There are two things that stood out for me about TBPN, the streaming financial talk show acquired this week by OpenAI.

One has been much commented upon: the upbeat, positive tone and enthusiasm that hosts Jordi Hays and John Coogan bring to the show. They did for tech what ESPN did for sports. People who were tired of the negativity they associate with legacy media found it refreshing.

The second, which has been much less appreciated, was the roster of guests—specifically, not just who they booked, but when they put them on the show.

It’s the booking (i.e., the hard part) that most people who aren’t in the industry overlook, and I think it explains both the enthusiasm for the show and why it would be hard to replicate.

Most of the booking for big legacy financial TV like CNBC and Bloomberg is done in advance and typically tied to a specific promotional event, like earnings, a book launch, or some charity endeavor. It’s similar to the way late-night TV works.

The other thing legacy media does—particularly political talk shows—is maintain a roster of reliable (often paid) commentators. That makes it easier to put on a show because you know they will show up and you basically know what they will say.

But it also makes it boring.

TBPN flipped that script. They accelerated the booking process to focus on what was trending on social media, invited people you’d never heard of who were doing interesting things, and brought on famous people at random times, making it more exciting.

I first noticed this back in September when TBPN had on Riley Walz, the 23-year-old hacker from San Francisco who built the “Find My Parking Cops” app to track parking cops in real-time. The app went viral overnight, and TBPN booked him the same day.

Riley would not be same-day booked by legacy media because: a) they are too slow, b) they are risk-averse, and c) it’s hard, expensive, and time-consuming to track that guy down. What they would do, would be have a talking head talk about Riley. But that’s not the same.  

TBPN did a similar thing by booking Soham Parekh, the software engineer accused of working four startup jobs at once, whose story went viral on X. TBPN was the first major outlet to get him on air to explain why and how he pulled it off.

They have done same-day programming for big names: specifically, Mark Zuckerberg live from Meta HQ as Ray-Ban Display and the Meta Neural Band were being announced and Travis Kalanick who came to the TBPN studio on the same day he announced rebranding his 8-year stealth company to Atoms and pivoting into robotics/mining. 

And they bring on lots of famous CEOs, including Palmer Luckey, Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Alex Karp, and Satya Nadella. But most of the time those executives appear when the topic is interesting, not because they’re pitching a book.

They also include lots of niche-famous people who loom large in the tech ecosystem, including Mark Gurman, Dan Primack, Doug DeMuro, Daniel Gross, Erik Torenberg, Lulu Cheng Meservey, and even my former Bloomberg colleague, Joe Weisenthal.

My favorite booking was Ken Burns, who came on as part of an episode focusing on the seismic shifts happening in Hollywood following media mergers. They used part of the time to ask Burns about how Steve Jobs called him to get approval for the “Ken Burns effect” on iMovie. 

There are people who credit the show’s success to the hosts being attractive, noting that Jordi and John have great wavy hair. And it’s undoubtably true that they both have great hair.

But in modern TV that’s more like a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. 

In the end it comes down to the show itself.