Inside a film studio lot in Hollywood on a Tuesday morning in August, Jordi Hays, a 29-year-old entrepreneur, ran into the frame of a live shot, waving a giant red flag. Dressed in what can be described only as Patrick Bateman-core — gray bespoke suit, button-down oxford, polished black wingtips, with a slicked-back swoop to his hair — Mr. Hays was shouting into the camera.
“The timeline is in turmoil!” he yelped, rattling off a series of references that only those obsessively glued to the tech industry corners of the social media site X would understand. “Perplexity has made an offer to buy Chrome!”
John Coogan, Mr. Hays’ 36-year-old business partner, dressed nearly identically, looked on with a smirk. Mr. Coogan, who at 6-foot-8 towers over everyone he meets, was slouched in his chair to fit into the frame of the shot. The two sat at a table piled high with tech company swag, copies of that morning’s Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, a dozen half-empty cans of Yerba Mate and Diet Coke, and microphones and laptops.
At 11 a.m. on the dot each weekday, they begin livestreaming “TBPN” — “Technology Business Programming Network” — a three-hour-long chat show of boosterish commentary on the worlds of tech and business.
The “TBPN” formula is simple: Two self-aware fellas who treat techno-capitalism like a Fantasy Football league, chronicling a ticker-tape dribble of executive moves, corporate acquisitions, initial public offerings and venture capital funding. Call it SportsCenter for the terminally online M.B.A. grad.
Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays (who have also been known to film the show in Miami Vice-style white suits; they have a predilection for the trappings of 1980s wealth) spend the live broadcast multitasking, obsessively scrolling through X as if they were traders staring at a Bloomberg terminal, spinning up graphics for social media designed to go locally viral:
— “Jian Zhang POACHED from Apple to go to Meta and work on artificial intelligence”
— “BREAKING: Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has updated his profile pic”
The first episode of their show, which they originally called “Technology Brothers” (a wink to the common put-down for men of their ilk, “tech bros”) aired last October.
Practically overnight, it became a sensation, at least in the seven-by-seven square miles of San Francisco, watched by everyone from the Celsius-pounding start-up crowd to the tip top of the tech elite. Executives from OpenAI, Palantir and Andreessen Horowitz appear regularly, as do pseudonymous X account holders like @roon and @carriednointerest, who are big in tech and finance Twitter circles but complete unknowns to outsiders.
Silicon Valley has often clothed itself in the mission-driven language of global transformation. But what Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays tap into is a “who’s up, who’s down” part of the culture that has long existed but is rarely expressed as explicitly in public. It turns out that tech people — especially in the A.I. talent-wars era of Silicon Valley — are just as interested in gossiping about who is changing jobs as they are in changing the world.
Founder Mode
In September, signaling its new status as the preferred outlet of tech-world insiders, “TBPN” broadcast live from Meta’s annual developer conference at its Menlo Park campus, and livestreamed a sit-down with Mark Zuckerberg after his keynote speech.
As Mr. Zuckerberg walked on to the pop-up set in the middle of Meta’s campus called “Hacker Square,” Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays welcomed the chief executive with firm handshakes. Someone pressed a sound effect button, broadcasting a voice-over saying “FOUNDER MODE” with the booming resonance of a World Cup vuvuzela.
(“Founder Mode” is considered a high compliment in Silicon Valley circles, a frame of mind possessed by those who built their own start-ups with the zeal of a bare-knuckle boxer.)
The trio spent the next 10 minutes talking strategy and the future, chopping it up like old friends. Mr. Zuckerberg spoke about how the newly debuted Meta Ray-Bans, which contain a small screen in the lens, can be used to send texts to friends. (There was no mention of the product demo failing onstage.) The C.E.O. then banged a gong — a staple of the show — to end the interview. “Congratulations on bringing sci-fi into the present,” Mr. Hays said.
