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.”