#379: Keith Grossman on The Future of Media

Keith Grossman is President of TIME, where he leads the business operations of the company, including global advertising, marketing, and their digital and consumer businesses. He previously served as Global Chief Revenue Officer at Bloomberg. In this conversation, we discuss the legacy media business model, the rise of creators, the importance of distribution, existing shift to digital, challenges with scaling, and the future of media. ======================== Athletic Brewing is re-imagining beer for the modern adult. We love beer. But we also love being healthy, active and at our best. No matter your motivation, if you want to keep a clear head and drink healthier, we are here for you. Athletic makes non-alcoholic beer that you don't have to compromise to enjoy. The beers are fully flavored, clean ingredient, and a fraction of the calories of full strength beer - they fit in any occasion. Check out www.athleticbrewing.com for more details and free shipping nationwide. ======================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 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. Keith Grossman is President of Time, where he leads the business operations of the company, including global advertising, marketing, and their digital and consumer businesses. He previously served as Global Chief Revenue Officer at Bloomberg. In this conversation, we discuss the legacy media business model, the rise of creators, the importance of distribution, existing shift to digital, and challenges with scaling and the future of media. I really enjoyed this conversation with Keith, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  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 Keith. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:28Speaker 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.

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Keith here. Thanks so much for doing this, man.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it.

• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. For those that don't know you, let's start with where were you born? Where did you grow up? And how the hell did you end up in media organizations?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Sure. So I was born in New York City, as I was telling you, whereas you know, at this point, you know, a bubble unto itself.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  I grew up Upper East Side and now live on the Upper West Side. So, you know, essentially gone very far in my life. And I, you know, went to school upstate New York and joined Conde Nast out of college. I interned at Conde Nast and interned at Wired and then interned at Ars Technica. I interned at Wired and ran Wired ultimately, and then ran Ars Technica and then went over to Bloomberg Media and became ultimately over time the Global Chief Revenue Officer. And then I joined Time and I had a brief stint in between, but you know, Mark and Lynn

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Benioff, Mark being the CEO of Salesforce and his wife bought Time as a private asset. And, you know, their vision for it was that, you know, it's a challenging time for media and they ultimately wanted to make sure that they could preserve what they felt was a, you know, rational centric perspective on the world for the next 100 years. And how do you modernize that and preserve sort of the integrity and the trust that it's had for the past 100 years? And so I've been at the brand now for Yeah, I want to say a year and a few months. I think when I you came on board over, you know, to check out the offices. When was that? That was November last year, right?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I, you know, we had just moved into to our new offices in Times Square. But I've been in the industry for, you know, uh, close to 20 years now.

• 5:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So your background is not in journalism. You've always been on kind of the the business side. Uh, and many people are more familiar with the journalism side, just because that's what they interact with. They understand, you know, generally that there's writers and that content is what they're consuming. Help people understand how are these organizations kind of structured from a business perspective? Um, and then as either the global chief, uh, you know, officer of revenue or as the president of time, kind of what your day to day responsibilities are.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Sure. So, you know, when when I was introduced to Conde Nast, you know, which is the publisher of Wired and The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue. Uh, the first time I ever heard about it, you know, I knew it too from the editorial and the content side. And and when somebody said you should check it out, my first reaction was that's a business. And, uh, and and I couldn't believe it. And, um, and you know, what I learned very quickly was, there's a few different ways in which, you know, brands that produce content actually can monetize themselves. They could do it episodically, which is either marketing support, right?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  So a big marketer comes in and says they want to buy advertising in some sort that goes, you know, alongside the content. Um, they can do it episodically, meaning e-commerce, right? So, um, you know, we sell a lot of of items in the Time cover store, for instance. Um, uh, episodically is also affiliate marketing. So like revenue that we could derive from selling products and then taking a rap share off of that. Or through, you know, annuity streams, um, which are subscriptions, right? And when you look at that, um, you know, like right now, we have, uh, an annuity stream with the print subscription of Time Magazine, but we also have an annuity stream with Time for Kids digitally.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  And we'll have another annuity stream with Time as we continue to evolve the digital infrastructure of the brand.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Um, that's really the two big ways in which a media company makes their revenue.

• 7:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And so obviously, there is this seismic shift or transition going on. Most businesses were, you know, majority ad-supported for many, many years. A little bit of subscription on just the actual distribution of physical publications. Talk a little bit about, you know, over the last 20 years, how you've seen that shift occur? Because I think most of the people who listen to this, they're going to be well aware of kind of what I'll I'll steal from Shopify, this idea of like, arm the rebels, right? So this is mostly the creators, the smaller publications. They've got their own perspective on this shift to digital, but you've been inside the machine.

• 7:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And so how do you think of kind of that shift or that transition as it's been underway?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Sure, so, God, how old are you? Can I ask that question? Is that a fair question? Can I ask that? I feel like we're not a job interview, right? This is, this is a podcast. I mean, how old are you? Do you mind me asking?

• 8:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Thirty-two.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're thirty-two.

