The Breakdown - Why the Robinhood Revolution Is the Future of Finance, Feat. Jill Carlson

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, Reddit’s WallStreetBets channel was featured on the cover of Bloomberg BusinessWeek as an emerging market force.  Since then, between the surge in signups for Robinhood and the wave of followers of Davey Day Trader Global Global, these day traders have taken an even bigger place in the conversation about the stock market.  While many finance professionals (and, most certainly, traditional financial media) have treated the movement with skepticism, paternalism or outright derision, Slow Ventures’ Jill Carlson has a very different view.  To Jill, this group represents a new wave of investors who are unwilling to wait for permission to play a game that has been largely closed off to most.  In this conversation, Jill talks about why the Robinhood revolution is very, very real, and what opportunities for entrepreneurship and investing she sees in terms of financial education, new exchange tools and more.  Find our guest online:Website: jill-carlson.com Twitter: @jillruthcarlson

Hey, hedge fund manager, if you're so good, why is it you that has a yacht and not your LPs, not your investors? Where are all the LPs yachts? Indeed, if you're so good, why aren't you just investing your own money and then living off the fat of land of that? And I think that, again, this has been something that everyone kind of knows, but like the system works so well for those who are in a position of power and position to profit off of it and position to just be the incumbents to it that no one before has been incentivized to actually change it. And that, I think, is what is so heartening about seeing new entrance and even retail itself come in and kind of kick some sand up.

Welcome back to the Breakdowns Free Ideas Festival, a Fourth of July exploration of ideas with the potential to shape the future of the economy. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Crypto.com. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Thursday, July 2nd, and this is day three of the Free Ideas Festival. And guys, I am so excited for this conversation today with Jill Carlson.

Jill is a perennial crypto-twitter leader. She is a venture capitalist that's slow ventures. She started her career on Wall Street. She's the founder of the Open Money Initiative, which looks at how open currencies, cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, etc., can be valuable in places like Venezuela and hyperinflation scenarios around the world. She brings a huge breadth of experience to every conversation she has. And today we are talking about the Robin Hood Rally. And more specifically, What's real about the Robin Hood Rally? I've seen so many people dismiss this phenomenon, dismiss Wall Street bets, dismiss Davy Day Trader Global, as these weird manias that are just like everything else we've seen before. And I don't think that's the case. I think there is something

more fundamental going on that is worth exploring. And that's exactly what we get into in this conversation. So strap in guys and let's talk stonks. All right, we are back with Jill Carlson. Jill. So stoked for this. You and I have been DMing, tweeting about it. What are the more interesting sociological, economic, psychological, generational phenomenon of our times, this Robin Hood Revolution. But first of all, thank you so much for hanging out tonight. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm stoked. You know, sometimes I like to just dive right in and get people to their ideas. But I think in this case, based on what we're going to talk about, your background is highly relevant. So could you just share a little bit about what you're doing now and what you were doing before?

and just the perspective that that gives you as it relates to this particular set of questions, ideas, phenomenon. Yeah, absolutely. So my current day job is as an investor in early stage company is a venture capital investor with a firm called Slow Ventures based in San Francisco. And we invest in kind of a whole range of things. I do a lot in the crypto space. Still, that's kind of my background.

But we also do a lot in mainstream fintech. I spend a lot of time in mainstream. fintech apps. And so all of that kind of tends to feed into the lens that I think I'll bring to bear here in this conversation. I previewed this a second ago, but prior to joining Slow, I built something of a career within the crypto space, worked at a variety of companies, protocol projects. I got into the space while I was working on Wall Street, which is kind of where I started my career. I was a bond trader at Goldman Sachs for a number of years. And it was actually through that lens that I initially fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole,

became really fascinated in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a new asset class. Obviously, over the course of the last few years, have kind of ridden all of the hype cycles within that, tried a whole bunch of the innovations and new products that have come to bear in that space that I think in a lot of ways are going to be kind of the leading edge of what more mainstream fintech innovation ends up looking like, and we can get into more of that in a second. But there's also one other aspect of my background that I feel like is worth mentioning, which is that I always grew up with this fascination with markets. I think like the global nature of them, I think the fact that they're kind of competitive and can

feel kind of gamified. I grew up with this sort of fascination and also comfort with finance and financial markets in general. And a lot of that I credit to my parents, both of whom were on Wall Street in the 80s and had careers, always had kind of CNBC on in the background at our house growing up and would talk about these things around the dinner table. And it really wasn't until I broke out of like the kind of East Coast bubble and even kind of the New York finance bubble that I started to realize how actually unique or differentiated that is, especially when I got out to Silicon Valley.

