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

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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**Scott Galloway** (1:31)
Episode 404, 440, Codes serving Atlanta, Georgia in 2004, Facebook debuted. True story, I just installed an app that lets me know which of my friends are racist. 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 Jordi Hays, 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 who are smart seem 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. 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've 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 Jordi Hays.
You both host TBPN, the daily live show that became OpenAI's first ever acquisition this spring. You've hosted names from Zuckerberg, to Altman, to Nadella. Before we get to the OpenAI deal, take us back to the beginning, give us, go all the way back 17 months and give us your back story.

**Jordi Hays** (3:34)
Long time ago.

**John Coogan** (3:35)
We met 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 were looking for what was next.

**Jordi Hays** (4:00)
LA is a terrible place to live if you work in tech outside of hard tech. We didn't see ourselves building a hard tech business. We both had some media background. I built an influencer marketing company in college. John had a big YouTube channel.
We did what had never really been done before, two guys in tech decided to start a podcast.

**John Coogan** (4:20)
It was revolutionary.

**Jordi Hays** (4:22)
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 podcast, and also the Founders Podcast, if you've listened to that.

**John Coogan** (4:51)
And he's one of the strongest believers in the power of podcasting that we're 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 seriously.