• 8:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You have to say how old you are now.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  I'm forty, right? And, and, but I'm like Benjamin Button, so I like age backwards. So I'm like a ninety-year-old, okay? So I just want to be totally clear with this. No, but okay, so, so take this for instance, right?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  You know, many people that I would say are over the age of forty have a relationship when it comes to media with the platform. Right, so they say print, or television, or radio. And they mean a magazine, their cable provider, or terrestrial radio, most likely in their car. Under forty, and then plus or minus five years, right?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Most people have a relationship with the experience that they have, right? So you say TV, and you actually just probably mean viewing video on a screen.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Right, like you don't have a relationship with what the platform is. And instead, what your relationship with media is, is it's viewing and listening and sharing and touching and reading. Right. And ultimately, if it's in print, great, like it might be. And if it's digital. Video, great, you don't really care, but you don't distinguish between sort of. How you want to actually get your content, you just say, I'm in the mood to view. Right. And, and, and if that's the case, what's happened in terms of sort of audiences is that the.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Way in which consumers have shifted towards these experiences is very different than the way that media had historically been set up and structured. So it used to be that, like, if you looked at Conde Nast, for instance, where I started my career. They were so dominant in magazines, right, physical magazines, and there's moats in physical magazines. Right, like there's barriers to entry as it relates to printing and distribution and securing of these paper costs. But what's fascinating about the digital revolution is. All of these sort of things that created moats at one point for industries are disrupted because the tools are handed to anyone.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Right. To create whatever they want. And what happens in that scenario. Is like the consumer is now confronted with infinite choice. Right. And infinite choice, because anyone can create anything now and interact with, with, with any individual. Seems like it's the most amazing thing on the planet. With the exception of it becomes extraordinarily paralyzing. Right. And so then all of a sudden, what happens is in a world of infinite choice. The advantage comes to the content creators that have established trust with their consumers. Right. So like you, for instance, have a tremendous amount of trust with your.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Your fan base, like I saw that yesterday when you tweeted out. To them, what should we be talking about, right? Like every time you and I interact on Twitter, I get more sort of comments than in any other interaction. That's trust with your fan base. You are a filter in which sort of people believe sort of the topics that you're going to talk about,

• 11:33Speaker 02

  that people want to see it through the lens of. In that environment, Time, in this instance, acts as a filter. The red border of Time acts as a sort of curator of trust. And people know that if I put the Time logo on anything, right, whether it's digital or physical, that they're going to get a certain type of experience. And that's not just for Time, it's for any brand. And so I think that what happens is that in a world of infinite choice, it actually is a very paralyzing, it's like euphemism, it's, it seems so amazing, but it's actually a very paralyzing existence. And what has to happen is, is brands exist to sort of curate and reduce and create filters.

• 12:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So in that world, obviously, Time is a great example where you are going to, and have done a great job of getting ahead of this transition to digital, right? And we, maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the public numbers you guys have released in terms of how that is going financially. But in doing so, you're going to start doing things you haven't done before. And so how do you think through the filter of keeping trust, right? Not, not doing anything to kind of put that in jeopardy, even though you're going to go do kind of new things, right? So not necessarily things that are new to the user, but new for Time as a, as a business.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  So, so it's really interesting that you asked that question. And, and I appreciate, you know, one of the biggest challenges, I think, that I face at Time is the evolution from Time Magazine to Time, right? And the reason is, is that, and it's not to dismiss the magazine, the magazine's a platform within the, within the overarching brand. But the reason is, is that for 97 years, essentially, the brand has been delivered and experienced one way for many, many people. And what's interesting is, is it's actually been neglected for about ten years by, you know, previous owners, whether it was Time Inc. or Meredith, as, you know,

• 13:34Speaker 02

  the industry shifted and changed, right? It wasn't sort of invested in on a business end, but consumers still flocked to the brand. And what I found was, was when Mark and Lynn purchased it and they gave us the investment to start to look at where we could develop. In the first year, what I've really focused on with the team has been building infrastructure and productizing existing areas where we know things work well with our audience. So, to give you an idea, when you think about the overarching ecosystem of Time, it reaches about a hundred million people a month, right? Time Magazine only reaches 1.6 million people.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Time.com reaches close to 30 million people. Time's social channels reach over 60 million people. Twitter alone, 17.4 million followers. Facebook, 13 and a half million followers. And so a lot of what we've been looking at has been, how do we productize certain areas that already existed, but people didn't really think about it because it wasn't getting marketed to their attention. So like a good example is, is Time for Kids. Time for Kids is an area that's been around for 25 years, but it's only existed as a classroom product, and that classroom product was print only. And when the pandemic occurred, what we looked at was, oh my God, there are parents that

• 15:02Speaker 02

  are gonna be at home, and for the first time ever, they're gonna have to homeschool their kids, and they need a product that they can trust as it relates to age-appropriate sort of news curation. And so we digitized Time for Kids on March 23rd, right? We did not know what we were gonna get into, and as of today, Time for Kids is a global product, right? It went from US to global. It's in 185 countries and territories, all 50 states, red and blue, which I love. It is, been produced in English, which has historically been the only language, Spanish, Chinese, and we're looking at other languages. We've produced creativity shows and a camp series, and over 350,000 people have registered for it.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Right? Since March 23rd. And what we did was, and the way that we really thought about some of our evolution during the pandemic, which sped up every plan that we had for this evolution of this. But what we did was, we said, what are the real areas that people are suffering or need help in? Like, where can we really help people with? And we found that it was parents and teachers and children. So we looked at Time for Kids. It was mental health and wellness, which is why you saw the launch of Time for Health, the way that we did. It was executives who said, how do I navigate this moment in time?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Which is why we went to Columbia Business School and partnered together to create Time for Learning, and ultimately expanded Time for Learning to, you know, Sean Harper at the USC Center of Race and Equity, and Zoom to do a thing on race in the workplace.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  And it's also why we partnered with Red Ventures to launch NextAdvisor as it relates to personal finance. Right? And so like, when you think about all the launches that we've done in the past, you know, 90 days to 100 days, that I alluded to in my note, they were all based on looking at huge societal trends, and then leaning into that. And that was where we, we worked at our permissions. Now, along that way, we launched other things too, and at varying degrees of success. Like, we saw that when we did Time for Giving, theoretically, it seemed great, but people weren't really into it. Right? So like, it wasn't as if we batted 100, but we really did put out a lot of things in the areas that we thought provided either value

