“TBPN” and the Rise of the Tech-Friendly Talk Show

Cramer was gesturing to the dynamic that has enabled “TBPN” to thrive. Over the past few years, the tech world has become increasingly hostile to traditional media outlets, dismissing them as technologically illiterate or openly antagonistic toward the industry. But tech founders have proved willing to talk to Hays and Coogan: in just the past six months, the pair has conducted wide-ranging interviews with Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir. After OpenAI announced its transition into a for-profit company in October—representing a windfall for Microsoft, which owns a major stake in the company—the first interview that the Microsoft C.E.O, Satya Nadella, gave was not with CNBC, or the Wall Street Journal; it was with “TBPN.”

“TBPN” ’s popularity among big tech C.E.O.s isn’t difficult to understand. Hays and Coogan are knowledgeable about the industry, and, perhaps more importantly, excited by it. “We consider ourselves to be part of a group that is obsessed with how business models work, how products work,” Hays said. Coogan jumped in: “Enthusiast media, some might say.” Much of the show is dedicated to the minutiae of life in Big Tech firms. The hosts zealously report on mundane press releases and earnings reports, and they cover hirings and firings with a similar passion to that exhibited on ESPN ahead of the N.B.A. trade deadline. Their interviews with C.E.O.s, while extensive, are inherently friendly. With Karp, they asked about his kettlebell routine; after Nadella announced the OpenAI news, they offered him a celebratory bang of a gong. “Give it a quick hit for twenty-seven per cent.” (Microsoft owns twenty-seven per cent of OpenAI.)

“TBPN” is part of an emerging ecosystem of tech-aligned media, which includes the interminable Lex Fridman show—which once ran an eight-and-a-half-hour-long episode about Neuralink—and web shows like Molly O’Shea’s “Sourcery,” which, last year, uploaded a clip in which Karp showed O’Shea around Palantir’s office and pulled out a samurai sword and began swinging it around. O’Shea set the footage to a DMX song, and it went viral. (A few months before her interview with Karp, she had appeared on “TBPN,” wearing a baseball cap that read “PLTR,” Palantir’s stock ticker.) There’s also Andreessen Horowitz’s program, “The a16z Show,” which hired away MrBeast’s chief of staff earlier this month, and the “All-In” podcast, which is perhaps the most influential show in this genre, considering that one of its co-hosts, David Sacks, is currently in charge of the White House’s A.I. and cryptocurrency policy. A few months ago, “TBPN” helpfully made a map of this quickly growing ecosystem, slotting themselves in between the categories “Neo Corporate Media” and “Neo Trad Media,” near such outlets as “Cheeky Pint,” a podcast where the president of the fintech company Stripe shares a round of Guinness with executives like Elon Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, and OpenAI’s in-house corporate podcast, which, in its most recent episode, explained how introducing ads to ChatGPT would “benefit all of humanity.”

“The scrutiny that ‘TBPN’ has gotten is that they’re not necessarily asking the hard questions,” Emily Sundberg, the editor of “Feed Me,” an influential business Substack, told me, a few days after her own “TBPN” appearance. (She’s been on the show several times.) “But I almost think that they’re more like entertainers, or they’re as much entertainers and producers as they are journalists.” Sundberg, a kind of Substack evangelist, explained that Hays and Coogan’s approach wasn’t much different from her own, though she noted that they follow an advertising-based model whereas she’s more focussed on subscriptions. “I relate to the show’s playfulness and mischievousness and creativity,” she said, “and, I guess, how they don’t abide by the traditional rules of media.”

At the Stock Exchange, I ran into Anna Melo, the N.Y.S.E.’s in-house historian. I asked if there was any precedent for an internet show like “TBPN” getting a semi-permanent spot at what is arguably the center of the financial world. “For the longest time, there wasn’t a lot of media here at all,” Melo explained. “CNBC first came onto the trading floor in 1995, which was really not that long ago.” She went on, “I think people don’t really understand how much that changed the game. The general American public was not following the markets minute by minute, the way that people are today, before CNBC came and made it almost a sportscast, treating the capital markets like it’s a match, and following it with that kind of energy.”

