Why OpenAI Bought a Podcast — with TBPN’s John Coogan and Jordi Hays

Scott Galloway sits down with TBPN creators John Coogan and Jordi Hays to unpack how they turned a daily tech show into one of the fastest-growing businesses in media — and ultimately, OpenAI’s first acquisition. They discuss why most podcasts get advertising wrong, how a small but influential audience can be worth more than mass reach, and why they built TBPN like a startup. Plus, they debate OpenAI vs. Anthropic and what Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the next big thing reveals about the future of tech. Want to listen to this and other episodes ad-free? You can, if you subscribe at profgmedia.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:29Scott Galloway?

  Episode 404, 404, code serving Atlanta, Georgia in 2004. Facebook debuted. True story, I just installed an app that lets me know which of my friends are racist. It's called Facebook.

• 1:45Scott Galloway?

  Go, go, go.

• 1:55Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 404th episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, the creators of TBPN, a popular daily show covering the biggest stories in tech and business. These guys, you may know them, they were supposedly bought for two or 300 million by OpenAI. If you're wondering why it makes sense for OpenAI to purchase a podcast, the answer is it makes no fucking sense, but I don't mind it. I like it when young guys who are smart and seem like good people and both of these guys fit that, fit that mode. Hit it big. Good for them. I'm happy for them. They do a podcast three hours a day, just talking about AI and they get amazing guests.

• 2:36Scott Galloway?

  There's no way to rationalize this acquisition, but I, look, I'm here for it. I like Mark Cuban and he sold his company for $5 billion to Yahoo, broadcast.com, radio on the internet. Oh, that was worth $5 billion. Anyways, I like these guys. We're going to talk a little bit about their acquisition, their approach, how they've become so successful. I was especially interested in what they said about advertising and a little bit about them being such young fathers. Anyways, with that, really admire what these guys have built. Let's catch up with our conversation with John Coogan and Jordy Hayes.

• 3:14Scott Galloway?

  You both host TBPN, the daily live show that became OpenAI's first ever acquisition this spring. You've hosted names from Zuckerberg to Altman to Nadella. Before we get to the OpenAI deal, take us back to the beginning. Give us, go all the way back 17 months and give us your backstory.

• 3:32Speaker 06

  Long time ago.

• 3:34Speaker 07

  We met through a mutual friend who connected us because we were in a similar stage of life, I guess. We'd both started companies in Silicon Valley, raised money from actually two of the same venture capital firms, never met, but we both were living in Los Angeles, had kids and were sort of looking for what was next.

• 3:57Speaker 06

  And LA is a terrible place to live if you work in tech outside of hard tech. And we didn't see ourselves building a hard tech business. We both had some media background. I built an influencer marketing company in college. John had a big YouTube channel.

• 4:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:13Speaker 06

  And we did what, what had never really been done before. Two guys in tech decided to start a podcast.

• 4:19Speaker 07

  It was revolutionary.

• 4:21Speaker 06

  No, so we met. We, we just loved talking. We would call each other, even though we didn't even know each other that well, and just talk about different ideas and what was happening. And eventually decided to record one of the conversations. We sent it to a guy named David Senra, who has David Senra by David Senra, popular podcasts and also the founders podcasts, if you've listened to that.

• 4:49Speaker 07

  And he's one of the strongest believers in the power of podcasting, that like we're still early, that it's not too late to start a podcast if you have a good idea, something fresh to offer. And so he was extremely encouraging, told us that we should take it deadly seriously.

• 5:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, we hadn't published an episode, but we sent him a Google Drive file.

• 5:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 06

  He listened to it. I was shocked that he listened to it because who has time for another podcast? And, but he did, and he, yeah, he said like, you know, take this 10 times as seriously. He saw something in us and, you know, we kept going from there.

• 5:21Speaker 07

  And so he sort of encouraged just to treat it like a business, like a startup, not like a side project. And that's something that we quickly identified as one of our key differentiators was that we had lots of friends and we'd been in these situations before my YouTube channel. I was running it on the side while I was also doing a business. And there's a lot of people that have investment firms that also have podcasts or they have a company and then they start a podcast to promote that company. And there weren't that many people outside of the traditional media. There weren't that many insiders that had transitioned and become full-time creators.

• 6:02Speaker 07

  Dwarash Patel, obviously in that group, David Senra, there's a few others, but it was a smaller group than I think the podcast charts let on when you scrolled through and you saw hundreds of hundreds of podcasts. Most of those folks were not spending 40, 50 hours a week.

• 6:18Speaker 06

  It was and still is low status to some degree. Like there's, there, I remember when we would tell our friends in the early days, because we told people with like a handful of episodes, we were like, we're going full-time on a podcast and like, we have supportive friends, thankfully. They were like, yeah, like that's excited for you. That's awesome. But you know, in their head, they were just thinking like.

• 6:39Speaker 07

  Wow, they're down on their luck.

• 6:41Speaker 06

  Completely lost.

• 6:42Speaker 07

  Couldn't come up with a single sass idea.

• 6:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 07

  What are they thinking? And so we started taking it really seriously and that unlocked a lot of things. That unlocked interviews with bigger.

• 6:54Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, before we get there, we should talk about like why we initially got any traction at all is because we weren't doing interviews.

• 7:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 06

  We did like 150 hours with just the two of us talking before we had done a single guest. And instead of having, there were shows that we love, like acquired is, is, you know, an amazing product, but it's like one topic and we would have, you know, we would talk for 90 minutes, but we'd cover.

• 7:22Speaker 07

  50 topics.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  Yes, 30.

