I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist. And TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom so they can continue to operate. I bet they even had a convo such as "we'll never tell you what to say," and both sides genuinely believed it.
But this never ends well. Even if there's never a conversation about it, directly, the implication is there.
I don't care about TBPN, specifically. I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently. (And I say this as someone who pays for some media, but not nearly enough. I don't have $10/mo for every outlet that deserves it.)
EDIT: sama basically said what I said he would: https://x.com/sama/status/2039773740586918137
say what you will about TBPN, but it was never objective journalism
Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?
The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?
I don't know if this could potentially make the media companies worse at reporting facts as they would try and raise money by appealing to people, but with enough competition it should sort its self out as long as there's no outside funding?
> Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?
This is how German system works actually. So, it DID HAPPEN. The German government has only some control over the budget but the actual media companies control the content themselves. Every resident has to pay a monthly contribution. This is a contribution to an independent account / budget for media only. It is not a tax that goes into a common pot that politics can decide to take out.
There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.
See more details on: https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/welcome/english
I would like to see a system like New York's campaign finance vouchers, where individual citizens get to decide where the public funds are directed. That way you have to have an audience and you have to appeal to people's sense of what's truly valuable, rather than just trying to farm views.
> The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?
Why not fill all government positions via random selection? The ancient Athenians thought that if your government officials were chosen by a process other than sortition, you don't have a democracy.
I mean, in theory I like this. But look what happened to NPR and PBS; it was ultimately at the behest of the president. They lost their revenue for not saying the "right" things.
That's true, and in the UK we've just removed jury duty trials for some crimes at the snap of a finger.
The CPB, the legal entity that the government actually funded (and which in turn supplied some of the funding for PBS/NPR and its stations) had its funding rescinded by Congress (under HR4 last year), and has since shuttered.
It's not clear how, even under that recent ruling, that rescission will be undone.
Reincorporate? You can just do things. Direct a human to take the required meatspace actions as the judiciary to recreate whatever legal entity previously existed, open a bank account, fund it, and start distributing funds.
If you need the Treasury to initiate the EFT and they refuse to, send law enforcement to effectuate the funds transfer.
In this case, you cannot simply force Congress to appropriate money to a reincorporated CPB -- unless you were to get a second ruling from a judge that the rescission was unconstitutional.
The Trump EO was deemed unconstitutional because he specifically called out that it didn't like the "left-wing propaganda" (his words) in PBS/NPR programming. Congress's rescission is ostensibly for budgetary reasons -- even if we all know in our heart that they were following Trump's orders.
What we can do is elect a Congress that will revive the CPB. Here's hoping.
the damage is already done.
Damage is done constantly in human existence, all around us. This is no different. Failure is when you stop trying. If you’re tired, rest, don’t quit.
I know it is hard to see the bias when you are in the bubble along with them.
Great, show me something they consistently misrepresent.
I agree that everyone has, by definition, some bias, but NPR/PBS tend to avoid editorialization significantly more than their counterparts.
PBS brings on Brooks Capehart to discuss politics. Having two partisan players from opposite sides of spectrum is a good way to get some balance. The fact that they agree so often on the fundamentals tells me the US is cooked.
> "we'll never tell you what to say,"
TBPN had almost all the big AI names in there, and they were extremely friendly. This would have been a problem anyway. They are not the "tough questions" kind of place.
Fairly good encapsulation of chomskey's manufactured consent. TBPN was chosen precisely because they'll never have to tell them what to say.
>I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist
>TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom
Company literally sold to someone else, we now conclude they believe to achieve economic freedom.
>Company genuinely believing anything.
Yep, it is 2026 and words mean nothing in, we better ooga booga or something
Bezos said WaPo would retain independence and it did. For a while. Then he meddled to the point of ruin.
To be honest, until a month ago, I hadn't even heard of TBPN or seen any of their content. But, seemingly, out of nowhere, they managed to get all the leaders in AI to appear in their programming.
The core of the information they present isn't much different than what you'd hear on Dwarkesh or other industry podcasts, the presentation is some weird mix of ESPN and Mad Money that I personally don't get, but maybe makes sense to a US audience.
