How to Survive the Chaos Economy
Tech Bros, American dynamism, who makes money in sports media.
POD 131: Tech Bros With Mics
This week, Brian, Troy, and Alex break down how tech is quietly building its own media empire—slick, founder-led, and fully aligned with industry interests. From TBPN to Turpentine, it’s not journalism—it just looks like it. They also explore the “Chaos Economy” through Foxconn’s EV pivot and unpack why analogies beat logic in shaping how we process tech shifts. Plus, Pete Buttigieg’s appearance on Flagrant shows that even politics is adapting to the influencer era. Out Friday AM. Listen. Watch
PVA CONVERSATION
Brian: Silicon Valley is quietly building a full-stack media ecosystem — and it’s running an influence arbitrage to do it.
The Technology Brothers Programming Network, aka TBPN, is an interesting example. It’s a daily, live-streamed YouTube show hosted by John Coogan (formerly of Founders Fund) and Jordi Hays. It looks like CNBC—three-panel shots, tickers, a stream of guests—but it operates more like media infrastructure for an industry.
It has a ton of sponsors, and many are Founders Fund portfolio companies. They have the logos running on the stream, and bring on the sponsor CEO for a softball chitchat. Watch marketplace Bezel’s CEO was holding forth on how tariffs will affect the watch market. Few people watch the livestream. The point is to produce the clips that get shared. The view counts are pretty low, but I still think this is significant for a few reasons:
Media influence is cheap if you don’t need it to be independent. You get all the optics of legitimacy – studio-quality production, thought leader guests, professional framing – without any of the overhead or headaches of journalism.
It’s not about reach. It’s about positioning. Even with modest viewership, the right 1,000 people seeing this—VCs, operators, regulators, founders—makes it valuable. It’s narrative positioning for insiders.
It reflects a broader revaluation of media’s purpose. This isn’t content for engagement. It’s content as infrastructure—built to reinforce consensus, shape perception, and drive capital flows. TBPN is a showroom, not a newsroom.
Troy, do you care about this, or would you rather move onto the Chaos Economy, which admittedly is higher stakes?
TROY: The guys are handsome. The media mechanic is pragmatic — three hours of live daily content production on YouTube repackaged for X, Insta and TikTok. It takes real skill to gab live about Kevin Systrom’s Meta courtroom revelations for 30 minutes. I like where it is going but it not a hugely compelling media product yet. Podcasts offer me a depth, expertise and personality that this next-gen CNBC lacks. This is a youthful take on an old news format. It needs to cook for a while. Let’s see if it sustains.
I did enjoy your broader take (paywall):
The tech industry feels burned by journalistic coverage. It believes the institutional press is focused on accountability—and has spent two decades trying to influence coverage. After many missteps in executing its go-direct playbook, an emerging constellation of tech-friendly media has risen, some directly controlled by venture capital firms, others subsidized and supported, and all broadly sympathetic to the Silicon Valley powerbroker consensus view of tech’s essential role in innovation….
Tech didn’t lose faith in journalism. It ran the numbers—and decided it could do better alone.
Or as Marc Andreessen recently admitted, “We sometimes called ourselves a media company that monetizes via investing.”
The Chaos Economy concept is kinda half baked, but I’ve been trying to square two very different vibes I see in the country — the self-inflicted macro economic despair with the intense micro innovation I see everyday, particularly around AI. Is there a silver lining? Are we proceeding to a new kind of economic reality, one that mirrors the changes in media that happened over the last 20 years? Where the spread of new enabling platforms (Then: the internet, social, mobile. Now: compute, LLMs, robotics) creates new resilience and a new understanding of the economy and relationship between individuals, corporations and institutions.
America remains the home of hustle and dreams. That is its great virtue. Combine this energy with the world’s most sophisticated capital markets and scale and you get a thundering engine of innovation. AI is generational RedBull for the hustlers. Or as AI thinker Andre Karpathy puts it, "AI is the new electricity, but it’s personal." It creates energy from the individual up through the rest of the economy. The Chaos Economy harnesses and creates growth despite everything negative floating around it.
