Odd Lots - How Josh Brown Created A Financial Media Empire

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

15 years ago was a pivotal moment for financial media. On the one hand, we were in the midst of a huge financial crisis, which shook everything up and exposed how little we knew about our own world. In addition to that, we were in the early moments of a revolution, which saw the rise of blogs, podcasts, "Finance Twitter" and other new platforms for disseminating information about markets and business. One of the winners from that era was Josh Brown, a former stockbroker who rose to fame in part on the back of his must-read blog The Reformed Broker. Now he's the CEO of a large investment advisory firm, Ritholtz Wealth Management. He's got a popular podcast. He's got a new book. He's a fixture on CNBC. And he even has a conference business. We talk about his career path, what he's learned, some funny stories from the good old days, and how he became a media giant.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, I'm Michelle Hussein, and for more than 20 years, I was at the BBC. But all the time I was delivering the headlines, I wanted to go further than the news of the day, to spend more time with the people shaping our world. And that's what I'm doing here on this podcast, speaking to people from Nigel Farage. To love you trying ever so hard. Russian needs to be taught a lesson. To tech journalist Karaswisher. And the tech industry is running wild.

You know, they've gotten what they wanted and they've seen a huge run-up in their stock prices. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me, listen and subscribe to the Michelle Hussein show from Bloomberg Weekend, wherever you get your podcast. You certainly ask interesting questions. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlods podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway.

Tracy, I know I'm biased. We're probably biased. I'm certainly biased. Speak for yourself, Joe. I myself have no emotions or opinions about anything. That's why I host a podcast. That's right. We're the question askers. We're not the answers. But I am sort of biased about anyone who sort of grew up in financial media in like the 2008, 2009 era. You know, like, we're just a different breed. We're just a little cut above, I think. It was definitely a moment in financial media that I think has yet to be recaptured because there were two things that were happening simultaneously.

So one, you had the financial crisis where everything was going haywire and it was all going haywire in a relatively new way. Yes. People had to suddenly learn what synthetic CDOs were, how the repo. I never learned, by the way. We told me after the show. Okay. How the repo market worked.

No, that I definitely didn't learn. All of that. Yeah. And then at the same time, you had like a big format change because you had all these blogs that suddenly burst out of nowhere. And at that time, the combination of like the new blogging format plus the news cycle itself, which was so weird and so fast-paced, really meant that blogs were kind of the perfect platform to cover the financial crisis. They had an edge at that time. And I feel, again, to your point, probably a bit of personal bias there. But, like, I feel like it was a very special moment.

It was. You nailed it exactly. It was the two things happening at once that made that a distinct time, which is, right. All this stuff was happening. And there were just new formats. And then, you know, Twitter came around then. So do you know when I joined, I tweet a lot. Do you know when I joined Twitter?

2009? No, March. 2008. Okay. And I was at South by Southwest when Bear Stearns collapsed. And, and you know, it was before everyone knew that the world was totally melting down. But also then I remembered, I have like distinct memories of that time because, you know, J.P. Morgan made that $2 per share offer for Bear Stearns. And like a week before Bear Stearns had been trading at like 60 or something like that. And I very distinctly remember a few people on Twitter talking about like, no, because people thought there was a typo. Remember, they're like, oh, there must be 20 or something like that. And I saw these voices who actually knew what they were talking about. Like, no, this $2 makes sense. This is a real number, et cetera. Eventually, I think they bought them for like $10 a share because the government pressured them. But that was the first place. It was like I was getting information from people who knew what they were talking about faster and sharper than I was getting any other platform at the time. And who were those people, Joe? I think one of them was Howard Linson. And I think another one was, uh,

Roger Arenberg, which were like two of the names who are like, you know, these two. But anyway, there were many other names, including someone we're going to talk to right now. I am very excited. So the person we're about to speak to, I remember linking to his stuff, right? When I started financial blogging, which was September 2008 on F.T. Alphaville. And again, the world blowing up around that time, Lehman collapsing, all of that. And I remember constantly linking to his stuff at the time. And then the other thing, this is kind of weird, but the other thing I associate with our guest, the first time I ever met him in person was in New York. And that was the last time I ever drank a blue moon. Because I think I had like three of them that night. He's a good guy to drink a

yeah. But it was too much. And ever since then, never again, no blue moons. But yes, lots of our guest for sure. Well, I'm really excited. I think it's his first time coming on the show. We're going to be speaking to the one and only Josh Brown, a legend back in the old days when we were linking to his blog. It was the reformed broker. He sunsetted that. He writes a new blog. He moved on to bigger things, for sure. He moved on to much bigger things, but that was huge. He's currently the CEO of Ridholt's Wealth Management. He is the author of a brand new book. You weren't supposed to see that. Secrets Every Investor Should Know. I was so excited. He hosts a popular podcast as well, the compound. Josh Brown, thank you so much for coming on outlaws. Tracy, I'm drinking a blue moon right now.

