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.)
> I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently.
I agree, but this is 100% not the right model. Altman is not the right person to be in control of a media organisation. He shows little willing to understand anything of how the world works currently, let alone something out of his wheel house.
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
You can unfortunately see this across the media spectrum. There seem to be basically two paths:
1. Cozy up to the big money in your industry, have them on for PR interviews with easy questions, and eventually get sponsored / acquired by them. I hesitate to even call this journalism, it’s more just sponsored entertainment.
2. Build a personal brand as someone known for being particularly critical / investigative / etc. This will undoubtedly make you far less money, and you’ll probably end up shilling ads for gold coins in between asking for Patreon supporters.
I’ve always wondered if a government-funded (in a way that cannot be manipulated) organization whose sole purpose is to criticize everyone would ever work. It might even need to be run anonymously.
coloneltcb 16 hours ago [-]
say what you will about TBPN, but it was never objective journalism
swyx 5 hours ago [-]
(and the fact that they proudly wore it on their sleeve and shone a lamp on it is complete and absolute genius)
unfitted2545 16 hours ago [-]
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?
okanat 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Maybe I'm biased as an American, but if this were to be proposed here, who decides which outlets are blessed with the government money and the corresponding air of legitimacy of being an official public broadcaster?
collinmcnulty 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tshaddox 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
riffraff 4 hours ago [-]
This is partially the case in Italy, though it changed over the years.
The assignment of funds is based on refunding prints/sales, so money goes to help newspapers that do print "something" of interest to the public.
The problem is that people don't want "independent" journalism, they want "my ideas" journalism.
Which.. still good somehow? Italy had plenty of newspapers which were the literal extension of political parties and a few independent ones in the past and still does.
But these days, they are all dying anyway.
vostrocity 10 hours ago [-]
There was a 2020 US presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, who proposed something like this.[1]
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.
unfitted2545 15 hours ago [-]
That's true, and in the UK we've just removed jury duty trials for some crimes at the snap of a finger.
toomuchtodo 15 hours ago [-]
This was reversed upon judicial review. Checks and balances.
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.
toomuchtodo 9 hours ago [-]
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.
valleyer 7 hours ago [-]
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.
postflopclarity 14 hours ago [-]
the damage is already done.
toomuchtodo 14 hours ago [-]
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.
greenchair 12 hours ago [-]
I know it is hard to see the bias when you are in the bubble along with them.
gkoberger 12 hours ago [-]
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.
hunterpayne 5 hours ago [-]
Ahem, their reporting on nuclear power was often non-scientific and just plain wrong. In fact anything having to do with the environment was generally pretty poor from a factual and scientific basis. Their reporting on politics was consistently rated as one of the most extreme in the US media.
I do wish they could do a 'just the facts' reporting as I think that is worth some taxpayer money to support. But by any measure, from any media watchdog, they were one of the most extreme and least accurate media source. That you can't see that says a lot more about you than PBS/NPR. Hell, there are 20 year old SNL skits mocking their coverage for its very narrow POV.
skeeter2020 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Petersipoi 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dist-epoch 13 hours ago [-]
> "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.
lobb-deep 13 hours ago [-]
Fairly good encapsulation of chomskey's manufactured consent. TBPN was chosen precisely because they'll never have to tell them what to say.
14 hours ago [-]
heliumtera 16 hours ago [-]
>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
16 hours ago [-]
jrflowers 12 hours ago [-]
I am sure that what you mentioned was said, but it is surprisingly difficult to have a conversation in a room full of these
There's no way a popular show like that needs money, they were probably millionaires already with sponsorships. Why are we pretending these people are poor or need help to survive?
tootie 12 hours ago [-]
Bezos said WaPo would retain independence and it did. For a while. Then he meddled to the point of ruin.
gos9 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
i_have_an_idea 17 hours ago [-]
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.
popalchemist 3 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI is to TBPN what Fox is to Republicans. A propaganda puppet.
clueless 14 hours ago [-]
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.
christoff12 14 hours ago [-]
I like this theory for no other reason than it seems plausible lol
thundergolfer 12 hours ago [-]
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.
nojvek 9 hours ago [-]
For anyone who really cares about AI in depth, Dwarkesh and the sxyz podcasts are the OG.
