I had so much fun flipping the script on
’s and , who have taken the tech twitter/X world by storm in the last year and built a daily show that acts as the water cooler for the terminally online tech industry.As I said recently, My two favorite qualities of John and Jordi are that they are earnest and enterprising. That combines for a playful disposition that learns and compounds rapidly, and enjoys the journey along the way. It makes everyone else want to root for you, help you, and join in on the fun.
We talked all about this, and about how much can happen in a year when you say yes and iterate daily.
We had a ton of fun and laughed a lot too, and I was quite inspired. I included 12 of my favorite ideas from the episode below. Enjoy!
P.S. John’s daily run of show newsletter that covers a topic they’ll discussion on the show is great.
Dialectic 33: TBPN (John Coogan & Jordi Hays) - Inside Tech’s Water Cooler
Dialectic Episode 33: TBPN (John Coogan & Jordi Hays) - Inside Tech’s Water Cooler - is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and all podcast platforms.
12 Lessons on Daily Compounding, Chemistry, and TBPN’s Uncopyable Playbook
You can’t copy compounding. John and Jordi took a great seed (chemistry and a creative format) and compounded it every day for a year. If you look at a frame from episode one of TBPN and a frame from today, the difference is remarkable. Those are the bookends of daily iteration and hundreds of tweaks. Jordi: “Going from zero to what we are today would be almost impossible, even for us.”
Discipline eliminates inspiration as a bottleneck. John and Jordi meet at 6:30am every morning to discuss before the live show. Mental muscles are warmed and arguments are sharpened. The live performance looks “effortless” because they show up. John on writing the TBPN daily newsletter: “I’ve never had writer’s block because I’m just transcribing the discussion we already had.”
Entertain, inspire or educate—Simply. Did the audience laugh? Learn something? Feel motivated to act? Jordi: “When people pitch us marketing ideas, I tell them, ‘I have more context on your business than 99.9% of people in the world, and I’m going to need you to repeat that marketing idea back to me because I’m still confused.’” Complexity isn’t entertaining, inspiring, or educational. Simplicity has a much better shot.
Go high and low at the same time. TBPN’s set looks like prime network TV: Mahogany desk, cinematic lighting, tailored suits, multiple camera angles. But the content also feels like eavesdropping on a group chat: Memes, live tweets, sarcastic quips, and internet-native humor. Formal enough to feel trustworthy while casual enough to be accessible and fun. Unseriously serious.
Borrow laterally, not recursively. When you steal from novel influences, you become original. “My biggest critique of tech is that there’s a really big world, and you can go and borrow from anywhere.” TBPN doesn’t study tech media. They draw from Formula One sponsorships, fashion house campaigns, SportsCenter graphics, and TV newsrooms. When your competitors are iterating on podcast aesthetics and you’re remixing television, you’re playing a totally different game.
Your niche is enough. TBPN makes content for about two hundred thousand people: founders, investors, operators, technologists. They could broaden, soften the insider references, explain the basics, but they refuse. Deliberate narrowness creates signal density. The content will feel like it’s specifically made for your corner of the internet, not everyone else.
The show is the end, not the means. Many creators use content as a Trojan horse for something else—build the audience, launch the fund, start the SaaS company, sell consumables. John and Jordi reject this premise entirely. The show is the point. Advertising lets them have an awesome business and never charge viewers a dime. No diversification, no hedging, no distractions. As David Senra says, aim to get to your last business quickly.
Start with obsession, not opportunity. TBPN didn’t start with a deck or a business model. It started because two people couldn’t stop talking about the business of technology. The show is a natural extension of their offline friendship, and that’s why they can podcast for 3 hours a day and still want to hang out after. Good luck competing with that.
Platform-Native or Bust. TBPN fully embraced what making a show built for X might mean. This meant less competition, an audience desperate for more, and content that feels like the embodiment of the platform itself. The water cooler, animated. They’re treating Substack, YouTube, and short form the same way.
A brand is what you feel. Jordi: “A great brand is not a logo. A great brand is not a website. A great brand is the culmination of what you make a group of people feel over time. It’s educating the audience. It’s making people feel something over and over and over until you stick in their mind. It’s the average of everything that you’ve made an individual person feel.”
Humor is a way in. Jokes let you do low-status things without apologizing. TBPN started as two guys reading printed out niche-vial tweets. They made a trailer about being reach and got their audience celebrating every ad read. “When you start with humor, you can broaden the aperture to get really weird.” Before too long, John and Jordi had Mark Zuckerberg ringing the gong after taking over Meta’s annual event.
Complementary obsessions multiply. John and Jordi are a venn diagram: John ran a YouTube channel before and obsesses over the details of production. Jordi built a digital ad business for years and and drives the commercial side. John loves tech and enjoys business, and Jordi is the inverse. They cultivated the right ingredients individually and are reaping the rewards together: “I feel like we started working on TBPN a decade ago.”
Description
John Coogan & Jordi Hays are the hosts of TBPN (X, YouTube, Spotify, Substack), a daily live show covering the technology business. TBPN was launched only about a year ago, but has become a mainstay in tech culture and a center of gravity forterminally online technologists.
John was previously an EIR at Founders Fund and tech YouTuber. He co-founded Lucy Nicotine and Soylent. Jordi has co-founded and invested in many business including Party Round/Capital and Branded Native, a podcast and youtube ad network.
We cover the origins of TBPN, or the Technology Business Programming Network, from its beginnings as “Technology Brothers” to the interplay between John’s love for technology and Jordi’s for business. They share how they’ve built a media business in an era of infinite competition by leaning into high volume and constant iteration, all while treating media as the “main thing.”
We discuss brand building and innovating on form by borrowing ideas from outside the tech industry—from Formula One and SportsCenter to Hollywood films—to avoid tech’s tendency toward circular references. We also talk about their focus on X/Twitter and a niche, highly informed audience, rather than trying to go too wide. We also chat about what makes their partnership work and how they take the work incredibly seriously while not taking themselves seriously at all.
Timestamps
00:00: Opening Highlights
03:18: Intro & Background
06:08: Technology vs. Business and the Strategy behind TBPN
12:08: Building a Media Business when Distribution is not Scarce
22:26: Being Entrepreneurs and Talent
30:33: Avoiding Audience Capture
35:57: Why Advertising is a Good Model
44:04: Technology’s Circular References and Borrowing Ideas from New Places
53:20: Narrow vs. Wide Appeal
59:44: X (Twitter)-First Content and Other Platforms
1:14:35: Making Content People Want to Share and Taking Yourself Seriously and Unseriously
1:20:28: Valuing Brand
1:30:10: Balancing Focus and Iteration
1:35:25: Endurance & Evolution
1:40:34: A Day in the Life of TBPN & Learning to be Newscasters
1:49:59: Jordi & John as a duo, Will Manidis, and the beginnings of TBPN
2:02:57: Grab Bag: Bias to Action, 15 Minute Interviews, Not Journalism, Talent, and Domination of Spirit
