OpenAI bought a livestream no one watches

When I learned of TBPN’s existence at some point late last summer. I couldn’t really understand what I was looking at. It was a livestream, hosted on X (and elsewhere), that seemed as if it had suddenly materialized out of nowhere. Its nearly-identical hosts had a professional studio, massive brand deals, and, somehow, unfettered access to the most powerful men in Silicon Valley. Almost nothing they ever asked those powerful men was important or interesting, of course. But the show was impressive, at least from a technical standpoint.

I have since learned that TBPN stands for the Technology Business Programming Network (lol), and the identical hosts call themselves The Technology Brothers (lol). Technology Brother #1 is named John Coogan, and he co-founded Soylent and a nicotine pouch company. And Technology Brother #2 is named Jordi Hays, and he ran a YouTube marketing company and worked in fintech. TBPN’s president, Dylan Abruscato, previously worked at HQ Trivia. All of this would explain the slick production, extensive access to Silicon Valley executives, and, of course, the complete lack of hard-hitting interviews.

In January, Vanity Fair called Coogan and Hays the “Gordon Gekkos of the venture capital era,” which is a decent way to think about the show’s sudden rise in popularity. (Though, let’s put an asterisk here and circle back in a sec.) The Gordon Gekko comparison is also a useful way to understand TBPN’s massive ad deals. A premium livestream hawking luxury goods for the new K-shaped America. TBPN has also been compared to SportsCenter, which, seeing as how desperate Silicon Valley is to seem masculine right now, is, if anything, a smart pitch for a show.

Last week, TBPN formalized their cozy relationship to Big Tech, announcing they had sold the show to OpenAI. The deal is reportedly in the hundreds of millions range. TBPN says the contract protects their editorial independence. Excited to see if we ever find out if that matters or not. The acquisition was reportedly brokered on the OpenAI side by Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications. Simo, while working at Facebook in the 2010s, was behind the, I would argue, disastrous push into Facebook Watch. Where Facebook commissioned a whole bunch of shows no one watched. We’ll have to wait and see if this pans out the same way for OpenAI.

The deal is so confusing that it sent Stratechery’s Ben Thompson down a doom spiral. “I don’t know what in the world OpenAI is doing here,” Thompson wrote. “It’s simply a deal that makes no sense — and, when you put it in such basic terms, it makes you consider how many things OpenAI has done over the last few years that make no sense.”

What’s crazy is, I’m not even sure it would make sense if you were looking at it as a simple creator economy play. Which is why we need to circle back to TBPN’s popularity here. Let’s go platform-by-platform.

The show has less than 60,000 followers on YouTube and their top video of all time, published nine months ago, has 370,000 views. Their livestreams on the platform usually have somewhere between 4,000-7,000 views. On X, ostensibly their home base, they have around 330,000 followers and livestreams do slightly better, if you believe those view counts. A livestream from last week, pre-OpenAI acquisition, had about 14,000 views. They hide their Substack audience numbers (notable), but based on public engagement, I’d estimate it’s under 100,000 subscribers.

Now, Technology Brother #1, Coogan, has written about their desire to remain niche. “If TBPN hits 10M subscribers, something has gone very wrong,” he wrote on LinkedIn last month. “From the very beginning we knew our core audience size: about 200,000 founders, executives, and position players in tech and finance. It may seem small but we were building for a very specialized audience.”

Which is fine if, as Coogan wrote, you’re “handmaking” a show every day and forging your own relationships with advertisers. I’d argue — if any bluechip advertisers are reading this — that we here at Garbage Day probably have roughly same sized audience. (I’m not jealous to be clear lol, I work as hard as I possibly can to never have the kind of audience TBPN has.) But TBPN’s size makes no sense if you plan on turning them into the official news network of a company like OpenAI. Also, as Thompson points out in his Stratechery post, TBPN, proudly, does not have a mainstream audience and likely will never get one.

Which has led me to two conclusions, conclusions that don’t necessarily contradict each other. The first, and the dumbest, which means it’s likely the closest to reality, is that OpenAI executives are so far up their own asses that none of this occurred to them. Rich people love buying stuff, especially if other rich people like it. TBPN is a country club every rich doofus in San Fransisco hangs out at, OpenAI bought the property. But there is, perhaps, another way of looking at this that makes a little more sense strategically. OpenAI sunset their AI video app Sora and then immediately turned around purchased a livestream produced by human beings, the one thing they literally cannot replace with their software. Which is why I do not see this as a story about the widdle podcast that could getting a big payday. Instead, this is an AI company buying a fresh piece of internet real estate that hasn’t been poisoned by the toxic waste they unleashed. I’ve read a bunch of arguments that OpenAI was buying influence, but I actually think they were buying the exact kind of “trust,” or “authenticity,” they’ve worked so hard to destroy. And they’ll likely destroy it anyways. But based on everything I’ve read from the Technology Brothers, it seems like they’ll be fine with that.