That's perfect. Josh, do you remember the first- Okay with that? I can deal. As long as it's you and not me, that's good. Josh, do you remember where we met the first time? Do you remember where it was? I remember. Oh, man, you do remember? Okay, I'm going to take a guess. I remember there was one night where Scott Bell got all the bloggers together at the Campbell apartment. on the Vanderbilt side of Grand Central. And that's like a speakeasy bar. Yeah. And I remember meeting a lot of people who were writing and tweeting about markets

for the first time that night. And I think you were one of them. I'm not sure. So it was that night. My recollection is a little different. I thought we went to the Michael Jordan Steakhouse, which is also in Grand Central. And just on the other side of the stairs. We might have done both.

But we both agree, I think it was probably 2009. Grand Central, either in the Campbell apartment or the Michael Jordan Stakehouse, which sadly is no longer there. But yeah, that was the first time. And now we're here. It was a Cambrian explosion of market commentators who were coming from non-traditional market commentary backgrounds. Prior to that moment, just to button up what Tracy was saying, prior to that moment, most of the people who were commenting on markets in a big way and were able to get their views out. the public were coming from Wall Street or were traditional journalists. And, you know, they were like the public relations firm would book the person on TV. The person would go on Bloomberg or on CNBC.

And, you know, they were like they had pedigree. And they also had guardrails. They had things that they weren't able to touch because they were connected to like a Fortune 500 company. And then all of a sudden, this Cambrian explosion on the internet, all of a sudden you've got people amassing large followerships who have no pedigree, who have no publicists, and who have no guardrails and are able to say things that, you know, other people would gasp at, but then that became the mainstream. And then all of a sudden, the media was picking up those voices rather than the traditional

voices that they had been so accustomed to booking. And I think all three of us, you know, benefited from having been early and visible in that era. And to this day, like a lot of the people that came out of the woodwork at that time are, you know, now part of the establishment. So it was a really cool thing to be a part of. I can count. Yeah, listen, I can count on on maybe two hands the people who are talking about finance on Twitter in March of 2009 when I started. It was a really small group of people because most professionals had compliance departments that just would not let them talk that way. Now, of course, now of course, the compliance department is like, when are you starting a podcast?

So it's changed a lot. But we were there, the three of us. And, you know, we can come up with a whole bunch of other names, but there aren't that many. Yeah. And to be fair, so one of the advantages that I think bloggers and people who were on Twitter at the time, had over traditional media was just the immediacy of that publishing platform because things were happening so fast, right? Like within within a single day, you would have like 10 history making stories all happening at once. And the newspapers and traditional media to some extent just

couldn't keep up. Whereas if you're tweeting about it, if you're blogging about it in real time, you really had a competitive advantage. But Josh, I know you've written about this before, but for the benefit of our listeners. Why did you get into blogging in the first place? Because again, people take it as a given now that you're on social media if you want to get ahead in your career. But back then, it was a very new and to some extent risky thing. So I'm working at a third-tier broker-dealer in 2008. And like many other firms on Wall Street, they were seeing their revenue implode and, you know, struggling and, you know, raising money to try to stay in business. And, you know, I go to the compliance officer and I'm like, hey, I'm reading this blog by this guy,

Barry Redholtz, and I'm reading a bunch of blogs. And they're doing a really great job describing what's happening. Every day there's more news. It seemed like every minute there was more news. And the people that were covering it best were not at the Wall Street Journal. they were independent bloggers like Tadas Visconta and Eddie Elfinbine and Barry and Eve Smith at Naked Capitalism and the Epicurean deal maker and Meb Faber. But these are like these are people who they either work on Wall Street or they used to or they talk to people that work on Wall Street. And they just, there's so much more urgency to the way that they're describing this unfolding crisis.

So I said, I said to my compliance officer, hey, I know, like, we have compliance restrictions and stuff, but if I stay within the lines of FINRA, at that time I'm a retail broker, if I stay within the lines of what FINRA says, I can and can't say, can I do a blog? And he looks at me, to his credit, he goes, I got to be honest with you. I don't even know if this place is going to be around tomorrow. I don't give a shit. Like, do whatever, do whatever you want to do.