and I would go around telling people like, oh, yeah, I was a bond trader. And people are like, why would you want to spend your time doing that? Like that sounds like the most boring, unsexy thing in the world, exactly. Whereas, again, from my perspective, I'd always kind of thought, like, oh, yeah, this stuff is cool. So that's a little preview of, I think, where I'm coming from with all of this. And, yeah, excited to dive into the topics at hand. Yeah, no, I think it's super relevant. So I wanted to make sure people have that context for one, like there is an actual Wall Street background that is relevant because, you know, I think there's obviously the kind of mainstream Wall Street or mainstream financial media narrative about this whole thing, which you can kind of resonate with. You have colleagues, you have friends who are kind of from that world and you lived in it. You were part of it. But then there's also the kind of this other side, the crypto career, which is obviously like a very useful person. perspective and experience when it comes to recognizing manias, I think. So obviously, important to

set with that too. But let's start with, when did you start to notice, you know, people have different names where I've been calling it the Robin Hood Rally or whatever you want to call it. But when did you start to notice this phenomenon and say like, wait a second, what's going on over here? You know, it seems weird. Yeah, I would say that there were a couple of things that happened in March around the start of COVID, which of course also coincided with a major return of volatility to the markets, the likes of which we hadn't seen since 2008, so really the likes of which this generation kind of younger millennials and zoomers had never really seen in their adult life. And there were two things that I started noticing in that moment. One was about my experience

very personally, as I was starting to get more involved in my portfolio or get more increasingly back involved, maybe I should say, in actively managing my portfolio of investments, I just realized, like, there's such a dearth of tooling out there geared towards someone like me who wants more than just, you know, the the year-to-date stock price or whatever Yahoo Finance can offer me. And it's shot, like, Yahoo Finance is like the last bastion of value that Yahoo has created that continues to persist and exist. But that was one thing that I started feeling was just like, I want to be able to log in, see what the U.S. Treasury Yield curve has done and see, you know, what the predictions were for non-farm payrolls for a given

week and then see when the actual comes in. And I was craving basically having a Bloomberg terminal again. I'm not going to go out and get a Bloomberg terminal subscription because it's 25 grand. And I just can't justify that. And so that was one impetus that kind of led me down this rabbit hole of thinking about the space, the white space, if you will, for products and technology in the market. And that led me back to thinking about like, huh, well, Robin Hood has created a new generation of traders in a way that hasn't really existed before. And I bet that I'm not alone in feeling this way and wanting better tooling.

The second thing that I started noticing around this same time, again, in sort of mid-March of this year, was I started noticing friends of mine, family members of mine. And here I'm not talking about people who grew up in kind of the tri-state area with parents who worked on Wall Street. Here I'm talking about, like, friends and family members, you know, in the Midwest, on the West Coast, in kind of the heartland, like, you know, areas where there's much less emphasis on sort of Wall Street culture, you know, the sort of Wall Street and financial markets fascination. All of a sudden, I started seeing all of these friends and family posting actually screenshots of their Robin Hood accounts, you know, leaving commentary about. about all of the gains they've made on their Tesla stock or, you know, posting sort of random penny stocks that they had found that were up like 250%. And it was a really cool thing to start to see because I was like, oh, hey, maybe this hypothesis that I'm forming around sort of what Robin Hood has done in terms of bringing new entrants into the market. Maybe that's actually

true. And, you know, here are all these people at the time anyway. Hopefully this continues to persist, like actually making decent money off of it. And that, again, is not going to be true for everyone, especially, you know, amongst kind of the new entrants. But those were the two things, again, you know, on the one hand, the thing that I was feeling. And then on the other hand, the thing that I was observing amongst friends and family who, again, previously, I think, would have said to me, like, why were you a bond trader? That sounds awful now suddenly posting these Robin Hood screenshots. Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, I think there's a lot of questions. that we could ask about why and maybe more pertinently why now.

