Thank you for all the well wishes this week and the patience as I wrestled with COVID. Which I will honestly say hit me a lot harder than I expected. And in a weird coincidence, my wife and son have also tested positive.

I still don’t feel great today, but I wanted to get out a newsletter.

This week should be back to a normal schedule and on July 1st, my big PBS project will launch. I’ll have more details on that in Monday’s newsletter.

If you have ever wondered how podcasts like Call Her Daddy or Theo Von are able to land A-list celebrity guests, it’s due to the work of a company called Central Talent Booking.

The company has been booking guests for shows such as Jimmy Kimmel Live! for nearly 25 years and as the podcast boom happened over the past decade, CTB has become the go-to talent booking choice for those projects as well.

Their list of clients includes a long list of television networks and studios, as well as just about every major podcast you can think of.

And yet, Central Talent Booking is a not a name that is familiar to most people outside the entertainment industry. And that it precisely why I wanted to hear their story.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Joanna Jordan, who founded Central Talent Booking in 1999, as well as her son Antoine, who is the company’s EVP. It was an eye-opening conversation and among other things, I was left with the feeling that I’ll know when I am a success when I can afford to use their guest booking services.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity (mostly mine)

Joanna, as I understand it, Central Talent Booking was launched while you were working as the in-house guest booker at The Late Show With David Letterman, which is an unusual way to start a business.

Joanna: You know, Rick, here's the truth. Antoine is better at telling my story.

Antoine: Let me tell you my mom's story. So CTV was founded in 1999 by Joanna, who at the time ran the talent department for The Late Show With David Letterman. She booked all the guests in-house for that show.

One day, she had an idea for a new type of company called the Talent Booking Agency, which did not exist at the time. Talent booking historically had been done in-house at large networks and never by an outside third-party agency. By the way, if you can't tell, Joanna's my mom.

She had this idea, but was super nervous to quit her job because it was a really good job at the time. She was five months pregnant with my younger sister, Isabel, and my father had just gotten laid off of his investment banking job. So it was a very, very tough time to start a company, but my mom is crazy or courageous, depending on who you ask, and scheduled a meeting with Dave and a couple of the producers to respectfully and gently resign the position.

And much to her surprise, their response was, “Joanna, we think that's a great idea for a company, and we don't want to lose you as our booker, so I guess we're going to have to be your first client.?” So she launched CTV with the endorsement of Dave, booked his show five years in-house, followed by six years as an independent agency, totaling 11 years, until a dude called Jimmy Kimmel came knocking on her door. We've now been booking Jimmy Kimmel Live for 22 years.

I grew up going to that show. Lots of really great, cool people over there. Fast forward to the world of podcasting.

In 2014, my mother was approached by a guy called Mark Maron, who had just had Barack Obama on in his garage for this thing called a podcast. My mother's initial reaction to Mark was, Mark, what the fuck is a podcast?”

“But obviously, I know you from late night. I'd love to work on this. How the hell do you have Obama in your garage? Please explain. What is this podcasting thing?”

They hit it off at the beginning, really liked each other, decided to work together. We booked Mark's show for 11 years, up until he retired the show in fall of 2025.

We actually booked Barack Obama as the last guest on the show as well. The Obamas are also clients of Central Talent Booking today. We book for all their media projects, including stuff like Michelle's podcast and different things for their company, Higher Ground.

Mark was way ahead of his time with podcasting, so he was sort of the only one we worked with for a while until 2019, when the space started to really get hot. Today, we work on a ton of them. Some of the big ones we book for are Call Her Daddy, Everything for the Unwell Network, the Mel Robbins podcast, This Past Weekend With Theo Von.

We do a slate of like 12 or 14 shows for Tom Segura's company, YMH, out of Austin, and many, many more podcasts. Today, we also work with a ton of content creators. I can go on and on.

We still book big game shows like Celebrity Millionaire, Celebrity Jeopardy. The bottom line is, when you think about where we fit in the ecosystem, anything that has an audience, an influence, and an image that's looking to trade those assets for the right guest interview, guest collaboration, guest appearance, or participation within their content, we facilitate that on our clients' behaves by representing them out in the collaborative ecosystem and interfacing with those that represent guests, publicists, managers, agents, record labels, movie studios, political think tanks, think every major institution that has a large roster of guests.

