#415: Jon Steinberg on The Current State of Media

Jon Steinberg is the President of Altice News & Advertising. He previously founded Cheddar, which was eventually acquired by Altice. Jon also served as the President and COO of BuzzFeed in the early 2010s. In this conversation, we discussed the Cheddar story, what Jon is building at Altice, and what his thoughts are on live television, newsletter, podcasts, e-commerce, and the rise of creators. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. John Steinberg is the President of Altice News and Advertising. He previously founded Cheddar, which was eventually acquired by Altice. John also served as the President and COO of BuzzFeed in the early 2010s. In this conversation, we discuss the Cheddar story, what John is building at Altice, and what his thoughts are on live television, newsletters, podcasts, e-commerce, and the rise of creators. I really enjoyed this conversation with John, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:09Anthony Pompliano?

  IRA product that allows you to buy Bitcoin, hold the private keys, and use tax-advantaged dollars to do it. Go to retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com/pomp.

• 2:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. Alright, let's get into this episode with John. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I've got John here. He's a legend. We're just leaving it at that.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Although most people, when you put out that you were interviewing me, their number one question was, "Who is this guy?"

• 3:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you know, you have to learn the first rule of Twitter, which is never read the comments because whether they're good or bad, they're not good to read, right?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's definitely true.

• 3:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, let's go through your background before you started Cheddar.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  You got it.

• 3:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What'd you do?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  I just go. I just go.

• 3:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, just go. Have you done podcasts before?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I've done like Brian Morrissey's Digiday Podcast. Yeah.

• 3:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, alright, so we're the second podcast you're doing. You just talk and I'll interrupt you when you need to shut up.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Okay, I give very concise answers too. That's kind of what I do as well. Alright, so a very winding and meandering career path. The highlights were, I was a Disney Imagineer in high school, an intern. I got that through basically writing them a letter as a kid, and it was kind of like the movie Big. So I used to go out to Burbank and work on theme park attractions, and I did that from basically 15 to 20. So that was really cool. Then, my career did not so great, and I got stuck being a consultant at Booz Allen after business school. I'm skipping around. I kind of felt like a child star who had had this bright period of time, and then now I was working in an office park in Northern Virginia. And

• 4:40Speaker 02

  so then I thought my career was over. But then through a series of lucky happenstances, I got hired into Google to work on partnership deals as a very...

• 4:50Speaker 02

  You know, low level junior type person, but that was good experience. And then a couple other hops and I became president of BuzzFeed. I met Jonah, I became president of BuzzFeed, 15th employee, very little revenue when I joined. I think we got it to 50 or 60 million when I left four years later.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Then I did a stint being president of, or CEO of Daily Mail North America, Mail Online. And then founded Cheddar in 2016, January 2016, started Cheddar. And that's it.

• 5:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about BuzzFeed real quick.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel like that was so disruptive when you guys were really scaling.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What was that experience like?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  The experience of BuzzFeed was that you can have, each of these startups is a series of bets, right? You place bets. And if one of the big bets works out, you're generally in a good spot. And if two of the big bets work out, then you know, it's like, it's like, it's like pocket aces, basically, right? Pocket aces and then you hit like an ace on the clock or something like that. And, and we, we had two bets and the first was Jonah's bet, Jonah Peretti, the founder's bet. That, that social traffic would be enormous. And Facebook would send enormous amount of traffic to sites that created content that worked well on social. And then my bet was that native advertising, creating advertorials, digital advertorials,

• 6:12Speaker 02

  would be a great advertising product in the face of banners, which were still being sold direct in 2010. And for a while that bet didn't look so good. 2010, 2011 were very tough. Advertising wasn't really picking up. Social traffic wasn't really coming. And then 2012 both hit like, like lightning. And that's what made that work.

• 6:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you then go to start Cheddar, what were the two bets?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  The two bets with Cheddar were that live would be a big thing, that people would want live content, nobody was really doing anything in live, and that there would be all of these OTT systems like Sling TV and what have you, that would want live content and we could be there. And in this new universe, there would be no difference between us and CNBC and CNN. And also subsequently, after a couple of different, you know, revenue models, we hit on this kind of live read branded content type product that worked really well as well. Now, the part of the bet that I got wrong, and it took a while for me to get it wrong, but luckily we corrected it, was these free TV systems. They're called

• 7:24Speaker 02

  FAST, free ad-supported television, like Pluto and Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus. Those became, those came out of nowhere, like a tidal wave, and became giant. And the virtual MVPDs like Sling and YouTube TV, while very important partners to us and, you know, incredible systems, didn't have nearly the scale and the growth that the free TV systems would have. But we were, we were quick enough to make sure that we were on the free TV systems.