But I guess the one piece of historical information is I guess we kind of put this story together and try to figure out like, again, that question of why and why now, right before COVID really hit, I remember that the first week, basically it was the last week in February that market started to react to COVID at all. And I remember because I was interviewing Caitlin Long when she announced Avanti that Monday. And it was like the first day that something had happened because we talked about it. And interestingly, I think literally the week before Bloomberg Business Week, the print magazine, their cover story had been on R slash Wall Street bets, the Reddit community. And so there was,

and it was basically about how these sort of renegades were trying to, effectively they were trying to bid up the price of options in a way that made their trades favorable and then kind get out like they were trying to work the system through pure kind of force and momentum right and so this was all it was about it had nothing to do with fundamentals that had nothing to do with a bunch of guys like sharing tips it was like basically collusion to try to manipulate the price in a way that benefited them and and so the story i mean i remember the cover it was like all these little kind of the the reddit the reddit yeah yeah like jumping around and then all of a sudden obviously uh over the course of the next few months it got really wild so for

me, I remember the first point where I was like, this is kind of different, was when oil went negative, all of a sudden people poured into USO. We saw it like between like that Friday and the next Tuesday or Wednesday, something like 160,000 people added to their portfolio where there had been like 90,000 total before that in the trade. And I was like, okay, that's a notable factor. Then you have this coinciding factor, which is Davey Day Trader Global Global, which all of a sudden. So, I mean, were you watching as Portnoy got involved?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I grew up in Boston. So I was a Boston sports fan. So I've been following barstool sports since before it was cool. I like to think. Did you remember when people were like barstool, like, I remember in crypto, people being like there needs to be barstool finance, like way before this whole thing went down. Totally.

Yes. And so that, just to go down that rabbit hole for a second, so. much of what people are talking about now in terms of areas where there should or could be products or even feature sets that don't exist on Robin Hood. It's like it's all stuff that we've heard talked about in crypto because crypto experienced this exact kind of retail hype cycle in 2016 to 2018 kind of time frame. And I look at like what's going on with like the meming, the shipposts, now around Wall Street and mainstream financial markets. And like Wall Street bets reminds me so much in so many ways of like the old Bitcoin

talk forums, right? Like go back to like the OG hoddling post. Like that reads like it could be about Tesla stock on posts on Wall Street bets today. Right. I look at like the tools and so forth that were created within crypto, whether that's like telegram and having, you know, chat and specialized chat rooms around trading and, you know, in many ways, collusion. Or whether that's like the Poloniac's troll box where people can like have this like live social kind of pseudonymous experience while they're trading, integrated. Like,

these are all things that now people are talking about within mainstream financial markets. And there again, I think it's really cool to think about crypto being a sort of leading edge of the wedge for a lot of these tools and trends. So I want to come back to the financial media aspect of this because I think it's super interesting. But first, you know, kind of building off of this comparison, do you think, I mean, and this is kind of like as fundamental a question as it gets, do you think the motivation in both of these cycles, right, the kind of crypto-ICO cycle and what we're seeing now or what we've been seeing for the past couple months, is it just the kind of greed plus

FOMO and there's easy money on the table? Or do you think there's something deeper, right? Does this reflect something else that's more, that's kind of a bigger structural, economic, or sociological phenomenon? So I think that one can be driven by the other. And this is where I think that I actually face a lot of disagreement and criticism within the sort of like mainstream VC world, maybe less so within crypto, because I think within crypto, there is sort of necessarily a willingness to sort of suspend disbelief around short-term hype cycles to believe in longer-term change. That is acutely put.

I try to be diplomatic here. But I think that within FinTech, rightly so, you know, a lot of FinTech investors who've been around the block and have much more experience than I do have seen these hype cycles come and go. Maybe they lived through 2000, 2001, and experienced all. of the day trading hype around that. Even around 2008, this isn't widely talked about, but wealth front, which of course now is like the paragon of sort of like passive buy and hold, very responsible retail investing. They started out as a company called Ka Ching, which you can probably guess from

the name, it was a stock picking site. It was this like social kind of stock picking site. you know, a far cry, albeit from sort of what goes on on Wall Street bets, but nonetheless, you know, it goes to speak to the fact that there's nothing new under the sun that we're talking about here in terms of, in terms of, you know, having more kind of social experiences or, you know, having new entrance around trading. But I do think, and this is such a dangerous thing to say I know, but I do think that there is. something slightly different about right now. And I think that there's a few factors at play. You know, there's, of course, the market volatility, which is now leading this whole younger generation of millennials and the zoomers to ask for the first time in their lives, like, oh, what am I doing with my money? Does it actually make sense to just have it all sit in, you know, an index fund, put it all in a Vanguard index fund and call it a day? Or do I want to be more