Joanna: Something I would like to add to that is, I mean, you and I are probably in the same generation, and we've both seen the industry change so much. And when you are a talent booker, you're in this kind of unique position where - as the industry shifts and changes - there's always still a need for talent, right? There's always a need for guests with whatever the idea, whether it's a short form video, whether it's legacy media, whatever it might be.

And now that the company is about 26 years old, we've ridden the wave as the industry has shifted and changed. And there was a very pivotal moment for us when Antoine actually came on board. You know, he's my son.

And just before the strike began, the two strikes that began three or four years ago now, you know, I could sense something was really dramatically shifting. And Antoine has a sales and marketing background. And I said, “You know, I can feel something is happening.”

And that's when the whole creator economy came in. So I asked Antoine to help me out, but now he's never left. He's here because he's such a pivotal part of our story now.

Antoine: I mean, it was such a blessing, Rick. I felt like everything in my career had just like prepared me for that moment. And it was like all the little things I'd picked up along the way at various opportunities were just the exact skill sets I needed to help my mom take her business to the next level.

Joanna: And it's really been fantastic. We were in Los Angeles at the end of May and we've been working with Warner Bailey who's been doing Assistants Versus Agents. And we've been working with Colin and Samir who did this event at Publish Press. And then literally we were both at those events and we went to Lighthouse and we did a panel which was exciting for us to get up there and explain talent booking to literally a room of about a hundred creators.

They were so kind afterwards about understanding our knowledge and experience and how it helps all of their outlets. And then for the rest of the weekend, I was with Jimmy filming Celebrity Millionaire.

So what does your job look like for a show such as Jimmy Kimmel Live versus what you would do for Call Her Daddy? What’s that process like? Are they looking for specific things and you’re helping to facilitate that? Are you suggesting guests? How does that process work?

Joanna: I've been working with Jimmy for 23 years. So obviously my job is to work directly with him to book his show. We have a team of bookers in-house, one of which works for Central Talent Booking.

And it is my responsibility to book the show and I deal directly with Jimmy. So I am doing that every single day for a million years now, 23 years.

But then with Alex, when we started working with Alex Cooper, it was at the very beginning of Spotify.

There's this great guy who I just adore called Max Cutler, who had sold his company to Spotify and he was helping Alex launch with Spotify. And he recommended that we speak to Alex and we were just booking Call Her Daddy for the window of time that she was doing Spotify. And then when she made the shift to Sirius, she actually asked us if we could have an overall deal with her company on Well.

And now I have a multiple of bookers that deal with her daily and her other shows, because it's more than just her show. It's a bunch of shows. And we are servicing all of their booking needs, which is booking around, you know, maybe 12 bookings a month for them across the shows.

It might be more than that, honestly. I mean, it's always evolving.

Just from my perspective as someone who's tried to arrange interviews or on the other side ends up trying to get on the podcast, the process has really seemed to change a lot over the last three or four years. It feels as if there’s a group of really big podcasts and then there's sort of everybody else.

So what is the biggest challenge for you guys when it comes to finding the right show, finding the right guests, selling those shows to a celebrity and saying “This is a show you want to be on, even though maybe you're not familiar with it?”

Joanna: We've been asked that question a lot lately. I mean, it really boils down to having a strategy.

I've worked very hard at having a strong what I would call the CTB system. If you have your own show and you come and work with Central Talent Booking, I'm going to give you a team and a style in which we work directly with the host. But every host is different, right?

Whether it's Jimmy Kimmel, whether it's Mel Robbins, whether it's Michelle Obama, whether it's Alex Cooper, they all have different interests. They all have different desires.

Antoine: It's less about convincing individual celebrities. And it's more about building relationships at the institutional level with various PR firms and management firms and all the different firms that control all these rosters.

So it's like when someone asks us to book a celebrity, we don't like hit up the celebrity and try to convince them. We talk to their representation.

