0:00 - Intro
2:40 - California politicians get caught violating their own rules at NFL playoff game
17:32 - Tom Brady retires; an ode to a worthy enemy
20:38 - Whoopi Goldberg embarrasses herself on Holocaust comments, and then her bosses embarrass everyone with a meaningless punishment
25:58 - CNN's Jeff Zucker resigns after phony "sex scandal"
32:01 - The aged-rocker Cancel Mob swings for Joe Rogan and misses
49:11 - Deep dive on the stock market and start-up world with Tobias Heaslip of Trading.TV
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Calgary Audio, Ladies and Gentlemen, February third, two thousand and twenty two. I'm Matt Bolinski. This is the Prevailing narrative and before we get into some topics, want to tee up an interview that I'm having on this episode is with Tobias he Slip. He is the CEO and founder of Trading TV, a super hot startup that is kind of the love child of CNBC Twitch and Robin Hood. So it's like live streaming for trading trading securities, stocks, crypto, what have you. You You can conduct the trades on the platform, but also you know, for creators, because now we have an entire universe of creators who are talking just about stocks and trading and financial news and that that speaks to the economic environment that we we are in um and you know, it's changing very rapidly with you know, a rise and interest rates in a new macro economic environment being kind of mandated by the FED, and a big dump off in crypto and tech stocks recently. So between that and inflation concerns, a lot of people's minds are on the market right now. And Tobias is a guy who has worked at you know, he's worked at Goldman Sacks Morgan Stanley um uh, some of the top boutique investment banks in the world where he has been a trader, particularly focusing on tech and media stocks, and so he's seen every piece of the chess board he is. He's seeing the financial markets from just so many different angles, and he's gonna tell us, you know what his thoughts are on the macroeconomic environment and what we're seeing the economy. Super interesting. Um We're gonna switch up format a little bit also this week because it's not gonna be my only interview. This Friday, I will also be releasing another podcast that has a long form interview on crime in America's big cities, in particular Los Angeles, with Deputy District Attorney John McKinney. He's one of the deputy district attorneys here in Los Angeles, has been for twenty three years and has been a vocal critic of Los Angeles boss Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon. And he's gonna give us just a masterclass and understanding why crime seems to be surging in Los Angeles, in America's big cities, and in particular indirect response to some of these new reformist, decarcerationist district attorneys like George Gascon who have been been elected in l A, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia and some other cities. UM. Will also be joined by my my good friend and colleague Shawn Maytian, who has been a criminal attorney and public and defense attorney here in Los Angeles. So we're gonna get the prosecutor's view and the defense attorney's view, and we're just gonna do a deep dive on crime and criminal justice in Los Angeles. I'm gonna have two pieces of content for you this week, UM. But first off, like I said today's episode, we'll get to some topics in a minute, and then to the interview with Tobias. This is the prevailing narrative, as always, your weekly dose of sanity, and we won't need some sanity after these recent NFL playoffs. They were incredible, dramatic endings, game winning fuel goals, lots of games went to overtime. Just an incredible set of games, including the Los Angeles Rams versus the San Francisco forty nine is game which took place at SOFI Stadium here in Los ange Je list this Sunday. Um. Beyond the antics on the field, there were some interesting ones in the stands and in more particularly the luxury boxes. So after the game, l A legend Magic Johnson goes to Instagram, as he often does, UH to do a photo dump of his his photos from the game, and the caption reads in the suite at the NFC Championship game with California Governor Gavin Newsom, l A Mayor Eric Garcetti, San Francisco Mayor, London Breed, and billionaires Alec Corris and my partner Mark Walter billionaire Alec Coors. Fascinating. Um. Either way, that photo dump is notable because it displays London Breed, Eric Garcetti and Gavin Newsome not wearing masks. Um they're supposed to be wearing masks. So FI Stadium was under a mask regulation, as are all indoor facilities in the state of California, by the rules laid down by Gavin Newsom himself. Um. So, while it's obviously patently absurd to expect people to wear a mask in an eighty raucous, rowdy, eighty thousand person NFL stadium during a playoff game, I mean they dispense with any actionality and try, you know, try to make us continue with the charade by issuing this mask rule and then don't even follow it. Of course, knew some the next day light his ass off and said that, you know, he only took the mask off one at Magic Johnson's request in order to take a photo, one also in order to eat and drink, even though you know there's numerous photos of him not wearing a mask at various junctures of the game. Um but lining is kind of a state of being for this individual. It's not really something unexpected. Um Garcetti just to take this guy, he's pretty much abandoned the post of mayor. I mean the only time he shows up is to go to sporting events. Ask anyone in l A, including people in the mayor's office. He's a band in the job of mayor. Okay, Essentially, during COVID he couldn't take the heat anymore. He was expecting to get a high ranking position in the Biden administration. Biden wanted nothing to do with him and shuffled him. Obviously, could be ambassador to India for fox sake, and and he's really hasn't done. He doesn't show up to work. And I know this because I know a lot of people involved with Garsetti's office and those who raised a lot of money for him, because I was one of those people back during his initial mayoral campaign in two thousand and thirteen. Listen, I was young and naive. He had a good stint as a city council person who's very pro business and pro development, and hey, if you're an up and coming young professional in l A, it made sense to go raise money for Eric Garcetti, who was likely to become the next mayor, as a good you know, as a professional advancement and networking. I mean, I got to experience this guy when I was a fundraising for him, you know at some of these events that I mean is a total phony which just you know, go put on his slide, fake smile and and talk down to everybody and then turn around to me and then make any number of crass, uh, you know, crass statements about women and god knows what, and just the guy's a total phony. Anyways, back to this game, you have the the political leaders of California and it's two biggest cities who are are telling everybody in requiring all businesses and indoor facilities in their territories to mask up, and once again they're not doing it at the game. Um most egregiously, what really lit the fire on social media and the response to this afterwards, is the fact that you know, Sunday, Eric Garcetti and London Breed and Gavin Newsom don't have to wear a mask at SOFI Stadium with eighty thousand people. But Monday morning, one of all the children in their cities in the state of California wake up and go to school, they have to wear a mask all day long. That's, on its face, just grotesque. And I the friends of mine, the followers of mine, who are parents who have to whose kids have to go through this, were absolutely livid and rightfully so. Was there any response acknowledging this from any of these people. Know of course Newsom just brushed this off and and suggested that he was wearing the mask the entire time. But beyond that, this is an eighty thousand person stadium. Nobody was wearing masks. We all know they weren't. Okay, everyone can see it right in front of their eyes. Yet we're supposed to continue with the charade and with this this meaningless pageantry. Uh. And businesses have to abide by this despite it continuing to corrode their relationship with their customers. UH. And while the people making the rules have do not feel compelled to follow it themselves. Um. This can only last for so long, right, A society can only last with the the elites and those making the rules essentially saying, hey, screw you peasants, we don't it rules for thee but not for me. For so long at some point it bubbles over um. And and so I'll get to where where I think that's going in just a second. But you know, we all know at this point in the vast majority of situations, because as we know, as we've discussed, masks can have a beneficial effect in certain limited circumstances, but are not universally are not universally useful, including duration right over the course of two to three hours sitting in a stadium, the amount of air flowing particles that leave everybody's mouth, regardless of which mask you're wearing. Unless everybody's wearing an N ninety five the entire time, it's not gonna stop COVID. Okay, if you stick people in this same space for two to three hours. Eventually the air is going to escape. Okay, you can go look at the CDC's guidance on various masks other than than nine, and this is what it says. So we all know it's bullshit, right, We all know these masks are hollow symbols and all they're meant to do really is to signal if I'm wearing a mask, or I'm instructing or suggesting that you were a mask. This is me giving a a symbolic gesture and an indication that I am a thoughtful, educated, sophisticated person who believes in science and cares about others. And this this is the symbol of that, even though we know that the health actual health impact at this point is next to meaningless um and and so we're once that that is another one of these factors that funnels into the grotesque hypocrisy of the political class defying their own rules because they know that they're making everyone observe these rules just based on that symbolism. Okay, they have the data, they have the understanding, they know that these things, given the circumstances in nine out of ten situations, do not have any discernible health impact whatsoever. But you know, hey, once again they're telling us let them eat cake, and they're telling us that that we have to abide by the rules, in particular a bunch of children while they do not. UM. And so what does this pretend for the states that you know, state like California that's a blue state, um, heavily democratic and is this something that is sustainable? And I think that a lot of people get lost in the false dichotomy between liberal and conservative red state versus blue state, and they don't understand that their cleavages within these communities, right California, Yeah, very blue. But not everyone's on board with this bullshit. Okay. I know because I've seen my direct messages and it's a lot of people from the state of California and from Los Angeles, including the vast majority Democrats, who aren't on board. Right. And I have a bit of a social media phoning. It's nothing, you know, it's nothing outrageous. Of about thirty six thousand followers on Instagram that's gone up by about thirty one since the beginning of the pandemic. And so that's a lot of people that are very engaged on news about COVID, right that they they're always interested in, you know, in the facts and the data and the relevant issues to this topic. So I get a ton of direct messages of people giving their honest thoughts and feelings about masks, vaccines, about COVID, about risk, about what's being done to their children, and the amount of messages I get that are caveated with I'm I don't feel comfortable saying this publicly, or I'd never say this publicly. It's unbelievable if you had any idea the pure volume of messages I get of people saying completely rational and in fact, probably more accurate things, but who don't feel comfortable saying it publicly, certainly in California amongst the the class and the cohort of parents. I mean this is because the the handful of care andish parents who want to who just lambasted anyone who who doesn't want to i'd buy a restriction, or who might suggest that certain restrictions don't have a rational basis, and they're the ones who control the conversation. But in response to this episode with Newsome, Breed and Garsetti, um, this is really empowered a lot of people who didn't feel comfortable speaking out to now speak out. Essentially a lot of people going to their their parent groups, their children's schools, the administration, or even youth sports, much of which require that kids mask outdoors during athletic activities, which is just insane saying hey, oh wait, the people making these rules don't feel the need to abide by them. Why are you forcing my kid, my six year old to play a soccer game with a mask, wearing a mask when the politicians were making the rules don't even feel the need to do so. And I think that this was a bit of a turning point in that regard whether or not Newsom finally caves and accepts that this is all bullshit. I mean, the the the momentum and the overton window of what people feel comfortable saying uh around the mass conversation, particularly in regards to children, I think has changed in response to this event. Um And this this actually followed an interesting piece that kind of discusses the split or this, let's let's call it this cleavage in Blue State Society about the mask issue by Ross Douth That was one of my favorite columnists. Um. He very much harps on a theme of American decadence, that we've become kind of a um, you know, a stale and bland society that's no longer dynamic. That even at some other times when things might have been more volatile, we were more dynamic society, and we've just kind of sunken into this on we and we no longer have true spirit. So his perit piece was called Willem mask Debate Split Blue States, and he mentions how even within Blue States, you can literally travel neighborhood neighborhood to neighborhood and experienced different realities. Uh As, He says, if you're a New York City resident, you can experience two completely different realities just by traveling the short distance from the posher parts of Brooklyn to two Queens. If you pass you pretty pretty much. In going from Brooklyn to Queens, you go from a world of ubiquitous and nine and careful checking of vaccine cards to a world where masking is maybe fifty proposition and outside of hipster establishments, the vaccine past rules are almost totally unenforced. You also see that in Los Angeles. I'd say at most pent of businesses here are checking vaccine cards. We have what's supposedly supposed to be a universal vaccine mandate for indoor businesses, nobody's enforcing it right, And once again we're supposed to continue with the charade and pretend, pretend that these are sensible rules that people are following, and that's just not the case. But the point of doubt, that's peace is that the things are starting to get hot under the collar within blue states. You kind of saw it with Virginia, with Virginia flipping back to a Republican governor and if you pull everyone, I mean essentially the the cohort that switched, that flipped, flipped Virginia from voting for Joe Biden by ten points over Donald Trump to electing a Republican governor literally less than you actually literally a year later. Is the handling of of COVID restrictions amongst children, as closing schools were quiring, you know, trying to force vaccine mandates and mask mandates on on the youth. And as we all know, the youth are at incredibly low risk from COVID. And this is one of the strangest phenomenon that it seems like the power structure in liberal cities and liberal States is trying to exert its power over the most one, most powerless and to least at risk. Cohart right as