product with features and functionality, and the entire team can go on vacation for a week. They can take a long weekend, and the product's still going to function as is. It's still going to deliver value to consumers. With news—we're in the news business. If we're not there, there is no— **Jackson:** Are you definitely in the news business? Is that how you think about it? **Jordi:** We can go down that path in a second, but there's no value to TBPN if we don't show up-- **John:** There's very little catalog value, as opposed to David Senra's Founders podcast or Acquired or Invest Like the Best. **Jordi:** We took a barbell approach. That means you have to show up every day, but it's also an opportunity to iterate every day. A baker gets to show up every day to make bread, but every single day they can change tiny little things. They can change the temperature, the amount of yeast, or the amount of flour. When we think about making the show, the product flows through all of us. It flows through the team. We know when the product is great; we feel it. We end the show every day and talk through what could have been better. This section could have b een better. We didn't have the right information to give the best takes on that story. That interview was really slow. We have to adjust the schedule for tomorrow to make sure that doesn't happen again. Every single day is an opportunity to make the product better. You don't have any opportunity to rest and sit back. There's never been a moment where we thought, "Oh, that was a great interview. Next week will be easy." Every single day is new, and we're trying to really compound it. I think we've done a good job of that. If you were to look at just one shot of the show every single day over the last year, you would see very clearly there are minor iterations happening. Some of that is in the content and the ordering. Every single day we've learned something new about the show and how to make it better. I think we'll do that for a very, very, very long time. What's interesting is that we've had a lot of people be inspired by TBPN. We've had a lot of people be a little too inspired, maybe copying. But for people who see what we're doing today, going from zero to what we are today would be almost impossible, even for us. It would be very, very challenging. We started with a once-a-week show: one camera, two mics, talking through some posts. Then we added another show, then another camera, then new microphones. We added an overlay, then we added live, then guests, then five days a week, then new channels. It's just this constant compounding. **John:** Even in the first episode, a lot of people don't realize that the wide shot is technically a visual effects shot because I wanted a more moody, cinematic lighting setup. I put the light stand behind us so that we would be backlit and have this dark room vibe. I wanted something more cinematic. But when you do that, if you don't have a huge lighting rig that can rig something out of frame, you wind up with a light stand in the background. Eventually, we just wrapped an American flag around it because I was sick of doing the VFX. But I went in and painted it out. **Jackson:** No way. **John:** I did a content-aware fill and overlaid that over the shot, so you can't see the light in the shot, but we're lit from the back. It has this "hanging out in an old school law firm" vibe. And even that was a very considered decision that was built on years of making videos. I had experimented with what happens when you point the light directly at your face—it looks kind of bland. If you put it off to the side, it looks a little bit better. If you put it behind, it looks even better. It's a tough challenge to try and clone all this on day one. It's fine to be inspired by TBPN and want to take media seriously. Maybe you start with some inspired things, but all the different elements were happy accidents—different ideas that came together, grew, and found their place within the show. It would be very hard to copy-paste all of this. **Jackson:** It would have been hard for you guys to plan a whole bunch of that stuff. ## [00:22:26] Being Entpreneurs \*and\* Talent **Jackson:** There's another element of this that is maybe a little less true for you given the YouTube stuff, but still broadly true: you've both been serial entrepreneurs and have done a whole bunch of different things. In this, you are both entrepreneurs and you are also talent. There's a line where you say, "We are the talent and we'd like to remain the talent and not build an empire." Because of the internet, media has rewarded networks--platform networks--and it has rewarded creators. And the middle is really, really hard. **John:** Barbell is a super key concept that we love and we want to keep coming back to as much as possible. **Jackson:** The other element of this, coming from the business and entrepreneurial world, is that on some level, you're labor. You're not really capital. **John:** Yep. **Jackson:** Obviously, there are elements where you're having leverage. I'm curious what that experience has been, especially for you [Jordi]. As someone who always thought a lot about distribution but was not in the spotlight, what has it been like to manage the dual role as the guy on camera, the showrunner, and the business guy all at once? Some people do it, but that's a little less typical for the internet creator. **Jordi:** Totally .Often with other more mature shows, there are people in every seat. The talent comes in to host the show, and that's merely one piece. Then there's a whole ad sales organization and HR and finance orgs. It's not that hard because we've both done it multiple times. You sit on top of all these different SaaS products, so you can leverage software in a lot of places, whether it's setting up payroll software or whatever you need to build your business. It's pretty turnkey now to set up the business around it. Of course, there are other key decisions. But the key flywheel we embraced early on was that I would push as hard as possible on iterating the content, finding new formats, and up-leveling the production. Jordi was really good at the business side: setting up the business, bringing on advertisers, and building the vision of what that flywheel could be. Once that flywheel got going, it paid for this ultra dome, and we were able to take this way more seriously than my previous YouTube channel. I never really turned it into a business, so I never thought about what it would look like if I put 100k into this. I thought about my YouTube account the way I think about my Twitter account. I didn't think about how if you find partners that can invest or pay to advertise in the content, you can make better content. Of course, that makes sense. I never took the plunge with the video essay or documentary channel, but with this, those two things aligned really, really quickly. It was very easy for us in the course of a couple of months to go from, "This is kind of cool," to, "Let's invest everything in this." We put every dollar and every moment of time possible into it because the two sides really feed off each other. As much as it was unplanned, we didn't have a crystal ball. If you had asked either of us two years ago if we would have any interest in being on camera for three hours a day creating a technology television show, we might have heard it out, but it certainly wasn't on the roadmap. At the same time, when you look back through our careers, it feels like TBPN is a natural evolution of everything that we've worked on. A decade ago, I spent a summer helping a podcast monetize for the first time. They had gotten to the top 10 in the fitness charts and hadn't monetized at all. Somebody reached out to them about a sponsorship, and they were like, "Sure. We were doing this for fun, but if we could make some money from it, then great." I ultimately helped them add a bunch of other sponsors and learn the business side of that. That work ultimately turned into a company called [Branded Native](https://www.brandednative.com/), which is a YouTube ad network that's still running and growing to this day. Through building Branded Native, I did thousands of advertising deals between companies and creators of all different types, from mom-and-pop creators to established media companies like Donut Media. I had done thousands of deals on the revenue side of the kind of business that we're building. Then I went on to build Party Round, which is when we (Jackson) met. That was taking everything I knew about media. When you look at Party Round's best work, it was entertaining the industry. We would do things that got a lot of attention and funnel that attention into our fintech product. But ultimately, when I look back at the work that I'm most personally proud of from that era--the work that wouldn't have happened without me--it's the media side. I got to experience having marketing-market fit at a time when... the product had a lot of demand during the craziness of 2021. When you fast forward to starting this show, you look back and [Soylent](https://soylent.com/) is the most iconic CPG company ever in the history of tech. It makes sense that a decade later John would have a show for the industry, a media product. You add John spending years understanding the craft of creating content. You combine everything I knew from the entertainment side in terms of creating things that were entertaining and fun, and everything I knew from the revenue side of modern media businesses. Then you apply John's understanding of the craft of making content and understanding content at a deeper level. The thing I always come back to is John's understanding that with content, your product is not the file that you upload to YouTube; it's the format of what you're doing. You add all of those key insights together, and I feel like we both started working on TBPN a decade ago. We were able to stack those learnings and combine that with the fact that we don't take ourselves very seriously, which is an important part of the show. We're going to have good takes sometimes and bad takes sometimes. We love the industry, but at the same time, we can recognize the silliness. But one thing we've always maintained is taking the work super seriously. We can have a lot of fun. It's fun to go to work, and I look forward to starting the day every day. But we're taking the actual work very seriously. Part of that is we're forced to. We have to physically speak the product into existence. We have to perform. If we're not having fun or it's not going well, we have to viscerally feel it. We've all met founders that, when things aren't going well, can kind of check out. **Jackson:** You can tell when somebody is on camera and they're not having fun. You can tell. **John:** That's 100% right. ## [00:30:33] Avoiding Audience Capture **Jackson:** There's something pretty common in the creator part of the world, but increasingly as people gain an audience. Part of it is audience capture, but part of it is the simple ego that comes when a critical part of why you're successful is your distribution. The one benefit you guys have is that there's two of you, so I'm sure a huge part of this is pushing each other and challenging each other. I'm curious how you're able to maintain a healthy amount of ego and also be checked or challenged, whether it be between the two of you or with other people. **John:** I was thinking about that just today. We've been growing this newsletter, and every day I write a couple hundred words to summarize my thoughts on the current thing or whatever is in my mind. We post them on X as well, and we're kind of writing for that audience. I have a vague idea of who's on the newsletter subscription, but I'm not super in there. And I realized I'm really writing this for Jordi. I'm pitching an idea to Jordi. There's a little bit of Jordi capture in the sense that I'm trying to find something that will make you (Jordi) tee off. I'm not trying to find something that'll make you happy. I don't want to bore you. **Jordi:** Yeah. We meet at 6:30 every morning. We try not to adjust the schedule at all. We've tried to fit a breakfast in with external people, and it doesn't work at all. We try to have the exact same morning every day leading up into the show. The process that's worked well is we show up and from 6:30 to 9:15, we just talk about what we're planning to talk about on the show. We debate a bunch of stuff, we sharpen our thinking, and just go back and forth. The entire time that we're working out in the morning, it is just back and forth on whatever is top of mind. By the time we show up to the office, I usually get immediately on Zoom meetings for whatever we're working on in the business, and John starts writing. **John:** I've never had writer's block because I'm just transcribing the discussion that we already had. **Jackson:** The wheels are already spinning. **John:** Yeah, I'm just rephrasing it to see, oh, there's some data points. You know, if you're in an argument with somebody, eventually you go to ChatGPT and look up facts. So I do a little bit of that, and then I bring that to the show. We rehash what we've already talked about, but we know the general parameters of the key discussion for the day. **Jordi:** There's been maybe two shows where one of us arrived late, and you just have to get to the studio with 20 minutes before you go live. That feels terrible. It's such an important part of the day. It's effectively three hours of fun debate on