I Dove Deep Into the SportsCenter of Silicon Valley

At the defense tech and data juggernaut Palantir’s customer conference in early September, CEO Alex Karp joined the online talk show “TBPN” to take a victory lap. “We’re crushing it,” Karp said, sporting a white T-shirt and a six-figure Patek Philippe watch. “I’m the most humble I’ve ever been.”

But Karp wasn’t there to talk business. Over 20-ish minutes, he confessed that he’s “an unhappy Democrat,” waxed poetic about what he thinks unifies “the woke left and the woke right,” detailed his cross-country skiing conditioning, boasted that he works on holidays, and bragged that he can hang from a bar for 4 ½ minutes. “There we go,” Jordi Hays, one of the show’s hosts, said as he hit a bird squawking sound effect.

This is how most days go on “TBPN,” short for the “Technology Business Programming Network.” In less than a year, it’s become something of a new media empire and an afternoon prayer circle for chronically online members of the tech industry. Five days a week, the Los Angeles-based former tech founders John Coogan, 36, and Hays, 29, anchor a marathon three-hour show discussing the tech news of the day and gabbing with three to 10 investors, founders, and occasionally journalists who most often call in remotely. Though the show airs in the middle of the workday (11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT), it regularly brings on Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for friendly interviews (recent guests include Marc Andreessen and Mark Cuban) and boasts an animated contingent of diehard listeners. “Tech becoming entertainment is the best thing that could’ve happened for my archetype,” a founder recently said on X about “TBPN.”

The show joins the ranks of several tech insiders attempting to cover their own industry. Founders Fund’s chief marketing officer, Mike Solana, launched the bloggy, anti-woke site Pirate Wires mid-pandemic to counter what he saw as needlessly negative tech coverage and to challenge “draconian political censorship.” “All-In,” currently the top tech podcast on the Spotify charts, features four venture capitalists who bloviate about politics (President Donald Trump christened one of them, David Sacks, as his “AI and crypto czar”). The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or A16z, tried and failed and is trying again to put its own spin on startup coverage.

The show also draws its branding from more traditional news networks. Much of its ethos is ESPN-coded, treating tech industry drama like a spectator sport: its NASCAR-themed merch, the hosts quipping about product launches with the same “booyah!” enthusiasm of “SportsCenter” anchors sharing Steph Curry highlights, the baseball card-style graphics the show shares on X whenever a top AI researcher is poached by a competitor. Its overall vibe is CNBC, if its hosts were hopped up on canned yerba mate. In a sense, both are competition for “TBPN”; the endgame of its YouTube livestreams may be permanent placement on one of your office TVs, aired beside “Squawk Box” and “The Pat McAfee Show.”

I recently spent a week tuning into the tech industry’s version of Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb and came away with a clearer picture of how Silicon Valley sees itself.

Filming from a Hollywood soundstage and seated in front of a dollar-green backdrop, Coogan and Hays flank a giant gong, which they ceremoniously strike when a startup raises a round of funding, a milestone founders increasingly announce on the show. Their table is littered with newspapers, Diet Coke cans, and trinkets — a “TBPN” hat, a clock from a tech conference. The show’s sponsors (Eight Sleep, Figma, and others) could make up a top-quartile venture portfolio. This isn’t all that surprising: Coogan cofounded the hyped meal-replacement startup Soylent and the Zyn competitor Lucy — whose mission is to “reduce tobacco-related harm to zero,” its Y Combinator page from 2018 says — and was previously an entrepreneur in residence at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Hays built a startup that helped founders raise money; he’s also an angel investor and advises early-stage startups.

If you don’t know anything about Silicon Valley, and you listen to them and watch them, you feel like you’re part of this ‘in’ crowd.Taylor Lorenz

“TBPN” is unabashedly capitalist and pro-tech. In their intro, Coogan and Hays call the show “the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.” When talking about AI, the duo are usually pretty blunt about their priorities: “Of course we’re in a bubble,” Hays said on one livestream. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make money on it.”

The hosts play into their timeline-savvy, complimentary personas. While Coogan tends to be the straight man, asking Karp for his “mental model for the state of the world order,” Hays is the funny one. In another interview, Hays asked a founder talking about her company to “explain it to me like I use TikTok for 12 hours a day.”

Hays often runs with the free-market bit: “Let’s give it up for global stocks,” he said over a canned applause sound effect. “Let’s give it up for Harvard Business School,” he said another day, referring to a talk that OpenAI’s Sam Altman gave there. Or, put simply: “Let’s give it up for monetization.”