• 17:29Speaker 02

  or utility to the consumer, and, and then watched what the response was. And when people started to really lean into it, we leaned back into it.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So obviously, there's multiple components or kind of sequential steps that you take, right? So there's, hey, we need a product, uh, let's look kind of in our toolbox that we already have, or we can create something new. Uh, what exactly is it? Who are we going to target? Um, and then it's actually getting it out from a distribution standpoint. Uh, many people who See this, they say, oh, of course, time can do this, right? They've got tens of thousands of millions of people who follow them on social media. They've got the time brand like this is a walk in the park for them. Obviously, in past conversations with you, I know that that might not necessarily be true. And so talk a little bit about how you think of like the product creation

• 18:19Anthony Pompliano?

  different from the distribution and kind of how you guys maybe go back and forth between the two to ensure that you end up coming up with a successful product, but also one that reaches a lot of people and can become profitable for you.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Sure. So I mean, I was thinking a lot about this question, especially talking to you on this podcast, given I think a lot of your audience probably looks at businesses through the lens of a challenger sort of lens. Is that a correct statement? Right? And I think that, you know, one of the advantages time has as a brand is it is a very well-known brand. It's a very famous brand. Like I have yet to come across somebody who doesn't know the brand, but everyone always says Time Magazine, right? And slowly people are beginning to see sort of other things, other areas of the brand comes to life.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  I think that the way that we navigated Q2 specifically, right? And I think that that was an important moment in time because it was, I think, every brand, no matter who you were, was equal at that moment in time. Like you saw your fate and it was a very humbling, humbling sort of moment. And, and at that moment, like what I really wanted to make sure, and I know my team really felt was was important to do was be as scrappy as possible. Right? So it wasn't like we didn't launch time for kids after, you know, six months of market research. Like we just felt in our gut that

• 20:03Speaker 02

  This was the right thing to do and it was like, we weren't gonna miss this opportunity. And so, um, you know, we found a partner that was willing to, uh, with e-magazines, who was willing to distribute quickly. We promoted quickly and, you know, if you remember, the day that Time for Kids went digitized, and if you look back at your DMs on Twitter, you and Paulina, I sent you both notes that was like, can you please promote this, right? Like, it was like, there was no, there was no budget that went into it. There was no, um, grand scheme, major deck that went into it. It was, you know, a handful of us saying, hey, this is, this has to happen and it has to happen now, right? Like, we've run out of time.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  And, um, and I like that. I mean, I, I, you have to remember, like, you asked me where I was, where I grew up. Like, I'm a neurotic Jewish male, you know, who grew up in New York City, pleading that the world was always gonna end. Like, I was made for this moment in time, right? Like, uh, right? Uh, but like, I looked at it and, and, you know, we were very fortunate that we had great owners. We have great owners that allow us to think long. And as we started to see success in Time for Kids, and as we start to see things pick up, we were able to take that success and say to our owners, will you help, will you invest in us in this area to allow us to continue to build upon this?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And that's how we started to get funds. But we really did it with our existing budgets and everything just shifting around. And, you know, there's a great quote, um, you know, I never thought I would say it from this individual, but, but it's a great quote from Mike Tyson. Uh, and I don't know if you know what I'm gonna say, is everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And it was, you know, like, we had these gigantic plans set forth. And of how we were going to evolve the Time brand and you know, Q2 came about. And it was like a huge wake up call and it was like, what are we going to focus on? And we had to really go straight down to core sort of roll up your sleeves brute tactics.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  And so everything was launched on minimum viable products. Everything was scrappy. There was no incremental money thrown at anything. There was no testing theories. And we succeeded on a few things which we're leaning into in the second half of the year and beyond. You know, Time for Health was a success. Time for Kids was a success. You know, some of the franchises, the Time 100 franchise and the Time 100 Talks was a huge success for us. Our ability to think about how we could take Time Studios and apply it to network television from a business perspective is a huge success. And then there are other things that we did that just failed.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  And like, and then what you have to just do is you have to just say, okay, what are we going to stop doing and forget it? And like, we tried it. Great. Move on.

• 23:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think part of the the lesson here for people is like, having a brand can sure can help in some cases, but it doesn't absolve you of all the challenges of of building a business, right?

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Now, you know, like, at the end of the day, you know, we we had huge successes. For all the successes that I could point to with like Time for Kids or Time for Health or others. Like you look at some of the stuff that we put out, like 20 people signed up, 100 people signed up. Like, I mean, these are real, like, it's black and white, like, hey, didn't work, right? And so there's no, there's no magic that says

• 23:42Speaker 02

  because we have this great brand that's storied.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  What we touch all of a sudden is successful. What it, what the magic is about the brand is that we have established trust that people are willing to at least give it a shot or look at it. Right? And that's where, you know, we have to lean into and that's sort of our advantage in this moment in time.

