September 16, 2024 • 49 mins
15 years ago was a pivotal moment for financial media. On the one hand, we were in the midst of a huge financial crisis, which shook everything up and exposed how little we knew about our own world. In addition to that, we were in the early moments of a revolution, which saw the rise of blogs, podcasts, "Finance Twitter" and other new platforms for disseminating information about markets and business. One of the winners from that era was Josh Brown, a former stockbroker who rose to fame in part on the back of his must-read blog The Reformed Broker. Now he's the CEO of a large investment advisory firm, Ritholtz Wealth Management. He's got a popular podcast. He's got a new book. He's a fixture on CNBC. And he even has a conference business. We talk about his career path, what he's learned, some funny stories from the good old days, and how he became a media giant.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Tracy, I know I'm biased, We're probably biased. I'm certainly biased.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Speak for yourself, Joe, I myself have no emotions. That's
for our opinions about anything.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
That's why I host a podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
That's right, we're the question askers, we're not the answers.
But I am sort of biased about anyone who sort
of grew up in financial media in like the two
thousand and eight, two thousand and nine era, two thousand
and seven. You know, like we're just a different breed.
We're just a different we're just a little cut above.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
I think it was definitely a moment in financial media
that I think has yet to be recaptured because there
were two things that were happening simultaneously. So one you
had the financial crisis where everything was going haywire, and
it was all going haywire in a relatively new way. Yes,
people had to suddenly learn what synthetic CDOs were, how
(01:18):
the revered the show, Okay, how the repo market worked.
Didn't learn all of that, and then at the same time,
you had like a big format change because you had
all these blogs that suddenly burst out of nowhere. And
at that time, the combination of like the new blogging
format plus the news cycle itself, which was so weird
(01:42):
and so fast paced, really meant that blogs were kind
of the perfect platform to cover the financial crisis. They
had an edge at that time. And I feel again
to your point, probably a bit of personal bias there,
but like I feel like it was a very special moment.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It was you nailed it exactly. It was the two
things happening at once that made that a distinct time,
which is right, all this stuff was happening, and there
were just new formats, and then you know, Twitter came
around then, so, uh do you know, and I joined
I tweet a lot. Do you know when I joined Twitter?
Speaker 5 (02:14):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Two thousand and nine, No.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
March two thousand and eight, Okay, And I was at
south By Southwest when bear Sterns collapsed, and and then
you know, it was before everyone knew that the world
was totally melting down. But also then I remembered I
have like distinct memories of that time because you know,
JP Morgan made that two dollars per share offer for
bear Sterns, and like a week before bear Sterns have
(02:39):
been trading at like sixty or something like that. And
I very distinctly remember a few people on Twitter talking
about like know that because people thought there was a typo,
remember like oh, it must be twenty or something like that.
And I saw these voices who actually knew what they
were talking about, like, no, this two dollars makes sense,
this is a real number, et cetera. Eventually, I think
they bought them for like ten dollars a share because
(03:01):
the government pressured them. But that was the first place
it was like I was getting information from people who
knew what they were talking about faster and sharper than
I was getting any other platform.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
And who were those people too?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I think one of them was Howard Lindzen and I
think another one was Roger Ehrenberg, which were like two
of the names who are like, you know based, But anyway,
there were many other names, including someone we're going to
talk to right now.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I'm very excited.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
So the person we're about to speak to, I remember
linking to his stuff right when I started financial blogging,
which was September two thousand and eight on ft Alphavil
and again the world blowing up around that time, Lehman
collapsing all of that, and I remember constantly linking to
his stuff at the time.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
And then the other thing.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
This is kind of weird, but the other thing I
associate with our guests. The first time I ever met
him in person was in New York, and that was
the last time I ever drank a blue moon, because
I think I have like three of them. Yeah, yeah,
but it was too much. And ever since then I
never again. No blue moons, but yes, lots of lots
(04:10):
of our guest for sure.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Well, I'm really excited. I think it's his first time
coming on the show. We are going to be speaking
to the one and only Josh Brown, a legend. Back
in the old days, when we were linking to his blog,
it was the reform broker. He son set it that
he's a new he writes a new.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Blue moved on to bigger things. For sure.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
We've done too much bigger things, but that was huge.
He's currently the CEO of Ridholt's Wealth Management. He is
the author of a brand new book You Weren't Supposed
To See That Secrets every investor should know. I'm so excited.
He hosts a popular podcast as well to compound. Josh Brown,
thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Outlaws, Tracy. I'm drinking a blue moon right now.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
That's perfect.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Josh. Do you remember that?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I can deal as long as it's you and not me.
That's good.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
Josh.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Do you remember the where we met the first time?
Do you remember where it was?
Speaker 5 (05:03):
I remember? Oh man, you do remember? Okay, I'm going
to take a guess. I remember there was one night
where Scott Bell got all the bloggers together at the
Campbell Apartment on the on the Vanderbilt side of Grand Central,
and that's like a speakeasy bar. And I remember meeting
(05:24):
a lot of people who were writing and tweeting about
markets the first time that night, and I think you
were one of them. I'm not sure, so it was
that night.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
My recollection is a little different. I thought we went
to the Michael Jordan's Steakhouse, which is also in Grand
Central and just on the.
Speaker 5 (05:40):
We might have done both.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
We might have done both, but we both agree. I
think it was probably two thousand and nine Grand Central,
either in the Campbell Apartment or the Michael Jordan's Steakhouse,
which sadley is no longer there, but yeah, that was
the first time, and now we're here.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
It was a Cambrian explosion of market commentators who were
coming from non traditional market commentary backgrounds prior to that moment,
just to button up what Tracy was saying. Prior to
that moment, most of the people who were commenting on
markets in a big way and were able to get
their views out to the public were coming from Wall
(06:18):
Street or were traditional journalists, and you know, they were
like the public relations firm would book the person on TV,
the person would go on Bloomberg or on CNBC, and
you know, they were like they had pedigree, and they
also had guardrails. They had things that they wouldn't they
weren't able to touch because they were connected to like
(06:39):
a Fortune five hundred company. And then all of a sudden,
this Cambrian explosion on the Internet. All of a sudden,
you've got people amassing large followerships who have no pedigree,
who have no publicist, and who have no guardrails and
are able to say things that you know, other people
(07:00):
would gasp at. But then that became the mainstream, and
then all of a sudden, the media was picking up
those voices rather than the traditional voices that they had
been so accustomed to booking. And I think all three
of us, you know, benefited from having been early and
visible in that era and to this day, like a
(07:20):
lot of the people that came out of the woodwork
at that time are you know, now part of the establishment.
So it was a really cool thing to be a part.
I can count yeah, listen, I could count on on
maybe two hands the people who are talking about finance
on Twitter in March of two thousand and nine. When
I started, it was a really small group of people
(07:41):
because most professionals had compliance departments that just would not
let them talk that way. Now of course, now, of
course the compliance department is like when are you starting
a podcast? So it's it's changed a lot. But we
were there, the three of us, and you know, we
can come up with a whole bunch of the names,
but there aren't that many.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
Yeah, And to be fair, so one of the advantages
that I think bloggers and people who were on Twitter
at the time had over traditional media was just the
immediacy of that publishing platform because things were happening so
fast right, like, within within a single day, you would
have like ten history making stories all happening at once,
(08:24):
and the newspapers and traditional media to some extent, just
couldn't keep up, whereas if you're tweeting about it, if
you're blogging about it in real time, you really had
a competitive advantage. But Josh, I know you've written about
this before, but for the benefit of our listeners, why
did you get into blogging in the first place, Because again,
people take it as a given now that you're on
(08:47):
social media if you want to get ahead in your career,
But back then it was a very new and to
some extent, risky thing.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
So I'm working at a third tier broker dealer in
two thousand and eight, and like many other firms on
Wall Street, they were seeing their revenue implode and you know,
struggling and you know, raising money to try to stay
in business, and you know, I go to the compliance
(09:16):
officer and I'm like, Hey, I'm reading this blog by
this guy barrio it Holtz, and I'm reading a bunch
of blogs and they're doing a really great job describing
what's happening. Every day. There's more news. It seemed like
like every minute there was more news, and the people
that were covering at best were not at the Wall
Street Journal. They were independent bloggers like Tatas Visconta and
(09:39):
Eddie Elfinbne and Barry and Eve Smith at Naked Capitalism
and The Epicurean deal Maker and Med Faber. But these
are like, these are people who they either work on
Wall Street or they used to, or they talk to
people that work on Wall Street, and they just there's
so much more urgency to the way that they're describing
(10:00):
this unfolding crisis. So I said, I said to my
compliance officer, Hey, I know, like we have compliance restrictions
and stuff, but if I stay within the lines of
FINRA is at that time, I'm a retail broker. If
I stay within the lines of what finra says I
can and can't say, can I do a blog? And
he looks at me. To his credit, he goes, I
(10:20):
gotta be honest with you. I don't even know if
this place is going to be around tomorrow. I don't
give a shit, Like do whatever, do whatever you want
to do. Just just just make sure you print a
copy of everything that you're hitting publish on and bring
it to me. And I'll sign it. And so I
appreciate him to this day because he was he was
(10:41):
dealing with much bigger issues. And you know, around that time,
there were so few people that had been given the
liberty to do that. I always tell people how lucky
I am. There were so few people in my position
who had been given the liberty to speak freely on
the internet. I was one of them. And as a result,
there was such a th for knowledge amongst the general
(11:02):
public that I was able to build a really big
following before you know, thousands of other people would start blogs.
So being early and you know, having that advantage, I'll
never not appreciate that I had the opportunity to do that.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I have a personal question in two thousand and eight,
two thousand and nine, and your boss is saying, I
don't even know if we're going to be around. So
I was like living in an apartment in Brooklyn. I
had two roommates at the time. It was sort of
the whole thing was very interesting. You hit a career,
you were at a brokerage. I believe you had a
daughter at least by that point. What's that like with
(11:54):
the anxiety of like you have like I didn't really
have any responsibilities. I could sort of sit there eating
my popcorn watching things employe, but you were in it,
and presumably you know, you had like supportive what's that
like supporting a family and being in the mix and
being at a company where it looks like the world
is ending.
