The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Why OpenAI Bought a Podcast — with TBPN’s John Coogan and Jordi Hays

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Scott Galloway sits down with TBPN creators John Coogan and Jordi Hays to unpack how they turned a daily tech show into one of the fastest-growing businesses in media — and ultimately, OpenAI’s first acquisition. They discuss why most podcasts get advertising wrong, how a small but influential audience can be worth more than mass reach, and why they built TBPN like a startup. Plus, they debate OpenAI vs. Anthropic and what Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the next big thing reveals about the future of tech. Want to listen to this and other episodes ad-free? You can, if you subscribe at profgmedia.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's called Facebook. Welcome to the 404th episode of the Prof G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, the creators of TBPN, a popular daily show covering the biggest stories in tech and business. These guys, you may know them, they were supposedly bought for $200 or $300 million by OpenAI. If you're wondering why it makes sense for OpenAI to purchase a podcast, the answer is it makes no fucking sense. But I don't mind it.

I like it when young guys were smart and seemed like good people, and both of these guys fit that mode. Hit it big. Good for them. I'm happy for them. They do a podcast three hours a day, just talking about AI, and they get amazing guests. There's no way to rationalize this acquisition, but I'm here for it. I like Mark Cuban, and he sold his company for $5 billion to Yahoo, broadcast.com, radio on the internet.

Oh, that was worth $5 billion. Anyways, I like these guys. We're going to talk a little bit about their acquisition, their approach, how they become so successful. I was especially interested in what they said about advertising and a little bit about them being such young fathers. Anyways, with that, really admire what these guys have built. Let's catch up with our conversation with John Coogan and Jordy Hayes. You both host TBPN, the Daily Live Show that became Open AI's first ever acquisition this spring. You've hosted names from Zuckerberg to

Aldman to Nadella. Before we get to the Open AI deal, take us back to the beginning, go all the way back 17 months and give us your bag story. Long time ago. We made. We made a lot of the time ago. We that through a mutual friend who connected us because we were in a similar stage of life, I guess. We'd both started companies in Silicon Valley, raised money from actually two of the same venture capital firms, never met, but we both were living in Los Angeles, had kids, and we're sort of looking for what was next. And L.A. is a terrible place to live if you work in tech outside of hard tech. And we didn't see ourselves building a hard. hard tech business. We both had some media background. I built a influencer marketing company

in college. John had a big YouTube channel. And we did what had never really been done before. Two guys in tech decided to start a podcast. It was revolutionary. No. So we met. We just loved talking. We would call each other, even though we didn't even know each other that well and just talk about different ideas and what was happening. And eventually decided to record one of the conversations. We sent it to a guy named David Senra, who has David Senra by David Senra, popular podcasts and also the founders' podcasts. If you've listened to that. And he's one of the strongest believers in the power of podcasting that, like, we are still early, that it's not too late to start a podcast if you have a good idea, something fresh to offer.

And so he was extremely encouraging, told us that we should take it deadly soon. Yeah, we hadn't published an episode, but we sent him a Google Drive file. He listened to it. I was shocked that he listened to it because who has time for another podcast. But he did. And he, yeah, he said, like, you know, take this 10 times as seriously. He saw something in us and, you know, we kept going from there. And so he sort of encouraged just to treat it like a business, like a startup, not like a side project. And that's something that we quickly identified as one of our differentiators was that we had lots of friends and we'd been in these situations before my YouTube channel. I was running it on the side while I was also doing a business. And there's a lot of people that have investment firms that also have podcasts or they have a company and then they start a podcast to promote that company. And there weren't that many people outside of the traditional media. There weren't that many insiders that had transitioned and become full-time creators. Dwar Keshe Patel, obviously, in that group, David Senra.

There's a few others, but it was a smaller group than I think the podcast charts let on when you scrolled through and you saw hundreds of hundreds of podcasts. Most of those folks were not spending 40s 60 hours a week. It was and still is low status to some degree. I remember when we would tell our friends in the early days, because we told people with like a handful of episodes, we were like, we're going full-time on a podcast. And, like, we have supportive friends, thankfully.

They were like, yeah, like, excited for you. That's awesome. But you know in their head they were just thinking, like, wow, they're down on their lock. Completely lost. Couldn't come up with a single SaaS idea. Yeah. What are they thinking? And so we started taking it really seriously.

And that unlocked a lot of things. That unlocked interviews with bigger people. Well, yeah. Before we get there, we talk about, like, why we initially got any traction at all is because we weren't doing interviews. Yeah. did like 150 hours with just the two of us talking before we had done a single guest. And instead of having, there were shows that we love like Acquired is, you know, an amazing product.

But it's like one topic. And we would have, you know, we would talk for 90 minutes, but we'd cover 50 topics. Yes. 30. And so we'd read the whole Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times. We'd pull from random headlines. We'd pull up tweets and posts on different social media sites. We'd print out the posts.

So we'd typically have a stack of posts, and we would pull them up and read through them. And Jordy has one there. We would discuss it. Sometimes we'd just be laughing about it. Sometimes it would take us on a tangent. We'd talk for 10 minutes. But then we would clip that reaction to that post and then quote tweet the original post. And so that was sort of a do things that don't scale moment.

