Audience Bridge Insights #13 - Your List Size Is Lying to You (with Armando Roggio)

Email was the original social media, and then email is having a renaissance. No matter how good your damn content is, people just get busy.

So massive CPMs and big things, it's just, you know, it's not going to happen. You can actually adjust the offer you're making to close that deal at a higher percentage. That's a key area of revenue.

If Google did change their algorithm tomorrow, how would that affect you guys over at QZ? And where would you have to shimmy and shake and try to find your way through?

I actually think we have like a once in a generation, call it opportunity or challenge. AI is changing everything, literally how you do anything. Media companies can adapt to that, or they can become the Washington Post. Those are really your options right now. And so we have to make sure that we're providing the product that our audience is ready for.

Welcome back to another episode of Audience Insights. Today I have an industry veteran, Armando Roggio, who's the Vice President of Audience development at Duplex, which is the owner of a number of things including the popular Quartz.com, or sorry, QZ.com, but Quartz media property, which is very popular out there. He's obviously, like I said, been in the industry a while. You can, you know, probably tell from his beard. I'm probably aging myself too. How's it going?

It's going really well. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Nice. Oh, a little disclaimer just so people know, Armando and QZ are clients of ours, so I just want to put that out there so there's no like biased whatever. Going on there if anyone has questions about that. But before we really get into it, you want to go ahead and give us a little background about yourself and what you've been doing and how you ended up at Quartz?

Yeah, absolutely. So I am old. That was the first thing you noted. So that's, you know, that's given me a little bit of time to move through the industry for a while. So I won't go all the way back because, you know, back when we were doing things on paper, etc. But most recently, I am with, with Duplex. We acquired Quartz last year and have been making that part of a modern media business, if you will. Prior to that, I have experience in retail, extensive experience in e-commerce. I actually worked in the semiconductor industry for a while. I was part of the Hearst organization, as in William Randolph Hearst Corporation. So again, I had the opportunity to have a broad spectrum of things. And then probably most recently before, which is relevant to what we're talking about, I was at an email service provider. So I worked for ConvertKit, now Kit, and was able to see the inside of the ESP. Awesome.

What, um, if you just can describe what you believe the current state of digital media is in 2026.

So I actually think we have like a once in a generation, uh, call it opportunity or challenge depending on how you want to look at it, but AI is changing everything, literally how you do anything from accounting to content to whatever it is. And media companies can, um, you know, they can adapt to that or they can become the Washington Post. It's— those are really your options right now. Um, and I think if you look at it as an opportunity, you can be the innovator who really defines what's next in the media business for decades to come.

Nice. Definitely didn't have a lot of people to watch the Post.

Sorry to Bezos. I know he's got a—

whatever. He's not losing sleep over it. Trust me.

Yeah, it's a rounding error. I'm sure.

Maybe from the waves on his like 120-foot yacht or something.

Yeah, I'm not sure you get waves on a yacht that size.

No, it's much bigger than 120 feet too. They kind of shortchanged them there.

And I shouldn't have picked on them a little bit because it is a challenge. I feel bad for those folks. But I do think that the industry is moving away away from that model and you have to adapt.

So, you know, talking about the new media landscape and obviously AI and all its impact across content algorithms, you know, everything you can think of, um, what do you think is more fragile right now? SEO, paid traffic, social distribution, or email?

More fragile? Boy, that's tough. I, I think SEO could be the most fragile right now. Um, I don't think enough has settled for us to, to really understand what works consistently now. I think you have SEO SEO, you have answer engine optimization, you have generative engine optimization, you have Google Discover optimization, you have all these sort of subsegments that are trying to figure out how to keep up with the changing landscape. And so obviously we consult with SEO consultants, etc. And really it doesn't seem to me like anyone has the same level of confidence about how to drive traffic that they did in the past. I do think that social is also a changing dynamic. You know, in the past in audience development, social was pretty much a given, like you could use social to drive audience consistently. I think from an organic perspective, that's less true. But I do think, however, that both paid and email are still predictable. Maybe paid, you're not seeing the return on advertising spend that you saw before, but you are still able to, you know, build campaigns, get a predictable result, and understand if that result meets your criteria for acquisition cost, etc., etc., and then double down when it does. And then email, I think, is having a renaissance. Very excited about email. Email. There was a report that came out, the Pew Research Center actually published something that I think said about 30% of Americans actually get at least a portion of their news from an email newsletter as opposed to all those other channels you talked about. So very bullish on email, you know, very capable of working and happy with paid. And then I think that social and SEO are a little bit in flux right now. How does that equate to what you hear from others?

