Why OpenAI Bought a Podcast — with TBPN’s John Coogan and Jordi Hays

22:22So I basically wanted to, we only sold advertising on an annual basis, which was good for us and good for the company. So for last year, we had kind of projections. This was 2025, our first full year in business. We had projections and we would show those to 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 annual spend with us, but they'd be on a fixed rate. So if we grew beyond what we were projecting, it was just like, you know, free incremental impressions or reach. And so that was super important.

23:01Also, 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 dollars, but, you know, we invested a ton of ton of money into equipment last year. And part of that was like 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.

23:39So, you know, it wasn't like we were gonna, we would run ads for every, 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, you know, 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 upfront. And it was part of the show that we were, we loved advertising, like, we truly think it's amazing.

24:19I 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, it's truly, it's truly an incredible business model. It's very aligned. And so we were very, I would say a lot of podcasts in tech, not you, I think you're very commercial. And that's a, that's a compliment, but a lot of podcasts in 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.

25:10And these people are running businesses, they're investing in the companies that of the founders that we talked to, they invest 10s of billions of dollars a year, they can run companies that spend billions of dollars a year on everything from advertising to software, to cloud, etc. And we always believed that that was a big enough audience for what we were trying to do. Because 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 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.

26:13John Coogan: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, 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 it on the net. Because I have to do an ad read before the interview starts. And with what we're doing right now, I'm sure the ads will be sliced in later.

26:50John Coogan: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 right 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 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.

27:29John Coogan: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.

28:11Yeah, 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.

28:43John Coogan: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 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.

29:25So they were building a business selling our advertisers, you know, basically like impressions for our advertisers. And so, yeah, 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 a 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 figured this out sooner than us, are we'll just say to, you know, an AI company, we're going to use your data.

30:16We'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, everything else is free.

30:54Everything else is free. And so, yeah, we had a couple of consumer partners early on, but we realized that 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 can spend$50 million on inference. But they can only buy one aid sleep, right? Or maybe two.

31:16John Coogan:Yeah. And so we realize the best use of our ad inventory should be entirely. And so our friends with consumer companies, we'll just support them like John Strink and Andrew Huberman's Yerba Mate company. And we don't even charge money for that because... Yeah, 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 OpenAI. 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.

32:02So my first question is, why did OpenAI buy you?

32:06John Coogan: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 OpenAI in that we were sort of contrarian supporters. So going back to the fact that the show is very pro-advertising, when it was initially rumored that OpenAI was going to put ads in ChatGPT, 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. And it was like, if you want to be open AI, you're going to need an ad supported version of your product.

32:52Otherwise, 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, 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?

33:11John Coogan: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 shout outs 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 OpenAI 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.

33:57John Coogan: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 and it 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?

34:36Like, you know, look at public opinion around AI. People are scared of it, even though they find it very useful in their day-to-day life. And so 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 Sam.

35:00John Coogan:Or even just talk about 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 like 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 And the other thing is that we were always, we were sort of ironically and unironically pro-technology throughout the entire show.

35:37We still are. We think that there's so many companies that, you know, compete with OpenAI 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, when there was rumor that OpenAI was going to do an adult mode, and again, like, this was in Q3, Q4 of last year.

36:26John Coogan:I thought Altman announced that. No? That was a rumor? 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, 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 gambling into a platform. If there's no money, it's a gambling. I think the defense is it's good for shareholder value, but I appreciate what you're saying.

37:09Yeah. I don't think that's going to get in the, I would bet. both of those will launch both, but you guys are closer to it than I am.

37:16John Coogan: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 highest score on Tetris is the same thing as being at a Vegas casino until 4 a.m. with real money. It's fun from a commentator to talk to other commentators. And feel free to push back because, you know, as you get older, you start to kind of figure out, you know, you don't know what you don't know.

37:58So 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 calcium poly market 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.

38:33It'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 poly market 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 dollars in value that these guys are creating. So I think it'll be a direct ripoff. 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 Platform's advertising business. So stay focused.

39:06You think 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 the goose is like golden eggs,

39:32John Coogan:but then the eggs get taken by the goose and get 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 platforms. And I do wonder, like, 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, Maxie— Oh, you're thinking way too long term. You're suggesting that— Am I? He owns 100 % of the voting stock or whatever.

40:10John Coogan:He can think long term. 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 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 was my claim. My claim was that he has a long-term economic incentive. Agreed. He might be ignoring that incentive. The terminal value 25 years out is pretty low, right?

40:51Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this. So 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 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.

41:25John Coogan: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 at looking at something that's working and saying, reverse engineer it and then, again, let's get our two billion people on it. And a couple of just business stories. I like this game where, you know, 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. It hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but JP Morgan and Goldman are taking them out. Fending spoons.

42:00Yeah. The Berkshire Hathaway of forgotten but beloved brands, 88 % recurring revenue. You guys are probably too young for this, but AOL, Vimeo, WeTransfer, you know, Some pretty good businesses basically buy these things. I don't know if they buy them on the cheap, but buy them at what they probably think are reasonable prices. Use AI or whatever it is they do to kind of, quite frankly, get efficiencies. Advanced Italians. There you go. And then lay off. No, that's literally, that's the view. It's like salaries are much cheaper in Italy than in the U.S. if you buy an American technology company.

42:34Well, and they hire really young people. They claim it's brilliant young people, but they hire young, inexpensive people out in Napoli that went to wherever, the Baconi 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 odd. Spending spoons. Pricing tomorrow. So we've had Mr. Ferrari on the show. I think he might be coming on tomorrow.