what we want to do. **Jackson:** Getting your muscles warm. **John:** It's also a very unique thing about this particular show. If you go to any traditional media daily show, there is a room of writers putting together a monologue. It's very rare that the hosts are doing all of the work. **Jordi:** Sometimes I see clips from other shows and I just assume that everyone does their own homework. I don't think that's the case at all. But that's part of what makes the show great: we want to keep that conversational feel. This is two people trying to understand the world with guests, and we try to lean on guests. On any given week, we're covering 30 different industries. There's such a broad spectrum, so we can't possibly be experts. It has to be conversational, and it has to feel like you're sitting here, hanging out with us, and just trying to understand the world. **John:** We have a lot of aesthetics of linear TV and traditional media, but our audience generally holds us to the bar of a live stream. **Jackson:** It's high and low together. **John:** It has the aesthetics of polished TV that has a whole writer's room and a teleprompter, but there isn't one. It's much more like watching somebody flip through the news on their computer on a live stream like you'd see on Twitch, just chatting. We've pulled these two things together—Twitch just chatting and traditional NBC, ABC, or Fox—and combined those to create this new thing. Maybe it hits different. **Jackson:** I'm sure you guys have talked to Senra about this, too. He's had people ask, "Why don't you hire somebody to read the books for you?" You are so not getting it. Oh my gosh. Yeah, there were 25 interns when I came in this morning and they showed me all the lines they wrote for you guys. [Laughs]. **John:** There's only one intern in today. **Jackson:** It's clear that it's you guys. ## [00:35:57] Why Advertising is a Good Model **Jackson:** One last thing on the business side: You started to talk about the reciprocal nature between the content and the business. **John:** Sure. **Jackson:** Why--we talked about the low-status part--but why do you love the business of advertising? Advertising gets a bad rap, especially in tech, ironically. What about advertising is so powerful? **John:** Price discrimination. There are people that follow the show who are billionaires, and there are people who follow the show that are in college. If you find a great product where that company can get both of those people as a client, you can extract $1 billion from the multi-billionaire who runs a massive company. You can also help the college student start their first company... **Jackson:** Maybe win them for life. **John:** and extract $200 a month on SaaS revenue once they get into YC. You can capture value from both, and that's only possible with advertising. If you're selling T-shirts, the billionaire shows up and says, "I'd like a T-shirt," and you say, "Do you mind paying 100 bucks?" **Jordi:** What independent media companies and creators love about the subscription business model is that they have some amount of revenue consistency. It's really easy for them to think, "If I get to a thousand subscriptions, or 10,000, or 100,000..."" **Jackson:** "I can raise money on that." **Jordi:** That or it's just really easy to understand. **John:** Your lifestyle is just very... **Jordi:** It's predictable. What I love, and why we were excited about advertising--obviously what John said--but also because we have never charged a member of our audience a dollar. Over a year, we haven't even sold merch; all the merch that we've made, we've just given away. It's a beautiful thing that roughly 15 or so companies have effectively financed TBPN so that it's free for the entire world. I think that's a beautiful thing. I think where advertising gets a bad rap is non-targeted advertising. If you're getting an ad that makes you ask, "Why did I get this ad?" that's not a great experience. Another issue is a high ad load. We have a higher volume of ads than the average podcast, but a much lower percentage of the actual content is advertising. **John:** Way lower than TV. A 30-minute TV show has 22 minutes of content and 10 minutes of ads. We're a 180-minute show, three hours, and there might be 5 or 10 minutes of total ads across that, which is less than 10%. **Jackson:** And the content and the ad is much closer together. One other criticism would be that it shifts the incentives. **Jordi:** As much as possible, we're trying to work with the most boring companies on earth. They're not boring to us. They're companies that the world does not wake up every day and say, "I want to learn about this company." We sell attention to those companies. There are a lot of companies in the world that should not be waking up in the morning thinking, "How can I be the next Cluely?" They should be thinking about how to build a fantastic product and get a meaningful amount of our market. There are so many other things that they should work on. There are companies like OpenAI that don't have to spend a lot of money on advertising because people just talk about OpenAI all day long. There's probably not a day that has passed that we haven't talked about OpenAI. You have the birth of a new hyperscaler, and it's the thing people are fixated on. We even joke that we expect venture capital firms to eventually realize that instead of making a derivative podcast that no one's going to listen to, they should take that money and just advertise with great podcasts that they love. That will happen eventually. This already happened in finance. Flip through The Wall Street Journal or any important magazine and you'll find advertising. **John:** Goldman Sachs has a podcast. Blackstone and BlackRock have podcasts, but they also advertise on F1, TV, or CNBC. They run ads because they need awareness. **Jackson:** That's a great point. **Jordi:** The main thing is content just wants to be free. Ask any creator. I would even say Ben Thompson probably realizes this. His show was born at a time when X was happy to promote your links. He was super early to a generational trend, and it would be very hard to recreate that massive base of paid subscribers. There was less competition for truly great technology analysis. **Jackson:** Now you're fighting gravity. **Jordi:** Yeah and the other thing is, we wanted to create a business that didn't require us to do other things. It pains me that for the last however many years, everyone has been on this path of making content that's just great enough to justify doing something else. Every time somebody does that, they are then in competition with somebody who doesn't have the other thing to do. **Jackson:** Yes. Yes. **Jordi:** We joke about venture capitalists taking a lot of vacations, but if you are trying to make a media business, you're competing in a market where a bunch of people want your audience-- they want the attention you have--and they don't have a venture fund. Then you, a media creator, go and start a venture fund. Who is your customer now? Is it your LPs, the founders, or your audience? I generally predict that people will continue to distract themselves. We wanted to build a business where we weren't thinking, "Okay, now we've had a little success and momentu m, let's diversify." It's about staying focused on the content itself because that's what our audience deserves. Every single day, I wish I had an extra three hours to prep for a story because people are tuning into the show every day and they deserve the best possible experience. They don't care if I were to start a venture fund and say, "I couldn't prep for the show this morning because I was trying to win this deal." Why does the audience care about that? **Jackson:** We're all doing that in so many little ways. It's just so tempting to focus on doing a little bit of something else. **John:** It even happens within the context of being extremely focused on media. We haven't done a fund, a company, a spin-out tech product, or anything like that. But even within TBPN, we've thought about whether the newsletter is too much of a distraction. **Jackson:** Yeah. **John:** Or is it actually synergistic? I think we got it to a place where it is synergistic because it serves as a way to prep the show and to prep discussions that will happen on the show. **Jackson:** The actual newsletter is exhaust. **Jordi:** And it's the most efficient way to consume the show. If you have the luxury of watching the live stream every day, it really is a luxury. It's not an efficient way to get news, and that's okay. For generations, people have liked having a TV on in the office during their workday and being able to passively understand what's going on. But the newsletter is the most efficient way. If you want TBPN in two minutes, that's how you do it. **Jackson:** Yes. ## [00:44:04] Technology's Circular References and Borrowing Ideas from New Places **Jackson:** This show began as something called Technology Brothers. You [Jordi mentioned it earlier--Party Round and Capital--more than almost anything else, you were amazing at tapping into the technology culture's zeitgeist. You've (John) done over 250 videos, not only about tech, but a whole lot about the business and culture around technology and its entrepreneurs. Tech is often criticized as being lacking in culture or unaware of culture, but clearly technology has its own culture. In many ways, as much as this is a show about technology and business, it is a show about the culture of the technology industry. Can you talk about the way you relate to that? Maybe another way of asking... **Jordi:** I think technology is too inspired by technology. **Jackson:** Mmm. **Jordi:** The best example of this is the Browser Company. It was a novel way to name a company, and the naming itself was valuable because it stood out. This is a consumer tech company creating a browser, and they have this cursive logo mark. It just stood out immediately. And you could tell that it was inspired. They weren't the first company in the world to name themselves "The Blank Company," but they were the first people in tech to do it and do it really well. Since then, over the years, we've seen probably 100 companies created with that same naming convention. It pains me every single time because people in tech just copy from within the industry. We've been trained to think that the best people copy-—that great artists steal. But I think that great artists actually steal from elsewhere. **John:** [Laughs]. **Jordi:** They're not saying, "This great artist did something. I want to be a great artist, so I'm going to do art exactly like..."" **John:** A perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. **Jackson:** Creativity is almost definitionally diverse inputs. **John:** Of course. Of course. **Jordi:** Diverse inputs. One of the things we've done well, and that I did historically with everything that I've worked on: It's great to copy and get heavily inspired, but don't do it from within the category and industry where you're competing for mindshare with the original person. The second company after the Browser Company to do "The Blank Company" with a cursive font probably got a little bit of attention because it was still somewhat novel. But now we're seeing the fifth, sixth, and seventh wave of naming companies this way, and it's the biggest anti-signal to me. It says you are not an original thinker. Maybe you just didn't want to take the time to find a unique domain name, but even that shows you're not heavily inspired. What TBPN has done is always borrowed from outside the industry. We borrowed suits... **Jackson:** how about (Pat) McAfee? **Jordi:** Yeah. We borrowed mahogany-—the official wood of business. **Jackson:** I didn't know about that. **Jordi:** Well, I just call it that. **Jackson:** [Laughs] **John:** The gong is a good example. From some sales cultures, but certainly not a common tech totem. **Jordi:** The New York Times on Sunday [called us SportsCenter for LinkedIn](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/technology/tbpn-silicon-valley.html), which is hilarious. It's probably a great way to explain it to somebody that reads the New York Times, but I've maybe watched an hour of SportsCenter in my entire life across 29 years. An hour of SportsCenter. So that wasn't even the inspiration, even though aesthetically we drew some inspiration from our graphics packages and things like that. From an advertising standpoint, I told every advertiser earlier that we were building a Formula One team and that we weren't just going to give you a host-read ad here or there. We were going to bring you into the entire world that we were building. We're constantly borrowing, but we're trying not to borrow... We were working on an entire product drop where we were going to send TBPN whey protein to a thousand companies that are friends of the show. Another company did a supplement drop before, and we just dropped it. We had done all the work but hadn't hit go on the PO, and we just said it's no longer going to be that interesting. We don't want to fast-follow within our same world. My biggest critique of tech is that there's a really big world, and you can go and borrow from anywhere. **Jackson:** You guys do a really good job of being insider-outsiders, both personally and because we're here in Hollywood, not in Silicon Valley. It's one thing to say, "have diverse inputs." I'm curious for both of you, is that a super intentional thing? Is that just your