involved. I think that this is a generation that in many ways likes to do its own research, likes to take matters into its own hands more, you know, likes to be educated and feel like an active part of any given decision. And I think that, you know, we see that play out in a number of other spheres. I see no reason why that won't continue to play out within finance, which could look like a move away from the betterment wealth front kind of models more towards a sort of hybrid approach. And then there's also all of the trends around gaming and, you know, the sort of entertainment factor that you have at play here where like the thing that I always come back to is if you look at the lottery, if you look at sports betting, these are massive, massive

industries, right? And here you have in the stock market another kind of outlet for, this, but one that is, A, legal, when you talk about it relative to sports betting or gambling, B, you can actually study it and research it and get better at it over time and sort of participate in it in an educated and a responsible way, which, you know, there again, people push back and they're like, oh, Jill, like, all people want is what they can get on Yahoo finance in terms of tooling or data around this. I'm like, really? Because if you talk to anyone who is, you know, an active sports better, even just someone who participates in a fantasy football league, like they can probably tell you the exact record that Tom Brady

held during home games in the rain, you know? And it's like that level of granularity in detail, I can totally see being ported over to the stock market and that level of also like excitement and participation. And again, just entertainment value out of it. I can see being ported over to the stock market in a way that hasn't happened before. And yeah, there are so many other threads to pull on, I think, in this conversation of the reasons why this time may in fact be different than 2008 or 2001 when we saw volatility and more active day trading again there. But I'll take a breath for a second, Nathaniel. I think that was really, really interesting point around deciding. idea of there being a similar phenomenon where people like learning things and taking risk,

right? Risk is embedded in the human psyche. It's a part of who we are. It has driven a huge amount of cultural evolution. And when people discover that there's this different type of game with a huge, like, massive set of new rules to learn, if they have the right sort of proselytizers, right, if they have the right sort of missionaries who evangelize things, right, which I think they got in they have in a collective way with Wall Street bets and then they have in a very distinct way in the context of like Portnoy, right, who is such a different force in financial media than anything that they've experienced, you know, basically ever. Can I just say one thing on that?

Like, I just think that if I look at the way that financial markets have been framed and talked about and set up, and if I look at, you know, to draw the comparison to gaming, if I look at the arena and the way that it's been set up to welcome or to not welcome certain participants, it is so obvious to me that, you know, this sounds like a grandiose statement, but I actually believe that this is true, that the financial markets and the way that access has been granted and denied to people or, you know, the way that it's just been designed is a totally like patriarchical, capitalist, deeply problematic system. that has intentionally been geared towards like the same old bastion of old white guys who go golfing and live in Greenwich, Connecticut,

and has intentionally excluded so many other people while offering those people like, okay, well, here's sports betting for you and here's, you know, the lottery for you. And that's the kind of risk that you're all allowed to take. Meanwhile, for us in this game, in this system that can actually be, you know, one and can actually be studied and you can actually get educated around and have a system around, that's just going to be for us, the old white guys in our mansions. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred exchange for serious traders and investors, trusted by over 4 million customers, including top financial institutions. BitStamp is built on professional grade trading technology. Their platform is powered by a NASDAQ matching engine, and their APIs are recognized as the best in the industry. Download the BitStamp app from the App Store or Google Play

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When you buy gift cards with the crypto.com app, you can get up to 20% back. Download the crypto.com app today and enjoy these offers until the end of September. I think that there's both intention and just non-realization in some ways when it comes to the financial media side of perpetuating this. Like, this is a system that makes people feel stupid and excluded, whether they mean to or not, right? If you look at, like, your average CNBC, like, Bloomberg, whatever, like, it's just a string of friggin acronyms, right? It's like, it's like because people make, like, and part of it is that it's an in-group language where people have studied so they feel like they get to use it and they get affirmed for saying that. But, like, it's this very kind of insular conversation. and I think that it I think that there have been cracks showing right you have weird insurgents in fin twit right and fin twit itself is like you know I mean I don't know for people who haven't been on there for long like the degree to which fin twit can sound like Bitcoin Twitter especially in the last six months has been really really notable right like there's definitely these new types of voices coming in however I think that to your point and this is actually an additional point that I that I wanted to get to and ask you about is so you have

on the one hand, this discovery of this really interesting, super high stakes, in fact, perhaps the biggest stakes game. You have these missionaries who are kind of inviting people in for the first time and saying, hey, these guys are trying to confuse us, but it's actually not that complicated once you dig in. It's just executing it. And then you have third, this gnawing sense that for a decade or more, like the system has been stacked against the set of people, that it's been harder and harder to buy into the game. And that if this whole thing, thing isn't going to trickle down and you're not going to get yours anyways, why not overturn the apple card all the way and actually like call the systems bluff, you know? And this gets us to,

