Larissa Padden 0:00: Hello and welcome to Cogcast, Cognito’s podcast, where we talk to journalists and media pros on everything that’s happening in the world of media and PR. I’m Larissa Padden, your host and former journalist turned PR professional. Today’s guest is Gregg Greenberg, reporter and host of InvestmentNews’ In the NASDAQ, but I am not your host this episode. My colleague Michaela Morales sat down with Gregg to discuss the broadcast landscape and what gets you a seat on his show, his movie, Friends and Romans, and for any New York sports fans listening, they do commiserate a little bit. Please enjoy.

Michaela Morales 0:34: All right, hi Gregg, how are you today?

Gregg Greenberg 0:37: I’m doing fantastic. A little bit cold out there, but it’s nice and warm in here.

Michaela Morales 0:40: Yes, yes, thanks for coming in in person to the Cognito office. We really appreciate it.

Gregg Greenberg 0:45: Well, I like the personal touch of interviews. That’s one of the things that I do on my In the NASDAQ show. I still have guests come to the NASDAQ. We speak to each other. We’re sitting down with each other, and I think that personal touch is really what helps the show and it’s why it’s been doing so well over the past few years.

Michaela Morales 1:02: Yeah, I fully agree. I, you know, I’ve been in the NASDAQ with you many times. Tell us the story behind launching it. What, what did you, how did you want the show to be different?

Gregg Greenberg 1:12: So it may not sound like it, but I’m ancient. I’ve been doing this for about 25 years. I was at TheStreet.com for, I don’t know, 15 or so years interviewing fund managers and CEOs, and then I spent a little time interviewing CEOs for videos that went on United Airlines, and then about 3 or 4 years ago, time kind of flies. Like I said, I’m pretty ancient. I joined InvestmentNews where I write articles for their magazine, but I also do videos at the NASDAQ. I know some folks over there. We set up a show on Tuesdays. I meet a lot of great clients, some of them Cognito’s, and we talk about what’s going on in the markets. I have authors, I have fund managers, and like I said, it’s great sitting down with people because what happened during the COVID crisis is that everyone started going towards Zoom. And Zoom is great. You can have your business meetings on Zoom. You don’t have to get on the Acela if you need to go to Boston or DC. You don’t have to fly anywhere, but it really is impersonal. So I, I’m a huge fan of people coming, sitting down. I think you get much more out of a guest that way.

Michaela Morales 2:10: And what are the best type of guests for this program? What do you find? Who do you find performs particularly well, or what do you look for?

Gregg Greenberg 2:17: I like guests that come to the studio and they have an opinion. They tell me where they think markets are going, what stocks they like, why they wrote the book, and they, they’re really forceful about why they have the opinion that they have. Sometimes people will come and they’ll give me the P/E of a stock and they’ll run down everything about that particular company. It gets a little bit boring. But give me some energy. Tell me why you like that stock. Tell me why it means something to you personally. Give me an opinion so that people can kick around so they can talk about it after the show. They can fight about it, because otherwise it gets a little bit dry. I mean, that’s the fun part about Wall Street. It’s almost like you’re picking your favorite baseball team or football team. It’s like, I like IBM. This is why, this is why IBM is better than your investment. Take that. And, you know, people got to defend their, their opinions. They got to defend, defend their stock picks, their portfolio allocations. So, I think one of the things that I learned from the great Jim Cramer is you want to leave every segment with someone having to do something to, to say, OK, this is what I need to do after listening to this particular guest. He, and he does it amazingly.

Michaela Morales 3:24: Oh yeah, I fully agree, and I think that makes for a much more compelling broadcast content, right?

Gregg Greenberg 3:30: Absolutely. If it means something to someone, you know, you have that 2 or 3 minutes because that’s another thing about what I, I like about my show is I like to keep it nice and tight. It’s going to be the 4 to 5 minutes because people have to get back to work. So you have people who are going to watch these videos at work, at the trading desk, why someone might like municipal bonds in 2026. They’re gonna watch it, then they gotta get back to work. So I like to keep it tight. I don’t interrupt my guests, so I tell them to keep it tight because that’s another thing about video as compared to podcasts. So when you’re in a podcast, you can kind of jump in if someone is kind of droning on a little bit, but when you jump in when someone’s speaking to you in person on a video, it, it looks like you’re a rude host. So I try not to do that. So I encourage guests to keep it tight and so we could just move on and get to the meat of it.

Michaela Morales 4:15: Yeah, when I’ve booked with you in the past, you’ll, you’ll typically do the nodding thing when you’re trying to, to move them along, right?