• 7:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, did that change, what, the content, or just the way you guys approached it? Like, what changed when those FAST systems came on the market?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Well, you know, for a while, we had two networks, right? We had one network which was designed for the pay TV ecosystem, and we had one network which was designed for the free TV ecosystem. And then during COVID, we did a layoff, and we also did a collapse of the two networks into one network, because, you know, I mean, advertising was very tough during COVID. And so, we were able to kind of knit it all together into one thing. But for a while, we were basically operating almost like two parallel networks to service each of these different platforms.

• 8:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. One of the things that Cheddar was well-known for at one point was the Trading Floor location, and also the Flatiron location.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the fascination with getting kind of cool, memorable locations to actually record from?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Live television is a window on the world. People watch live television in the same way they look out the window, especially when it's news. They want to see like, what's going on in the world. And to the extent that you can provide... That there's an aura that comes with it that makes it much more compelling than if you're just in a studio. And so we were covering the stock market and tech companies and the trading floor is the incarnation of business and markets. And also, by the way, all these amazing companies come through there every day to ring the bell. And so that to me was the most important piece in launching the network was that we get on the floor of the

• 9:31Speaker 02

  stock exchange. And went to Tom Harley, who was the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange at the time, or the president. And I had been on CNBC a lot as a contributor. So he and I had gotten to be acquaintances. And I laid out this vision of what I wanted to create. I wanted to create a CNBC for millennials. And I was going to deliver in all these new places. And it was going to be on social. And right away, he was like, Okay, you know, we don't have much to lose. If you do well, you can stay. And if it doesn't really go anywhere, we're gonna boot you out. And you know, that was we got going right away.

• 10:02Anthony Pompliano?

  He put you in like, the smallest place I've ever seen. I was on Cheddar once or twice. And literally, it was like wedged into what most people

• 10:11Speaker 02

  We have the second largest set on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. That set is CNBC is massive. CNBC has an entire post, right?

• 10:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Our thing is bigger than what Fox Business has and bigger than what Bloomberg has there. So look, space is at a premium. I mean, the only space more valuable than the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is maybe like, you know, Park Avenue in the 70s. But like, other than that, you know, I would have taken a postage stamp if that's if that was the space that he gave me.

• 10:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, I was I was gonna say, like, you obviously wanted to be there because where they put you, even if it's the second biggest one, it was just such like a unique spot in between the trading little pits or whatever.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like wedged between our space is wedged between two trading pots, basically. It's like, it's almost like if we weren't using it, it would basically be storage space.

• 11:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So you also ended up going in a very interesting distribution kind of strategy. So you already talked about the FAST systems. You talked about a number of these like OTT platforms. I remember you did deals, if I remember correctly, at one point Cheddar was getting streamed to gas station.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  GSTV, we're still in the gas stations.

• 11:22Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Well, explain that one.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  So there is this thing called GSTV run by this guy Sean McCafferty, great guy.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And most gas stations you go to, I find this most gas, I mean, I used to travel quite a bit. I don't travel anymore because no one travels anymore, but like most gas stations you go to, on the pump, there's a TV screen and that TV screen runs commercials and news. And basically every time I've ever been in your one, the news update it's running is the Cheddar news update. You know, our anchor Baker Machado is the, is the gas station TV anchor, basically. And it's great. It gets the brand out there. You know, people hear what Cheddar is for the first time. Everybody makes fun of it, which means they're seeing it. You know, people make fun of you. That's when you really know that you're, that they, that they know who you are and they're hearing you is when they make funny.

• 12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Another deal you did was at one point you were getting like licensed or streamed to college campuses. I think if I remember correctly.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  I still have that. So we bought from Viacom. Viacom had this thing called MTVU, which is screens that are in cafeterias, gyms and student unions that were hardcoded to MTV, basically playing music videos. We bought that from them. It's 1,400 screens on 400 campuses and changed it to Cheddar and we call it Cheddar U. And so we have the largest, basically, college network, largest college audience, place-based college audience of anybody through having Cheddar U. So we have that as well, too. Look, I've been obsessed with distribution. I mean, if your content is great, you know.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  And it's not distributed properly, no one's going to see it. And there's a lot of content that's so-so, but has great distribution and gets seen by plenty of people. And so, you know, distribution is probably more important than content and content's probably number two.

