One day in January, Dwarkesh Patel and Sholto Douglas dropped to the black rubber floor of a San Francisco gym to compete in the Chestmaxxer Challenge, seeing who could do the most push-ups in 60 seconds.
The guys weren’t there just for a workout. It was show time. Patel, 25, is a podcaster who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI; Douglas is an AI researcher at Anthropic. And behind them, recording the whole thing, was Jayden Clark, 27, host of “MOTS,” or “Members of Technical Staff,” a podcast about San Francisco tech culture. Clark was filming for the pilot of “Swole as a Service,” a fitness-meets-AI show where researchers debate frontier machine learning while lifting.
As they cranked out push-ups, Clark, who goes by Creatine Cycle on X, lobbed out questions. “Are we sure we are not in a bubble?”
Their minute complete, Patel and Douglas collapsed on the floor. “The value’s extremely rational, underpriced,” gasped Douglas. “This feels like pillow talk,” added Patel.
Welcome to the tech-bro podcast industrial complex, where apparently every wannabe mogul has a podcast. There are so … many … shows. Jack Altman, founder of Alt Capital, has “Uncapped,” a VC podcast with guests like venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, and his brother Sam. Stripe billionaire and cofounder John Collison recently launched “Cheeky Pint,” with guests including Armstrong and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman. And in January, Andreessen Horowitz, the powerful Silicon Valley venture capital firm, launched a fellowship to train tech-friendly content creators.
The shows are increasingly shaping what gets funded, who gets platformed, and what gets believed. And they play an increasingly influential role in the tech ecosystem. With traditional media evermore suspect, tech-bro podcasts offer industry leaders a direct line to their target audiences. In November, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever broke years of public silence by appearing on Patel’s show. And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave “TBPN” (founded by Soylent’s John Coogan and angel investor Jordi Hays) his first interview after OpenAI’s for-profit shift.
Some shows have grown into empires. The “TBPN” podcast, launched in 2024, is on track to pull in $29 million this year. “All-In,” the VC gabfest launched in 2020, has more than 1 million YouTube subscribers; cohost David Sacks now serves as President Donald Trump’s AI adviser.
An obsession with AI isn’t the only thing these shows have in common: Almost all are hosted by men. More than 90% of popular business and tech podcasts have males on the mic, according to a recent UC Annenberg study.
Just don’t call them tech bros. “I would not call myself a tech bro,” said Clark. “I associate tech bro with not looking after oneself, and maybe not being super great socially. They’re high earning, but slobs.”
“I don’t know what a tech bro is, to be honest,” said Lenny Rachitsky, a former Airbnb engineer whose “Lenny’s Podcast,” launched in 2022, has surpassed 20 million downloads (opens in new tab) and ranks at No. 6 on Apple’s technology charts. “I think they’re actually really smart, insightful, deep-thinking people.”
The podcast pipeline
The tech podcast deluge comes as fewer Americans place their trust in traditional media. A recent Gallup poll found that only 28% trust the media to report fairly. Podcasters have moved into that gap: 23% of listeners trust them more than traditional outlets, Pew Research found.
“The younger the audience, the more likely they are to not trust traditional institutions and media. … They’re talking at them, not talking with them,” said Jim Louderback, the former CEO of VidCon and author of the Inside the Creator Economy newsletter. (opens in new tab) “Trust is the most important new currency that’s out there. If you can build trust, you can build a lot of other things on the backs of that.”
Kaya Yurieff — who founded Scalable (opens in new tab), a creator-economy media company, in October and signed with CAA in January — agreed. “Trust in institutions and legacy media is just kind of at all-time lows, and people really trust people,” she said. “Information is easy to access now. What people want is a point of view — someone to connect the dots.”
The podcasts also serve as a signifier for particular values and interests, with different shows aligning to different tribes. “You self-identify by being a [fan of] ‘TBPN’ or an ‘All-In,’” suggests Louderback. “It’s like this is a group of people that all want to hang out and be together, and the content acts as a unifying force.”
The high-profile success of many podcasts becomes a lure for others who see that having one can open doors to access and capital. “People see these success stories and think, ‘Maybe I can make this work for myself,’” Yurieff said. “During the pandemic it was, ‘every VC has a podcast.’ Now we’re in another big wave.”