That's pretty good. I mean, you know, now you also have the, you know, you have the AI aspect and everyone asking the AI for stuff. How much is that taking away from, from search? And I know, I mean, I know they were launching the paid, like the paid ads or something through like ChatGPT. They were trying to test— thought I saw something that said they might be scrapping it just because it's like, I mean, I don't know, you're using AI and now it's going to be biased if you're paying for ads. I'm like, what are you really showing the people? But I guess search went through that kind of dilemma too.

So I don't think you have to be biased. I mean, we're beta testing right now ads in chat. So there's a QZChat module that we're showing to part of the traffic. It's not full traffic on keys.com, but for some of the traffic you'll get it. It suggests a couple of prompts to dig deeper into the editorial that you're looking at. And then there are ads in there, but the ads are not influencing in any way the output of the chat. What they are is similar to some other ad formats where they're meant to add contextual value as opposed to influence the chat. So if you want to check it out, you can check it out. It doesn't show like for everyone. So if you don't see it, you're not going to see it because you're not in the right cohort.

But now, is that, is that, is that ad platform just on from you guys putting your own ads, or is it, you know, you're, you're pulling them in from either ChatGPT's got the platform for it, or is it from Google, or like where the ad's coming from?

That's one of those things we can't actually disclose, uh, right now.

There you go, secret sauce. All right, that sounds so good. You guys are on cutting edge over there.

Perfect. We try. Yeah.

Well, if Google did change their algorithm tomorrow, how would that affect you guys over at QZ? And where would you have to kind of shimmy and shake and try to find your way through?

I mean, it would have a massive impact on us, right? So we still get it. A significant amount of our traffic is from organic, a lot of it from Google Discover, a lot of it from Google News. So it would have a massive impact if something pushed us out algorithmically. I think that You know, we are in a good position because of our parent company Duplex and the products that Duplex has. We can derive a certain amount of traffic and page discovery, content discovery through the core product. I definitely think we would go to email and paid if we had no other options in search. As I said, I think those are the channels right now that are the most controllable, most predictable. We already do a fair amount of traffic from our newsletter business. It's not enough that I'd say we didn't care about organic, but it's not nothing either.

Well, you know, while I was there, The smart thing to do was that they had this thing that you could identify this traffic sort of pixel you put on the website and like all this organic traffic's coming, you start capturing it so you can start reaching out to them in case they did shut off that spigot. You know, that is so cool.

That is a product of yours that we use. So yeah, the, you know, I think that's a lot of your products are named smart. And I do think in this, in this market, SmartPixel is a, is a product you should be looking at. It's been one of our, in terms of cost to revenue ratio, it's probably our top producer. You know, so it's, I think the thing that folks have to think about is match rate, right? It's not going to be all of the traffic that you see, but it's a great tool.

And well, that's our secret sauce of that product, right? We're not giving you everyone. We're just giving you the ones that our system feels is going to be the ideal match that's going to want to stay on, subscribe, and interact with your stuff, knowing, you know, seeing what they're doing on the site currently and things like that. So where some of our competitors are just basically sending you anyone who matches, right? I don't know if that's— plus we're all email-centric over here. So like we know which are the primary email addresses of the people that are out there and that's who we're, we're using to identify things.

And I think also the way that the tool adds in the right— so it's at a pace where you're making sure that you've got sustainable growth through that particular part of the subscriber growth mix.

So yeah, I'm pretty happy when you're looking at your, your data acquisition, whether it be whether it be Facebook, Google, whatever channel you're using, what are you guys looking at? What are you looking at, you know, as the head of audience development? What's your KPIs or what you're looking for to make sure that that source is a quality source?

So ultimately what we're trying to do is earn money on the subscribers on a lifetime value basis, right? So we want to be able to sell sponsorships. So, you know, have ads on our site and have the cost of acquisition be significantly lower than the average LTV. So what we're looking at is What we're looking for is an engaged subscriber, not just an open. We need someone who clicks, clicks on sponsorship ads, who clicks through to our website where we have ad revenue. That's our sort of holy grail of someone. They open at a high rate, they engage with us by clicking, and ultimately they also migrate to our other newsletters. So we have our flagship newsletter, which is where we put in a lot of our growth. And then we're, you know, we're always encouraging folks to try some of our other newsletters to extend that LTV. For us, it's really are they clicking and what percentage of them are clicking is the number one factor.

Before I met you, I actually helped you out a little bit on the deliverability side of things. What, what surprised you the most about deliverability once we started digging into it?