Speaker 5 (12:13):
So I'm living in a rent control department on the
upper east side Rupert Towers, which used to be the
Rupert Brewery that sponsored the Yankees. I'm up on ninetieth
and Third Avenue. I'm commuting down on the sixth train
to forty second Street every day. My office is in
the Helmsley Building, which is now called two thirty Park,
but I'll always call it the Helmsley Building, And on
(12:34):
the left side of the building is Barri Stearns. The
right side of the building is JP Morgan. You know,
a lot of my friends from college are bond salesman
at Bear. My wife's best friend works at Lehman Brothers.
She works at Golden Sacks. And I'm just surrounded by
people that work at, you know, some of the biggest
banks in the country, because those were the big employers
(12:57):
in New York and so, you know, it was highly
anxious we were in our i don't know, mid to
late twenties, so everybody was going out and drinking a
lot and just like commiserating. But I'll never forget the
day bear Stearns closed because it was the same day
as that as the Saint Patrick's Day parade. So like,
(13:18):
out of more big curiosity, myself and all my fellow
brokers walk around the corner from Helmsley over to the
quote unquote the bear Stearns Building, which by the way,
had just finished construction a year before. A lot of
people don't know that. They spent ten years building it
and then the firm went out of business deal later.
So we walk around the corner. We see Aaron Burnett,
who at that time is CNBC. She's sitting at a
(13:39):
folding table doing live coverage from in front of the
bear Stearns building, and behind her almost the entire Saint
Patrick's Day Parade is coming off of Fifth Avenue where
it ends, and like people are like publicly drunk, and
there's green hats and bugles and you know they're blowing
horns and there's horse and meanwhile you look behind that
(14:03):
and you see white collar workers coming out of the
front of the building with cardboard boxes with all their
stuff in it. It's I want to find that footage
because I don't I don't think people appreciate the extent
to which it was just an absolute daily circus. And
not long after, that same scene would be repeated in
Times Square, where Lehman Brothers was headquartered. They literally took
(14:26):
the sign off the front of the building almost symbolically,
and you have thousands of people coming out of the
front of the building with cardboard boxes. Some of them
would get recalled the next day when Barkley's bought it.
But that was those were the times that we lived in.
And you know, I think one underappreciated aspect of this
(14:47):
is it's only like five or six years removed from
the nine to eleven era, and it just felt like
trauma after trauma after trauma. So that was the New
York in which I worked and lived and started to write.
And about a month after I launched The Reformed Broker,
the Madoff thing broke. So we went from so we
(15:11):
went from bear Stearns to a year later Lehman Brothers
aig the tarp vote blah blah blah blah blah, and
just when you think it's over. The most trust shattering
revelation of a Ponzi scheme in the history of finance breaks,
and so I just had endless fodder to write about
(15:34):
and maybe to answer your question. That helped serve as
a distraction from all of the anxiety in which people
working on Wall Street, you know, had to live.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
I remember when the Madoff thing broke, I think it
was later in two thousand and eight, was it?
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:52):
And I remember the headline December Yeah, and the headline
on the ft Alphaville post, the very first post on
the topic is one of my all time favorites.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
It wasn't by me.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
I think it was by our founder Paul Murphy, but
it was he made off with it, which was at
the time a very original pun and sticks in it
became less original as the months went on and the
story went on. Okay, what happened? So what happened to
the brokerage that you were working at? And like, how
did you manage the career transition away from blogging and
(16:28):
into I mean, you basically run an investment and a
media empire at this point, So how did that happen?
Speaker 5 (16:34):
All? Right? So I'm still a broker, but I'm also
a co branch manager. And it's interesting retail investors didn't
at least the type of investor. We weren't really dealing
with investors. We were dealing with gamblers, people that were
trading stocks. And around that same time you had the
(16:55):
introduction of the two x and then the three X
in xctfs. So the ticker symbols are now infamous. You
had the TNA and the TZA. One of those was
triple long, the Russell two thousand, the other was triple short.
You had the FAS and the FAZ. Those were the
triple long and triple short financial sector in the XCTF.
(17:20):
And that's what the retail brokers pivoted to. They were
no longer pitching stocks because everything looked uninvestable. I mean,
you literally had a fifty seven percent peak to trough
decline in the S and P. And by the way, again,
that same thing had happened from the dot com bubble
through NRON world Com nine to eleven. So like after
ten years of that kind of volatility, people were just like,
(17:43):
you know what, I'm going to invest in volatility, And
so that's what the brokers, the retail brokers pivoted to
I'm a co branch manager. I have to send letters
to the clients where they disclaim, yes, I want to
be trading the three x long or short Russell two thousand.
Like the clients would sign the letters and that would
(18:04):
give the brokers carte blanche to just you know's all right,
let's play. We're in the game. You would have these
are ETFs that are trading I don't know, hundreds of
millions of dollars maybe billions of dollars in in volume,
and you could be down twenty percent in the morning
and then up twenty percent in the afternoon. It was
just the wild West. And I looked around and I said,
(18:26):
what the hell am I doing this for? Like, no
one is being helped by this activity, even the brokers.
They were barely making money. So it was just like
it was an epiphany that I had up until then
spent ten years doing retail brokerage, and nobody was better
off for it, not me, not my clients, not the
firm I worked for. So I started to get really
(18:49):
curious about, well, what are what are normal people doing?
And like what should I be doing to actually help
people in this profession? And it became really obvious that
I was on the wrong side of the boat. So
the brokerage side, the Series seven side, where you're selling investments,
versus the investment advisor side, where you're giving advice and
(19:11):
the investing is incidental to the advice, and you're not
selling products, you're building portfolios and you're helping people really
solve the puzzle of how are they going to retire,
how are they going to pay for their kids college, etc.
So I knew that I was on the wrong side
within the profession, and in those days, most people were.
(19:31):
There were more people that were registered representatives or Series
seven license brokers than there were true financial advisors. And
so my decision, guys was I'm going to be a
reformed broker and I'm going to go over to the
investment advisor side. But then the catch was, well, how
do you do that? How do you leave? How do
(19:52):
you leave the brokerage side and go over to the
advice side? And I didn't know. So it wasn't until
twenty ten that I met Barry, who is, you know,
at that time my idol. Now he's my partner, but
I when I met him, I sat with him and
I said, all right, here's my problem, or he said
here's I didn't say anything first, Barry did like an
(20:15):
hour so I want to remind people. And of course
Barry is a host of a show on Bloomberg and
so okay. So Barry says, here's my problem. I have
the number one best selling book in the country about
the financial crisis. It's called Bailout Nation, and I think
(20:35):
it proceeded to big to fail and all the rest.
So he's all right, at the number one book in
the country on the financial crisis. I actually predicted the
crisis on my blog. I called it in real time.
I predicted the market crash, and I had my phone
is ringing off the hook because I also predicted the bottom.
So he in the New York Times three days before
(20:56):
the market bottomed, he said, I don't know if there's
a thousand more points down from here, but I think
you buy them. And literally three days later, the market bottom.
So the phones are ringing off the hook at the
RIA that he works at. And he's not a financial advisor,
he's a strategist. He doesn't talk to clients, so he's like,
my problem is the phones are bringing off the hook
(21:17):
the emails are pouring in. People are like, Barry, just
take my money, take my money, take my money. I
don't do that. So I don't know how to help
these people. I said, Oh, okay, I have the opposite problem.
I'm ready to help people. Nobody's calling me. I don't know.
I don't know where to get my next client from.
So we teamed up and it was like lightning in
(21:38):
a bottle. Like I'm telling you guys, we had like
hundreds of people a month just call the firm. I
would start talking about like how we're going to invest
their money, and they'd be like, just shut up, here's
my Social Security number, Like open me an account, and
I'm leaving Merrill Lynch, I'm leaving, I'm leaving Leman, I'm
leaving this. From leaving that firm, I get my money
(22:00):
out of there, and I want to work with Barry.
So my transition was like this insane rollercoaster of going
from like nobody wants to talk to me, and then
the next day it's like, oh my god, Josh, how
do I get you guys money? And that's how it started.
And you know, we've been we've been running ever since.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Uh when so there's a lot of questions that I
have a different past week could go down. So you
start the advisory with Barry, and now it's huge and
you have all advisors all over the country, so multiple offices,
et cetera. And we could talk about that more on
the media side, So you had been doing the blogging,
(22:42):
you know, I think both of us, like I started
blogging in like two thousand and six or whatever. You know,
it was just to write and I didn't think anything
would really come of that aspect other than like, you know,
personal notebook, et cetera. When did it seem like the
media side of your career was also getting could be
like a real thing that like is not just like
(23:02):
a notebook or whatever, but something that like, oh there's
like this can grow and this can grow your profile.
And obviously now you're on CNBC and you have a
conference biz and by the way, if you're listening to this,
I believe it is going to be released the day
that we're all out at your future Proof conference. But
when did you sort of realize that there's something big
(23:23):
happening on the media side that could be more than
just a blog that you like, you know, tell people
what's going on?
Speaker 5 (23:29):
So all right, so I'm writing every day, yeah, and
I'm writing every day. Yeah, I'm a man on fire
and I am and I don't. So. I think the
charm of what I was doing then is that I
never presented myself as like I'm like this, you know,
billionaire hedge fund manager, or I'm a cheap strategist at
(23:51):
you know, Goldman Sachs, you know, caliber market commentator. I
never I can't help it. I was always ever just me.