I think, the whole hurts thing, right? People are sitting here being appalled clutching at pearls that these, you know, that these people are going to ruin their lives because they don't know. It's like, no, they're playing chicken. They're playing chicken with hurt stock. Like, they're seeing how far, they're, they're expecting you to drive off to the side because the cliff is coming up so fast, you know? That's kind of what they're going for. It's a game. It is being treated as a game.

No, 100%. Because why not, right? I think that you're getting at something, though, that is why there has been this fascination around Davey Day Trader, not just from sort of like new entrance market, but I would say actually even more so from financial Twitter, from, you know, Jim Kramer and all of the good folks over at CNBC or on Bloomberg or whatever, you know, having him on talking to him, talking about him is there is this just kind of element of, pardon my language, of like, you from Davey Day Trader at the system, which I think is getting at something that a lot of people

didn't even realize existed. Like, you know, I go back to, this is why I started with the anecdote about me growing up in a house that was very embedded in Wall Street. Like, I didn't even realize that, oh, I am a part of the group that has been allowed into this just by virtue of having had parents who had some degree of education, comfort and then were able to build careers in this space that allowed me to have a seat at the table of this game. And I think that to go back to your comparison to crypto-Twitter, one of the beautiful things about crypto Twitter that we now see happening on FinTwit and on Wall Street bets and on all of these other venues is it's like you don't have to be Bill Ackman. You know, you don't have to be Warren Buffett. You can be like, you know, the the dog avatar or, you know, the the space cat avatar. And that is how people know you. And, you know, you can be, you know, you can be.

a reputation totally pseudonymously without having to show credentials past the fact of just like, hey, I have been able to make money. Here's how I'm doing it. Here's how I'm thinking about it. And I think that that is actually a super powerful trend. And my hope is that in 20 years, you know, there's a competitor to Bloomberg and CNBC that is, that looks nothing like that that doesn't feature just the voices of, again, you know, these old guys sitting in Greenwich, Connecticut, but also features the voices of like these just totally pseudonymous avatars who like, it doesn't actually matter who they are because this is, you know, it can be a more open system where anyone can have insights and do well and make money. Yeah, I think that you're right

that crypto is kind of a leading indicator around that. I mean, certainly you're seeing literal Wall Street Betts influencers now. They're being courted the same way influencers are, which is hilarious. But if you look in the crypto space, right, like people like flood, right? Like they got really well known because not because they were just not in that case even because they were screaming on Twitter. It's because people were just watching the Bitmax leaderboard. And they were like, wait, how much turned into how much?

Wait, went? Totally. They watched it happen. And it's like that there's no credential. That is the credential, you know? And especially in a market context, like what pure credential is there than actual success. I mean, by the way, this is one of Portnoy's consistent rants. Whenever someone comes at him who's like a financial advisor type person, I mean, it's just good, good luck winning that fight.

Right? Because he's like, you're literally, if you're so smart, why aren't you spend? your own money, you know? Yeah. And there's obviously you could, there's a million nuanced to answer to it. But the sound bite of that and the, what's underneath that soundbite I think is really resonant with people because it's like, and that's what everyone feels like, right? All these guys, they're not like, they're not betting anyone else's money but theirs, right? Exactly. And there's something really interesting there that has been kind of a perennial whisper or chant or I don't know what you would identify it as probably different things.

at different times over the course of the progression of Wall Street. But you go back to the seminal book, right, that then became a saying of where are all the LPs yachts? And what that's getting at is exactly the same sentiment like, hey, you know, hey hedge fund manager, if you're so good, why is it you that has a yacht and not your LPs, not your investors? Where are all the LPs yachts? And, you know, indeed, if you're so good, why aren't you just?

investing your own money and then living off the fat of land of that. Why is it that you're making so much off of the two that you're charging as opposed to just the 20? And I think that, again, this has been something that everyone kind of knows, but like the system works so well for those who are in a position of power and position to profit off of it and position to just be the incumbents to it, that no one before has been incentivized to actually change it. And that, I think, is what is so heartening about seeing new entrance and even retail itself come in and kind of kick some stand up. Yeah, no, I completely agree.