I don't see why that is interesting to OpenAI, but maybe I'm missing something.
Super confusing... seems like some sort of in with the VCs that can pull this program's guests was enough to create a new podcast that is now seen as influential. My best is, this was a side liquidity event for the openAI VCs that had somehow invested into the podcast, looking to get some money out of openAI stake.
I like this theory for no other reason than it seems plausible lol
Dwarkesh gets far more technical and in the weeds than TPBN. It’s very different. I can’t listen to TPBN though it seems fun but I’ll relisten to Dwarkesh episodes more than once.
For anyone who really cares about AI in depth, Dwarkesh and the sxyz podcasts are the OG.
I don’t know. I find him pretty hard to listen to. He has admitted that his show prep is AI produced, and I think the gaps in his understanding come across in conversation. I also find his child-like irreverence and familiar tone with his guests to be very distasteful. He also can’t drink a pint of Guinness and you just can’t trust people like that.
His elbows are too pointy?
have not heard of sxyz podcasts? searching yt did not gave anything meaningful
(came from f5 bot) haha yeah if any ai companies are looking i’ll talk for $200m!!!
Just based on the number of very prominent guests they get to do interviews, they clearly have a lot of viewers in influential tech/vc circles, even if their total audience size isn’t huge.
That's true, but a lot of these people are also competitors. I can't imagine it'll be attractive going to the OpenAI media channel to talk about Gemini or Grok.
I have known about TBPN since early summer last year. They are widely known about in Cali startup culture at least.
This is the IT version of "I was listening to them before they got big!". Just as nerdy.
Me neither. Just seems like a money grab (tbpn founders getting a massive rip) and allows OpenAI to push corporate propaganda.
American here.
I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets.
Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends.
The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe.
tl;dr = it's for gamblers
I would guess that the whole "manosphere" phenomenon helped cryptocurrencies and Trump, so probably can help OpenAI too?
OpenAI is the most well-capitalized startup in history, and simultaneously in the center of the most hated cycle in tech (AI) since the mechanized loom.
Isn't the arbitrage these guys ran using their VC connections pretty obvious? TBPN is one of the few professionalized-with-a-team media outlets that offers a positive view of AI vs. the doomer stance of all other media (by a factor of like 100 to 1).
Total audience size is irrelevant if a good percentage of the people in that audience are tech influencers/billionaires, regardless of how niche and mainstream-irrelevant outside of X that TBPN is.
Media properties, like sports teams, are different than other businesses. To the people who own them, influence can be far more important than cashflows. Hence why a surprisingly large percentage of 19th century newspapers in many countries are still under the control of the families who founded them (just look at the NY Times).
While acquiring a youtube channel with 50K subs for hundreds of millions is definitely dotcom bubble-esque nonsense and will be viewed as such looking back, it makes total sense to me why its happening.
Conspiracy theory: they recorded a guest with egregious dirt on OpenAI and this money is to bury it. I have no proof and it's implausible but it makes more sense than the stated reasons.
Love these guys. Discovered them through a Senra tweet back in 2024. Very high signal to noise ratio!
I've built a database of fundraising announcements and guests TBPN has had on. Started as a tracker for myself and made it public now.
TBPN has become the de facto deal announcement venue. Which explains the "why would OpenAI buy this" question. 296 companies announced fundraises on the show, totaling $70.9B across 314 deals. a16z showed up in 20 deals, Sequoia in 13, Founders Fund in 12. Defense & aerospace alone: 35 companies raised $10.3B.
The show's reach is absolutely top tier!
Data at https://www.tbpndigest.com/
Yo this is a sweet website
TBPN, OpenClaw and Astral - that's 3 high profile acquisitions in a month. I smell a PR push to be seen as the 'good guys'.
I don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership point to a cynical growth machine.
The winner of this AI cycle will fund the lobbies that decide the politics of the future. OpenAI gives me a 'must escape the permanent underclass' energy. Not the energy I want from possibly the most influential people of the near future.
They are probably preparing for an IPO
Had to double check this wasn’t a late April Fools joke. Each weird acquisition or product launch feels like an implicit admission that anything like “AGI” is never coming.