doubt. That goes on and kind of explaining these two different universes that are that are essentially right next to each other, and to pass back and forth between these two worlds just a subway riders short highway drive away from each other, is to appreciate not the ever expanding influence of Faucci and technocracy, but now at least the palpable limits of its power. Where do we find the limits of power to enforce COVID restrictions? Right? At what point do they become too much? The people start disobeying? And then he goes on with one crucial acceptance, of course, public school systems where statewide school mask mandates and states New York and Connecticut have kept kids masked in communities where otherwise the public health regime as a little purchase. Right, So all these cafes and restaurants in l A are flaunting the vaccine mandates. They're not checking the fucking cards. Okay, they're just not. Then you go to schools. You can't hide in schools, they're checking vaccine cards amongst the youth. They're enforcing the MASK mandates amongst the youth, which is the strangest because, as doubt that mentions, kids are one of the lowest GRISP populations, and that means that this extension of power only heightens the peculiarity of the entire dynamic. It's like the the restrictions are being more most forcefully applied against the most powerless and the most at risk cohort of the population, which is just incredibly strange. So where does this all end? Right, you are our parents, and because once once again, as I mentioned, all these people that follow me and our young parents have kids that are d m ing me about, you know, their their frustration and aggravation with COVID restrictions for their kids. Sorry to break it to you, these are not Trump voters, These not Republicans. A ton of these people are Democrats. And it's at some point this breaks, right, you know, the at some point there will be a straw that breaks the camel's back, and these politicians are not going to be able to can or forget the politicians. The other citizens that try to enforce this stuff are not going to be able to enforce enforce that kind of biomedical security state, Uh, to the same degree that they think they can right now. Like, for instance, California is still under a state of emergency. In two weeks, there's gonna be hundreds of thousands of people coming to l A and a hundred thousand people in that stadium for super Bowl. How like the utter absurdity of all of America, Washington, the Super Bowl going on in Los Angeles and Los Angeles still technically being under a state of emergency. And this is going to get nasty as deservedly, so should get nasty. I mean what the political fallout will be for people like newsman well garcaid he has already done and he knows his political career for all intents and purposes is pretty much over. That's why he's been hiding in a cave for essentially for the last year, only to come out to go to sporting events. Um. So you know another place where we need to kind of look past the red verse Blue divide and understand they're starting to become some breakages within these cohorts. And uh, you can you can believe me or not believe me. You can deny that this is what my d MS look like that. It's a lot of Democrats who are really no longer on board with these COVID restrictions. But that's just the truth, and you're gonna start seeing that materialize one way or the other. All right, let's stay on the topic of football here for a second, and also on the topic of enemies. People like Eric Garcetti and Gavin new Some they are, of course, are my enemies. I'm making no bones about that. But there's another enemy of mine who I actually learned quite a bit from and reached a healthy level of respect for, and that is Tom Brady. Tom Brady announced his retirement this week. I was looking up some quotes about, you know, respecting an opponent or a worthy opponent. Warriors want a worthy opponent. There is no redress in fighting the pathetic. Maybe that's what pisses me off so much about guys like the Newsoms of the world and these other just ridiculously incompetent politicians. I mean, these are these are pathetic enemies. But the one who is not, Tom Brady, very much a worthwhile and an admirable, an admirable competitor. Man. I used to despise this guy, right and first off, as an Angelino everything about Boston sports, and as a New England Patriot, he represented Boston sports. I just despised. We have a natural rivalry. It started between the Lakers and the Celtics decades ago, really heated up when I was a kid in the eighties between the Lakers and the Celtics. And it's just there is such a such contrasting cultures between Los Angeles and Boston, and these Boston sports fans were just these really kind of lowbrow, bottom drawer aggressive, wanna be tough guy, obnoxious people. It's like, go go freaking find something else to do to value in your life other than Boston sports and having a crappy accent. And then Tom Brady comes along and is the vessel for their success. And it's just he seemed like the most cliche, mindless dude who just was his favorite movies where every cliche sports was Oh my god, America Varsity Blues in the program are the greatest movies of all time. Like Tom, this guy, this guy is so annoying. And then you go to his his the beginnings of his success in his career, when he led the Patriots of their first Super Bowl with the tuck rule beating the Raiders. We all know the tuck rule was bullshit, and everything about Tom Brady I just despised and I rooted tooth and nail against him for years. UM could not tell you how thrilled I was when New York Giants upset his great uh New England Patriot teams a couple of times. But you want to know something, eventually I bit the bullet. Eventually, this guy's greatness was just impossible to deny. And the guys what a track record. I mean, at the top of his game, retiring at forty four after you know, one of his finest season statistically, and just shown himself to be a focused competitor who cared nothing, nothing but you know, his love for the game and and the mission at hand for a long time. And UM, I want to say thank you to Tom Brady because having to go through that evolution and and accepting the healthy level of respect for an opponent and someone who I had spent a lot of time hating on, you know, I think that's that that's something that's healthy. So as opposed to the unworthy foes and some of these, like I said, just woefully moronic and buffoonish politicians who clearly interests are clearly at odds against people of good will. Let's look for those who are enemies, but who are worthy foes, such as Tom Brady. Tom, enjoy your retirement. Congratulations on an amazing career, and thank you for helping me learn a couple of things here and there about the world. Okay, this week in Cancel Culture. And you know something that's not going to be a segment on this podcast, but let's be honest, if we wanted it to be, it could. And there's just NonStop of these these little pseudo controversies in corporate America or the media. Um. And this week's one was particularly just eye rolling and demeaning UM because it's around it, you know, notable intellectual and historian Whoopi Goldberg and the brilliant minds at the View Uh. And so long story short, um, Whoopi Goldberg board Karen Johnson. But she decided to adopt a Jewish moniker because she thought it would help her in the entertainment industry. Go look it up. Her brother stated, you know, it's very open to state, and that's why she adopted that name. But you know, they as they so obviously super appropriate to get into the topic of race and the Holocaust on the view and WHOOPI Goldberg thought that she was had the baseline knowledge to start commenting on this topic, and she started arguing against the notion that the Holocaust and Hitler's hate for the Jews was quote unquote racism. Right. I forget what she specifically referred to it, but you know, because Jews are for the most part white, although uh Sephardic Jews, I think, you know, it's questionable because they she classifies them all his caucasion that there was no racism involved. I mean, the the degree, the levels of ignorance around the Holocaust, World War two and Nazi philosophy that this exhibits are hard to overstate. Um, And just why the view you stay in your lane. You got to know when you're over your skis, this is not what you should be discussing. But um, you know obviously what you mentioned this and it was very you know, there's a big social media pylon and it was very quickly exposed that this was a ridiculous comment and just denied so much underlying um information about you know, how do you think Hitler determined who was a Jew. He didn't care if a person who was Jewish was an atheist who never went to synagogue. The third Reich had policies to determine whether or not a person was Jewish and thus was going to be sent to the concentration camps based on their genetics and their bloodline. Uh, and it's they're pretty much doing twenty three and me to determine who was going to Oshwitz. So don't sit there and tell me that this had nothing to do with race, or at least race as the Nazis conceptualized it. Um. But regardless, you know what was the response here, what the issues, the apology and uh just kind of goes through this ruggle session of how she needs to learn more in YadA YadA, YadA, YadA, YadA um. And then after that was just inevitable. You know that that's how these things go. But then the view goes ahead and still suspends her for two weeks. Did anyone ask them to do this? And I'm Jewish, I know a lot of other you know, I would be hard pressed to find a Jew who thinks that there's anything to be gained from WHOOPI Goldberg being suspended, and in fact, it's kind of embarrassing because it really infantilizes the the entire subject that Okay, let's well, we need to teach this sixty three year old or whoever old, WHOOPI Goldberg is a woman a lesson um and and by suspending her and that's how we're going to make our karma deposit to society. And I mean Jesse Single on Twitter he I thought he gave voice to this um his response to the WHOOPI Goldberg two weeks suspension. It's condescending bullshit, is what it is. Like we can't handle one celebrity saying a tone deaf thing. I it the safety is m My ancestors were chased around Europe by bloodthirsty lunatics for generations. Both my grandpa's fought in World War Two, and here's where we are now, Like this is just putting a childish sheen on otherwise important issues, right, Like we all know that whatever is said on the view about the Holocaust doesn't really freaking matter. But it's now this part of the new social code, and particularly in corporate America, that you now have to go. It's like putting children on a time out. Right. It's like corporate America is now one big romper room kindergarten, and we have to do these little symbolic showings of of giving someone detention or demerit or or um. You know, the hall monitor coming around and you know, telling them to not run in the hallways, and that's supposed to pacify whoever the supposedly supposed offended class or the offended group was. I don't know how. I'm not going to speak for other people who are members of ethnic or religious subgroups. Um, but when someone says something tone public, figures on something tone deaf about them. I mean, you've got all the chattering heads, you know, yelling for some sort of punishment or consequence. But this all feels very condescending, like who cares, Like, oh, we're gonna pacify the Jews by by giving Whoopi Goldberg a two week suspension? Like who who are you trying to pacify? Like? Is this how adults operate? Is this how an adult society operates? But this is how all of corporate America and definitely corporate media, this is how it operates. Right now. It's like a freaking kindergarten. Um, so that and and you know she'll come back in two weeks and we all know this was completely meaningless and hollow. It's just very patronizing for them to think like, Okay, we'll throw you a bone and and suspend whoopee for two weeks for her wrong, wrong think. And you know this approaching uh, you know the senior citizen woman will you know, really learn some deep lessons by her two weeks suspension and you know we'll she'll put up on a Holocaust museum next to this view studio. This is all ridiculous, Okay, Okay, So there was another one of these incidents this week with Jeff Sucker, the head of CNN UM resigning. That was actually yesterday morning. So Jeff Sucker UM kind of the the you know, the hall of Hall of Fame, member of failing upwards in the entertainment industry, former head of NBC. UM has been the chieftain of CNN for about nine years now, which I think also speaks a lot as to what I'll get to in a second. But um, he resigned yesterday apparently, I mean, you're looking at what's the controversy. Apparently was simply having a consensual relationship with a colleague, and not even a younger colleague that he had just hired or something like that. I mean, this is apparently he he kind of fell in love or had a relationship with, um, a woman that's been one of his lieutenants for twenty years now. Um. And it's even strange. This is funny. This was revealed as part of the investigation into the Chris Cuomo sexual misconduct allegations, which is just quite poetic, to say the least. Um. Yeah, Embattled CNN boss Jeff Sucker walked away from the network on Wednesday after failing to disclose a quote unquote consensual relationship with the CNN staffer. Says, I acknowledge the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began, by didn't, I was wrong. As a result, I'm resigning today. So that is also now apparently a new rule our social code in America. If you have a consensual two adults have a consensual relationship, and if your colleagues, apparently one person has to resign or apparently guess whoever the bosses has to resign. It's not like he was sleeping with an intern. He's literally sleep. He literally had a consensual romantic relationship with a a pretty high level of female executive. And once again, this is this is how a society of children operates. This is like the the the childish environment that we had a hundred years ago, where you know, you you needed an adult chaperone for you know, to seventeen year old kids to go out on a date, and you couldn't wear women weren't supposed to wear a skirt, you know, above their knee. We did believe society could accept people exercising some free will or coloring outside the lines a little bit, and we have to treat people as so fragile with such kid gloves that we're firing anyone who carries on a consensual relationship with a colleague. This is this is a strange way. This is a strange new set of codes. And I mean makes me incredibly glad that I do not work in a big corporation in corporate America. And I mean another I asked this question often, how much longer can this go on? Um? So more than meets the eye though on CNN and Zucker though, and you start to wonder, um, is there more going on here, and CNN is part of Warner Media. Warner Media was recently or is in the process of being purchased by Discovery. Discovery Media CEO David zas Lev, who would was going to be Jeff Sucker's boss, I mean, he made some interesting comments recently because we're thinking of Okay, so just to back up, Zucker made his bones as a producer of The Today Show and then did a lot of work in reality TV. So it started making us making a lot more sense, while CNN became such a clown network and went from a news news network to an advocacy sensationalist network over over Zucker's tenor because that's that's in his DNA. Zucker was the one behind The Apprentice. A lot of people kind of trade Donald Trump's rise back to Jeff Zucker, which is even more ironic on how Zucker kept his network CNN alive, essentially becoming the Donald you know, the Donald Trump news network. Um. So CNN drifted more in a reality TV show tabloid or sensationalist