I mean, you're seeing this across basically like every part of the investing spectrum, too. I remember, because I first got the Silicon Valley in like 2008. And 2007, 2008 is when I first started coming out before moving. And it was like barely coming back Web 2.0 after, you know, the crash, right? Like, you were like any time there was like a $30 million acquisition, which happened like once every five or six months, it was like, wow, like maybe we're onto something again. And it was the very beginning soon of Y Combinator and the Accelerators. And then very soon there was like, you started to see these seed funds, right, when microVCs

and all this sort of stuff. And over the time that I was there, I left in 2017. And like every other asset class, because there was just so much money available farther and farther out on the risk curve, it became more and more. It's like, well, what is basically the theoretical IRA right now based on like the higher valuation and sort of follow on rounds of my investments? Because the game quickly shifted to like how fast can I raise a bigger fund? And obviously, you know, in any market there are, even when things. things get way out of whack. There's a huge number of really, like, good participants. And I think that one thing that VC often has going for it is that it's structured such that there's more

kind of, you know, there's more debate and dialogue about these things as they're happening, you know, and that in some other places. But still, it's like, it's a, it's a, I think it validates what you're saying kind of more broadly of. It's just been a weird capital structure. And I think this goes back to kind of another part of this insurgency, which is so interesting, is like, I remember, I think the most remarkable interview, like, hold aside all the kind of the gruff and showmanship and craziness of Portnoy. This one interview that I think stood out to me the most was with Fox Business. I can't remember the host, but he basically was like, so it was a little rough when you started. And so tell me what happened.

And Portnoy was like, yeah. So when I got into it, you know, I learned about what options were or whatever. And I opened my account and I started and, you know, things were going bad for everyone. So I shorted a couple things. I shorted Lulu Lemon. I shorted Boeing, and I just got destroyed. I took a bath. And then I realized that the whole game is rigged,

that the Fed's going to print Shrewbucks for as long as it takes, and everything's always going to go up. And since then, it's been pretty easy. And it was so matter of fact. And, like, this is obviously what scares the shit out of people because the Fed put has been reimagined as a totally different thing. I mean, right? Jerome Powell has become, like, the new meme for all of these things.

And obviously, that can end in catastrophe. Good old J-Bow. Yeah. But I think that this like this kind of cynicism is like it's not unwarranted, right? Totally. And I think that there is something really powerful in people waking up for the first time and kind of asking these questions like, well, wait, how is the stock market still going up? Like everyone I know, you know, has been laid off or furloughed. Why is the stock market still up year to date, depending on what index you look at? And I think just even the asking of that question is such a powerful thing that is going to be a not only of different financial decisions for a lot of people, but also, you know, different politics potentially. And I think that we are just at the beginning of a cycle of something that could look very different. And I say that very optimistically. I think that it's easy for me to get misinterpreted as sort of like, oh, this is, you know, this is all doom and gloom that's very scary.

I actually think that that's a very powerful thing to have people asking these questions and that potentially wind up leading to change. And that's something that I'm actually quite optimistic about. Well, and this is why I wanted you particularly for this discussion. And I really appreciate you coming on because this is the sense that I got from seeing your tweets where other people were being either dismissive, you know, particularly kind of from a legacy perspective or like hyper-concerned about like the travesty that would befall all these investors when they inevitably take a bath when there is a crash. Like holding aside the fact that like the Fed is very clear, like they're going to push this thing for as far as it possibly can go.

But holding aside that fact, like, you had, or it's seen this perspective where it's like, there is something here, some sets of things that are really powerful, really interesting, are about more than they seem. And like, and you want to, and you want to see more of it. So what are, let's start to, I guess, by way of kind of like wrapping up over the next, you know, a few minutes or whatever, what are the pieces, what are the parts of this thread that you can tease out that you can see turning into, not just kind of like high level practical change or like high level change or from a mindset perspective, but actual like new

tooling, new channels, new opportunities. Like, I mean, you're thinking about it from an investor as well, I know, you know. So like, what are the, what are the things that excite you potentially coming out of this? Yeah, I'm definitely thinking about it as an investor. So to the extent that you're listening to this and you're working on something or thinking about this too, hit me up. I'm sure you can put my contact details in the show notes or what have you. They'll be there. look, the first thing I want to say in response to that is if you want to go ring your hands over the travesty that might befall people from, you know, taking risks they don't understand. Go look at the lottery first.