And so I was writing from the perspective of a
grunt in the trenches on Wall Street, suffering through all
the ups and downs like everyone else, and talking about
what it was like to talk to clients, talking about
(24:12):
what it was like to navigate, you know, all of
the various cross currents that were happening, but from a
street level. And I think the readership appreciated that. And
what ended up happening was it became popular enough that
professionals in the financial media started like people were sending
them links, and then they started to share those links
(24:33):
in their editorial meetings. And the first people that put
me on TV were CNN Money, my friend Caleb Silver.
I was like, in with this group of other financial
bloggers with Howard Lindzen and who's a venture capitalist at
the time, and you know, a whole bunch of people.
And CNN is starting to do more financial content because
(24:54):
the whole country is like wrapped with what's going on.
So CNN Money really was my first shot at being
able to take my writing and turn it into like
television and commentary. I was also getting a lot of
calls from the Wall Street Journal. They were linking to
me every day, and they were like, because they didn't
set that time. And Tracy will attest to this, Joe,
(25:17):
you were writing at cluster Stock, which became exciting, but
like I never will. But the large, the large media firms,
the large media firms were not staffed up to do
hourly commentary on every twist and turn in the market.
So instead of attempting to do that with traditional journalists,
(25:38):
and they had amazing journalists, they pivoted to this idea
that all right, we can't cover everything, but we'll do
a link fest every day and we'll tell the readers
what where else they can go. So they were serving
their purpose. Like the Wall Street Journal didn't have at
that time five people who could write markets blogs. So
we became the ben fish areas of that vacuum, and
(26:03):
all of a sudden I start getting called from the
Wall Street Journal. They're doing video. Kelly Evans is like,
I don't know, twenty three years old, and she is
like their lead markets, you know, daily blogger, and she's
doing video, and she's like, hey, I don't know if
they're going to allow me to do this, but I
asked them if I could bring you on and let's
(26:23):
see what happens. So all of a sudden, I start
getting calls from Bloomberg and then of course, like eventually
CNBC calls and they're like, here's the deal. We're talking
about your blog posts every morning. Are you normal? Like
we put you on because at that time, bloggers were
a little bit scary, and there were some scary guys
(26:45):
you know, on Twitter and writing about finance that ended
up becoming, you know, obviously these people in maniacs. So
I'm like, no, I'm normal. I'm working in the industry,
I'm Series sixty five, I'm registered, I'm overseen by the SEC.
I have a wife and kids. I'm not gonna I'm
not gonna come on the air and embarrass anyone. So
I guess like I had this progression, uh, and I'd
(27:08):
done enough that people were like, all right, this guy's good.
And so that's That's really how like the media thing,
the origin of the media thing happened. It it was
it was Look, there was a show you guys probably remember.
It was a show that Fox Business used to tape
from the lobby the bar pulling Bear at the Waldorf Historia.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Remember that, Yeah, I remember, all right.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
So it's it's Cody Willard and Eric Bolling and Eric
Bolling and they're the hosts and they every day, this
is five days a week. I can't even believe this
went on. This is seven, this is eight and nine
every day in the bar at the Waldorf Astoria. They
set up a TV studio. There are regular people eating
(27:54):
steaks and drinking in the background, and they did this
like happy hour show. So they were invited me to
come down and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna be on
Fox Business. And then I find out they're like, no, no, no,
you're not going to be on. You're a blogger. We
just want you to sit on set and do a
blog post about the show. And I'm like, well, I'm like, oh,
(28:14):
I'll show you.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
It's a mistake.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
That's just so like there's something about that that's like
so perfect. Like two thousand and nine, traditional media trying
to figure got to do something.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
But this is exactly it. So I I failed the
normality test, but I think it like it speaks to
the uncertainty of the moment and how traditional media was
sort of grappling with this new cast of characters, which
is like when I was at the FT at the time,
there was a sense internally that the people on ft Alphaville,
(28:47):
who were writing good stuff and doing good analysis, should
have some sort of video format. And then we I
remember we shot like an initial version of what the
video could be, and the feedback from our video team
came back that we were so weird and off putting
on camera that we should be played by puppets.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
That was an actual suggestion.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
It's funny because I think like if I like there
was this view that like the bloggers were like these
weird like sort of like caged wild animals, and like
I remember going to a conference like two thousand and seven,
it was a tech conference, it was a little bit
before and they had like this like special like blogger bullpen,
like they separated us from the other journalists. But there
(29:31):
was like but like they get a little space because
we know they're cool and they're doing something, and so
they get their own seats. But they're like different and
they have to be sort of segregated from the other
people there.
Speaker 5 (29:41):
That was a weird There was There was a there
was a guy on the air named Dennis Neil and
he would pick fights with bloggers from the air. So
he was I don't know what time he was. He
was on CNBC. I don't know what time his show
was or whatever, but he had this recurring I'm not
even kidding, he had a recurring segment called blog you,
(30:04):
and he would this is all true, you could look
this up. He would he he would pick a different
blogger who was like prominent on Twitter each time they
did the segment and like and like go off on
this person. And then they started booking the bloggers onto
his show for like a live debate. It was guys,
(30:25):
it was wild and I forget the guy's name. One
guy was just a complete lunatic and on the air
just went nuts on Dennis Neil. I don't I think
a month later, Dennis Neil was off the air, and
the bloggers won. The bloggers won, because yeah, so by
blog you by twenty ten, every network Bloomberg, Fox, Business, CNBC, CNN,
(30:50):
anyone covering the market. If you would just turn on
the TV and watch for an hour, you would see
somebody that started off as a blogger. So I think
the freaks one and and you know again like by
by now it's it's fifteen years later, by now we're
the establishment. But in that time there were Tracy. You're
absolutely right, there was like a red line these are
(31:12):
these are journalists or TV people and these are blog freaks.
And you know, of course that's that's it's funny now,
but like that's that's how it was, and crossing over.
So Barry had crossed over. Barry was on Cudlow like
three nights a week at the at the peak of
the crisis, Cudlow had an amazing show at seven I
(31:34):
think it was at seven o'clock on CNBC every night,
and it was all chief strategists and economists and some politicians,
and Barry was on there almost every night, and he
was a regular and he was like a blueprint of
how you can go from being a blogger to being
a mainstream commentator.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
What are the pros and cons of running you know,
the investment firm, the advisory alongside the media. So, you know,
I imagine you get there, there's promotional opportunities, you get your
thoughts out there and some of your ideas. But on
the other hand, it must take some time. And also
(32:28):
I can imagine that you know, if you put your
thoughts out there, some of those inevitably are going to
be mistakes that people can like bring up and criticize.
So I'm just wondering how you think about like the
upsides and the downsides of doing those two things.
Speaker 5 (32:43):
You have to decide that you are willing to be
publicly wrong and that you are going to have the
humility that when you're wrong, you're going to turn that
into content. And some of the most popular blog posts
of that era not just me, everybody, Here's why I
got blank wrong. Now, not everybody went that way. There
(33:06):
are some people that doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down
on what they were wrong about and never let it go.
There are some people that are like macroeconomic geniuses, and
they're still calling for the double dip recession from twenty
eleven that never happened. It's coming any day now. But
I think I think the bet that you had to
(33:27):
make was that by being humble and by owning your
mistakes and maybe even turning them into an entertaining way
to learn something, that the audience would come along with
you for the ride. And a lot of us did that.
This is not something I came up with on my own.
I watched people that I respect own their errors, and
(33:50):
you know, people like Doug cass who was writing at
the street dot com. This guy's buying a stock in
the morning and writing a column about how he's bullish,
and then telling it in the afternoon and the next
day he's shorting it. So he had like a lot
of flexibility in how he thought. So I looked at
that and I said, all right, So Doug has a
lot of respect from people all over the street, and
(34:12):
he's saying, I bought this thing, I'm wrong, it's down,
I'm gonna sell now. I don't personally believe in invest
in that way. I don't think that people should be
frantically switching back and forth bull bear, bull bear, But
it showed me that you can be open and honest
with your audience and they will respect you more for it,
(34:33):
rather than hiding there was as the first show of
it's kind on on CNBC was Fast Money and one
of the original cast members it doesn't matter who, and
it's so long ago, one of the original cast members.
I remember the producer telling me if he was wrong
about a stock on like Tuesday night, he wouldn't show
up on Wednesday. Like, I'm not coming, sorry, I can't
(34:57):
make the show tonight. So like you could do you could?
I do that for a few months, but it's gonna
wear really thin with the audience. So I think having
the humility and trying to turn the things you're wrong
about into teachable moments that's been really powerful, and the
people that have done that have done very well as
a result.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
We you know, like we could turn that. We could
just talk forever about this and about that era because
we're barely scratching their service. No, I just appreciate you
so much reminding me of some of the hilarious things
that we're going on. I had totally forgotten about that
show in the bar, but I remember it the blog
use segment.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I remember it.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
This is like great stuff and again memory Lane stuff.
I'm all about it. There are so many other things
if we zoom ahead, you know, right now twenty twenty four,
things have changed, you know, like finance Twitter isn't what
it was, Blogging is different. But things are always evolving,
and I like to you know, I get anxious about like,
(35:52):
oh am, I like gonna get stuck in a current
way of doing things, and then the way people consume
financial and from will change. Well, I'd be able to
pivot on time. I like to think I've done an
okay of sort of like figuring out when to try
new things and drop old formats. Do you get anxious
about that yourself? The fact that you know so many
different new platforms and like trying to you know, worry
(36:15):
about getting stuck or like what do you think is
happening right now in finance media?