Gregg Greenberg 4:21: Well, what I say to the guests before they come on is I say give me 20 to 25 seconds for each question, and that’s actually a lot of time. And then I say, once we get to around 25 seconds, if I’m nodding my head, land the plane, because there’s a Yiddish term. I don’t know if you speak Yiddish, Michaela, but it’s called zitzfleish. So it’s a, it’s, it means tushy fat, and it’s when you talk about kids, kids have no zitzfleish. They don’t want to sit. It means they want to get up and run. So when I kind of feel the guest dragging in the zitzfleish in my tushy fat, then I know it’s time for me to nod my head and move on to the next question.

Michaela Morales 4:53: Well, it works. It works. In terms of the guests you’ve had on recently, and I know you were filming earlier today, are there any themes that are top of mind heading into 2026 that you’re seeing among your guests?

Gregg Greenberg 5:06: Some of the things that we spoke about in 2025 include alternative assets. That was a big thing. It used to be everyone, you want to put your money into a stock or a bond. Now it’s you want to put them into something less liquid. Alternatives have been a very big theme. They used to be the domain of institutions and college endowments. Now everyone on Wall Street wants to sell you an illiquid asset to shove it into your portfolio. Might be good, it might be bad, but you know, Wall Street has a tendency to go overboard. So right now it seems like a lot of people are putting illiquid assets in their portfolios and maybe not next year or the following year we’re gonna find out whether or not it was a good decision. The other thing of course, was AI and frankly, no one knows how that’s gonna end up. So people are still trying to figure out what they’re gonna use AI for other than just to give them the notes from the meeting they just went to or write cover letters when they get canned. That’s another big thing. And then the really interesting thing that’s happened over this past year, which is President Trump’s second term, is that Wall Street is looking to Washington. So for a long time you had a financial crisis, whether it be the dot-coms, whether it be the housing, and it was always Wall Street’s fault. Now, Wall Street is taking its cues from the White House or from Washington. Is it gonna be tariffs? Is he gonna do the one big beautiful bill act? What does that mean? So it’s, it’s very different now from the times when I was interviewing folks when everyone was blaming Wall Street for everything. Now everyone on Wall Street is looking south to DC.

Michaela Morales 6:33: Yeah, yeah, we see it all the time in the headlines, right? I think that’s very accurate. And I’m sure you’re getting a lot of those types of pitches in your inbox as well.

Gregg Greenberg 6:44: I get a whole lot of pitches in boxes, and I think we’re going to talk about that in a little bit as to which pitches, you know, I, I take and which pitches I don’t take, but yes, it has been a year of people talking about Washington and although the markets have really generally just moved upwards steadily since Liberation Day back in April with very little volatility, people have been talking about volatility, but it really hasn’t been there in the VIX, the so-called fear index, which spiked up to 60 in early April with the whole tariff thing. And then after that it’s really come down to 15. It’s been fairly steady, so volatility has been low, even though everyone loves to talk about it as stocks have gone up. But I’ve seen a whole lot of different pitches about fixed income and the Fed, and it’s been head spinning, and a lot of it stems from Washington as opposed to what the banks are doing. Maybe that’ll change in 2026 and the banks will do something stupid. We’ll see, you know, that’s the wonderful part about working in the financial business is you don’t know who’s gonna be doing something stupid next.

Michaela Morales 7:42: Fully agree with that. Fully agree with that. Well, you kind of prefaced my next question. I’m wondering a little bit when you’re interacting with comms pros, what types of pitches resonate with you the most? What do you look for when you have 200 emails in your inbox in the morning?

Gregg Greenberg 7:58: And that’s a low amount. So I get a lot of pitches from all across, every PR firm on Wall Street, outside of Wall Street, everywhere in the world. So here’s the thing, if you send me a pitch, I like it to be personalized because once again, as soon as I see it’s, hello, Mr. Greenberger, hello Gregg, and it looks like it’s coming from auto or you’re pitching it to everyone, I, I can automatically get rid of it. However, I am an overeducated, underpaid, ink stained wretch, and I have an ego as well. So if you send something to me that’s personal and said, hey Gregg, I just read your last story in InvestmentNews about, I always go back to municipal bonds and, and I, and I really thought this was good and I’m gonna say, hmm this person read what I wrote. Maybe I’ll keep reading their pitch. I’ll give them the courtesy of that. I also, as a lot of the PR folks knows, on the side, I write plays and movies. I had a movie out in theaters, a while ago, but it was still in theaters called Friends and Romans. So if someone says, hey, Gregg, I, I enjoyed your play. I enjoyed your book. I wrote a book not too long ago. I enjoyed your movie. I’m gonna read their pitch a little bit longer because at least they took the time to, to, to have an interest in me. So straight off the bat, the top, the most important thing is to show that you have an interest in me and then maybe I’ll have an interest in you and your pitch as well.