• 24:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who are in the startup kind of technology world, and they generally write off the incumbents in any industry, you know, media or otherwise. And they just say, look, they're so out of tune. They don't know what's all the new technology is. They don't know the new platforms, things like that. I know for you, that's not the case, and you spend a lot of time paying attention to some of these trends. I want to talk a little bit about kind of two of them, which is, one, the rise of the creator. So kind of these individual content creators that are becoming more popular. And then two is the platforms really that are empowering them. So whether that is the Shopify's and the e-commerce side, there's plenty in the content space.

• 24:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But just talk kind of from your vantage point, how you evaluate, you know, these trends? And then kind of the pros and cons as you see it.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Sure. So if I can, like, I'd love to step back and just, very early in my career, I was very extreme in my viewpoint of things. I always thought it was either like black or white, left or right. And I realized like, things aren't that extreme. And David Pogue, back in 2010, before he left the New York Times, he wrote this piece. I thought it was the most brilliant piece ever, and it was called, the title of the piece is, you know, "What I Learned Covering Ten Years of Tech Journalism." And what he said was essentially that things don't necessarily, things are not as extreme as people think it is. Like, things don't necessarily kill everything.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Like, when MTV came out and video was supposed to kill the radio star, it didn't, right? But things splinter, right? Instant coffee didn't kill real coffee. You know, like, and you look at this, and you know, at the end of the day, you could give, sure, a lot of counter sort of examples of areas where things did kill things, right? Color TV definitively killed black and white TV. The camera in your phone definitively killed point and shoot cameras, but it didn't kill DSLRs, right? Like, certain things evolved out. And so I think that the reason I bring that up is is that there's there is value to incumbent brands regardless of who you are if you're structured properly.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Right. Most incumbent brands can't get out of their way because they're so big. And they have such established systems that they can't necessarily adjust to what the reality of the system is. And so when you look at like my background, for instance, right? And and you look at sort of what my specialty is like, I like building brands and turning brands around. Right. And Wired, you know, for what it's worth, you know, was originally primarily a print business and it's a technology brand and you know, we diversified it into becoming more of a digital brand, you know, than than a print brand.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  And we really built it up in the 18th smallest brand that had come in as to the fourth largest brand, made back every dollar and was the first brand to cross that chasm of, you know, 50% or more revenue being digital. And part of it to me was just educating myself on consumer behavior and expectation. And I think that the most important book I ever read in my entire life is related to business theory was The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen. Right. And, you know, to give you an idea of what a loser I am, I read it on my honeymoon. Okay, so so I don't know what you read on your honeymoon. I know you went to McDonald's. But I read The Innovator's Dilemma on my honeymoon and and I came back and I said, you know what?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  I know exactly how we're going to navigate this to my partner, Howard. Time they said, I know exactly how we're going to navigate this moment. We're just going to operate on the simple question of, is this a good deal for us? And we're going to shift the way that sellers are compensated so that way they're not protecting a CPM, but they're working in conjunction with what clients' needs were. And also, you know, how they could work within the marketplace with maximum fluidity. In every place I've ever gone, the first thing that I've done is is shifted the comp structure of the sales team. So that way a dollar is a dollar. And most places won't do that because they're historically built on very high CPMs on one platform, let's say, print,

• 28:32Speaker 02

  and much lower CPMs on platforms like digital. And until you're willing to realize that all of those CPM protections that people play on P and L's is BS, it's not real, right? It doesn't make a difference and most incumbents don't want to change the way in which they're accounting and doing their systems and thinking that granularly about human behavior, right? And success, because the second you shift the way a seller goes into the marketplace and represents your brands to represent the interests of the marketplace, then you get a better outcome than the seller representing the interests of the brand itself.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  And you can work with the biggest issue at hand, which is the innovator's dilemma and win with speed. I say that all because most incumbents don't think like that. But here's where the incumbent's advantage is. And this is where like I look at my advantage. Like I'm a privately owned company, right? And I'm allowed to evolve without ever spending any of my time on the street trying to raise money. Right? So let's pretend, for instance, that you're a small startup. I would say at least 50% of your time is on calls trying to raise money. Right? And I don't spend 50% of my time raising any money.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  I spend 100% of my time thinking about how to make Time a Better Brand. And so that is discounted tremendously because people can't see brands being able to do stuff like that because they think it. And then there's also the allure of the new, like people just love the new.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  I bring all this together because it's not, I'm not defending incumbents in the slightest. Like I keep thinking that there are huge disadvantages to being an incumbent. But the idea that it's an either or world is what I would dispute. Like I think that it's a world that everything sort of exists together. And incumbents evolve, some, some die. And some up and comers emerge and most up and comers die. Right? And so, so like I think that people don't want to ever look at the world in that view because it's not as exciting. It's actually quite boring.

• 30:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What do you think are the advantages of these creators and these platforms that are the up and comers? So, most of them will die, but some will thrive. The ones that do end up thriving, what are you not jealous of in terms of the advantages they have that you might not, but more so just you recognize that here is an area where they are better than us or having a structural advantage that you don't?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Sure. So, in content creators, you know, like, at the end of the day, the only thing content creators businesses are based on is monetizing trust, right? And ultimately, trust manifests itself in how much time is the consumer going to provide me in a given week, or day, or month with the brand of that individual?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  I, you know, I've been in entrepreneurship my entire life that works within big companies, right? Like, when I was in high school, I had a computer consulting company. Like, I like the idea of like controlling my own fate and destiny. And I think that what a lot of these content creators all of a sudden realizes is, unbridled by a larger sort of mechanism, they could be more of themselves, and they could find an audience where they can be happy just sort of creating sort of a brand that is based on them. Now, the challenge with

• 32:28Speaker 02

  that is, you know, most people are 50% successful based on themselves and 50% successful based on the brands that they go to. So, like, if I was faced with the same scenario in Q2, but I was at a brand, and I'm just going to make up the brand called like, you know, like, I just, you know, I was just petting my dog before I came in here. So, let's call it like, Dog Lovers United, or whatever, right? Nobody would care like that, that I was doing all of these new innovations. And so, part of my brand gives me permissions to try certain things easier. And then...

