WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Wall Street Weekly: A Run to Remember

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Join Patrick and George as they discuss the top moments from the past 35 episodes of the show. 

Welcome to Wall Street Weekly, a show where your host, George and Patrick, cut through the financial jargon to keep you educated and informed about the markets that affect our lives. Enjoy the show. This is the highly informing, overperforming radio show on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. As we say those words, for the last time, this is the final episode, not just of season three, but of Wall Street Weekly. Patrick, how are you doing? Crying in my sleep lately, George, and it's no exaggeration to say. that it's a bittersweet ending, but it's been a great ride for sure. And even though this is our last episode where we reminisce a little about the good times

on Wall Street Weekly, we will be talking about some financial concepts. So even if you weren't here with us for the ride, I think you'll still get a lot from this episode. And it's why we have to disclaim it by saying all this is for entertainment purposes only and that anything we say on the show should not be taking his financial advice, always contact the trusted financial professional before making any decisions. Patrick and I discussed before the show that we're going to format this as going back and forth, as we have a little bit of a ranking of our top five favorite episodes.

I'm going to hand it off to Patrick as he gives us his fifth best episode that we've done. That's right. All right. Number five, I guess another disclaimer. They were all great episodes. Some were better than others. Some were better than others. But here are my top five favorites.

Number five, I'm going to go with our recent interview with Paul Tice. A solid choice, yeah. So that was our, that was pretty historic is the word, because that was our first professional interview. He was a professional. It was an amateur professional interview. But it was a lot of fun. We got to pick up his book that hadn't even been released yet before we did the interview. And then we read the book and did some research, writing some questions for him and stuff like that. And then we called him over the phone. And it was a pretty interesting experience. It was a lot different interviewing someone who wasn't in the studio. with us, but I enjoyed it, and he had a lot of good things to say about environmental, social, and governance factors. What was the title of his book again? Remind me? The race to zero. The race to zero. Yeah, I just want a quick add on to that one. I didn't realize that you get to read books before the released if you do an interview. Like Patrick said, it was a lot of fun. For number five for me is our first episode ever, which would have taken place in February of 2023. So really not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. I don't even know.

remember what that was about. It was a very jumbled episode. We hadn't really secured the format yet, which meant that we had me bringing three stories, you brought a historical story, and then we were still four minutes short, so we did some Warren Buffett quotes to end the time. It wasn't the best, but I'm not going to criticize us because that was our first time sticking our foot out the door. And I think that the big difference from the first to our last episode is the first episode, it really felt like we were trying to teach people stuff, trying to be really experts on the material we were presenting. And now I think we're more focused on learning with the audience

because we realize how much we really don't know, especially focusing on the markets for as much as we have in the past 16 months. I think there's just really a big difference there. And I think the best soundbite from our first episode was a Warren Buffett quote that has remained with me, even if we researched it in the last three minutes of recording, just so we had some extra content. Predicting rain doesn't matter, but building an arc does.

And we discussed that for a while. But I think in investing, it's easy to make predictions and then forget about your bad ones and remember your good ones and then think you're this great investor. But it really doesn't matter unless you have skin in the game. Definitely. And I really agree with what you said about how

in the first few episodes we were kind of more teaching and now we're definitely more learning with the audience. That's absolutely true. I mean, I knew going in that I didn't have a whole lot of investing knowledge, but definitely when you're in the teaching position and do you have that responsibility of sort of conveying information to people, that's when you really realize how much you don't know. If you can't explain it simply, you probably don't understand it well enough.

Patrick, what's your number four? Okay, so my number four was another interview. This one was cryptocurrency with Ian, fellow investment club member. And that was a lot of fun. He brought a lot of great insights. And that was one of the episodes where I just learned the most because I really didn't have much of an understanding of how cryptocurrency works. And Ian brought a lot of great in-depth knowledge. And I was really able to listen and pay attention to him and just, it was nice to be able to shut up

on our own radio show for once and just hear someone talk about something that he actually, you know, knew what he was talking about. And he was really good at conveying that information. I have that as number four as well. I actually combined our three crypto episodes, two with Ian, and one with Sam Wagner. One thing I want to make our audience aware of is we actually submitted part of that episode for the awards competition where we were named finalists. And that was when you talked about tulip mania. Do you remember that?

Well, it's funny because I find that a lot of the things that I did research on and talked about in the shows, I've kind of forgotten a lot of them, which is kind of sad. I do remember tulip mania. And so for those that don't remember, that was about the Dutch tulip crash, which happened in the 1600s, early 1600s. And that was when flowers were quite literally a hot commodity, and they were selling for the equivalent of millions of dollars, even one tulip bulb at one point.