Speaker 5 (36:19):
So I think I was actually I was talking to
I was talking to Michael Batnic about this yesterday, so
it's fresh in my mind. I think in that era
and for about ten years, yeah, Twitter was the most
essential platform for making sure that if you took the
time to write something and put your thoughts out there
and do the research, that is required when you're writing,
(36:43):
like if you really put effort into a piece of content,
Twitter was the way that you could make sure there
would be distribution. Yeah. Less so Facebook because the pros
aren't really spending their days on there and it's not
urgent enough, it doesn't move fast enough. But tweet deck
was the way that you distributed content, and it was
extremely powerful because if what you did was good, or
(37:08):
if people hated it or whatever, if it struck any
kind of chord, the amplification in the form of retweets
was more powerful than the Wall Street Journal dot Com
linking to you, because it was like everybody was resharing
the best four or five things that had been written
that day. So this guy, Tatus Wisconsa, he works with
(37:28):
us now, he's our director of investor Education. He had
a blog called Abnormal Returns and it was ground zero
for daily financial commentation.
Speaker 4 (37:37):
That was actually like the first thing you would look
at when you got into the office in the morning.
Speaker 5 (37:42):
I remember now Tatus is the librarian of finance Twitter.
If somebody wrote something, he knew it. He read everyone,
He read everything, and he curated the best ten to
fifteen things that had been written each day. He did
it five days a week, did it for more than
ten years. He's still doing it. And if you made
Tatus's site, you won. Like that means what you wrote
(38:05):
that day was legit. That would then be complimented by
what would happen on Twitter because everyone was reading abnormal returns.
And there were other notable link fests each day. Deal
Breaker had one that Best Levin and Matt Levigne worked on,
and there were a few others. But like that was
basically like the mixtape that you know, like the rappers
(38:29):
all wanted to get on the DJ Clu mixtape, which
would then be sold on the on Canal Street in Chinatown,
and that's how DJs from around the country would know
that something is hot. This was very similar, and then
Twitter would just amplify it and really enable something to
go viral. That all changed. The first thing that happened
is the Wall Street Journal and CNBC dot Com and
(38:51):
even and Yahoo Finance, the distribution channels, they started hiring
their own bloggers and they stopped linking out, so now
they never link out. But I remember that taking place,
and then it's all of a sudden, like all right,
the mainstream media is no longer going to link out,
but you still had to have normal returns, and you
still had Twitter. What's changed in the last few years
(39:12):
is that Twitter is no longer a worthwhile distribution platform.
Things go viral if they are really negative or violent
or racist, or somebody just being piled on for an opinion.
That's not the climate that it used to be when
people were trying to share information and debate topics. Now
(39:34):
they debate personalities. They hate Chamoth or they hate Mark
Cuban today and then the next day, like you know,
so somebody got filmed stumbling out of a bar drunk.
It's not a platform anymore where you could write something
amazing and anyone's going to pay attention to it. And
finance Twitter, finance Twitter is a vertical is really small
(39:57):
within the context of Twitter. He's talked to this guy,
Aard Podnos, who was quote unquote in charge of finance
Twitter for Twitter. It was it was one guy overseeing
what all of us were doing. It was not like
sports or celebrity.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Call what does that mean? He was in charge.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
I think that it's awesome. One of my favorite people
Twitter had him monitor finance Twitter. So anything that had
a ticker or you know, all the Wall Street people
that were now tweeting. His job was to oversee what
people were saying and try to make it helpful for
the rest of Twitter users to find.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, like all the cash tags and all the things
that sort of formalize it. I don't know.
Speaker 5 (40:40):
So it's over. So it's over, and it's okay. Like
things things aren't meant to less forever, Like Saturday Night
Live on the air for fifty years is an anomaly.
Most things don't go on for more than three or
four years. So I think you guys correct me if
I'm wrong. I think peak finance Twitter is let's say,
(41:01):
twenty ten to twenty twenty. And then in twenty twenty
things really broke down and it became more of like
a platform for venting rage and me too, and you know,
posting disturbing video clips, and it just became less about communities.
(41:21):
And that's around the time that I think it lost
its relevance for finance.
Speaker 4 (41:25):
Joe and I were talking about this the other day actually,
but I think the thing that's missing from Twitter, other
than like a good feeling among human beings, is sincerity
and like earnestness. That's kind of what bothers me about
it is like everything is just about like making the
best joke that you possibly can, and there's no room
(41:46):
for like earnestness, Bring back earnestness.
Speaker 5 (41:50):
I liked, well, I like the jokes, but what killed
what I'm describing is the quote tweet. So not every innovation,
not every innovation is good. So there was a time
when if somebody said something smart or posted a great chart,
you would copy paste that tweet and you would and
(42:13):
you would repost it and you would say via at
whoever it was, or you would do a manual, or
you would do RT. You would write RT, which would
tell everyone, this is not my original thought, I'm retweeting
this person. Then they built a product that was a
quote tweet where you could hit a button and say,
(42:34):
I want to comment on this above the person's tweet,
and that facilitated a wave of dunking, and dunking is
basically like, look, how dumb this person is. So I
know that there were people that used it positively also,
but I'm just saying like that was something that Twitter
built that had a very adverse consequence on the community,
(42:56):
and it just it devolved into worse than high school.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You obviously like worked like crazy. You know, you've worked
like an insane person over the last several years. Both
Tracy and I have as well. Do you, like, do
you ever think about slowing down and like taking time
savoring things like I'm taking my son to a football game.
I wish I had done more this weekend. I wish
I had done you know, I had more time, and
sometimes like, oh, should I have like worked less and
(43:23):
done more? Stuff like that? Do you ever like have
anxiety about like, you know, do you have two big
kind of components of your job. You're very public and stuff.
Do you ever feel like, oh, slowing down or how
much longer can you do it? Stuff like that?
Speaker 5 (43:36):
I mean I think about I think about it, but
then I don't do it. Yeah, that's right. Somebody told
me you work as though somebody took something away from
you and you're you're fighting to get it back. Like
that was their impression of my I don't want to
say work ethic like I'm like this, like like like
(43:56):
I'm in the coal mines. I love what I do. Yeah,
but that I think the pace and the intensity of
what I've done and what I still do to this day,
the amount, the volume, and the urgency it it looks
like it looks like a dog who somebody pulled their
toy away from them. And I don't know if that's
(44:18):
inherent to my personality or if you know. One of
the things I talk about in the new book is
I there was no safety net. So I never stopped working.
I never had a period of time where I didn't
have a job. I went from one thing to another
thing to another thing because I was terrified of what
happens if I stop, Like I'm nobody, nobody needs me,
(44:40):
so I have to stay used. I have to stay useful,
and I have to so there might be equal parts
ambition and fear, because if there's no net underneath you,
when you're on a tightrope, what do you don't stop walking?
You got you gotta keep walking to the end of
the tightrope. And by the way, there's no end in sight.
I don't know where it ends, but I think that's
probably the best way to describe the why. And it's subconscious.
(45:03):
I don't think about it every day. I just I
don't stop because I don't want to stop. I love
what I do and I think I'm helping people. But
also I'm afraid of what happens if I stop, Like
what happens if I fall what if I fall off?
So that's probably the driving thing. But I don't want
to give people the impression that I did not spend
(45:25):
the last eighteen years raising my children and you know,
building a home, because I really think that I've given
the circumstances where I started in my profession. I think
I obviously overachieved relative to you know, what most people
would have said is my ceiling. And I think I've
(45:45):
overachieved on the family side as well. Thank God. I
have a daughter who started college this fall. I have
another kid in high school, and you know, I like
to say that everything I do is for them, but
it's selfishly. It's my own insecurity that drives me. And
I don't know when that stops. Joe made me, maybe
talked to me. In five years, maybe I'll feel differently.
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (46:04):
Yeah, I feel like ambition and anxiety are the true
drivers of productivity and tweets.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Probably Josh Brown, this was such a blast. I'm so
glad we made this happen, and I'm looking forward to
seeing you in just over a week at your conference
out in Newport when when.
Speaker 5 (46:21):
You guys, you guys were a highlight last year and
you'll be a highlight again this year. People are so
excited when they see Joe and Tracy.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Too, kind man, Tracy, that whole conversation is worth it,
just to be reminded of the blog you segment un
CNBC and the the the the I still can't believe
(46:52):
that was real, the show in the bar, but I
remember it, and I think I was, like I was
there like once for a taping or for a party
for it, so man.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
It really well.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
Also, weird time you reminded me with that bullpen comment,
like bloggers truly were segregated from everyone else. I remember,
do you remember going into Goldman Sachs one time because
they had like a special event for Lloyd Blank Fine
to talk to to talk about Oh yeah, you.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Kind of if you want. Although I I.
Speaker 4 (47:26):
I quibble with some of your some of your narration,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
You know it might have been off the record, so
I won't Yeah, okay go into details.
Speaker 5 (47:35):
Yes, but yes, the.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Bloggers were treated like these like weird special creatures, like
kind of alien, Like everyone knew they were interesting and
kind of cool. And doing something, but like they weren't
really the same, and all the traditional media outlets are
like how do we deal with them? And it was
very weird times, it was.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
But that was so much fun with Josh and I
think his his career like to some extent, has mirrored
the evolution of financial media, I think. And one of
the few benefits perhaps of getting older is that we've
been in financial journalism for I don't know, like almost
(48:12):
twenty years now. Yeah, does that sound right? And so
some of the people that we were, you know, sort
of growing up with have gone on to like massive success,
and Josh is definitely one.
Speaker 5 (48:24):
Of them, and it's well deserved, totally.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Shall we leave it there.
Speaker 5 (48:27):
Let's leave it.
Speaker 3 (48:27):
There, all right?
Speaker 4 (48:28):
This has been another episode of the Odd Loots podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
And I'm Joe Wysn't though. You can follow me at
the Stalwart. Follow Josh on Instagram. He has, wisely, I think,
probably abandoned us on the other side Downtown Josh Brown.
Follow our producers Carman Rodriguez at Carman Ermann, Dashel Bennett
at Dashbot, and Cal Brooks at Cal Brooks. Thank you
to our producer Moses Ondem. For more Oddlots content, go
(48:57):
to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we have transcripts,
blog and a newsletter and you can chat about all
of these topics with fellow listeners twenty four to seven
in our discord discord dot gg slash upline.