• 7:24Speaker 07

  And so we'd read the whole Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, we'd pull from random headlines, we'd pull up tweets and posts on different social media sites. We'd print out the posts. So we'd typically have a stack of posts and we would pull them up and, and read through them. Jordy has one there. We would discuss it. Sometimes we'd just be laughing about it. Sometimes we, it would take us on a tangent. We'd talk for 10 minutes, but then we would clip that reaction to that post and then quote tweet the original post. And so that was sort of a do things that don't scale moment. It was a love letter to whoever posted that original idea or that take or whatever they

• 8:09Speaker 07

  posted. And as you know, from posting, oftentimes the numbers get really big. You get a thousand likes on something and it all just kind of just melts into the background and it becomes just noise and you see the number go up. But if someone quotes your post with a thoughtful commentary that's filmed in 4K with cinema cameras and the hosts are wearing suits and they printed, they took the time to print out your post, it's just, wow, these people went a lot further to say something. I'm at least going to see what they had to say about the thing that I fired off in the shower. Right? And so that just told individual people, maybe 50 people a day, got a little message

• 8:50Speaker 07

  from us, hey, we exist, we liked what you said, and here's our commentary. And then they followed us, they reposted it, they quote tweeted and said, I can't believe this happened. What is this? This is weird. This is interesting. And so that was the interesting, like zero to one moment.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. Early lessons in going to zero to one was, you know, needs some element of format innovation, like podcasts are incredibly noisy, incredibly powerful. But we came in with something that was a truly unique product because one, there was no one else that had us talking about crazy ideas for 90 minutes. We had a monopoly on that. And then a real focus on marketing the show, treating the show like a product that we make every day, but we were incredibly fixated on, on marketing that product. And I think that, and that, that, that happened through clips and, and, you know, the love letters concept, things like that.

• 9:43Scott Galloway?

  So also I think you guys recognized a real gap in the market and that is two white guys hosting a podcast.

• 9:50Scott Galloway?

  I've heard nothing you said the last five minutes. I was so excited about that joke.

• 9:57Scott Galloway?

  What did you guys, what did you guys do before this?

• 10:00Speaker 07

  I grew up in LA, studied economics in college, moved out to Silicon Valley as soon as I graduated, joined a Y Combinator company. Where'd you grow up in LA? I grew up in Pasadena. I live there now, actually. And where'd you go to college? I went to Northeastern in Boston, and then I went out to Silicon Valley, was sort of on a finance track post-Great Financial Crisis, was very interested in that, but then got bitten by the Y Combinator bug, reading Paul Graham's blog, reading Hacker News, wanted to move out to Silicon Valley, maybe join a tech company, realized that a lot of the big tech companies, I wouldn't be fit for the corporate ladder, wanted to start a company.

• 10:43Speaker 07

  Started one company, teamed up with a Y Combinator company. The first business I started was called Soylent. It was a meal replacement shake.

• 10:50Speaker 06

  You probably had a couple Soylents over the years, Scott.

• 10:53Speaker 07

  Heard about that? It was like a decade ago. That was one of my favorite movies. It went like very viral. Soylent Green? Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that's a great name for a food product, but... That was the point. The point was like, it was rage bait. It was rage bait. Like, everyone had a comment. Liquid Death, that kind of thing? Yeah, Liquid Death, same thing. And so, yeah, I was like, I was interested in technology and working on software startups, but then we got pulled into this consumer packaged goods, direct to consumer boom, and grew that company a bunch, raised a bunch of money, eventually sold that company, started another company with basically the same team, but then got that company to scale and had

• 11:37Speaker 07

  the opportunity during COVID to sort of think about what was next, started a YouTube channel, and then eventually went over to Founders Fund to become an entrepreneur in residence, and that gave me a lot of free time to explore what was next, and that sort of set me up to be ready to go full-time on something completely new when the right pitch came my way.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  We're not very good at being concise, as you can tell. We talk, we do this for three hours a day. We'll have hit the four-hour mark by the end of the day of podcasting. We really love this. But I grew up in the Bay, in the Bay Area, was always obsessed with the idea of building companies, building startups. I built a first-ever company was a skateboard company when I was 12, because I figured out that the boards that I was buying in California for $35 would be a blank Canadian maple board. I could get them made with my logo for $17.50 in the Midwest. And so I went and raised like $500 to do my first run, and so started selling skateboards.

• 12:43Speaker 06

  That was kind of when I caught the bug. Took me about a decade from there to build like a real business that could support my life, but I started, I actually met a number of podcasts while in college, and this was at a time where you'd have like a podcast with an incredibly loyal fan base, tons and tons of downloads, and they'd be in the top 10 of whatever category they were in, and they'd be running like zero ads, which sounds insane, but they would just be doing it for the love of the game, and maybe they had another business. And so I went to them and I was like, if I can bring you advertisers, can I take a cut? And so I started doing that, and that over time turned into a company called Branded

• 13:23Speaker 06

  Native, which is still running today, but does like YouTube creator advertising for a bunch of different brands. And so I didn't raise money for that business. It got profitable quite quickly, and I started taking the profits and investing those in other startups. So then, over the last however many years, I guess, eight years, invested in like 70-some startups, eventually started a fintech company. I started maybe the most 2021 ZIRP company ever, company called Party Round, which was Venmo for fundraising and investing, because I would get invited to invest in a startup. And then I remember the first time somebody said like, well, I'll send you the docs and then you can just wire after that. And I was like, wire transfer?

• 14:08Speaker 06

  I'd never actually done a wire, I'd never actually done a wire transfer at the time myself, like an outbound push. And so I was like, why is this not like Venmo? A lot of VCs thought that was a great idea in 2021, as you can imagine, everyone and their mom was investing in startups and had built like a fairly viral brand on X for that business, ended up evolving it into a banking product over time that was building a stablecoin, basically a stablecoin bank. The month that we launched, FTX collapsed, which killed a lot of excitement that people had around crypto, as you can imagine.

• 14:51Speaker 06

  And then a few months after that, SVB collapsed, and people started really caring about how much FDIC coverage they had. We, at the time, had standard like 250K of coverage, and our average customer balance was like a million dollars, something like that. And so people were like, I was telling our customers like, yeah, there's a bank run that's happening, like you need to be practical with your business. We ended up getting Aqua hired by a company called Row in New York City, and then worked there, and that's like when I met John. So we had been like, both of us had gone through the sort of like Silicon Valley factory,

• 15:35Speaker 06

  had had some wins, had some losses, had been like, I would say, very humbled by like work and life, right? Like, I went from being like, you know, running a hot startup, and to basically like having my business blown up by like, you know, the market dynamics. And then I'm sitting there, I've got like a one-year-old son at the time, I've got another on the way, like that's like deeply humbling. And so I think that, based on like what we do and what we talk about, they expect us to be like, you know, maybe cocky or something like that, but I think we came at TBPN from a very, we had been humbled by Silicon Valley, been humbled by startups, and I think that

• 16:19Speaker 06

  has informed our coverage, right? Like, I think we give people, we always would give people the benefit of the doubt. We like took a strategy early on, which was called Golden Retriever Mode, which is an idea that, you know, John can, has described many times on the show, but like, being in a golden retriever mindset and trying to act, show up in the world, and at least that was our role with TBPN, is showing up as like golden retrievers, you're like happy, friendly and dumb.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  Yeah. Not trying to be, oh, I got this person, I'm smarter than them, I'm the smartest one in the room always, being, yeah, a little humble in some ways.