Well, I mean, deliverability for us has become, I would say, excellent overall. Some of it was just how simple, like the sort of the way, you know, that I found you, if you will, was actually podcast that you had done, saw, saw the podcast, reached out a little bit, got some feedback on, on how to organize our, our sending segments, etc. And so I guess the big takeaway was something that I already knew, but that you really hit home for us was how important it is to keep only active subscribers on that list. So you really cull out anyone who isn't opening, isn't clicking. In our case, across all of our newsletters, that meant not sending to 700,000 people, which is a lot. But the ultimate thing that we learned is that that had zero impact impact on our major KPI. It didn't— our clicks, the actual number of clicks did not drop because those people weren't clicking anyway. And what we saw was, you know, a tripling of the open rate in some cases for the newsletter. And ultimately, I think it's a better product because of it. Curiously too, you know, I think one of the things that people are afraid of when you suggest to them that they create a base sending segment and that they only send active usage is like, hey, my overall subscriber count is going down. No one's going to want to sponsor the newsletter or whatever. What I found is when we tell potential sponsors what we do to keep the list active and engaged, they're far more impressed than they would have been by the additional subscribers. They're more impressed that we're paying that kind of attention to deliverability, to engagement, etc. I think it's actually a better selling point.

And I've had a couple of different conversations on the podcast with different people and talking about like everyone's so focused and bent on this, this whole what's, what's the CPM rate of the buy? What's the CPM rate instead of just a flat purchase. Hey, do you want access to my audience? It's $3 grand, or it's $5 grand, or it's $1,500, whatever it is. Like, you're going to know what you're going to get back if it works or not, right? Then they'll keep on going. If not— but when you try to artificially inflate your numbers, you can always say like, you're going to approximately get this many clicks. That's all they care about, how much traffic they can actually get. They don't even know that's going to 500,000 people or 300,000 people. It's like, you know, ads are, you know, you'll probably get 1,500 clicks, and then that's what you're shooting for.

You could—

if you get 1,500 clicks sending to 50,000 people, or you 1500 clicks, send it to 500,000 people, they're not going to care, nor do they need to know. So if you can— and I think the industry slowly will start going that direction, um, just because the inbox is getting that much harder to get in. So people are going to have to continue to follow these best practices. So it's going to be harder and harder to grow these massive lists. So massive CPMs and big things, it's, you know, it's not going to happen. So very happy you guys, you know, went that route. And, and it helps with everything else you're doing because now all this investment you're doing on other growth, you know, these Facebook campaigns you're doing, all this other stuff prior, you probably get less engagement activation off these new people because your deliverability just wasn't there. And then it hurts you as you try to scale and you're like, oh no, we're gonna put more money to get more people in. And it actually gets worse and worse and worse as things roll downhill. But now when you have that baseline, people see it, they're like, oh my God, my activation rates went from like 10% to like 40% of people now becoming clickers off of my acquisition or whatever that number is.

Yeah. And I mean, I think it's also the case that you don't actually— that You don't actually lose those folks, right? We also use, of course, smart reactivation. So just because we've moved someone out of the base sending segment doesn't mean that we've sort of lost them entirely, right? What we're doing is then picking the right time to reengage them, add them back in the list at a, again, a very low cost. So yeah, I think it's part of a bigger strategy that looks a little bit counterintuitive if all you're looking at is that top line number. But in reality, it's the, it's the best practice What, what's the metric now that, that you watch, you focused on more daily than you did before? I will say that most recently I've been looking at the per top-level domain performance. As, as Chris knows, because I, we meet every week, but we have a good ESP partner. They just added, they do a lot of development for us specifically. They added a report that we'd asked for that shows us our deliverability statistics, not just sort of in bulk, but by top-level centers. So, so Gmail, Yahoo, etc. And that, since that report's been live, I probably check that 2 too much, like, uh, just to try to understand.

I mean, if we're not looking at— if you're not watching at least once a day, you're not watching it enough. All it takes is one day, one day for it to hit, you know, shit to hit the fan, and then you're like, oh, what happened? Oh, you see right here.

Yep, that's the report I love. So I do hit that report every single day, and it's, it's really interesting to me to see how from newsletter to newsletter you can have a significantly different performance between, you know, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.