natural curiosity? **John:** It's very clear that if you look for inputs on how to make a TV show look good in Silicon Valley, you're not going to find a bunch of great examples. It's much better to go where they make great stuff and pull from that. **Jackson:** Hollywood's dying. I thought they had no good ideas. **John:** I don't mean Hollywood specifically as a location... **Jordi:** Hollywood doesn't have a ton of amazing \*new\* ideas. We come up with ideas all the time: you take that show, that format. No one's done that in tech. If you do that, and you do it well, it will be a hit. **Jackson:** It will be new to me. Or new to them. **Jordi:** People will think, "Wow, they're geniuses." **John:** When we were thinking about how we wanted the look of the show to feel, we didn't just look at Pat McAfee, SportsCenter, and CNBC. I also looked at how news shows have been filmed throughout history. In the 1980s, if there was a movie about a news show or it featured a cut to the news, what did that look like? **Jackson:** What's that aesthetic? **John:** How does Hollywood portray a news studio when they have cinema gear and can do proper lighting? **Jackson:** And everybody has something in their head when they think of that, by the way. That's partially a product of the cultural time. That's really cool. **John:** Yeah. There's an Apple TV show called \*[The Morning Show](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morning_Show_(American_TV_series))\*. Aaron Sorkin has a show about the news as well ([The Newsroom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Newsroom_(American_TV_series))). There have been a bunch of places where we've pulled visual references. Even right now, this set design is much more moody and contrasty than pretty much any TV show. Pat McAfee, CNBC, Fox News, ABC—all of those are much brighter sets. Ours has a lot more contrast, a lot more cinema in it. We're even filming on cinema cameras instead of TV cameras. That's a deliberate choice. I wouldn't find that reference in tech specifically. **Jordi:** We have found maybe one idea within tech to make the show better this year, and we found hundreds from outside of tech. Whenever I'm consuming any type of non-tech media, I'm pausing, screenshotting it, and sending it to John and Ben, saying, "Look at this, this is cool. We should implement this kind of thing." Tech is just very circular. They're saying, "Oh, this other VC podcast did this thing. We should do that." **Jackson:** There's no broader field of view. And by the way, other industries are great at this. Fashion is a great example of an industry that's constantly looking elsewhere. **Jordi:** Totally. It's the best example. A fashion brand planning their fall/winter 2026 season now is going into the archive of another brand, or they're finding some ad campaign from Coca-Cola and are like, "Look at this. This is amazing. Let's bring that into the present." **John:** This is true in other Silicon Valley companies. We were just looking at Anduril, which launched a [new augmented reality headset](https://www.anduril.com/hardware/eagleeye/). That's not pulling from what Boeing is doing. **Jordi:** They pulled from Call of Duty. **John:** It pulled from Call of Duty; it pulled from anime. It also pulled from tech, which is not defense—-the industry they're actually in. We're not really a tech company; we're a media company. They're really a defense company, but they're a tech defense company. They're clearly pulling from other references. They're not just asking, "What does Lockheed do? What does Boeing do?" And that's always the nature of these things. ## [00:53:20] Narrow vs. Wide Appeal **Jackson:** On some level, you are making a show about the culture of tech, though. **John:** Yes. **Jackson:** One thing you've done a good job of so far is playing to a certain niche and playing enough inside-baseball stuff. [The Metis List](https://www.metislist.com/) is a great example of the most inside baseball-—it's AI researcher Twitter. Of course, there are parts of tech like Apple and Instagram that are way more broadly appealing, both now and in the future. I'm curious how you think about toeing that line. It seems clear you are making a show for people interested in the business side of the tech world. How do you think about dialing the aperture wider or more narrow? **Jordi:** We're not going wider. **John:** Agreed. **Jordi:** It's critical because we have no plans to retire from the mics until we're actually retired. It's so critical that the content we put out every day and the things we talk about are deeply interesting to us. There's a lot of tech content on YouTube. If you look for tech content, you're going to see iPhone reviews, SpaceX news from two years ago... **John:** Political critique of tech, that's really popular. Retail trading, what's stocks you buy. There are whole tech creators that would never talk about a private company because their audience doesn't care. **Jackson:** Yes. **John:** We're almost the opposite. Once they go public and are mature, we'll talk about them a little bit, but it's more about the lessons. **Jackson:** \*You\* guys might not care as much. **John:** Yeah, exactly. We're private markets guys. **Jordi:** The thing that we said early on, and I think it's still true, is that we make content for 200,000 people in the world. These are people that run companies, that invest, and that work at the most important tech companies in the world. It's the founder that just applied and got into YC. It's a very small group of people, and we're very intentional about making sure that the content is interesting to them. We're not always going to get it right, but in general, if it's interesting to us, it's probably interesting to that group. The funny thing is, we got a review last week, and somebody said, "I'm a doctor on the East Coast. I've never worked in technology. I started listening to TBPN and I listen every single day now." It's great if those kind of people adopt the show, enjoy it, and get value out of it to understand the world. But we would never adjust the content to try to get more of those types of people. That would be like doing tech reviews... **Jackson:** Making it more shallow. **Jordi:** Or just asking what's the next 100x stock. **John:** We could 100x every single view, impression, and subscriber number in three months if we wanted to. I've done it before. I got to half a million subscribers on YouTube. My biggest videos were the history of [Donald Trump](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZYqnEK4-2Y) and the [history of Xi Jinping](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrxrIH5zhBc). You just stop making the stories of Anduril... **Jordi:** History and politics are the two things that would... **John:** Yeah, it's so easy if you're just chasing views, but that's not what we're doing here because we're actually building it as a business, not just as some sort of vanity project. **Jackson:** The business part is almost a helpful constraint. **John:** Totally. As soon as you go there, you're selling different products, CPMs are different, and there's a whole bunch of things. I don't think we'd enjoy it as much. Then it's way more competitive because there are so many great shows about politics or what's going on in the public markets. CNBC and Bloomberg are actually great products if you're a retail trader and you want to look at the stock chart for the day. But we're rarely pulling up stock charts because a lot of times we're talking about private companies. **Jordi:** Another thing that's notable is that a lot of traditional business television formats were created at a time when people didn't have a cell phone in their pocket. It was deeply valuable to have a screen flashing charts of what gold is doing, what this stock is doing, or that the S&P is down 1%. That was really valuable to have on because you didn't have a phone that would give you that information. So a challenge has been not being too inspired by television. People want to put a label on it and say it's like the new CNBC or something else, but it's important to be inspired but create some constraint. **John:** The New York Times used to have box scores for every game that was played in sports because you couldn't look them up. The Wall Street Journal, to this day, has several pages printed with the share price of the top 1,000 companies in the world. **Jackson:** Wow. It was just the way it was done. The only reason it's still done is because that's the way it has been done. **John:** Exactly. Do we want a segment of the show where we just read off every stock price? I don't think so. **Jordi:** Name every stock, John. **John:** There was a streamer who was doing that for a while, and it was pretty effective because people found it very meditative, like ASMR. So I don't want to count that out as a bad thing. But in general, we want to do a show that assumes the modern trappings of technology and modernity. **Jordi:** You asked, "Are you news?" It's a good question. I would say we are not the delivery mechanism for news, but the conversational layer that happens on top of it. Oftentimes I find out news from the chat right here. Somebody will put something in all caps in the chat, and I'll go to X and see that it broke five minutes ago. **John:** Everyone has that group chat now where they send posts from X, hoping there's a little bit of discussion around it. We just productize that. We'll talk about it and give you a couple of sound bites on either side of whatever tweet is going viral. There might be a little bit in the quote tweets and the DMs, but we're just an extra layer on top of that. ## [00:59:44] X (Twitter)-First Content and Other Platforms **Jackson:** Let's talk about that a little bit. A lot of things went into the success you guys have had in the last year, but I think more than anything else, aside from your own ability, is thinking medium-first around X or Twitter. The first viral stuff was you log on, have a viral tweet, and see two guys in a suit reading your tweet on a printed piece of paper. **John:** Yes. **Jackson:** Amazing line from you this morning: you said, "X is the internet's dive bar. The drinks have always been cheap, the bathroom faucet perpetually broken, and the whole place has changed ownership multiple times. Ultimately, it's where groups of friends go to hang out regularly, and that aspect compensates for its rough edges. But you can't act surprised when a fight breaks out." [Laughs]. **John:** That was Jordi's line. It was h alf me, half him, molded together. **Jackson:** I've been meeting people on Twitter for the last decade, and I've always struggled to explain it to people. There is this unique thing where maybe it's 200,000 people—I don't know exactly how big it is—but there's a community. **Jordi:** I don't think there are that many people. **John:** If you're in true tech Twitter and you make a banger about someone like Josh Kushner--he's pure inside baseball, no one outside really knows him yet--a thousand or a couple thousand likes means you did it. Everyone loves it. **Jackson:** Yes. You can hang out with people the next day and reference the tweet, not even that specifically, and they'll say, "Oh, I saw that." **John:** Exactly. Because it is a very small corner. It's a small table at the dive. **Jackson:** At the dive bar. I'm curious what you love about that medium and, more importantly, how you guys have evolved with it over the course of the last year as your main playing field. **Jordi:** I think People mistake our success--they want to pin it on growth hacks. Clipping was a growth hack. **Jackson:** "Virality." **Jordi:** Yeah. There are people out there that believe we have had success because we figured out a good growth strategy, and that has certainly contributed to the success. But that is not why we are successful. We're constantly thinking about growth levers and new ways to distribute the content, but fundamentally, the thing that we actually care about is the show and every single day, making it slightly better. It is accurate to say that TBPN is a media company or a show that was born on X, and it is an entertainment companion product to X. But it's not any specific strategy. The thing that I think is really powerful is I personally would use podcasts to understand current events, but it's a wildly inefficient way to do it. I found this podcast that was recorded three weeks ago. **Jackson:** They're going to talk about one of these things. **Jordi:** It was published a week ago, and they talked about this thing that I'm reading about now. The set of events has changed, so there wasn't a bleeding edge. TBPN at its core is a bleeding edge commentary. We went off air at 2:00 p.m. Pacific today and won't be back on until 11:00 tomorrow. There's going to be some stuff that happens in between, but it's always present. **Jackson:** You're reacting to tweets that have been tweeted while you've been live. **Jordi:** Yeah. That, much more than a specific growth hack, clipping, or a specific thing we did with the brand or the suits, is why it was a unique media product and got traction. People see the clips, but they don't see the tens of thousands of people that are tuning in daily to the show. That happens below the surface. People have tried to overanalyze it. Of course tech people are thinking, "TBPN realize d that clipping is the only thing that matters." **Jackson:** You took that medium seriously. There are no gotchas. It's maybe