GorbachevyChase 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
His elbows are too pointy?
born-jre 7 hours ago [-]
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!!!
mlinsey 16 hours ago [-]
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.
i_have_an_idea 16 hours ago [-]
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.
archeantus 5 hours ago [-]
Distribution is the moat. This is distribution, I guess.
georgeven 12 hours ago [-]
I have known about TBPN since early summer last year. They are widely known about in Cali startup culture at least.
skeeter2020 11 hours ago [-]
This is the IT version of "I was listening to them before they got big!". Just as nerdy.
hrldcpr 17 hours ago [-]
I would guess that the whole "manosphere" phenomenon helped cryptocurrencies and Trump, so probably can help OpenAI too?
bargainbin 6 hours ago [-]
Funny, this gave me strong manosphere vibes as well, despite ostensibly not being about using misogyny to extract wealth from incels.
gkoberger 17 hours ago [-]
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
xyst 8 hours ago [-]
Me neither. Just seems like a money grab (tbpn founders getting a massive rip) and allows OpenAI to push corporate propaganda.
pembrook 13 hours ago [-]
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.
tootie 12 hours ago [-]
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.
screye 16 hours ago [-]
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.
a_victorp 11 hours ago [-]
They are probably preparing for an IPO
delfinom 10 hours ago [-]
They are busy funding age verification lobbying already
OpenClaw was not acquired. The creator of it was hired by OpenAI, but OpenClaw is still independent.
csmiller 17 hours ago [-]
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.
throwatdem12311 12 hours ago [-]
but Jensen said we already achieved it!
MagicMoonlight 7 hours ago [-]
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.
16 hours ago [-]
operatingthetan 16 hours ago [-]
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?
gordonhart 16 hours ago [-]
They're primarily a Twitter phenomenon and get circulated quite widely within the tech sphere there.
disiplus 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
MagicMoonlight 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ohong 13 hours ago [-]
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).
sidrag22 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 13 hours ago [-]
Their primary outlet is Twitter, not YouTube.
aswegs8 14 hours ago [-]
Not sure either, it seems like OpenAI has more money than they can spend and just looks for outsized bets.
ancorevard 7 hours ago [-]
X
tantalor 14 hours ago [-]
Never heard of it.
SamDc73 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Andrey28 7 hours ago [-]
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.
how does that explain the "why would OpenAI buy them?" question? OpenAI has better relationships with every VC than these guys do.
And why does OpenAI care about funding announcements, which trail actual fundraises by weeks or months?
Topfi 14 minutes ago [-]
It's not like the current CEO of OpenAI ran arguably the most desirable VC until a few years ago...
elliottlovell88 6 hours ago [-]
Yo this is a sweet website
phillipcarter 17 hours ago [-]
Sooo....why the hell is the TBPN website so InfoWars-coded?
polio 11 hours ago [-]
It's also slow as hell. It takes like 200ms for the social media buttons to change color upon hover.
duskdozer 46 minutes ago [-]
yup. open the page, fans start revving up.
sureglymop 3 hours ago [-]
I've read this word 50 times in this thread so far and still don't know what it is an acronym for...
QuadmasterXLII 11 hours ago [-]
I visited it to find out what the hell a tbpn is and abjectly failed
brap 4 hours ago [-]
I couldn’t put this into words so thank you for that
rbtprograms 17 hours ago [-]
oh wow you were not kidding
robotresearcher 14 hours ago [-]
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.
tantalor 14 hours ago [-]
> acquihire
What else would there be? It's a podcast. They have no assets.
huslage 17 hours ago [-]
I've never heard of TBPN but it appears to be an AI sports network of some sort??
phrotoma 26 minutes ago [-]
The extremely uninformative website isn't helping much. There's a more info button that provides no info whatsoever.
minimaxir 17 hours ago [-]
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)
phillipcarter 17 hours ago [-]
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.