100%. Unfortunately, that's, you know, that's how the business has been forever, especially in the ESP game. Is that they show you just enough to keep you happy and think— make you believe things are all good and dandy in the deliverability world. So you keep on sending because a lot of them send on volume. The more you're sending, the more money they're making. So they don't want you to stop sending and like tighten up like the things that I tell them to do because they're like, oh my God, they're going to, you know, they're not paying anymore. So it's just bulk, all delivery in one place. You know, the general consumer doesn't know any better. So we'll just put it there versus— yeah, but once you start getting serious to a serious size or list in general, like if you don't have information, it could be detrimental. Detrimental, like business detrimental, where you see a big chunk of your list disappear and then you're like, where did 100,000 people go that were making me a bunch of money? Yeah, very happy they released that. We were talking about that for months.

We were. Yeah. So super excited about that. And it's nice to have— I mean, like this was like you said, they built this for us based frankly on your suggestion and it's been really good. We're about to do a redesign on one of the newsletters. And so one of the things that we're already doing is trying to understand how to roll out that redesign, making sure that, you know, that our best audiences are in fact informed even, right? And one of the things that came up in a strategy call this morning is we're actually thinking about reaching out to our best, most engaged folks and warning them that we're doing a change and asking if there's anything they'd like to see, just so that we're making sure that when we do release the new format, that they're comfortable with it and advocates of it.

Don't be scared out of a little thing at the bottom there. Don't be scared to whitelist us. Yeah, since we, you know, implemented the base sending segments and, you know, we're sending a lot, you know, much tighter. What are you seeing as far as, or can, or do you know like what your normal list churn looks like right now monthly?

Yes, I mean, we're definitely positive on growth because we have the 9 different newsletters. I would, I kind of know them more on a newsletter basis, but we are probably Yeah, to give you a ratio, for every 3 that we're adding, we're probably churning 1 at the moment.

That's good. I mean, the lists are growing.

It is. And that doesn't take into consideration when we're able to move them from one list to another. So we have been really successful at getting folks who are on one list to join another. And then as they may come off of one, I think that's normal behavior. I think for myself, when I sign up for a newsletter, I'm usually very excited about it at first. I'm a regular reader rather but, and as time goes on, I may lose interest in that particular topic or segment and I move on to another one. So the fact that we're already baking in migrating them from one to the other, I think also helps us.

Right. Well, don't unsubscribe from AudienceBridge Insights, all right?

Yes, I won't. And the other thing I'll say about the, that churn, you know, talking about that churn is remember that we are, you know, we do have those base settings segments implemented. So if someone is not active, we're turning them off very quickly. Right.

Well, that's, that's, I mean, it's exactly what you said is And fortunately, no matter how good your damn content is, people just get busy or uninterested and with whatever they have going on and they just lose sight of it and they're moved on, you know?

Yeah.

Doesn't mean they didn't like it. Your stuff sucks. I mean, Morning Brew, The Hustle, like all the best 14/4, all these super awesome newsletters. People just stop. I stopped getting in and reading because now I'm in, you know, maybe I'm like in my sports mode. No, no, I'm just watching sports all the time. I don't care about my tech news and all this stuff. So it happens to everyone. You're never going to have a lifer like me. Yeah, you might have like 100 lifers out of your million people, but like people just, you know, come and go. So that's the problem that people don't understand. And that's when your deliverability hits the fan. Since we were talking about the state of media and where it's— where you see it, where it's at and things, and, you know, you're big on email now and some other things. Do you believe or see that nowadays it's like all these media companies, whether— I mean, a lot of them like like the Morning Brew media company, even MarketBeat media company. Uh, are you seeing these people that they're becoming more of a, like, a data company than just a media brand?

I, I think this has been something that's been going on for a number of years, that, that yes, you have to be a data company. The difference in knowing who is visiting the court's website, um, and not knowing, uh, is a significant change. It's not It's not like it's 5% better in revenue. It's significantly better in revenue if we have, if we know who's there. I think it also creates all sorts of ways to have a deeper relationship. One of the things that we do is we have a paid membership like a lot of these media companies do. And part of the reason that you can do that is because you can predict someone on the site, how likely they are to become a subscriber. You can actually adjust the offer you're making to close that deal at a higher percentage. It's a key, you know, key area of revenue. And that is something that is about the data. So yeah, I do think you're becoming data companies. I also think that data is leading more toward sort of virtuous cycles or flywheels, if you will, where I think media companies are going to start to be able to predict what you publish in order to attract the target audience, in order to engage the target audience much more so than we have in the past. And I think that this is not just even limited to media companies, but other industries. I also think that to some extent, we'll see more media companies also become commerce businesses of some kind. I don't know if that necessarily means e-commerce or a digital product, but I think you have seen several examples of media companies that have been able to cross over into a digital product. The one that comes to mind for me is Every. You're probably familiar with them, every.to. And they have— I'm just looking on their website here. I think they have 4 now digital products: Monologue, Sparkle, Cora, and Spiral. I think they're an early example of this where media companies will start to offer services, start to offer software, start to offer products as part of the mix, and that there'll be a blurring of the line between pure content and pure commerce.

