The Pomp Podcast - #415: Jon Steinberg on The Current State of Media

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

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

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.

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product that allows you to buy Bitcoin, hold the private keys and use tax advantage dollars to do it. Go to retirewithchoice.com slash pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com slash pomp. 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. All right. Let's get into this episode with John. I hope you guys enjoy this one. 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. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got John here. He's a legend. We'll just leave it at that. Although most people, when you put out that you were interviewing me, their number one question was, who is this guy? 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? Yeah, that's definitely true. All right. Let's go through your background before you started Cheddar.

You got it. What'd you do? I just go. I just go. Yeah, just go. Have you done a podcast before? Yeah, I think I've done like Brian Morrissey's Digiday podcast. Yeah. All right. All right. So we're the second podcast you're doing. You just talk and I'll interrupt you when you need to shut up. Okay. I give very concise answers too. That's kind of what I do as well. All right. So 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 a office park in Northern Virginia. Um, and so then I thought my career was over. Um, but then through a series of lucky happenstances, I got hired into Google to work on partnership deals as a very, 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. 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. Let's talk about BuzzFeed real quick. I feel like that was so disruptive when you guys were really scaling. What was that experience like? 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 flop or something like that. And we, we had two bets and the first

was Jonah's bet, Jonah Peretti, the founder's bet 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 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 lightning. And that's what made that work. Got it. And so when you then go to start Cheddar, what were the two bets?

The two bets with Cheddar were that live would be a big thing, that people would want live content, nobody was really doing anything 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 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 that are called 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 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 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 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. Got it. One of the things that Cheddar was well known for at one point was the trading floor location and also the flat iron location. What was the fascination with getting kind of cool, memorable locations to actually record from? 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 stock exchange. And I went to Tom Farley, who was the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange at the time or the president. And I'd 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 going to boot you out. And you know, that was what we got going right away. 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 largest set on the floor of the new york stock exchange that set is cnbc's is massive cbc has an entire post right yep our thing is bigger than what fox business has and bigger than what you know bloomberg has there so look space is at a premium i mean the only space for people then the floor of the new york stock exchange is maybe like you know park avenue in the 70s but like other than that um you know i would i would

have taken a postage stamp if that's if that was the space that he gave me yeah well I was I was going to 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 yeah it's like wedged between our space is wedged between two trading pods basically it's it's like it's almost like if we weren't using it it would basically be storage space absolutely so uh you also ended up going in a very interesting distribution uh 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 uh if i remember correctly at one point cheddar was getting streamed to gas station

gstv we're still in the gas stations all right well explain that one so there is this thing called GSTV run by this guy, Sean McCafferty, great guy. Um, 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, is the is the gas station tv anchor basically uh and it's great it gets the brand out there um 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 that's when you really know that you're uh that they that they know who you are and they're hearing you is when they make fun of you absolutely uh another deal you did was at one point you were getting like licensed or streamed to college campuses, I think. 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 hard-coded 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 years. So we have that as well too. Look, I've been obsessed with distribution. I mean, if your content is great, you know, 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, you know, gets seen by plenty of people. And so, you know, distribution is probably more important than content. And content is probably number two. 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, gas stations, college campuses, OTT, et cetera. Well, the most important thing that's happened now is we have enough scale on these fast systems that we can run standard 15 and 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 comm score number although we're getting comm 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.

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? Well, so actually what's interesting about it is I think we did well for the investors and I think it was a great outcome. The people who put in early money made a great return on it. I think that for a lot of our investors, 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 the investors were happy and I think that I have a great relationship with them and they would certainly back me again. But most firms are looking for multi-billion dollar exits and a $200 million exit doesn't

really move the needle for most of these firms. 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 and um you know nbc universal was owned by comcast fox was sold to disney um you know we were always the only independent you look you look on hulu live or you look on sling and it's cnbc which is owned by at&t it's um msnbc which is owned by comcast it's and and you know when i started started the company, I felt a bit like I was running around with a BB gun and everybody else had, you know, muskets, right? And then over the course of four years, it began to feel like, you know, I no longer had a BB gun. Maybe I had like a slingshot now because, you know,

we had improved, but they had developed, you know, extensive arsenals of weapons, right? And so we, it was natural to link up with them. It was also natural to link up with Altice because they were exclusively news focused. You know, 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, you know, 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 Altice as investors, I think for three, two, three years at that point. So they knew the company inside and out. And it was the right time. And, you know, also, I mean, COVID, COVID ended up coming as