Just make sure you print a copy of everything that you're hitting publish on and bring it to me and I'll sign it. And so I appreciate him to this day because he was he was dealing with much bigger issues. And, you know, around that time, there were so few people that had been given the liberty to do that. I always tell people how lucky I am. There were so few people in my position who had been given the liberty to speak freely on the internet. I was one of them. And as a result, there was such a thirst for knowledge amongst the general public that I was able to build a really big following before, you know, thousands of other people would start blogs. So being early and, you know, having that, having that advantage, I'll never not appreciate that I had the

opportunity to do that. On April 4th, 2023, around two in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. I have a personal question. When 2008, 2009, and your boss is saying, I don't even know if we're going to be around. So I was like living in an apartment in Brooklyn. I had two roommates at the time. The whole thing was very interesting. You hit a career, you were at a brokerage, I believe you had a daughter, at least by that point.

What's that like, the anxiety of, like, you have, like, I didn't really have any responsibilities. I could sort of sit there eating my popcorn watching things implode, but you were in it. And presumably, you know, you had like supportive. What's that like supporting a family and being in the mix and being at a company where it looks like the world is ending? So I'm living in a rent control department on the Upper East Side, Rupert Towers, which used to be the Rupert Brewery that sponsored the Yankees. I'm up on 90th and 3rd Avenue. I'm commuting down on the 6th train to 42nd Street every day. My office is in the Helmsley building, which is now called 230 Park, but I'll always call it the Helmsley building. And on the left side of the building is Bear Stearns. The right side of the

building is J.P. Morgan. You know, a lot of my friends from college are bond salesmen at Bear. My wife's best friend works at Lehman Brothers. She works at Golden Sacks. And I'm just surrounded by people that work at, you know, some of the biggest banks in, in the country because those were the big employers in New York. And so, you know, it was highly anxious. We were in our, I don't know, mid to late 20s. So everybody was going out and drinking a lot and just like commiserating. But I'll never forget the day, Bear Stearns closed because it was the same day as the St. Patrick's Day parade. So, like, out of morbid curiosity, myself and all my fellow brokers, walk around the corner from Helmsley over to the quote-unquote

the Bear Stearns building, which, by the way, had just finished construction a year before. A lot of people don't know that. They spent 10 years building it and then the firm went out of business a year later. So we walk around the corner. We see Aaron Burnett, who at that time is CNBC. She's sitting at a folding table doing live coverage from in front of the Bear Stearns building. And behind her, almost the entire St. Patrick's Day parade is coming off of Fifth Avenue

where it ends. And like, people are like publicly drunk and there's green hats and and bugles and, you know, they're blowing horns and there's horses. And meanwhile, you look behind that and you see white collar workers coming out of the front of the building with cardboard boxes with all their stuff in it. It's, I mean, I want to find that footage because I don't, I don't think people appreciate the extent to which it was just an absolute daily circus. And not long after that same scene would be repeated in Times Square where Lehman Brothers was headquartered, they literally took the sign off the front of the building, almost symbolically. And you have thousands of people coming out of the front of the building with cardboard boxes.

Some of them would get recalled the next day when Barclays bought it. But those were the times that we lived in. And, you know, I think one underappreciated aspect of this is, It's only like five or six years removed from the 9-11 era. And it just felt like trauma after trauma after trauma. So that was the New York in which I worked and lived and started to write. And about a month after I launched the reformed broker, the Madoff thing broke. So we went from, so we went from Bear Stearns to a year later, Lehman Brothers, AIG, the tarp vote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And just when you think it's over, the most trust-shattering revelation of a Ponzi scheme in the history of finance breaks. And so I just had endless fodder to write about and maybe to answer your question, that helped serve as a distraction from all of the anxiety in which people working on Wall Street, you know, had to live.

I remember when the made-off thing broke, I think it was later in 2008, was it? Yeah. And I remember the headline. December. Yeah. And the headline on the F.T. Alphaville post, the very first post on this topic, is one of my all-time favorites. It wasn't by me. I think it was by our founder, Paul Murphy, but it was he made off with it, which was at the time a very original pun.

And sticks in my, it became less original as the months one. on and the story went on. Okay, so what happened to the brokerage that you were working at? And like, how did you manage the career transition away from blogging and into, I mean, you basically run an investment and a media empire at this point. So how did that happen? All right. So I'm still a broker, but I'm also a co-branch manager. And it's interesting. Retail investors didn't, at least the type of invest. We weren't. We weren't. dealing with investors. We were dealing with gamblers, people that were trading stocks. And around that same time, you had the introduction of the 2x and then the 3x index ETFs. So the ticker

symbols are now infamous. You had the TNA and the TZA. One of those was triple long, the Russell 2000. The other was triple short. You had the FAS and the FAZ. Those were the triple long and triple short financial sector index ETF. And that's what the retail brokers pivoted to. They were no longer pitching stocks because everything looked on investable. I mean, you literally had a 57% peak to trough decline in the S&P. And by the way, again, that same thing had happened from the dot combe bubble through Enron WorldCom 9-11. So like after 10 years of that kind of volatility, people were just like, you know what? I'm going to invest in volatility. And so that That's what the brokers, the retail brokers pivoted to.