It was a love letter to whoever posted that original idea or that take or whatever they posted. And as you know from posting, oftentimes the numbers get really big. You get a thousand likes on something. And it all kind of just melts into the background and it becomes just noise and you see the number go up. But if someone quotes your post with a thoughtful commentary that's, filmed in 4K with cinema cameras and the hosts are wearing suits and they printed, they took the time to print out your post. It's just, wow, these people went a lot further to say something.

I'm at least going to see what they had to say about the thing that I fired off in the shower, right? And so that just told individual people, maybe 50 people a day, got a little message from us, hey, we exist, we liked what you said, and here's our commentary. And then they followed us. They reposted it. quote tweeted and said, I can't believe this happened. What is this? This is weird. This is interesting. And so that was interesting like zero to one moment. Yeah, early lessons in going to zero

to one was, you know, need some element of format innovation. Like podcasts are incredibly noisy, incredibly powerful. But we came in with something that was a truly unique product because, one, there was no one else that had us talking about crazy ideas for 90 minutes. We had a monopoly on that. And then a real focus on marketing, the show, treating the show like a product, that we make every day, but we were incredibly fixated on on marketing that product. And I think that, and that, that happened through clips and, and, you know, the love letters concept, things like that. So also, I think you guys recognized a real gap in the market and that as two white guys hosting a podcast. Exactly. I've heard nothing you said the last five minutes. I was so excited about that joke.

What did you guys do before this? I grew up in L.A., studied economics in college, moved out to Silicon Valley as soon as I graduated, joined a Ycom. Where did you grow up in L.A.? I grew up in L.A. I grew up in Pasadena. I lived there now, actually. And where did you go to college? I went to Northeastern in Boston, and then I went out to Silicon Valley, was sort of on a finance track post-gray financial crisis. I was very interested in that, but then got bitten by the Y Combinator bug reading Paul Graham's blog, reading Hacker News, wanted to move out to Silicon Valley, maybe join a tech company, realized that a lot of the big tech companies, I wouldn't be fit for the corporate ladder, wanted to start a company. Started one company, teamed up with a Y Combinator company. The first business I started was called Soylent.

It was a meal replacement shake. You probably had a couple Soilants over the years, Scott. heard about that? I mean, it was like a decade ago. It went like very viral. Soiling green. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great name for a food product. But that was the point. The point was like it was it was rage bait. It was rage bait. It was rage bait. Like everyone had a comment. Liquid death. That kind of thing. Yeah. Liquid death. Same thing. And so and so yeah, I was like I was interested in technology and working on software startups. But then we got pulled into this consumer. packaged goods, direct-to-consumer boom, and grew that company a bunch, raised a bunch of money, eventually sold that company, started another company with basically the same team, but then got that company to scale and had the opportunity during COVID to sort of think about what was next, started YouTube channel, and then eventually went over to Founders Fund to become an entrepreneur

in residence, and that gave me a lot of free time to explore what was next, and that sort of set me up to be ready to go full-time on something completely new when the right, when the right pitch came my way. We're not very good at being concise. Concise. As you can tell, we talk, we do this for three hours a day. We'll have hit the four-hour mark by the end of the day of podcasting. We really love this. But I grew up in the Bay in the Bay Area was always obsessed with the idea of building companies, building startups. I built a first ever company was a skateboard company when I was 12 because I figured out that the boards that I was buying in California for $35 would be a blank Canadian maple board.

I could get them made with my logo for $17.50 in the Midwest. And so I went and raised like $500 to do my first run. And so started selling skateboards. I was kind of when I caught the bug. It took me about a decade from there to build like a real business that could support my life. but I actually met a number of podcasts while in college. And this was at a time where you'd have a podcast with an incredibly loyal fan base,

tons and tons of downloads. And they'd be in the top 10 of whatever category they were in. And they'd be running like zero ads, which sounds insane. But they would just be doing it for the love of the game. And maybe they had another business. And so I went to them and I was like, if I can bring you advertisers, can I take a cut?

And so I started doing that. that over time turned into a company called branded native, which is still running today, but does like YouTube, you know, creator advertising for a bunch of different brands. And so I didn't raise money for that business. It got profitable quite quickly. And I started taking the profits and investing those in other startups. So then over the last, however many years, I guess eight years invested in like 70-some startups, eventually started a fintech company. I started maybe the most 2021 ZERP company ever,

company called Party Round, which was Venmo for fundraising and investing, because I would get invited to invest in a startup. And then I remember the first time somebody said, well, I'll send you the docs, and then you can just wire after that. And I was like, wire transfer. I'd never actually done a wire,

I'd never actually done a wire transfer at the time myself, like an outbound push. And so I was like, why is this not like Venmo? A lot of VCs thought that was a great idea in 2021. As you can imagine, everyone in their mom was investing in startups. And had built like a fairly viral brand on X for that business, ended up evolving it into a banking product over time that was building a stable coin, basically a stable coin bank.

The month that we launch, FTS collapse, which killed a lot of excitement that people had around crypto. as you can imagine. And then a few months after that, SVB collapse, and people started really caring about how much FDIC coverage they had. We at the time had standard, like, 250K of coverage. And our average customer balance was like a million dollars, something like that. And so people were like, I was telling our customers, like, yeah, there's a bank run that's happening.