direction. Um. But then David zass Lab you know, Discovery is kind of just the facts. Discovery is a network's content supposed to have a little more gravity and UM. A couple of months back, zass Lab gave an interview when he mentioned that he wanted to be very hands on in running the new media company and gave you know, imply that he wanted to be more hands on with CNN, and even you know outright said I preferred news back in the day when it was more objective, um and less advocacy and opinion based. What did he say here, Yeah, in the nineteen nineties, when MSNBC and Fox News launched, zass Lab said, the world was in a different place. I think overall, we'd probably be better off if we just had news news networks in America, but we don't. Media tends to be a reflection of where the country is. Where the country was when we launched MSNBC was much more fact based and less divided. So I mean, maybe this is part of it. Maybe Zucker saw the writing on the wall, UM that zass Lab was gonna come in probably fire him, um, just based on performance alone, because they want to return CNN back to actual news, back to being an objective news network. While everyone kind of can acknowledge it's not at this point, not that I know The response here is oh, but what about Fox News? Yeah, I know Fox News is an advocacy network as well. Okay, stop with the just the what about is um? Um? So this seems to be the new social codes in corporate America. Everybody is treated like a kindergartener. Say one thing out of line. Oh, we have to go put you on to put you, put a dunce cap on you, and have you go sit in the corner for a couple hours, so until you you've paid the piper um being a consensual relationship with the colleague. That's the corporate environment cannot handle that. The people are too fragile, the system is too fragile, the ecosystem, and you know, we're gonna live by the tyranny of the human resources department that we want no controversy whatsoever. And these are the new rules. So um, I'm predicting that this is going to continue in corporate America. They're not gonna take corrective course, and there's just gonna be people who are just gonna just like people have left a lot of big news organizations for sub stack, a lot of people just gonna start new companies. Right, Nobody wants to live like this, there's more money involved. These are scaled networks and organizations that pay big bucks. But at some point they start to shed and they start to deteriorate, and talent, and both executive talent and on camera talent is going to leave and go independent because who the hell wants to live like this? I know I certainly don't. And that's why you get the benefits of parent is straight unfiltered. The prevailing narrative will be back in just a moment, well be Goldberg, Jeff Zucker. That's just child's play. Let's get to the main event. Let's get to the main course. Joe Rogan and the attempt to cancel Joe Rogan off Spotify that has arisen and to a certain extent, extinguished all within the last week. Joe Rogan has taken a bit of a COVID skeptics approach. Recently interviewed a couple individuals who um have shown some skepticism of the usefulness of the vaccine, blown up some of the other orthodoxes and pieties about the pandemic, and and it's gotten a little controversial. Um So, the oddest thing is these interviews are all from at least about a month ago, but all of a sudden over the last week, UM over the Hill rock star former rock star Neil Young decides I'm gonna take it upon myself to launcher crusade against Joe Rogan on Spotify and that he's uh, he is is amplifying dangerous misinformation about the vaccine, and I'm going to It's either me or Joe Rogan, and I want my music off Spotify if they won't take down Joe Rogan. Um. That wasn't a tough decision for Spotify. Neil was gone within a few days, so he tried to kind of stoke the flame here and and create a bit of a ground swell to cancel Rogan. Um. He was joined by uh, a guy who drummed plays guitar for Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, a lovely woman I'm sure did some great music back in the sixties and seventies, but I mean she's also a boomer who's over the hell. Um. There was a hashtag campaign, uh, you know, cancel Spotify. There are a lot of people with blue check marks on Twitter and social media talking about this and and obviously warning about the grave danger of Joe Rogan and his messaging. Um, but Joe gave. You know, what I would say is I'm not really an apology but a message just kind of stating his perspective on it all. And I don't it doesn't seem like Spotify is gonna take any action other than something completely symbolic and hollow. You know, a label about misinformation that may be applied to some of his podcasts, not that he is misinformation, but that people should be aware of misinformation. I mean, it's nothing. Um, so this is another cancelation attempt that failed, but obviously is very telling about our environment. Um, you listen to me enough, you know, I think this is complete bullshit. I think the term misinformation is a pretty meaningless term for some reason. Inaccuracy, liar, falsehood is no longer. Okay, we have to term term something that we disagree with that we think is wrong as misinformation. But let's look at what really what Rogan is doing, what the response was to him, and and whether or not which which one was valid, and what what it tells us about, you know, the media environment these days. So the thing that gets lost in claiming that Joe Rogan spreading misinformation is that he's an interviewer. He's conducting interviews. You cannot impute the views or what's being said by the interviewee to the interviewer. It's not Joe Rogan even necessarily making these statements. Right throughout history, we can go and look at journalists and people who conduct interviews, inter interviewing all sorts of terrible people. Journalists gave Osama bin Laden interviews. Okay, Mike Wallace of sixty minutes interviewed the Aetola Comanian Iran. And you know, does that mean Mike Wallace was spreading the message of death to America? Not necessarily, That's not how it works. It's the interviewer's job to ask questions, probe, search for information, and kind of play off whatever the interview he says. And that's what Rogan did. Here's and even otter piece of why why it's so odd that this the controversy around Rogan sprang up this last week. It sprang up in regards to two gentlemen, Peter McCullough, who I had a conversation with, and Dr Robert Malone, who aren't even necessarily super anti vacs, right, they seem to be vaccine skeptics to a certain extent, and I'll get a little more into the details in a second. But Rogan did uh interview a gentleman who I think does qualify as anti VACS named Alex Berenson Um about two months ago. No one seemed to get their panties in a bunch about that. For some reason. I think it's because so many people have already written off Barrenson that they soume people didn't find those that conversation a threat. But Dr Peter McCullough very well credentialed individual Dr Robert Malone, I mean, partially responsible for the creation of m RNA vaccine vaccine technology. These are super credible individuals. And while as I've discussed before on this podcast, and I think McCullough in his Rogan interview may have veered off in a couple of unfortunate directions I interviewed him, you know, for the most he did kind of correct or walk back a couple of things he said on Rogan. And there are a few others that I'm still skeptical of, particularly in terms of theirs data um. But you know, McCulla has been been cited and published more than pretty much any cardiology living cardiologists in America. I mean, he's got some pretty significant credentials and his thoughts and his views need to be considered, just like Dr Robert Malone. So in his his explanation, you know, he Rogan said, listen, I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. There was reason for skepticism. I was. I saw a lot of things around COVID, around the pandemic, around the vaccine that weren't adding up. And these were two guys who were both highly credential, and they are they're just undeniable that they're highly credential, So I want they seem to be very skeptical, so I wanted to hear what they had to say. I'm sorry, but that's okay. You're allowed to do that. You're allowed to interview people and hear what they have to say and hear their arguments. And you could make the case that Rogan should have pushed back on some stuff a little bit more aggressively. But that's not ubiquitously his responsibility, right, I mean, people have their own responsibility to go ahead and check out views to consider, and also to see that Rogan didn't agree with everything with them on everything. He probed them, he questioned them. That's how discourse works, That's how an interview works. Um. And be beyond that, just the the absolute nerve and chutzpah of so many of these journalists and public health officials, after the amount of times they've been wrong about stuff, to still just be so mind blown that anyone's questioning their credibility. And the couple of people had some interesting ways of framing this on Twitter. Um for instance, Uh, you know a friend of mine, Bridget Fetasy her tweet the fiery but mostly peaceful protest people are big mad, no one trusts them anymore. It's like, yeah, after you tried to shovel us mostly peaceful protests, after public health officials, after telling us that we needed to be locked up in our house for three months, all of a sudden, we're justifying ten person protests and pseudo riots based off public health concerns and saying that this was not a threat to viral spread. I mean, how are you supposed to How how are these people still claiming credibility and how are they how are they vilifying and demonizing people for turning to a person like Joe Rogan who does seem so inquisitive and curious and very much humble. Go listen to Rogan's interviews. He's a very humble, polite guy, and they're treating him like some flamethrower who's saying things come. That's just he's he's not doing what they claim he's doing. They're not. This is not just a matter of free speech, right of Oh well, Joe Rogan gets to you know, it gets to have a voice to It's no there, they're substantively is representing one what he's saying into what he's doing. He's engaged in a discourse that's part of a process of seeking knowledge, right of testing out. And given how many orthodoxes or supposed truth turned out not to be true during this entire episode, this is a valuable exercise. I mean, let's tally him up. First off, the attempt to to stifle any investigation into the origination of of the coronavirus and the lab leak, and all the claims that the lab leak had been debunked, that we had had it confirmed that this had originated from an animal at the wet market. That turned out all not to be true. Right, we don't we don't have proof that it originated from the lab. But we know that the claims that that that had been debunked were false. Right. Um, making people wear a mask walking through the entrance of a restaurant then taking it off when they go sit down to eat. When you make people do patently absurd things like that, you you harm the credibility of the establishment. Right, You're the people are looking at these absurdities and wondering, Wait, something doesn't add up here, it doesn't make sense. As time went on and we started to see that Jesus Christ, the the harm from COVID and severe outcomes are so heavily concentrated amongst people, you know, fifty five or above, but public health officials and and authority figures didn't want to acknowledge that. Right. So these types of things create confusion for people. They harm credibility when we were looking at different states. Um, and this was my experience. When you were looking at certain states saying we have to take these COVID restrictions or there's gonna be death and carnage everywhere. But then other states were not taking those same restrictions and having generally the same results. Right, And nobody wanted to account for that. Nobody wanted to account for Wait a second, this this may be why we're trying to be a little more cautious, but we understand No. Instead, it was complete scare tactics that, hey, if we release these restrictions, the hospitals are going to be overflowing, nobody's gonna be able to get their appendix out, and it's gonna be uh, something that you see out of movies. So once again people look at this stuff and it doesn't add up. Then they told everyone if Faucci, Joe Biden, Rachel Maddow, all these other people from the liberal media apparatus said if you get the vaccine, you can't get COVID they called it, said you will be a dead end for the virus. That turned out not to be true. Right, when you keep on making these pronouncements, these dire pronouncements, or these conclusions, and they keep on turning out not to be true, people are gonna start trying to find an explanation. They're gonna start poking around. And that's what Rogan, just as a guy, just as an individual, was curious and wanted to see if you could find a deeper understanding of these issues because the establed the the establishment narrative that he was being told was not true. He kept on finding things were false, and he was totally justified in doing so. So what what place does Joe Rogan occupy here? Because his critics, his critics at this point want to want to paint him as Alex Jones, as some performance artist, flamethrower, conspiracy theorist who's trying to just find the most unorthodox phony sensationalist headlines and claims and conversations just to throw red meat to his audience. And that's simply not true. That's not who he is or what he does. So a couple of people who are commenting on this topic Zai Gilani, who I mentioned a lot, uh, Joe Rogan's appeal isn't that he's a truth teller or a subject matter expert. He doesn't claim to be a journalist or operating a professional news show. His audience of millions just appreciate someone who approaches the world with curiosity and humility. That's okay. Joe Rogan can be a normal guy who likes to have conversations, who like who can explore topics and test out information and points of view. To see whether or not they are accurate or not. Okay, And that's exactly what he's been doing with some of these COVID contrarians. And here's the thing, I hate to break it to you guys. A lot of what these guys say is true. Okay, how about natural immunity. Go go look at the comments. Go look at the literature in terms of what Dot Robert Malone says, what Peter McCullough says about, uh, the power, about the effect of getting getting COVID and having an immune response and immune protection from being infected and recovery. Go go look at the studies, okay, and see if they're more supportive of McCullough and malone's points of view on natural immunity from prior affection or that of Fauci in the healthcare establishment. I'm sorry, the totality of the evidence, in the fact the facts are on the side of the contrarians. There's some other stuff in terms of the vaccine that I'm you know, still seems to be a little hazy in terms and it seems that McCullen and Malone might be off kilter. But that just means that you're just taleling up the scorecard here. Okay, this is not that one side has the monopoly on misinformation and the other side has the monopoly on truth. That is simply not what we're doing here. Another what I thought was very insightful perspective on this on Twitter. It's an anonymous account, but it mentions the magnitude of Rogan's presence in COVID discourse is a direct function of failure in official institution. Institutional sanctioned sense making, centurious midwitch are the cause of, not the solution to row influence. Joe Rogan, just a normal, inquisitive, curious guy, has more influence and more people are looking to him and his show for truth and understanding on COVID because so much of what they've been told by the establishment turned out to be bullshit, and it would be nice for the establishment to finally own up to that, but it seems like that's beyond them. Instead, they're gonna go and try to silence the voices that are calling them out, that are exposing them for being wrong on stuff. Joe Rogan is not saying I know everything about the pandemic. What he's saying is what I'm being told and what we're being told by the establishment doesn't add up. So I'm going to go on an exploration. I'm going to go in a truth seeking mission to see if we can figure out if we can gather a better understanding of all of this. And that's what he was doing. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. And to the extent that that does have grander implications for quote unquote free speech. I mean, yeah, people should stick by these principles, and people always love to hide behind it's it's such a cop out of Oh, these are private companies, they can they don't have They're not obligated to give voice to everybody. The First Amendment only protects you from government censorship, not from private company censorship. Mike Salana had a good retort to this. The pro censorship squad loves to fall back on this monopoly speech company is a private business, so the First Amendment doesn't matter, which is technically true, but runs from the point do you believe in the value or not? If not, why support the First Amendment at all? Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe that this is a positive force right. If you do, you should try to honor that principle. Even if you're not legally required to do so, and you should advocate that companies and third party actors also honor the spirit of that. We should want private companies to honor the First Amendment even if they don't have a legal obligation to do so. Right, And these social media companies they kind of as it's another conversation of whether or not they resemble utilities or common carriers, but they have a lot of characteristics of companies that could be regulated and thus forced to adhere to the First Amendment. So either you know, either advocate or support the principle or don't. You don't get to just hide behind the First Amendment when when you feel or use the First Amendment when you feel like it's convenient or non threatening and say, oh, well, as long as the government's not shutting any shutting off anyone's speech, it's okay. No, either you think either you think free speech and free expression is a positive force or a negative force. So if you think it's a negative force, at least own up to it. And then beyond that, I mean, these the cancelation attempts just completely failed. It was a pitiful failure. Like literally Neil Young and like three other eighty year old people were the only ones who took their music off Spotify. They didn't do a goddamn thing to its Spotify and nose Broken is the most most popular uh you know person in audio and in podcasting by a country mile. Okay, if they took Broken off Spotify, you know what's gonna happen. He just takes his content back to all the other platforms and he has a bigger audience than ever. And the aren't these people, the pro censorship crowd, aren't you tired of failing? Aren't you tired of looking stupid? Right in the name of shutting down speech? That which sometimes if you're if we're putting together a score card of how his level of accuracy versus the level of accuracy of the establishment that's trying to shut him down, and his score card, his score is looking pretty good. Right. It's just unfortunate that so many people in positions of authority who have a voice have felt have gotten comfortable advocating for censorship, even though it usually doesn't work, particularly when you're trying to take on as big official as Joe Rogan. It's just a very bad sign for our social fabric and for where we're at that everyone thinks this is a good thing that I'm gonna I'm gonna exercise my heck my heckler's veto by trying to financially harm Spotify that I think I'm doing something super noble and admirable by threatening to take my music off Spotify, so they'll stop, so they'll shut down any conversation that Joe Rogan is trying to have trying to find truth. I mean, this is not noble. This is not what good people do. Um. So who knows, maybe they will continue to take ls here and there. Um this one, Yeah, this was a complete l I mean it's it's been a week. If they were waiting for a cascade of big name musicians to take their music off Spotify because of their outrage over Joe Rogan, it's not happening, Neil Young enjoy and that was the one of the most ridiculous parts of this. This is all being done in the name of capitalism. After leaving Spotify, his his big um rebellious move was to leave Spotify for Apple Music, the biggest company in the entire freaking world. So within two days at the top of the Apple Music carousel, you see Neil Young's music being promoted. I mean, this is just so ridiculous. It's self parody of an aging rock star who once was a rebel and now is kind of exercising his supposed rebelliousness by jumping from Spotify to Apple. It's ridiculous. So Joe Rogan continue to represent the curious, humble every man. I look forward to the many conversations he's having. Yeah, I hope he becomes a somewhat more adversarial interviewer um because I think it would. It would help his cause and it would lead to more truth if he puts his guests feet to the fire a little bit more. But his behavior thus far has been perfectly fine and perfectly reasonable. He adds to the conversation, and given the state of our public discourse, other than him and we, we should be very glad to have Joe Rogan around. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is the prevailing narrative. And you know it's been on everybody's mind recently, the stock market and the economy. You've got the stock market taking a dive, Crypto taking a dump, inflation running rampant, the FED trying to turn off some of the gas from the overheated economy, chaos in the markets, and to help us make sense of it. All is to Bias he slip. He is the CEO and founder of Trading TV. To Bias, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here for sure. And aside from us being friends and me having a lot of respect for you and what you're building right now on one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because you have seen every you know, You've been on every piece of the chessboard in the the financial world. You've worked at major financial institutions um some of the bit. You've worked as an equity analyst at one of the big banks. You've been a director of trading at a boutique investment bank. You we're building a business around retail trading, and now you're a startup founder. So why don't you tell us a little bit more specifically about your background and kind of how that fills out the entire landscape of the financial markets. Yeah, absolutely so. I spent about ten years on Wall Street working about the bicide and South side of the Street. Started my career Goldman Sacks. I went to Morgan Stanley. Was an unbelievable time to be a part of Morgan Stanley because it was actually the first time that social media was becoming an investable asset class. So it was very just synergistic with me being a millennial and and using these products that they asked me to cover them from an analyst standpoint, which of course I accepted. At the time, everyone thought that social media was a flash in the pan, rights like we had just come off of Friends to you know, having a massive run up and then dying off my Space having a massive run up and dining off. So like Facebook comes along and was going public. I think most people expected it to be a six to twelve month trajectory and then for this to be a non existing platform. Uh turned out that social media actually became quite a thing, so that was great for my career. Went from there to a hedge fund called ox IF, where I ran training for a little bit, and then was a bar plays where I ran trading across all of the t m T so that's technology, media and telecom verticals UM and then I founded Trading TV last year. So it's been it's been quite a decade. Uh mostly a bowl market. Uh, you know, pretty pretty much a continuous bowl market for the last decade. So if we are going to go into a prolonged bear market, I think it would actually be technically my first real one. But I'm ready for it. Fascinating inflection point for you, tob to be building this company at and to that point, and to frame our discussion coming up in a second about the macro economic environment. Um. Want you were on a podcast with some friends and clients in mind and the group over at group Chat in October with a bit of a different market and in macro environment, you mentioned a strategy that should come across with an anecdote during your times at the bank called the up into the Right strategy. So why don't you tell us about what happened with the up into the right strategy and that will kind of lead us into whether or not that strategy is no longer feasible. Yeah, um, to be clear, I was I was joking. I mean, they have the event did happen, but I was joking about the actual strategy. But in this market, you know, we we did experience sort of a fomo culture for a really long period of time time and you know, we will get we'll dive into what was fueling that. But the idea that you know, you just had to be invested in whatever asset class, no matter where the price was, was a prevailing narrative that took place, uh you know, for for at least the last few years, um specifically within like crypto, but to a to a certain extent within equities as well. And yeah, I mean, at some point in time, the music does stop, right, and I think we've been playing this game of hot potato for probably longer than anybody had imagined. I mean, I know a lot of people that are professional investors that focus specifically on short selling, which have been carried out. You know, they've lost their funds over the course of the last two or three years because they had never seen anything that they felt like was as inflated as the environment and the asset prices, both in the public markets and private markets that we've experienced over the course of the last twenty four and thirty six months. But and essentially they said they figured that we eve in historical cycles, we were at the end of one. They found that it was a safe time or uh um, a shrewd time to be short selling, and the market cycle lasted longer than you know that their best estimates had expected, way longer. I mean, you know there's the uh the quote, you know, the markets can stay irrational for a lot longer than you can stay solvent. And uh, you know, at some point in time, like a lot of the hedge funds had had pretty much given up on on the short side of things. Um. And you know, even companies that I feel like we're we're widely accepted as great shorts. Game Stop for example, had just totally punished people. I mean, the numbers, uh for for Melbourne, you know, the fund that was very famously short game Stop during the whole you know, run up on Robin Hood and everything else. They just came out and like, you know, they're still fifty six percent underwater from what was effectively like a two or three week event, right. Um, So most people just aren't willing to risk their funds on short ideas anymore. And so I feel like now it's the perfect time for it to actually occur, with the market to go down, because there's very little people that there's very few people that are actually profiting from this downturn. M no doubt. Um, I've got I need you to to just explain then give the anecdote behind the up into the right strategy. It's too good. Yeah. So, um I was at the time, I was working at a hedge fund. Um and you know, like you're a new analyst at a hedge fund, so like one of the things that you want to do all the time is you want to pitch ideas and so you know, like I had a fairly uh fairly technical background. You know, I'm not a certified technical analyst or anything like that, but like I know how to read charts, so I was like in the process of conducting technical analysis and just to give people like an understanding of like how it works. And when you work at a hedge fund or you work at an investment bank, there is no privacy. Like you're not in an office where you know, I mean, if you're a big time like PM or something like that, maybe they give you a private office. But the vast majority of traders and analysts sit on a desk. And that desk is like you know, ten fifteen, twenty computers in a row. Everyone's got like two, three, four, six screens or whatever, and generally people just walk by and they can see what you're working on or whatever. So I was doing technical analysis on a particular stock, I forget which stock it was, and like one of the head guys that was at the fun walk by and he's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm doing technical analysis that was actually getting ready to pitch this to you and like a little bit, and he's like, it's very simple. If the chart is in the upper right hand corner, it continues to go towards the upper right hand corner. The chart is in the bottom right hand corner, it continues to go to the bottom right hand corner. And I was like, all right, so I guess you know I won't pitch this particular idea. Yeah. So the idea of momentum and things that go up keep on going up, and something that if you're steeped in market fundamentals and read the great let's call it Peter Lynch texts of investing of you know, from days of old, or even some of the principles of Warren Buffett and monger Um, you know up until the right doesn't seem so it doesn't really seem feasible. Then along comes the twenty one century, and these outstock the market environment other than the quick blip in two thousand and eight, two thousand ten, in particularly two thousand tens, all of a sudden up until the right doesn't seem like such a bad idea is just a kind of universal strategy there, but all of a sudden to the extent that you could ride that strategy out um the market the last you know, four to six weeks suggest otherwise. So why don't we get into a little bit about what's going on from a macro economic perspective um. Something that a lot, you know, the lay person is very familiar with is just the notion of short term interest rate hikes. But beyond rate, that's not the only factor and variable going on here. It's also what's you know, some people refer to as balance sheet normalization and the concepts of quantitative easing and quantitative tightening um from the FED um. So maybe if you can, you know, to the the extent, give us a bit of a primer on that aspect of it and what's going on right now. Yeah, absolutely so. I think at a high level, like you know too, it can get extremely technical it can get extremely confusing, but at a high level of what people need to understand is is the FED putting liquid And when we stay liquidity, we just mean are they putting cash into the system or they're taking cash out of the system. And so since two thousand and seven two eight, the beginning of the Great Recession that was a real estate driven recession, the FED has been expanding their balance sheet to unprecedented levels. And we've never seen a FED balance sheet anywhere close to the levels that we've experienced thus far. And so what happens when they are an expansionary FED balance sheet environment is all asset classes are going to be inflated because there's just cash in the system. So that that exists for commodities, it exists for real estate, and it certainly exists for equities. Why because despite the best efforts to be able to get the little guy the money, at the end of the day, the system just works real Even if the little guy gets the money, then it ends up going to the owner of the business. What does the owner of the business end up doing. Well, they're an investor, so they put money into stocks and it kind of