I'm a co-branch manager. I have to send letters to the clients where they disclaim, yes, I want to be trading the 3x long or short Russell 2000. Like the clients would sign the letters and that would give the brokers carte blanche to just, you know, let's, all right, let's play. We're in the game. You would have, these are ETFs that are trading, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars. maybe billions of dollars in volume. And you could be down 20% in the morning and then up 20% in the afternoon. It was just the Wild West.

And I looked around and I said, what the hell am I doing this for? Like no one is being helped by this activity. Even the brokers, they were barely making money. So it was just like it was an epiphany that I had up until then spent 10 years doing retail brokerage and nobody was better off for it. Not me, not my clients, not the firm I worked for. So I started to get really curious about, well, what are normal people doing? And like, what should I be doing to actually help people in this profession? And it became really obvious that I was on the wrong side of the boat.

So the brokerage side, the Series 7 side where you're selling investments versus the investment advisor side where you're giving advice and the investing is incidental to the advice. And you're not selling products, you're building portfolios, and you're helping people really solve the puzzle of how are they going to retire, how are they going to pay for their kids, college, et cetera. So I knew that I was on the wrong side within the profession. And in those days, most people were. There were more people that were registered representatives or Series 7 licensed brokers than there were true financial advisors. And so my decision, guys, was I'm going to be a reformed broker and I'm going to go over to the investment advisor side. But then the catch was, well, how do you do that?

Yeah. How do you leave? How do you leave the brokerage side and go over to the advice side? And I didn't know. So it wasn't until 2010 that I met Barry, who is, you know, at that time my idol. Now he's my partner. But when I met him, I sat with him. I sat with him and I said, all right, here's my problem.

He said, I didn't say anything first. Barry did like an hour. That sounds about right. So I want to remind people. And of course, Barry is a host of a show on Bloomberg. And so, okay. So Barry says, here's my problem. I have the number one best selling book in the country about the financial crisis.

It's called bailout nation. And I think it proceeded to big to fail and all the right. So he said, all right, at the number one book in the country on the financial crisis, I actually predicted the crisis on my blog. I called it in real time. I predicted the market crash. And my phone is ringing off the hook because I also predicted the bottom. So in the New York Times, three days before the market bottomed, he said, I don't know if there's a thousand more points down from here, but I think you buy them. And literally three days later, the market bottom.

So the phones are ringing off the hook at the RIA that he works at. And he's not a financial advisor. He's a strategist. He doesn't talk to clients. So he's like, my problem is the phones are ringing off the hook. The emails are pouring in. People are like, Barry, just take my money, take my money, take my money. I don't do that.

So I don't know how to help these people. I said, oh, okay, I have the opposite problem. I'm ready to help people. Nobody's calling me. I don't know where to get my. next client from. So we teamed up and it was like lightning in a bottle. Like I'm telling you guys, we had like hundreds of people a month just call the firm. I would start talking about like how we're going to invest their money. And they'd be like, just shut up. Here's my social security number.

Like open me an account and I'm leaving Merrill Lynch. I'm leaving, I'm leaving Lehman. I'm leaving this firm, leaving that firm. I got to get my money out of there and I want to work with Barry. So my transition was like this insane roller coaster of going from like nobody wants to talk to me. And then the next day it's like, oh my God, Josh, how do I get you guys money? And that's how it started. And, you know, we've been running ever since. So there's a lot of questions that I have a different past. We could go down.

So you start the advisory with Barry. And now it's huge. And you have all advisors. all over the country, so multiple offices, et cetera, and we can talk about that more. On the media side, so you had been doing the blogging, you know, I think both of us, like, I started blogging in like 2006 or whatever, you know, it's just to write and I didn't think anything would really come of that aspect other than like, you know, personal notebook, etc. When did it seem like the media side of your career was also good, could be like a real thing that, like,

is not just like a notebook or whatever, but something that like, oh, there's like, this can grow and this can grow your profile. And obviously now you're on CNBC and you have a conference biz. And by the way, if you're listening to this, I believe it is going to be released the day that we're all out at your future proof conference.

But when did you sort of realize that there's something big happening on the media side? That could be more than just a blog that you like, you know, tell people what's going on. So, all right. So I'm writing every day. Yeah. And I'm writing seriously.

You're literally every day. Yeah, I'm a man on fire. And I am, and I don't. So I think the charm of, of what I was doing then is that I, I never presented myself as like, I'm like this, you know, billionaire hedge fund manager or I'm a cheap strategist that, you know, Goldman Sachs, you know, caliber market commentator. I never, I can't help it. I was always ever just me.