“What we’ve created is something that looks a lot like traditional television but with what we hope is all the best parts of independent media,” Mr. Hays said in an interview at Tartine, a block down the street from the Hollywood gym he and Mr. Coogan visit together at 6:30 every morning before work.
The show’s audience is relatively small. Most of its viewership tunes in on X when the show is livestreamed; the highest number of simultaneous viewers its had is around 130,000. Recordings of the shows posted to YouTube hover around the low thousands to tens of thousands of views per episode.
Despite that, the hosts consider CNBC and Fox Business — both with hundreds of thousands of daily viewers — to be their competitors. After all, they point out, broadcasters are increasingly moving away from a focus on linear television and toward the cross-platform strategy that “TBPN” has embraced. The bet is that one day viewers will start looking for anchors who are a little less Wolf Blitzer and a bit more Mr. Beast.
“TBPN” is small, with just 10 employees, and Mr. Hays and Mr. Coogan intend to keep it that way, they say. “I do not want to manage a dozen TV hosts,” Mr. Coogan said. He pointed to his co-host, who was halfway through his breakfast of a double smashburger. “We are the talent, and we’d like to remain the talent, not build an empire,” Mr. Coogan added, as Mr. Hays nodded and chewed.
For now, the show’s audience size is less noteworthy than the type of viewers it attracts. The show counts among its fans the occasional world’s richest person, Larry Ellison; the former shark on “Shark Tank” Mark Cuban; and Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick. Start-up founders consider it a required watch. Entire communications teams for executives of public companies strategize how to make their C.E.O.’s interview on “TBPN” feel like a good hang while promoting their businesses.
“We’re in the business of hanging out and talking about business,” Mr. Hays said. “And we love business.” (And wealth: in one recurring segment on the show on Fridays, Mr. Coogan rifles through the mansion section of The Journal. Occasionally, the hosts cover high-end cars, luxury watches and the state of the art markets.)
They consider themselves tech-positive, like their podcasting peers Dwarkesh Patel and Lex Fridman, who are other regular stops on a C.E.O.’s press tour, perhaps because of their often gentle approach to interviewing. (Tech executives have grown increasingly hostile to traditional media. Seeing Mr. Zuckerberg do a sit-down interview with anyone other than a podcaster these days is about as rare as snowfall in Palo Alto.)
But “TBPN” is less obviously interested than those shows in the philosophy behind new technology, and more often focused on competitive corporate strategy.
To that end, Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays embrace attention-grabbing rankings and scoreboards.
In July, they debuted “The Metis List,” — a play on Forbes’ “Midas List” of top technology investors as well as a reference to Greek mythology — which ranks the top 100 artificial intelligence researchers in the field. The metrics are both legitimate and cheeky; peer rankings, education, academic citations and “number of Dwarkesh appearances” all factor in.
From Soylent to Streaming
Starting a streaming news show was never really the plan, though both men have long been interested in start-up culture. In 2013, Mr. Coogan co-founded Soylent, the coder-embraced nutrient slurry that was something like the Gatorade of hustle culture, named after the marquee food source in the 1973 dystopian film, “Soylent Green.” (Spoiler: “Soylent Green is people.”) In 2021, Mr. Hays founded Party Round, a crowdfunding venture capital start-up that rose to prominence during Silicon Valley’s heady ZIRP, or “zero interest rate phenomenon,” era.
Party Round fell out of favor as interest rates rose and another start-up acquired it in 2024. Soylent sold for a middling amount to a global food conglomerate the year before. But those experiences, Mr. Coogan said, gave the pair an insider’s perspective on what it means to build a challenging business.
“Imagine being 25, raising money from Andreessen and Google and all these prominent investors, and then like two years later you’re just getting hammered by the market,” Mr. Hays said. “We’ve gone through that, and I think that’s really important for how we approach our coverage.”