• 13:17Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a Y combinator saying that first time entrepreneurs worry about product, second time entrepreneurs worry about distribution. And I think that that's a perfect example here. How did that change the conversation with advertisers? One, just as you got larger and larger, I'm sure that helped. But two, around where you have the distribution. So it's one thing to say, hey, people are coming to our website. It's a whole other thing to say, you know, gas stations, college campuses, OTT, etc.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Well, the most important thing that's happened now is we have enough scale on these vast systems that we can run standard 15 to 30 second commercials, right? And that's really important because advertisers want simple turnkey solutions, right? Where we've continued to struggle is with measurement, which is that there's no Nielsen number for all the places we're in. There's no single com score number, although we're getting com score. And so that's been, measurement has probably been one of the greatest difficulties of the business, has been probably the most great difficulty.

• 14:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. You eventually sold the business for a big number. I'm assuming you, other shareholders did very well in that. Why'd you sell it?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Well, so, you know, actually what's interesting about it is I think we did well for the investors and I think it was a great outcome. And people who put in early money made a great return on it. I think that for a lot of our investors, you know, it wasn't quite a Silicon Valley return because they didn't get to put as much money to work as they would have liked. And so I think that, you know, the investors were happy and I think that I have a great relationship with them and they would certainly back me again. But, you know, most firms are looking for multi-billion dollar exits and, you know, a $200 million exit doesn't really move the needle for most of these firms, right? So. That's just a bit of a side note. Why did I sell the business? Because I looked out and everything was getting bigger and more consolidated.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  And NBC Universal was owned by Comcast. Fox was sold to Disney. We were always the only independent. You look on Hulu Live or you look on Sling and it's CNBC, which is owned by AT&T. It's MSNBC, which is owned by Comcast. And when I started the company, I felt a bit like I was running around with a BB gun. And everybody else had muskets, right? And then over the course of four years, it began to feel like I no longer had a BB gun. Maybe I had like a slingshot now because we had improved. But they had developed extensive arsenals of weapons, right?

• 15:51Speaker 02

  And so it was natural to link up with them. And it was also natural to link up with Alties because they were exclusively news focused. The other part of the portfolio is News 12, these hyper local news stations. So the company basically decided that they were going to be in telecommunications, broadband television, telephony, and news. And they weren't going to be in dramas and comedies. And so this was the perfect kind of addition to that portfolio. I had had Alties as investors, I think, for two, three years at that point. So they knew the company inside and out. And it was the right time. And also, I mean, COVID ended up coming as well too. Now, I didn't know COVID was coming.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  But I'm certainly lucky to have the support of a large corporate parent to kind of get through COVID. Whereas I think that would have been unbelievably difficult as a standalone startup. So I can't really claim that that factored into the decision. But I think it certainly made the decision more right in retrospect.

• 16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of people in America, I don't think, know about Alties.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Would you agree with that?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Actually, let me answer your question a little more about why I sold as well too. Is that... You know, I really think that, you know, I've told Jessica Lessin this when she interviewed me, is that media is really about, you know, independent media companies are like drug discovery, you know, developing a drug. You've heard me say this before?

• 17:16Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but I can already see where this is going and I like it, so keep going.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  And so you develop a great drug. So let's say Cheddar, we developed an amazing drug for arthritis, great arthritis drug. We had great scientists, we developed a great arthritis drug, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now we have a choice. We have to go through FDA trials. Now that's going to cost kajillions of dollars. Then we need an entire pharmaceutical sales force. Then we need an entire, you know, production line to get this thing out there. And for most media companies, trying to do that is a mistake. They're literally reinventing the wheel and they're reinventing the wheel when people already have a wheel. And the only unique thing that they've really brought to the table is their unique new drug that

• 18:00Speaker 02

  they did through R and D. And so that's why it is the right decision for Morning Brew to sell to Business Insider for, you know, I can't, what was the number quoted, 75?

• 18:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that is the alleged number, yes.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Right. Because what are they going to do? Build an entire sales force, build an entire CMS, build a research division, build all these things that Axel Springer and Business Insider have. And look, the history of media companies, independent media companies, is that they get too large, they've built up this infrastructure, the infrastructure's not necessarily as, doesn't have the margins that the other people have, the incumbents have, and then they're sort of too big, basically. I mean, that's, that's what happens when you get too big in media.

• 18:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Patrick Drahey, who I think owns Altis.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Controlling shareholder.

• 18:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. He fascinates me because he's a multi-billionaire. There are almost no interviews with him anywhere.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm seeing him tomorrow for breakfast. I'll tell him that you.

• 19:02Anthony Pompliano?

  You should tell him to come on the show, for sure.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Unlikely, unlikely, yeah.