And so I was writing from the perspective. of a grunt in the trenches on Wall Street, suffering through all the ups and downs like everyone else, and talking about what it was like to talk to clients, talking about what it was like to navigate, you know, all of the various cross currents that were happening, but from a, from a street level. And I think the readership appreciated that. And what ended up happening was it became popular enough that professionals in the financial media started, like people were sending them links. And then they started to share those links in their editorial meetings. And the first people that put me on TV were CNN Money, my friend Caleb Silver, I was like in with this group

of other financial bloggers with Howard Linson, who was a venture capitalist at the time. And, you know, a whole bunch of people. And CNN is starting to do more financial content because the whole country is like wrapped with what's going on. So CNN Money really was my first shot. being able to take my writing and turn it into like television and commentary. I was also getting a lot of calls from the Wall Street Journal. They were linking to me every day. And they were like because they didn't set that time. And Tracy will attest to this.

Joe, you were writing at Cluster Stock, which became business insider. But like, sorry. I forgot it was called Cluster Stock. I never will. But the large media firms, the large media firms, the large media firms, media firms were not staffed up to do hourly commentary on every twist and turn in the market. So instead of attempting to do that with traditional journalists and they had amazing journalists, they pivoted to this idea that, all right, we can't cover everything, but we'll do a link fest

every day. And we'll tell the readers where else they can go. So they were serving their purpose. Like the Wall Street Journal didn't have at that time five people who could write markets blogs. So we became the beneficiaries of that vacuum. And all of a sudden, I start getting called from the Wall Street Journal. They're doing video. Kelly Evans is, I don't know, 23 years old. And she is like their lead markets, you know, daily blogger. And she's doing video.

And she's like, hey, I don't know if they're going to allow me to do this. But I asked them if I could bring you on. And let's see what happens. So I all of a sudden I start getting calls from Bloomberg. And then of course, like eventually CNBC calls. And they're like, here's the deal. We're talking about your blog posts every morning. Are you normal?

Like we put you on? Because at that time, bloggers were a little bit scary. And there were some scary guys, you know, on Twitter and writing about finance that ended up becoming, you know, obviously that these people are maniacs. So I'm like, no, I'm, I'm normal. I'm working in the industry. I'm series 65. I'm registered. I'm overseen by the SEC.

I have a wife and kids. I'm not going to come on the air and embarrass anyone. So I guess, like, I had this progression and I had done enough that people were like, all right, this guy's good. And so that's really how, like, the media thing, the origin of the media thing happened. It was, it was, look, there was a show. You guys probably remember. It was a show that Fox Business used to tape from the lobby, the bar, full and bare.

at the Waldorf Astoria. Remember that? Yeah. I remember that. All right. All right. So it's Cody Willard and Eric Bolling and Eric Bolling and they're the hosts. And they every day, this is five days a week.

I can't even believe this went on. This is 07. This is 08 and 09. Every day in the bar at the Waldorf Astoria, they set up a TV studio. There are regular people eating steaks and drinking in the background. And they did. this like happy hour show. So they were inviting me to come down and I'm like, oh, I'm going to be on Fox business.

And then I find out, they're like, no, no, you're not going to be on. You're a blogger. We just want you to sit on set and do a blog post about the show. And I'm like, well, I'm like, oh, well, I'll show you. That's just so like, there's something about that that's like so perfect like 2009 traditional media trying to figure. We got to do something new. This is exactly it.

So I failed the normality test, but I think it, like, it speaks to the uncertainty of the moment and how traditional media was sort of grappling with this new cast of characters, which is like when I was at the FT at the time, there was a sense internally that the people on FT Alphaville who were writing good stuff and doing good analysis should have some sort of video format. And then we, I remember we shot like an initial version of what the video could be. And the feedback from our video team came back that we were so weird and off-putting on camera that we should be played by puppets. That was an actual suggestion.

It's funny because I think like if I, like there was this view that like the bloggers were like these weird like sort of like caged wild animals. And like the zoo, I remember going to a conference like 2017. It was a tech conference, it was a little bit before. And they had like this like special like blogger bullpen. Like they separated us from the other journalists. But there was like this. Yeah, they're a freaks. But like they get a little space because we know they're cool and they're doing something.

And so they get their own seats. But they're like different and they have to be sort of segregated from the other people. That was a weird time. There was a guy on the air named Dennis Neal. And he would pick fights with bloggers from. the air so he was i don't know what time he was he was on cnbc i don't know what time his show was or whatever but he had this recurring i'm not even kidding he had a recurring segment called blog you and he would this is all true you could look this i remember this he would he he would pick a different

blogger who was like prominent on twitter each time they did the segment and like and like go off on this person and then they started booking the bloggers on to his show for like a live debate. It was guys, it was wild. And I forget the guy's name. One guy was just a complete lunatic and on the air just went nuts on Dennis Neal.