the first truly X-native media thing, and that was a really powerful thing. **John:** I do love growth hacks. It's really fun to figure out what works in the current X algorithm. It's constantly changing. We had this idea of Paul Graham's 'do things that don't scale,' but also this idea of love letters to Silicon Valley. When you post a tweet, maybe it gets a thousand likes, but at a certain point your phone just explodes. It abstracts and you're just refreshing: another 500 random people liked it. It's exciting, but it gets old if you post a lot and you lose the connection. Sometimes you can see that a person you're actually friends with in real life liked it, and that's exciting. But the number getting bigger gets old really fast. You can reply and you can quote tweet, but quote-tweeting with a 4K video of us in suits with your tweet printed was the super quote tweet. It was the highest honor. It was like, "This post is so important now." **Jackson:** Now tt's the scorecard, the player cards, or the wedding announcement. **John:** Exactly. That player card format has been used in all sorts of Instagram accounts for box scores for sports events, and Complex does it. A lot of folks use that kind of format, but bringing that to X again was another interesting growth hack. There have been a whole bunch of those that are fun to innovate on. We've never lost sight of the fact that content wants to be free, so advertising is a natural fit. Content also wants to be everywhere, but that doesn't just mean taking the same thing and putting it on every platform. Every platform is unique. From a very early stage, we were on RSS and on YouTube. A lot of podcasts were audio only, and then they realized they needed to do video at some point. They added a video component, but it's just them sitting in a bland corner of the office with some slat walls. It's not opinionated. We said that for YouTube, you really want to build a set that's opinionated for your video. **Jackson:** You guys have built a world here. **John:** There's a world here. This visual world does not matter for the RSS product, but the RSS product does need us to contextualize things that we're looking at. As we're doing the show, we will be describing what we see. That's us thinking for the RSS feed. This set design is us thinking for the YouTube channel. How we clip on X and what context we give with the subtitles-—all of that is thinking for X. On Instagram, vertical needs to be a little bit tighter, one to three minutes. That's a different format. The medium is the message. The medium is really important on all these different platforms. When you create all this content, you have to actually make it feel native in that particular platform. **Jordi:** Each platform is basically a full-time job. **John:** Yes. **Jordi:** Companies still have this mindset of, "I'm going to hire a person to do social," and I don't believe that. Ask anyone on X that's growing an account really quickly how they're doing on Instagram if they're not a full-time content creator. Every one of these platforms is different, and it takes a long time to start chopping them down. **Jackson:** I do want to talk a little bit about other platforms, but you guys were both pretty good at Twitter long before this. **John:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Or at X. Old habits. What makes somebody good at that platform? **John:** Regarding your question about taking Twitter seriously, to close that out : the 200,000 most important people in tech, business, and the private markets—that's where they hang out. That's their Bloomberg chat, their Bloomberg terminal. It doesn't matter how senior you get at the most Tier one fund; everyone's glued to Twitter. If something's happening on Twitter, they're talking about it in a group chat. They might not post. But they talk about it. **Jordi:** I love when a multi-stage VC that "doesn't use it" says, "I don't really go on Twitter." **Jackson:** They all lurk, man. **John:** You can tweet something with their name, not even tagging them, and they text you within five seconds. You realize, okay, so you're extremely online. **Jackson:** Yes. **John:** The 200,000 most valuable, most important people in tech are there. Advertising them is obviously important, so you want to go there first, you want to nail that, and then flow through from that. In terms of what it takes to be good at Twitter, the most succinct distillation I heard was from Dwarkesh Patel. He said to tweet like you're lobbing texts in a group chat. Don't think about opening a doc and turning it into a blog post. Just think, "I would text this to a couple friends," and that does well. Do you have any other insights? **Jordi:** Every poster is great for a different reason. I've seen people try to adopt the Cluely, [Roy Lee](https://x.com/im_roy_lee) style of posting. There may be people out there that don't like his style, but they still watch. **Jackson:** By the way, critically, when he first got going, it was different. Whether or not it was good, it was different. To your point about influences. [Avi](https://x.com/AviSchiffmann) is the same thing. He is definitely doing something different. You can hate it, but it is not the same style that everybody else is trying. **John:** Yeah. The meta changes a lot. Sometimes it's memes or really pithy one-liners. Long posts seem to be doing really well recently, I've noticed that. As the algorithm changes--one day I'll open it and every post that is served to me is basically an essay by a technologist. **Jackson:** Nikita's on the sliders. **John:** Yes, there's an essay by a technologist about something that's pretty deep. And then sometimes you'll just get slopped up with with clickbait stuff. **Jordi:** The same thing you'll see: there are accounts getting 10 million impressions a month that are basically worthless accounts. They could not sell 100 copies of a book if they wrote it. And then there are accounts with 600 followers that are getting 300,000 impressions a month, and they could raise a $30 million seed round. **Jackson:** Yep. Quality of reach. **Jordi:** It's about understanding the quality of the content and who's actually watching or engaging with it and who gets value. That can be inversely correlated with size. **John:** With all these platforms, there is something valuable about volume. You see this with a lot of the accounts that post viral stuff. If you click on the account, they had 10 flops on the path to that really big one. **Jackson:** It's more like TikTok now. **John:** If you're posting a lot, you build the muscle. That's just true for anything. **Jordi:** I still think it's the most efficient way to become known in tech, **Jackson:** It's the town square still. **Jordi:** You can have an outsider break into the industry just by the quality of their thoughts. **Jackson:** On the other platforms: you're doing a lot in many places already. The Substack stuff, to your earlier point, is great. Who knows, maybe it's even your cameos on Sora. I'm curious how you think about your near-term priorities within the context we were talking about earlier, which is that you're not going for people outside of that 200,000-person group. You could make the case that Instagram doesn't matter. **John:** No, Instagram does matter, because those same 200,000 people are also on Instagram, and I want to hit them there. **Jackson:** You want to hit them \*there.\* **Jordi:** With different content. **John:** Same audience, slightly different content. **Jackson:** Right. **John:** If you look at the Wall Street Journal, there's the business section, but there's also the mansion section. We're going to send those exact same people something on Instagram that's a little bit more sugar. **Jackson:** Yeah, [Laughs]. The Porsches... **John:** Whereas on X, you get 400 words from me: a debate about a thing, some sort of technical deep dive, or an interview with an AI researcher. That's going to be a little less Instagram-focused. But we will take people everywhere. **Jordi:** I think there's a stated versus revealed preference phenomena happening as well. No high-powered executive wants to go out and say, "I love Instagram. I use Instagram for two hours a day. It's awesome. I'm on there. That's my main thing." But let's be real, there's a bunch of high-powered CEOs out there that are using Instagram a lot. **John:** Right. **Jordi:** Maybe they're not your heroes, but they're people that are able to move markets. My wife started posting on TikTok in 2022, and the quality of inbound people coming through LinkedIn was insane, just from people saying, "I saw your TikTok. I'd love to talk." **John:** People would go to LinkedIn? **Jordi:** Leave TikTok, go to LinkedIn. **Jackson:** Also, for these people, Twitter doesn't exist. **John:** Sure. Now that I think about it, I got a lot of that from YouTube too. People would DM me on LinkedIn. **Jordi:** Part of it is understanding that X is a relatively small ecosystem. If you want to have an impact on the world, you have to break out of X. Everybody that has built an audience on X has experienced meeting somebody that uses X, and they're like, "Oh, how's it going? It's great to see you." Then you meet somebody that might be important, but they're on LinkedIn, and they're like, "Who are you? What do you do? Oh, you have a manufacturing company. That's cool." They don't have the context. ## [01:14:35] Making Content People Want to Share and Taking Yourself Seriously and Unseriously **Jackson:** There's a meta thing here. You guys are both amazing internet marketers, within this context and without it. My best version of trying to distill what that is is making content or products that other people want to share. Or even more, that they want to share their reaction to or them talking about... **Jordi:** I think it's much more... The way that I think about it is everything you do from a marketing standpoint should entertain, inspire, or educate people. I don't know that many other buckets that stuff can fit into. We talk with companies all the time that are going to do a campaign, work with a certain person, or do a stunt. You sharpen your intuition enough and you understand if it fits into one of the buckets. Is it wildly entertaining? Is it wildly inspirational? Is it wildly informative, and is it actually bringing novel information to people? For me, if it doesn't fit into those buckets, it's just not going to hit. You can have something hit in any of those buckets. A poster, for example, can entertain. They can post something that's super funny with perfect timing, and it can get a million views. It can feel emotional and inspiring, like the [iconic Founders Fund vibe reel](https://youtu.be/Gvf547kGOXs?si=ch74E3m9iZzjRw6c). **John:** The first vibe reel ever. **Jackson:** Did you make that? **John:** No, that was before my time. **Jordi:** That is an example of a novel format. It hadn't really been done in tech, but it was inspiring. **John:** Even more narrowly around entertainment, I just think of funny. A lot of this stuff is just: is this funny? And then people might share it. We keep coming back to humor. If we're laughing about the concept… **Jordi:** And simplicity. Virality hates complexity. If you launch a complex idea that requires a lot of context… **Jackson:** Yes. **Jordi:** It will not go viral. People try to brute force it, Somebody will launch something complicated and confusing, and they'll send the post to a bunch of people and say, "Like this, please comment, repost, quote it." You can manufacture it, but you can see it in the data. This is not getting any reach because people don't actually like it, and the actual ratio of engagement is bad. It looks like it was a successful launch, but it was really just engagement farming. **Jackson:** This is what Gabe at MSCHF says. He says, "We want ideas that slap in one sentence and slap harder in three." **Jordi:** Yeah. **Jackson:** But make sure it slaps in one sentence. A lot of people on Twitter and in tech, the tendency, including my own, is to try to do a a three-order, need all this context. But starting simple is a really, really strong place. **Jordi:** When people pitch us marketing ideas, I tell them, "I have more context on your business than 99.9% of people in the world, and I'm going to need you to repeat that marketing idea back to me because I'm still confused." If you hit the timeline with this, you're going to have a bunch of people whose immediate reaction is, "Wait, what's going on?" They're certainly not entertained, because being confused is not a great state to be in. They're not inspired, feeling an emotion, or thinking, "I want to take action now." They're certainly not being educated, because they're just sitting there thinking, "I just watched 30 seconds of this 90-second video, and I don't know what's going on." Then they're on to the next thing. **John:** Why do you think the original [Technology Brothers launch video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On3SXnMe5bI) went viral? **Jordi:** Because... nobody in tech would do something as silly as that? **John:** It was funny. It was certainly entertaining. I want to go back to the idea of making it shareable. We never thought, "Oh, there will be something in here that people have to share." But maybe we did in the sense that if you see this, you can just send it to your friend. **Jordi:** If you look back at what the criticism of that video was, it was, "Okay, Temus Succession." [Laughs]. That is