If CNBC’s entrance to the trading floor coincided with an explosion in retail investing, “TBPN” has seemingly arrived to usher in the next stage of mass financialization: Silicon Valley’s dominance. This fall, the N.Y.S.E. announced plans to expand trading to twenty-two hours a day, under pressure to compete with always-open crypto markets and commission-free stock-trading apps. The Exchange’s deal with “TBPN” aims to appeal to the new generation of investors who have grown up with an understanding of the market as both dominated by tech companies, which now make up about a third of the S. & P. 500, and as primarily virtual, manifested through online forums like Reddit’s WallStreetBets, which has more than three million members who boast about their impulsive and high-risk trades.

In that vein, “TBPN” was one of the first platforms to embrace prediction markets. As early as last spring, “TBPN” was featuring a scrolling chyron of Polymarket odds. I asked Hays for his view on how the internet, and companies like Polymarket, had expanded the purview of financial markets. “On the topic of the financialization of everything, we’re concerned about it, but at the same time we do believe it’s inevitable,” he said. “Look at the last few weeks, every major cable television network is signing a deal with a prediction market now.”

This idea, that tech’s intrusion into almost every aspect of life is inevitable, is helpful for understanding Hays and Coogan’s perspective. I asked them about the growing backlash to artificial intelligence. “We get that a lot of people hate A.I.,” Hays said. “If I’m the average person in America, and I see a really terrible video generated by A.I., and I hear that these companies are trying to take my job . . .” Hays trailed off. “We’ve had people on the show, and we think it’s honestly hilarious that they’re just saying this out loud. They’ll say, This is a big opportunity because we’re displacing labor. I’m, like, how can you say that? Say it better. Paint me a better vision for this technology.”

The day after their show at the Stock Exchange, I met Coogan and Hays at an Irish pub on Stone Street long known as a retreat for traders after market’s close. They were joined by Dylan Abruscato, “TBPN” ’s president and the founder of Crypto: The Game, a sort of blockchain-inspired version of “Survivor.” Abruscato got his own table nearby, while Coogan and Hays sat across from me, squeezing into a small wooden booth. (Coogan is an imposing six feet eight.) The hosts placed identical orders (black coffee and Red Bull), and explained how the show was created.

“We thought, there’s room for something that was lighthearted, something that was funny,” Hays said. “We were going to reclaim the term ‘tech bro’ from being used as a pejorative.” Their comfort with this description is evident: both Hays and Coogan refer to themselves as founders and share a grandiosity typical of others in the tech world. (On the website for Hays’s previous venture, Party Round, the staff bios do not feature head shots but, rather, marble busts of their visages in the style of Roman emperors.)

This sensibility influences their coverage of thornier topics, such as tech governance and regulation. Hays and Coogan often echo the emerging consensus in the tech world, which is that Washington just doesn’t get it. A few days before they arrived in New York, the Times had published an article exposing how Sacks was using his White House role to enrich himself and his friends in Silicon Valley. Sacks later accused the Times of dramatically misrepresenting his role, and high-profile figures like Altman and Andreessen jumped to his defense on X, where they explained that, actually, the proximity of Sacks to the A.I. industry was helpful to his role in crafting the nation’s A.I. policy. The subtext of this idea—that creating a system where elected officials are invested in the success of the A.I. industry can be a point of motivation, instead of a corrupting force—is a frequent talking point within the very same tech-media ecosystem that Sacks and “All-In” are a major part of.

Hays and Coogan broke down the Times piece (and the subsequent social-media discourse) on “TBPN” and arrived at a similar conclusion. “If you believe that A.I. and crypto are industries that we should support in the United States, then you want to have a czar focussed on those things that generally feels positively about those things,” Hays said. “In general, I think creating an environment in the U.S. where we can continue to lead in A.I. is important. I didn’t see any smoking gun in any of this stuff.”

At the bar, I asked them what they thought about President Trump’s new way of working with Silicon Valley. Abruscato, who was listening to the conversation from his table, interrupted. “No politics,” he said. Hays agreed. “The show doesn’t talk about politics at all,” Hays continued. “We’ve distinctly told our audience that we don’t get into politics.” He and Coogan explained that their main interest is in figuring out how business models and products work. “I see us as trying to determine: How good is A.I. at doing a particular task?” Coogan said. “That’s a lot of the debate. Once you know that, you can go have the discussion about policies somewhere else.”