Michaela Morales 9:16: All right, so now we know the secret sauce to how to get into Gregg’s inbox. Once we get through the initial test of you reading the email and maybe we make it through onto In the NASDAQ, what do you typically expect from comms pros? What are you looking for in terms of process?

Gregg Greenberg 9:33: So, I’ve read the pitch. I love it. You’re gonna come in with your guests and you’re gonna meet me in the NASDAQ. So I’ve been doing this for a while. So once you get the guest to the NASDAQ or wherever we’re gonna meet, and you know, I think it’s important just to trust me with the guests. So sometimes we’ll have the, the PR folks, they’ll want to say, well, the guest is a CEO of a company and they can say this or they can’t say that, or they can do this, but they can’t do that. My advice is always don’t worry about it. You got the guest through the gatekeeper, which is me, and you got them onto the show. It’s probably a good idea just to kind of step back because generally the guest is a CEO. It’s an accomplished person. It’s an author. They’ve done enough to get there. So just, just kind of take a step back and say, OK, we’ll let Gregg handle it from there, and I will. I’ll get them into the chair. The guest generally knows what they can say and what they can’t say. So sometimes you might see a PR person say no, no, no, they can’t say this or they can’t say that, but the guest knows and they’re a CEO and they’re your client, so there’s no reason to tell them anything once they get there if something happens or they say something that maybe might be against compliance during the interview or after the interview, don’t interrupt the interview. Trust your client. I think that’s pretty important. So it’s once you get through the gatekeeper me and deliver the client. Take a step back. I think that’s pretty valuable advice.

Michaela Morales 11:00: Yeah, I fully agree. And, and in terms of what we do on our side, we definitely wanna make sure we’re prepping the spokespeople as much as possible. Are there certain ways that you prefer your guests to interact on the program that we should be aware of when we’re prepping them?

Gregg Greenberg 11:16: That’s a great question. So one of the things I like when people come on In the NASDAQ is if in Wall Street parlance they talk their book. Like I said, if people wanna come on and they really wanna talk about every single thing about their stock or, or, or bond or whatever they’re there to pitch, you know, it’s fine. But if you have a guest and say, well, what we do at Cognito Financial Services is, this is how we help our clients, I think that’s good. You came all the way there to, to, to show off. So make sure your client says something positive about how they’re different from their competitors because I get lots of different mutual fund companies. So if you have your particular guest come on and say, well, what we do at Mutual Fund Company X and how we’re different from our competitors is this. Now, it doesn’t mean going to a whole commercial, but they need to separate themselves from the pack, and they need to have some energy as well. No one wants to watch boring people on camera, so they don’t have to be Jim Cramer or myself jumping around, but they really need to have a little bit of energy. So make sure that they talk their own books and explain why they’re different from the other people that are going to be on my show right after them and give them a little bit of energy right at the top as well, because once again, you’re gonna have people who are on trading desks or at work, they’re gonna watch this thing and they can turn off this, this video very quickly and you don’t want them to do that.

Michaela Morales 12:35: Mhm, yeah, and when I’ve been in the NASDAQ with you, I’ve sometimes brought maybe some more novice spokespeople who might get a little nervous in person and I think you’ve done a great job of making them feel very comfortable as well.

Gregg Greenberg 12:48: Well, here’s the thing, this is my approach now. The folks that you bring me in the NASDAQ as guests, I want them to give good financial advice to investors, so the investors can make some money and hopefully retire comfortably. I’m not out to give you a gotcha. Like, oh, you told me to buy, once again, I always choose IBM. I don’t know why, but you told me to buy IBM last year and it’s going down 20%. I’m not gonna do that because I know what you, you want to do is, and your guests want to come and they want to give good financial advice. Now, if I have a politician who comes on my show, I’m not gonna really give them, you know, a second take or help or guide them through the process. I want them to say something meaningfully stupid. So then it gets, you know, buzzed around virally. So, it’s different when it comes to, to politicians. But for if it’s someone who really wants to help investors, which is all they’re trying to do, so I don’t understand it when people attack guests on some of my competitors’ shows and say, well, this is not what you said last time, or that stock’s down 26 points from when you brought it up. It’s like, well, look, they really just wanted to go up to the stock to go up to help people. I’ll assume that’s what they want to do, and they’re not just trying to sell you a stock so they can get out of it. That may be the case, but I, I, that’s, you know, that’s thinking badly of people’s motives, and I would never do that.