Like, you need to be practical with your business. We ended up getting aqua hired by a company called row in New York City and then work there. And that's like when, when I met John. So we, we had been like both, both of us had gone through the sort of like Silicon Valley factory, had had some wins, had some losses, had been like, I would say very humbled by, by like work and life, right? Like I went, I went from being like, you know, running a hot startup. up and to basically like having my business blown up by like, you know, the market dynamics. And then I'm sitting there. I've got like a one-year-old son at the time. I've got another

on the way. Like that's like deeply humbling. And so I think that based on like what we do and what we talk about, they expect us to be like, you know, maybe cocky or something like that. But I think we came at TBPN from a very, we had been humbled by Silicon Valley. been humbled by startups and I think that has informed our coverage right right like I think we give people we always would give people the benefit of the doubt we we like took a strategy early on which was called a golden retriever mode which is an idea that you know john john can can has described many time on the show but like being in a golden retriever mindset and trying to act show up in the world and at least that was our role

with TBPN is showing up as like golden retrievers. You're like happy, friendly and dumb. Yeah. Not trying to be, oh, I got this person. I'm smarter than them. I'm the smartest one in the room always. Being, yeah, a little humble in some ways. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you don't need me to tell you how much hiring great people matters. But the time and resources you have to spend to get it right are precious commodities. sourcing connecting with and screening candidates can quickly eat into time better spend on your customers. That's where LinkedIn hiring pro comes in. It's designed to be your hiring partner, helping you source the right candidates faster. That way, you can hire with confidence without making it feel like a full-time job.

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That's G-O-G-E-V-I-T-I-com slash Prop G for 20% off your membership. So I'm fascinated by and a little bit jealous because what I've seen is that you guys this year are going to, you're tracking towards, and I'm very open about our business and transparent about the economics because I want young people to learn about money and building businesses. But 11 employees, 5 million in ad revenue in 2020. you're tracking past, from what I see here, 30 million in 2026, bootstrapped, profitable, zero outside capital, show was 17 months old at acquisition.

This was what struck me, though, around 70,000 viewers per episode across platforms and 58,000 YouTube subscribers. So here at Prop G this year, we'll do, I think, about 20 million, and we do substantially more downloads in video views than that. And yet you guys have 50% more revenue. And my, so now, granted, I'm the idiot reading ZipRecruiter ads or telling people to drink Zbiotics before they go get fucked up. I introduced them.

I introduced the founders of Zbiotics. I love them. I just ordered a bunch. It's a fantastic product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I connected the team.

Stephen, one of the co-founders went to high school with me. I absolutely love that product. I just ordered a bunch. I spent a lot of money on it. Is it because you guys are selling just sponsorships as opposed to add a? insertions? Like, how do I get the same revenue per viewer that you guys? Yeah, so it's a couple things. So one, because I started this company branded native and I had done, literally done thousands of, like, influencer podcast, YouTube, you know, deal. So I was obsessed with the commercial side.

And early on with that business, if I would connect an advertiser with a content creator and the first few ads went, well, I would immediately book out like an annual deal because I thought I was in the interest in both companies. I was like, the advertiser wants to allocate budget effectively. The content creator wants predictable revenue. And so I would do that when I could. And it worked well. And so for this business, like, you know, we had a small team.

And knowing that we were having to show up and be live for three hours a day, I knew that we weren't going to have time to be doing a lot of ad sales. So I basically wanted to, we only sold advertising on an annual basis, which was good for us and good for the companies. So for last year, you know, we had kind of projections. This was 2025, our first like full year in business. We had projections and we would show those advertisers and say like, hey, this is what we think we can do for the year. They would sign on, but they'd be on a fixed rate. So they would be committing to an annual spend with us, but they'd be on a fixed rate.

we grew beyond what we were projecting. It was just like, you know, you know, free incremental impressions or reach. And so that was super important. Also because we wanted the ability to know how much revenue we were going to have in the month of March and April and May and things like that because we wanted to hire a team. We wanted to invest in our space.

We have, I would say, one of the most unique, you know, podcast studios in the world. You know, it's not, it's certainly like sub a million. but we invested a ton of ton of money into equipment last year. And part of that was having this predictable revenue stream. And then the other thing that the other approach that we took was, you know, I was pitching, advertising with us as like sponsoring a Formula One team. So, you know, it wasn't like we were going to, we would run ads for every company,

every day. But then we would put their logo on like, you know, merch that we would make. we would put their logo on clips. If we did anything IRL, we would show up for them there. And so it was like, you know, actually like, you know, a big tech company sponsoring a Formula One team, they know they're going to be on the car, they know they're going to be here,

they know they're going to be everywhere. And so by having like, you know, basically one contract, and then we were very open and up front, and it was part of the show that we were, we loved advertising. Like, we truly think it's amazing. I was like, I love that, somebody anywhere in the world can listen to this content for free that we put so much

effort into making and it doesn't matter who you are it's just free like it's uh it's truly it's truly an incredible business model it's very aligned uh and so we were very i would say a lot of podcasts in tech not you i think you're very commercial um and that's a that's a compliment but a lot of podcasts and tech were like above, above ads. They were like doing ads would be low status because I have a venture fund and I get management fees and things like that. And then the other thing is like we had a focus early on and it's still our focus, which is we believe that there's 200,000 people in the world max that we make content

for. And these people are running businesses. They're investing in the companies that, uh, of the founders that we talked to, they invest tens of billions of dollars a year. They can, you know, run companies that spend billions of dollars a year on everything from advertising to software, to cloud, et cetera. And we always believed that that was a big enough audience for what we were trying to do because we, in this business, we go live for three hours every day, we can't afford to talk about things that we aren't interested in.