At Quartz, is there anything you guys are doing on the content delivery side when it comes to, you know, the user profile or the, you know, AI user profile to like try to not target but go more dynamic with the content on a user-per-user basis. So different people are seeing different articles, um, things that they might like better, just trying to optimize basically the inbox experience per user, which, you know, I know some, some pretty big enterprises that have been able to do it very successfully. And then it's great for deliverability, obviously, because now instead of sending a broadcast blast to 500,000 people, which is the same exact thing, you know, everyone almost has a unique— it's almost like sending an individual email to 500,000 different people.

Yeah. I mean, I think that individualization is definitely something that we're talking about. I don't know. I can't say that we're far along that path. One of the interesting things I think is, you know this from conversation with me, that we're experimenting with the idea of sort of micro newsletters or newsletters that are in a series. Where it's very niche. You are sending it to a relatively small audience that's hopefully highly engaged, and you're, you're not sort of creating content that gets written every single week. You're creating more of an evergreen series that can be sent and doing that at scale. So lots and lots of sort of small audience newsletters. That's definitely something we're experimenting with and using AI to help us identify the signals of success best for the topic, etc. AI is also a very sensitive topic in the media industry because I think there's concern around how AI is implemented, particularly, you know, with content creation itself. And so trying to be very sensitive to how we use AI as it relates to content creation specifically to make sure that we're not taking humans out of the loop and providing that human guidance. Does that make any sense?

Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. Is there anything, you know, I guess what about the AI does scare you? Obviously the human, we're saying like the human element when you're talking about content stuff. Uh, anything else that you're worried about as far as growth goes or engagement in general?

I, I guess I am pretty bullish on AI in general. When I was talking about that sort of the, the balance there, I think that it would be easy for a media company right now to get ahead of where your audience is in terms of AI acceptance. So the thing to think about is that I'll use an analogy of a self-driving car. Self-driving cars are a reality right now. People are riding in them. Not everyone has the same level of comfort. If you have a Tesla, maybe you let it self-drive you everywhere. So to give you some context, I mentioned that I was in the semiconductor industry. So in 2007, we were testing self-driving cars. And one of the things that, you know, we were providing semiconductors at the time for the sensory systems in those self-driving cars. So the ability to see the road, et cetera, et cetera. And from a marketing perspective, what we realized was that technically in 2007, we were ahead of the audience. So a car could drive itself then, but no one was ready to let a car drive itself. And today, a lot more people are ready for that. I think the same thing is true with AI in the media industry. AI is capable, in my opinion, in producing quality content that is indistinguishable from human-written content, but our audience isn't ready for that. And so we have to make sure that we're providing the product that our audience is ready for and that we're not getting ahead of them in their level of comfort, whether that's in a, you know, a personalized email message or personalized content on the site. And this is something that industry's been a really long time, you know, Google something for fun and look at Target's early efforts in data. Target, you might remember this, but they hired a data scientist. I'm going to get some of the details wrong here, but they hired a data scientist and they actually got a complaint because their software had sent a coupon book to a young lady who was, I think, 18 or something, who lived with her father and was filled with things for someone who's pregnant. It was because Target had predicted that she was pregnant based on her purchasing even before she told her dad. So Target had to back off of that. That was a number of years ago because, again, the technology was ahead of where the audience was ready for it to be, right?

Was she pregnant?

She was, she was actually. The, the dad had to apologize.

That's what the lock came, came out for.

Yeah, so basically, yeah, so that's, uh, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, is you can get ahead. So, so with AI, I think media companies have to be careful not to get ahead of what the audience is ready for in terms of the AI systems that you're using, especially around content It's so tough because in the industry we're in, obviously we're all AI forward and like, oh, you're using it for trying to optimize everything.

And, and I'm, you know, on my Twitter, I see AI freaking everything just because the people I communicate with.

So everything's just AI.

You think like AI is this huge mainstream thing.