continues to inflate those assets. So we've now been I think whatever we're in two so fourteen years of an expansionary environment and really for the first time during that period of time, we've reached an flection point where inflation is now at seven and the Fed realizes that, due to their mandate um they have to do, they have to take action, right, So how did they do that? Well, the first thing that they do is they stop purchasing treasury So they're actually gonna physically stop buying bonds just real quick. In terms of the Fed quote unquote printing money because it's the late person term that that is where the money printing comes in, because they print the money to buy the treasuries and others. Right, yeah, So I mean just looking at your personal balance sheet, right, like if you if you have an expense um you have to pay cash for it um or you can I guess like get some form of credit. Right, But like at some point in time, if there's something that you can't afford, like you just can't buy it. Well, that same dynamic doesn't exist for the Federal Reserve because they enjoy the luxury of being able to control the currency in circulation. So if something comes up like a pandemic, for example, and they think that it's going to take two trillion dollars of cash and injections to be able to support the economy through the pandemic. And they don't have that on balance sheet or they don't have it from tax revenue. They just print it. Right, It's like literally right click excel enter to trillion, enter and then go forth and like, you know that that problem is now going to be it has to be solved somehow in terms of the effects of it. UM. So the effects of it were, yes, the economy sustained economic growth throughout the pandemic um, which a lot of people didn't think that it would be able to UM. But inflation is now the issue. And so when you see a number like seven percent, a lot of people are like, yeah, seven percent feels it doesn't sound like a lot. But when you start thinking about the things that people actually use and do on a daily basis, groceries, ubers and lifts, you know, food delivery, rent a lot of that stuff is up way more than seven UM and it's starting to affect people's lives. Right. So what the FED is doing now is they're stopping the purchasing of assets, so they're stop printing and stop buying bonds, and then on the other side of it, they actually move interest rates up. So right right now we're at i don't know, like zero to twenty five or zero at fifty basis points target FED funds, and like the markets now anticipating three rate hikes this year. Um. Just to give people some context, right, like, we've been dealing in a basically zero interest rate environment for quite some time in the eighties and nineties, like prime interest rates where in the teams, um. So, you know, it is feasible to believe that economic growth could occur in a high rate environment. But because of the whole hard landing UH anticipation, you know, obviously there's there's like a little bit of concern and that's the reason why assets are selling off. M hm. So I love your thoughts on the recent statements from uh FED chiefs, your own power, but also in terms of what we can anticipate in terms of rate hikes. But also, uh that's one and two, what really can be the impact of raising rates from historically low levels to just above historically low levels, Because that's what I'm trying to to make sense of right now, I think a lot of other people is like, Okay, we understand that rates at the historically low levels they've been at for so long will lead to a lot of you know, of asset appreciation and inflation um, particularly amongst high growth companies. But okay, so what's going to be the impact of some kind of mild rate increases Because listen, we're not we if even under the worst case scenario, we're not going to find ourselves back at six percent interest rates short term eight percent or even you know, the double digital interest rates that we saw in the seventies and eighties and sometimes into the nineties. So what really, you know, what what what can the market um digest or how does it digest once again going from historically low to just above historically low. Yeah, so this cycles because of the rate of technology and what that actually the rate of technological change and how that um accelerates the cyclicality of the economy. Things tend to move much faster now than they had in the past. So you can make the argument that a lot of the move of that we've seen over the course of the last I don't know, four or five weeks has been pricing a lot of this in, Like if you look at where you know, futures rates are trading like they're already building in a three interest rate hike, Like bitcoins off fifty percent right, Like stocks are down between ten fifteen some of them. So these things tend to get priced in. And like the best example of it was actually in the pandemic, right like the world was ending, like literally zombie apocalypse was on the table of potential possibilities, um, and then they hit stocks down whatever it was fifty scent and like a short period of time, and then then it becomes about, Okay, what's the go forward Because the market is a is a future looking market. You're not looking in the past. That's the reason why you can't like trade Google searches or whatever, because you're looking at what's going to occur in the future and then discounting that back. So when you look at the pandemic, it was like, Okay, you hit things to what the market perceived to be the worst possible levels. Um. So looking at that now out how does that look in terms of the eight interest rate hikes? I think it's probably a more prolonged time period. So we need to cool inflation from like seven percent down to two percent or thereabouts. UM. How quickly can that happen? It can happen fairly quickly. UM. But that means that there's most likely a recession in there so defined as like two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth UM, so that probably takes somewhere between like six and eight quarters to be able to accomplish, understood UM. And so interest rate hikes are one piece of kind of shifting macroeconomic h wins. The other piece is and this is something I think a lot of people have heard about quantitative easy easing or understand the concept, but quantitative tightening is one that they don't necessarily understand. And that is also and some of UM. What it is the concern now, at least from what I've seen in bongs some very shrewd market observers, is that six months ago we were anticipating some interest rate hikes or quantitative tightening, but we weren't anticipating both. And with the inflate, when inflation turned out to be not transitory but more more substantial and you know, permanent and tangible UM, that now with both of those that played, that's what it hit the market so hard. So if you could just explain quantitative tightening more specifically, because I think some people you know, don't necessarily understand that other than conceptually as the the uh, the evil twin of quantitative easing. Yeah, the the easiest way to describe it is that it's harder for people to borrow money, and it's more expensive for people to borrow money. Right so, like the sourcing mechanism for the banks becomes a more expensive sourcing mechanism. They have to pay more money to borrow money from non depository from non depositing accounts. So when when you go to get a loan, like the bank is going to say, Okay, actually, we're not going to give you this loan right now because it's more expensive for us to get the money. And so if you want the loan, either there's a higher hurdle rate that you have to jump over in order to be able to get it. So you have to have a better credit history, your business might have had to be in existence and showing you know, positive growth or cash flows um or you're not gonna be able to get the loan. And then if you do get the loan, as opposed to paying a very small interest rate, which would incentivize everyone to go out and borrow money and then go into the world and spend that money or invested or whatever. UM, the interest rate is actually going to be be much higher on that UM. So the effects of that are valuations start to come down because there's less money in the system that are chasing opportunities. UM. So you've already started to see that happen in the public markets. UM. I operate primarily as a founder in the private markets. And so there's a big conversation right now is to what's going to happen to start up valuations because you know, you've seen it used to be a very big deal to be a unicorn, right Like there was there was only you know, a handful of companies during the initial wave of startups that became unicorns, and like they were celebrated and they founders became celebrities and whatever. Right now, I forget what the total number is, and this number is like changing daily. But as of like you know, last year, there was like seven hundred you acorns in the private markets that got you know what I mean. So like you're just like now, now you've got to be a deca unicorn. Yeah. Now that's the thing, right is your company has to be worth ten billion dollars in order for you to like, you know, achieve like any decacorn status or the accolades that go along with it. UM. So you know, it'll be really interesting to see what happens to start up valuations. My guess is that the same thing that applies to the lay individual in terms of his ability to be able to finance daily activities get loans you know, for either purchases or for investment purposes, will become more difficult and or more expensive. UM. That probably happens to startups as well, Meaning like the vcs that are out in the marketplace that are deploying investor capital are going to be more selective of the companies that they invest in. Um, they're gonna push back harder on on founders like me in terms of the valuations that we're putting on our businesses. Um, there's going to be a requirement to show you know, material metric growth whatever is applicable for your particular industry. UM. And I think that's a good thing. I think it's a really good thing for sure. And that brings me to a related point about okay, the monetary base in terms of it's staying stable based on the type the money that the FED has injected into the system versus the FED siphoning money out right from what I've gathered around quantitative tightening. There when the the debt that the FED has been buying is this transferred and that's a cat that that is a cash based transaction. The FED is essentially receiving cash and this from certain intermediary financial institutions and thus taking cash out. Not just it's not okay, it's almost like we're not we haven't just stopped printing money. We're now actively taking money out of the of the economy. Is that correct? So the way that it works is the gold standard on anyone's balance sheet from like a banking perspective, is always your treasury assets. Right, so like the in terms of financing the government, like there's a agreed upon thing and like you know, people will disagree or whatever, but like the United States will never default done. It's debt. So that's like a triple a asset. And so when you need to raise capital, like you can sell basically an infinite amount of treasuries to the FED, and the FED is by mandate the buyer of last resort, so there's always a market for you to sell those assets. Um and so when you're selling those assets, the FED is literally trying their trading cash for a piece of paper, and then they're just holding that piece of paper on balance sheet, which then is paid from the government in the form of an interest rate. Right, So when people say they're taking money out of the system, we're not going to a place where like the FEED is selling down. It's it's current holdings at least not in like a major, major way. But they're stopping the purchasing of it. So they're probably I don't there's I don't have the numbers in front of you. But they're buying like billions and billions of dollars of of these bonds per month. That's no longer going to be occurring, right, and just taking another step further. So as the reason why this mechanism exists is also because it's the way that you maintain above and beyond the target interest rate, the FED funds rate. There's an inverse relationship between bond prices and the actual rate. So if you're buying them, then you're pushing the price of the bonds off, which then pushes the interest rate down. So if you want to be operating in a low interest rate environment, then you're continuously purchasing these things for the purpose of driving the price of it up, which then keeps the interest rates down. In the absence of the purchasing, then the selling occurs, so the price of the bond is then going lower. The interest rates then go up. Got it? Got it? Okay? So that is the very technical explanation of how this whole economy thing works. Now let's talk a little bit more about how it tangibly impacts, uh, you know, your investment people's investments perspectives or a lot of the companies that they deal with on a day to day basis. Um so, uh, high flying high growth tech stocks, right, these are get a lot of focus because they're the names that a lot of people use on a day to day basis, given you know, the the the size of their user base. And I mean this is something that I like to when when I think people have a slightly distorted perspective over what a bubble quote unquote looks like. In two thousand twenty two, as opposed to what prior bubbles have looked like. Um, I think it's very helpful to try to draw some distinctions to what happened in the first dot com era, right, and that prices went out of control, a lot of speculation and they plummeted. And then it probably think about it just from the the uh in in the e coom sector, pets dot Com, a bunch of other The first handful of companies that decided to put dot com at the end of their name and we're selling stuff online, got insane valuations two thousand, two thousand one, bubble pops. You had an entire generation of early startup employees that thought that they were about to retire, and all of a sudden, two months later, their stock options were were worth nothing essentially, and then you start, you know, Amazon stays the course. Another generation of eCOM companies starts to pop up back and you know it's called the mid two thousand's, and they start to really start making some waves late, you know, late to the late outs in the early two thousand tents, and then all of a sudden, by the two early two thousand tents. Wait, you have an entire sustainable economy of of eCOM companies, and you have you know, these eCOM uh these flash sales sites, the group ons of the world, and these are you know, legitimate startups whatever you want to make call their some outsize valuations. And then since then it's there's no bubble that has popped. Okay, all these these UH eCOM companies that have grown that even with valuations it seemed to outstrip their financial fundamentals and revenue, there hasn't been any pop there, right, So it seems like we continually go through this cycle of UH items that are overhyped, that based on short are overhyped in the short term, but are actually properly evaluated over the long run. Um. And so while we may see, as you you mentioned earlier with the more connected world, a shorter cycle here, where whereas from the early two thousands bubble popping, it took probably eight to ten years for the eCOM environment to once again, you know, for those companies to grow into a true ecosystem. Probably it's unlikely that it's gonna be that that type of horizon here. You're probably gonna see some sort of some sort of kind of mild correction or even in the you know, less mature space like crypto. I mean, the cycle of boom, bust and rebuild into a tangible ecosystem is probably going to be a lot quicker, I imagine. Yeah, So a few things on that. So