After a few more stints around the Valley — Mr. Coogan did an entrepreneur’s residency at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and worked on a nicotine gum start-up — the two met through mutual friends in 2023. And despite their “Dudes Rock” mien, they were industry nerds at heart. Mr. Coogan had been streaming tech-focused interviews and deep dives into companies on his own YouTube channel for years. They recognized that a two-person dynamic might work better as a daily show. Moreover, they just liked talking to each other.
Mr. Hays, who moved to Los Angeles after college, commutes to the show’s Hollywood studio from Malibu. Mr. Coogan, a Pasadena native, lives there with his family. And though many of the companies “TBPN” covers are based in the Bay Area, they settled on Los Angeles because they need to cultivate media talent, not engineers.
The set approximates a CNBC studio set up in the locker room of an Equinox gym. One recent morning, Mr. Hays took off his pants while on the phone with a potential guest, changing out of his workout clothes and into a suit. A dozen young men scurried around the set, prepping for the show and chawing packets of Zyn. There were zero women present, and the only people that appeared to be older than 30 were Mr. Coogan and me.
Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays avoid news anchor-style stuffiness, describing different tech products as “mid” (which means bad) or “extremely sick” (which means good). A Bloomberg-style visual ticker at the bottom of the broadcast screen shows off Polymarket odds on different tech events happening, like a 30 percent chance of Meta’s latest A.I. model, Llama 5, launching this year, and even lower odds of Tesla debuting robotaxis in California before 2026.
At three hours of daily livestreaming, the show can drag. Even the most charismatic of hosts can struggle to make earnings reports and data centers seem as exciting as, say, the Final Four.
But the extremely online tech crowd eats it up.
“A lot of what they do is aimed at people who have their nose up against the glass,” said Peter Kafka, a correspondent at Business Insider who hosts a podcast on the intersection of tech and media. “The gap between what they’re doing, and what you and your buddy are talking about over lunch or drinks or whatever is pretty minimal. And I think that’s why it works, because the idea is that you and your buddy could be these guys, too.”
The morning I was present, David Risher, chief executive of Lyft, appeared on Zoom in to boast about his company’s most recent earnings report and the latest projects while wearing a black-and-white Aloha shirt. The affair was largely chummy. “I’ve actually tried to get our investor relations folks to do our next earnings call in the form of a podcast,” Mr. Risher said. “Maybe I can get you guys to host it!”
Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays don’t consider themselves journalists, and they wear their optimism about the companies they’re discussing on their sleeve. They also expressed some reservations about talking to me — “the enemy,” as Mr. Coogan put it in faux scare quotes — especially as most of their peers are wary of institutions like The New York Times. But he added they believed traditional publishers still serve a crucial role in the media environment.
“We can’t do what we do without you guys,” Mr. Coogan said.
Because “TBPN” is free, it relies largely on a handful of paying sponsors — mostly tech start-ups like Ramp, a virtual credit card start-up, and Polymarket, the recently legalized online betting marketplace — and expects to generate $5 million in revenue this year. It recently hired Dylan Abruscato as its 10th employee to manage ad revenue, which he has been charged with tripling in 2026. Mr. Abruscato is no stranger to livestreamed media; he worked as director of partnerships for HQ Trivia, the live game show app that skyrocketed to popularity in 2018 before fizzling two years later. (The Wall Street Journal, perhaps taking a page from the playbook of “TBPN,” devoted a headline to Mr. Abruscato’s hiring.)
On Friday, Mr. Hays and Mr. Coogan interviewed OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the latest high-profile get for the show. Mr. Altman spoke about Sora, the company’s new video generation A.I. app, and also noted he had recently bought a new Acura NSX, which earned him numerous air horns from Mr. Hays’ soundboard. (“I have a proclivity for expensive cars,” Mr. Altman admitted.)
But even as their star rises, they aren’t forgetting to sweat the small stuff. “Nine years ago today, Mark Zuckerberg went live on Facebook and smoked a brisket in his backyard,” the show’s X account posted soon after announcing Mr. Altman’s interview.
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
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