My point is this… like in media, in the Chaos Economy innovation will happen at the edges, supported by new LLM platform “brains”. Innovators will rely less on institutions (see Harvard). Scale advantages of large organizations will continue to give way to smaller teams. Individual energy will supersede macro obstacles.
The Chaos Economy’s virtue is distribution of innovation to millions of self-interested innovators. It could become the engine of a new American moment that thrives despite uncertainty. The Tech Bros are restless. I will remain optimistic.
ANONYMOUS BANKER
Transformation in Sports Media
We talked last week about capital flowing into two golf-focused media platforms: Good Good Golf and Pro Shop. Both pair media presence with complementary commerce to monetize fan engagement, a microcosm of the broader transformation reshaping sports media. For decades, ESPN embodied centralized power, extracting affiliate fees nearly twenty times richer than an average cable network and, in turn, underwriting the modern sports-rights arms race and skyrocketing franchise values. Cord-cutting and direct-to-consumer models are dismantling that hub-and-spoke system, scattering economic power across a new network of leagues, teams, creators, and digital platforms.
Policy changes have accelerated the trend: looser league rules let private-equity firms buy team stakes, pulling fresh capital to the field. In the past week alone, Ryan Smith’s Halo Experience began raising $1 billion for sports-tech infrastructure, while Cynosure | Checketts Sports Capital launched a $1.2 billion vehicle aimed at teams, venues, and digital media assets. These investors are not trying to rebuild ESPN; they are funding novel ways to squeeze value from consumer interest in sports with some interest in sports rights but a broader interest in fan engagement and their purchasing power. Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s TMRW Sports, already “worth” ~$500 million before its debut event, illustrates the playbook: treat sports as a software-defined platform that can power broadcasts, betting, gaming, and immersive experiences.
The winners in sports media that emerge will blend three key ingredients: (1) at least a slice of premium rights/IP to anchor attention; (2) longer-form, sports-adjacent storytelling that deepens narrative equity; and (3) always-on mechanisms (social channels, fantasy, commerce, micro-bets, creator collaborations) that let fans engage (and spend) long after the final whistle. Businesses that stitch those layers together can turn episodic viewership into durable, high-margin digital relationships, capturing enormous value and creating sustainable businesses.
Nice links from the chat
The hostile internet is driving us crazy, argues the Financial Times. LINK
The Washington Post just traded the SEO hamster-wheel for a straight licensing check from OpenAI. LINK
Google has finally abandoned its six-year quest to replace third-party cookies; billions spent on Privacy Sandbox now look like sunk cost. LINK
Ad-buyers tally the “endless millions” wasted chasing that now-defunct plan. LINK
A looming DOJ remedy could break up Google’s ad-tech stack and loosen its grip on open-web advertising. LINK
Geoffrey Hinton says humans are “analogy machines,” a point Barack Obama uses to frame AI’s threat to white-collar work. LINK
Obama’s full analogy, in tweet form. LINK
Andreessen Horowitz acqui-hires podcaster Erik Torenberg, doubling down on “principals media.” LINK
Gergely Orosz is the Lenny of programming. He’s now got 1 million followers. He’s a programmer in the Netherlands (and a TRB Pro member). There are many more Gergelys in the making. LINK
Florida-based Infinite Reality claims it raised more than $3 billion from a sole unnamed investor. That would make the obscure company the beneficiary of one of the biggest funding rounds of the year. Not all is as it seems. LINK
Small is the new big? The new flex seems to be how few people you have vs how many people you have. This doesn’t last, but is this a better way to build something lasting? Besides, if Bill Gates has AI is replacing doctors and teachers in 10 years, maybe it is best to hold off on hiring. LINK
More evidence the lean-team flex is spreading. LINK
VCs tout efficiency over headcount in the AI era. LINK