Speaker 4 (49:08):
And if you enjoy Odd Thoughts, if you like it
when we indulge ourselves in some financial media naval gazing,
then please leave us a positive review on your favorite
podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber,
you can listen to all of our episodes.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Absolutely ad free.
Speaker 4 (49:25):
All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel
on Apple Podcasts and then follow the instructions there.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Thanks for listening.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Tracy, I know I'm biased, We're probably biased. I'm certainly biased.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Speak for yourself, Joe, I myself have no emotions. That's
for our opinions about anything.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
That's why I host a podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
That's right, we're the question askers, we're not the answers.
But I am sort of biased about anyone who sort
of grew up in financial media in like the two
thousand and eight, two thousand and nine era, two thousand
and seven. You know, like we're just a different breed.
We're just a different we're just a little cut above.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
I think it was definitely a moment in financial media
that I think has yet to be recaptured because there
were two things that were happening simultaneously. So one you
had the financial crisis where everything was going haywire, and
it was all going haywire in a relatively new way. Yes,
people had to suddenly learn what synthetic CDOs were, how
(01:18):
the revered the show, Okay, how the repo market worked.
Didn't learn all of that, and then at the same time,
you had like a big format change because you had
all these blogs that suddenly burst out of nowhere. And
at that time, the combination of like the new blogging
format plus the news cycle itself, which was so weird
(01:42):
and so fast paced, really meant that blogs were kind
of the perfect platform to cover the financial crisis. They
had an edge at that time. And I feel again
to your point, probably a bit of personal bias there,
but like I feel like it was a very special moment.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It was you nailed it exactly. It was the two
things happening at once that made that a distinct time,
which is right, all this stuff was happening, and there
were just new formats, and then you know, Twitter came
around then, so, uh do you know, and I joined
I tweet a lot. Do you know when I joined Twitter?
Speaker 5 (02:14):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Two thousand and nine, No.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
March two thousand and eight, Okay, And I was at
south By Southwest when bear Sterns collapsed, and and then
you know, it was before everyone knew that the world
was totally melting down. But also then I remembered I
have like distinct memories of that time because you know,
JP Morgan made that two dollars per share offer for
bear Sterns, and like a week before bear Sterns have
(02:39):
been trading at like sixty or something like that. And
I very distinctly remember a few people on Twitter talking
about like know that because people thought there was a typo,
remember like oh, it must be twenty or something like that.
And I saw these voices who actually knew what they
were talking about, like, no, this two dollars makes sense,
this is a real number, et cetera. Eventually, I think
they bought them for like ten dollars a share because
(03:01):
the government pressured them. But that was the first place
it was like I was getting information from people who
knew what they were talking about faster and sharper than
I was getting any other platform.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
And who were those people too?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I think one of them was Howard Lindzen and I
think another one was Roger Ehrenberg, which were like two
of the names who are like, you know based, But anyway,
there were many other names, including someone we're going to
talk to right now.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I'm very excited.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
So the person we're about to speak to, I remember
linking to his stuff right when I started financial blogging,
which was September two thousand and eight on ft Alphavil
and again the world blowing up around that time, Lehman
collapsing all of that, and I remember constantly linking to
his stuff at the time.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
And then the other thing.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
This is kind of weird, but the other thing I
associate with our guests. The first time I ever met
him in person was in New York, and that was
the last time I ever drank a blue moon, because
I think I have like three of them. Yeah, yeah,
but it was too much. And ever since then I
never again. No blue moons, but yes, lots of lots
(04:10):
of our guest for sure.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Well, I'm really excited. I think it's his first time
coming on the show. We are going to be speaking
to the one and only Josh Brown, a legend. Back
in the old days, when we were linking to his blog,
it was the reform broker. He son set it that
he's a new he writes a new.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Blue moved on to bigger things. For sure.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
We've done too much bigger things, but that was huge.
He's currently the CEO of Ridholt's Wealth Management. He is
the author of a brand new book You Weren't Supposed
To See That Secrets every investor should know. I'm so excited.
He hosts a popular podcast as well to compound. Josh Brown,
thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Outlaws, Tracy. I'm drinking a blue moon right now.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
That's perfect.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Josh. Do you remember that?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I can deal as long as it's you and not me.
That's good.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
Josh.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Do you remember the where we met the first time?
Do you remember where it was?
Speaker 5 (05:03):
I remember? Oh man, you do remember? Okay, I'm going
to take a guess. I remember there was one night
where Scott Bell got all the bloggers together at the
Campbell Apartment on the on the Vanderbilt side of Grand Central,
and that's like a speakeasy bar. And I remember meeting
(05:24):
a lot of people who were writing and tweeting about
markets the first time that night, and I think you
were one of them. I'm not sure, so it was
that night.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
My recollection is a little different. I thought we went
to the Michael Jordan's Steakhouse, which is also in Grand
Central and just on the.
Speaker 5 (05:40):
We might have done both.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
We might have done both, but we both agree. I
think it was probably two thousand and nine Grand Central,
either in the Campbell Apartment or the Michael Jordan's Steakhouse,
which sadley is no longer there, but yeah, that was
the first time, and now we're here.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
It was a Cambrian explosion of market commentators who were
coming from non traditional market commentary backgrounds prior to that moment,
just to button up what Tracy was saying. Prior to
that moment, most of the people who were commenting on
markets in a big way and were able to get
their views out to the public were coming from Wall
(06:18):
Street or were traditional journalists, and you know, they were
like the public relations firm would book the person on TV,
the person would go on Bloomberg or on CNBC, and
you know, they were like they had pedigree, and they
also had guardrails. They had things that they wouldn't they
weren't able to touch because they were connected to like
(06:39):
a Fortune five hundred company. And then all of a sudden,
this Cambrian explosion on the Internet. All of a sudden,
you've got people amassing large followerships who have no pedigree,
who have no publicist, and who have no guardrails and
are able to say things that you know, other people
(07:00):
would gasp at. But then that became the mainstream, and
then all of a sudden, the media was picking up
those voices rather than the traditional voices that they had
been so accustomed to booking. And I think all three
of us, you know, benefited from having been early and
visible in that era and to this day, like a
(07:20):
lot of the people that came out of the woodwork
at that time are you know, now part of the establishment.
So it was a really cool thing to be a part.
I can count yeah, listen, I could count on on
maybe two hands the people who are talking about finance
on Twitter in March of two thousand and nine. When
I started, it was a really small group of people
(07:41):
because most professionals had compliance departments that just would not
let them talk that way. Now of course, now, of
course the compliance department is like when are you starting
a podcast? So it's it's changed a lot. But we
were there, the three of us, and you know, we
can come up with a whole bunch of the names,
but there aren't that many.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
Yeah, And to be fair, so one of the advantages
that I think bloggers and people who were on Twitter
at the time had over traditional media was just the
immediacy of that publishing platform because things were happening so
fast right, like, within within a single day, you would
have like ten history making stories all happening at once,
(08:24):
and the newspapers and traditional media to some extent, just
couldn't keep up, whereas if you're tweeting about it, if
you're blogging about it in real time, you really had
a competitive advantage. But Josh, I know you've written about
this before, but for the benefit of our listeners, why
did you get into blogging in the first place, Because again,
people take it as a given now that you're on
(08:47):
social media if you want to get ahead in your career,
But back then it was a very new and to
some extent, risky thing.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
So I'm working at a third tier broker dealer in
two thousand and eight, and like many other firms on
Wall Street, they were seeing their revenue implode and you know,
struggling and you know, raising money to try to stay
in business, and you know, I go to the compliance
(09:16):
officer and I'm like, Hey, I'm reading this blog by
this guy barrio it Holtz, and I'm reading a bunch
of blogs and they're doing a really great job describing
what's happening. Every day. There's more news. It seemed like
like every minute there was more news, and the people
that were covering at best were not at the Wall
Street Journal. They were independent bloggers like Tatas Visconta and
(09:39):
Eddie Elfinbne and Barry and Eve Smith at Naked Capitalism
and The Epicurean deal Maker and Med Faber. But these
are like, these are people who they either work on
Wall Street or they used to, or they talk to
people that work on Wall Street, and they just there's
so much more urgency to the way that they're describing
(10:00):
this unfolding crisis. So I said, I said to my
compliance officer, Hey, I know, like we have compliance restrictions
and stuff, but if I stay within the lines of
FINRA is at that time, I'm a retail broker. If
I stay within the lines of what finra says I
can and can't say, can I do a blog? And
he looks at me. To his credit, he goes, I
(10:20):
gotta be honest with you. I don't even know if
this place is going to be around tomorrow. I don't
give a shit, Like do whatever, do whatever you want
to do. Just just just make sure you print a
copy of everything that you're hitting publish on and bring
it to me. And I'll sign it. And so I
appreciate him to this day because he was he was
(10:41):
dealing with much bigger issues. And you know, around that time,
there were so few people that had been given the
liberty to do that. I always tell people how lucky
I am. There were so few people in my position
who had been given the liberty to speak freely on
the internet. I was one of them. And as a result,
there was such a th for knowledge amongst the general
(11:02):
public that I was able to build a really big
following before you know, thousands of other people would start blogs.
So being early and you know, having that advantage, I'll
never not appreciate that I had the opportunity to do that.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I have a personal question in two thousand and eight,
two thousand and nine, and your boss is saying, I
don't even know if we're going to be around. So
I was like living in an apartment in Brooklyn. I
had two roommates at the time. It was sort of
the whole thing was very interesting. You hit a career,
you were at a brokerage. I believe you had a
daughter at least by that point. What's that like with
(11:54):
the anxiety of like you have like I didn't really
have any responsibilities. I could sort of sit there eating
my popcorn watching things employe, but you were in it,
and presumably you know, you had like supportive what's that
like supporting a family and being in the mix and
being at a company where it looks like the world
is ending.