And when in reality, freaking 99% of people have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

Like they know it's out there. They don't know how to use it. They're not doing this. I mean, I think 99% out now. I mean, it's gotten now with ChatGPT and all the press that some people are using that for like basic stuff. They still don't comprehend what it can do, what it is doing, how many people are using it or how it affects them. So like when I'm thinking about it and I'm using, I'm doing all stuff like, oh my God, all these people, everyone knows, knows AI, that this is going to be perfect. Or I don't want to hide this stuff because everyone's going to think it's AI. My rap video, I don't know if you saw my rap video yet. I did. Maybe I'll get my editor on this podcast to throw it in here. I told ChatGPT, I'm like, everything you know about me, write a rap, a rap song, you know, write a rap song about everything you know about me. And I wrote the rap song. I went to HeyGen, which is like the video creator or whatever. I threw it in there with my, my persona, and it created the whole rap video. I put some music to it, and I'm sitting there rhyming off, you know, spitting bars about email and all this stuff and list growth and deliverability. Just pretty funny and amazing. What's one belief about email that you had had, say, 5 years ago that's completely changed in your mind?

I, I love email, and I think a lot of people might answer a question like this by saying, you know, why isn't email obsolete by now, right? It's been around since 1971, so 55 years. But I think the thing that has changed the most for me actually is the idea that email couldn't be impacted the same way that organic search was. And what I mean by that is, you know, as organic search evolved, We all had to become SEO experts or at least SEO fluent in order to make sure that we were getting traffic. I always thought of email as a safe thing, right? You send it to somebody, show there's deliverability. You know, it's been now 13 or 14 years since Google released the promotions tab officially. But today I think email could change significantly in how it's read and in particular with email summaries, the same way you're seeing overview. So the thing that concerns me as someone who is very reliant on email and very encouraged by email is what happens when people don't read their inbox. There's a— if you're probably familiar with N8N and building, you know, agentic automation, one of the templates that they have is a tool that sorts your inbox for you, right? So you basically give it access to your Gmail, you hook it into, you know, an LLM it basically hides, if you will, anything that it doesn't, that it doesn't deem important or doesn't meet the criteria. So that's the big thing for me. I think that email still has some level of vulnerability that I didn't think it had 5 years ago.

I, I did that with Fixer and it organized my whole inbox with all these labels, and I hated it. I turned it right off. I like to say, let me go through my own process here. It was like, what if I missed something? I don't know, it's a little too crazy to let it take over the inbox like that. What's interesting that you— when you're talking about email, and I had Ryan Dice on the podcast and we were talking about it and he brought it up, which to me it's like almost like getting full circle where he said email was the original social media, right? That's what you used to communicate back and forth with people. You weren't getting advertisements, you weren't getting all these notifications from businesses. It was literally you got mail. And you're like, yeah, my buddy, let me talk about it. Let me get back to him, you know. So it was like used for like communication and back and forth socially. Then, you know, he's like, you know, then marketing got a hold of it and ruined everything like they do. So now you got that. So it went from a social thing to just heavy, heavy marketing. And then it got to the point where all you were getting was promos and marketing from businesses that you might have purchased or got services from in the past or transactional things. And, and, and the whole communication part kind of lost its luster, and the type of emails that people would send out was all that, you know, transactional marketing stuff. And then now in the last 5, 6, 7 years, and really heavy now with the way the newsletter industry is going, is now people are producing these newsletters and this content to push out to people, which is more valuable, you know, more content-based, not, not promo marketing stuff. And it's getting more back into kind of like you were saying, like how organic search came in. People are able to like share stuff, and you're allowed to learn stuff from the email now, where that wasn't the case just 5, 7 years ago. Strictly image-based almost marketing. Hey, 20% discount here. Here's this, here's that, you know. So it's more back to that kind of a communication channel. At Quartz, you guys are doing— I mean, I guess, are you guys— I know you guys are probably launching some new newsletters. Is there any newsletters you guys are coming out with or have recently launched that you're excited about?

So we do have a new newsletter coming out, you know, maybe behind the trend, if you will, but focusing on practical crypto investment, understanding how that market is. So post-hype, what's the real opportunity in crypto? So we're starting that one. We are pretty excited about the Court's Obsession. It's actually not a new one, but that is one that has very high engagement. If you're not subscribed to it, I would encourage you. It gives you a deep dive into some kind of obsession. And then this isn't newsletter related, but, we'll be coming out with a podcast miniseries, uh, with an overlap with another podcast called The Capitalist Hippie, trying to do something new in podcasts as well. And that'll be promoted in the newsletters.

This is your guys' first podcast, or is the other one yours too?