• 17:02Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Superhuman. The pace of modern work can be relentless. You're getting a constant influx of messages from a ton of different apps. You haven't closed all your browser tabs in a year. Everything seems urgent, and staying on top of it all feels like an impossible task. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing, and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, help you be the best version of yourself at work. It handles the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that only you can do. Whether you need to summarize an endless email thread or prep for a meeting that's

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  happening in five minutes, Superhuman Go works inside the tools and sites you already use, your browser, inbox, docs, and your project tools. And its AI chat is available on the side of your browser, and it's always ready. No new tabs, no switching apps, no losing your place. This is AI that works with you, not on top of you, so that you have the time and brain space to solve the problems that matter. Check it out, find out more at superhuman.com. Support for the show comes from Upwork. Trying to scale your business? At some point, you're probably going to hit a point where you need some help. Sometimes the best way to break through that is bringing in the right talent at the right time. Upwork can help. Upwork is a one-stop platform where you can find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across

• 18:29Scott Galloway?

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• 19:14Scott Galloway?

  That's U.P.W.O.R.K.com/profg. Upwork.com/profg. Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The regentic trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and

• 19:56Scott Galloway?

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• 20:34Scott Galloway?

  So I'm fascinated by and a little bit jealous because what I've seen is that you guys this year are gonna, you're tracking towards, and I'm very open about our business and transparent about the economics because I want young people to learn about money and building businesses. But 11 employees, 5 million in ad revenue in 2025, you're tracking past, from what I see here, 30 million in 2026, bootstrapped, profitable, zero outside capital, show was 17 months old at acquisition. This is what struck me, though, around 70,000 viewers per episode across platforms and 58,000 YouTube subscribers. So here at Prof G this year, we'll do, I

• 21:19Scott Galloway?

  think about 20 million, and we do substantially more downloads and video views than that. And yet you guys have 50% more revenue. And my, so now granted, I'm the idiot reading ZipRecruiter ads or telling people to drink Zbiotics before they go get fucked up.

• 21:37Speaker 07

  I introduced them. I introduced the founders of Zbiotics. I love them. I just ordered a bunch. It's a fantastic product.

• 21:43Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  Well, connected the team.

• 21:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, I connected the team. Steven, one of the co-founders went to high school with me. I absolutely love that product. I just ordered a bunch.

• 21:50Scott Galloway?

  I spent a lot of money on it. Is it because you guys are selling just sponsorships as opposed to ad insertions? Like, how do I get the same revenue per viewer that you guys?

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's a couple of things. So one, because I started this company branded Native and I had done, literally done thousands of like influencer podcasts, YouTube, you know, deals. So I was obsessed with the commercial side. And early on with that business, if I would connect an advertiser with a content creator, and the first few ads went well, I would immediately book out like an annual deal because I thought it was in the interest in both companies. I was like, the advertiser wants to allocate budget effectively, the content creator wants predictable revenue. And so I would do that when I could. And it worked well. And so for this business, like, you know, we had a small team. And

• 22:44Speaker 06

  the, knowing that we were having to show up and be live for three hours a day, I knew that we weren't going to have time to be doing a lot of ad sales. So I basically wanted to, we only sold advertising on an annual basis, which was good for us and good for the companies. So for last year, you know, we had kind of projections, this was 2025, our first like full year in business. We had projections and we would show those to advertisers and say like, hey, this is what we think we can do for the year. They would sign on, but they'd be on a fixed rate. So they would be committing to annual, annual spend with us, but they'd be on a fixed rate. So if we grew beyond what we were projecting,

• 23:25Speaker 06

  it was just like, you know, you know, free incremental impressions or reach. And so that was super important. Also because we wanted the ability to know how much revenue we were going to have in the month of March and April and May and things like that because we wanted to hire a team, we wanted to invest in our space, we have, I would say, one of the most unique, you know, podcast studios in, in the world. You know, it's not, it's certainly like sub a million dollars, but we, you know, we invested a ton of, ton of money into equipment last year. And part of that was like having this predictable revenue stream. And then the other thing that, the other approach that we took was, you know,

• 24:06Speaker 06

  I was pitching advertising with us as like sponsoring a Formula One team. So, you know, it wasn't like we were gonna, we would run ads for every, every company every day, but then we would put their logo on like, you know, merch that we would make, we would put their logo on clips. If we did, you know, anything IRL, we would show up for them there. And so it was like, you know, actually like, you know, a big tech company sponsoring a Formula One team, they know they're going to be on the car, they know they're going to be here, they know they're going to be everywhere. And so by having like, you know, basically one contract, and then we were very open and upfront, and it was part of the show that we were, we loved advertising. Like, we truly think it's amazing. I was

• 24:51Speaker 06

  like, I love that somebody anywhere in the world can listen to this content for free that we put so much effort into making. And it doesn't matter who you are, it's just free. Like, it's, it's truly, it's truly an incredible business model. It's very aligned. And so we were very, I would say, a lot of podcasts in tech, not you, I think you're very commercial. And that's a, that's a compliment. But a lot of podcasts in tech were like, embarrassed above, above ads. They were like, doing ads would be low status because I have a venture fund and I get management fees and things like that. And then the other thing is like, we had a focus early on, and it's still our focus, which is we believe

• 25:36Speaker 06

  that there's 200,000 people in the world, max, that we make content for. And these people are running businesses, they're investing in the companies that, of the founders that we talked to, they invest tens of billions of dollars a year, they can, you know, run companies that spend billions of dollars a year on everything from advertising to, to software, to cloud, et cetera. And we always believed that that was a big enough audience for what we were trying to do. Because we, in this business, you, we go live for three hours every day, we don't, we can't afford to talk about things that we aren't interested

• 26:21Speaker 06

  in. We can't afford to be explaining to people like what AWS is, you know, we can't, we don't, we don't have the time, nor do we want to take the time to explain SpaceX's business in the year 2026, because we assume that our audience has been following SpaceX and understanding SpaceX for a decade plus now.