Yeah, right. Like, don't even start with me about, you know, the damage that Robin Hood is causing to sort of your common man. Like, go look at the lottery. Go look at all of these other forms of gambling that somehow we're all just okay with turning a blind eye to. But, you know, from that more kind of positive perspective, of what I think might come out of this and where I think that there's a ton of opportunities.

I would say a few things. First, I want to give a ton of credit to a lot of people who are building very cool products who spent a ton of time over the last few months. Educating me and sharing with me what they're building. Go check out common stock is a really cool social trading app. Adam Finance is a very cool sort of like Bloomberg for Retail app, public finance is sort of somewhere in between the two. They're a brokerage that has a social component, kind of a trollbox, if you will. Tendies.aF. Have you looked at this? Only just very recently.

Okay. This one's hilarious. I won't, I won't spoil it. But if you've spent any time on Wall Street, let's go check out Tendies. www.tendee's.com. I won't blow the cover of the creator of it. It's very cool. But I think that all of these products are starting to get at something really critical here, which is that this does not need to be boring. Finance does not need to be boring.

Education does not need to look like Sue Zorman and the Boglehead's Guide to Investing and how we trade options by the Nigerian brothers. It can look and feel more like Wall Street bets. And credit to Cheddar, I think that they tried to be. sort of like an earlier version of this. But I think that they were still so stuck in kind of the boomer finance ways that they didn't quite take it far enough. And so, you know, I'm excited for more finance education tools that just look and feel more like entertainment, whether that's something along the lines of master class, whether that's along the lines of sort of like memeification,

gamification. I'm excited about that. So that's education. The next area I would say I'm really excited about is new trading platforms. And this is where I get a lot of pushback from just sort of standard run-of-the-mill fintech investors. And by that, I mean like non-crypto. The thing that I see within crypto is if I look at where most of the enterprise value has been created, and I'm not talking about protocols themselves. I'm talking about actual company enterprise value. It has been within exchanges. I look at Coinbase. I look at Bitmex. I look at finance. And I look at the fact that there are so many crypto exchanges across all of these different markets, not just across different markets, but serving different users around different needs.

And then I look at the fact that what exists for stock trading? I mean, it's effectively all of the old school players, whether that's Schwab, E-Trade, Interactive Brokers, Fidelity, or, you know, some of the newer players like Robin Hood. And, you know, I understand that a lot of the hurdles here are regulatory in nature. You know, it took Robin Hood on the order of years to actually launch and get off the ground. But I am optimistic that new trading platforms that enable new types of experiences and welcome in new participants that rebuild and reimagine the arena for this quote-unquote game can and will be built over the next few years. That's the next area that I'm really excited about. And then the last one that I'll mention here.

As an aside on that one, just real quick. Yeah. Yeah, please. I want to see Sam Bankman-Fried let loose with regulatory approval to do whatever he wants and see how fast. He has just scooped, scooped the entire business of a new generation of, like, Wall Street traders. I mean, come on. And I think this validates your point, too. Like, you use Coinbase at Binance's, like, examples, right?

But, like, every minute you turn around and you're like, oh, no, like, the barriers to entry are getting higher and higher and higher. and these companies are so excellent at what they do. Like, I mean, really, like, Binance fastest unicorn ever, right? Like, at the time that it became the fastest unicorn ever. And then all of a sudden, this thing that was like, like, they kind of were talking about having them build, you know, some derivatives exchange with a market maker and then it didn't go through. So the market maker just decided to build it themselves. And then all of a sudden they have like a billion dollar valuation nine months later. And they're just absolutely crushing things and putting it.

Like, it is so insane how fast things evolve in this space. holding aside everything with like these crazy decks experiments, right? Just even in the centralized exchange space. So I think it's very, very validating of your sense of the opportunities there. Thank you. Because not many people agree with me on that. You know, most people are like, oh, unless they're building a neobank, it's not interesting. And I just don't think so.