I don't, I think a month later Dennis Neal was off the air. And the bloggers won. The bloggers won. I need to find this footage. So by blog you, by 2010, every network, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, anyone covering the market,

If you would just turn on the TV and watch for an hour, you would see somebody that started off as a blogger. So I think the freaks won. And, you know, again, like by now, it's 15 years later. By now, we're the establishment. But in that time, Tracy, you're absolutely right. There was like a red line. These are journalists or TV people. And these are blog freaks.

And, you know, of course, that's, that's, it's funny now. but like that's how it was and crossing over so barry had crossed over barry was on uh cudlow like three nights a week at the at the peak of the crisis cudlow had an amazing show at seven i think it was at seven o'clock on cnbc every night and it was all chief strategists and economists and some politicians and barry was on there almost every night and he was a regular and he was like a blueprint of how you can go from being a blogger to being a mainstream um commentator. I'm June Grasso, inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Law podcast. Every weekday, we help you make sense of the legal stories that shape the nation and the world. Listen for complete

analysis of the biggest court cases, the latest actions from Congress and regulators, and the legal moves driving the markets, from corporate law to constitutional law and from state courts to the Supreme Court. At Bloomberg Law, we go beyond the day's headlines. We speak with top attorneys, judges, scholars, and policy experts to break down what the rulings really mean. We do this every weekday, then bring you the best conversations in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg Law on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen as you start your day. And on the West Coast, catch up in the evening.

That's the Bloomberg Law podcast with me, June Grosso. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts. What are the pros and cons of running, you know, the investment firm, the advisory alongside the media? So, you know, I imagine you get, there's promotional opportunities. You get your thoughts out there and some of your ideas. But on the other hand, it must take some time. And also, I can imagine that, you know, if you put your thoughts out there, some of those inevitably are going to be mistakes that people can, like, bring up. and criticize. So I'm just wondering how you think about like the upsides and the downsides of doing

those two things. You have to decide that you are willing to be publicly wrong and that you are going to have the humility that when you're wrong, you're going to turn that into content. And some of the most popular blog posts of that era, not just me, everybody, here's why I got blank wrong. Now, not everybody went that way. There were some people that doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down on what they were wrong about, never let it go. There were some people that are like macroeconomic geniuses and they're still calling for the double-dip recession from 2011 that never happened. It's coming any day now. But I think the, I think the, bet that you had to make was that by being humble and by owning your mistakes,

and maybe even turning them into an entertaining way to learn something, that the audience would come along with you for the ride. And a lot of us did that. This is not something I came up with on my own. I watched people that I respect own their errors. And, you know, people like Doug Cass, who was writing at the street.com, this guy is buying a stock in the morning and writing a column about how he's bullish and then selling it in the afternoon and the next day he's shorting it.

So he had like a lot of flexibility in how he thought. So I looked at that and I said, all right. So Doug has a lot of respect from people all over the street. And he's saying, I bought this thing. I'm wrong. It's down. I'm going to sell. Now, I don't personally believe in investing that way.

I don't think that people should be frantically switching back and forth, bull, bear, bull, bear. But it showed me that you can be open and honest with your audience and they will respect you more for it. rather than hiding. There was a, the first show of its kind on, on CNBC was Fast Money. And one of the original cast members, it doesn't matter who, and it's so long ago, one of the original cast members, I remember the producer telling me,

if he was wrong about a stock on like Tuesday night, he wouldn't show up on Wednesday. I'm not coming. Sorry, I can't make the show tonight. So like, you could do that for a few months, but it's going to wear really thin. with the audience. So I think having the humility and trying to turn the things you're wrong about into teachable moments, that's been really powerful. And the people that have done that have done very well as a result. We, you know, like we could turn the, we could just talk forever about this and about that era because we're barely scratching the surface. Though I just appreciate you so much

reminding me of some of the hilarious things that were going on. I had totally forgotten about that show in the bar, but now I remember it, the blog you segment. I remember it. I remember This is like great stuff. And again, memory lane stuff, I'm all about it. There are so many other things. If we zoom ahead, you know, right now, 2024, things have changed, you know, like finance, Twitter isn't one it was. Blogging is different. But things are always evolving.

And I like to, you know, I get anxious about like, oh, am I like going to get stuck in a current way of doing things? And then the way people consume financial information will change. Well, I'd be able to pivot on time. I like to think I've done an okay of sort of like figuring out when to try new things and drop old formats. Do you get anxious about that yourself, the fact that, you know, so many different new platforms and like trying to, you know, worrying about getting stuck or like, what do you think is happening right now in finance media? So I think I was actually, I was talking to, I was talking to Michael Batnik about this yesterday. So it's fresh in my mind. I think in that era and for about 10 years, Twitter was the most essential.

platform for making sure that if you took the time to write something and put your thoughts out there and do the research that is required when you're writing, like if you really put effort into a piece of content, Twitter was the way that you could make sure there would be distribution. Less so Facebook, because the pros aren't really spending their days on there, and it's not urgent enough. It doesn't move fast enough. But tweet deck was the way that you distributed content.