We can't afford to be explaining to people like what AWS is. You know, we can't, we don't have the time, nor do we want to take the time to explain SpaceX's business in the year 2026, because we assume that our audience has been following SpaceX and understanding SpaceX for a decade plus now. Yeah. The other thing with the audience,

we found, yeah, we just found ways to get ad impressions to people that normally don't see ads. I think you've talked about this, too, about how certain powerful people basically don't experience advertising. We figured out how to get ads to them. One of the ways, during our, before our interview with Mark Zuckerberg, I read him a ramp ad directly because our ads are integrated. He put the headphones on, and John started reading them in the net before the interview starts. And with what we're doing right now, I'm sure the ads will be sliced in later, although shout out Zbiotics, they did get a freebie in here. But our ads are integrated. So there might be a Fortune 500 CEO is coming on.

And right as they're coming on, they hear an ad. Throughout the interview, they're looking at our screen, which has all the corporate logos, including the ramp sponsorship right there. So there's ad integrations and logo placement there. And then after they hop off, they might still hear us read the internet. the next ad, and then every time we share one of their clips, a lot of media companies and shows and podcasts have a clipping strategy, but they don't monetize the clips very well. So all of our clips have brands on them, logos, and then at the end of every one-minute clip is a full ad read.

And so, you know, of course, some people scroll to the next video by then, but a lot of people do stick around and they do see that ad impression. And so the actual ad impressions goes much further. And these clips, if it's some, you know, AI for legal company that's on, that's going to get sent to the competitor company, even if it's a very small audience. It's going to get sent around that small community. And so that clip might only get a few thousand views, but it's going to be with the right people because it's essentially trade media. Yeah, the other thing that we did, we realized early on that if we were going to be doing live podcast style ads, we weren't going to be able to do a 90-second ad.

Like people would just immediately bail. And so we pitched advertisers on instead of giving you a smaller number of 90-second ads, we'll give you, you know, 250-20-second ads. and really selling that like repetition and frequency. So I've memorized all the ad reads. We have buttons that we can pull up and they take over the screen to show you the graphic really quickly, but it's not long enough that you want to pull out your phone and tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And just to give you an idea of how the advertisers get like sort of like strange incremental reach,

we made a bunch of merch early on that people were really excited about. and we never sold merch because it's not our core business, and it wouldn't really move the needle from a revenue standpoint. But there were websites that were making fake TBPN merch. They're still out there and putting our advertisers all over the merch in the way that we did. So they were building a business selling our advertisers, you know, basically like impressions for our advertisers. And so, yeah.

So, yeah, and I think it was, you know, I think like the TBPN story is as much around like marketing innovation and business model innovation and format innovation as it is timing, right? The timing of launching a show like this during one of, you know, the most historic technology cycle of our lifetimes certainly plays a part as well. Yeah, I think that's really interesting construct or model. Think of it as a Formula One team, because I find that our most lucrative deals, and it sounds like you've figured this out sooner than us, our will just say to, you know, an AI company, we're going to use your data, we're going to talk about you all the time, we'll disclose that you're an advertiser, but we want X dollars, and we're not going to get into this whole impression CPM game. We kind of managed to bust out of that. No, and you're instantly losing when you do that because if you're advertising enterprise products, one customer can pay for the entire ad placement, the entire deal, right? And so that was something we recognized early on with Ramp. I was like, yeah, we're going to get you or at least help you close a public company. And if that is the only customer that we get you for the entire year, jobs finished. Everything else is free. Everything else is free. And so, yeah, we had a couple. of consumer partners early on, but we realize that, like, the people in our audience can actually go and buy $5 million a year of this SaaS company, or they can spend $20 million on cloud, or they could spend $50 million on inference.

I mean, also recruiting. But they can only buy, like, one-eighth sleep, right? Or maybe two, right? And so we realize, like, the best use of our ad inventory should be entirely. And so our friends with consumer companies, we'll just support them, like, John's drinking Andrew Huberman's, you know, Yerbermata company. And we don't even charge money for that because... Yeah, we just serve. We just like them. Let's talk a little bit about, I hadn't heard of you guys, and then I heard about you all the

time because my understanding is your first acquisition or media acquisition of OpenA.I. And the rumor is you guys got sold for the low hundreds of millions, which is, I don't think any company, any podcast, at least less than two years old, has ever gotten sold for nine figures much less, what sounds like more than that, call it a 20x plus revenue multiple, which media businesses never trade at. So my first question is, why did Open AI buy you? I think they saw what we were doing online and wanted to partner with us in the way that our brands had. So we had a very interesting history with Open AI in that we were sort of contrarian supporters. So going back,

back to the fact that the show is very pro-advertising. When it was initially rumored that OpenAI was going to put ads in chat GPT, the general response was, this is bad. We don't like ads. But we're the guys who love ads. And we think ads are a really powerful business model. And we think ads can make things free. It was like, if you want to be OpenAI, you're going to need an ad-supported version of your product.

otherwise, like Silicon Valley, we were like looking around being like, you guys think that everyone in the world can spend $20 a month on software. And you don't realize that like their most American households will like cancel a $10 a month streaming product if they don't have a show that they love in that very, very moment. We were, we were very pro ad. And so we were celebrating milestones along that path in a very sort, it was like half ironic, sort of funny, but also. We did believe it was a real model. And we had done a number of stunts on the internet. We ran a Super Bowl ad that did shoutouts for everyone in our community. We had launched a product called Claude with ads that was sort of making fun of the anthropic ad that was targeted at, it was punching at OpenAI, and Open AI couldn't really punch back.