• 26:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. The other thing with the, the audience, we found, yeah, we just found ways to get ad impressions to people that don't, normally don't see ads. I think you've talked about this too, about how certain powerful people basically don't experience advertising. We figured out how to get ads to them. One of the ways, during our, before our interview with Mark Zuckerberg, I read him a Ramp ad directly, because our ads are integrated.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  He put the headphones on and John started.

• 27:14Speaker 07

  Because I have to do an ad read before the interview starts. And with, with what we're doing right now, I'm sure the ads will be sliced in later, although shout out Zbiotics, they did get a freebie in here. But our ads are integrated, so there might be a Fortune 500 CEOs coming on, and right as they're coming on, they hear an ad, right, throughout the interview, they're looking at our screen, which has all the corporate logos, including the Ramp sponsorship right there. So there's ad integrations and logo placement there. And then after they hop off, they might still hear us read the next ad. And then every time we share one of their clips, a lot of, a lot of media companies and shows and podcasts

• 27:56Speaker 07

  have a clipping strategy, but they don't monetize the clips very well. So all of our clips have brands on them, logos, and then at the end of every one minute clip is a full ad read. And so, you know, of course, some people scroll to the next video by then, but a lot of people do stick around and they do see that ad impression. And so the actual ad impressions goes much further. And these clips, if it's, if it's some, you know, AI for legal company that's on, that's going to get sent to the competitor company, even if it's a very small audience, it's going to get sent around that small community. And so that clip might only get a few thousand views, but it's going to be with the right

• 28:39Speaker 07

  people because it's essentially trade, trade media.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. The other thing that we did, we realized early on that if we were going to be doing live podcast style ads, we weren't going to be able to do a 90 second ad. Like, people would just immediately bail. And so we, we pitched advertisers on, instead of giving you a smaller number of 90 second ads, we'll give you, you know, 250 20 second ads. And really selling that like repetition and frequency.

• 29:13Speaker 07

  So I've memorized all the ad reads. We have buttons that we can pull up and, and they take over the screen to show you the graphic really quickly. But it's not long enough that you want to pull out your phone and tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

• 29:25Speaker 06

  And just to give you an idea of how the, how, how the advertisers get like, sort of like strange incremental reach, we made a bunch of merch early on that people were really excited about. And we never sold merch because it's not our core business and it wouldn't really move the needle from a revenue standpoint. But we would, there were websites that were making fake TBPN merch, they're still out there, and putting our advertisers all over the merch in the way that we did. So they were building a business selling our advertisers, you know, basically like impressions for our advertisers. And so, yeah,

• 30:07Speaker 06

  and I think, I think it was, you know, I think like, the TBPN story is as much around like, marketing innovation and business model, innovation and format innovation, as it is timing, right? The timing of, of launching a show like this during one of, you know, the most historic technology cycle of our lifetimes certainly plays a part as well.

• 30:29Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I think that's really interesting.

• 30:33Scott Galloway?

  Construct our model, think of it as a Formula One team, because I find that our most lucrative deals, and it sounds like you figured this out sooner than us, are we'll just say to, you know, an AI company, you're, we're going to use your data, we're going to talk about you all the time, we'll disclose that you're an advertiser, but we want X dollars, and we're not going to get into this whole impression CPM game. We kind of vanished to bust out of that.

• 30:59Speaker 06

  No, and you're instantly losing when you do that, because if you're advertising enterprise products, one customer can pay for the entire ad, like placement, the entire deal, right? And so that was something we recognized early on with Ramp. I was like, yeah, we're going to get you, or at least help you close a public company. And if that is the only customer that we get you for the entire year.

• 31:22Speaker 07

  Job's finished.

• 31:23Speaker 06

  The, everything else is free. Everything else is free. And so, yeah, we, we had a couple of consumer partners early on, but we realized that like, like the people in our audience can actually go and buy $5 million a year of this SaaS company, or they can spend $20 million on cloud, or they could spend $50 million on inference.

• 31:44Speaker 07

  I mean, also recruiting.

• 31:45Speaker 06

  But they can only buy like one A sleep, right? Or maybe two.

• 31:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 06

  Right? And so we realized like, the best use of our ad inventory is, should be entirely. And so our friends with consumer companies, we'll just support them, like John Strinkin, Andrew Huberman's, you know, your remate company. And we don't even charge money for that, because.

• 32:04Speaker 07

  Yeah. We just serve, we just like them.

• 32:06Scott Galloway?

  Let's talk a little bit about, I hadn't heard of you guys, and then I heard about you all the time, because you're, my understanding is your first acquisition or media acquisition of OpenAI. And the rumor is you guys got sold for the low hundreds of millions, which is, I don't think any company, any podcast, at least less than two years old, has ever gotten sold for nine figures, much less what sounds like more than that, call it a 20X plus revenue multiple, which media businesses never trade at. So my first question is, why did OpenAI buy you?

• 32:38Speaker 07

  I think they saw what we were doing online and wanted to partner with us in the way that our brands had. So we, we had a very interesting history with OpenAI in that we were sort of contrarian supporters. So going back to the fact that the show is very pro advertising, when it was initially rumored that OpenAI was going to put ads in ChatGPT, the general response was, this is bad. We don't like ads. But we're the guys who love ads. And we think ads are a really powerful business model. And we think ads can make things free. And so.

• 33:19Speaker 06

  It was like, if you want to be OpenAI, you're going to need an ad-supported version of your product. Otherwise, like Silicon Valley, we were like, looking around being like, you guys think that everyone in the world can spend $20 a month on, on software? And you don't realize that like, their, most American households will like cancel a $10 a month streaming product if they don't have a show that they love in that very, very moment?

• 33:43Speaker 07

  We were, we were very pro ad. And so we were celebrating milestones along that path in a very sort, it was like half ironic, sort of funny, but also we did believe it was a real model. And we had done a number of stunts on the internet. We ran a Superbowl ad that, that did shout outs for everyone in our community. We had launched a product called Claude with ads that was sort of making fun of the Anthropic ad that was targeted at, it was punching at OpenAI, and OpenAI couldn't really punch back. And so we were laughing about that. And so we'd done a couple of these like viral marketing campaigns. And to be able to work with us, this was the deal that made the most sense to, to

• 34:27Speaker 07

  help on the marketing side. And that, and that includes things from billboards to the next Superbowl ad, I hope we can have a really strong voice in.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, we had been very loud about, you know, the need to, it felt like before AI was like real, and before it was something that we used every single day, the technology industry and the labs like needed to use fear-based marketing to raise the necessary capital to build a lot of these models. And, and it basically by like the midpoint of last year, we were seeing that, like, this sort of like fear-based approach to selling the product is going to just go really, really, really badly. And it has, right? Like, you know, look at public opinion around AI, people are scared of it, even though they find it very useful in their, in their day-to-day life. And so we had been, we had been unofficially

• 35:20Speaker 06

  giving OpenAI advice.