• 19:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I figured it's unlikely. What's it been like, or kind of what have you learned from being around somebody like that who I think just most people look and say, look, he's built this amazing, very large company, obviously one that you found attractive to kind of partner with and go work with. Kind of anything there in terms of just the way that the company operates, or Patrick specifically?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  So he's a genius, you know, and I would say the culture, most of my interaction, I'm privileged to be able to interact with Patrick on a routine basis, but my boss is Dexter Goh, who's the CEO of Altice, right? And Dexter's been working with Patrick for a very long time. I think over a decade or something like that. And the way Patrick and Dexter work is they're very calm, they're very steady, and they have a sense of humor about everything, right? And they know their numbers cold. And that's basically, and also, you know, they understand that that most businesses are operated inefficiently, and there is margin to be derived from almost,

• 20:12Speaker 02

  from almost any business, right? And so that steadiness, that facility with my numbers, I mean, you know, I'm going to see Patrick tomorrow, I'm walking in there, this is just a casual catch-up, I'm walking in there with a stack of printouts like this, and my laptop, because like, he's just gonna ask me some number, you know? And it's always a little bit like an exam. But, you know, I did well in school, and I know how to study. So, you know.

• 20:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. What's the biggest focus for you right now at Altice as you kind of scale the business?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  You know, we have two advertising products that I'm really trying to grow. You know, we have the local advertising business, which is selling Spox throughout our footprint on our cable system. And that's a very steady business that's doing quite well. And then we have the emerging products, which are basically the Cheddar product, the sponsored content, and we're also selling, we have an advanced advertising division that allows us to sell national advertising that can be targeted and have conversion tracked by IP. So I would say innovation in that. I would say that from the content standpoint, News12, we've done an extensive kind of rebrand and regraphic and re-moderation of that over

• 21:29Speaker 02

  the past few, over the past year, really. And then with Cheddar, you know, trying to make, figure out these fast systems, figure out which ones are gonna be the biggest, making sure that we're there, making sure we have the channel position. You know, we launched on Tubi, we launched Cheddar and News12 on Tubi last week, which is kind of amazing. I've been pushing The Tubi folks for a long time to do news because I felt like it was one of the giant platforms that didn't have news. But I'd like our content to be everywhere on these fast systems, even the ones like, you know, Peacock that haven't put us on yet.

• 22:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, before we get into kind of a couple of topics, I'm just gonna throw out and you mind dump on us your thoughts.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What about Netflix, Peacock, you know, these other platforms? Do you see them eventually adding news and you guys being a contender there? Or do you think like maybe a Netflix just will never get into anything?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  I was in, I was in a, uh, somebody held a thing with Reed Hastings, I think one of my professors and I asked a question, I said, Reed, I've been, and I, I've had two interactions with Reed in the past, however many years. One was at DLD in Munich and then the last was this one a few weeks ago. In both cases, I asked him, when are you going to do news? And in both cases, he told me, you know, no plans, right? And so I don't see them doing it. Peacock has some news on it. You know, they have, they have the NBC Universal news on it. Whether or not they open it up to other people's news is yet to be seen. Amazon, we have a great relationship with. Amazon on the Fire platform has Fire News. So it's, it's a dedicated square on, if you have a fire stick and we're one of the news providers there. So in some ways that's an alternative to Prime.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  And so, you know, and Disney Plus, I don't really see doing it. I mean, look, it bums me out. It bums me out that, you know, Netflix and Disney Plus, like two of the biggest and fast growing. Don't have news. What bums me less is if they decided tomorrow to put on news. They would do one of two things. Either Disney would decide they were only doing ABC. Okay. Or if they decide to let other people on, we would definitely get the phone call because we always get the phone call when people decide they want to put news on because we have a high quality product and it's free. And that's, that's, that's a winning combination for people that need news content.

• 23:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. You've been live video at Cheddar for a long time. Talk to me about audio. Do you guys rip the audio from the videos and put them out as podcasts? Have you thought about podcasts? Kind of what's going on there?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  So we do the audio simulcast we do on TuneIn and iHeart and a few others. We don't get very good statistics on it. I don't really know what the listenership is there. Podcasts, I've completely stayed away from, you know, it's too competitive. It is personality driven and you either need a big personality that draws an audience or true crime. And those seem to me to be like the two categories that really work, right? And, you know, we, Cheddar was always an ensemble cast type thing, always more of a news type thing. And we don't have the, stars is really the wrong word.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  We don't have the people like Barstool has that are able to really gather loyal followings kind of by personality. And so that would make a, that would make a podcast, I think, very hard for us to do.

• 24:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Newsletters?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  We bought Need to Know, you know, which was kind of like a smaller version of the skim. I think it has three or 400,000 subs. It does okay for us. But, you know, look, you can only do one thing when you're a startup, really, you know? And you can, not that we're a startup anymore, now we're part of this larger thing. But really, video has been my sole focus for the past four and a half years. And I think it's going to be my sole focus for the, for the, for the coming future.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  I think that we're the best at live video. I think that we have made it our sole focus. And I think that that's where we're going to continue to focus, certainly for another year or two.