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Part of the reason that the brand is successful is because of the individuals that are there. When you're a creator, you could try whatever you want. You have no sort of limitations, but only the people that understand the brand or know you will accept it. And very few people outside of that will give you a shot, you know, until somebody else has convinced them that they should give you a shot. And so if you look at some of the brands out there today that I really admire, right? You name Shopify or Substack or any of these others, you know, they give individuals the tools, but they don't give people the destinations or the distributions, right? Like they don't give people the means to allow other people to identify or explore them.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And so, I mean, does that answer your question? Or I feel absolutely there, I apologize.

• 33:58Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I think that's great. And I guess as part of that, you know, there's an argument to be made of kind of the unbundling of media organizations. But there's also an argument to be made that many platforms are simply just rebundling all over again. Right? It's kind of like you're almost unbundling under the current brands and then just rebundling under new brands. Like maybe talk a little bit about, you know, do you agree with that? Do you not?

• 34:24Speaker 02

  I do, actually. I mean, I really, I don't know. Do you know Rich Greenfield?

• 34:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah. From, was it Light Street or Light Street Partners?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  White Speed. And like, so, so, you know, like I do believe, you know, like in his theory of the unbundling, right? And then ironically, I also believe that the problem with the unbundling is it comes down to, again, this, this paradox of choice, right? And you unbundle, unbundle, unbundle. And then the consumer has infinite choice. And ultimately, the consumer just says, God, I just want to be, I just want it easy. Right? And so like, that's why the rebundling occurs. And I do think that what happens in the unbundling is, is the crap gets dismissed, right? It gets sort of pushed aside.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  And I do think that one of the things that's really lovely with the digital evolution is you're going to start to see sort of more efficient things coming together, right? Now, the problem. Is you lose surprise and delight, right? Like so in a world where there's no data, people made gut decisions. Like everyone sort of had some common truths around them and, and there was surprise and delight. You didn't know what was on the next channel. You didn't know what you were going to read on the next page. You didn't know what was going to be put together. And like editors' jobs were to curate like a selection of, of ideas for you.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  And some of them landed and some of them you didn't agree with. Now where everything can be so personalized, what you actually get is this custom tailored information. It almost puts you in your own little unique filter bubble. And it divides people further from having any sort of common truths.

• 36:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and is it a world where as this happens, uh, the monetization, right? So we think of it as like there's the incumbent models, which we talked a little bit about. But in these new models, uh, there's completely different monetization strategies. Or is it a world where there's just only so many, right? I mean, it's basically there's ad supported and there's subscription supported. And either you're going to do one of those two things and maybe you can sell some physical products, right? But there's not like you can reinvent the wheel over and over again on monetization.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  So yes and no, right?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  There's a really interesting, uh, I would say fallacy that happens with transitions most of the time, which is as these transitions take place, most people think that the old manners in which people consume or pay for content or engage with a brand can be applied to the new technologies, right? So like, if you take, you know, the Alexa or, you know, your iPhone when it first came out or any new device, right? Most of the time, the first sort of iterations of brains and engagements on these new platforms were repurposed versions of.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  What people's experiences were on a different platform. Does that make sense? It does. And then I think that what happens in that world is that people think that the business models that were applicable in one world are also applicable in another world. And so they think about it through the lens of marketer support or subscriptions. And if you think about what I was saying in the beginning is it's either it does fall in the camp of either episodic or annuity, right? But it doesn't fall into marketer supporter subscriptions. It's like marketer support subscriptions are sort of subsets of either episodic, which is what marketer support would be, and subscription would be an annuity.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  And here's like a real example, like look at television, for instance, right? Like the traditional form of television exists where the network would create the content. It puts a huge investment in the content creation and then it sells commercials against that.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  The economics have gotten so unwieldy that you're seeing it on like linear television today. There's challenges, right? And you see it, you see, you know, the shift to streaming, the streaming wars are on. What's happening here? And that's very real, right? Like I I've never owned a landline since graduating from college. I assume you don't have a landline with Pauline in your house, right? You just have two cell phones. And I'm willing to bet that my six year old daughter doesn't have a cable subscription when she graduates from college and gets her first apartment. These are generational shifts, right? Where they where they go. And so the economics of television are going to have to change, right?

• 39:22Speaker 02

  And if you think about it, like a brand like Time has Time Studios, which is its long form film distribution unit. And historically, Time Studios would create, you know, films for Netflix or Amazon and then sell it to them the way that we did with like a Year in Space. Or we would work with Magnolia and do something like the John Lewis Good Trouble, you know, documentary. But today, we have the ability to create content for the networks.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Take airtime from the networks and split ad revenues with the networks. And that's a business model that never existed before, where it's like, all of a sudden, you know, I can look at a television network and say, I'm going to take my brand and create content for your network. So I'll fill an hour of your airtime. I've now saved you the content cost creation. And in return, let's split what the ad revenue would be, let me own the rights. So that way I can sell the rights internationally and it can become a great new business. And what you're going to see, by the way, and you know, when does this go live? This podcast this afternoon, or does it go live like?