well, too. Now, I didn't know COVID was coming. 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, you know, that I can't really claim that that factored into the decision. But I think it certainly made the decision more right in retrospect. A lot of people in America, I don't think know about Altice. Yeah. Would you agree with that? Actually, let me answer your question a little more about why I sold as well too, is that I really think that, I've told Jessica less in this when she interviewed me, is that media is really about, independent media companies are like drug discovery, developing a drug. You've

heard me say this before? No, but I can already see where this is going and I like it. So keep going. 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 gajillions of dollars. Then we need an entire pharmaceutical sales force. Then we need an entire 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 they did through R&D. And so that's why it is the right decision for Morning Brew to sell to Business Insider for, I can't remember, what was the number quoted, 75? I think that is the alleged number, yes. 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 is 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. Yeah. Uh, Patrick Drahi, who, uh, I think owns all teas. Okay. He fascinates me because he's a multi-billionaire. Uh, there are almost no interviews with him anywhere. Uh, I'm seeing him tomorrow for breakfast. I'll tell him that you, uh, you should tell him to come on the show for sure. Uh, but unlikely, unlikely. Yeah. I 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? 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. And, but my boss is Dexter Goey, who's the CEO of Altice, right? And Dexter has 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, They understand that most businesses are operated inefficiently and there is margin to be derived from almost any business. That steadiness, that facility with my numbers. 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 he's just going to ask me some number. you know? And, uh, and it's always a little bit like, um, an exam, but you know, I did well in school and I know how to study. So, you know, I love it. What's the biggest focus for you right now, uh, at Altice as you kind of scale the business? You know, we, we have two advertising products that I'm really trying to grow. You know, we have the local advertising business, which is selling, um, spots throughout our footprint on our cable system. Uh, and that, 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, News 12, we've done an extensive kind of rebrand and re-graphic and remodernization of that over the past few, um, over the past year, really. And then with Cheddar, um, you know, trying to make, figure out these fast systems, figure out which ones are going to 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 News 12 on Tubi, um, last

week, which is kind of amazing. I've been pushing the Tubi folks for a long time to do news. Cause 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. So before we get into kind of a couple of topics, I'm just going to throw out and you mind dump on us your thoughts. 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 they'll never get into anything? So I was in, I was in a, 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'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 a, 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. Um, and so, you

know, and in 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, um, 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. 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? 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. um it is personality driven uh and you either need a big personality uh that draws an audience or true crime and those seem to me to be like the two categories that really work right and um 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. 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. Newsletters. We, 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. Uh, 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 is going to be my sole focus for the, for the, for the coming future. Um, 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 what

we're going to continue to focus certainly for another year or two. 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? Yeah, I mean, you and I've talked about this before. I think the amazing thing about the newsletter thing is that if you're a writer, and you're part of a media company, and you can go sign up 1000 people at a hundred dollars 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, he's on sub stack. He is. Yeah. And he's going to 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 a hundred percent of what he creates. And so I think it's really disruptive to, to printed to print journalism print digital journalism absolutely what about uh 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 longer form stuff on youtube uh but just things that aren't live news based how do you think about that 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 then, you know, 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 still nickels and dimes, if that, I mean, TikTok isn't even nickels and dimes. 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 going

to lean in hard on? I think the way that you would do this is, look, I'm reading the same articles everybody's reading. 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 car leases from Triller and all this stuff. I think that it goes one of two ways. My kids, my 10 and 11-year-old, they love Charlie Emilio. 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. And if that happens, I think some of them will choose to be rolled up into a company, not dissimilar from what we saw 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 de-bundling of writers with the TikTok stars. They're all de-bundled in individuals and out there doing their influencer deals. And then the question is what makes sense to roll up and bundle into a company. And I imagine somebody, if not already, will take a pass at making a company basically out of TikTok stars. What about monetizing through non-advertising and non-subscription? So subscriptions become popular with things like Substack, right? For kind of

emails and that. Advertising is a known thing. What about things like either in more endorsement type models uh maybe even joint ventures or physical products like we've seen creators on youtube who maybe can't monetize very well on that platform yeah 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 well who's the first creator that that comes up with the next all birds right like that that would be super interesting to see that happen And we've seen all these D2C 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 so I think that's a viable model. I think many of the other things you talked about are really kind of just advertising in another word, basically sponsorships or brand. 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. 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.

