The Information profiles TBPN: Abe Brown calls in to defend his 'bro culture' piece

Summary

The Information's Abe Brown profiled TBPN in a piece that reads less like a hit and more like a curious anthropological study — and Brown called in live to defend it.

The article describes how John Coogan and Patrick Hayes launched the show last October after attending Peter Thiel's Hereticon, building an early audience by printing out posts from X, filming themselves in suits discussing them, tagging the original authors, and watching those authors repost the clips. From that low-tech flywheel, they've grown to roughly 130,000 followers across their X accounts and the show's account, with around 7,000 YouTube subscribers — numbers Brown describes as "incredibly niche," a characterisation Coogan and Hayes largely accept and own. Coogan points out he has individual YouTube videos with 3 million and 8 million views, but the show itself is deliberately narrow: they've consciously avoided TAM expanders like politics.

Distribution and access

Despite the follower count, the access is notable. Brown notes TBPN has had guests from Sequoia, Khosla, Lightspeed, and virtually every major venture firm. A producer was dispatched to Andreessen Horowitz's annual investor day in Las Vegas to set up a mini studio — Coogan says he wants to replicate that format with other firms to give audiences a full partnership view rather than a single-partner perspective. Ramp CEO Eric Glyman compares the show to ESPN for tech, with founders, investors, and developer conferences standing in for players, coaches, and games.

Business model

TBPN has no outside investors and intends to keep it that way. Coogan's line from the piece: "We could go out and within an hour I guarantee you we could raise probably like $15 million. And I believe that would destroy us." The show is run from a tenth-floor office at the Jonathan Club in LA, with a small video production crew. They're moving to a 4,000 square foot Hollywood studio, which will allow standing, walking, and in-person guests — something the Jonathan Club setup doesn't support. They're receiving around 20 pitches a day from PR firms and turning down 95%; the filter is whether the guest is visibly engaged in the X conversation around tech, not whether they have a polished PR deck.

Guest strategy and format

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar's description of joining is telling: "They just sent me a Zoom link, I joined." No pre-interview, no prep. Coogan and Hayes frame the informality as a feature — the questions they care about are the ones investors actually want answered, CapEx trajectories and build-out timelines rather than personal or political gotchas. The suits are deliberate: they want a format where a public company CEO's risk-averse PR team sees a clean, brand-safe package comparable to Bloomberg or CNBC.

Mentorship and origins

David Senra of the Founders podcast advised Coogan early on and pointed to Pat McAfee as a model — less for the livestream format specifically and more for the always-on seriousness of commitment. The tactical evolution to daily live shows and guest-led formats came organically once they went all-in; Senra's actual instruction was simply to take it far more seriously.

Dream bookings

The stated ambition is all seven Magnificent Seven CEOs — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla — on the same show. No other podcast has done all seven. The new Hollywood studio, and the ability to host in-person guests, is partly built around making those appearances cinematically worthwhile when they eventually happen.

Brown closed the piece noting that TBPN "maintains just enough independence from their subjects but feels none of the pressure for critical coverage most journalists in their position would" — a line Coogan and Hayes treat as accurate rather than a dig. When Brown called in, he described the piece as "fair and accurate journalism" and accepted the sauna invitation.