And the price was just artificially inflated so much. And then people realized that the intrinsic value was much lower than its sticker price. And so once the price started going down, then all of a sudden, everyone just kind of freaked out, decided to get out while they could. And then it actually cratered the Dutch economy, right? And all because of a flower. Overall, just a very unique story that the judges must have appreciated as well.

Now, for my number three, I'm going to play a clip and let's see if Patrick remembers this day. Tonight is September 14th. We're recording this right after Sean Fain's announcement at 10 p.m. Eastern Time. And Sean Fain, the leader of the United Auto Workers Union, has just officially laid out his strategy as to how the labor strike is to play out. You remember that, Patrick? I do. That was our breaking news broadcast. That was an interesting time because we did that right after the United Auto Workers informational video from Sean Fane's Facebook video. We watched that live stream and then he announced where the strike was going to happen. Was that the episode that we did with Joe? Yep, Joe Klaezy, our good friend, was on that episode as well. You'll be hearing from him later. Basically, we knew that the UAW was going to go on strike. It wasn't any hidden news or anything like that. But the mainstores,

street outlets weren't covering it weeks ahead of time. And we decided that'd be pretty cool to do, being that we are in Michigan, it affects us more than it affects most other places. The unfortunate thing about that, or maybe fortunate, was that the announcement came on our recording day at 10 p.m. And of course, we've been hyping up this story for the last few weeks. We can't make an episode at 7 p.m. on Thursday and then have the news be irrelevant three hours later. So we had to do a live episode at that point. It was a good call. I think it was. I mean, the content was very well done. I think we'll actually end up submitting that for a competition. I think it's one of our best episodes. Also having Joe doing a little bit more of the politics there was pretty cool. I will say though, editing tell two in the

morning was not the best way to spend my morning. What's your number three, Patrick? I'm curious to hear as we continue on with our last episode of season three of Wall Street Weekly on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Real quick, you just mentioned that you were editing until 2 a.m. that one time for the UAW episode. Yeah. But I also remember on our very first episode, we had some technical mishaps as well. We ended up finishing the episode and it went okay. But during the editing process, we were both working on it. And we just decided we just need to re-record this thing.

And so we literally re-recorded the whole episode. And that was our first episode. I remember because we had to sign out to get the key to open the... the radio studio at that point. I remember when I signed back in, it was a six-hour process to get the first 22-minute radio show. Yep, that was, yeah, you came back late that night. That was crazy. Yeah. Anyways, number three, top episode, I'm going to go with our episode on, we titled at Wall Street's Biggest Betts, and that was the biggest win, well, one of the biggest wins, with Michael Berry in the 2008 financial crisis. And I think that was one of my favorites because

that was one of the ones that I learned the most from my behind-the-scenes research. I did a lot of looking up the whole process of the financial crisis, the housing bubble and crash. And it's such a complicated story, but it was so cool to be able to tie my research into the movie The Big Short, which I had seen. And it was so interesting. I was doing half of my research by watching video clips from the movie. And then half of my research from journal articles and other things that were explaining. the principles more in depth. And ultimately I got to a point where I could actually kind of understand it and explain it fairly well, I thought, maybe.

No, it was great. And so that was really cool because I remember I did not have any clue what that was all about. When I first watched the big short movie, it was pretty neat to be able to see that all come together. And I think that was a pretty great series that we did. One week we did the guys who bet big and won, but then trying to also show the other side of the coin because it's not a only winners on Wall Street. We also did an episode on the people who bet big and lost. Do you remember what that was about? That was about the natural gas guy who was trading futures and then... That's right. And then the weather messed him up. Yeah. Okay, George, that was my number three.

You're number two? Are we on number two? Number two, and this is a little bit of a preview. I've got to say the Berkshire Hathaway meeting. Pretty cool. Patrick wasn't there, but the reason I feel okay putting this on the list is because a week from today, we are going to be in Omaha, Nebraska, doing some of those same, hopefully better interviews with people who are just excited to meet Warren Buffett or to hear from him. As a reminder, Berkshire Hathaway is the conglomerate, Warren Buffett built. And I put on here, it definitely has a chance to become a number one moment with Patrick when we go this spring. I'm definitely looking forward to that as well. I've never been And so that'll be a new experience for me.

It'll be really interesting to see and meet some new people who are way more knowledgeable about this than I am. And to have so many smart investors in such a concentrated space in one, what is it, a stadium where they do the shareholder meeting. Yeah. So that'll be pretty cool. And I will say too, I think it's always good no matter what you're doing to find someone who's smarter than you to bounce ideas off of. Because I remember going last year, you tell you. an investing idea to someone who has way more experience than you do, and they can point to ten flaws in your thesis that you had never even thought to think of before. And that's what makes it such a great event, in my opinion, the people. Okay, number two. Is it mine? Yep. Okay.