42:56John Coogan: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, our 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 core of the show is that we're trying to understand markets and strategies. Do you 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 actually line by line with their...

43:41John Coogan: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 Q1 2025 was about$270 million, and they lost$120 million. Q1 26, they're now at$625, and they pivoted to profitability,$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 % recurring revenue. The bear case is that it's highly levered.

44:19It's debt is four times EBITDA, 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 end around. What do you love about the brands, though? Is it just like nostalgic for you? Because I look at these brands and I'm like, I've used almost every one of them once over the years. You've seen it. But I churned. And I don't like, I like going and working with a company where I know that the founder is spending 14 hours a day obsessing over.

44:51John Coogan:I think the problem here is that you're an early adopter and you move on to the next thing to early adopt. I would 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. And if they've made it through so many transitions, I feel like the risk of like getting eaten by the big labs or getting slopped 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.

45:38John Coogan: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 give you another one because I want to get through two more and before you guys 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.

46:16Yeah. Polygamy, podcast polygamy. Something. So, curious on your take on Snap. And this comment is pregnant with a, or this question is pregnant with a comment. I think, I'm actually thinking about buying some Snap. I think the biggest unlock in the tech market right now would be if Snap spawned Spectacles Group.

46:37John Coogan: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, if Zuck has a 30 % to 50 % discount on his business because he's kind of erratic and just does what he wants, Snap has maybe an 80 % discount on it because— Stock's down 93 % in five years. Yeah, I'm saying 80 % relative to where maybe it should trade. 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.

47:23John Coogan:I agree with you. But the question is, people have been asking for the specs spin out for years. Is it going to happen? To a class-share other company, we don't know. Yeah, 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. Being a young handsome billionaire. You think that's a good enough? Yeah. You think he's okay? 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.

48:04We'll be right back.

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49:38We're back with more from John Coogan and Jordy Hayes. Another thesis. I want to test the independence that's supposedly in your acquisition. I've never seen a flippening like what's happened with OpenAI and Anthropic. I've never seen Hertz or Avis overtake Hertz the way Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI. Your thoughts?

49:58John Coogan:Didn't it 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 anons, but I think. Yeah, 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 has taken its back.

50:31I 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, we had never seen, because 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.

51:18You 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 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, we are, again, we are glad that, uh, I am just glad that, that, uh, both these companies are here in the United States. Uh, and, and that we have a third and a fourth and a fifth and a sixth and a seventh and eighth that are here in the U S as well.

52:02Um, 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, uh, and he had some, uh, he had some pretty interesting slide. He says, he's talking about the value of like soft, how you should value soft bank. He says, what matters is not the eggs. It is the goose itself. Because he's saying like SoftBank 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.

52:39John Coogan:The true value is the power to keep lying. The 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?

53:23But 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.

53:56John Coogan:We have a tinfoil hat in our studio. You don't buy it if we were here. No, that's the problem. The goose. I'm listening. The 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 him, 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 Chubiti 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 have been very generous. First off, let me say, I'm really happy for you guys.

54:34What 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...

54:42John Coogan:Have you heard of a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet? It's a convertible SUV. It's a really special car. We're going to get a few 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 I wanted was a... a car insurance, four bedroom house and a four bedroom. I mean, I just wanted a four bedroom house in California. Yeah. So I was lucky through my, no, no. Yeah. Well, it's crazy, but no, I think I was lucky to, to have built, you know, built my first company and done, done well with that.

55:26And 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?

55:51John Coogan:I have a five-year-old and then twin two-year-olds, basically. Four. 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, you know, get better at chess and not win by too much of a margin. You want your wife to be happy. 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.

56:33We see our kids every single day. I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old and another on the way. And we spend a lot of time. A third on the way.

56:43John Coogan: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 didn't think of that. They don't have kids. So, a lot of young men listen to this podcast. What advice would you have for guys who are just kind of 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 Naval Ravikant saying, work like a lion. and it was very funny because the way he delivered that line was it was like so over the top pithy and thoughtful and so like high on his own supply with that line but I do think that's a little bit of the story here was that I mean Naval was no you you were you were playing like an exaggerated character oh I was in it I was in character you were in character and you were 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.

57:58And like, we didn't even really go into this,

58:01John Coogan:but I spent like years learning every single piece of camera equipment, every single piece of microphone equipment and all of 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.

58:34John Coogan: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 format. Yeah, I think credit to our spouses, like at least personally. Like my, my wife is an amazing entrepreneur. She actually, she went to NYU and would, would sit in on your class back in the day. She never, she said she could never like actually get into the class, but, uh, she would just go. Um, 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. Cause if we're going to be, if we're going to be great parents and, and, uh, have a great, It's hard to excel at two things at once.

59:18And so the focus was like, you're going to, my wife made sacrifices with her career, which was to, just because she could be 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 overly obsessed with the work that we were doing. And it allowed our kids to get all the love and attention 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.

1:00:02I 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, what, 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.

1:00:31John Coogan: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.

1:01:15John Coogan: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 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. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in 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.

1:01:58John Coogan and Jordi Hayes are the creators of TVPN, a popular daily show covering the biggest stories in tech and business. I'm really, I'm happy. It's, it's, your story is such a nice story. You're an impressive young man who did something you're good at and you had a great accent, but more than anything, I'm just really glad that 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.

1:02:34Thanks for having us. Thanks, Scott. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Jenaire. Cami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Prop G Media.

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