And we position our client correctly out in the market where, it's basically an interesting ask where they think “OK, this makes sense for the promotional base plans or image based plans of my client.” You know, on that note, I'll give you a quote from my mom that this is probably my mother's best quote. And it's an old quote.

Joanna: I have many quotes, but this is the best one.

Antoine: This is the best one. It's the most unique and it's very specific to the industry of talent booking. It's the quote is celebrities do things for three reasons.

They do it for money. They do it for promotion and they do it for image. Today, celebrity can mean TikTok star, author, politician, business leader.

But the rule still holds. Those are the only three reasons influential people do content on a repeated commercialized basis. In podcasting, for example, 99 percent of the time everything is promotion and image based.

It's extremely rare for someone to receive cash comp to do a podcast. So when you talk about how do you convince a celebrity to do something, those are the two primary commercial drivers.

Is this good for a project that they're promoting a project they're promoting? It could be a new Netflix special. If they're a comedian, it could be a movie coming out or a TV show.

It could be an influencer with a private equity backed beauty brand. It could be a politician on campaign. It could be a financier doing something for their own personal brand.

There's a million different reasons why people do content for promotional reasons or for image based reasons or thought leadership or elevating their own personal brand. But that's really how the nuts and bolts of like how these transactions take place or how these interviews take place or these exchanges or these. I wouldn't call them transactions.

I'd call them collaborations.

One of the trends I’ve noticed in the industry is there was a time not that long ago when convincing someone to sit down and talk for an hour was impossible. If you were lucky, you were given 10 or 15 minutes. Unless you were writing for the New York Times or GQ or some other high-profile outlet.

But it’s a lot more common now to see a Tom Hanks or Barack Obama sit down and talk on a podcast for an hour or more.

Why do you think that value has changed? Why do you think sitting down for a long conversation is more important than it used to be for high-profile guests?

Joanna: I really think it boils down to the fact that when we used to get all those 10-minutes in a hotel room on a junket, the talent just ended up giving the same answer over and over again. And I think the audience has become more sophisticated to understanding how that works.

And now when when talent is doing a one hour interview, whether it be for Barack Obama doing Mark or going to a late night show or doing something fun creatively with a short form show, I think movie studios, as an example, when it comes to the movie star schedules, recognize the value of giving that extra time. By the way, I'll give you a perfect example.

We worked we work with this British outlet called Jolly that gets massive numbers on YouTube, really massive numbers. And we had we were talking to Jon Favreau's publicist about Jon being in London for the Star Wars promotion. And the Jolly guys wanted to to book him because Jon is such a foodie.

They wanted Jon to meet them at a fish and chip shop to talk about British fish and chips because they thought it would make for a fun interview. It all happens in the space of 35-40 minutes, from him leaving the hotel to get to the fish and chip shop. Everything is set up. He sits right down.

They do the interview. There's a tap on the shoulder to the producer. It's time to go.

He's got to get back to the movie, to the hotel, to do other interviews. That organizing every minute of that thing took about two, three weeks of back and forth negotiations. And then within a week, it got over a million views.

How much of this process revolves around trust, both trust from the side of talent that you're not going to put them in a situation that doesn't work and from the people on the show you’re booking that you're not just going to book somebody, or they're not going to show up and refuse to talk.

Joanna: I don't think that there's a movie studio, a publicist, a book publisher, a record company, a manager, an agent that doesn't know that when Central Talent Booking is representing a show, that everything is going to be handled professionally. And that is why we are the best.

Antoine: From being in this business a long time and from talking to people, you learn that some talent are a little easier to deal with than others. And knowing what the process is like when you know someone is really difficult and you have to go to their people and say, “Look, let's get real here. They've got to do this.”

Joanna: It's all of that, but you have to be able to talk their language, right? You have to understand their concerns. You have to understand that DDA was representing Disney at this for London, arranging Jon's schedule.

They had to trust us. We trusted them. It was a collaborative effort so that all the dots were dotted and all the T's were crossed, and that's what we do all day long.