• 35:23Speaker 07

  Just through the show.

• 35:23Speaker 06

  Every single day through the show, being like, hey, like, where's our Steve Jobs?

• 35:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 06

  We was going to be like, and I'm not saying that's, I'm not saying that's Sam.

• 35:31Speaker 07

  Or even just, just talk about the product. Like, just talk about what the product can do for you. Cause there'll be a model release, and they'll talk about the stats and the benchmarks, instead of just being like, well, now you can go and ask for a custom piece of furniture, and it will just give you exactly the image of the piece of furniture that you want. You can just go get it made for cheaper than what you would get somewhere else, or something like that. Like, there's all these different use cases that come up, and they always come with like, a blog post and metrics. And it's not just like, hey, you can go use this thing for this particular problem now.

• 35:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. And the other thing is that we were always, we were sort of ironically and unironically pro technology throughout the entire, throughout the entire show. We still are. We think that there's so many companies that, that, you know, compete with OpenAI that are, that are fantastic. Like SpaceX is one of the greatest American companies in history. Anthropic is one of the greatest American companies in history. Google, you know, all these players, like, we generally just want the American technology sector to do well. We have friends at, at, at all of these companies.

• 36:37Scott Galloway?

  Well, thank God you guys are here, because they're, they're, they could use the help.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  It's, uh.

• 36:42Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 36:42Scott Galloway?

  It's been pretty rough there.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I'll give you another example. So like, I, when there was rumor that, that OpenAI was going to do an adult mode, and, and again, like, this was in Q, Q3, Q4 of last year.

• 36:58Scott Galloway?

  I thought Altman announced that. No? That was a rumor?

• 37:01Speaker 07

  He, he, well, he announced that, that they were planning on working on it, or rolling it out under a certain umbrella that would be maybe age gated or something, but it never launched, but there was.

• 37:14Speaker 06

  And that's the kind of thing that, that's the kind of thing that like, I was very, I, I was like, there's no way to, there's no, in my view, there was no way to defend that kind of action. In the same way that I don't think there's a way you can defend Zuckerberg launching, you know, prediction markets, you know, integrating, integrating gambling into, into.

• 37:33Speaker 07

  If there's no money, there's a gambling.

• 37:36Scott Galloway?

  I think the defense is it's good for shareholder value, but I appreciate what you're saying.

• 37:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:42Scott Galloway?

  I don't think that's going to get, I, I would, I would bet that both of those will launch both, but you guys are closer to it than I am.

• 37:48Speaker 07

  Do you think Meta will launch a, a gambling product that includes?

• 37:52Speaker 06

  Allows you to bet on whether or not OpenAI will do.

• 37:55Speaker 07

  And money? Because, because there was some rumors in the reporting that it might be all for like social points. And I think that's a much more nuanced discussion. Like, I, I, I'm not pro gambling, but also I've played role-playing games where I've been like, I want my score to be really high. And I don't know that trying to get the highest score on Tetris is the same thing as being at a Vegas casino until 4am with real money.

• 38:20Scott Galloway?

  It's fun to, from a commentator to talk to other commentators, and feel free to push back, as, you know, as you get older, you start to kind of figure out, you know, you don't know what you don't know. My sense is the business story that's unfolding in our world right now, is I think we're going to find out post-World Cup, that there was more money wagered on World Cup games on calcium poly market than have ever been wagered on anything before in history. And I think Zuckerberg, who is a brilliant business person, and only has one concern and one brand association, and that is delivering shareholder value. It's not protecting youth, it's not start, you know, stopping young girls from cutting themselves, it's not concern about radicalizing young men, it's

• 39:01Scott Galloway?

  not the polarization of our country, or coursing of our discourse, it's about shareholder value. And to be blunt, that's kind of what private companies are supposed to do. Right? And I think he looks at calcium poly market and says, I know, I'm going to take a 2 billion person hose and fire it at this, and potentially take some of that 10, 50, 100 billion dollars in value that these guys are creating. So I think it'll be a direct ripoff.

• 39:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I just look at it as like, if he really cared about shareholder value, he would be running what is the greatest business in the world, which is Meta Platforms advertising business.

• 39:37Scott Galloway?

  So stay focused. You think you should just stay focused?

• 39:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I think Meta would, I personally think Meta is like a, a $3 trillion company, and is going to permanently have a discount on it because of the metaverse, because of AI.

• 39:50Scott Galloway?

  Well, the metaverse is basically gone. He's basically shut that down.

• 39:54Speaker 06

  No, no, I know, but I'm, but I'm just saying like

• 39:55Speaker 07

  As a shareholder, like at any moment, the cash flow could disappear.

• 39:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, the business.

• 40:01Speaker 07

  It's like, it's like the goose.

• 40:02Speaker 06

  The business is ripping.

• 40:04Speaker 07

  But then the eggs get taken by the goose and gets sent off to a different farm. And you're like, ah, where are my, where's my golden egg? I, I, I do always wonder about the feedback loop of like, you identified a bunch of problems with the, with the platforms. Um, and I, and I do wonder like there, sometimes there is a, there is a flywheel there where, uh, you know, kids get addicted to social media, the next generation doesn't let their kids use the platforms. They don't get addicted, then that destroys shareholder value. And so if you're pure shareholder value maxi.

• 40:38Scott Galloway?

  You're suggesting that.

• 40:39Speaker 07

  He owns a hundred percent of the voting stock or whatever.

• 40:42Scott Galloway?

  You think, you think he's thinking, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm not going to publish. I'm going to be more thoughtful and, uh, measured around potential harms to young people, including evidence internally.

• 40:56Speaker 06

  I, I think.

• 40:57Scott Galloway?

  That show, hold on.

• 40:57Speaker 06

  I think the most simple explanation.

• 40:59Scott Galloway?

  Because their parents are going to see that. And when these kids grow up and realize that they had eating disorders and anxiety that they're not going to let their kids do it. You think that's actually influencing him right now?

• 41:12Speaker 07

  That's, that was my claim. My claim was that he has a long-term economic incentive.