I asked them if it was possible to avoid politics when discussing crypto schemes, or during interviews with executives who help design surveillance tools for ICE, and mentioned a segment from a few months earlier. Hays and Coogan had asked a “TBPN” intern to assemble a Lego set of the Fury, a lethal drone designed by Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries, which had recently been purchased by the Pentagon. (Luckey has been a guest on “TBPN” multiple times.) Coogan paused. “Maybe it’s the least political show in an endlessly political world. But if that’s my North Star, and I’m charging toward that, it’s the best I can do.”

A few days after I met Hays and Coogan, the two announced that they’d nearly sold out all ad inventory for 2026. According to a report from Semafor, “TBPN” is charging sponsors eighty-seven thousand dollars a month, or around a million dollars a year. The show has twenty-nine sponsors—and that’s with just ten employees, and little to no distribution costs. The ad revenue seems especially high when one takes into account “TBPN” ’s viewership. Abruscato told me that an average live stream attracts around fifty thousand unique viewers on YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and multiple podcast platforms. (Clips cut from the show, meanwhile, get tens of millions of impressions on social media each week.)

“We don’t care about having two million viewers,” Hays told me. “We want two hundred thousand of the right kind of viewers.” That’s the sales pitch to advertisers: clout over total viewership. “TBPN” wants its viewers to be a relatively small group of Silicon Valley power players, or people who aspire to be ones, because, in the midst of a bona-fide A.I. gold rush—A.I. startups secured close to fifty per cent of all global venture capital funding in 2025—that’s all they need. (Abruscato told me that the show routinely gets e-mails from big-name tech executives during the live broadcast, reacting to something that Hays or Coogan just said.) Implicit in this strategy, too, is a straightforwardly symbiotic relationship between “TBPN” and its guests. “TBPN” bought a Super Bowl commercial this year, which ended with a mosaic of company logos—the companies affiliated with every guest who has ever appeared on the show. Even though it was just a regional buy in the Bay Area during the pre-game show (much cheaper than a prime-time slot), the ad was shared on social media by several of the featured companies, leading to more than a million views across social media. After all, it was an ad for them, too.

This approach means catering to specific interests, with no detail too small. Last summer, Coogan and Hays débuted the Metis List: a power ranking of A.I. researchers, who were graded across a range of metrics, including citation count and total appearances on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast. It was a smash hit in the insular world of A.I. scaling, and it coincided with a tulip-like explosion in perceived value for these A.I. savants, some of whom were negotiating pay packages as high as two hundred and fifty million dollars.

But it wasn’t just a list; “TBPN” decided to build a whole ecosystem around the career paths of high-profile tech workers. When an employee jumped from OpenAI to Meta, or from Gemini to Anthropic, “TBPN” would announce it on the show and share a kind of trading card across social media, featuring the employee’s face and an all-caps description along the lines of “BREAKING NEWS: TRADED.” These cards became a sensation, so much so that some tech companies have adopted them as a template to announce new hires. Whether these tactics provide useful insights into the industry or not, they speak to “TBPN” ’s shrewd business strategy. By credulously covering the exploits of tech startups, and breaking down discourse more suited to Bay Area hacker houses from behind an anchor desk, they know how to make a group of nerds feel like the most powerful people in the world, which, perhaps, they are.

I spoke with Coogan about the Metis List, and he explained that they named it after the first wife of Zeus, best known for being swallowed by Zeus and giving birth to Athena inside his head. Coogan was poking fun at tech companies’ impulse to name themselves after myths and parables, even when those myths and cultural artifacts have negative associations. (Some famous examples include Palantir, the Metaverse, and, of course, Coogan’s own Soylent.)

“You know, the Midas wealth list is orchestrated by Forbes,” Coogan told me. “And Midas, everything he touches turns to gold—a cautionary tale. These things are always cautionary tales, and people don’t realize them. We talked to a startup named Icarus yesterday—” he said, before stopping himself, perhaps imagining the C.E.O. of Icarus reading this piece. Coogan continued. “Well, granted, Icarus has, like, the most incredible team ever. So I think it actually might work out.” ♦