And so we were laughing about that. And so we'd done a couple of these, like, viral marketing campaigns. and to be able to work with us, this was the deal that made the most sense to help on the marketing side. And that includes things from billboards to the next Super Bowl ad. I hope we can have a really strong voice in.

Yeah, we had been very loud about, you know, the need to, it felt like before AI was, like, real and before it was something that we used every single day, the technology industry and the labs, like, needed to use fear-based marketing to raise, the necessary capital to build a lot of these models. And basically by like the midpoint of last year, we were seeing that like this sort of like fear-based approach to selling the product is going to just

go really, really, really badly. And it has, right? Like, you know, look at public opinion around AI. People are scared of it, even though they find it very useful in their, in their day-to-day life. And so we had been, we had been unofficially giving Open AI. advice every single day through the show being like, hey, like, where's our Steve Jobs? Yeah. We were just going to be like, and I'm not saying that's not saying that Sam. Like just talk about what the product can do for you because there'll be a model release and they'll talk about the stats and the benchmarks instead of just being like, well, now you can

go and ask for a custom piece of furniture and it will just give you exactly the image of the piece of furniture that you want. You can just go get it made for cheaper than what you would get somewhere else or something like that. Yeah. There's all these different use cases that come up, and they always come with, like, a blog post and metrics. And it's not just like, hey, you can go use this thing for this particular problem now. Yeah. And the other thing is that we were always, we were sort of ironically and unironically pro technology throughout the entire, throughout the entire show.

We still are. We think that there's so many companies that, that, you know, compete with Open AI that are that are fantastic. like SpaceX is one of the greatest American companies in history. Anthropic is one of the greatest American companies in history. Google, you know, all these players. Like, we generally just want the American technology sector to do well. We have friends at all of these companies. Well, thank God you guys are here because they could use the help. It's been pretty rough there.

Yeah, and I'll give you another example. So, like, I, when there was rumor that Open AI was going to do an adult mode, and again, like, this was in Q3, Q4 of last year. I thought Alvin announced that. No? That was a rumor? He, well, he announced that they were planning on working on it or rolling it out under a certain umbrella that would be maybe age-gated or something. But it never launched, but there was. And that's the kind of thing that, that's the kind of thing. that's the kind of thing that, like, I was very, I was like, there's no way to, there's no, in my view, there was no way to defend that kind of action in the same way that I don't think there's a way

you can defend Zuckerberg launching, you know, prediction markets, you know, integrating, integrating gambling into, into, if there's no money, is it gambling. I think the defense is it's good for sure all the value, but I appreciate what you're saying. Yeah. I don't think that's going to get, I would, I would bet that both of those. will launch both, but you guys are closer to it than I am. Do you think meta will launch a gambling product that includes a prediction market product that includes cash and money?

Because there was some rumors in the reporting that it might be all for like social points. And I think that's a much more nuanced discussion. Like I'm not pro gambling, but also I've played role playing games where I've been like, I want my score to be really high. And I don't know that trying to get the high. score on Tetris is the same thing as being at a Vegas casino until 4 a.m. with real money. It's funded from a commentator to talk to other commentators, and feel free to push back. As you get older, you start kind of figure out, you know, you don't know what you don't know.

My sense is the business story that's unfolding in our world right now is I think we're going to find out post-World Cup that there was more money wagered on World Cup games on Calci and Polymarket than have ever been wagered on anything before in history. And I think Zuckerberg, who is a brilliant business person and only has one concern and one brand association, and that is delivering shareholder value. It's not protecting youth. It's not stopping young girls from cutting themselves. It's not concern about radicalizing young men. It's not the polarization of our country or coursing of our discourse. It's about shareholder value. And to be blunt, that's kind of what private companies are supposed to do, right?

And I think he looks at Calcium Polymarket and says, I know I'm going to take a two billion person hose and fire it at this and potentially take some of that $10, $50, $100 billion in value, that these guys are creating. So I think it'll be a direct rip-off. I don't know. I don't know. I just look at it as like if he really cared about shareholder value,

he would be running what is the greatest business in the world, which is meta platforms advertising. So stay focused. You should just stay focused. Yeah, yeah. I think meta would trade. I personally think meta is like a $3 trillion company and is going to permanently have a discount on it because of the Metaverse,

because of AI. Well, the Metaverse is basically gone. He's basically shut that down. No, no, I know, but I'm just saying like, as a shareholder, like, at any moment, the cash flow could disappear. Yeah, the business. It's like, it's like the goose is ripping.

But then the eggs get taken by the goose and gets sent off to a different farm. And you're like, ah, where's my golden egg? I do always wonder about the feedback loop of like, you identified a bunch of problems with the, with the platforms. And I, and I do wonder, like, there, sometimes there is a flywheel there where you know, kids get addicted to social media. The next generation doesn't let their kids use the platforms. They don't get addicted.