And it was extremely powerful because if what you did was good or if people hated it or whatever, if it struck any kind of chord, the amplification in the form of retweets was more powerful than the Wall Streetjournal.com linking to you. Because it was like everybody was resharing the best four or five things that had been written that day. So there's a guy taught us Fisconta. He works with us now. He's our director of investor education. he had a blog called Abnormal Returns, and it was Ground Zero for daily financial commentary. That was actually like the first thing you would look at when you got into the office in the morning.

I remember. Now, Tadus is the librarian of finance Twitter. If somebody wrote something, he knew it. He read everyone. He read everything. And he curated the best 10 to 15 things that had been written each day. He did it five days a week. He did it for more than 10 years.

He's still doing it. And if you made Tadus. site, you won. That means what you wrote that day was legit. That would then be complimented by what would happen on Twitter because everyone was reading abnormal returns. And there were other notable link fest each day. Deal breaker had one that Best Levin and Matt Levine worked on.

And there were a few others. But like, that was basically like the mixtape that, you know, like the rappers all wanted to get on the DJ Clue mixtape. which would then be sold on Canal Street in Chinatown. And that's how DJs from around the country would know that something is hot. This was very similar. And then Twitter would just amplify it

and really enable something to go viral. That all changed. The first thing that happened is the Wall Street Journal and CnBC.com and even in Yahoo Finance, the distribution channels, they started hiring their own bloggers and they stopped linking out. So now they never.

link out. But I remember that taking place. And then it's all of a sudden like, all right, the mainstream media is no longer going to link out. But you still had abnormal returns and you still had Twitter. What's changed in the last few years is that Twitter is no longer a worthwhile distribution platform. Things go viral if they are really negative or violent or racist or somebody just being piled on for an opinion. That's not the climate that it used to be. when people were trying to share information and debate topics. Now they debate personalities. They hate Chamath or they hate Mark Cuban today.

And then the next day, like, you know, somebody got filmed, stumbling out of a bar drunk. It's not a platform anymore where you could write something amazing and anyone's going to pay attention to it. And finance Twitter, finance Twitter is a vertical who's really small within the context of Twitter. He's talked to this guy, Jared Podnos, who was quote unquote in charge of finance Twitter for Twitter.

It was one guy overseeing what all of us were doing. Wait, they had someone. It was not like sports or celebrity culture. What does that mean? He was in charge. I think that's awesome. One of my favorite people, Twitter had him monitor finance Twitter. So anything that had a ticker or, you know, all the Wall Street people that were

now tweeting, his job was to oversee what people were saying and try to make it help. for the rest of Twitter users to find. Yeah, like all the cash tags and all the things that sort of formalized it. I don't know. So it's over. So it's over. And it's okay. Like things aren't meant to last forever.

Like Saturday Night Live on the air for 50 years is an anomaly. Most things don't go on for more than three or four years. So I think, you guys correct me if I'm wrong, I think peak finance Twitter is, let's say 2010 to 2020. And then in 2020, things really broke down. And it became more of like a platform for venting rage and Me Too and, you know, posting disturbing video clips. And it just became less about communities. And that's around the time that I think it lost its relevance for finance. Joe and I were talking about this the other day, actually. But I think the thing that's missing from Twitter other than like a good feeling among human beings is sincerity and like earnestness.

That's kind of what bothers me about it is like everything is just about like making the best joke that you possibly can. And there's no room for like earnestness. Bring back earnestness. I like well, I like the jokes. But what killed what I'm describing is the quote tweet. So not every innovation is good. So there was a time when if somebody said something smart or posted a great chart,

you would copy paste that tweet and you would and you would repost it and you would say via at whoever it was. Or you would do a manual or you would do RT. You would write RT, which would tell everyone, this is not my original thought. I'm retweeting this person. Then they built a product that was a quote tweet where you could hit a button and say, I want to comment on this above the person's tweet. And that facilitated a wave of dunking. And dunking is basically like, look how dumb this person is.

So I know that there were people that used it positively also. But I'm just saying like that was something that Twitter built that had a very adverse consequence on the community. and it just, it devolved into, into worse than high school. You obviously, like, worked, like, crazy. You know, you've worked like an insane person over the last several years. Both Tracy and I have as well. Do you like, do you ever think about slowing down and, like, taking time, savoring things?