This is— so the, uh, obviously we purchased Quartz last year. They had a podcast, um, that, that they hadn't, um, maintained in the last little bit. Um, we're going to be bringing it back, but instead of— similar to what I said about with those, um, sort of small topics, small audience newsletters. The concept we have is instead of committing to, you know, a podcast episode every week for the next year, we're just doing miniseries. So on a particular topic, this will be 6 episodes in partnership with this other newsletter, or excuse me, other podcast. Very topical. We've had our reporters doing some deep interviews, etc., around the topic. It's going to be around power and AI. So the AI power consumption problem. But yeah, pretty happy with that. And we're, you know, we have other sort of smallish experiments all the time going on in trying to understand that data signal you mentioned. Uh, you know, what should our next topic be? A gentleman that I work with very closely, very competent individual, Simon, he's suggesting a true crime. Uh, we'll see if that happens. That's, uh, crime.

People love that. If you talk about engaging, engage, engaging audience, they, they, they go mad about that stuff.

I mean, we'd probably take like the business standpoint from it, right? So the, you know, some of the more interesting business crime story, but that's on the table, not approved yet. But heard it first here on your podcast. You heard it first here.

If it doesn't come out, you did not hear it here. Let's get some other interesting things. So first, what hobbies are you into?

For me, coding is a lot of hobby. Food is a hobby. But my number one hobby overall is drinking. Actually, it's terrible, but cocktail making and wine are my top, my top hobbies. So yeah, you can't see it, it's just off camera. I have a bar, nice collection of wine over there, but I really do enjoy the art of wine, the art of cocktail making. A lot of, a lot of folks will say that I tend very boozy on the cocktails, so not a lot of fruit juice. Most of my mixers are various kinds of liqueurs, but yeah, that's my primary hobby.

All right, so we will sommelier and mixologist, do it all at once?

All at once, yes.

What's your favorite drink that you make?

I have like a top 5, and depending on the season or whatever, those will mix in and out. But a massive fan of a gin martini, a well-made gin martini. Okay. So that's a big one. The Manhattan is another one of my favorites. I think vermouth in those two drinks is vital. So your vermouth is almost as important as your whiskey or your gin. I'm also a big fan of a black Manhattan, which the difference there is you switch out the vermouth for a Verna, which is an Italian amaro, so a bitter liqueur. And then in the same vein, I'm a big fan of Negronis, which is, you know, gin, vermouth again, and in that case Campari, which is another amaro. And then I'll also go with like an Old Fashioned, a Oaxaca Old Fashioned. Boulevardier sometimes makes the list depending on the season. So those are kind of mine.

I was gonna say, where's your, where's your Old Fashioned game.

That's where I'm going. Yep. Um, and you know, a lot of times neat. So I'll drink whiskey neat sometimes, uh, fairly often. I have a, a really nice whiskey that was given to me. It was, um, someone had picked it up at a sort of a whiskey club or whatever, but it was a whiskey that's been aged 7 years in French wine barrels and then another year or two in barrels that had been used for an orange liqueur. Um, and so it's got this very kind of a orange underpinning to it. It's a bourbon, very nice.

Is it a known distiller or is it just like some custom thing?

It's, it's a distiller here that's local to where I live. Koenig is the distillery. I don't know how well known that is, uh, you know, elsewhere in the country.

Yeah, I know, I just didn't know if it was like a, you know, one of these major, major brands that you got it from, or if it was, you know, something like you said, like a local distillery.

We actually have— so I have it, I'm seeing it in my view here, but it's actually sitting on a Koenig whiskey barrel because the last time I was at the distillery, I bought— I was there buying some, some whiskey, and they said if I bought a case of whiskey, they would give me a barrel. And so my poor wife was waiting on the car. I came out with the case and I started to back into the back of the spring like this. And then, yeah, so I have, I have a full-size barrel now that I display my whiskey on.

So that's awesome. Yeah, we, uh, every year we go in a way away football game for the Miami Dolphins, and we went to Cincinnati, which I had no idea when I went for the first time that you actually land in Kentucky. But the day before the game, whatever we did, we did a whole whiskey tour. Went to like Four Roses, Buffalo Trace, forgot which other. We only did 3 of them, can't remember the other one, but it was fun. And then as far as your wine, red or white?

Both, depends on what we're, you know, what we're eating. And so my wife and I, we plan out our menu for the week, uh, actually just recently started having AI help us with that, believe it or not, um, and then do the wine pairings and then to, you know, the appropriate wine with the appropriate meal. Nice.

What is your favorite movie?

So this is a hard one for me because I'm not actually a movie or TV guy. So I don't actually own a television. Might be one of the only Americans not to own a television. But favorite movies, it'd be hard to say. I think if you asked my kids, they would say The Incredibles because when they were kids or, you know, even in their teens, we ended up watching that a lot. It might Moon, if you're familiar with that film. Uh, so what's that?