• 25:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What about outside of you guys, right? So you guys say with live video, but what do you just think about kind of the rise of newsletters and this whole kind of phenomenon that's going on?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you and I have talked about this before. I think the amazing thing about the newsletter thing is that if you're a writer

• 25:47Speaker 02

  and you're part of a media company and you can go sign up 1,000 people at $100 a year, you know, that's pretty incredible, right? And I'm not sure how many people can do that, but look, you just, you know, Casey from The Verge just left to go, he's on Substack.

• 26:04Anthony Pompliano?

  He is.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he's gonna probably make more money than he makes at The Verge. And he's probably going to have a better lifestyle and make more money and, you know, and own 100% of what he creates. And so I think it's really disruptive to printed, to print journalism, print digital journalism.

• 26:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. What about other forms of video? So not live video, but whether it's kind of the TikTok and short form type stuff, whether it's more of like the vlog and the longer form stuff on YouTube, but just things that aren't live news based. How do you think about that?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  I think that, you know, there hasn't been a lot of, the YouTube thing is, we do some YouTube, we do some explainers on YouTube and they do, they do plenty well. There hasn't been a lot of innovation there really, you know, and TikTok, we were really big on TikTok for a while. We still have a million four followers on TikTok, Cheddar does. We do our gadget videos there. Monetization really isn't there, you know, either. And for a long time, from my BuzzFeed days to my early Cheddar days, you know, we were, we were going places where we could get growth and get the brand out there and it was exciting and it was the right thing for the company at the time. But now, I'm just much more focused on the economics of these things of, you know, does it make financial sense for us to be spending time on this? And so many of these platforms are still, you know, are

• 27:25Speaker 02

  still nickels and dimes, if that. I mean, TikTok isn't even nickels and dimes.

• 27:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. All of these different platforms are kind of benefiting from the rise of the creator, right? I think that we've always thought about that as like, oh, the YouTubers and people who had kind of more creative type skills and they probably lack some of the business, you know, interest and scalability and skill set. Now it almost feels like we're getting the opposite, right? We've got tons and tons of business minded folks who are starting to be able to build audiences because of these platforms, reducing the friction to doing that. You mentioned Barstool, there's a couple of others that are kind of leaning into this overlap between the creator or personality and audiences and monetizing it. How do you kind of think through, maybe not for you guys, but other media companies? Is that something where they're gonna lean in hard on?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  I think the way that you would do this is, look, I'm reading the same articles everybody's reading, you know, the one that Taylor Lorenz at the New York Times just put out about the TikTokers that are making millions of dollars and get free cars to, free car leases from Triller and, you know, all this stuff. And I think that It goes one of two ways either and look my kids, my 10 and 11 year old, they love Charli D'Amelio. Like that's like, that's their favorite person, right? And so I think it goes one of two ways, basically. These Uber stars on these short form platforms are able to continue to get influencer type sponsorships and do deals and stuff like that.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  And if that happens, I think they will, some of them will choose to be rolled up into a company, not dissimilar from what we saw during, you know, with the MCNs and YouTube back in the day, where all the YouTube stars got rolled up into these companies. And then there were various squabbles and it didn't really work. And then they really, they all decided to unbundle. You know, it's sort of interesting. I mean, it's like Substack is basically the the bundling of writers. With, with the TikTok stars, they're all debundled in individuals and out there doing their influencer deals. And then the question is, what makes sense to, to roll up and bundle into a company? And I imagine somebody, if not already, will take a pass at making a company basically

• 29:37Speaker 02

  out of TikTok stars.

• 29:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What about monetizing through non-advertising and non-subscription? So subscriptions have become popular with things like Substack, right? For kind of emails and, and that advertising is a known thing. What about things like either in more endorsement type models, maybe even joint ventures or physical products? Like we've seen creators on YouTube who maybe can't monetize very well on that platform.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  They've had to get creative. Does the large media companies almost use these creators as like R and D and just take the best practices and start to monetize in other ways as well?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Well, who's the first creator that, that comes up with the next Allbirds? Right? Like that, that would be super interesting to see that happen. And we've seen all these D to C companies that are doing well, that make a single product, that kind of reduce the choice for the consumer, which is really compelling because I think people want less choice. They want to be told these are the shoes to get, not like, you know, select from any number of these shoes, right? And, and so I, I think that's a viable model. I think many of the other things you talked about are really kind of just advertising in. In another, in another word, basically sponsorships or branding, I mean, that's all basically forms of advertising. But when you get right down to it, you basically have three avenues for monetizing media, as far as I can tell.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  You've got, to your point, subscription, advertising, and e-commerce. The bloom is a little bit off of e-commerce. I mean, there were a bunch of media companies that went into it, but basically, Amazon took down the affiliate payments that they were giving people. These e-commerce things typically have very low margin, because selling physical products has very low margin, which is why there's Amazon and basically nobody else.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  But there may be this little carve out of these D to C, high-end, custom products that influencers may be able to get into and may make e-commerce a go. But look, advertising and subscription have been around for, you know, hundreds, if not a thousand years, basically, as the two major forms of media monetization.