It was never coming. Slopchain markov generators are completely unrelated to AGI. They don’t think, they aren’t capable of ever thinking.
You need something completely different, which they haven’t figured out.
but Jensen said we already achieved it!
I don't understand this at all. 58.2K youtube subs and under 3k views on most videos. This seems like they have barely just started?
They're primarily a Twitter phenomenon and get circulated quite widely within the tech sphere there.
It’ll be some sort of investor fraud. Like it’s Sam’s friend who will give him most of the billion back or whatever.
TBPN was also reportedly on track to do $30M in sponsorship revenue this year, up from $5M last year. Audience size is modest but targeted & high value per viewer (mostly decision makers in tech).
seems about right. They came across as the yes men of podcasts for tech people that want to pretend they are doing no wrong, maybe i just chose a really rough 10 minute section of a random podcast though, but not one moment did they not come across in that manner.
Their primary outlet is Twitter, not YouTube.
Not sure either, it seems like OpenAI has more money than they can spend and just looks for outsized bets.
They’re more active on Twitter/X,
idk what it is about them that every "tech bro" type guy around me follows them, but I never followed them myself, so I was surprised to know they only have 300k on Twitter.
Sooo....why the hell is the TBPN website so InfoWars-coded?
It's also slow as hell. It takes like 200ms for the social media buttons to change color upon hover.
I visited it to find out what the hell a tbpn is and abjectly failed
oh wow you were not kidding
Don't overlook the penultimate paragraph:
"I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. They've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me. I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show [...]."
So there's a large acquihire component here. Maybe the dominant component.
> acquihire
What else would there be? It's a podcast. They have no assets.
I've never heard of TBPN but it appears to be an AI sports network of some sort??
Essentially yes. It only has traction on X, but in the AI world that is all that is necessary. (its engagement metrics are poor for its size on all other platforms)
Sort of. There's a lot of activity now in other places:
- Reddit has a ton of exciting content about local models
- Bluesky has some interesting developers toying with memory and social media bots since it's an open platform (unlike X)
However, most leaders in the AI space all post on X and sam altman + the sv investor class are all hopelessly addicted to it.
I just recently switched away from Bluesky to reluctantly checking back in to X, for the first time since the acquisition. It feels like all the AI information is on X, it's basically necessary.
Bluesky is better than Mastodon for AI, and I'd rather be on a platform where it's more open and I can at least use whatever client I want. I love what Hailey & Cameron are doing on Bluesky and I miss chatting to Penny & Void. But Bluesky felt like being in a rural country town, and X was like a major city. Turns out it isn't just hearing relevant information that's important, but the speed with which you hear it. Half the time Bluesky was just screenshots of X anyway.
I gave up on Bluesky at the point where Anthropic / Claude got its designation from DoW, and no-one on Bluesky even cared. I'm still bitter about that.
what do you even do on X, you basically just subscribe to a bunch of blowhards to get insider sloppy seconds, then occasionally yell into the void and hope someone (anyone) finally responds?
I've seen it mentioned before but never checked it out. It def has ESPN vibes but I think it's more like a new Techcrunch.
It really feels like OpenAI simply acquires anything AI adjacent that is trendy or allows financial analysts to argue that we just don’t understand Sam Altman’s 39D chess strategy.
Maybe he's playing a friendly game against Trump of 4-dimentia chess?
"airs weekdays from 11–2pm PT"
This is one of those moments where I turn out to be entirely out-of-touch with the rest of humanity, because I cannot imagine being able to spend 3 hours every day watching some livestream news show!
Is this is the younger alternative to having Fox News playing on the TV all day?
Yes but also think of it as 'generates content from 11-2pm PT, with each hour giving 12+ small clips that have the chance to be shared, go viral, etc.'
Like most streaming, it's what is referred to as "second monitor content". You have it on in the background.
It's CNBC for Silicon Valley - a combination of good background noise, a broad survey of what people are talking about around the valley, and occasionally really great interviews.