SyneRyder 14 hours ago [-]
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.
plaguuuuuu 12 hours ago [-]
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?
mertleee 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
brentm 16 hours ago [-]
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.
simonw 16 hours ago [-]
"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?
mkmk 16 hours ago [-]
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.'
swyx 5 hours ago [-]
this is the correct answer. the stream is just the production process, not the full product.
internet101010 9 hours ago [-]
Like most streaming, it's what is referred to as "second monitor content". You have it on in the background.
mlinsey 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Eufrat 11 hours ago [-]
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.
skeeter2020 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe he's playing a friendly game against Trump of 4-dimentia chess?
clueless 14 hours ago [-]
60K followers on youtube for low hundreds of millions? seems steep
plaguuuuuu 12 hours ago [-]
guarantee one of them caught an OpenAI guy murdering a prostitute or something
nickgreg 2 hours ago [-]
Good for the TBPN team! I think their genius wasn't in having the best info, it was that they made tech people feel like celebrities.
bugsense 30 minutes ago [-]
Why could OpenAI feel the need to control the narrative?
brentm 16 hours ago [-]
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.
asadm 17 hours ago [-]
attention is all you need
blueblisters 15 hours ago [-]
The only logical step for Anthropic now is to buy the Dwarkesh Patel podcast
yalogin 12 hours ago [-]
What is tbpn, a podcasting company? Why would OpenAI want that? How is this helping them attain profitability or further their ai market capture?
noman-land 11 hours ago [-]
PR team.
downrightmike 12 hours ago [-]
'buy everything to build the castle' thing companies do before they implode.
moezd 5 hours ago [-]
More acquihiring for the AI gods, for they will never be satisfied until all shall bow to them.
iandanforth 13 hours ago [-]
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.
_jab 17 hours ago [-]
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?
df2sdf 12 hours ago [-]
Theyre not. They have never been focused... actually they were when they first created the market. But since.. nah.
CompoundEyes 11 hours ago [-]
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.
mlinsey 16 hours ago [-]
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?
Topfi 15 hours ago [-]
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...
mlinsey 12 hours ago [-]
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.
df2sdf 12 hours ago [-]
This is some insane delusion.
Focus on building a great product and you win. All this other stuff is noise.
operatingthetan 16 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't OpenAI be focused on becoming profitable and surviving the next 2 years instead of buying podcast toys?
bfeynman 16 hours ago [-]
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
16 hours ago [-]
kingleopold 15 hours ago [-]
AI will eat all Media, all of it.
yieldcrv 16 hours ago [-]
states should remove the "purpose" field of incorporation statutes, its too antiquated now and for half a century
angrydev 16 hours ago [-]
Wait a second...
Topfi 17 hours ago [-]
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.
travelalberta 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Topfi 16 hours ago [-]
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.
df2sdf 12 hours ago [-]
Focus always wins out in the end.
shrubble 7 hours ago [-]
OpenAI helps fund Axios, also, BTW.
qwertyuiop_ 13 hours ago [-]
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.
sidrag22 13 hours ago [-]
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.
df2sdf 12 hours ago [-]
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.
philipwhiuk 30 minutes ago [-]
> Erm people are not stupid, especially the investing community.
Yes, yes they are. It's not a community. It's a herd.
faangguyindia 17 hours ago [-]
I thought they acquire the pirate bay.
elAhmo 12 hours ago [-]
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.
thelastgallon 9 hours ago [-]
I saw the first comment "free media" and thought TBPN is The Pirate Bay Network.
13 hours ago [-]
tantalor 14 hours ago [-]
> 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"
sefrost 17 hours ago [-]
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.
game_the0ry 16 hours ago [-]
I have lost faith in sama and openai management.
lovich 17 hours ago [-]
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?
Philpax 17 hours ago [-]
What.
throwatdem12311 12 hours ago [-]
lol public opinion is in the toilet so they buy a propaganda arm. Typical
talideon 16 hours ago [-]
I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...
voidfunc 8 hours ago [-]
Never even heard of TBPN but congrats!
hokkos 14 hours ago [-]
April fools or self-dealing ?
adamgordonbell 16 hours ago [-]
This interview is very in-depth look at the TBPN business:
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.
suriya-ganesh 17 hours ago [-]
since tbpn is known for their quite oblique satire. i wonder if this is some long April 1st thing.
brimal 16 hours ago [-]
Should start a new AI company just hoping to cash in on the gold rush.
dwa3592 11 hours ago [-]
I literally did not know TBPN existed and I am gonna forget about it in the next minute.
6DM 11 hours ago [-]
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?
boringg 17 hours ago [-]
Why though? Great for the TBPN crew.
rvz 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
doctorpangloss 4 hours ago [-]
who?
creddit 12 hours ago [-]
A real loss.
QuadmasterXLII 11 hours ago [-]
what does tbpn even stand for?
georgel 11 hours ago [-]
They were called "Tech Bro Podcast Network" but rebranded at some point.