there's not a lot of parallels that are that can be drawn between the dot com bubble and what we're experiencing now for a few different reasons. One, the venture capital environment in the early two thousand's was basically I mean, it existed, but it was way, way um smaller than it is today. So what you had is a mechanism of financing is you had a lot of companies who should have been who today would be VC back companies which were publicly traded at the time, because that was the only mechanism to be able to raise capital. I think a lot of people, a lot of people, you know, forget that the reason to go public is to to raise capitals operate your business, right, So, in the absence of capital and the private markets, a lot of these businesses had to go um public, and they went public much earlier than we would see companies go public today. Why because companies in the private markets today can go to venture capital firms and they can get funding that way. So what you had is you had a bunch of early stage companies, a lot of them pre revenues. We would consider them to be you know, seeds seed precede Series A, maybe some serious B companies which were trading at the exact on a public on a public exchange NASDAC nicely whatever um And And at the same time, people were projecting out the growth of the Internet, and so it was kind of like, alright, great rising tide lifts all ships. Holy sh it. You know, there's only a few million people that are on the internet right now. You know, ten years, twenty years from now, like you know, three billion people are going to be Internet users. And like you do the math or whatever, and you can get insane valuations. Those uh, those valuations were then applied to companies that were non deserving. We're not in that environment today, right, Like the vast majority of companies which which hold market caps that are huge on NASDAC are real businesses. We're talking about Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, you know, like these are real companies that are generating tremendous amounts of profits um and like, you know, we can argue about whether they should trade at you know, two trillion dollars in market cap or one point seven or whatever. But like it's not going from two trillion to zero, Like that's just not gonna You're not gonna occur. So what happens is you get a bunch of these companies that are sort of in the middle that probably have extended valuations. I'm talking about mostly sass software businesses which trade off a price to sales mechanism. But I think sales I think salesforce isn't interesting. Wants to look at in that in that cohort. Yes, they're they're they're still trading like a hundred and thirty times earnings. Yeah, so there's, Um, there's a period of time where businesses go from a price to sales. Like when you're an analyst, you're looking at things on a revenue basis to begin with. Why because like below the line you can basically financial engineer because you're trying to reinvest money into the business. So you're looking at topline revenue growth until the business matures. Um. But if you would have pulled like you know, the Warren Buffett uh School of Investors or whatever in the sixties and seventies that like we were no longer going to value companies off price to earnings. You know, we're going to look at price to sales. They like, that's fucking insane, But that's how you look at software businesses because when the when the revenue is going the right way, you want to be investing every dollar back into the business to grow top line. You worry about expansion expansion of margins later and profitability later. Um so yeah, it's like Salesforce is now like a fairly mature company, right, so like they're gonna start to be evaluated more and more off like what they can do from a profitability standpoint. But those companies like that's not the Salesforce or whatever is maybe sells off a little bit like it's more of the you know whatever, Like the company that hasn't broken a profit, that trades had fifty times sales, sixty times sales. Those are the ones which will start to get hit really, really aggressively, because there will be a question as to whether or not profitability can ever be established, right, not just to whether or not they're doing it intentionally, but this like whether there's a path forward. So the best example of this that that you know comes up a lot is like the gig economy stocks like can uber, can lift, can grub hub? Like are these businesses that can make money long term? Like actually like physically produce a profit. Yeah, And so you're the the outlook because we're you've got these companies. You've got the blue chips, you know, the Netflix and the Google's, the Amazon's um and the Apples, and they've already grown beyond what some people ever believed was But people did not expect to see trillion dollar market cap companies, and then they came pretty quick. And in fact, it's even more surprising because they were companies that hadn't really exist, you know, at the beginning of the beginning, in the turn of the millennium, I mean, you didn't have any trillion dollar companies, and it was a question when you were going to see one. But then the fact that it was companies that hadn't even really reach scalability at such time was pretty shocking to people. So then you think, okay, wait, these they've got to be hitting a saturation point. How much more can they grow? But then see Apple continue to purport absolute monster earning over and over and over and over again, and so they're the supply chain disruptions. By the way, Like they're like they're being revenue. They'd beat revenue by like six billion dollars last quarters. Granted the estimates were probably slightly lower because everyone expect there to be some sort of impact, but like they literally have like cargo ships worth of product that can't get delivered to stores, which are materially um impacting their ability to actually generate revenue because they don't have a phone to sell your they don't have a Mac to sell you. It's like sitting on a cargo ship in China and Port of l A or whatever. Um. So, like, yeah, you're right, Like these businesses the and it's not just the core business of what it can do, it's the ancillary businesses that exist that can then add to revenue and profitability as a result of the core business being in place. So like Amazon is the best example. Like when you tell people what does Amazon do, Like, oh, it's an e commerce player, Yeah it is. It's also the world's largest cloud computing company or like one of the topic Amazon web services. So like me and every other founder, um, like we pay Amazon every month for the right to be hosted on their servers, and like you know this, if you were to break up Amazon's market cap into trenches. Um, you you know, like Amazon Web Services would probably be, if not a trillion dollar business, like close to a trillion dollar company that spurred from Amazon d commerce business. Why because there was no one that had enough store servers to be able to service the needs of Amazon's explosive growth. So they're like, fuck it, we'll just build Amazon Web Services. Okay, now we have extra capacity. So like you know, startups want attack onto our cloud computing great, right, that same thing exists. Like Apple didn't start as a phone company and started as a as a computer company, right, they sold They sold desktop computers. Probably one of the least sexy businesses that Apple is in today. Most people think of app was a hardware company. Now Apples a software company. Like if you are on the if you're on the app store, if you want the privilege of being on the app Store. I think they just lowered into twenty but whatever between twenty and of all in app purchases go to Apple. So like you could literally run the Gillette razor the Gillette model for raisors where they could be like here's you know, here's the phone. Just take it right, and like it's still a profitable business because people are going to spend money on the phone and they're gonna generate. They're gonna generate. Like no one conceptually understood what an app, what the possibility of like an app store would be. And now it's a duopoly, right, Like they're either on Android, Google or you're on iOS and Apple. Both of them coincidentally have the exact same pricing metrics. So you can't you can't go to one and say, oh, you know, like we're gonna be we're gonna save someoney. You go over to Google. It's like no, no, it's the same price. And so like what is that worth? I mean, you know it's obviously worth trillions at app also because I want to you know, as this leads into your thesis for starting trading TV, which you want to get to in a moment. There there's certain um certain kind of let's call it infrastructure, uh, the the the characteristics of infrastructure in the digital asi and the globalized age, right when you're dealing with entirely global markets and in in a generally connected society, that the potential addressable market for an Amazon, Google, Apple is just beyond what anyone had ever contemplated before. And then, you know, an analyst I read a little while back when thinking about what Apple could grow into being so, think about how much of the world still hasn't been on board of fully into either one the digital world or to a a kind of tier one hardware UH digital universe. And that's still a lot of people, right, So Apple still got a ton of room to grow, and we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break. So similarly, UM, retail the the global markets that the UH supply change that when when working can service that, and and UH it can can service that global market. Um, this really changes the game, much like you know, a more connected society and retail trading platforms like robin Hood now make retail trading feasible. UM, so maybe you could tell us a little bit about retail trading the extent to which that informed your thesis behind trading TV and like I said, some of the kind of underlying infrastructure that's made it all possible. Yeah. Absolutely, So I've always been a big believer that financial markets were made out to be much more complex than they actually are, and I know we've gotten fairly technical in this in this podcast. So my hope is that people that are listening to it um are not like scared away by these concepts and they can understand the vast majority of what we're saying. But and that's what we do on this podcast. We try to scare people, we see who still are and then we give them the good stuff. So now we're talking so UM. When I was on Wall Street, I was I was really kind of shocked by the amount of effort that went into convincing people, um and these are like institutional clients or whatever, how complex something was. Because if you could convince them that it was complex, then it just became like okay, great, like you can charge me whatever you want for this service because I can't do it myself. Well, the retail environment has been sold that myth for the beginning, since the beginning of time until now right, UM, So, people were basically if you wanted to invest in the stock market, then you either had to like go to Fidelity or Charles Schwab and like there was this concept of you know, I need a financial advisor, like not people that have like if you if you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, you need a financial advisor because you have a huge amount of assets that need to be tax efficiently deployed and whatever. But for like the average person that's got you know, two thousand dollars or whatever, like, they shouldn't be using a financial advisor, Like you can definitely do this yourself. So Robin Hood popped up with this concept of commission free trading, and that was a very disruptive thing for the industry, and it was something that actually should have existed a long time ago, but it didn't because it didn't benefit anybody who was in the industry before and was charging egregious commissions to cut the commissions to zero. But it could have existed a long time ago. So they disrupted that. And now with the one thing that they've done really well, Like I'm obviously not a huge fan of Robin Hood, but the one thing they've done really well is they've introduced whatever it is, people to financial markets who probably wouldn't have been invested in financial markets otherwise, and that is a incredibly positive thing. So the retail environment right now is saying, Okay, we're gonna have a resurgence of this whole do it yourself concept where the young people today they just do not buy into this concept of like the only way to get wealthy is to like work at a corporate job and invest in your four own k and mary well and by the first house and the value and the equity and that like no one wants to hear that. Like everyone knows that there's a million exciting opportunities that are going on, whether they be in stocks, whether they be in crypto or web three like whatever, right, n f T S, Like there's all this ship that's going on, and like people just want access to it because they feel like this is the way to be able to get financial independence quickly. Um. And so what we started trading TV was was the mechanism to be able to centralize the content around that so it doesn't matter whether you want to be invested in stocks, crypto, n f T S, trading cards, rare sneakers. The centralized platform where creators are on there that are providing educational and entertaining information about a myriad of different assets, hopefully every asset that you can conceive of. And then because you're already on platform and you know you're there, to learn about let's send n f T. We also facilitate the transactions uh directly on platform as well. From an infrastructure standpoint. The reason why trading TV hasn't existed previously it is because you had to build two sides of the house before. So like there's the social layer where you're you know, distributing livestream or vode content, transaction layer where you're actually facilitating money and trans and transactions. Um So now there's companies that you can utilize to be able to solve both sides of that problem. So like we can effectively just take those products, marry them together with an API integration and focus on you know, customer service, delivery of the content, things like that which previously wasn't possible. So you can make robin Hood and Twitter YouTube into the same platform. You make it a high exactly. And and by the way, like you know, talking about the how how early we are, like in order for my platform to work, you know, five G kind of has to be a thing, right. I think there's this assumption, you know by people that like technology is just way ahead of where it actually is, Like just just taking Instagram for example. I mean, you know again people hate on Facebook, but when you post a video to Instagram, like it uploads seamlessly, it plays seamlessly, like all of the billions of transactions, the comments, the likes, the sharing, like all that stuff happens across like a billion person user base flawlessly and like very rarely goes down. And yet like no one understands like the technological feat and accomplishment that that is, Like it is mind blowing that someone was able to figure that out. Amazon does the same thing, but they're also moving billions trillions of dollars around. You can't delivery the next day no matter where. It's incredible. Sometimes it comes in fifteen minutes, like you know, so it can't be understated how difficult that is to do. But from like my perspective, live streaming, like why is live streaming not bigger thing yet? Well, because the actual distribution mechanisms moving it through whatever Verizon or whoever is, like the delivery mechanism, it's simply just didn't exist, like the broad bands didn't exist in order for us to be able to do it at scale until very recently. Um, so this is like, you know, this is sort of the early innings of a lot