• 31:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I, I keep thinking about this idea of, you know, Joe Rogan, rather than have to sponsor Traeger grills, he should have just said, hey, I want the Joe Rogan grill, it's a Traeger grill with the Joe Rogan logo, he sells it through to his audience, owns equity, gets a higher percentage than just the ad dollars. Or you even go to, you know, take a D to C company like maybe Casper, right? I don't know their exact numbers, but somewhere where there's very high cost of acquisition, and you almost have them eventually get bought by like The Rock. And The Rock says, hey, this is the best mattress, I work out hard, and then I go to sleep every night, and you can drastically reduce the cost.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  I wonder how much of the economics of that are already captured through advertising and through referral. And you know, this is the thing about Joe Rogan, is I, I started listening to Joe Rogan only two weeks ago, just because I kind of wanted to, you know, I just, just.

• 32:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Who'd you listen, what, what episodes you listened to?

• 32:32Speaker 02

  I listened to the one where he was talking to a psychologist about narcissism.

• 32:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Then I listened to the episode where he was talking to Colin Quinn.

• 32:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So you haven't listened to any of the super, super, uh, out there ones yet?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  No, I just wanted to listen to the most current ones, right? And, um, and I had listened to parts of the Elon Musk one, a little, way back when. I was shocked by how many live read commercials he had at the beginning. He has like seven minutes, eight minutes, I mean, right? And but what I recognized is, oh, all you have to do is to skip to the you just drag the slider and you don't have to listen to eight minutes of sponsors. So I don't know how sustainable that really is. And I mean, his podcasts are super long. So I've never listened through, but there's no commercials in the middle, right?

• 33:18Anthony Pompliano?

  None.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  So, but he's using referral codes. So I mean, I guess most people don't skip the commercials. And I guess he's getting great brands to do this stuff with him.

• 33:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  So, you know.

• 33:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, look, it is fascinating, right? I mean, everybody who's a loyal listener knows you can just hit the fast forward button. You hear the music, right? And then you kind of just undo it. And that's where the episode is going to start. But again, you know, how many people actually fast forward? I'm sure some percentage.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  But back to what you're saying, you know, on the grills, right? Which is, you know, I believe he's capturing the vast majority of the economics of his contribution to what's the name of the grill company you mentioned?

• 33:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Traeger Grills is one of his big sponsors.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Trigger?

• 34:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Traeger.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Traeger.

• 34:02Anthony Pompliano?

  T R A E G E R. We're running ads for him right now. Look at us.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that he's capturing the value he's creating for Traeger because they're probably paying him a very high referral per grill, right? I'm not sure him going through the trouble of buying or owning the grill company or starting the grill company would really work. Although ironically, we're talking about grills and, you know, George Foreman, I suspect that the George Foreman Grill worked out very well for him. I mean, he did it for many years. Obviously, it must have been working. And, you know, maybe it's a little bit of experimentation of both. I mean, I do think there are categories that are super cheap to produce in where brand is really important. And Rogan could be very successful because he's also all about like health and martial arts and things like that as well,

• 34:49Speaker 02

  too. And he does a one of his commercials is for a supplement or a greens type drink, you know? I bet a lot of people would buy Joe Rogan vitamins or Joe Rogan, you know?

• 35:00Anthony Pompliano?

  He actually is equity owner in a company that.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  So they have they have natural greens or something, I think it was?

• 35:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, oh, maybe he ran an Athletic Greens?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Athletic Greens, Athletic Greens.