• 40:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Next week.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Oh, perfect. So on Monday, so I'm telling this to you now before, but on Monday, we're going to announce that, you know, we have the Time 100 this year, being broadcast on ABC on the 22nd of September at 10:00 PM, following Dancing with the Stars, right? Now, that's a business model that a year ago could not exist, but the pandemic opened it up. And so I think that what people should always do as they look at any business or as they look at evolving a business is always ask why? Why can't we do this? Why are we doing this? And if you can't get a rational answer, or if your answer is just because that's how we've always done it, then that's the issue that most incumbents have as opposed to startups.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Like you, you gotta get asked the because, who cares about because? Like, if you don't have a rational basis, it like, you gotta, you gotta think about, how are you going to tweak it and fix it?

• 41:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So I, I think when people hear that, right? Where you're going to take the Time 100 and you're going to put it on television. Talk through a little bit how you think about a startup or an incumbent who couldn't, you know, have that conversation, strike a deal like that. They would say, oh, if we want to do something, we're just going to stream it on the internet. Right? So that's kind of one option. The second is on television. And so is it a attraction because of the audience size? Is it an attraction because of the partner? They're like, why go to television versus digital? I think it's a prime example of, of these situations.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  So we do a lot of digital distribution and we have a lot of success. You know, we do the Time 100 Talks, which we launched in Q2, not as a virtual event, as a television show. We do it every week and every week, hundreds of thousands of people actually tune in to watch it. And then ultimately, it gets clipped and it gets millions of views as we put it through our ecosystem. The ability to get quickly into the network world is, I mean, no matter how much it's transitioning today, it's still gigantic, right, on every level. And it's still where a lot of eyeballs are today on every level. And so there is a prestige to being able to do something of that.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  I think that what a lot of people tend to say when they look at sort of evolution is, is, forget, forget targeting this person, let's target this audience, like this is useless, or this was the old, let's go to the new. And I'm simply saying, like, you can't discount anything. Like, half of the time, 100 this year is going to be digitized, right? And it's going to be streamed over our own site and over Twitter and through those feeds. And a portion of it is going to be broadcast, right? And I don't think, like, a brand like ours should ever say either or, like, we should play in all the different areas. I learned quickly when I was at Wired, a really interesting

• 43:30Speaker 02

  reality of getting talent to, to speak at events. And I remember

• 43:40Speaker 02

  we had Chris Sacca at the Wired Business Conference. God, I want to say maybe in 2010. I might be wrong on the year. But he made a comment to us, to Maya Drayson, who's now with me at Time. She's amazing, but she, he made a comment about, about, he didn't, he didn't come and speak to the Wired Business Conference for the 400 people that were in the room, right? Like, they were great 400 people that we curated. He, he spoke at the Wired Business Conference for the distribution that the Wired brand gave him to the entire ecosystem that was outside of the room. And I think that to any small brand, like, what you want to think about is, is,

• 44:23Speaker 02

  like, there's one value to speaking to your audience, but if you don't have the distribution to push it out, there's only so much influence and impact that you can ultimately have. And, you know, like, I do think that there's huge value, you know? We take the time and the talks, and not only do we stream it on our site, but we stream it live over Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, right, three very big communities for us. So that way, we are maximizing what that reach is digitally.

• 44:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of digitally, time is already going through this transition. You have drastically grown the digital revenue. Is there a world where it is 100% digital, right? And kind of you do all the things that you do today, just bigger batter, there's more revenue channels. But the legacy stuff kind of just erodes away, not because you guys want it to, but just that the trends force that to happen.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  I, I don't know. I mean, here, all, here's what I would say is, as it relates to marketing revenue, time is never going to be anything less than a digital first marketing revenue sort of organization. However, print is still a very large consumer revenue base for us. And, you know, what was interesting and what we found was, was we had our internal projections as to what we could do as it relates to print revenue. And in Q2, and we grew print revenue 6% against the projections that we had. So like in the most challenging quarter, we found that there still was a large consumer demand for print.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  And, you know, what I would say is, is this, think about horses for a second. I bet you, you never thought you'd talk about horses on this podcast, right? But like, back prior to trains or cars, right? Like horses were mass transportation, right? Like, if you think about, did you ever play the Oregon Trail game by growing up? Like, how'd they get across the country? Horses, right? But then trains came around. And what happened to trains? What happened to the horses when trains came around? They became vocal transportation, right? And then cars came around. And what happened to the horses? They didn't go extinct. They just came relegated to two very specific niche audiences.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Gamblers, right?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  You can see that one coming. And, and the applicants, right? Collectors. And I think that print is going to fall along that same spectrum. Like, I don't think in my lifetime or in your lifetime, uh, print is going to disappear. But I do think that the value proposition that it provides is going to get continuously defined by the audience that it wants. And then all print products are going to have to choose. Um, are you delivering what the expectation is of that audience? And so like in the case of time, if you look at it, like the value proposition of time is it sort of captures living history in the moment, right?

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Like, um, the magazine has gotten rid of and shed certain things that historically the, um, the was, uh, that, that the internet is essentially replaced, right? And it goes to bigger thought leader pieces. It goes to bigger sort of contextual pieces. The goal of print is to see the ongoing conversation of the internet, not to compete with it. Right? And then ultimately, like, if you look and you'll see very subtle cues with it, like, we're slowly like, we increased the paper stock, right? Make it a slightly better product, right? Like, and you, you think about it from that perspective. And so I think again, that the people who think that like, oh, print is dead.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Well, yes, in the marketing sense, print is seeing the floor drop very quickly. There's still business there, right? But like, uh, from the consumer front, there's still a very strong consumer business that's existing.