Then that destroys shareholder value. And so if you're pure shareholder value maxi... You're suggesting... Am I? He owns 100% of the voting stock or whatever. You think he's thinking, oh, I'm not going to publish. I'm going to be more thoughtful and... measured around potential harms to young people, including evidence internally.

I think, hold on, I think the most simple explanation. Because their parents are going to see that. And when these kids grow up and realize that they had eating disorders and anxiety, that they're not going to let their kids do it. You think that's actually influencing him right now? That's, that was my claim. My claim was that he has a long-term economic incentive. Agreed.

He might be ignoring that incentive to his point. The terminal value 25 years out is pretty, is. pretty low, right? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this. So let me, let me bounce a thesis off of you guys. And then I want to talk about it.

One more thing because I wanted to close the loop on, I think the simple, the simple explanation is like, it is culturally in meta's DNA to launch a version of the hot thing, regardless of what it is. And so it doesn't in consumer. Yeah, in consumer, it's like it doesn't matter that it's gambling and that it is objectively harmful. it's the new hot thing in consumer, so we're going to do it. If it's photos, it's photos, if it's videos, it's videos you acquire

or you build internally. They're the largest second mouse in history, maybe beside Apple. I think Zuckerberg is a genius or looking at something that's working and saying reverse engineer it and then, again, let's get our two billion people on it.

A couple of just business stories, I like this game where we go back and forth on something. I'm curious what you guys think of, so a tech IPO, I think it's pricing tomorrow, that it hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but J.P. Morgan and Goldman are taking them out. Standing spoons.

Yeah. The Berkshire Hathaway have forgotten but beloved brands, 88% recurring revenue. You guys are probably too young for this, but AOL, Vimeo, we transfer, you know, some pretty good businesses. Basically, buy these things. I don't know if they buy them on the cheap,

but buy them what they probably think are reasonable prices. Use AI. or whatever does they do to kind of, quite frankly, get efficiencies? Advanced Italians. There you go. And then lay off. No, that's literally, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's. It's like, salaries are much cheaper in Italy than in the U.S.

If you buy an American technology company. They claim it's brilliant young people, but they hire young, young, young, inexpensive people out out of Napoli that went to wherever the Bacconi or whatever. Anyway, I'm just curious what you guys think of this IPO. What is your prediction on it? Do you like the company? It's all, spending spoons. pricing tomorrow.

I don't, so we've had, we've had Mr. Ferrari on the show. I think he might be coming on tomorrow. I have not tracked the price. We don't give like

specific financial advice and like buy sell ratings. I don't know. I don't know if I have a mature take on it. Yeah, because so we are origins are in the private markets, right?

Yeah. Like John and I don't really do a lot of public markets investing outside of index funds. Like we, the DNA and the, DNA and the core of the show is that we're trying to understand markets and strategies. I think it's a good company. We don't have to talk about valuation. I think it's a good company.

I have no idea. I think that you would like let's go let's go actually line by line with their with with what's the market cap? What's the PE ratio? I think that's the biggest question. Q1 2025. There's a lot of growth there. Only 13% is organic. It's mostly a roll-up, but the Q-1-25 was about $270 million, and they lost $120 million. Q-1-26. They're now at $6.25, and they pivoted to profitability of $27 million. So call it $2.5 billion run rate. And the valuation, I think, is somewhere between $18 and $20 billion. So about eight times revenues. The bull case is this is a SaaS company at a decent valuation with great brands,

consumer brands, 88 percent recurring revenue. The bear case is that it's high. levered. It's for, it's, it's, it's debt is four times. Evita, which is pretty large leverage. And I'm trying to figure out, I like the company because I love these brands and I love the idea of consolidating the back. What do you love about, what do you love about the brands, though? Is it just like nostalgic for you? I think, because I look at these brands and I'm like, I've used almost every one of them once over the years. You have seen any, but I, I, I turned out. And I don't, like, I like going and working with a company where I know that the founder is, you have

is spending 14 hours a day obsessing over. I think the problem here is that you're an early adopter and you move on to the next thing to early adopt. I look at it and I say, they're making a single dollar from AOL. That dollar is going to be around a thousand years from now because if they're still able to make money from a company that's so old, and like they've already faced disruption from cloud,

disruption from mobile, disruption from AI is probably not going to hurt those companies either because these are very resilient. If they've made it through so many transitions, I feel like the risk of getting eaten by the big labs or getting sloped by some competitor that just clones you with vibe coding, that's much more of a risk when you're a young company that's growing

and everyone's like, oh, they're making a lot of money. We should copy that. No one's thinking, let's copy Vimeo, let's copy AOL, or whatever else they have in the portfolio. and as we've talked to some of the people that run those legacy brands, they're built on relationships at this point and advertiser partnerships. And it's not the same go-to-market motion that you see in some high-growth, hot startup in Silicon Valley in 2026. So I don't know. Let me get you another one.

I want to get two more. And before you goes, please, to start your daily three-hour podcast, which sounds like torture to me. Why don't we stay on and you can just open the show with us? Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Polygamy, podcast polygamy. So the,

curious on your take on Snap, and I, this comment is pregnant with a, or this question is pregnant with a comment. I think, I'm actually thinking about buying some stuff. I think the biggest unlock in the tech market right now would be if Snap spawned Spectacles Group. Yeah, that's the big looming question. Well, yeah, you have a business.