Speaker 5 (12:13):
So I'm living in a rent control department on the
upper east side Rupert Towers, which used to be the
Rupert Brewery that sponsored the Yankees. I'm up on ninetieth
and Third Avenue. I'm commuting down on the sixth train
to forty second Street every day. My office is in
the Helmsley Building, which is now called two thirty Park,
but I'll always call it the Helmsley Building, And on
(12:34):
the left side of the building is Barri Stearns. The
right side of the building is JP Morgan. You know,
a lot of my friends from college are bond salesman
at Bear. My wife's best friend works at Lehman Brothers.
She works at Golden Sacks. And I'm just surrounded by
people that work at, you know, some of the biggest
banks in the country, because those were the big employers
(12:57):
in New York and so, you know, it was highly
anxious we were in our i don't know, mid to
late twenties, so everybody was going out and drinking a
lot and just like commiserating. But I'll never forget the
day bear Stearns closed because it was the same day
as that as the Saint Patrick's Day parade. So like,
(13:18):
out of more big curiosity, myself and all my fellow
brokers walk around the corner from Helmsley over to the
quote unquote the bear Stearns Building, which by the way,
had just finished construction a year before. A lot of
people don't know that. They spent ten years building it
and then the firm went out of business deal later.
So we walk around the corner. We see Aaron Burnett,
who at that time is CNBC. She's sitting at a
(13:39):
folding table doing live coverage from in front of the
bear Stearns building, and behind her almost the entire Saint
Patrick's Day Parade is coming off of Fifth Avenue where
it ends, and like people are like publicly drunk, and
there's green hats and bugles and you know they're blowing
horns and there's horse and meanwhile you look behind that
(14:03):
and you see white collar workers coming out of the
front of the building with cardboard boxes with all their
stuff in it. It's I want to find that footage
because I don't I don't think people appreciate the extent
to which it was just an absolute daily circus. And
not long after, that same scene would be repeated in
Times Square, where Lehman Brothers was headquartered. They literally took
(14:26):
the sign off the front of the building almost symbolically,
and you have thousands of people coming out of the
front of the building with cardboard boxes. Some of them
would get recalled the next day when Barkley's bought it.
But that was those were the times that we lived in.
And you know, I think one underappreciated aspect of this
(14:47):
is it's only like five or six years removed from
the nine to eleven era, and it just felt like
trauma after trauma after trauma. So that was the New
York in which I worked and lived and started to write.
And about a month after I launched The Reformed Broker,
the Madoff thing broke. So we went from so we
(15:11):
went from bear Stearns to a year later Lehman Brothers
aig the tarp vote blah blah blah blah blah, and
just when you think it's over. The most trust shattering
revelation of a Ponzi scheme in the history of finance breaks,
and so I just had endless fodder to write about
(15:34):
and maybe to answer your question. That helped serve as
a distraction from all of the anxiety in which people
working on Wall Street, you know, had to live.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
I remember when the Madoff thing broke, I think it
was later in two thousand and eight, was it?
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:52):
And I remember the headline December Yeah, and the headline
on the ft Alphaville post, the very first post on
the topic is one of my all time favorites.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
It wasn't by me.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
I think it was by our founder Paul Murphy, but
it was he made off with it, which was at
the time a very original pun and sticks in it
became less original as the months went on and the
story went on. Okay, what happened? So what happened to
the brokerage that you were working at? And like, how
did you manage the career transition away from blogging and
(16:28):
into I mean, you basically run an investment and a
media empire at this point, So how did that happen?
Speaker 5 (16:34):
All? Right? So I'm still a broker, but I'm also
a co branch manager. And it's interesting retail investors didn't
at least the type of investor. We weren't really dealing
with investors. We were dealing with gamblers, people that were
trading stocks. And around that same time you had the
(16:55):
introduction of the two x and then the three X
in xctfs. So the ticker symbols are now infamous. You
had the TNA and the TZA. One of those was
triple long, the Russell two thousand, the other was triple short.
You had the FAS and the FAZ. Those were the
triple long and triple short financial sector in the XCTF.
(17:20):
And that's what the retail brokers pivoted to. They were
no longer pitching stocks because everything looked uninvestable. I mean,
you literally had a fifty seven percent peak to trough
decline in the S and P. And by the way, again,
that same thing had happened from the dot com bubble
through NRON world Com nine to eleven. So like after
ten years of that kind of volatility, people were just like,
(17:43):
you know what, I'm going to invest in volatility, And
so that's what the brokers, the retail brokers pivoted to
I'm a co branch manager. I have to send letters
to the clients where they disclaim, yes, I want to
be trading the three x long or short Russell two thousand.
Like the clients would sign the letters and that would
(18:04):
give the brokers carte blanche to just you know's all right,
let's play. We're in the game. You would have these
are ETFs that are trading I don't know, hundreds of
millions of dollars maybe billions of dollars in in volume,
and you could be down twenty percent in the morning
and then up twenty percent in the afternoon. It was
just the wild West. And I looked around and I said,
(18:26):
what the hell am I doing this for? Like, no
one is being helped by this activity, even the brokers.
They were barely making money. So it was just like
it was an epiphany that I had up until then
spent ten years doing retail brokerage, and nobody was better
off for it, not me, not my clients, not the
firm I worked for. So I started to get really
(18:49):
curious about, well, what are what are normal people doing?
And like what should I be doing to actually help
people in this profession? And it became really obvious that
I was on the wrong side of the boat. So
the brokerage side, the Series seven side, where you're selling investments,
versus the investment advisor side, where you're giving advice and
(19:11):
the investing is incidental to the advice, and you're not
selling products, you're building portfolios and you're helping people really
solve the puzzle of how are they going to retire,
how are they going to pay for their kids college, etc.
So I knew that I was on the wrong side
within the profession, and in those days, most people were.
(19:31):
There were more people that were registered representatives or Series
seven license brokers than there were true financial advisors. And
so my decision, guys was I'm going to be a
reformed broker and I'm going to go over to the
investment advisor side. But then the catch was, well, how
do you do that? How do you leave? How do
(19:52):
you leave the brokerage side and go over to the
advice side? And I didn't know. So it wasn't until
twenty ten that I met Barry, who is, you know,
at that time my idol. Now he's my partner, but
I when I met him, I sat with him and
I said, all right, here's my problem, or he said
here's I didn't say anything first, Barry did like an
(20:15):
hour so I want to remind people. And of course
Barry is a host of a show on Bloomberg and
so okay. So Barry says, here's my problem. I have
the number one best selling book in the country about
the financial crisis. It's called Bailout Nation, and I think
(20:35):
it proceeded to big to fail and all the rest.
So he's all right, at the number one book in
the country on the financial crisis. I actually predicted the
crisis on my blog. I called it in real time.
I predicted the market crash, and I had my phone
is ringing off the hook because I also predicted the bottom.
So he in the New York Times three days before
(20:56):
the market bottomed, he said, I don't know if there's
a thousand more points down from here, but I think
you buy them. And literally three days later, the market bottom.
So the phones are ringing off the hook at the
RIA that he works at. And he's not a financial advisor,
he's a strategist. He doesn't talk to clients, so he's like,
my problem is the phones are bringing off the hook
(21:17):
the emails are pouring in. People are like, Barry, just
take my money, take my money, take my money. I
don't do that. So I don't know how to help
these people. I said, Oh, okay, I have the opposite problem.
I'm ready to help people. Nobody's calling me. I don't know.
I don't know where to get my next client from.
So we teamed up and it was like lightning in
(21:38):
a bottle. Like I'm telling you guys, we had like
hundreds of people a month just call the firm. I
would start talking about like how we're going to invest
their money, and they'd be like, just shut up, here's
my Social Security number, Like open me an account, and
I'm leaving Merrill Lynch, I'm leaving, I'm leaving Leman, I'm
leaving this. From leaving that firm, I get my money
(22:00):
out of there, and I want to work with Barry.
So my transition was like this insane rollercoaster of going
from like nobody wants to talk to me, and then
the next day it's like, oh my god, Josh, how
do I get you guys money? And that's how it started.
And you know, we've been we've been running ever since.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Uh when so there's a lot of questions that I
have a different past week could go down. So you
start the advisory with Barry, and now it's huge and
you have all advisors all over the country, so multiple offices,
et cetera. And we could talk about that more on
the media side, So you had been doing the blogging,
(22:42):
you know, I think both of us, like I started
blogging in like two thousand and six or whatever. You know,
it was just to write and I didn't think anything
would really come of that aspect other than like, you know,
personal notebook, et cetera. When did it seem like the
media side of your career was also getting could be
like a real thing that like is not just like
(23:02):
a notebook or whatever, but something that like, oh there's
like this can grow and this can grow your profile.
And obviously now you're on CNBC and you have a
conference biz and by the way, if you're listening to this,
I believe it is going to be released the day
that we're all out at your future Proof conference. But
when did you sort of realize that there's something big
(23:23):
happening on the media side that could be more than
just a blog that you like, you know, tell people
what's going on?
Speaker 5 (23:29):
So all right, so I'm writing every day, yeah, and
I'm writing every day. Yeah, I'm a man on fire
and I am and I don't. So. I think the
charm of what I was doing then is that I
never presented myself as like I'm like this, you know,
billionaire hedge fund manager, or I'm a cheap strategist at
(23:51):
you know, Goldman Sachs, you know, caliber market commentator. I
never I can't help it. I was always ever just me.
And so I was writing from the perspective of a
grunt in the trenches on Wall Street, suffering through all
the ups and downs like everyone else, and talking about
what it was like to talk to clients, talking about
(24:12):
what it was like to navigate, you know, all of
the various cross currents that were happening, but from a
street level. And I think the readership appreciated that. And
what ended up happening was it became popular enough that
professionals in the financial media started like people were sending
them links, and then they started to share those links
(24:33):
in their editorial meetings. And the first people that put
me on TV were CNN Money, my friend Caleb Silver.