what we were going for. **Jackson:** Keep in mind, that is shareable too, because you are setting up somebody else's punchline. **John:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Which is really powerful. **Jordi:** Yeah. I was like, "Okay, you nailed it." That's what we were going for. We filmed a Succession-style vibe reel for a podcast that is three months old. **Jackson:** That doesn't have revenue yet. **John:** With a thousand viewers, listeners. **Jordi:** And self-awareness is super key... **John:** I do think there was something inspiring in the sense that people would think, "Oh, wow, they're taking this really seriously." People in tech like to see that people are taking things seriously. **Jackson:** It's the high and low together again. **John:** Exactly. **Jackson:** It was clear you were taking it seriously enough to do the video, but you were also making fun of yourself a little bit. **John:** Yep. **Jordi:** It's an interesting dynamic where the audience is really smart. They will see through anything. You need to be authentic because they're going to see through it, especially over time. Maybe you could get away with a launch video where people don't realize this is not a serious team, but over time, people figure it out. However, they don't have an appetite to work to understand what you're doing. You can assume that they're smart, but also assume they're not going to put any effort into really understanding it, because they just don't. And that's fine. ## [01:20:28] Valuing Brand **Jackson:** You, maybe even more than marketers, are two quietly brilliant brand guys. When I think about the stuff you guys have done historically, both [Lucy](https://lucy.co/) and to Jordi's earlier point, Soylent more than many anything else, and everything you've [Jordi done has spiked on a bunch of dimensions, but especially brand. It goes back to our influences conversation. I think there's maybe nothing tech as an industry is worse at than brand, or maybe even nothing that tech cares less about. I'm curious, what does brand mean to you, and what actually makes a great brand? **John:** Jordi's way better at this than I am. I've been along for the ride with most of the other brands. **Jordi:** Part of it goes back to Branded Native and working with so many companies, understanding what is working from a strategy and channel standpoint and how brands actually get made. Great brands do not start with spending $300,000 on a branding agency and doing a brand package. They typically happen very organically. A great brand is not a logo. A great brand is not a website. A great brand is the culmination of what you make a group of people feel over time. It's educating the audience. A great brand is making people feel something over and over and over and over and over until you stick in their mind. A brand is the average of everything that you've made an individual person feel. When you look at TBPN, people like the TBPN brand because we've probably entertained them and made them laugh—hopefully a bunch of times. One of our KPIs is making people laugh. Making people not... **Jackson:** And the second, third, fourth, and fifth times are as good or better, too. **Jordi:** Yeah. We joked originally that this wouldn't be possible if we weren't able to fork over $300,000. People would ask us how much we spent on the Technology Brothers brand because it's so great. How did you pull it off? We would say, "We just put the capital to work." But it's really about building up a group of people. Great brand work is actually done externally. Any key role or things that are done every single day in the organization, we in-house. We're not going to have production out-of-house. A lot of professional podcasters outsource production, which is crazy. Your job is to make a piece of content and make it better every day. With a brand, you're creating artifacts that are sometimes evergreen, like a logo mark, or sometimes used for a moment, like ad creative. It's really effective to constantly be going outside of the organization to bring in new ideas. Those people are thinking, "I saw this campaign that you've never heard of. Let's bring that in." Part of it is having that relationship with a group of people and then not getting stuck with one. We've worked with different people for merch and different designers. We have core partners that we go back to a lot, but we're constantly willing to bring in new people. Taste is a factor, you look at two logos... but it's ultimately just a personal thing. **Jackson:** That's what I was gonna say--you have a critical point of view. You clearly know how to work with all kinds of great external creatives, but that does not work if you don't know what you like. **Jordi:** I also cherish that dynamic. I don't negotiate heavily with creative talent. That might sound crazy because your job is to get great services for the lowest possible price. But if you go into a dynamic with a designer, I'll get a proposal, and if I think it's wildly more than I value what we're trying to do, I'll say, "Thank you, we're going to go elsewhere." But if I'm close in the ballpark with a creative that I want to work with, I'm not sitting there saying, "Hey, you pitched us 20k, but our budget is 6k." Sometimes they'll opt in, but then in their head, they're thinking, "I'm doing 6k work." **John:** On the branding thing, every brand is spiky in different ways. There are a bunch of different elements that describe the brand; it's not just an arrow in one direction, it's a whole bunch of things. We've done that with the brand world. One thing that we've had a lot of fun with is when we find a thread to pull on that we're getting some brand value out of, we just keep pulling on it as long as possible. At some point, we were riffing about horses. It was related to technology journalists being rich and nepo babies, and they all have horses. Then that turned into us being into horses and recommending buying horses. **Jordi:** And I said, if your daughter's not a horse girl by the time she's five, you failed. [Laughs]. **John:** At some point, I decided I was going to become a horse expert. I reworked my entire YouTube algorithm to just serve me dressage content and understand all these different horse breeds. That's probably manifested in the horse behind us. It's all these little things. It's not just, "Oh, we need a statue and a horse." There's this lineage in the brand. **Jackson:** This is the world building thing. **Jordi:** There are two more things that I pull on. One, we're in an era where you have less control over your brand than ever because your brand is created by others. In our case, we have a bunch of people here in the studio. When Tyler posts, that is part of our brand. When Ben posts, that's part of our brand. When Brandon posts, that's part of our brand. **Jackson:** When fans post about you, it's a little bit part of your brand. **Jordi:** Yeah. Even with the merch, we didn't sell it originally because we wanted to effectively control who was wearing our logo. Over time, you can't keep total control. I remember one day I texted John because somebody had a TBPN hat, and I asked, "How did this person get it?" This person is not somebody that I want to align with. **John:** Just off-brand. **Jordi:** You have more control over your brand than ever because you can constantly adapt and change. It's not like we have packaging where if we want to change the logo, it's a six-month new run. We could change anything at any time. But you have less control because your team is constantly creating it, and this is the same for every company. One more thing I forgot, because I said there was a second part. Something that we did early on, and I think every company should do this, is we made a sheet... **John:** The bible. **Jordi:** The are our friends and our enemies. HVAC, rollups... **John:** It was like the CCP. **Jordi:** It was silly stuff. This is not a spite show, but we kept it on the table. **John:** We also included memes, sections, and phrases. All of this contributed to the world and the language of that world. We defined people, ideas, and themes that we were going to go back to. All of that was super helpful. **Jordi:** We constantly update that, and that is part of how you do the world-building. You don't want to leave it to chance and think, "Hey, this thing was super funny on episode six. We want to bring that back." There are people in our audience, if we're talking about a car, who will say it looks cool but it's not as nice as a 2012 Nissan CrossCabriolet. That's just a riff that we've had that it might be the perfect car. **John:** It's a two-door convertible SUV. What more do you need? **Jordi:** There are not a lot of options if you want a two-door convertible SUV. **Jackson:** There's something to come back to, and that's a payoff for the person who's been with you. **John:** Exactly. **Jordi:** There's also a super steep learning curve with the show. We're making a decision to not say what AWS is. Traditional television will be like, "AWS is a cloud computing division." **Jackson:** It goes back to everything we were... **Jordi:** Part of that steep learning curve is very powerful because people ramp up and then they're ready. **Jackson:** And it feels like you're actually talking to me. **John:** You can see it in the New York Times: "SportsCenter for the LinkedIn crowd." More people would say, "Clips for TPOT." That would be another way to frame the show. **Jackson:** [Laughs]. **John:** But they needed to put it in these universal terms. We do a little bit of that, but not a lot here because we're focused on that niche. **Jackson:** I love that. Maybe the brand bible will be exposed someday. ## [01:30:10] Balancing Focus and Iteration **Jackson:** We talked about it a little earlier. You have this amazing pace, and you guys are both very pro-experimentation. On the other hand, you've talked a lot about the Senra or Munger-ish idea of doing one thing and being really focused. You had a bunch of interns here; you have a few less now. I wonder what goes into fostering a culture that is super pro-experimentation on one hand, and then also knows what to hold onto, what not to change, and what to say no to. **John:** We don't have a hard and fast rule. There is an algorithm for this: explore versus exploit. It's mostly just that everyone knows what they have to do. They're all chopping wood, knowing what works, and getting that done every day. We're constantly lobbing new ideas and tests faster than people can actually run them, so they have a backlog of new ideas. But people also experiment within whatever they're doing. **Jordi:** This is specific to content businesses, where content is ultimately the product. You have to figure out what is evergreen and what you just need to make slightly better every day. Then you need to figure out stuff that works momentarily but is not durable. There's a lot of that on the Internet. If you create something novel, like a cinematic video, it works really well for a time. That was the case earlier this year, but by summer... **Jackson:** It's the Browser Company thing. **Jordi:** Yeah. And by summer, it stopped working well **John:** We couldn't do a vibe reel every every month. It's just not possible. There's no appetite for it. **Jordi:** Physically, we could. We have the talent. **John:** Oh yeah, easily. We were doing them in a day. It was novel, but it wasn't durable—something that people want to consume on a regular basis. **Jackson:** What do you think would have been most surprising to you either six or 12 months ago about this? **John:** Probably the Meta Connect moment. The second video we filmed, the one I mentioned earlier, was us talking about the Meta Ray-Bans alone in this room. Then, 10 months later, we were interviewing Mark Zuckerberg about that exact product. **Jackson:** By the way, also Jim [James Cameron. **John:** Just because my initial idea for the format was no guests ever, no traveling ever, just two people. I was like, that's the secret sauce. **Jordi:** We thought that early on: how great is it to have a podcast where you don't have to worry about booking guests? **John:** Or travel. This is the secret to success. This is amazing. Let's just do this forever and never change it. **Jordi:** At the same time, while we are open to experimenting in real time, we're hyper-calculated. When we were talking with Ramp at the end of last year, they had seen about six weeks of the show, and they thought it was cool. But everything about this year has been premeditated. We knew we were going to go live, add guests, and do an extraordinarily high volume of guests. **John:** We did after a couple of weeks. When we sat down to record the first episode, we said, "No guests." Then three episodes in, we were like, "But what if?" **Jordi:** I'll give you an example. We loved the name Technology Brothers, and we've told the story before, but unfortunately, it would get abbreviated, so people would call us the Tech Bros, which made our skin crawl. **Jackson:** And it's literally the thing you were trying to avoid. **Jordi:** We had realized that we wanted to do this for decades, so we wanted to adapt. The name TBPN was chosen because we could get a four-letter dot-com. **John:** Which is insane. Jordi's a beast at this stuff. All the handles were available, too. **Jordi:** Well, they weren't available, but we figured it out. **John:** They weren't actively used, and there were no trademarks, so it was gettable across