• 48:26Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the last things I want to talk about is, uh, you focus on the business side of time. These, uh, legacy organizations have spent literally decades, uh, figuring out the right balance between, uh, the business side and the editorial side. Um, and in many cases, there are, you know, very strict kind of, uh, firewalls and can all, all the things that I think people, uh, would expect. In the challenger case, though, uh, for many creators, they are the CEO. They are the head of editorial. They are the operations person, the accountant, kind of everything. Um, and so. Without speaking to the editorial sex, I think that's kind of very case dependent.

• 49:07Anthony Pompliano?

  How would you, if you're in their shoes, think about building a business, right? As a challenger in terms of where are the things to think about? Where are the places to spend time? How do you think about kind of, you know, you don't have a lot of resources. So you've got to kind of jumpstart that. Just talk through a little bit, like if you're in that challenger seat, what would you think about?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that, you know, ultimately I go back to this equation that if you're in the content business, right, like what you are ultimately monetizing from the business end is trust, right? And you don't actually need a divide between, between edit and business. If the business side understands the importance of that sort of mandate, which is if you violate trust, and in this world where there's cancel culture and where anything can sort of, you can make a mistake and it can be over very quickly. If you violate trust, you're dead, right?

• 50:13Speaker 02

  And in that sort of equation, my advice is, is build trust with your audience. And if you build trust with your audience and accept advertising revenue as part of your streams, then the advertising that comes in to your ecosystem just can't violate that trust. It doesn't mean that it has to be bad advertising. Like as a matter of fact, there was an ad I once did, and I'll never forget this, at Wired for Netflix that was for one of their series that outperformed every editorial piece on Wired for the whole month.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  And it was an ad that we had built together, that was a custom content, a clearly stated advertisement, probably 50 different ways. And the reason is, is this, in, in analog world.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Edit exists in one bucket and advertising exists in another bucket. When it's digitized, it's only sponsored advertising if it sucks. Right? Otherwise, it's just content, right? To the consumer. And so if you're a marketer and you look at some of the marketing messages that some of the most sophisticated marketers do, like take a P and G in the world, right? Like they create amazing content. And then through that content, they build trust. And the whole reason that they want to be with a content provider is because that content provider has trust already.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  And their trust plus the marketer's trust creates a really good association altogether to ultimately move product. My only advice would be never, ever, ever, ever, ever violate trust. If you don't believe in the product, don't hawk the product. If you think the product is amazing, then stand by the product. Don't weave the product into something unnecessarily, right? Like people could see stuff like it's a stain on your shirt, right? If you can see the stain, everyone can see the stain. But if you keep in mind the consumer first and you keep in mind the importance of building trust with the consumer first, that's all, then I would say that that's the basis by which you should move forward.

• 52:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I think that is the most important piece of this is it's not the tactical, right? It's the philosophical here is what you have to optimize for. And that can inform a lot of decision making. That kind of goes off.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so wait, before I leave, I have a question for you.

• 52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, you get it. Well, hold on. Yeah, I asked the same two questions to everybody and then you get to ask me one at the end.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Otherwise you get two, I get one? Is this how you negotiate with Paulina?

• 53:06Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, normally it's the opposite. Usually she gets 12, I get zero.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Okay, awesome. Okay, so what are the two questions? I should have prepped for this knowing is I have no idea what these questions are going to be.

• 53:18Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Innovator's Dilemma. Two books, two books, that two best books I ever read. Innovator's Dilemma as it relates to understanding business models as it relates to leadership. The single best book I ever read was A Long Walk to Freedom, which was the autobiography of Nelson Mandela.

• 53:38Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great suggestion. No one's ever said that on here, actually.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Can I, can I give context for why I said that?

• 53:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  I read, I read a book called A Force for Change by John Cotter, who's a Harvard Business School professor, who, he wrote the book in 1988, and it's the difference between managers and leaders. It's a really interesting book. Most people don't distinguish between the two. And after I finished it, I wrote him a note and I said, I loved this book. I think I was the first person since 1988 that wrote him this note, right? And he wrote me a really nice note back, and I have lunch with him, and I asked him

• 54:18Speaker 02

  the same question that you just asked me about business books and leadership. And he said to me, I think every business book written today is crap. And I said, why? He goes, nobody researches anymore. They just want to turn it around in like three seconds. Nobody does the hard work. He goes, you want the best book on leadership? Read A Long Walk to Freedom. And I said, why? He goes, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, everyone thought that South Africa was going to fall apart. He goes, I got book after book from think tanks throughout the world, from schools, from educational institutes, saying that South Africa was going to go into war and famine, and that there was going to be chaos, and that it was the end of South Africa. And you know what happened? I said, what? He goes, none of it.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  And I look at him and he goes, you know why? And I go, why? He goes, great leadership. Picture this, you're in jail for 35 years. You get out, and now you're in charge of the people who put you in jail, and you don't actually take, you don't actually go after them. I mean, it really teaches you about the human psyche and how it evolved. And I just think that it's, if you're looking for a lesson on leadership, it's an amazing, amazing book.

• 55:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great explanation.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Second question. Second question.

• 55:36Anthony Pompliano?

  More fun question, aliens believer or non believer?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  A total believer.