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. Yeah. I keep thinking about this idea of, you know, Joe Rogan, rather than have the 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 uh take a d2c 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 cash i wonder how much of the economics of that are already captured through advertising and through referral and you

the interesting thing about Joe Rogan is I started listening to Joe Rogan, uh, only two weeks ago, just because I kind of wanted to, you know, I just listened. What episodes you listened to? I listened to the one where he was talking to a psychologist about narcissism. Okay. Then I listened to the episode where he was talking to Colin Quinn. Yep. Okay. So you haven't listened to any of the super, super, uh, out there ones yet. No, I just want 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, um, 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 just 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, his pockets are super long, so I've never listened through, but there's no commercials in the middle, right? None. So, uh, but, 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 yeah oh you know i mean look it 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's going to start but again you know how many people actually fast forward i'm sure some percentage 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 traeger grills this is big one of his big sponsors trigger trigger traeger traeger we're running ads for him right now look at us yeah i i think that he's 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, I, I, I suspect that the George Foreman grill worked out very well for him. I mean, he did it for many years, obviously it must've been working and, um, 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 too and he does a commercial one of his commercials is for a uh 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 he actually is a equity owner in uh in a company that uh so they have they have natural greens or something i think it was uh oh maybe he ran an athletic greens athletic greens athletic okay so he's not an equity owner there as far as i know he's got he's got a different company um the areas that you're most interested in outside of live television like 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 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 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 um wealth front for the first time last night a friend of mine pulled up wealth front because you know wealth management is one of the areas it'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 to have just just how much things can be done online and differently and in a modern fashion. So I had a one of the founders of Carlipso, which was bought by Carvana to come on. And this week I've recorded three podcasts where the guest mentioned buying a car on Carvana this year. I mean, just the selection is not even that good. Like the selection is not that good. I wanted to pick up 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 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. 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? So I don't really invest that much. 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. And I think that like, 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. Connected fitness, I don't think is tapped out yet. Peloton and Mirror 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. 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 um coffee recently i've i've i've uh experimented with coffee there's there's two coffee startups that interest me uh i'm not an investor in either they're just interesting one is jot coffee which is super concentrated coffee then you just put another the other is this thing called cometer 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 um that's that's are you a big coffee drinker yeah i'm a big coffee drinker yeah i even have a coffee tattoo no you don't really yeah i do for those who are just listening we're about to see a coffee tattoo oh he he legitimately has a coffee tattoo on i got one i got a coffee tattoo so it's like

the yin and the yang of life and then that's scotch scotch that's fantastic although although i'm not drinking now i am doing like the dry uh sober october sober october yeah all right how many cups of coffee do you have a day i've ebbed and flowed over time because you know my doctors want me to have less um but i have three four cups of coffee a day all right this is a really important thing like like literally breaks friendships are you an ice coffee drinker i saw your tweet about that i saw your tweet about that do you drink iced coffee i drink iced coffee you drink iced coffee in the winter yeah of course all right we're friends still i i think that basically iced coffee is

the afternoon beverage so like you know uh oh do you go hot coffee in the morning and iced coffee in the afternoon 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 don't put it it'll put a chill in you if you have a you know an iced coffee first thing in the morning i don't think i know a single person who goes hot and cold in the same day do you have you use an ultra concentrate coffee no 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 i i get my ass up and i walk to starbucks and i go and i order coffee and i want to dunk you should be going to duncan my friend my my great partner duncan is where you should be going listen uh duncan donuts everyone knows america runs on duncan america runs on duncan cheddar runs on duncan 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 that's a great question atlas shrug probably why 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 buy

into any of that. I believe the society needs to take care of its population and the capitalism alone is not perfect. So 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. 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. 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. those are all great ones second question more fun aliens are you a believer or a non-believer i'm a i'm a complete believer why 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 um and i and i do think that you know when you 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 i tend to be more open-minded um 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 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'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 my first my cat doesn't even bother trying to process that 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 have you have a cat right yeah but like if the aliens showed up are they showing up with like multiple species and and there's uh pets involved 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. Contrarian view there, my friend. All right. What question you got for me to finish this up? Who's the most interesting person that you've ever interviewed? The most interesting person I've ever interviewed. um you so interesting is hard because it's because everyone finds different things interesting but the person that i think uh 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 um just i 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. Uh, and you never know, like when people go on television and stuff, you're kind of like, Hey, do they, how, how much do they believe what they're saying? And kind of what's that conviction look like? And, uh, 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. Um, and the second time we did it uh tesla had run um 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 uh but i just think that it's fascinating to find

somebody who's had a very long storied career uh and reached a point where like she's probably just as hungry now as she always was uh 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 good answer all right where can people find you on the internet john steinberg on twitter all right we're gonna have to do this again in the future i think i feel like uh maybe i'm gonna have to come back with like a coffee tattoo or something myself now to uh to one up a nice coffee tattoo all right we'll do it again in the future pleasure thanks for the time