everything, which is awesome. **Jordi:** The reason that made sense--it didn't make sense because we weren't building a network--but it did make sense because we want this to be a place that the Mag 7 comes on regularly. Their PR departments are much more likely to say, "Sure, I reviewed TBPN. It looks cool. You should go on TBPN," than, "You should go on Technology Brothers." **Jackson:** "Go hang with the Tech Bros." **John:** As opposed to Theo Von—he can be a comic, but the name "Theo Von" can evolve to mean anything. And now it means something more serious. **Jackson:** Tech Bros is really loaded. **John:** I seem to remember, we picked TBPN because of the initialism for Technology Brothers, "TB." But then we decided we shouldn't keep the "TB" around. **Jordi:** Well I was looking for short domains that featured "TB." But from the beginning, it was Technology Business Programming Network, inspired by ESPN. ## [01:35:25] Endurance & Evolution **Jackson:** You (John) referenced the MKBHD idea where if you don't love the content, you're not going to be able to do it forever. You guys are currently doing three hours of live broadcasting every single day. That's a lot of endurance for a year, let alone five. If you really want to go crazy, Charlie Rose and Johnny Carson did this for 30 years. **Jordi:** Jim Cramer just celebrated 30. **Jackson:** How do you set yourself up for that kind of endurance? **Jordi:** The news has been something I've loved my entire life. Since I could read, I would read the newspaper every morning. My dad would get up before me, and it would be on the coffee table. He would have looked through it already. I would pick it up and read through it. My interests in the content evolved. I used to be more into geopolitics than I am now. Political content in general was more appealing when I was younger and trying to understand the world. Even in middle school and high school, I would get home from school and refresh TechCrunch to find out what happened that day in tech. Continuing into my adult life, no matter what I was working on, I was still interested in what was happening broadly. The confidence we have that we can do this for decades is that I cannot imagine a world in the future where I wake up and I'm not interested in understanding and talking about what's going on in the world. **John:** It would be impossible if we had to do the exact same show every day. If it was a play with a script and we had to tell the story of Apple every single day for three hours, that would be a waking nightmare. But the news cycle changes, and you can go wherever you want within the niche of technology. I saw this on my YouTube channel. I would talk about AI, and then defense tech got big. I talked about defense tech. I did some videos on the Metaverse, VR, and crypto. You can move around; you don't need to be that niche. **Jackson:** If you were to speculate, what will be different about the format in five years? Or aspirationally, is there anything you hope will change? **John:** I think the chat experience will change. Most linear TV doesn't have a chat. It would be funny if Bloomberg read the Bloomberg chat. I believe Pat McAfee reads from the chat, but only at a certain interval. The chat's going crazy, but they will take questions at a certain moment. Right now, we go to the chat if they have a zinger. **Jordi:** Today we were live and the chat was saying, "Guys, you're on TV in France." **John:** We had to react to that. I heard from a very popular streamer he sees reading chat as a skill. **Jackson:** Have you ever watched (IShow)[Speed](https://www.youtube.com/c/ISHOWSPEED)? **John:** Yes. **Jackson:** That is Twitch 15 years ahead. Truman Show\+. **John:** Incredible. It's very clearly its own skill. We have the skill to keep a conversation going. If I notice Jordi has to talk to a guest on a text message, I can just go to the camera and read from a Wall Street Journal article. We can pass the ball back and forth very easily, but integrating chat will change a lot. **Jordi:** The chat is part of the show too. We'll be talking about something I remember last week we were talking about model adoption on Open Router and we missed a key thing: two out of the three top models were free and the others were paid. It was very obvious, but in the moment, we didn't put that together. Somebody in the chat said this is important. Not only did that make the analysis better--and it was community-sourced--if you're listening to the recording--and the majority of our audience is not watching live--you get that extra context. If John and I were just recording by ourselves, we never would have included it. That feedback loop is super important. **John:** That's a very important network effect and something that's very durable over time because it actually makes the show better and feeds back into itself. It's important in a very different way than just having a lot of listeners. **Jackson:** Yes. And when you get to a certain scale and you have enough affordances with the chat, they're going to learn--This is what streamers like Kai and Speed do. Speed will literally say, "I have created a choose-your-own-adventure. I'm going to do one of two things. Chat, which should I do?" It is cool to see. ## [01:40:34] A Day in the Life of TBPN & Learning to be Newscasters **Jackson:** One thing a few people asked me to ask you on Twitter is what a day looks like from end to end for both of you. **John:** Fun. **Jordi:** Same day, every day. Gym is 6:30 to 8:00, breakfast is 8:00 to 9:00, and we're in the studio at 9:00. John quickly goes into writing the newsletter. I typically will have some Zoom meetings during that time that are more focused on the business. **We have from 9:** 00 to 11:00 to prep the show. If we're running ahead of schedule, we're actually dressed before... **John:** A lot of times, if you see the timer at five, four, or three minutes, we're getting dressed. **Jordi:** There's no time to be creative in that window. What I love about it is that your mood doesn't matter; how you feel doesn't matter. We have an obligation to go live. There's a countdown every day. **John:** Totally. **Jordi:** In building companies previously, if you wake up feeling under the weather, you might not add that sales call to your calendar; you'll add it to tomorrow. You're constantly negotiating with yourself. We don't have the luxury of negotiating because we made a promise that we go live every weekday. **Jackson:** You've taken one day off? **John:** We also took July 4th off. **Jackson:** And then what about post-show? **John:** I would view the daily routine as a narrowing of the aperture. When we meet at the gym, we're often talking about stuff that may or may not make it on the show: "Watch this movie," or what was going on broadly in group chats and online, different news stories that are kicking around. By the time we're at breakfast, we're honing in on the key topics. Once we get to the studio, we're taking screenshots that you will see on the show of individual posts or Wall Street Journal articles. During that 9.00 to 11:00 window, I'm writing the newsletter, but I'm also piecing together the order and bouncing ideas off Jordi "Hey, there's this Wall Street Journal article, there are these posts. What do you want to kick off with?" **Jordi:** We're sourcing content for the show 24/7. **Jackson:** Getting closer and compressing. **John:** Exactly. **Jordi:** When the show ends, we're usually caught up on the news. We try to make sure we're ending by covering what's been happening during the show. Sometimes it's live; other times, we're catching up. Then immediately, new content is being created for tomorrow's show. After the show, we'll eat lunch and talk about what worked well, what didn't, and what we should change. We'll often change the show for the following days, saying, "Okay, that was too many guests." The main thing we're trying to protect is 90 minutes a day that we can just hang out. One of the challenges of doing guest segments is that they're wildly unreliable. [Interviewing Andrew Sorkin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTtbCg2HLl0) today was super energizing. It made the show better and super interesting. We would have been happy to keep doing that for much longer. **John:** The whole chat was saying, "This is an amazing interview. Great interview. I love this." **Jordi:** They were just really excited to hear from him. It's helpful that he is a professional TV host; it's not his first rodeo. The variability in guests is a huge challenge. If somebody's coming on for 15 minutes, we know to show up with high energy and put on a show, but they might come in with very low energy. **John:** That's a big part of the reason for the gong. If you're a founder who raised $10 million building some sort of boring SaaS thing and you're not the most high-energy person, at least we're resetting the energy level up here, and you can laugh. **Jordi:** We see it in the metrics: guests have much lower retention than the two of us. It's about protecting that time that we can just hang out. That's the most fun, energizing time for me. If you think about it, two out of ten guests make the show better. There's a power law there. Maybe one is amazing, and we wish we had 90 minutes with that person. If eight out of ten are making the show slightly worse, that's not a great hit rate. We still want to talk to those people because they help inform the content and allow us to build relationships. There's always some insight and some learning and some takeaway. **John:** Some people are good on a random Tuesday; other people are amazing at a certain moment. A VR founder who's building something completely independently and can talk trash about whatever the big companies just launched—they're great on that launch day. But on an average day, you don't even have a product to launch. What are we talking about here? **Jordi:** The other thing is the live nature means that we have to adapt to what's happening. There have been times where we have four guests slated, and then some big story breaks and suddenly we have to... **John:** We actually killed this product entire -- one of the big viral days was [crypto day](https://youtu.be/YHaT1gwbTpU?si=dWliNRErTiQh119n), and we had the most insane lineup: Chris Dixon, Balaji, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. We had so many killers come out. **Jackson:** A mini event, sort of like the Meta thing. **John:** It was very cool. We tried to do it again with an AI day and had a whole bunch of AI researchers, but that was the day that Trump and Elon broke up. The chat was just consumed by it. We didn't have screens reading the chat, so Jordi was reading it on his computer and said, "John, we have to pivot." We canceled, brought a bunch of people on later, and realized you can't have a conference about a specific topic if something else crazy happens. **Jordi:** We were at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna IPO. **John:** Figma was the biggest story of the day. It was the current thing on tech Twitter. **Jordi:** And it's hard to displace an IPO in terms of mindshare, especially a company like Figma, which is universally used and loved. But at the Klarna IPO, I got a text from the team. John didn't have his laptop pulled up, and they said, "Charlie Kirk just got shot. Open your computer." I opened the computer and immediately saw the video. **John:** How do you talk about 'buy now, pay later' in that moment? **Jackson:** Yeah. **Jordi:** You go from the euphoria of celebrating this team's 15-year journey getting to this point, and then suddenly you have this absolutely horrific, tragic event. We have to adjust to it. **Jackson:** It's a unique thing about news. **Jordi:** Whereas with a podcast, something amazing or tragic could happen during the show, and when people listen to this, they're not thinking you need to respond to [something]. I haven't seen my phone. I have no idea what's happening in the outside world. **John:** That's a point where I thought it was really good to look to how legacy TV deals with that. On CNBC, they do a breaking news alert. They cut away from the business content and say, "We have some breaking news, a tragedy has occurred. Here are the facts." Then they go back to it. They're basically just kicking you over to NBC if you want to follow the full story because that's where the breaking news will live. I remember we were in the gym at our first studio when the Blue Origin launch had just happened with Katy Perry, and Jeff Bezos was there looking absolutely shredded. It was very funny because there were six TVs on the wall, all on different channels, and you could see how each of them covered it differently. CBS has Gayle King, who went to space, so for that entire channel, it was wall-to-wall coverage all day. It's the Super Bowl for them. The person you as a fan of this channel know is in space, so they have to cover it all day long. On ABC, they didn't have one of their anchors go, but it was still a great story, so they had some real cameras there and probably spent half an hour on it. On CNN, they did about 10 minutes. And on CNBC, they just put it picture-in-picture. The rocket came back, it landed, and they went back to the stock market. Sizing stories for your audience is really key. It's knowing, "Okay, this one is a breaking news one-liner. This is five minutes. This is a full hour." **Jackson:** This goes back to not trying to be everything for