Michaela Morales 14:07: That doesn’t happen on Wall Street.

Gregg Greenberg 14:09: Certainly not on my show.

Michaela Morales 14:10: Definitely not on your show. Definitely not on your show. In terms of broadcast, you know, the landscape has changed so dramatically and how people consume video has changed dramatically. What are you seeing as a journalist right now in 2025, almost 2026, since you’ve been in the trenches?

Gregg Greenberg 14:30: So, like I said, In the NASDAQ, it’s kind of a throwback show that I actually have people sit down next to me cause now everyone’s just doing it on, on videos and on Zoom screens. When I first started doing this, 25 years ago at TheStreet, we had a, a green sheet behind us. I used to call it our al Qaeda setup and I would sit next down to a mutual fund manager. We’d have one camera and they, they would nod like they were my prisoner. And, and as more people watching videos and as the technology got better, this is in like 2001 or 2002, as the technology got better, they got a studio and the hits kept coming. Now every, everyone watches videos, so I, I think that the technology’s gotten much better. People watch videos, but I think that they need to be shorter to the point because the videos now, people watch these TikTok things. My kids watch them. They’re only a few seconds. So you really got to get your point across quickly. So I think that that’s a big thing. Hopefully, people will take a step back going into the future and start listening to people a little bit more, giving them a chance and listening to the whole video. So I think hopefully that’s what happens in the future. But in terms of the media landscape is, first of all, there’s a whole lot of videos to watch and people’s attention spans are shorter, but there’s a whole lot less business publications. So when I started doing this 25 years ago, you had Fortune, you had Forbes, you had a whole lot of people that would pay attention to individual stocks. Now, there’s a lot less business magazines and a lot less people paying attention to individual stocks for a few different reasons. One of them is that people are buying ETFs now. So people said, I, I, you know, I got blown up buying individual stocks in the tech bubble, and the housing bubble. Forget it. I’m just gonna buy a bundle of stocks now in the form of an ETF. So people don’t really wanna hear individual stocks as much anymore. You know, the other thing is, is that people just kind of pushed their money and said, I’m just gonna let my advisor deal with it, whether that even a virtual advisor on, on E-Trade or, or Robinhood, they can just make a portfolio for you. So I, I think those two aspects have changed as well. People are less interested in individual stocks. They’ll always be stock pickers. People want to beat the market. But now the speculation is more in things like crypto and that kind of jazz, and, and, and there’s just less publications, which makes things harder for you. I mean, InvestmentNews has been around for a long time. We’re always going to be around, but you know, I worry about you. You Cognito, because I, I know that you need places to pitch to, and there’s just less magazines. There are less magazines than there used to. I’m not, I don’t even, they call them magazines. I don’t even know if kids today, I call them kids today because I’m old, but they, I don’t know if, if they even read magazines, but I know that they’re certainly online.

Michaela Morales 17:06: Mhm, yeah, and back in the day it used to be, you know, you would want to get a placement for a client above the fold, above the print fold, right. Who’s going to see it online?

Gregg Greenberg 17:17: And well, it was also you’d want to get your, you’d want to get your company on Yahoo Finance. That was a big part of the whole dot com boom and even afterwards for a while is that you would want to name a particular stock, so it goes on Yahoo Finance underneath that ticker and people had to look for it there. And that model is really kind of blown up now. So a lot of things have changed, but the, the important thing is that people need good financial advice, and, and that will always be the case, and I think they’re actually getting it now. There’s more places to get that good financial advice and hopefully some of those people giving that good financial advice are coming on my show In the NASDAQ.

Michaela Morales 17:56: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we’ve seen them already on there. And I, I think one of the places also tried and true to get good financial advice is InvestmentNews, and we haven’t really talked about your, your more, your written column. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and what you look for when people are pitching you more for print?