I was like, in with this group of other financial
bloggers with Howard Lindzen and who's a venture capitalist at
the time, and you know, a whole bunch of people.
And CNN is starting to do more financial content because
(24:54):
the whole country is like wrapped with what's going on.
So CNN Money really was my first shot at being
able to take my writing and turn it into like
television and commentary. I was also getting a lot of
calls from the Wall Street Journal. They were linking to
me every day, and they were like, because they didn't
set that time. And Tracy will attest to this, Joe,
(25:17):
you were writing at cluster Stock, which became exciting, but
like I never will. But the large, the large media firms,
the large media firms were not staffed up to do
hourly commentary on every twist and turn in the market.
So instead of attempting to do that with traditional journalists,
(25:38):
and they had amazing journalists, they pivoted to this idea
that all right, we can't cover everything, but we'll do
a link fest every day and we'll tell the readers
what where else they can go. So they were serving
their purpose. Like the Wall Street Journal didn't have at
that time five people who could write markets blogs. So
we became the ben fish areas of that vacuum, and
(26:03):
all of a sudden I start getting called from the
Wall Street Journal. They're doing video. Kelly Evans is like,
I don't know, twenty three years old, and she is
like their lead markets, you know, daily blogger, and she's
doing video, and she's like, hey, I don't know if
they're going to allow me to do this, but I
asked them if I could bring you on and let's
(26:23):
see what happens. So all of a sudden, I start
getting calls from Bloomberg and then of course, like eventually
CNBC calls and they're like, here's the deal. We're talking
about your blog posts every morning. Are you normal? Like
we put you on because at that time, bloggers were
a little bit scary, and there were some scary guys
(26:45):
you know, on Twitter and writing about finance that ended
up becoming, you know, obviously these people in maniacs. So
I'm like, no, I'm normal. I'm working in the industry,
I'm Series sixty five, I'm registered, I'm overseen by the SEC.
I have a wife and kids. I'm not gonna I'm
not gonna come on the air and embarrass anyone. So
I guess like I had this progression, uh, and I'd
(27:08):
done enough that people were like, all right, this guy's good.
And so that's That's really how like the media thing,
the origin of the media thing happened. It it was
it was Look, there was a show you guys probably remember.
It was a show that Fox Business used to tape
from the lobby the bar pulling Bear at the Waldorf Historia.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Remember that, Yeah, I remember, all right.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
So it's it's Cody Willard and Eric Bolling and Eric
Bolling and they're the hosts and they every day, this
is five days a week. I can't even believe this
went on. This is seven, this is eight and nine
every day in the bar at the Waldorf Astoria. They
set up a TV studio. There are regular people eating
(27:54):
steaks and drinking in the background, and they did this
like happy hour show. So they were invited me to
come down and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna be on
Fox Business. And then I find out they're like, no, no, no,
you're not going to be on. You're a blogger. We
just want you to sit on set and do a
blog post about the show. And I'm like, well, I'm like, oh,
(28:14):
I'll show you.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
It's a mistake.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
That's just so like there's something about that that's like
so perfect. Like two thousand and nine, traditional media trying
to figure got to do something.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
But this is exactly it. So I I failed the
normality test, but I think it like it speaks to
the uncertainty of the moment and how traditional media was
sort of grappling with this new cast of characters, which
is like when I was at the FT at the time,
there was a sense internally that the people on ft Alphaville,
(28:47):
who were writing good stuff and doing good analysis, should
have some sort of video format. And then we I
remember we shot like an initial version of what the
video could be, and the feedback from our video team
came back that we were so weird and off putting
on camera that we should be played by puppets.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
That was an actual suggestion.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
It's funny because I think like if I like there
was this view that like the bloggers were like these
weird like sort of like caged wild animals, and like
I remember going to a conference like two thousand and seven,
it was a tech conference, it was a little bit
before and they had like this like special like blogger bullpen,
like they separated us from the other journalists. But there
(29:31):
was like but like they get a little space because
we know they're cool and they're doing something, and so
they get their own seats. But they're like different and
they have to be sort of segregated from the other
people there.
Speaker 5 (29:41):
That was a weird There was There was a there
was a guy on the air named Dennis Neil and
he would pick fights with bloggers from the air. So
he was I don't know what time he was. He
was on CNBC. I don't know what time his show
was or whatever, but he had this recurring I'm not
even kidding, he had a recurring segment called blog you,
(30:04):
and he would this is all true, you could look
this up. He would he he would pick a different
blogger who was like prominent on Twitter each time they
did the segment and like and like go off on
this person. And then they started booking the bloggers onto
his show for like a live debate. It was guys,
(30:25):
it was wild and I forget the guy's name. One
guy was just a complete lunatic and on the air
just went nuts on Dennis Neil. I don't I think
a month later, Dennis Neil was off the air, and
the bloggers won. The bloggers won, because yeah, so by
blog you by twenty ten, every network Bloomberg, Fox, Business, CNBC, CNN,
(30:50):
anyone covering the market. If you would just turn on
the TV and watch for an hour, you would see
somebody that started off as a blogger. So I think
the freaks one and and you know again like by
by now it's it's fifteen years later, by now we're
the establishment. But in that time there were Tracy. You're
absolutely right, there was like a red line these are
(31:12):
these are journalists or TV people and these are blog freaks.
And you know, of course that's that's it's funny now,
but like that's that's how it was, and crossing over.
So Barry had crossed over. Barry was on Cudlow like
three nights a week at the at the peak of
the crisis, Cudlow had an amazing show at seven I
(31:34):
think it was at seven o'clock on CNBC every night,
and it was all chief strategists and economists and some politicians,
and Barry was on there almost every night, and he
was a regular and he was like a blueprint of
how you can go from being a blogger to being
a mainstream commentator.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
What are the pros and cons of running you know,
the investment firm, the advisory alongside the media. So, you know,
I imagine you get there, there's promotional opportunities, you get your
thoughts out there and some of your ideas. But on
the other hand, it must take some time. And also
(32:28):
I can imagine that you know, if you put your
thoughts out there, some of those inevitably are going to
be mistakes that people can like bring up and criticize.
So I'm just wondering how you think about like the
upsides and the downsides of doing those two things.
Speaker 5 (32:43):
You have to decide that you are willing to be
publicly wrong and that you are going to have the
humility that when you're wrong, you're going to turn that
into content. And some of the most popular blog posts
of that era not just me, everybody, Here's why I
got blank wrong. Now, not everybody went that way. There
(33:06):
are some people that doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down
on what they were wrong about and never let it go.
There are some people that are like macroeconomic geniuses, and
they're still calling for the double dip recession from twenty
eleven that never happened. It's coming any day now. But
I think I think the bet that you had to
(33:27):
make was that by being humble and by owning your
mistakes and maybe even turning them into an entertaining way
to learn something, that the audience would come along with
you for the ride. And a lot of us did that.
This is not something I came up with on my own.
I watched people that I respect own their errors, and
(33:50):
you know, people like Doug cass who was writing at
the street dot com. This guy's buying a stock in
the morning and writing a column about how he's bullish,
and then telling it in the afternoon and the next
day he's shorting it. So he had like a lot
of flexibility in how he thought. So I looked at
that and I said, all right, So Doug has a
lot of respect from people all over the street, and
(34:12):
he's saying, I bought this thing, I'm wrong, it's down,
I'm gonna sell now. I don't personally believe in invest
in that way. I don't think that people should be
frantically switching back and forth bull bear, bull bear, But
it showed me that you can be open and honest
with your audience and they will respect you more for it,
(34:33):
rather than hiding there was as the first show of
it's kind on on CNBC was Fast Money and one
of the original cast members it doesn't matter who, and
it's so long ago, one of the original cast members.
I remember the producer telling me if he was wrong
about a stock on like Tuesday night, he wouldn't show
up on Wednesday. Like, I'm not coming, sorry, I can't
(34:57):
make the show tonight. So like you could do you could?
I do that for a few months, but it's gonna
wear really thin with the audience. So I think having
the humility and trying to turn the things you're wrong
about into teachable moments that's been really powerful, and the
people that have done that have done very well as
a result.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
We you know, like we could turn that. We could
just talk forever about this and about that era because
we're barely scratching their service. No, I just appreciate you
so much reminding me of some of the hilarious things
that we're going on. I had totally forgotten about that
show in the bar, but I remember it the blog
use segment.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I remember it.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
This is like great stuff and again memory Lane stuff.
I'm all about it. There are so many other things
if we zoom ahead, you know, right now twenty twenty four,
things have changed, you know, like finance Twitter isn't what
it was, Blogging is different. But things are always evolving,
and I like to you know, I get anxious about like,
(35:52):
oh am, I like gonna get stuck in a current
way of doing things, and then the way people consume
financial and from will change. Well, I'd be able to
pivot on time. I like to think I've done an
okay of sort of like figuring out when to try
new things and drop old formats. Do you get anxious
about that yourself? The fact that you know so many
different new platforms and like trying to you know, worry
(36:15):
about getting stuck or like what do you think is
happening right now in finance media?
Speaker 5 (36:19):
So I think I was actually I was talking to
I was talking to Michael Batnic about this yesterday, so
it's fresh in my mind. I think in that era
and for about ten years, yeah, Twitter was the most
essential platform for making sure that if you took the
time to write something and put your thoughts out there
and do the research, that is required when you're writing,
(36:43):
like if you really put effort into a piece of content,
Twitter was the way that you could make sure there
would be distribution. Yeah. Less so Facebook because the pros
aren't really spending their days on there and it's not
urgent enough, it doesn't move fast enough. But tweet deck
was the way that you distributed content, and it was
extremely powerful because if what you did was good, or
(37:08):
if people hated it or whatever, if it struck any
kind of chord, the amplification in the form of retweets
was more powerful than the Wall Street Journal dot Com
linking to you, because it was like everybody was resharing
the best four or five things that had been written
that day. So this guy, Tatus Wisconsa, he works with
(37:28):
us now, he's our director of investor Education. He had
a blog called Abnormal Returns and it was ground zero
for daily financial commentation.