They get a lot of guests to do interviews that they wouldn't do elsewhere, in part because they are unabashedly and unapologetically cheerleaders - pro-tech, pro-VC, pro-startup, pro-Big-Tech, etc. They don't grill you like an old-school journalist would about whatever the latest political controversy is, they ring a giant gong when their guest brings up a cool traction or fundraising number.
I would never use it as my only source of news for what's going on in tech, but with a lot of other tech journalism covering the downsides or problems with the industry, there is definitely a niche for them.
60K followers on youtube for low hundreds of millions? seems steep
guarantee one of them caught an OpenAI guy murdering a prostitute or something
OpenAI helps fund Axios, also, BTW.
What is tbpn, a podcasting company? Why would OpenAI want that? How is this helping them attain profitability or further their ai market capture?
'buy everything to build the castle' thing companies do before they implode.
attention is all you need
The only logical step for Anthropic now is to buy the Dwarkesh Patel podcast
When does the 24 hour agent news network start? Programming by agents for humans and agents. Sora talking heads scraping articles and generating content. I’d find human to agent or agent to agent live interview segments interesting.
Maybe it's just me but as soon as something like this, that should be independent, is owned by something it reports on, it becomes something you need to automatically trust less.
I saw the first comment "free media" and thought TBPN is The Pirate Bay Network.
With intense competition for enterprise contracts coming from Anthropic, I thought this was OpenAI's time to get _less_ memey, not more. What the hell are they thinking?
Theyre not. They have never been focused... actually they were when they first created the market. But since.. nah.
Never even heard of TBPN but congrats!
An AI company owning a major tech podcast?
Wow, what’s next?
Ecommerce giants owning major newspapers? An aerospace company owning a microblogging platform? Startup accelerators owning tech news aggregators?
If the vast majority of CEOs in this industry are to be believed, any company that achieves "AGI" will be undefeatable, their model improvements and research findings impossible to catch up to. Why risk that being Anthropic, Moonshot or any other competitor to OpenAI by spending your money on this?
The few months/years before "Everyone dies", wouldn't OpenAI want to be the "Anyone" that "build it" and is in control during that time? Unless, of course, OpenAI does not actually believe in that being a possibility, as suspected when they were working on social media...
I admit I'm surprised by the move, from a company that reportedly just talked about how they need to focus more on fewer, more strategic products.
But I also see the potential value. This is an entertaining and highly influential podcast, a lot of top VC's and founders watch it; it definitely punches well above it's audience KPI's in strategic value. I've seen many interviews or op-eds on the platform pretty clearly shape the startup discourse on X.
I also think it should run mostly autonomously, it'll only be as much of a distraction for OpenAI execs as they want it to be.
OpenAI just raised $122 billion (including future commitments), so whatever the purchase price was (we have no diea) is not going to even be a rounding error on their financial resources or their ability to pay their datacenter bills.
This is some insane delusion.
Focus on building a great product and you win. All this other stuff is noise.
Shouldn't OpenAI be focused on becoming profitable and surviving the next 2 years instead of buying podcast toys?
Robinhood did exact same thing, it's more for marketing reach and distribution stuff. Wouldn't be surprised in few years they let it go or spin it down, just paying for a funnel/some narrative control
AI will eat all Media, all of it.
states should remove the "purpose" field of incorporation statutes, its too antiquated now and for half a century
I have made a commitment to reduce my overly long and excessively hedged comments on here, so, if I may: What the heck. Is this a belated April fools joke?
This is not what a company on the precipice of AGI or even one that has faith in LLMs being a consistent growth driver across the industry would realistically do.
Is this a good investment financially? I don't know and seeing as I have never heard of TBPN before this post, I am not the right person to gauge that.
But any investment, be it in building your own Social Networks (Sora 2), a news show or anything else beyond model training is frankly, to me at least, a clear admission that OpenAI does not see nearly as much value in models as they have been selling investors on.
Considering the rest of the economy, that is more terrifying than any "AI will kill us" prediction.
If OpenAI believed even a tenth of what they have tried to sell investors, governments and the public on, they'd not have a penny to invest in anything akin to this, plain and simple.
I think there will be an AI correction and OpenAI will be the center of it. I have no clue what their plan is, they seem to throw everything at the wall an nothing sticks. Gonna take MicroSlop down with them. Anthropic and Google will come out the other end in great shape though.