of these technologies, like blockchain technologies are in like warm ups to preseason, like we're not even remotely closed um to what we're gonna see, and that's what's exciting. And so I want to talk about that and within the framework of information flow because it was another really interesting point you made on the group in the group chat conversation um and and and how it kind of tips you off to where uh the arrival of retail trading, or at least the the arrival of it in mass as it has recently. And that typically the way that you gathered information that you discovered alpha uh an information advantage while working, you know, as a financial professional at a bank, was you call other smart people. You call you know, the the people working in investment banks. No, but your boss letting you go on social media and looking, letting you go on Twitter, and people have to keep a very low public profile. But then you were going and seeing the comments and the chatter in reddit, on in reddit groups, on reddit threads, on Twitter, was actually had more valuable and more informed information that you were finding from those calls on the street. That had been the way that people transferred information and did their research for decades, Right, And so this really this kind of foreshadow the idea that that a whole new, uh, a whole new sector of trading and financial and let's call it not professionals, but financial activity and trading activity was going to pop up outside the scope of actual banks and financial institutions. Yeah. So the one thing I think there's like a few benefits that institutional investors typically enjoy, um, you know, whether it's like more capital or the ability to be able to hire you know, certain analysts that are really great at at you know, picking stocks or whatever. But the one thing that's a massive disadvantage is the lack of community. And community is kind of like this overused term. But when I mean community, I mean if you're a hedge fund, your your bread and butter is outperforming other hedge funds. Like that's like what your goal is, right, because then come the end of the year, you can say, look, I've posted two percent, five percent, ten percent better returns than the other guy. Thus you should withdraw money from the other guy and you should deposit it with me. Right, So it's a fairly finite world of like hedge fund buyers and like there's a large amount of hedge funds that are looking for, you know, investors in their hedge funds. So because of that and of that dynamic, there's not a lot of communication between hedge funds. Like there's some other regulatory things and reasons why or whatever, but like there's not a lot of Hey, Matt, you know, I found this amazing idea. You should also be invested in this, right, because if I tell you, then you do it, then our returns of the same. In the in the retail community, it's almost the inverse where if somebody has a great idea or if they realize something that shouldn't exist, like a fundamental mispricing of an asset game stopped for example, when it was you know, massively over sold from a short sale perspective, and if that is not communicated to the rest of the community, the likelihood that that asset is going to actually revert to the value that it should be is almost zero because the individual retail investor doesn't have enough money to make it so, right, So like that guy that realizes that might have like a few thousand dollars in investment. So you need the rest of the community to buy into the idea in order for it to like actually start to move, and the only way to do that is to like actually tell them about it, whether it's using voice, video chat, whatever. So that was like a really it was like a white bulb moment for me where I was like, holy shit, these conversations are happening. And by the way, the ideas are really good, you know, Like I like I was struggling to come up with um as many good trade ideas as I was finding in the forums, right like, and I was getting paid a lot of money to come up with to come up with this train to come up with this straight out um and and a big part of it is also just as technology moves faster, there's like a contingent of people who just thoroughly enjoy staying on the cutting edge of it, and like they're they're paying attention to every gooddle thing and so that that's their focus. Like they on they're reading things that you know, most people wouldn't read in terms of white papers, and their understanding what that impact is going to be in the larger ecosystem. And then they're they're continue to extrapolate that new investment ideas and once they do um, then these like really lively discussions take place. So I wanted to build a platform around that because I feel like if somebody, if anybody that's interested investing could have access to this information on a real time basis, um the likelihood that they would be able to profit from it is extremely high. And you know, very few people are like gonna actually go into like the vowels in the Internet and do it on on you know, frequent basis. So there was an opportunity to commercialize and product tise it. And so if you could, you know, we've gotten a little bit down the road in terms of what you're doing with Trading TV, but if you could back up and give us, give us the you know, the ten for the thousand foot view. Yeah. So Training TV is the world's first tradeable livestream platform for traders and financial content creators. The one line pitches it's a fintech love child of Twitch and TikTok meets robin Hood, initially moving into uh crypto and n f t s later on this year, so sort of a coin based open sea competitor as well. Um So creators come onto the platform. They can create content on everything from stocks and options to crypto trading cards where sneakers and f t s. As long as it's an asset class UH that can be traded or invested in contents totally fine. On our platform, Fans, followards, and audiences can then buy and sell the underlying asset directly from us. So we watched the beta app last year. We spent about six months in beta, learned a lot UM. You know, it was a primarily desktop oriented experience, and the first x months totally pivoted to a mobile first experience starting on February four. UM. You know the reason why we would desktop people are like, yeah, idiot, you know desktop or whatever verse mobile like of course, well, YouTube and Twitch or desktop oriented experiences. So I was kind of following the logic that creators would want to create on desktop. UM was turned out to not be the case that they wanted to use mobile, and and fans, followers and audiences also wanted to use mobile. UM also a pivot towards UH more short form video content that leads the experience. So if I come to the platform for the first time, I'm not familiar with the creator, it's a big investment for them to watch a thirty minute video or a forty five minute live stream or whatever. So there needs to be a familiarization process um to introduce the user to the creator and start to build that relationship, build the rapport um. And that's more easily facilitated through short form content. So we've now pivoted to when you come to the platform, it's a very short form video experience, which then leads into the long format video if people are looking to get more in depth on things, and that's being a founder of a tech startup, something that that is digitally focused, or where you're you're encountering your customers digitally. I mean that's it's always uh iteration, iteration based on market feedback, which is fascinating. I mean that's right. You're you're you're constantly updating, particularly during this early state, early phase. So much like that was some initial user feedback. Um, you know, oddly enough that that you kind of launched or started to open up the platform more around this seismic shift in the market over the last couple of months. Anything that you've learned from what's the chatter in retail right now that you're seeing on the platform. So I actually think that I candidly believe that this is the best time to be launching uh the platform because more people, there's higher levels of engagement. So if you look at if you look at total overall social volume as it relates to assets, they tend to skyrocket during periods of extreme volatility. Like the worst thing for our platform is is a like super boring market where things kind of like go up or down ten basis point today and like, you know, it's not really fun to be trading because things aren't really moving around and there's not conversations that are worth having. Like think about this, Like this is an hour long conversation and that could probably go on for ten hours. Like there's so much ship going on in the world right Like there's interest rates that are getting moved for the first time in in twelve years. Like I don't know, that's a monumental thing that people should probably pay attention to. That's going to have an impact on all our lives, positively, negatively, whatever. Um, Like there's the possibility that Russia invades Ukraine and like then there's a like a bona fide war potential that's going Like what's that going to do to asset prices? Like there's just so much it's gonna like we're in the beginning of of web three and blockchain and like game changing technologies, and all of those assets can now be treated like companies are every single day issuing n f t s and you know, some of them are total nonsense and should be worth less than you know, the they're not printed on paper, but the blockchain they're printed on um, you know, and some of them and some of them are gonna be worth like tens of millions of dollars. So it's a really it's a great time. But I think initially the reaction when things start to get a little bit hairy is to just like pull back, right, which is fine, um, But in the process of pulling back, meaning like even though you're not trading, what most people are doing is they're looking for information. So being the hub of that information is a positive because eventually we think that that person who's consuming that information will then take action. You know, it doesn't need to be today, it doesn't need to be tomorrow. It doesn't need to be next week, a month from now, a year from now, or whatever. But we want to be the on ramp to be able to give people the confidence to be able to take action at some point because incredible opportunities are going to occur. You're you're trying to monetize discourse around a niche, which is something that I think is is very much a fraud the opportunity and because I think a lot of people assume that everyone's saying, Okay, well, Facebook, the next thing is going to come around, and it would be a direct a direct replacement, just like my Space was for friends during Facebook was for my Space. That's not how it goes. Okay, You're going to kind of have your broader based you know, uh, it's called your broader based social media platforms and those kind of staple profiles, and then there's gonna be just a vast array of of niche platforms that service one particular conversation or discourse, and you're trying to do it around trading, financial markets and retail investing. Yeah. I think that you're good, Yeah, totally. And I think that there's some spaces that the verticalization of them is just like wholly unnecessary. So you take like there is a market for I don't know, civil war reenactments, but like I don't know, you know, you got to assess total addressable marketing. You gotta like look at what the total was are like using gaming as a as a parallel, Like gaming is a massive market, so there can be a number of multiple you know, Unicorn Decocorn companies that supports that ecosystem, whether it's discord and chat, whether it's Twitch and streaming, you know, like all the different publishers that go into it. So finance to me is this thing that was traditionally looked at as very unsexy because there wasn't a lot of disruption UM that was taking place in the actual space. And that has gone you know, from basically non existent disruption to uh an entire like Defy and Web three sort of movement over the course of the last eighteen months. UM. And so I think there's gonna be you know, ten, fifteen, twenty thirty companies that end up being multiple billion dollar businesses that are supporting this UM and if trading TV can you know play a part in that, And that's great, fantastic for your from your mouth to God's ears. UM. So we've been talking about this more in terms of the public markets and macroeconomic policy, but let's talk a little bit more about you know, you are now a startup founder and you're you have just and you just went through the experience. And one that scares off probably the the you know, the prohibitive activity for of the people who end up not starting companies you raise money. Um, what were your experiences raising a pretty significant initial round over the past year? You know, what did you learn and what's your what's your outlook and you know, has has anything any understanding has changed from when you began that process. Yeah, it's a great question. And actually, like I've been keeping a notebook on all of my learnings from the fundraising process, the entrepreneurial process in general, just because I feel like there's a lot written on like scaling businesses and you know whatever, like sort of the growth phase of things, but there's not enough written on like how do I get from that moment in time where I wake up with what I think is a great idea to like day one of operating a business. Um, So I guess like a few things I would I would call out. One is I strongly recommend that that people find a co founder, like I didn't have a co founder, and if I could go back in time, I would have Like, my first thing I would have done is instead of pitching investors, I would have just pitched UM, like technical, I'm a non technical founder. For everyone listening, so you know, I come from Wall Street, not from Silicon Valley engineering background. So I would have just gone to Silicon Valley and I would have sat in coffee shop and I would have pitched the idea to like every engineer that I found or whatever until someone was like, yeah, I found this business with you, UM. And the reason for that is you make a lot of like technical mistakes along the way that cost you both money and time that can be avoided if you have like a great technical founder. Conversely, if I was a technical founder, I would have found I would be looking for a business oriented person because I've dealt with a lot of engineers who I think are fantastic engineers, but they don't do what I do, and I don't do what they do, like they're not out in the world doing business development, raising money, so on and so forth. So the combination of both sides of the house, I think makes for a compelling story. And as we go into what I think is going to be a tougher environment to raise money um. Having like a great founding team is I is super important. Also, I want to say that my biggest fear when I'm starting t TV was that I was like going to tell you know you or someone else, not that you would do it maliciously, but like that someone was gonna like steal my idea. Like you're at a cocktail party and you're like, oh, you know, my buddy is like starting this great streaming company for traders. And then because like everyone's seeing, you know, a social network and so like you know, Facebook, was that's never gonna happen. Like all day, there's been all day telling people about your idea. That should be the only thing you should do. Just tell people a good good advice when taken becomes great advice. The thing is, most people don't take good advice, just like they don't act on good ideas. Okay, if you have a good idea, someone else has had it before, You're not gonna there's no light bulb that that's gonna be. No light bulb is gonna go off when you uh pict your idea to someone and then they're then