The AI talent wars look like pro sports drafts. These podcasters are your sideline commentators.

Business Insider

3 days ago

If last year was the summer of AI startup fundraises, this one will go down in history books as the one when machine learning researchers were treated more like pro athletes than Ph.D.s.
The AI talent wars have reached new, almost comical heights. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly dangled offers in the hundreds of millions — and at least one reportedly greater than $1 billion — to lure top talent away from rival firm OpenAI and startups spun out of it, like Mira Murati's Thinking Machine Labs.
That kind of money sounds more fitting for an NBA draft pick than a machine learning engineer. This absurdity — and the flurry of traditional media attention on it — has fueled the rise of the tech-friendly "Technology Business Programming Network," or "TBPN" for short.
On the daily talk show, a series of 15-minute interviews with tech's biggest names and their backers, cohosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays track talent moves with ESPN parlance. Since late June, their "TBPN" X account has posted dozens of baseball-card-style graphics of AI researchers being "traded" between top labs, as if they were athletes swapping jerseys.
"We realized early on that people would call TBPN the Sports Center for tech," Hays said on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast on Monday, revealing an ironic truth about their branding: "It sounded cool. We didn't really know what that meant. John and I don't watch sports at all."
The duo's calculated charisma has sparked a social storm because of its redux of the podcast, a played-out format in tech and venture capital. Many main character-coded investors and tech luminaries have podcasts of their own — from Harry Stebbings' "The Twenty Minute VC" to the "All-In Podcast," where Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg hold court online.
In an industry often cautious of media coverage, Coogan and Hays's inside baseball tone has struck an approving chord. "Tech becoming entertainment is the best thing that could've happened for my archetype," one wrote on X.
Ex-founders flipping the script
The hosts' intimate familiarity with the startup world — and the access being an ex-founder brings — may afford them a unique vantage point into the tech's inner workings. Coogan has "never really had a real full time job," he told Business Insider in April, when we first profiled "TBPN," but he has built a roster of companies. In 2013, Coogan cofounded Soylent, which quickly amassed a cult following. After Soylent, he cofounded Lucy, which makes nicotine gum and pouches. He's also an entrepreneur in residence at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.
"TBPN" isn't Coogan's first time running a tech media playbook. He skims The Wall Street Journal in print while lounging in his gym's sauna every morning and channeled that ritual into content during the pandemic with a news-driven YouTube channel that has nearly half a million subscribers.
In college, Hays built a YouTube ad network to help podcasts monetize. He then started a fintech company, Party Round, later renamed Capital, which helped startup founders raise money. Capital was acquired by the business banking platform Rho in 2023. Hays also angel invests in early-stage startups and advises others, like Coogan's Lucy.
The pair decided to take their idea for a founder-friendly talk show more seriously late last year. "We were joking that technology needs a podcast," Coogan said. "Because, obviously, there's a ton."
Two months after their first episode in October 2024, Coogan and Hays were uploading three episodes a week.
In January, they began featuring guests and moved to broadcasting every weekday. Episodes are shot live, and interviews with founders are unedited. Though typically filmed from a soundstage in Los Angeles, Coogan and Hays have increasingly shot live from high-profile tech events, including the Hill & Valley Summit in DC earlier this year and from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for Figma's IPO in late July.
Building an AI roster
In July, "TBPN" launched its Metis List, which ranks the top 100 AI researchers, in large part by number of citations on AI research papers, a quantitative estimate of their contributions to the field, Hays said on Odd Lots. At the top of the list, according to Coogan, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who was early to spot the importance of using transformer technology at Scale, Coogan added, and is the CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc., known as SSI.
Sustkever's story also shows fierce competition in the AI sphere. His SSI cofounder, Daniel Gross, left the company in July after his venture investing partner Nat Friedman was tapped to co-lead Meta's Superintelligence Labs. The Financial Times reported in April that SSI last raised at a $32 billion valuation.
Hays told Odd Lots that he and Coogan obsess over tech "the way that our college friends follow sports." So far, the duo has interviewed 200 or so guests who work or invest in AI, according to the "TBPN" guest directory. That roster includes OpenAI engineers like Yash Kumar and Isa Fulford; Scott Wu, founder and CEO of Cognition AI, who appeared after the startup acquired AI coding assistant Windsurf; interim Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang also joined that same day; and John Chu, a partner at Khosla Ventures who invests in AI.
Coogan and Hays have breathed new life into the meaning of the tech bro: "The name 'tech bros' had been a slur, right?" Hays told Business Insider in April. "We wanted to reclaim that word in a fun way by saying, 'No, we're not tech bros — we're technology brothers.'"
The duo has watched the AI draft from the sidelines, but Coogan and Hays don't pretend to be journalists. They think of themselves as "digitally-native news anchors," Hays said.
They aren't venture capitalists either (though they do occasionally angel invest). While some of their tech brethren have raised funds off their podcast momentum (Stebbings, for example, started 20VC's fund in 2020 after his podcast took off), the pair has different intentions.
"We want to do what we're doing now for decades," Hays said. "We're not doing this so that in a year we can raise a fund."