Like, I'm taking my son to a football game. I wish I have done more this weekend. I wish I had done, you know, had more time and sometimes like, oh, should I have, like, worked less and done more stuff like that? Do you ever like have anxiety about like, you know, you have two big kind of components of your job. You're very public and stuff. Do you ever feel like, well, slowing down or how much longer can you do it, stuff like that?

I mean, I think about it, but then I don't do it. Yeah. That's right. Somebody told me you work as though somebody took something away from you and you're, you're fighting to get it back. Like that was their impression of my, I don't want to say work after. like I'm like this like like like I'm in the coal mines. I love what I do. Yeah. Um, but the I think the pace and the intensity of what I what I've done and what I still do to this day,

the amount, the volume and, um, the urgency. It, it looks like, it looks like a dog who somebody pulled their toy away from them. And I don't know if that's inherent to my personality or if, you know, one of the things I talk about in the new book is, is I there was no safety net. So I I never stopped working. I never had a period of time where I didn't have a job. I went from one thing to another thing to another thing because I was terrified of what happens if I stop. Like I'm nobody. Nobody needs me. Yeah. So I have to stay useful. And I have to so there might be equal parts, ambition and and fear. Because if there's no net underneath you when you're on a tight rope, what do you do you don't stop walking.

You've got to keep walking to the end of the tightrope. And by the way, there's no end inside. I don't know where it ends. But I think that's probably the best way to describe the why. And it's subconscious. I don't think about it every day. I just, I don't stop because I don't want to stop.

I love what I do. And I think I'm helping people. But also, I'm afraid of what happens if I stop. Like, what happens if I fall? What if I fall off? So that's probably the driving thing. But I don't want to give people the impression that I did not. spend the last 18 years raising my children and, you know, building a home. Because I really think

that I've given the circumstances of where I started in my profession, I think I obviously overachieved relative to, you know, what most people would have said is my ceiling. And I think I've overachieved on the family side as well. Thank God. I have a daughter who started college this fall. I have another kid in high school. And, you know, I like to say that everything I do is for them. But selfishly, it's my own insecurity that drives me. And I don't know when that stops, Joe. Maybe talk to me in five years. Maybe I'll feel differently. I don't know. Yeah, I feel like ambition and anxiety are the true drivers of productivity and tweets, probably. Josh Brown, this was such a blast. I'm so glad we made this happen. And I'm looking forward to seeing

you in just over a week at your conference out in Newport when you guys were a highlight last year. and you'll be a highlight again this year. People are so excited when they see Joe and Tracy. Oh, too kind, man. Tracy, that whole conversation was worth it just to be reminded of the blog you segment on CNBC and the, I still can't believe that was real, the show in the bar, but I remember it. And I think I was there like once for a taping or for a party for it. So, man.

It really, well, also, you reminded me with that bullpen comment. Like, bloggers truly were segregated from everyone else. I remember, do you remember going into Goldman Sachs one time because they had like a special event for Lloyd Blankfein to talk to a bunch of bloggers? Do you actually want me to talk about this, Tracy? Oh, yeah, you can if you want. Although I, I quibble with some of your narration. But yeah, okay, go on.

You know, it might have been off the record. So I won't. I won't go into details. but yes. But yes, the bloggers were treated like these weird special creatures, like kind of alien. Like everyone knew they were interesting and kind of cool and doing something, but like they weren't really the same and all the traditional media outlets are like, how do we deal with them? And it was very weird times.

It was. But that was so much fun catching up with Josh. And I think his career, like to some extent has mirrored the evolution of financial media, I think. And one of the few benefits, perhaps, of getting older is that we've been in financial journalism for, I don't know, like almost 20 years now. Yeah. Does that sound right? And so some of the people that we were, you know, sort of growing up with have gone on to like massive success. And Josh is definitely one of them and it's well deserved.

Totally. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. you can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal.

You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow Josh on Instagram. He is wisely, I think, probably abandon us on the other side. Downtown Josh Brown. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Erman Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kel Brooks at Kel Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses, on them. For more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots,

where we have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can chat about all of these. topics with fellow listeners 24-7 in our Discord.org.g.g. slash oddlots. And if you enjoy oddlots, if you like it when we indulge ourselves in some financial media naval gazing, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes, absolutely add-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts, and then follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

Tech returns to San Francisco, June 3rd and 4th. Join me, Emily Chang, along with Tom Giles, as we convene the CEOs, investors, and innovators shaping what's next in technology. Powered by Bloomberg's Global Newsroom and unrivaled terminal data will break down the capital, connectivity, and big ideas driving the industry forward. Be part of the conversation. Register now at BloombergLive.com.com slash tech. That's Bloomberg.Live.com slash tech.