Speaker 4 (37:37):
That was actually like the first thing you would look
at when you got into the office in the morning.
Speaker 5 (37:42):
I remember now Tatus is the librarian of finance Twitter.
If somebody wrote something, he knew it. He read everyone,
He read everything, and he curated the best ten to
fifteen things that had been written each day. He did
it five days a week, did it for more than
ten years. He's still doing it. And if you made
Tatus's site, you won. Like that means what you wrote
(38:05):
that day was legit. That would then be complimented by
what would happen on Twitter because everyone was reading abnormal returns.
And there were other notable link fests each day. Deal
Breaker had one that Best Levin and Matt Levigne worked on,
and there were a few others. But like that was
basically like the mixtape that you know, like the rappers
(38:29):
all wanted to get on the DJ Clu mixtape, which
would then be sold on the on Canal Street in Chinatown,
and that's how DJs from around the country would know
that something is hot. This was very similar, and then
Twitter would just amplify it and really enable something to
go viral. That all changed. The first thing that happened
is the Wall Street Journal and CNBC dot Com and
(38:51):
even and Yahoo Finance, the distribution channels, they started hiring
their own bloggers and they stopped linking out, so now
they never link out. But I remember that taking place,
and then it's all of a sudden, like all right,
the mainstream media is no longer going to link out,
but you still had to have normal returns, and you
still had Twitter. What's changed in the last few years
(39:12):
is that Twitter is no longer a worthwhile distribution platform.
Things go viral if they are really negative or violent
or racist, or somebody just being piled on for an opinion.
That's not the climate that it used to be when
people were trying to share information and debate topics. Now
(39:34):
they debate personalities. They hate Chamoth or they hate Mark
Cuban today and then the next day, like you know,
so somebody got filmed stumbling out of a bar drunk.
It's not a platform anymore where you could write something
amazing and anyone's going to pay attention to it. And
finance Twitter, finance Twitter is a vertical is really small
(39:57):
within the context of Twitter. He's talked to this guy,
Aard Podnos, who was quote unquote in charge of finance
Twitter for Twitter. It was it was one guy overseeing
what all of us were doing. It was not like
sports or celebrity.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Call what does that mean? He was in charge.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
I think that it's awesome. One of my favorite people
Twitter had him monitor finance Twitter. So anything that had
a ticker or you know, all the Wall Street people
that were now tweeting. His job was to oversee what
people were saying and try to make it helpful for
the rest of Twitter users to find.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, like all the cash tags and all the things
that sort of formalize it. I don't know.
Speaker 5 (40:40):
So it's over. So it's over, and it's okay. Like
things things aren't meant to less forever, Like Saturday Night
Live on the air for fifty years is an anomaly.
Most things don't go on for more than three or
four years. So I think you guys correct me if
I'm wrong. I think peak finance Twitter is let's say,
(41:01):
twenty ten to twenty twenty. And then in twenty twenty
things really broke down and it became more of like
a platform for venting rage and me too, and you know,
posting disturbing video clips, and it just became less about communities.
(41:21):
And that's around the time that I think it lost
its relevance for finance.
Speaker 4 (41:25):
Joe and I were talking about this the other day actually,
but I think the thing that's missing from Twitter, other
than like a good feeling among human beings, is sincerity
and like earnestness. That's kind of what bothers me about
it is like everything is just about like making the
best joke that you possibly can, and there's no room
(41:46):
for like earnestness, Bring back earnestness.
Speaker 5 (41:50):
I liked, well, I like the jokes, but what killed
what I'm describing is the quote tweet. So not every innovation,
not every innovation is good. So there was a time
when if somebody said something smart or posted a great chart,
you would copy paste that tweet and you would and
(42:13):
you would repost it and you would say via at
whoever it was, or you would do a manual, or
you would do RT. You would write RT, which would
tell everyone, this is not my original thought, I'm retweeting
this person. Then they built a product that was a
quote tweet where you could hit a button and say,
(42:34):
I want to comment on this above the person's tweet,
and that facilitated a wave of dunking, and dunking is
basically like, look, how dumb this person is. So I
know that there were people that used it positively also,
but I'm just saying like that was something that Twitter
built that had a very adverse consequence on the community,
(42:56):
and it just it devolved into worse than high school.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You obviously like worked like crazy. You know, you've worked
like an insane person over the last several years. Both
Tracy and I have as well. Do you, like, do
you ever think about slowing down and like taking time
savoring things like I'm taking my son to a football game.
I wish I had done more this weekend. I wish
I had done you know, I had more time, and
sometimes like, oh, should I have like worked less and
(43:23):
done more? Stuff like that? Do you ever like have
anxiety about like, you know, do you have two big
kind of components of your job. You're very public and stuff.
Do you ever feel like, oh, slowing down or how
much longer can you do it? Stuff like that?
Speaker 5 (43:36):
I mean I think about I think about it, but
then I don't do it. Yeah, that's right. Somebody told
me you work as though somebody took something away from
you and you're you're fighting to get it back. Like
that was their impression of my I don't want to
say work ethic like I'm like this, like like like
(43:56):
I'm in the coal mines. I love what I do. Yeah,
but that I think the pace and the intensity of
what I've done and what I still do to this day,
the amount, the volume, and the urgency it it looks
like it looks like a dog who somebody pulled their
toy away from them. And I don't know if that's
(44:18):
inherent to my personality or if you know. One of
the things I talk about in the new book is
I there was no safety net. So I never stopped working.
I never had a period of time where I didn't
have a job. I went from one thing to another
thing to another thing because I was terrified of what
happens if I stop, Like I'm nobody, nobody needs me,
(44:40):
so I have to stay used. I have to stay useful,
and I have to so there might be equal parts
ambition and fear, because if there's no net underneath you,
when you're on a tightrope, what do you don't stop walking?
You got you gotta keep walking to the end of
the tightrope. And by the way, there's no end in sight.
I don't know where it ends, but I think that's
probably the best way to describe the why. And it's subconscious.
(45:03):
I don't think about it every day. I just I
don't stop because I don't want to stop. I love
what I do and I think I'm helping people. But
also I'm afraid of what happens if I stop, Like
what happens if I fall what if I fall off?
So that's probably the driving thing. But I don't want
to give people the impression that I did not spend
(45:25):
the last eighteen years raising my children and you know,
building a home, because I really think that I've given
the circumstances where I started in my profession. I think
I obviously overachieved relative to you know, what most people
would have said is my ceiling. And I think I've
(45:45):
overachieved on the family side as well. Thank God. I
have a daughter who started college this fall. I have
another kid in high school, and you know, I like
to say that everything I do is for them, but
it's selfishly. It's my own insecurity that drives me. And
I don't know when that stops. Joe made me, maybe
talked to me. In five years, maybe I'll feel differently.
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (46:04):
Yeah, I feel like ambition and anxiety are the true
drivers of productivity and tweets.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Probably Josh Brown, this was such a blast. I'm so
glad we made this happen, and I'm looking forward to
seeing you in just over a week at your conference
out in Newport when when.
Speaker 5 (46:21):
You guys, you guys were a highlight last year and
you'll be a highlight again this year. People are so
excited when they see Joe and Tracy.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Too, kind man, Tracy, that whole conversation is worth it,
just to be reminded of the blog you segment un
CNBC and the the the the I still can't believe
(46:52):
that was real, the show in the bar, but I
remember it, and I think I was, like I was
there like once for a taping or for a party
for it, so man.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
It really well.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
Also, weird time you reminded me with that bullpen comment,
like bloggers truly were segregated from everyone else. I remember,
do you remember going into Goldman Sachs one time because
they had like a special event for Lloyd Blank Fine
to talk to to talk about Oh yeah, you.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Kind of if you want. Although I I.
Speaker 4 (47:26):
I quibble with some of your some of your narration,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
You know it might have been off the record, so
I won't Yeah, okay go into details.
Speaker 5 (47:35):
Yes, but yes, the.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Bloggers were treated like these like weird special creatures, like
kind of alien, Like everyone knew they were interesting and
kind of cool. And doing something, but like they weren't
really the same, and all the traditional media outlets are
like how do we deal with them? And it was
very weird times, it was.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
But that was so much fun with Josh and I
think his his career like to some extent, has mirrored
the evolution of financial media, I think. And one of
the few benefits perhaps of getting older is that we've
been in financial journalism for I don't know, like almost
(48:12):
twenty years now. Yeah, does that sound right? And so
some of the people that we were, you know, sort
of growing up with have gone on to like massive success,
and Josh is definitely one.
Speaker 5 (48:24):
Of them, and it's well deserved, totally.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Shall we leave it there.
Speaker 5 (48:27):
Let's leave it.
Speaker 3 (48:27):
There, all right?
Speaker 4 (48:28):
This has been another episode of the Odd Loots podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
And I'm Joe Wysn't though. You can follow me at
the Stalwart. Follow Josh on Instagram. He has, wisely, I think,
probably abandoned us on the other side Downtown Josh Brown.
Follow our producers Carman Rodriguez at Carman Ermann, Dashel Bennett
at Dashbot, and Cal Brooks at Cal Brooks. Thank you
to our producer Moses Ondem. For more Oddlots content, go
(48:57):
to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we have transcripts,
blog and a newsletter and you can chat about all
of these topics with fellow listeners twenty four to seven
in our discord discord dot gg slash upline.
Speaker 4 (49:08):
And if you enjoy Odd Thoughts, if you like it
when we indulge ourselves in some financial media naval gazing,
then please leave us a positive review on your favorite
podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber,
you can listen to all of our episodes.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Absolutely ad free.
Speaker 4 (49:25):
All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel
on Apple Podcasts and then follow the instructions there.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy Alloway
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