• 55:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 55:43Speaker 02

  I think that you have to be so selfish and self centered to believe that the universe is as big as it possibly is and that we're the only possible living entity. Now, I don't believe that aliens are green figures with big eyes or whatever, but I can't possibly rationally believe that in this entire universe, and I don't know if you've gone to the planetarium at the natural history museum, but it's pretty big when you go into it and you hear Neil deGrasse Tyson talk. I can't envision that we're the only living species. Now, whether we're the most advanced, I don't know, but like I can't envision that we're the only ones. What's your answer for that?

• 56:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah, I'm with you. It's just, it's too big. The three key pieces, and I've got the advantage of I've asked hundreds of people this question and thought about it way too much is just, one, are we more advanced or less advanced? Two, do we want to discover them or are we cool with them discovering us? Right? Kind of the conqueror or the explorer usually ends up being the more successful, at least in human history. And then the third is just from a time scale standpoint. So there might be other life, but is it, you know, a million years before or after you and I are sitting here talking?

• 57:06Speaker 02

  So, so I have a great meme and I'll send it to you after this and it's a bunch of aliens talking and it says year 2020 and the aliens go, fuck, we're up next.

• 57:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. I, speaking of memes, I don't know if you saw this, I think it was, it in the New York Times, I can't remember, but somebody interviewed Elon Musk and the whole interview is, you know, very serious, right? And kind of everything from tell us your vision for the, you know, future to defend yourself, the whole nine yards. And at some point they ask him.

• 57:42Anthony Pompliano?

  When your Twitter account was hacked, there was a rumor that potentially they took the DMs of a couple of accounts. Were you worried? And he said, no, not really. Like, I'm sure you could like, take something out of context and, you know, make me look bad or something. But for the most part, it's just me swapping memes with people.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So it's like, okay. And then like, one of the follow up questions was, if given the choice of being a billionaire or a meme lord, which would you choose?

• 58:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, of course, the billionaire says a meme lord, right? But it's just like, in what world do they have Elon Musk? And that was one of the serious questions, right? And of course, he's like, eyes light up, I'm sure. And he's like, a meme lord, what else would you want to be?

• 58:25Speaker 02

  So, so, so my question for you would be this, you know, as we evolve time, like, we've really been rethinking a lot of different areas. And, you know, you know this about me because, and I've said this to you, like, I believe in this crypto trend. Like, I think it's very real. Historically, the only way in which you could get subscriptions to time or whatnot would be through, you know, your credit card or cash or check. And, you know, we've slowly evolved it to different digital payment methods through Apple Pay, obviously,

• 59:06Speaker 02

  and others. But if you were to give me advice on how to implement a crypto option on subscribing to some aspect of time, like, where should I start? And how should I think about this?

• 59:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So I will not say company name.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Don't say company name.

• 59:26Anthony Pompliano?

  You, you and I will both get eviscerated online, no matter which, which name I say.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  Let's, we're talking trend wise.

• 59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I think there's, there's three things, right? So one is, If you stay within the traditional confines that you have had in terms of people are just paying for kind of a holistic subscription, whatever that entails, there's just the simple pay with Bitcoin, right? So there are a whole bunch of Bitcoin payment processors that can facilitate that. And each one's got pros and cons to it. And that's really people who I think are in crypto, like Bitcoin, already have it. They just want to use that as their preferred payment method. I actually don't know how popular of a payment method that would be, right? Because most of the people I think in Bitcoin want to hold on to the Bitcoin rather than spend it.

• 1:00:18Anthony Pompliano?

  But that's one option. The second is there are a couple of payment processors now that what they do is one that we've invested in even that says, hey, I'm going to take my dollars and I'm going to pay Keith dollars, but the transaction is actually processed through the Bitcoin Lightning Network. So you get dollars, I sent you dollars, but in between the sender and receiver, it is converted to Bitcoin sent across the Lightning Network and then converted back to dollars and sent to you. And the advantage is one, you can do it globally, you can do it much faster. There's a kind of a complete removal of all of the credit card transaction fees.

• 1:01:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And then there's no chargebacks, right? So you kind of from a merchant standpoint, it's very attractive. And then you just get dollars. You don't have to worry about kind of the Bitcoin component of it. So I think that's more realistic in the sense of people, they just want to spend dollars, right? And so they don't have to understand the underlying infrastructure. And the last one is I do think that there are or will be a very big rise in kind of these digitized currencies. So the digital dollar, the digital yen, euro, you know, R and B, whatever. So it's the technology, but it's not a change in kind of monetary policy, right? So what's there between a US dollar in today's form versus a digital dollar?

• 1:01:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Just the technology, right? And so, yes, there's advantages to that, right? Whether it's cost or efficiency or whatever, but, but really you're just moving dollars around in a new kind of frontier, right?

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Love it. Thank you. So, so the next time we chat,

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  my hope is that this is the topic you're like, how did it go? How did this implementation go? And then I will, and I will credit you and I thank you for that. Thank you for having me on this day. I hope I was remotely interested to anyone that was listening.

• 1:02:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, now that people know that you are paying attention to your Twitter account, when this comes out, my guess is that you're going to have a bunch of people tweeting at you. Either one recommendations for time or two, I'm sure there's a couple of smart ass challengers that will explain, you know, why they're the next time, hoping that you pay attention.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  No, listen, any, any, any suggestions are much, much appreciated to your audience. And thank you for, for the kind words. Yesterday I saw so many, they brought my ego up so high that when I read all the nasty ones, it brought it back down to where it was before you even tweeted it out. So.

• 1:02:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Keith, thank you so much for, for doing this. I'll do it again in the future.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Anytime. Have a great one.