• 41:16Scott Galloway?

  Agreed.

• 41:17Speaker 07

  He might be ignoring that incentive.

• 41:18Scott Galloway?

  The terminal, the terminal value 25 years out is pretty, is pretty low, right?

• 41:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:25Scott Galloway?

  I like this, so let me, let me bounce a thesis off of you guys and then I want to talk about.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  One, one more, one more thing because I, I wanted to close the loop on, uh, I think the simple, the simple explanation is like, it is culturally in Meta's DNA to launch a version of the hot thing, regardless of what it is. And so it doesn't, in, in.

• 41:46Speaker 07

  In consumer.

• 41:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, in consumer, it's like, it doesn't matter that it's gambling and that it is objectively harmful. It's the new hot thing in consumer, so we're going to do it and, and.

• 41:57Speaker 07

  If it's photos, it's photos. If it's videos, it's videos you acquire or you build internally.

• 42:02Scott Galloway?

  They're the, they're the, they're the largest second mouse in history, maybe beside Apple. I think, I think Zuckerberg is a genius at looking at something that's working and saying, reverse engineer it and then let, again, let's get our two billion people on it. A couple of just business stories, I, I like this game where, uh, you know, we, we go back and forth on something. I'm curious what you guys think of, so a tech IPO, I think it's pricing tomorrow that, it hasn't got a lot of attention, but JP Morgan and Goldman are taking them out.

• 42:30Speaker 06

  Spending spoons.

• 42:31Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. The, the Berkshire Hathaway have forgotten but beloved brands, 88% recurring revenue. You guys are probably too young for this, but AOL, Vimeo, WeTransfer, you know, is some, some pretty good businesses. Basically buy these things. I don't know if they buy them on the cheap, but buy them at what they probably think are reasonable prices. Use AI or whatever it is they do to kind of quite frankly, get efficiencies.

• 42:55Speaker 06

  Advanced Italians.

• 42:57Scott Galloway?

  There you go. And then lay off.

• 42:59Speaker 06

  No, that's literally, that's, that's, that's the view is like salaries are much cheaper in Italy than in the US. If you buy an American technology company.

• 43:06Scott Galloway?

  They, they claim it's really young people, but they hire young, young, inexpensive people out of Napoli that went to wherever, the Vicconi or whatever. Anyway, I'm just curious what you guys think of this IPO. What is your prediction on it? Do you like the company?

• 43:20Scott Galloway?

  It's odd, spending spoons, pricing tomorrow.

• 43:22Speaker 06

  So we've had, we've had Mr. Ferrari on the show. I think he might be coming on tomorrow.

• 43:28Speaker 07

  I have not tracked the price. We don't give like specific financial advice and like buy, sell ratings. I, I don't know. I don't know if I have a mature take on it.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, because, so we, our origins are in the private markets, right?

• 43:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 06

  Like John and I don't really do a lot of public markets investing outside of index funds. Like we, uh, the, the DNA and the, the core of the show is that we're trying to understand markets and strategies.

• 43:57Scott Galloway?

  You think it's a good company? We don't have to talk about valuation. I think it's a good company.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  I, I have no, I have no idea. I, I think that, uh, you would like, let's go, let's go actually line by line with their, with, with.

• 44:12Speaker 07

  What, what's the market cap? What's the P/E ratio? I think that's the biggest question.

• 44:16Scott Galloway?

  Q1 2025, there's a lot of growth there. Only 13% is organic. It's mostly a roll up, but the Q1 2025 was, uh, about 270 million and they lost 120 million. Q1 26, they're now at 625 and they pivoted to profitability 27 million. So call it two and a half billion dollar run rate and the valuation, I think it's somewhere between 18 and 20 billion. So about eight times revenues. The bull case is this is a SaaS company at a decent valuation with great brands, consumer brands, 88% recurring revenue. The bear case is that it's highly levered. It's for, it's, it's debt is four times EBITDA, which is pretty large leverage.

• 44:55Scott Galloway?

  Um, and I'm trying to figure out, I like the company because I love these brands and I love the idea of consolidating the backend around.

• 45:02Speaker 06

  What do you love about, what do you love about the brands though? Is it just like nostalgic for you?

• 45:07Scott Galloway?

  Uh, I think.

• 45:08Speaker 06

  Cause I look at these brands and I'm like, I've used almost every one of them once over the years.

• 45:12Speaker 07

  You've seen it churn.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  But I, I churned and I don't like, I like going and working with a company where I know that the founder is spending 14 hours a day obsessing over.

• 45:23Speaker 07

  I think the problem here is that you're an early adopter and you move on to the next thing to early adopt. I would look at it and I say, they're making a single dollar from AOL? That dollar is going to be around a thousand years from now. Because if they're still able to make money from a company that's so old and like they've already faced disruption from cloud, disruption from mobile, disruption from AI is probably not going to hurt those companies either. Because these are very resilient. If they've made it through so many transitions, I feel like the, the, the risk of like getting eaten by the big labs or getting slopped by some competitor that just clones you with vibe coding.

• 46:04Speaker 07

  That's much more of a risk when you're a young company that's growing and everyone's like, oh, they're making a lot of money. We should copy that. No one's thinking, let's copy Vimeo, let's copy AOL or whatever else they have in the portfolio. And as we've talked to some of the people that run those legacy brands, they're built on relationships at this point and advertiser partnerships, and it's not the same go-to-market motion that you see in some high-growth, hot startup in Silicon Valley in 2026. So I don't know.

• 46:36Scott Galloway?

  Let me give you another one, because I want to get through two more and before you go.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  Please.

• 46:40Scott Galloway?

  To start your daily three-hour podcast, which sounds like torture to me.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  Why don't we just stay, why don't we stay on and you can just open the show with us.

• 46:47Scott Galloway?

  Double it, see if we're here.

• 46:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:49Scott Galloway?

  Um, polygamy, poly, poly, wait, podcast polygamy.

• 46:52Speaker 07

  Something.

• 46:53Scott Galloway?

  The, uh, curious on your take on Snap. And I, this, this comment is pregnant with a, or this question is pregnant with a comment. I think, I'm actually thinking about buying some Snap. I think the biggest unlock in the tech market right now would be if Snap sponsored Spectacles Group.

• 47:09Speaker 07

  That, yeah, that'd be, that's the big looming question.