everyone. **John:** Exactly. **Jackson:** I ## [01:49:59] Jordi & John as a duo, Will Manidis, and the beginnings of TBPN **Jackson:** have a few questions about you guys. **John:** Please. **Jackson:** First and foremost, we've talked about it a bit, but what makes this partnership special? And when did you know that there was something here? **John:** The early thing was that we both had years of experience in YouTube, but on different sides—-me on the content creation side, and Jordi on the ad sales side. So there was a lot there. **Jordi:** John's one of the few people, and certainly at the top of the list, where when I talk about the things I'm good at, he's consistently bringing ideas that are better than my own. That dynamic is super powerful. We have distinct skill sets and distinct focus areas in the business that made it powerful. I consistently come to John with an idea in a space that I'm good at generating ideas in. Let's say it's an advertiser we're working for, and I want to pitch them on a concept for their next product launch. I come with an idea, and he'll say, "Okay, what if you did it this way?" Typically, when I pitch those ideas to people, they just say it sounds great. I'm not getting one-upped. When you have a partnership, you want to be getting one-upped all the time. That's what makes a partnership great—that two people combining are creating something better than any one of them would do individually. The other thing is that we never run out of things to talk about. If it's a Friday and is driving to Santa Barbara and I'm going to Malibu, instead of taking my have one because it's an hour both ways every day--I'll just send the driver home and ride with John. He goes out of his way because we didn't get quite enough time. **Jackson:** There's a line in the New York Times profile: "The show doesn't look very different from when we're hanging out offline." I think that's very clear. **Jordi:** Every single day, there are moments off-air that I wish were on-air because it's impossible to recreate how we got to a conclusion or a specific line that you can't really recreate. **John:** Also, if we had a line that we were dying laughing at in the gym and delivered it on the show again, it's hard to fake my reaction. **Jackson:** I've had to do this a couple of times where I had an interview, we lost an hour, and we had to redo it. It's a different thing. This is maybe the dumbest way to ask this, but how important was [Will Manidis](https://x.com/WillManidis)? Was he as important as he claims to the formation of this partnership? **Jordi:** He introduced us. He's made a number of truly incredible introductions to people we never would have reached. **John:** Will also has a particular way of expressing his belief, positivity, and cheering for you in a very quantitative, hyperbolic way. For probably the first six months, every time we would text with him about some mundane decision we were making, he would say, "Yeah, that's great. I just told," and he would drop the name of some Tier 1 fund. He would say, "I just told them that we're oversubscribed at 400 post." We weren't fundraising or doing anything like that, but he would say, "So-and-so bought it hook, line, and sinker." **Jordi:** We have a group chat with a few other buddies. We'd say something or something would happen, and he would post one of our own assets in the chat and say, "I'm updating our 2026 guide." **John:** He would refer to the guide. Like we were a public company. He would also do these funny things, using the language of a philosophical venture capitalist. He would say, "Yes, I've updated my thinking on TBPN. I no longer think it will merely destroy all podcasts, but I think it will actually destroy all of media." We were like, "What are you talking about?" **Jordi:** We have a beautiful relationship with posters. If you look back at all the shows, probably 80% have featured one of Will's posts. He's very good about putting his own spin on what's happening in the world. There are a number of people like that I can think of—the [Roon](https://x.com/tszzl)'s of the world, the [Bucco Capital](https://x.com/buccocapital)'s. We've curated all these amazing thinkers that are constantly putting information and takes out into the world. We're curating those, and they are a key part of the show. **John:** Interestingly, the sports world has done a great job of embracing posters. Stephen A. Smith reacts to random people with hot takes about basketball or sports, and Pat McAfee will elevate a post about something. But for some reason, maybe it's just the private markets thing, but business television has not. I feel like I would have seen if Roon had ever been on Bloomberg, for example. That would be an amazing moment. From my perspective, I look at a lot of our guests—-I don't want to call them out too much because maybe they'll start getting calls—but for a lot of them, I think, "How are they not getting called every single day?" **Jackson:** It's like their influence out-punches their credibility. **John:** It's so many extra steps to introduce someone like a Roon to a Bloomberg audience on TV. Whereas for us, it's supernatural because we've told the story so many times and the show is X-native, as you mentioned. So it's a little bit easier. **Jackson:** Were there any other ideas you guys considered doing together, podcast or media-wise or otherwise? **Jordi:** The first thing we worked on was a drop activation for Lucy. **Jackson:** Oh, right. The Excel thing. **Jordi:** The original idea, and I made a whole deck on it that I sent to John, was an energy drink for white-collar workers. **John:** Sort of like displacing Diet Coke. **Jordi:** Or Red Bull or Celsius. Those products are loved by the laptop class, but Celsius is not leaning into Wall Street. It's just a happy accident that Wall Street has made Celsius their own. So we kicked around the idea for a beverage company. I thought you could do the style of marketing and media that we do to support a new energy drink. We were both fascinated with that category. At the same time, neither of us had any interest in creating a consumer packaged goods business. **John:** It's such a grind. Once you break through zero to one, it's a grind. You're at a trade show 20 minutes from O'Hare in Chicago every week, forever, talking to some local chain distributor. There are 25 other people with the exact same label claim, they don't know you, and you have to be a creator. Both of us recognized that neither of us wanted to be a CPG operator because I'd been in that space and we'd both tasted it and been around it. **Jordi:** So we put out an entire campaign around it, and we put out at least a five-minute video of us riffing in the characters that became the original Technology Brothers show. **John:** We filmed a full hour. We sat down, and Ben was filming it over there. **Jordi:** Ben was like, "Did you guys script that?" **John:** He was like, "What was that?" There was something there. We were playing these hilarious characters and just completely melted into it. We thought it was great. We also did an overlay, made it retro, and had a lot of graphics and funny things. **Jordi:** We even worked with [Day Job](https://dayjob.work/) on the packaging. There was a PR box we sent out that had this comically large tin of Lucy's. It was massive, with this huge Rolex inside that had the branding on it. We executed on it really well and sent it to a bunch of people, but that was the first time we actually made content together. **John:** We did two test episodes on Riverside, recorded, and then we started recording in person. We shipped the first episode that we recorded. In terms of formats, I was pretty convicted on the two-person, in-person reaction show as a seed. I'd seen it in other categories, and it seemed like a very clear white space. I'd actually done some similar experiments. I did two test episodes with [Lulu Meservey](https://x.com/lulumeservey), and we clipped that up. It was interesting, but she was very focused on comms, and we weren't able to go all over the place. If there wasn't a comms story that week, we didn't know what we would talk about. Then I did a test video with [Jason Carman](https://x.com/jasonjoyride) that was highly cinematic. We were on the phone talking to each other. That was cool, but he was very clearly making documentaries. He didn't want to become a hot-takes newsman. When Jordi and I put together the first test episode on Riverside, it was super easy to talk about everything because we were super confident. **Jordi:** In hindsight, we both wanted to continue to be a part of the private market ecosystem: venture, startups, et cetera. This is where we've spent our entire adult lives. This is the thing that we spend the most amount of mental energy thinking about. But we didn't want to do a traditional venture-backed business. We didn't want to become venture capitalists. We just didn't feel called to do those things again. There are not a lot of options outside of media to actually stay heavily involved without doing those two paths. And being in LA, it's not a tech hub. LA Tech Week is this week, and I haven't seen any technology out there. **Jackson:** I didn't even know. **Jordi:** It's a terrible tech hub. It's basically a string of neighborhoods loosely connected by freeways. There are a couple of companies that are somewhat important, but the idea of building a tech company in LA is a joke to me. Ignoring El Segundo, which is it's own thing. We were in a position where we both have kids—John has three, I have two, all under five. They're set up in their communities, and we had no desire to move. I really felt like if I wanted to build another company, I had to move to San Francisco or New York, and I didn't want to do that. I like LA County. I love where I live. Media was the perfect business to start. It allowed us to stay involved with the world that we love and talk all day long with friends like you that are in and around the industry. We're building a business that is extremely well-suited to build in Hollywood. We are not looking to hire 50 engineers in the next two years. We're hiring for a couple of roles now. Where's the best place in the world to build a media and entertainment company? It's LA. ## [02:02:57] Grab Bag: Bias to Action, 15 Minute Interviews, Not Journalism, Talent, and Domination of Spirit **Jackson:** I [interviewed Gabe Whaley](https://dialectic.fm/gabe-whaley) from MSCHF recently, and he brought up Soylent. an excerpt in the MSCHF employee guideline handbook where it says, "Soylent could have been a speculative artwork. Instead, it's real." Gabe went on to say "you could have done it as a small batch, or an artist could have lived off it as a performance for 20 years, documented everything, had a video, and then done a gallery show about it—living off the powder. Instead, it was a business. It was a company. They put it out into the real world, and that's rad, that's cool." That partially applies to you, and it captures this earnest, "just try stuff" attitude. Even what you were describing, a whole lot of iteration cycles that people didn't see, were a real thing. I'm curious what goes into your inclination to just say, "That's an interesting idea. Let's put it into reality and see if it works." **John:** I think there are seeds in humor because humor gives you the permission to do something low status. Even the Soylent thing was a social experiment. We didn't know if it was a complete joke the whole time, but then it went viral and people wanted to buy it. As a YC company, starting a consumer packaged goods company was extremely low status. **Jackson:** Also, the literal name. **John:** Everything was trollish, insane. When you start with the lens of humor or performance art, it gives you the ability to broaden the aperture to get really weird. This started as something really weird—just two guys reading the newspaper, which isn't a show. Now we've shaped it into something that does look like a real news product and a real media product. It allows you to start from a blank canvas as opposed to thinking, "This is what a podcast is," or, "This is what a show is," and then having to take what is already a thing and find a little bit of differentiation. **Jordi:** We both like creating things. John created Soylent and then Lucy. Going back to my very first company, I created a skateboard company when I was 12. I realized that there were people out there that would manufacture skateboards, and if I created a logo and gave them the artwork, I could do it. As a 12-year-old, I called up my aunt and said, "I need $500." The boards were $17.50 to make. I was going to buy them and sell them locally in stores, at the skate park, and to my friend's parents who would then gift them to their kids for birthdays. It was that realization that you could make things at a young age. The thing about making things in the physical world, and even software and companies, is the feedback loop takes so much time. For example, I started a consumer water filter business ([Rorra](https://rorra.com/)) with my partners Brian and Charlie years ago. From the seed of the idea to forming the company, to raising money, to developing the product and the brand, to launching a partnership with Andrew Huberman--that was years in the making. If you enjoy making things, there's nothing better than content. We can have an idea at breakfast and ship it two hours later. That iteration is super addictive. The challenge with startups is you can