They did a one and a half billion in Q1, so they'll do somewhere north of six. this year trading at a $7 billion market cap. Again, it has like the old, if Zuck has like, you know, a 30 to 50% discount on his business because he's kind of erratic and just does what he wants, like, you know, Snap has like, you know,

maybe 80% discount on it because stocks down 93% in five years. Yeah, I'm saying 80% relative to where maybe it should trade. Yep. Still zero marginal cost and network effect. So even if someone vibe codes a direct competitor, it's not going to have the liquidity pool of content. I agree with you. But the question is, people have been asking for the spec's spin out for years.

Is it going to happen? Two-class show. We don't know. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to tell. There is something where I think you get in that seat and you enjoy the life of being the CEO of this company. And being a young, handsome billion-year-old-old-wife, you think that's a good, right? Yeah.

You think he's okay? It's like, I think it might be good. It's like being the dictator. It's like the dictator of an online nation of, you know, Zoomers. Yeah. It's a pretty good gig. Yeah, and I think if you're a shareholder, you just have to know that you're going into that. We'll be right back.

We're back with more from John Coogan and Jordy Hayes. Another thesis. I want to test the independence that's supposedly in your agriculture. I've never seen a flippening like what's happened with Open AI and Anthropic. I've never seen Hertz or Avis overtake Hertz the way Anthropic is overtaken open AI. Your thoughts? Didn't happen with Apple and Microsoft a bunch? It didn't happen in 90 days.

My sense is this has been the most vicious number two to number one I've ever seen in the corporate world. And you may not even agree that they've superseded them. Thoughts. I mean, I think that's clear on the ARR numbers that have been leaking out. What are those? I haven't seen those. I mean, there was a, like, a lot of this comes from, like, complete anon's, but I think... Yeah, the state of... The state of news is, like, very funny where, like, one account with 60 followers on X will just say something,

and then that suddenly is taking his back. I agree with you. It's one of the most remarkable stories in history. It's a story about the value of focus, right? Like, that, to me, is the... it's it's uh we had never seen because i i think it will be imprinted in like we're in a situation where like the market for intelligence is growing so quickly that there's so many companies that are doing well like the number seven code gen startup is like crushing it and

raising it like a billion multi-billion dollar valuation because because like there's just so much demand and so that is part of it and then i think this story will be imprinted on a bunch of founders today, which is that like, don't get complacent. You got to focus. Like, you have to respect your, you have to give ultimate respect to all of your competitors. And I think people couldn't imagine something like this because it hadn't happened before. So it wasn't, or at least, at least in this way, like historically, it's like, well, you had a few years to see this kind of thing coming. So, like, ultimately, both companies are doing incredibly well. They both have amazing products.

And I'm, I'm, we, again, we are glad that, I am just glad that both these companies are here in the United States. And that we have a third and a fourth and a fifth and a sixth and a seventh and an eighth that are here in the U.S. as well. I do have one, one for you. I want to get your take. I don't know if you saw Masa's slides from last week. He put out a new deck. And he had some pretty interesting slide. He says he's talking about the value of how you should value soft bank.

He says, what matters is not the eggs. It is the goose itself. Because he's saying like soft bank is being valued at three eggs, but the goose is not valued. And he says, what matters is not the eggs, it is the goose itself. Do you think he's aware of the power to keep lines? Power of memes? Yeah, do you think, because he had another slide, and I'm going to pull this up, he had a slide in 2019 that just said SBG shareholder value and it had a bunch of unicorns and an arrow that said

toward further growth. And I think the stock is up like 5X since then. He said it was because of AI traffic. That's why it's going to go up. So he's actually had some pretty good calls. But the real question that we've been debating is like, is he aware of the power of just like silly, goofy memes because it does pretty accurately convey like the idea he's trying to get across, which is like, you're valuing me based on my eggs, but why aren't you valuing the goose

that's producing those eggs? But I'm curious what you think. Whenever I read his decks, I think, okay, you know, our uncle's back on meth. I don't, I don't, I just don't get them. And I'm convinced that he's actually an agent of the CIA who's been charged with transferring oil capital back from the Gulf to America with crazy fucking ideas that PIF and Mubalaba fund and then transfers it to U.S. entrepreneurs. So I think he's an agent of the CIA charged with reallocating capital or repatriating capital back from the Gulf. We have a tinfoil hat in the in our studio. You don't buy it. If we were here, if we were here. Well, no, that's the problem. No goose. I'm listening. He's the goose. He's the golden goose. He's our golden goose. I just

think I just have to give them. I give him credit for putting together the silliest slide ever in 2019 that, you know, years and years, you know, four years before Chad Chabit, that he was like, AI traffic is going to cause our stock to go up a lot, and he called it perfectly. Yeah. So last question, you guys, I'm a very generous. First of all, let me say, I'm really happy for you guys. What are you doing with all this money? And you can't say nothing, and I never really thought about the money. Like, give me... We're going to buy... Have you heard of a Nissan Marano cross cabriolet?

It's a convertible SUV. It's a really special car. Of them. No, we... It's a process, I think. Next house for most of us. Well, I would say this. When I started working, when I started working, when I started working on companies, like all, like, all I wanted was a was a, was a,

car insurance. A four bedroom house. I mean, I just wanted a four bedroom house in California. Yeah. So 10, 12 million. You're also. No, no, yeah, well, it's crazy. But no, I think I was lucky to have built, you know,

built my first company and done well with that. And so I think we're, we started the show doing it for the love of the game. Like John and I, we get off the show. Like, we get in the car to go home. We call each other. We just keep doing the show. Well, we just, like, we genuinely just love talking about this stuff.