What type of genre is it?

I guess it would be science fiction.

Um, so it's— okay, I think I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, it's— let me see if I can find the year here for you. So it looks like it came out, uh, in 2009. Um, Sam Rockwell is the star and on camera for those. So that's probably it, probably my favorite movie there.

Okay, what was— since you never go and never watch movies, you don't see— what was the last movie you saw in the movie theater. The last way back for this one, huh?

Like 10 years? It's not— I don't know if it's been that long because, um, yeah, I'd have to think about it. It might have actually been a Wes Anderson, the one that he did about the— I think it was the Paris Dispatch, but that would have probably been the last one. So yeah, I don't see— I probably see a movie in a theater once every 2 to 3 years.

I can't get— I can't get people to go watch movies with my wife. Hates going to the movies, so she never goes.

So I like never—

I never go. Sometimes I'll always ask my kids, hey, you want to go to a movie? Let's go. Now, what everyone's been waiting for, the story behind why you have a banana in your profile picture.

There's not, there's not a great story behind that. I just, I just happen to be, uh, I happen to have had that photo taken. Um, it's cropped out in my pictures on profiles, but I was, I was on my balcony, a nice day outside. Uh, my wife, yep, she was snapping a couple pictures of me because she does that sometimes. She loves me like that. So I just sort of presented the banana in her direction and It was a funny enough picture that, you know, that I ended up using it for a profile picture. And then there was a period of time a couple years ago where I was actually looking for a job. So I put together a new resume and always trying to stand out in those environments. And I had actually taken the picture and done a banana-themed resume based on the picture. And it did get me some attention. Ultimately didn't lead to any jobs, as is almost always the case. Work usually comes from who you know, not just sending something out. But, uh, that's the, I guess, the story behind it, which is not a story of much interest.

Since then, have you worn a banana outfit for Halloween?

Never.

Never.

You have to be careful, you know, how you— you have to hold up a standard. I think you know this, but I have— number one, I have a lot of children, so you have to keep a standard of, like, expectation for them. And then number two, I coached wrestling for a very long time, and so I can't walk around my town without occasionally running into people who are now adults that I coach. So I have to keep the, like, the bar very high, and a banana suit would be— I'd never live it down. Yeah, I'd never live it down.

So I want to share one productivity hack that Armando gave me when we first started, uh, working together, which has changed my, my punctuality, we'll say. Which is, I mean, for me especially, I got, I got lots of meetings, uh, which are on my calendar, which I know about, but unfortunately for me, the way my mind works something comes up and then I just get sucked in and get blinded from everything else. I mean, I could be at a party doing work and everyone's going crazy, like, how can you be doing this? Just, I just block everything out. So there'll be plenty of times where I'm always late to a meeting or almost miss it all entirely. So you taught me how you're always—

because I'm like, you're always on here early, how do you do this?

And he told me to every morning go to your, your phone and set up alarms for every single meeting you have for 5 minutes before. And he does that every morning. And now I do that every morning. And since then, I am always on time, early to our, to our meetings and everyone else's meetings. And I even beat you sometimes.

Yes, but it gives you that nice buffer. The alarm goes off, you, you know, you have to switch gears, dude.

And it's, it's like that— it's also like that whole, like, girls on a blind date. And like, hey, tell your, tell your friend, you know, they tell you, their friend, hey, call me at this time. So I, I have to go or something, You know, so it's like, that's what I'll be like in a meeting. It goes, and I'm like, oh guys, we got to cut it off. I got another call. And it like ended it. So then just keep on talking and talking and talking.

So absolutely.

That's one of my favorite game changers. Well, I thought that was a good conversation. I hope people got some stuff out of there. Is there anything you would like to share or plug that you haven't already, or where people can find you if they want to find you?

Armando Ruggiero is a fairly unique name. So you can look me up on LinkedIn. In. Um, if you did want to reach out, it's just arogio@qz.com, uh, to introduce yourself. Don't mind you emailing. Obviously I can't be an advocate of email if I'm not willing to receive them myself. But yeah, I think this is a great conversation, you know. Um, really appreciate working with you as a client, uh, you know, week to week. And so appreciate you having me on your podcast.

Appreciate those words. And, and whenever we actually get an IRL, uh, I'm expecting some high-quality drinks coming my way.

Sounds good. It'd be my pleasure.

All right, Armando.

All right, Chris. See you later.