Data analyst and pundit Nate Silver, who I think is often wrong, is definitely right in his new assessment of X. He published a piece this weekend, titled, “Social media has become a freak show.” His data proves what we already knew. X is a right-wing website and all of the biggest accounts are conservative influencers. Elon Musk is the account growing the most month-to-month, but close behind him is right-wing publisher Eric Daugherty, someone I had actually never heard of before.

X’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, is real mad about Silver’s piece and the two of them have been duking it out all weekend. The feud did result in one very funny moment, though. Bier got mad at Silver for quote-posting his responses to Bier’s replies. “Can you stop quote tweeting without the context? It’s intellectually dishonest,” Bier finally wrote.

Which isn’t really Silver’s problem. He isn’t the one that designed quote-posts to remove all context. It’s almost like something maybe Bier should try and fix! (Bluesky has fixed this btw.)

Cheekface is an American rock band that is, uh, a bit of an acquired taste. I’d compare them to Cake or Ween or The Dismemberment Plan. If you disagree with me about that comparison, please do not email me. Anyways, they’re fun. I think their new track “Black Site” is cool. They do, also, have a fair amount of spoken-word sections in their songs that are, again, an acquired taste.

Unfortunately, Cheekface keeps trying to share their music on X. And the two main demographics on the site these days — right-wingers, whose conservative sensibilities are violently threatened by art they don’t understand, and teenage pop stans, whose conservative sensibilities are violently threatened by art they don’t understand — have been having a weeks-long freakout over the band’s music.

Dumping on “cringe” music has also become something of an engagement hack on X. This is not an exhaustive — or linear — list of artists X has gone after over the last six months, but they spent the winter screeching about Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Sombr, that one horn band with the choreographed dance moves (again), Hobo Johnson, and most recently, Vampire Weekend.

The immediate hatred of Cheekface was enough to lead some users to wonder if this was coordinated. The band announced last month they would not do an AT&T commercial due to the company’s ties to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Could this be right-wing backlash? I actually don’t think there’s much a conspiracy here. I’m inclined to agree with Keegan Bradford, the guitarist of the band Camp Trash, and one of the louder voices on alternative music Twitter. “I don’t think there’s any backlash,” he wrote on X. “They’re releasing new songs and the same people are reacting just as negatively as last rollout lol.”

Speaking of fandoms and anti-fandoms, the second season of The Pitt is nearing the finale and fans of the show have spiraled out into a particularly strange beast. As writer and comedian Mike Drucker wrote on X last week, “Geez Louise, people who love The Pitt really seem to hate the shit out of people who love The Pitt.”

Again, I’m not trying to be exhaustive here, because I actually find writing about fandom discourse to be wildly tedious, but from what I can tell there are several pockets of the Pitt fandom that all believe their version of the fandom to be the correct one. First, we have the people who hate the show’s star, Noah Wyle, because they believe he’s a zionist. He hasn’t confirmed or denied he is or isn’t, but it — and other past controversies — continue to hang over the show.

The show also deserves some very real criticism for the way its handled Black characters. There are all kinds of rumors about why actor Tracy Ifeachor left the show abruptly after season one and that seems to have dovetailed with the fanbase’s distrust of Wyle. Again, like with the alleged zionism, it’s become a weird vibe that hangs over the show.

And, finally, there are the shippers, the fans who are constantly fighting with each other over whether or not different characters are gay and/or in love with each other. Long-time Garbage Day readers can probably fill in the blanks here on how nasty these conversations can get.

The Pitt’s unruly fandom hit a fever pitch last week, when a fan on X tried to organize a harassment campaign against Warner Bros’ marketing team. On top of everything I outlined above, fans of the show have been spiraling this season because it has been darker and more political than the first. And it seems like fans aren’t happy their comfort characters are being put through the ringer.

All of which is to say, it’s very weird when antagonistic fandoms like this pop up and it’s even weirder that there’s basically nothing anyone can do about it once they start going off the rails.

Sue Jacquot is an 81-year-old woman who started gaming on YouTube as a way to raise money for her grandson’s cancer treatments. A horrible indictment of American healthcare, sure, but, luckily, her grandson’s cancer is in remission and she’s still making fantastic videos. Her username is GrammaCrackers.

She started out making Minecraft videos. But, as someone who became extremely addicted to Fortnite over the winter, I really related to her video playing through the game for the first time, embedded above.

(instagram.com/reels/DWo7xOfkQMK/)

P.S. here’s ghoulmaxxing.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***