Picking winners at this stage is hard, but maybe you are right on Alphabet and Anthropic. The former has use for data centres including those filled with ML hardware in a way MSFT and AWS may not if LLMs crash, simply by virtue of YouTube and other services which have relied on ML long before the hype started. Their buildout also started earlier and that may help them not overbuild to keep up with the hype, but who knows.
On Anthropic, hard to tell from the outside whether they are just more quite on their buildouts or whether they truly mainly rent their hardware, which could give them some flexibility if the market craters.
On MSFT, I'd rather they fix their products, at least to keep their mass of employees from being affected negatively.
Focus always wins out in the end.
I thought they acquire the pirate bay.
First I'm hearing of them and with this ownership I'll be highly skeptical of any of their content if I do happen to watch.
How does acquiring a relatively unknown niche podcast align with their mission ?
Their mission statement: Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
Well, they need to ensure AI advances, and that means advancing the podcast that will pretend that popular opinion is absurd and big tech is always right.
Erm people are not stupid, especially the investing community.
Methinks this is one of those moments where we will look back and say: Oh Sam facepalm.
All of the ads are gone from the stream?!
As a viewer I don’t think this is in my interest as I think they will get a lot less prestige guests now. They have interviewed some huge names recently.
I have lost faith in sama and openai management.
What is TBPN? It looks like some sort of scam or parody of a podcast when I got to their site.
Even if it’s legit and I’m just old enough to not understand modern aesthetics, why would OpenAI be spending any sort of money on media at all?
> Technology Business Programming Network
This sounds like a fake podcast they would make fun of on Silicon Valley
Edit: it gets even better, "Coogan is co-founder of meal replacement company Soylent"
April fools or self-dealing ?
I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...
Such a ridiculous set of acquisitions from OpenAI and the state of the market in general. A trillion dollar company buying 50k subscriber Youtube shows that happened to ride the hype train, while teams spend decades of their live perfecting something dreaming about a fraction of an exit.
This interview is very in-depth look at the TBPN business:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/35L5nxL7VSmHIuaArgdCx1
They are intentionally making something like Bloomberg TV, with a very specific tech news audience and with some of the playbook of twitch streamers - growing via clipping -- but a look and feel of Cable news shows.
They mention squawk box on CNBC many times, as competition, in the interview and that they have no problem with filling ad inventory for their 3+ hours of programming a day.
since tbpn is known for their quite oblique satire. i wonder if this is some long April 1st thing.
I literally did not know TBPN existed and I am gonna forget about it in the next minute.
Should start a new AI company just hoping to cash in on the gold rush.
lol public opinion is in the toilet so they buy a propaganda arm. Typical
This channel is less than 2 years old, <60k subs, most of their videos have low view rates... I don't get it. Is this a joke?
Why though? Great for the TBPN crew.
> Why though?
It got your "attention", which is what they (OpenAI) are after.
> So rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense to bring them in, support what they’re doing, and help them scale—while keeping what makes them special.
OpenAI was losing attention to Anthropic because of Claude Code, so they raised money and are trying to buy it back.
what does tbpn even stand for?
They were called "Tech Bro Podcast Network" but rebranded at some point.
The attention economy, that is the game - there isn't anything else to it now.
Without attention you're nothing.
Shouldnt the product speak for itself? Why do you need to buy a press team.
I mean litteraly, with all the AI podcasts out there just get it to do it. It was going to take all our jobs anyways or something.
TBPN > Prof G Pod > BG2 Pod > All-In Podcast
Perplexity preparing to acquire Quartr in response to this in three, two, one
Will they maintain the hard right political angle?
Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook
comparing TBPN to the WP is weird
calling it now that OpenAI changes strategy to instead of building actual AI / anything themselves they just raise lots of capital and buy anything promising in/around the AI space.
TBPN seems like the media equivalent of Soylent. Oh wait...
open ai acquires an somewhat media established group to push their corporate propaganda. Got it.
Sam has extraordinary business sense.
Sounds like OpenAI trying to control another narrative.