The podcasts are booming too because there’s a large audience outside of tech and Silicon Valley hungry for an insider’s view on what’s happening here.
Ashlee Vance, a veteran tech reporter, sees the boom from two perspectives: as a journalist and as a creator. Last year, he left Bloomberg Businessweek and launched Core Memory (opens in new tab), a science-tech media startup that produces videostreams, documentaries, and a Substack. “It shockingly, feels like everybody’s got a podcast,” Vance said, adding that listeners want shows that make sense of the San Francisco culture “spilling out of the rise of AI.”
Vance agrees that the surge reflects tech’s frustration with legacy media. “I think tech journalism, as a whole, overcorrected. There’s this underlying baseline of cynicism,” he said, noting that industry-centric shows are allowed a level of detail most traditional media outlets would avoid. With an independent show, “you don’t have to dumb things down. I don’t mind challenging the viewer sometimes to keep up.”
That resonates with Rachitsky. “It has always felt like there’s a lot of anti-tech, anti-progress kind of bias in a lot of media,” he said. He pointed to the skepticism toward AI as an example. Where mainstream media regularly flags worst-case scenarios about AI and job security, his audience for “Lenny’s Podcast” is much more positive. He surveyed 1,750 (opens in new tab)of his listeners and found that 70% said they enjoyed their job more due to AI, though many also felt less secure. “There’s a lot of interest in listening to people who are optimists.”
But Rachitsky stops short of suggesting podcasts are traditional media’s successor. “Someone without a lot of context or possibly some bias is not going to give you the full story.”
Owning the mic
This being Silicon Valley, having a podcast is not just about the show. It’s also a way to signal authority and status — and opens up access to talent and capital.
Andreessen Horowitz leaned into this idea in January, when it unveiled the inaugural a16z New Media Fellowship. The eight-week program includes dinners and lectures with Marc Andreessen and Replit CEO Amjad Masad. Out of 2,000 applications, the firm chose 65 fellows, including researchers from Google AI (opens in new tab) and OpenAI (opens in new tab) and employees of Vercel and Prime Intellect. “The cultural power this elite cohort holds is immense,” the firm wrote in a blog post. Apparently, Andreessen Horowitz wants people who can ship products and tell stories.
Clark was among those selected as an a16z fellow. His show “MOTS” is bare bones: an iPhone on a tripod and two DJI microphones (the mic of choice for the tech-bro crowd). His topics are very much of the zeitgeist, ranging from Bay Area gender ratio parties to AI-pilled people. “The vibe in SF now is that events are over, and group chats are in,” he said.
Clark moved from Australia in 2017 to study saxophone at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. But he soon drifted into the startup world through gym buddies and eventually began working with the “TBPN” team, clipping short snippets of shows onto social media. There, he met Brent Liang, now at Andreessen Horowitz, who recruited him for the fellowship. “I didn’t even really ask what it was,” Clark said, adding that if “a16z wants to use my name for something, you don’t say no.”
For many fellows, the draw isn’t just proximity to power; it’s the lure of potentially working with one of Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies. The firm has offered Kalshi, Anduril, Deel, and ElevenLabs as possible collaborators.
There are other media-for-techies fellowship programs, too. Akshyae Singh, a software developer, launched a competing initiative in January called the Frame Fellowship (opens in new tab), pitched as bringing more diverse voices into the AI safety influencer space. “The content creators in this space [are] largely dominated by white males,” Singh said. “We need more representation in the space. … You have so much influence on how people think.”
Sarah Zhang, 20, applied for the a16z fellowship but did not make the cut. “You ask your closest friend at a16z to nepo you in,” she explained. Zhang hosts “Wyrd, (opens in new tab)” an interview series about founders with unusual life trajectories. Her guests have included Justin Waldron of Zynga and Eric Zhu, founder of Sperm Racing, the viral competitive event. “I’m obsessed with talking to people whose paths make no sense on paper,” she said, “to make tasteful public therapy.”
For her part, Zhang has no problem with being labeled a tech-bro podcaster. ”I’m super Elon-pilled. Is that a bad thing?” And she is confident that the new soft power in Silicon Valley is sound. “I’m really SF-pilled. I’m really doomerism-pilled. But if I can make this work? Most AGI-proof job ever.”