We are a machine at Central Talent Booking. We are living and breathing constant bookings. All across everywhere in lots of different ways.

And it's a little bit like working on a trade floor on Wall Street, working as a talent booker at CTV. We are hustling, but we understand the rules. We understand the game and we understand how we have to represent our clients properly.

Antoine, when it comes to booking guests, how different is it booking someone for Jimmy Kimmel versus booking them on a podcast. Are the expectations different?

Antoine: It is different. It is different because, don't forget, Jimmy is on ABC. Jimmy is on Hulu.

Jimmy is on YouTube. Jimmy has 20 million followers on YouTube, maybe more now, And you’re being picked up in a car, getting to the show, the whole experience of doing late night is no different from doing a morning show, doing a daytime show.

It is part of the promotional tour, right? Sometimes talent will decide to only do three podcasts, maybe because they're making a movie in Prague right now. Or, I'll give you an example.

Dwayne Johnson is doing a junket in Hawaii for Moana and then going to China for a premiere. That sort of thing brings other type of opportunities, the best way to utilize his time promotionally. So you have to look at every celebrity, every outlet and collaborate and work with everybody to make it be a good fit.

The thing to remember is that when you get a no, a no isn't a no forever. A no is because maybe they're not in America. Maybe they only have this short window of time and you're going to be an outlet that needs extra time.

So they'd rather wait for the next promotional opportunity. You have to look at the entire picture, the business of it, the business of the image of the talent, the business of the promotion of the talent, the business of the entire deal and each one is different. As an example, we just locked in a host for a new medias outlet, which was a money deal. That's more kind of transactional with an agent, just working out all those sort of details.

Joanna: And you need it all. If you are trying to open a movie or, or open a TV show globally, because I don't forget more and more things are day and date. It's not like back in the good old days when it was limited early on and then went wide globally and then it’s going to saturate.

But even if you look at the way they’re planning The Odyssey, they’re structuring completely for a promotional plan to the Oscars. Everything that is being planned with The Odyssey is not for a saturation of the summer. It’s a long burn. So there’s a different style to dealing with that then when - for instance - Spiderman comes out this summer,

How does the global aspect of entertainment change your job? Because it used to be very Hollywood-centric and now it's a global business.

Joanna: It is such a global business. And it's a global business that America dominates.

Antoine: Let's be clear though. America dominates entertainment across social media as well as traditional media.

I met someone in LA where there is a huge business now dubbing over English content into other languages. I have yet to see a format come out of, you know, Asia or South America or Europe or Africa or any other, you know, major continent that's been dubbed in reverse to English that's viral. Do you know what I mean?

America is truly at the top of culture and the zeitgeist.

So what's the biggest challenge for the company right now? You are dominating the space, you’ve been doing it a long time. But what remains the biggest challenge for you?

Joanna: I'm excited, Rick. I feel like I am so thrilled and excited about the changes. Everyone's like, Hollywood is not dead.

Hollywood is changing. I always love a bit of a wild, wild west feeling. I love that we’re working with everything from major studio projects to a short form YouTube video. It keeps it interesting. I find it very exciting.

Antoine: The total addressable market for our services, given the shift in the industry, has completely exploded. So for us, I welcome the shift.

The shift is good. I want to ride the wave of the shift. The challenge is just the challenges that come with growth.

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Looking things up in a library database, I found a bunch of old pieces of mine I thought were lost forever.

Including this piece on David Letterman, which includes some stories that aren't that well known:

It is very strange to read pieces that I haven’t seen in more than a decade and barely remember writing.

SUNDAY, JUNE 28TH:
BET Awards (BET)
Get Off My Lawn (Lifetime)
In The Eye Of The Storm Season Premiere (Discovery)
Love Is Blind: Argentina Season Premiere (Netflix)

MONDAY, JUNE 29TH:
Adventure Time: Side Quests Series Premiere (Disney+/Hulu)
BET's 4th Annual Black + Iconic Soiree (BET)
Declarations: Black Americans And The Revolutionary War (PBS)
Disney Celebrates America: The Pursuit Of Happiness (ABC)
Instant Italian Season Premiere (fyi)