• 47:11Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, you have a business, they did a one and a half billion in Q1. So they'll do somewhere north of six this year, trading at a $7 billion market cap. Again, it has like the old, if Zuck has like, uh, you know, a, a 30 to 50% discount on his business because he's kind of erratic and just does what he wants, like, you know, uh, Snap has like, you know, uh, maybe, uh, 80% discount on it because.

• 47:37Scott Galloway?

  Stock's down 93% in five years.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm saying 80% relative to where maybe, maybe, maybe it should trade.

• 47:45Speaker 07

  Yep. Still zero marginal cost and network effects. So even if someone vibe codes a direct competitor, it's not going to have the liquidity pool of content. I agree with you. Um, but the question is, people have been asking for the spa, the specs spin out for years. Is it going to happen or is there something that's? Yeah, it's hard, it's hard to tell. There is something where I think you get in that seat and you enjoy the life of being the CEO of this company and.

• 48:15Scott Galloway?

  Being a young handsome billionaire with a model life. You think that's a good run?

• 48:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:18Scott Galloway?

  You think he's okay?

• 48:19Speaker 06

  It's like.

• 48:20Speaker 07

  I think it might be good.

• 48:21Speaker 06

  It's like being the dictator. It's like the, the dictator of an online nation of, of, you know, Zoomers.

• 48:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  It's a pretty good gig.

• 48:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think if you're a shareholder, you just have to know that you're going into that.

• 48:36Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

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• 50:51Scott Galloway?

  We're back with more from John Coogan and Jordy Hayes.

• 50:55Scott Galloway?

  Another thesis, I want to test the independence that's supposedly in your acquisition. I've never seen a flippanting like what's happened with OpenAI and Anthropic. I've never seen Hertz or Avis overtake Hertz the way Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI. Your thoughts?

• 51:10Speaker 07

  Didn't happen with Apple and Microsoft a bunch?

• 51:12Scott Galloway?

  It didn't happen in 90 days. My sense is this has been the most vicious number two to number one I've ever seen in the corporate world. And you may not even agree that they've superseded them. Thoughts?

• 51:22Speaker 07

  I mean, I think that's clear on the ARR numbers that have been leaking out.

• 51:27Scott Galloway?

  What are those? I haven't seen those.

• 51:29Speaker 07

  I mean, there was a, like, a lot of this comes from, like, complete anon's, but I think.

• 51:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, the state of news is like very funny where like one account with 60 followers on X will just say something. And then that that suddenly has taken its back. I agree with you. It's it's one of the most remarkable stories in history. It's a story about the value of focus, right? Like that, that to me is the is the it's it's we had never seen because I think it will be imprinted in. Like, we're in a situation where like the market for intelligence is growing so quickly that there's so many companies that are doing well. Like, the number seven code gen startup is like crushing it and raising it like a billion,

• 52:16Speaker 06

  multi-billion dollar valuation because because like there's just so much demand. And so that is part of it. And then I think this story will be imprinted on a bunch of founders today, which is that like, don't get complacent. You got to focus. Like, you have to respect your, you have to give ultimate respect to all of your competitors. And I think there, people couldn't imagine something like this because it hadn't, like, it hadn't happened before. So it wasn't, or at least, at least in this way, like historically, it's like, well, you had a few years to see this kind of thing coming. So like, ultimately, both companies are doing incredibly well. They both have amazing products.

• 52:58Speaker 06

  And I'm, I'm, we are, again, we are glad that, I am just glad that that both these companies are here in the United States. And and that we have a third and a fourth and a fifth and a sixth and a seventh and an eighth that are here in the US as well.

• 53:16Speaker 06

  I do have one, one for you. I want to get your take. I don't know if you saw Masa's slides from last week. He put out a new deck and he had some, he had some pretty interesting slide. He says, he's talking about the value of like soft, how you should value SoftBank. He says, what matters is not the eggs, it is the goose itself. Because he's saying like SoftBank is being valued at three eggs, but the goose is not valued. And he says, what matters is not the eggs, it is the goose itself. The true value is the power to keep life.

• 53:54Speaker 07

  The power of memes.

• 53:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, do you think, because he had another slide, and I'm going to pull this up. He had a slide in 2019 that just said SBG shareholder value, and it had a bunch of unicorns and an arrow that said toward further growth. And I think the stock is up like 5X since then. He said it was because of AI traffic. That's why it's going to go up. So he's actually had some pretty good calls, but the real question that we've been debating is like, is he aware of the power of just like silly goofy memes? Because it, it does pretty accurately convey like the idea he's trying to get across, which is like, you're valuing me based on my eggs, but why aren't you valuing the goose that's producing those eggs? But I'm curious what you think.

• 54:37Scott Galloway?

  Whenever I read his decks, I think, okay, you know, our uncle's back on meth. I don't, I don't, I just don't get them. And I'm convinced that he's actually an agent of the CIA who's been charged with transferring oil capital back from the Gulf to America with crazy fucking ideas. It PIF and Mubalaba fund and then transfers it to US entrepreneurs. So I think he's an agent of the CIA charged with reallocating capital or repatriating capital back from the Gulf.

• 55:08Speaker 07

  We have a tinfoil hat in the, in our studio.

• 55:11Speaker 06

  You don't buy it. If we were here, well.

• 55:14Speaker 07

  No, that's the problem.

• 55:15Scott Galloway?

  The goose.

• 55:16Speaker 07

  I'm listening.

• 55:18Speaker 06

  He's the goose. He's the golden goose. He's our, he's our golden goose. I just think, I just have to give him, I, I give him credit for, for putting together the silliest slide ever in 2019 that, that, you know, years and years, you know, four years before ChatGPT, that he was like, AI traffic is going to cause our stock to go up a lot. And he called it perfectly.

• 55:40Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, so last question, you guys have been very generous. First off, let me say, I'm really happy for you guys. What are you doing with all this money? And you can't say nothing. And I never really thought about the money. Like, give me.

• 55:53Speaker 07

  We're going to buy, have you heard of a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet?

• 56:00Speaker 07

  It's a convertible SUV.

• 56:01Speaker 06

  It's a really special car.

• 56:02Speaker 07

  Of them. No, we, it's, it's a process, I think. Next house for most of us.

• 56:10Speaker 06

  Well, I would say this, when I started working, when I started working, when I started working on companies, like, all, like, all I wanted was a, was a, was a.

• 56:21Scott Galloway?

  Car insurance?