But so just really quickly. So education, I touched on new training platforms and brokerage platforms. I touched on. And the last one that I wanted to touch on real quick. is just data. And this goes back to what I was saying around, you know, my own frustrations of like, okay, I'm not going to pay for a Bloomberg terminal. Yahoo Finance isn't cutting it. And again, credit to Coyfin, credit to Adam Finance, who are building out sort of new retail oriented sort of terminals. But I think that there's still room for further innovation there. And, you know,

there in particular, I look at what exists in other sort of investment areas. And I don't even know of the people who are active in these markets would qualify them as investments. But I look at like the sneakerhead space. I look at Stock X. I look at Rally Road. I look at bring a trailer. And I look at the way that information and data gets passed around in those markets, the way that communities have formed around those markets. And I think that there's something really interesting to learn from them. Again, just from the perspective, like, this does not have to look like our dads or our grandfather's Wall Street. Like, this can look and feel like a very different experience that offers much more in terms of entertainment value, in terms of accessibility.

And so that's the overarching theme that really excites me, again, within these areas of education, trading platforms, and data. I mean, listen, I really appreciate you hanging out tonight. I love your perspective on this because I just think, like, to your point, too, like, I mean, so here is the kind of moment for me. Like, people are getting all worried and nervous. And by the way, I completely agree with your assessment about, like, we're very selective. And by the way, this goes back all the way through American history.

We love being very selective about kind of how we're going to be patronizing to people about what we're worried about them doing or not. But, you know, when you have a generation that's like trading stock tips on TikTok, I feel like you can view it exactly one of two ways. Either one, this is devastating. It's a market top signal. It means that things have gotten ridiculous. Or two, these fucking 13 year olds want to talk about the stock market. And maybe that's something that we should be excited about and trying to make good rather than trying to beat into a pulp, right?

Exactly. There's a way to channel it. it doesn't have to, you know, someone said this to me. Someone who's actually an entrepreneur or working on one of these apps that I mentioned said to me, you know, there's this problem that you face when you're trying to build out something social around financial markets and trading, which is that it can feel like all roads lead to you becoming, you know, a pink sheets broker or, you know, kind of a dirty bucket shop. And I think that that doesn't have to be the case. I think that if you look at the way that these things are evolving now, I don't see all

tools heading in that direction. And I'm pretty optimistic that some of the entrepreneurs working on this this time around can solve for that. And exactly, it can become a thing to celebrate rather than to fear that we have all of these new entrants getting excited about financial markets and investing. Love it. Well, for people who are working in this space or who just want to talk with you more about it, where can they find you? Yeah.

So I am constantly on Twitter, probably too much for my own good. So you can tag me in a tweet at Jill Ruth Carlson. I am less good on my DMs, as Nathaniel knows himself, I infrequently check them because they can often feel like a bucket shop. people shilling ICOs and God knows what else, but tag me a real UI problem there for sure. Yeah, yeah. Or you can email me at Jill at slow.com. Love it. All right, Joe. Well, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this. I really appreciate it. And we will definitely have to follow up and talk about what's transpired over the course of the next few months because you know it's going to be nuts.

Yeah, for sure. I look forward to it. Thanks so much. Reflecting on this conversation with Jill, the thing I keep thinking about is something that I think fundamentally people are not understanding about what we're seeing. People are so worried about the idea that everyone's going to lose their money, yes, but even more than that, I think that people are worried in the traditional finance community that these new entrants to the stock market are going to have their lunch handed to them from a psychological standpoint as well, that they're going to have some big disillusionment moment where they realize that the stock market that they were pinning so many hopes and dreams on was a cyclical market just like anything else,

and what goes up must come down. But I think that people don't realize is that there's no chance I don't believe for real disillusionment because disillusionment with markets is actually a prerequisite of participating right now. These folks aren't sitting around being like, wow, the stock market is this brilliant place where anyone with gumption and ideas can figure out how to make it, it is a rigged game that they have discovered the rules of and are now rewriting the rules to suit themselves. Disillusionment is a prerequisite, and that changes the dynamics of this thing. Still, though, I think Jill's message of optimism that there is really something here that can be channeled and harnessed as a

force for good is a great note to leave this on. So I hope you'd enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And until tomorrow, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace. I'm Galen Moore, senior research analyst at CoinDesk. On July 7, I'll be with Lucas Nootze from Coinmetrics, hosting a live webinar on everything you need to know about a fundamental that's critical for understanding digital assets. Bitcoin Days Destroyed. Join us by signing up at coindes.com slash sign up.