And it's a blessing to be able to do it every day. Yeah, that comes through. And you guys, you guys are both dads? How old are your kids? I have a five-year-old and then twin two-year-olds, basically. Four. Oh, you're in Vietnam. Exactly.

Which is why the money is odd, because the things I want, money can't buy, you know? Like, you want time with your kids. You want peace and quiet. You want to end a tantrum gracefully. You want to educate the five-year-old properly. You want to get better at chess and not win by too much of a margin, but let him win every once in a while, right? Exactly. These things are important, and money can help, but it's a small piece of the puzzle.

Yeah, I think we built the business around our family life. We see our kids. We see our kids every single day. I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old and a two-year-old. another on the way, and we spend a lot of... You have a third on the way. So we're going to have six between us. That's another edge that we have.

Like, we have something to work for. Most male podcasters don't have children. If you look at the top of the charts. I don't think of that. They don't have kids. So what a lot of young men listen to this podcast, what advice would you have for guys who are just about thinking about having kids?

I don't know. Early on we recorded in that test episode that we did, we were kind of playing this exaggerated character. And Jordy had this quote where he was quoting Deval Ravacant saying, Work like a Lion. And it was very funny because the way he delivered that line was so over the top pithy and thoughtful and so high on his own supply with that line. but I do think that's a little bit of the story here. I mean, Naval was... No, you. You were playing like an exaggerated character. Oh, I was in character. You were in character, and you were saying work like a lion

like you had coined it, even though it was clearly a quote. And it was, anyway, I do think that's a little bit of the story here, which is that there's a lot of time to explore, a lot of time to build skills in a bunch of different areas. And, like, we didn't even really go into this, but I spent like years learning every single piece of camera equipment, every single piece of microphone equipment and all the different tools that we needed lighting so that on day one I was able to bring that and then coach the team and hire great people

that could advance that. And now they know a lot more than me, but it took a while. I also spent a lot of time programming. So if we have someone on who's working on a software company, which most of people are, I'm a little bit more fluent there, Jordy had done all sorts of things in branding and, you know, marketing strategies and actually building fintech company. And he's deep in crypto. And there's all these different areas that came together through these, like, little sprints that finally came together into like the right.

Yeah. I think, I think credit to our spouses, like at least personally, like my wife is an amazing entrepreneur. She actually, she went to NYU and would sit in on your class back in the day. She said she can never like actually get into the class, but she would just go. But we, you know, we, you know, once we had kids, we established like one of us, like we were like, it's time to divide and conquer. Because if we're going to be, if we're going to be great parents and have a great, like, it's hard to, it's hard to excel at two things at once. And so focus was like, you're going to, my wife made, you know, sacrifices with her career, which was to just be. because she could be, you know, raising venture and she's invested in a ton of great companies

and all that stuff, she locked in on the household, and I locked in on work, and we had very clearly established that at least for a few years, that was going to be how we were going to operate, and that allowed me to be the best version of myself and be, you know, overly obsessed with the work that we were doing, and it allowed our kids to be, to get all the love and attention that they need, that they've needed to thrive. And that means when I go home over the last few years, it's like I get to be there with them. I get to be present.

I get to be as great of a dad as I can, but I wasn't worried about like, oh, what exact, what preschool are they going to? Or when is music class? Like, we had fully divided and conquered. And again, that's like a temporary sacrifice, but has delivered, you know, great results for us. And I think you only get that by like really,

clearly establishing that versus just assuming things or hoping that it'll end up that way. The other piece of advice for young people is probably around like where to live, where to go. There are these cities that are complete vortexes. San Francisco is like this AGI vortex right now. It's a vortex for venture capital and startup energy. And I'm extremely glad that I moved to San Francisco right after college because I was exposed to a ton of different aspects of the industry just naturally. I don't think I would have done well if I had stayed there permanently. I think that by leaving San Francisco, it gave me a completely different perspective on the world that has then allowed me to succeed even in tech, even though I'm outside of the vortex.

And more than anything, it's just good for my life personally and my well-being, I think. But I think that as a young person, there definitely is some, a lot of value to, if you want to be in finance, going to New York City is probably good early on. Burning the ships. My first, I lived in a, I lived in the one-bedroom apartment, the tenderloin with three people. It was $1,500 a month. It was complete squalor, but we were in the mix, and we got exposed to a lot of things, and that was extremely valuable. And I think that just putting yourself in the action very early on, no matter what the cost, if you're early in your career, can have a lot of benefits. John Coogan and Jordy Hayes are the creators of TBPN, a popular daily show covering the biggest stories in tech and business.

I'm really, it's, it's, your story is such a nice story. You're impressive young man who did something you're good at and you had a great exit. But more than anything, I'm just really glad the young, talented men. are having a lot of kids. I think it's wonderful to have kids being raised in households, loving, secure households with very present fathers. So I think that's actually the nicest thing about your story. Very much appreciate your time today and congratulations on your success. Thanks for having us. Scott. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janair. Kamie Rieke is our social producer,

Bianca Rosario Ramirez, is our video editor. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from PropG Media.