Gregg Greenberg 18:15: So for, for, I write a daily column on InvestmentNews where I speak to investment advisors, RIAs, and it’s a bit market-based so they can tell me where they think gold is going in 2026 or Bitcoin or municipal bonds and once again I always come back to municipal bonds for some reason. So, so I, I write that every single day and I’m always looking for great financial advisors to speak to and give me their opinions. And then I write a, a column for our magazine. So the InvestmentNews magazine has been around forever. And then whenever you walk into your, your broker or your investment advisor, InvestmentNews is generally the, the magazine that’s on the table. So, I write a column for that. Usually I profile one of the CEOs of the, the industry, and then I write a market column as well. So I like typing too. I like doing the interviews and for videos. I like writing. I like doing podcasts like we’re doing here today. So it’s an interesting job, you know, once again, I’m overeducated, you know, underpaid, ink stained wretch, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world because I speak to so many interesting people, you know, over the course of a day, let alone a week or a month.

Michaela Morales 19:20: That makes perfect sense. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about your movie?

Gregg Greenberg 19:24: It’s a mob comedy. It was out in theaters about a decade ago. It was adorable. It was called Friends and Romans. It’s about a pair of actors who are always extras in mob movies, but they want to prove that they can act. So they staged Julius Caesar at a theater in Staten Island, and a real mobster joins the cast and a real FBI agent joins the cast and hilarity ensues. And you could find it on Tubi or you can find it on Amazon, and it’s a family movie and they don’t make them like that anymore, which is why I’m still here in the financial journalism business and not speaking to Variety or The Hollywood Reporter, you know, in the big time in LA.

Michaela Morales 19:59: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I think we should all take a look at that. We really should, everybody.

Gregg Greenberg 20:04: I may even make another $14 from that movie.

Michaela Morales 20:07: Well, looking into 2026, I know you talked a little bit about the themes that a lot of your guests are talking about right now. Are you looking at anything in particular into the new year in terms of topics and areas you want to explore on In the NASDAQ?

Gregg Greenberg 20:23: It’s a great question. You know, I usually ask the questions. I usually don’t get the hard questions asked to me. I think it’s going to be an interesting year. I think we’re going to be in the 2nd year of President Trump’s administration, and I think the 1st year there was a whole lot going on, whether it be tariffs or Venezuela. We had some hot wars, so I think it’s going to be another year of once again looking down towards Washington. So to see what, what happens down there. And then I think once again, I think this whole AI is gonna be revealed a little bit more as to what people can actually do with it. I think this year everyone was looking at it and saying, hm, like once again it can talk about the meeting ex post facto. We could, write my cover letter, but we’re gonna really see what happened with the rubber meets the road with regard to AI in the coming year. Maybe it, it won’t be as big as everyone says it’s going to be. And you have these massive valuations in the so-called Magnificent Seven, which was another massive story in 2025. We’re going to see if that Magnificent Seven, and it’s already getting whittled down to the Magnificent 2 or 3, we’re going to see if that follows through in 2026. So, it should be an interesting year because stocks are really trading at, at all-time highs. And you know, the Jimmy Cliff, Jimmy Cliff just recently died, right? It was the, the, the harder they come, the harder they fall, right? You know, the higher you go, the, the, the longer the drop down. So it should be an interesting year.

Michaela Morales 21:43: Yeah, I bet. I’m sure you’ll be getting even more pitches heading into January.

Gregg Greenberg 21:47: Bring them on. Just suck up to me. That’s the key.

Michaela Morales 21:50: We got the tips right here exclusively on the podcast, absolutely. Anything else you want listeners to know? Any, any ways that they can find you?

Gregg Greenberg 22:00: Yeah, you know, go out and read InvestmentNews. It’s kind of, kind of like the granddaddy of the publications for financial advisors, but there’s a whole lot of good stuff in there when it comes to everyday investing as well. Those are the kind of columns that I write. And then we’ll see. Maybe I’ll think of something interesting and creative to write either a play or a movie or something you can come down and see in 2026 for my personal stuff. And then I really just hope everyone has a really nice holiday, holiday season, and we’re gonna see what happens with the Mets. I just heard that they traded Diaz. Diaz is out in LA as if the Dodgers needed any more help, but we’ll see how the Knicks do. I really don’t have high expectations for either of the New York football teams, but maybe we’ll see that the Knicks do well and if the, the Mets can get some replacement for, for Diaz, we’ll see how they do in the bullpen.

Michaela Morales 22:47: As a lifelong Mets fan, I feel you. I heard Diaz, Diaz hurt today, but you gotta believe, right?

Gregg Greenberg 22:51: Tug McGraw said that, and I believe too. I believe you gotta believe, right?

Michaela Morales 22:56: All right, Gregg, well, thanks so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to chat with you today.

Gregg Greenberg 23:00: I had fun. Thanks for having me.

Michaela Morales 23:01: All right, talk to you soon.