• 35:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so he's not an equity owner there as far as I know. He's got he's got a different company. The areas that you're most interested in outside of live television, we could talk about all these different things, like where do you see the biggest opportunity? If you were going to go restart a new media company today, where would you look?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  I think that media is not where, media is not the, the only media ideas I have kicking around in my head are the media ideas for my, my job, really, just because it kind of sucks up so, one only has so much media frontal lobe, right? I think financial services, there's a lot to be done in financial services and I think that you've seen parts of the stack already being taken apart and being done by startups like Lemonade for insurance, or Robinhood for stock trading, or Acorns for saving. And I think that's really just the tip of the iceberg. I think that there is, you know, I was actually looking at Wealthfront for the first time last night, a friend of mine pulled up Wealthfront because, you know, wealth management is one

• 36:13Speaker 02

  of the areas that's kind of interesting to me. And I was surprised by sort of how basic it was and how many things you couldn't do. And so to me, I think that we'll, you know, we'll see every, every type of insurance and every type of financial product startupized and that's much earlier innings, I think, than what we've seen in media. The other thing I'll tell you is, you know, I bought a used car over the summer through Carvana and, you know, I can't imagine ever going back to buying a car any other way. I mean, so, you know, that's an example too of, of just, just how much things can be done online and differently and in a modern fashion.

• 36:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So I had a, one of the founders of Carleepso, which was bought by Carvana Come On, and this week I've recorded three podcasts where the guest mentioned buying a car on Carvana this year. Right? I mean, just exploding.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  The selection is not even that good. Like the selection's not that good. I wanted a pickup truck and like they only had like a handful that fit like low mileage and what I wanted and, you know, the super cab and all of that type of stuff so I could fit the kids in it. But they make it so easy and, you know, there's no fighting over the price, the price is set, you can go and check the blue book to make sure that it's, you know, it's within range. And it's, and I had gone, I had gone to a dealership before and I was immediately, you know, arguing with the guy over price and the prices didn't make any sense and it's a far better experience. I mean, I can't imagine why anyone would do anything other than buy a car online.

• 37:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it makes sense. You've been heavily involved in the startup world and in investing. What are some of the other themes that you find interesting right now or that you're looking to invest in?

• 38:00Speaker 02

  So I don't really invest that much. You know, it's very rare that I do investment. For me, I love operating and I find investing to be really frustrating because I just want to take the steering wheel, you know, and I think that like, you know, so I don't in the few things that I've invested in, but mostly it's a relatively uncomfortable thing for me. So I like, personal finance is super interesting.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Connected fitness, I don't think is tapped out yet. Peloton and Mirror, you know, are great and are big, but I don't think they're the only ones that can come into that. I think that that's a mega trend that's here to stay.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  I think that there will be more fast TV services. I don't think we're done with that yet. I don't think there's enough of them. And I think that they'll be customized to different interests and likes.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Coffee recently, I've experimented with coffee. There's two coffee startups that interest me. I'm not an investor in either. They're just interesting. One is Jock Coffee, which is super concentrated coffee. Then you just put another, the other is this thing called Cometor, which is frozen, it comes frozen. The coffee, coffee pods come frozen. You boil a cup of water, you put the coffee pod into it. That's, that's.

• 39:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you a big coffee drinker?

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a big coffee drinker. Yeah, I even have a coffee tattoo.

• 39:20Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you don't. Really?

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do.

• 39:23Anthony Pompliano?

  For those who are just listening, we're about to see a coffee tattoo. Oh, he legitimately has a coffee tattoo on.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  I got a coffee tattoo, so it's like the yin and yang of life, and then that's Scotch.

• 39:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Scotch. That's fantastic.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Although I'm not drinking. I am doing like the dry.

• 39:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Sober October?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Sober October, yeah.

• 39:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Dry October.

• 39:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, how many cups of coffee do you have a day?

• 39:49Speaker 02

  I've ebbed and flowed over time because you know, my doctors want me to have less. But I have three, four cups of coffee a day.

• 39:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. This is a really important thing like, like literally breaks friendships. Are you an iced coffee drinker?

• 40:04Speaker 02

  I saw your tweet about that. I saw your tweet about that.

• 40:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you drink iced coffee?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  I drink iced coffee.

• 40:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you drink iced coffee in the winter?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 40:11Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. We're friends still.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  I, I, I think that basically iced coffee is the afternoon beverage. So like, you know.

• 40:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, do you go hot coffee in the morning and iced coffee in the afternoon?

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I need to warm myself up. I need to warm up my, my chili bones in the morning, you know, like I need a hot coffee. You know, I do, I do believe that consuming a cold beverage on a cold day in the morning and then I walk my daughter to the school bus like, you know, it'll put it, it'll put a chill in you if you have, you know, an iced coffee first thing in the morning.

• 40:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think I know a single person who goes hot and cold in the same day.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Do you have, do you use an ultra concentrate coffee?

• 40:47Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  You should, you would love it. I mean, it's, it's actually perfect for iced coffee. What are you brewing? Are you cold brewing or what are you doing?

• 40:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I get my ass up and I walk to Starbucks and I go and I order coffee and I walk back.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  You should be going to Dunkin', my friend. My, my great partner Dunkin' is where you should be going.