have a good idea, but you don't know if it's truly a good idea for... **John:** ...12 to 18 months. **Jordi:** No, even more. I've had companies that I thought were literally dead because they weren't sending updates. Then they send an update, and they’ve just crossed a million dollars a month in revenue. It's working finally. The thing that's so addictive about media is that we love generating ideas. Sometimes an idea takes three hours to make, sometimes it takes 20 minutes. **John:** I'm laughing because you're talking about how addictive media is, and I think we're on the fifth hour of podcasting for the day. [Laughs] **Jackson:** we sat down, I asked if you guys were sure you were ready to do this. They're like, we could podcast, literally... We are almost out of time. I would love to do a quick speedrun of a few miscellaneous things if you guys are up for it. How do you do a great 15-minute interview? **John:** You've got to ring a gong. A big one, ideally. **Jordi:** We don't do life stories. This is not a place where you're going to learn everything there is to know about people. It takes some amount of context. **John:** Most people wish that every meeting they had with entrepreneurs was 15 minutes. We just have the affordance to make it 15 minutes. There's an intro, what you do, and then the news. You have to be news-driven, so we ring the gong or talk about the product announcement. Then, pretty quickly, we ask you to take us one layer deeper in understanding your business and your market. We had somebody on who was building AI for personal injury attorneys. I don't really know anything about the personal injury market, so I'll just ask one question to get a little more information on how that market works. Maybe I come out of that interview just understanding how many personal injury attorney firms there are or what's the average size. **Jordi:** The reason a 15-minute interview is great is that historically, it would have been a 90-minute interview. That was way too much time for that person at that point in their career or that moment. We just recognize it's much more interesting to hear for 10 minutes from somebody in a specific moment in time than for 90 minutes. We talk to a lot of Seed, Series A, and Series B founders who are just starting their journeys. Someday they might be like an Alex Karp, a Palmer Luckey, or Marc Andreessen in that they can just talk and talk and it's entertaining, but they're not at that point yet. Let's give them the format where they can come in, introduce themselves to the world, and we get to hear how they're thinking in that moment. When we are at Meta Connect and at YC Demo Day, we think it's a very interesting media product to interview an entire management team in three hours because you're getting to hear how all those people are thinking. You could piece together interviews from an executive team over a quarter, but this is all in that one moment where they're launching a new product. With our Demo Day content with YC, you get a really good sense of the batch from listening to a bunch of three-minute interviews. You get a good read. **Jackson:** More than reading Gary Tan talk for 45 minutes about all of them. **Jordi:** You're getting a real... **Jackson:** Yes. That's cool. You're getting a flash pulse check with a bunch of different flavors. What is the conscious difference between what you guys do and journalism? **Jordi:** We don't break news. **John:** We rarely break news. We're very happy for the news to break at 9 a.m. on Tech Twitter/X, as it normally does. After a fundraise, they come on and give us more context. Let's react to the reaction. How are people perceiving it? Your launch video got 10,000 likes and a lot of hate. Let's talk about why. **Jordi:** We could break news, but it puts us in a very adversarial position. We think it's good and healthy that founders are generally able to control their own narratives and decide when news should break. We've both been in positions where a journalist is breaking a story, telling you the news is going out in an hour, and asking if you have a comment. There's a lot of value to fact-finding and original reporting. There are stories that need to be told, and certainly stories that don't want to be told that still need to be told. But it's important for our position in the ecosystem to not be scooping. I have no interest in being the one to deliver a story that doesn't want to be delivered. **John:** You see it in sports. There's a commentary guy... **Jackson:** There's Shams, and there's Stephen A. [Smith]. **John:** Exactly. And then there's also the newswire for sports scores, which used to be printed and now it's digital. All these different pieces have moved around to different sections of the ecosystem. You just have to know your lane and thrive in it. **Jordi:** An example is that CNBC is not in the scoop business... **John:** And the Wall St. Journal is. **Jackson:** And you teach your audience what to expect from you. You had a bunch of interns here. I'll pick on [Tyler](https://x.com/tylercosgrove) as an example. **Jordi:** Tyler's the only remaining intern, and he's not really an intern. **Jackson:** Why does someone like that, who is generally smart and capable and could probably do a lot of things in tech that are not media, stick around here for another year or five? **Jordi:** I can imagine a bunch of different paths for Tyler post-TBPN. I can imagine a world where he stays with us for 30 years and is just a personality on the show. He would be an incredible personality to bring to the show because he has more time than we do. He can go out and nerd out about something and come back. He has a different set of interests, so he's bringing something novel to the show. Tyler is unique in that he's a recurring personality on the show. But think about what his optionality will be if he decides to move on. He's still in college—on a gap semester, he hasn't officially dropped out. If he decides to go back to school, or stay with us and then a year from now decide he wants to start a company or work at a venture firm, he's going to have truly infinite optionality. **John:** Or work for one of the thousand companies we interviewed this year that we can easily make an intro to. **Jordi:** One more thing that I would add, to put it in corporate speak, is talent retention. We want to create an environment where the people at the company today are riding with us across decades. Certainly people will go off and do other things, but to date, we haven't had somebody decide to leave on their own. We're hyper-conscious of creating ways so that people can grow in the industry. If you're deciding to work in tech media, I don't know many other places you can go that will be fulfilling after working in this type of environment. **John:** I see it much more like a law firm's partnership than a C-corp that is growing, changing, and cycling people through. The people who get in develop a unique set of skills that work very tightly together. It's a small group for a very long time, and everyone participates in the upside for a long time. **Jackson:** That's definitely rare in media. **John:** As opposed to, "We're all going to be on a four-year vest, and then we're going to get out and sell this thing." **Jackson:** But also with content creators, it's pretty rare for there to be real durability around something like that. **John:** I think we have a pretty clear vision of what the show looks like in 30 years. And it's not Vice News, where you have a bunch of other people doing other shows. We're not building a media company or a platform with a bunch of other things where it's, "Oh yeah, thank goodness we don't have to podcast today because we hired hosts." **Jackson:** Right. **John:** No, we're building a show. You can look at what Rogan's organization looks like and what Huberman's organization looks like. You can see that you can be doing $100 million a year, top line, with a team of 10. So why not just do that? **Jackson:** permanent underclass. What would you say to young people who are feeling this pressure? **Jordi:** I think it's a very toxic mindset. **Jackson:** Or if you guys were 21... **John:** Game theoretically, there's immense alpha in not participating in that culture. If everyone else in your college class is participating in "get your bag" culture and get-rich-quick schemes, and they're hustling and flexing while you're just compounding, you're going to win. It's going to be even less competitive. **Jordi:** It's also the financial advice we give to the team—and I'm saying that in a joking way, but it is financial advice. If you're in your twenties with a relatively modest cash flow, trying to YOLO into investments to escape the permanent underclass is a ridiculous concept. One, you're not deploying size. Two, it's going to distract you from the main thing that's important. **Jackson:** Well, I think the fear is, what else could be the main thing? Are there even any main things left? **John:** There are tons of main things left. The power laws get steeper all over the place. Just be at the top end of the power law. **Jackson:** And maybe, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, look at a more diverse set of inputs for where creativity is going to come from. **John:** Don't fall into the status trap. I guarantee you that the best pottery maker in the world is going to be pulling seven figures if they're the best ceramicist. They'll be in high demand. **Jordi:** I think about this so much because when I was in college, I was obsessed with startups. I would be refreshing TechCrunch. I'd be on tech Twitter at the time. I was so obsessed with venture capital. My first real business was a company that didn't raise money, that just grew profitably and has continued to grow profitably for my entire adult life. That is the entire reason I was able to just decide. John was an EIR at Founders Fund, and I didn't have anything else I needed to do with my time. Being really into startups and having a lifestyle business was at times miserable because I'd be sitting there thinking, "I'm making real cash flow here and nobody is gonna look at my LinkedIn." It doesn't feel like... **Jackson:** It doesn't feel like I'm in the big leagues. **Jordi:** I didn't feel like I was in the big leagues at all. If you have a lifestyle business, get ready to make a lot of money, but no one is gonna care about you at all. You might be providing value to a set of customers, but you're not giving people an opportunity to make money if you're raising venture capital. **John:** That's a great point. **Jordi:** It's really sad. If you're just chugging away building a business, no one cares. **John:** David Senra will care in 50 years if you build a lifestyle business. **Jackson:** But by the way it takes a long time. **John:** It takes a long time for you to get recognition. **Jackson:** How have the wives of TBPN influenced or made this thing better? **John:** Focusing on building something in person was a no-brainer. We want to be home with our families, so this idea of being on the road all the time just raises the quality bar. We'll travel for Mark Zuckerberg, but are we going to travel for some random thing just because it's fun or trendy or there's a 1% chance that it's good? It keeps things really focused, and we just continue to raise the bar. **Jordi:** They're both incredible mothers. We both wake up before the kids and are at the office or starting the workday before the kids are even up. They are such incredible moms that we get to go home after the show, and the kids are happy and thriving. We just get to hang out. They're carrying the burden of the household, which gives us the ability to be live on the air for three hours and not be thinking, "Are the kids eating lunch?" **John:** The time we've had to pull the stream because of family stuff was literally during the LA fires. **Jackson:** Wow. **John:** And that was completely reasonable: get home. But other than that, it's been fantastic. **Jackson:** My final question. I'm not sure who this quote should be attributed to-—I think it's either you (John) or Will. "Podcasting has little to do with profit. Podcasting is about domination of the spirit." **John:** We heard that. So, that is a... **Jordi:** That might be Senra. **John:** Someone else said that in business: "Business has little to do with profit. Business is about domination and spirit." **Jackson:** Beautiful. **John:** And then I said it at one point. **Jordi:** You just used it in a job post. **John:** I used it in a group chat. Then Will posted it publicly and replied to me, and that reminded me, so I posted it in the job post. One of the things was that we take podcasting really seriously. We don't care about the status--maybe it's low status, maybe it's high status. We're doing it, we're all in, and we're going very hard on it. To take the edge off a little bit, we throw in some humor. But we do feel that. **Jackson:** My question was going to be, how are you going to spiritually dominate? **Jordi:** A better line from David Senra. We were hanging out and he said, “I wish media was a zero-sum game. **John:** [Laughs] I'm mad that I can win and someone else can win...” Media is so brutally competitive and he's like, “I wish it was more competitive.” I love it. It's amazing. **Jackson:** Gentlemen, thank you very much. This was wonderful. **John:** Thanks for having us. This was great. Good times. **Jordi:** Super fun. **Jackson:** Cool. **Jordi:** Thank you.