Why Distribution is King 👑

🏀 0 Days: CBB National Championship in Indianapolis

🏇 26 Days: Kentucky Derby in Louisville

⚽ 66 Days: FIFA World Cup Kicks Off in Mexico City

Today’s Newsletter will take ≈ 4 minutes ≈ to read

Subscribers Goal: 7,952 / 10,000 (79.5%)

■■■■■■■■□□

This past week made it official. The shift from old media to new media isn't "coming." It happened. And the smartest people in the world are spending billions on it.

Let me break down what happened.

OpenAI just paid hundreds of millions for a show most people have never heard of.

On Wednesday, OpenAI acquired TBPN - a daily three-hour live tech talk show hosted by Jordi Hays and John Coogan - for a reported price in the low hundreds of millions.

Here's what makes this insane.

TBPN launched 18 months ago. They didn't have massive viewership. A few thousand concurrent viewers on a good day. Their biggest episode hit around 70,000 views. 68K subscribers.

But the guests they booked? Zuckerberg. Sam Altman. James Cameron. Evan Spiegel.

The bottom line: OpenAI didn't buy a media company for reach. They bought it for distribution and voice. They want a trusted channel to shape how the world talks about their company. That's how valuable distribution has become.

And OpenAI isn't alone in this.

Elon Musk bought X. Larry Ellison's consortium bought TikTok. Now OpenAI buys TBPN. The pattern is impossible to ignore - the most powerful people in tech are spending whatever it takes to own distribution. Not build products. Not ship features. Own the conversation.

LeBron James chose a YouTube golf channel over every legacy platform on earth.