• 41:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, uh, Dunkin' Donuts, everyone knows America runs on Dunkin'.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  America runs on Dunkin', Cheddar runs on Dunkin'.

• 41:11Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I asked the same two questions, everybody, before we finish up and then you get to ask me one to finish it. Uh, first one is what's the most important book you've ever read?

• 41:21Speaker 02

  It's a great question. Atlas Shrugged, probably.

• 41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Because I think that, I think Ayn Rand is widely misquoted and misunderstood and people basically use it as an excuse for being totally capitalistic and having no social welfare net. And I don't, I don't buy into any of that. I, I, I believe the society needs to take care of its, of its population and the capitalism alone is not perfect. So I'm not, I'm not like crazy on it, but. The notion of the creator and the value that the inventor brings to society and the role that capitalism plays in moving a world forward really spoke to me. And so that book was sort of formative in kind of how I think I shaped my entrepreneurial mindset.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  So there was that book, Catcher in the Rye, I really like a lot too. The idea that as we all come of age, there's this discomfort in adjusting to the old, the adult world and figuring out where one fits in. Robert Caro's book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, about how cities get built. You know, Robert Moses was a terrible person, but the book is an amazing book to understand how cities get built and the politics that go into them and how complicated projects are executed. I gave you three books, I guess.

• 42:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Those are all great ones. Second question, more fun. Aliens, are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 42:52Speaker 02

  I'm a complete believer.

• 42:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Just because I think that if the universe is infinite, that the likelihood that we are the only intelligent life form is just, you know, it's just not possible. It's just not possible. And I do think that, you know, when you hear about the sightings that people have had and the experiences that people have had, there's a striking similarity in, you know, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There's a striking similarity in all of this stuff. So, but you know, I tend to be more open-minded. You know, I am, I'm religious, you know, I'm Jewish. I believe in God. I believe that there are things that happen that are outside of our control

• 43:38Speaker 02

  and that there are forces in the universe that we don't understand. And so I think that aliens sort of plays into that. Look, aliens, you know, the other possibility is... That we are all in a terrarium or a fish tank on an alien's counter, right? I mean, you know, when you have pets, like my cat, my cat's understanding of the world is very, very strange, you know? She, she's in this, she's an indoor cat. Her universe is this apartment and her other universe used to be a different apartment when we moved. I mean, how does my cat possibly, well, first of all, my cat doesn't even bother trying to process that.

• 44:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So I started asking the alien question because one night I was laying in bed and I had this really intelligent epiphany, which was, do you think aliens have pets? Like you, you have a cat, right?

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:32Anthony Pompliano?

  But like if the aliens showed up, are they showing up with like multiple species and, and there's pets involved?

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Well, you know, where my thought first went to is, you know, do they have livestock? Do they have working animals and animals that they breed for food? And the likelihood is that they are more advanced than us and they've probably already moved off of a, you know, an animal-based diet. They probably are on only a plant-based diet. So I would suspect that the aliens show up without pets or livestock. They also probably don't travel with them.

• 45:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Contrarian view there, my friend. All right. What question you got for me to finish this up?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Who's the most interesting person that you've ever interviewed?

• 45:17Anthony Pompliano?

  The most interesting person I've ever interviewed? Um. So interesting is hard because it's, because everyone finds different things interesting. But the person that I think was the most misunderstood, and I walked away and I said, I could talk to that person for hours and hours and hours and like never get tired of talking to her, is Kathy Wood from Arc Invest. Just, I'd done two interviews with her. The first one was like $300 Tesla stock price. She was giving the whole innovation story and she was getting hammered by everyone. And you never know, like when people go on television and stuff, you're kind of like,

• 46:01Anthony Pompliano?

  hey, do they, how, how much do they believe what they're saying and kind of what's that conviction look like? And I remember coming out of the first conversation being like, that woman really understands technology trends, really understands innovation, really has kind of that independent thinking and first principles thinking. And the second time we did it, Tesla had run. So everyone kind of shut up about that. Now they were on to the next thing, you know, saying that, that she was wrong on. But I just think that it's fascinating to find somebody who's had a very long storied career and reached a point where like, she's probably just as hungry now as she always was, and just enjoys playing the game. Right? And so it's just like all those little pieces to it. She'd probably be the answer.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Good answer.

• 46:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Where can people find you on the internet?

• 46:48Speaker 02

  John Steinberg on Twitter.

• 46:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. We're gonna have to do this again in the future. I think I feel like, maybe I'm gonna have to come back with like a coffee tattoo or something myself now to, to one up.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  An iced coffee tattoo.

• 47:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. We'll do it again in the future.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Pleasure. Thanks for the time.