going to take it and run with it. Other people may run, may compete with you, but that either you're going to beat them or you're dead. Anyways, Yeah, that's it. You have to execute, you have to scale. And I mean from the legal perspective, it's these founders asking people to sign NDAs ahead of just here. Here's a quick message for any anyone who can just came up with a great idea, wants to pitch you to raise money and wants people to buy to sign an n d A. Nobody, nobody valid, nobody legitimate is signing your goddamn nd A. They'll laugh at you if you try. Yeah, it actually it actually does. Like that's the thing is that you you didn't nail it. They will laugh at you and it actually makes you look like an amateur. So I would I would highly encourage people that think that, you know, getting an nd A as a as a positive to to not go that route because if you have specs to do it, they would never do it because it would bar them from investing in like companies. So anyway, um, so yeah, getting a founder, I think getting a technical co founder or a founder to buys what do you what do you think what aspects of your pitch or aspects of your business do you think where they convey ensing factors and getting these highly discerning professional investors to invest with you. Yeah. So well, one, like we were I pitched creating a technology that that previously didn't exist, so I tradeable live streaming is something that we invented. So like we had like a strong technological idea UM or at least like taking technologies that were utilized in other formats and repurposing them for something totally new. UM. One that was one too. We had a massive potential addressable market, so like it's not just thinking about UM, you know, like let's say stocks or something like that. Like we were going after the entire retail investing ecosystem, which even during the course of the pitch was expanding far far faster than we could even update the pitch decks. So the best example is, you know, n f t s, Like I didn't put n f t s into my the first version of my pitch because they didn't exist in early and now we're at like, you know, twenty billion dollars in like you know, daily traded volume or whatever on like Open Sea. So the asset classes were just expanding far faster than than we could we could keep up with UM, that was that was the second thing. The third thing was UM the focus on on community and creators. So like companies today, Like one of the reasons why a lot of people have asked me, like, oh, robin Hood shooting the bed, you know, is that bad for for TTV? And I'm like, no, it's a it's a positive. You know, Like the biggest competitor is now there's a kink in their armor, right, Like they're showing the their their stock prices, finally showing the weaknesses, which I've been alluding to for a very long time. And I think the primary reason that robin Hood's starting to fail is because they didn't focus on community. Like there was no every all of the engagement that was taking place associated with the transactions that were taking that we're happening on platform, we're taking place off platform. So there were those were those conversations weren't happening on robin Hood, and like they didn't build a community, like they didn't have something that that wasn't a part of what they thought was important. UM. I think it's it's at the center of what's important. And I think that no matter whether you're developing UM social application or whether you're developing, you know, something in healthcare or whatever. You know, like you need to you need to start with the community piece of it, Like you need to find people who are genuinely interested uh in in whatever you're doing and building around them, because that's just that's where things start to get into the flag. People like to chat, man, people like to chat. Get past get past your hang ups that some people have. This defines that everyone wants to have a voice now and oh my god, well sorry, the genie is not going back in the bottom. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has a voice. Everyone wants you know, a lot of people want to have a voice. It's gonna be some people who probably shouldn't have a voice, but you're gonna have to take the good with the bad and adding a social layer and some community around just about anything you do in the social media age and going forward, it's it's gonna be critical to what you're to to what you're building. Yeah, and so I think that those three things were really important. How is the fundraising environment, you know, uh, moving from like actual like the ideas and all the rest of that stuff into like getting in front of vcs UM. It's incredibly It's shocking, Like how easy it is to get in front of the VC if you are active on Twitter, if you're active, Like the biggest mistake that people make, and I made this mistake because I was ignorant to how it actually worked, is like this whole concept of like stealth mode, you know what I mean, Like I spent saying I spent six months seriously that like I spent six months in stealth mode. You know, the only I could only raise money from my friends and family, shocker. The only people that knew that I was fucking doing anything where my friends and failing. You know. As soon as I like exited stealth, then like every BC in the world was like calling me up, Hey, let's have a meeting or whatever. And like I had a few pre pre existing relations ships from my time on Wall Street. But of the VC is that I've had conversations with since founding TTV are brand new and they didn't have any idea that I was you know on the face. Yeah, there's like there's literally positions at all big VC firms that like the only thing those people do is comb through LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever and look for new companies um to invest in so like a I love that you know, you create your own content. Um, I think more founders and more people that are interested in being entrepreneurs should create content. Whether that's video content, whether it's tweets, like, whether it's writing I write on on on Medium, sub stack, whatever, Like, create fucking content and get it out in the world. And like if the content starts resonating, like if you're like, hey, you know this, this is my idea, blah blah blah, and it starts resonating, it's that's a tangible thing that you can then go and sell to a VC. Okay, I put this, you know, I put this whatever tweet out and you know it got retweeted, you know, ten thousand times. Like that's a much better Like that's a tangible data point, right, Like that's a much better thing to start the conversation off than like, hey, I've got an idea, well, okay, great, Like lots of people, yeah, lots of people have ideas. Not everybody has an audience, and an audience people, it's a good social proof point that people think that what you have to say is worthwhile I don't know, this can kind of hey, it can come off as cliche. Gary v Air quotes type of bullshit. But it's just this is the reality, man. Content does have scalable benefits for sure. Yeah, so I think that that's like, get away from the fear of like someone stealing your idea, start creating content, find a co founder. Once you start creating the content, you've got a decent story to tell there, um, you know, be active on on LinkedIn and and the other uh you know sort of social platforms which vcs trafficking um. And then yeah, from there, like when you're doing your pitches, I think like honesty is something that has become a higher of more value too. It's like meaning like I don't mean that people were being dishonest, but like more reasonable expectations about what it is that you're going to do. Like you know, there's always this concept of if I pitch it too big, you know, uh, is it gonna sound like, you know, too grandiose or whatever, and then they're not going to buy into it. Like there's a there's a happy medium between like the superum in the weed sort of pitch and then like this, you know, hey, we're going to create Amazon in twelve months. So but like I think having like a reasonable outlook like here's where we are today, here's like what's tangible over the course of the next year, and like laying that stuff out in like a viable manner, uh is super important because like most of the time you're pitching too, um, either either multi stage or stage agnostic investors, and so they're thinking about it from like all right, if I'm in a precede, like what can I get between here and seed? You know, like that sort of thing. And so having like that that roadmap laid out is super important. And I get pitched a lot now because you know, I've been doing my own investing on the side, and like so few of these people really understand like, Okay, I'm going I'm investing in preced like where like what do you need to do to get to seed? And like what's that look like? You know my because I'm trying to ten ax my money from pre cede to seed, right or I'm trying to like so like understanding like what stage you're at is also super important. M And so you locked in your your round before the market started to tank, um, but have you been keeping abreast of the prep because at least at the initial of on the initial dip, some we were saying, okay, wait, the the public markets are being affected more than the private markets, meaning, um, the the stock market is dipping harder than the valuation the venture capital of the startup or early stage valuations in the private markets. Is that holding true? Is they're starting Are you starting to see a pullback of investment funds in it from early stage companies, recalibration of early stage valuation ruas that still something we're anticipating that we haven't quite seen yet. Yeah. So in terms of the speed, um, obviously public markets are going to react a lot faster because they're they're traded on in exchange. It allows real time liquidity, right, so like that, so like they're gonna it's gonna move faster in the public markets, and it will in the private markets because that's the liquidity dynamic that exists. UM. In terms of private markets and the correlation to public markets, traditionally it's been fairly strong, meaning like you know, when public markets equities are are going up, Like founders love to use those as comps because it benefits us to do so, because most of the time you're comping against the company that's you know whatever like ten, fifteen, twenty billion dollars and evaluation UM. When they go down, of course, there's pushback from private market founders that like, oh, you know, just because this market, the public market equity is going down, doesn't mean that our company is suffering. And it's a case by case basis, right, Like, there's companies that are going to be able to raise tremendous amounts of capital and extremely high valuations. I think ft X just announced like uh, you know, thirty five forty billion dollar valuation or something like that today. UM. That is separate from f t x U S which just raised at an eight billion dollar valuation. So you'll consider to continue to see mega deals. But UM, over the course of this year, what I'm expecting is a more difficult environment to be able to raise funds for companies that don't have like traction. So you know, if you're a company that's going from zero to one UM, it's gonna be harder for you to kind of get the capital there UM, and the valuations will probably come down, you know, in line with public mark evaluations. Like okay, what does that mean? So business is worth less? Like okay, you know like you know, within the concept of like venture capital, Like then VC is not about hitting like you know, a single right, like you're you're looking for hundred x returns or whatever. So like if valuations come down to like, so be it um. But I think it's a positive in in a lot of ways because if you're a business, if you're a company that's executing in an environment where less capital is getting deployed, like, yeah, you're gonna be able to demand. You know, you're gonna have leverage. Right, the vcs still have to deploy they still have money that needs to be deployed. There's still there's still a ton of money sitting with with venture funds right now and that's not going anywhere. Yeah, and they've got that money has to go somewhere. Yeah, And if the macro environment it darkens a little bit, like the amount of it. Yeah, they love when this happens because at least that their return their returns are gonna be like they know that, like you know, looking at my business whatever, like you know, they know that at some point in time, maybe it's not going to be you know, two months from now, maybe it's six months from now. Maybe it's a year from now whatever, Like there's gonna be another ball market, right, So like if you've got a chance to buy a business that would have been you know whatever, a billion dollar valuation during the bull market for two fifty three hundred million dollars or whatever. Because like things are are in bear market territory, like great, that just means that they're gonna make a lot more money when things go back up. So yeah, I think good companies will continue to find funding. It'll just be at you know, slightly more reasonable valuations. And what's been enjoyed by founders and investors over the course of the last you know, two or three years. Yeah, it was venture capitalists taking a pitch from a founder point into Netflix stock. And so that's why we can't give you that million dollar cap on that stage, for god knows what they'll pull. They'll pull out any any stop to take some leverage there. Um. So this has been fantastic. Uh, it will not be the last time you know, you and I are chatting, and obviously to your thesis about trading TV that there's going to be an ongoing conversation. No shortage of topics to talk about in the financial and financial markets. In the economy. Um, but for the moment um, give us the current status of Raating TV. And for anyone who's listening out there who was interested in participating in being a creator, in joining, um, how best to do so? Yeah, So mobile app launches February fourteen. iOS and Android will be available. If you're a creator, if you're a user, it's a great time to be able to download the app start operating. UM. We also do have a creator's corner, so we are taking we are negotiating deals on a one off basis with individual creators. That's at ww dot Trading dot TV. You can get in touch with us there. But yeah, I mean, like I'm really you know, pleased to be a part of the podcast. It was great that we were able to have this conversation. UM. Looking forward to the continued collaboration from from you and I And yeah, thanks for having me absolutely. But let us let everyone know where they can find you on social. Yeah. So my social handles are either at t TV dot HQ for their company or at Tobias Underscore Francis for me. Personally, I'm on Instagram, Twitter Link Dan, Uh what else am I on? I think that's it. I think we just started at TikTok. So we're on TikTok now, which has actually been fine, inevitable pull out gravitational Politicok there, man, you can find me, you can find this man um and I'm sure you guys found this illuminating everything you wanted to know about the financial markets. Use this information to go make a billion dollars sound cool at parties, or even go become one of the top creators on Trading TV. Use it however you wish. Um So, every Tobias, thank you once again for joining us and everyone that's the Prevailing Narrative. Thank you so much. I am at Bolinski once again. You can listen and subscribe to the Prevailing Narrative on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you're listening right now. Make sure to follow me on my socials at Matt Bolinsky m A T T B I L I N s K Y. The Prevailian Narrative is a Cavalry Audio production and association with I Heart Radio, produced by Brandon Morrigan, Executive produced by Dana Burnetti and Kegan Rosenberger for Calvary Audio. I'm Matt Bilinsky.