The week I tuned in, Coogan and Hays leaned into X-coded lingo legible to Gen Z, tossing around phrases such as “oneshotted” (destroyed by something), “nerfed” (kind of a synonym for oneshotted), “rugged” (blindsided, and often used to describe newly insolvent crypto investors), and “aura farming” (trying to seem effortlessly cool, while actually coming off a little cringey).

“They’re coming into tech media right when everyone in the tech world is getting internet-pilled,” Taylor Lorenz, a journalist who covers the creator economy and online culture on her Substack, tells me. “If you don’t know anything about Silicon Valley, and you listen to them and watch them, you feel like you’re part of this ‘in’ crowd.”

On a Thursday night back in late July, “TBPN” threw a party with Emily Sundberg, who writes the popular business Substack FeedMe, at San Vicente, the new West Village members club. There, a clique of tech bros — some sporting mullets, all wearing suits — spent the evening hobnobbing with New York media personalities. Most chitchat opened with versions of the same question: “Are you an investor, operator, or writer?” Maybe attendees skewed more financier than freelancer: The following day, Sundberg thanked partygoers, who “took Blades from the Hamptons,” in her newsletter.

Regardless, the event highlighted how “TBPN” has also arrived, advantageously, as the mainstream media is in flux. For the first time, more Americans are finding news on social media than on television or even news sites, the Reuters Institute found in June. In a Pew Research Center survey last year, a fifth of adults said they routinely get news from influencers.

I look at “TBPN” as an existence proof of heaven.John Exley, a daily listener and self-described “venture capitalist without any money”

Traditional newsrooms are following suit to stay relevant with young people. The New York Times fills its app with minute-long video explainers on even its hardest-hitting stories. The Wall Street Journal is hiring a talent coach to train journalists in how to build personal brands using social media. In July, the tech publication The Information launched its own weekday livestream, “TITV,” during which a journalist similarly interviews reporters (albeit from his own newsroom) as well as venture capitalists and founders. Lorenz calls it “Temu TBPN.”

Maybe it’s the hosts’ optimistic tenor — or their proximity to the industry they cover — that’s afforded “TBPN” a level of executive access that’s difficult for most traditional journalists to attain. In late July, for instance, Coogan and Hays filmed a live episode of Figma’s initial public offering from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange alongside legacy outlets like Bloomberg. Last week, they returned for Klarna’s IPO.

“TBPN” isn’t journalism, and Coogan and Hays don’t pretend otherwise. But unlike other tech-forward media ventures, many of which opt to sidestep (and sometimes lambaste) mainstream news outlets by embracing the newfound “go direct” PR spirit, “TBPN” references reporting and welcomes journalists on the show, regularly featuring Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal.

Lorenz sees this as a core feature of the livestream. “So many of these Silicon Valley billionaires have tried to dip their toes into media, but it has this antagonistic and negative vibe to it,” she tells me, referring to A16z’s short-lived publication, Future, and Solana’s Pirate Wires. “Those people are driven by weird politics and grievance culture.”

David Schweidel, a professor at Emory University’s business school who researches customer behavior and marketing, sees the live format as another key to the show’s rise. Real-time content comes with credibility, he tells me, since gaffes can’t be cut out. “People want that realism to it,” he says. “They don’t necessarily want what looks very clean and polished with lots of postproduction that has gone into it.”

John Exley, 36, who tells me he’s “a venture capitalist without any money,” schedules his meetings around “TBPN.” The other fans I spoke with — male founders and tech investors — can’t always tune in during the work day and often opt to listen afterward. Some chat about episodes in an “after-hours” group chat organized by Exley.

“I listen every second, every day, as much as I can,” he tells me. To Exley, the show is “more like a home, a place, than it is a podcast,” he adds. “I look at ‘TBPN’ as an existence proof of heaven.”

“‘TBPN’ is soothing,” he continues. “You’re not alone.”

After a week of “TBPN,” I wasn’t quite ready to crush a case of Red Bulls, set a new personal record for my dead hang, and declare it “time to build.” But the show did teach me that, with enough techno-optimism and X-feed parlance, I could learn to become a tech bro. The hosts of “TBPN” hope to aura farm their way into turning you into one, too.

Julia Hornstein covers venture capital and defense tech for Business Insider.