14 hours ago [-]
kklisura 14 hours ago [-]
TBPN > Prof G Pod > BG2 Pod > All-In Podcast
Atomic_Torrfisk 13 hours ago [-]
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.
qwertyuiop_ 12 hours ago [-]
I hope when we look back at 2026 this is not the "Big Short moment"
The attention economy, that is the game - there isn't anything else to it now.
Without attention you're nothing.
rvz 13 hours ago [-]
Perplexity preparing to acquire Quartr in response to this in three, two, one
wahnfrieden 16 hours ago [-]
Will they maintain the hard right political angle?
chvid 17 hours ago [-]
April fool!
lexcamisa54 4 hours ago [-]
thought
The
hmokiguess 17 hours ago [-]
Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook
misiti3780 14 hours ago [-]
comparing TBPN to the WP is weird
bad_haircut72 14 hours ago [-]
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.
louiereederson 16 hours ago [-]
TBPN seems like the media equivalent of Soylent. Oh wait...
> Source: OpenAI bought TBPN, which was set to generate $30M in 2026, for "low hundreds of millions of dollars"; OpenAI says TBPN will be editorially independent
wut
johnwheeler 14 hours ago [-]
Sounds like OpenAI trying to control another narrative.
xyst 8 hours ago [-]
open ai acquires an somewhat media established group to push their corporate propaganda. Got it.
16 hours ago [-]
Marciplan 10 hours ago [-]
silly.
mertleee 17 hours ago [-]
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yubainu 6 hours ago [-]
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dfordp11 5 hours ago [-]
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BoredPositron 16 hours ago [-]
Sam has extraordinary business sense.
Rendered at 10:49:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
I agree, but this is 100% not the right model. Altman is not the right person to be in control of a media organisation. He shows little willing to understand anything of how the world works currently, let alone something out of his wheel house.
1. Cozy up to the big money in your industry, have them on for PR interviews with easy questions, and eventually get sponsored / acquired by them. I hesitate to even call this journalism, it’s more just sponsored entertainment.
2. Build a personal brand as someone known for being particularly critical / investigative / etc. This will undoubtedly make you far less money, and you’ll probably end up shilling ads for gold coins in between asking for Patreon supporters.
I’ve always wondered if a government-funded (in a way that cannot be manipulated) organization whose sole purpose is to criticize everyone would ever work. It might even need to be run anonymously.
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?
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
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.
The assignment of funds is based on refunding prints/sales, so money goes to help newspapers that do print "something" of interest to the public.
The problem is that people don't want "independent" journalism, they want "my ideas" journalism.
Which.. still good somehow? Italy had plenty of newspapers which were the literal extension of political parties and a few independent ones in the past and still does.
But these days, they are all dying anyway.
1. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/andrew-yang-the-most-meme-...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-f...
It's not clear how, even under that recent ruling, that rescission will be undone.
If you need the Treasury to initiate the EFT and they refuse to, send law enforcement to effectuate the funds transfer.
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.
I agree that everyone has, by definition, some bias, but NPR/PBS tend to avoid editorialization significantly more than their counterparts.
I do wish they could do a 'just the facts' reporting as I think that is worth some taxpayer money to support. But by any measure, from any media watchdog, they were one of the most extreme and least accurate media source. That you can't see that says a lot more about you than PBS/NPR. Hell, there are 20 year old SNL skits mocking their coverage for its very narrow POV.
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.
>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
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_eWdX4qBUyQ3D
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.
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
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.
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.
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/01/openai-ai-kids-safety-coal...
You need something completely different, which they haven’t figured out.
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.
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/
And why does OpenAI care about funding announcements, which trail actual fundraises by weeks or months?
"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.
What else would there be? It's a podcast. They have no assets.
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
Wow, what’s next?
Ecommerce giants owning major newspapers? An aerospace company owning a microblogging platform? Startup accelerators owning tech news aggregators?
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...
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.
Focus on building a great product and you win. All this other stuff is noise.
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.
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.
Their mission statement: Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
Methinks this is one of those moments where we will look back and say: Oh Sam facepalm.
Yes, yes they are. It's not a community. It's a herd.
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"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/MesrrYyuoa4?t=235
Without attention you're nothing.
> Source: OpenAI bought TBPN, which was set to generate $30M in 2026, for "low hundreds of millions of dollars"; OpenAI says TBPN will be editorially independent
wut