• 56:22Speaker 06

  Four bedroom house and a four bedroom, I mean, I just wanted a four bedroom house in California.

• 56:27Scott Galloway?

  So 10, 12 million.

• 56:30Speaker 06

  No, no, yeah, well, it's crazy. But no, I think I was lucky to, to have built, you know, built my first company and done, done well with that. And so I think we're, we started the show doing it for the love of the game. Like, John and I, we get off the show, like, we get in the car to go home. We call each other. We just keep doing the show. Well, we just like, we genuinely just love talking about this stuff. And it's a, it's a blessing to be able to do it every day.

• 56:59Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, that comes through. And you guys, you guys are both dads? How old are your kids?

• 57:03Speaker 07

  I have a five year old and then twin two year olds, basically.

• 57:07Speaker 06

  Four.

• 57:08Scott Galloway?

  You're in Vietnam.

• 57:09Speaker 07

  Exactly. Which is why the money is odd, because the things I want, money can't buy, you know? Like, you want time with your kids, you want peace and quiet, you want to end a tantrum gracefully. You want to educate the five year old properly. You want to, you know, get better at chess and not win by too much of a margin, but let him win every once in a while, right? Exactly. These things are important and money can help, but it's a, it's a small piece of the puzzle in my.

• 57:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I think we, we built the, we built the business around our family life. We see our kids, we see our kids every single day. I have a four year old and a two year old and another on the way. And we, we spend a lot.

• 57:53Scott Galloway?

  A third on the way.

• 57:54Speaker 07

  Third on the way. So we're going to have six between us.

• 57:57Speaker 06

  That's another edge that we have. Like, we have something to work for. Most male podcasters don't have children. If you look at the top of the charts.

• 58:07Scott Galloway?

  Think of that. They don't have kids. So what, a lot of young men listen to this podcast. What advice would you have for, for guys who are just about, kind of thinking about having kids?

• 58:19Speaker 07

  I don't know. Early on, we, we recorded in, in that test episode that we did, we, we, we were kind of playing this exaggerated character. And Jordy had this quote where he was quoting Naval Ravikant saying, work like a lion. And it was very funny because the way he delivered that line was, it was like so over the top, pithy and thoughtful and so like high on his own supply with that line. But I do think that's a little bit of the story here was that.

• 58:48Speaker 06

  You mean Naval was?

• 58:49Speaker 07

  No, you, you were, you were playing like an exaggerated character.

• 58:53Speaker 06

  Oh, I was in it. I was in character.

• 58:54Speaker 07

  You were in character and you were, and you were saying work like a lion, like you had coined it, even though it was clearly a quote. And it was, anyway, I do think that's a little bit of the story here, which is that we, there's a lot of time to explore, a lot of time to build skills in a bunch of different areas. And like, we didn't even really go into this, but I spent like years learning every single piece of camera equipment, every single piece of microphone equipment and all the different tools that we needed, lighting, so that on day one, I was able to bring that and then coach the team and hire great people that could advance that. And now they know a lot more than me, but it took a while. I also spent a lot of time programming. So if we have someone on who's working on a software company, which most of people are, I'm a little bit more fluent there.

• 59:39Speaker 07

  Jordy had done all sorts of things in branding and, and, you know, marketing strategies and actually building fintech company. And he's deep in crypto and there's all these different areas that came together through these like little sprints that finally came together into like the right.

• 59:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I think credit to, credit to our, our spouses, like at least personally, like my, my wife is an amazing entrepreneur. She actually, she went to NYU and would, would sit in on your class back in the day. She never, she said she could never like actually get into the class, but she would just go. But we, you know, we, you know, once we had kids, we established like one of us, like we were like, it's time to divide and conquer. Because if we're going to be, if we're going to be great parents and, and have a great, like, it's hard to, it's hard to excel at two things at once. And so focus was like, you're going to, my wife made, you know, sacrifices with her career,

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  which was to, just because she could be, you know, raising venture and she's invested in a ton of great companies and all that stuff. She locked in on, on the household and I locked in on, on work. And we had very clearly established that at least for a few years, that was going to be how we were going to operate. And that allowed me to be the best version of myself and be, you know, overly obsessed with the work that we were doing. And it allowed our kids to be, to get all the love and attention that, that they need, that they've needed to thrive. And that means when I go home over the last few years, it's like, I get to be there with them. I get to be present.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  I get to be as great of a dad as I can, but I wasn't worried about like, oh, what, what, what exact, what preschool are they going to? Or when is music class? Like, we had fully divided and conquered. And again, that's like a temporary sacrifice, but has delivered, you know, great results for us. And I think you only get that by like really clearly establishing that versus just assuming things or hoping that, that it'll end up that way.

• 1:01:44Speaker 07

  The other, the other piece of advice. For young people is probably around like where to live, where to go. There are these cities that are complete vortexes. San Francisco is like this AGI vortex right now. It's a vortex for venture capital and startup energy. And I'm extremely glad that I moved to San Francisco right after college because I was exposed to a ton of different aspects of the industry just naturally. I don't think I would have done well if I had stayed there permanently. I think that by leaving San Francisco, it gave me a completely different perspective on the world that has then allowed me to succeed even in tech, even though I'm outside of the vortex.

• 1:02:28Speaker 07

  And, and more than anything, it's just good for my life personally and my wellbeing, I think. But I think that as a young person, there's, there definitely is some, a lot of value to if you want to be in finance, going to New York City is probably good early on. Burning the ships, my first, I lived in a, I lived in a one bedroom apartment, the Tenderloin, with three people. It was $1,500 a month. It was complete squalor, but we were in the mix and we got exposed to a lot of things. And that was extremely valuable. And I think that just putting yourself in the action very early on, no matter what the cost, if you're, if you're early in your career can have a lot of benefits.

• 1:03:11Scott Galloway?

  John Coogan and Jordy Hayes are the creators of TBPN, a popular daily show covering the biggest stories in tech and business. I'm, I'm, it's, it's, your story is such a nice story. You're impressive young man who did something you're good at and you had a great exit. But more than anything, I'm just really glad that young, talented men are having a lot of kids. I think it's wonderful to have kids being raised in households, loving, secure households with very present fathers. So I think that's actually the nicest thing about your story. Very much appreciate your time today and congratulations on your success.

• 1:03:47Speaker 07

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:03:47Scott Galloway?

  Thank you, Scott.

• 1:03:50Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janer. Kami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.

• 1:04:11Speaker 09

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