My number two, I would say the episodes on the banking crisis. And so that was another kind of kind of breaking news, I guess. Not exactly, not exactly breaking like the UAW one. That was practically a live story. But the banking crisis was such a huge deal and we were able to report on it, you know, a few days after. It really felt to me like this is what Wall Street Weekly should be doing, you know, breaking down the news stories that you're seeing on the very front page of your news apps and newspapers and stuff like that and just talking about those going through them, trying to simplify them and just getting all the interesting details out. Whenever I describe what Wall Street Weekly is, I always use that.

episode because for me that's kind of the pinnacle of an event that is fairly easy to understand once you know some basic terminology, some basic investing ideas, but most people don't want you to know or don't take the time to really break it down. And I think, like you said, that's really what Wall Street Weekly tried to be about every week. Okay, your number two? I already did my number two. I've got- Not keep up with this. This is ridiculous. I've got a one B and a 1A. So I'll do the honorable mention, which is a 1B. We weren't super involved in this, so I've got to give all the credit to Joe Klazzi. But this did win us. Best Promotional announcement at the Michigan Association of Broadcasters Banquet. And I think it's so well done

that it deserves a second listen. It was a Wednesday, or was it a Tuesday? I'd lost track of time. My brain was spinning from the events of last week. Silicon Valley, credit Swiss. First the public. Jerome. How? What did it eat? and mean. After reading a tweet saying the U.S. banking system was doomed, I resolved to withdraw my life savings and buy Dogecoin and GameStop. Only fools wouldn't diversify. In the midst of the chaos, I heard a glimmer of hope. The soothing voice of Patrick Scott on the highly informing, overperforming Wall Street Weekly on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Only they could quell the fear in my heart. Maybe they could be the people we needed to guide our nation through

this crisis. Maybe. So overall, I think that was just a fantastic job. So actually the story behind this is pretty funny. It was a Tuesday before we record on a Thursday. And being such late notice, I had reached out to Joe with a little bit of a script and asked him if he'd be willing to record an intro for us. For that specific week, because Patrick and I had put a decent amount of time into preparing knowing that the banking crisis was a big opportunity for us, admittedly.

I remember my initial idea was that there would just be some rain sound effect in the background and making the bident crisis seem more dramatic than it actually was. And within about an hour, Joe had sent back to me the final draft, writing, oh, I didn't do that much, it wasn't that good, see if you like it. And when I finally listened to it, Patrick and I just laughed because we realized how far above and beyond he had gone to help make sure that specific show was going to be great for us. Joe's a man of many talents also designed our logo. And we really want to thank him for that. Like we said, it was an opportunity to go to the Michigan Association of Broadcasters award ceremony, get first place certificates.

And for Patrick and I, pretend like we were a big part in creating that. Joe's a real one. And yeah, that was pretty cool to be able to stand up on a stage for work we do in this tiny little studio, even though I had absolutely nothing to do with that. To be fair, you were the only name that was mentioned in that pro. That's true. But I think that goes to the banking episode and part of the reason, too, that it was so successful. What's your number one?

My number one, I chose because I just remember it being so fun to talk about in research. And it was really the idea that made me want to do the radio show in the first place when you asked me. And that is the meme stocks episode. So we had been talking about starting up this radio show for a little bit, maybe a month or so. and I was telling George, you know, I don't really know a whole lot about investing in finance and all of those things. It would kind of be like a one-man show if you asked me to do it with you. But then I started thinking, you know, there are all these stories that I want to learn about. Like the meme stocks, for example.

So that was GameStop and AMC and all the Reddit Army creating the short squeeze that lost Wall Street a ton of money and launched the stock prices of these two supposedly, you know, joke companies. And I just thought that was such an interesting story. Even someone outside of finance and investing could really enjoy that. I thought that's what I would want to bring to the table. I remember when we were first pitching ideas for Wall Street Weekly. Now we've kind of, a couple days before we record, we decide what we want to talk about

in the episode. And I think that's the best format for a show like this. But early on, I didn't know if we were going to have enough content to do a 22-minute show every week. And I remember trying to write down ideas on the board. Yep. And it was the meme stock episode. And I think one other story that maybe kept coming up, maybe the 2008 financial crisis.

And that's all we could brainstorm. And it's really cool to see that we went from not really knowing what we were going to talk about. A lot of it we felt was going to have a deep historical focus. That was initially the idea was having Patrick do a main historical story every week. And then I would do three news stories. And I think we've kind of come to find out that so much of Wall Street is just noise. There's new stories that if we would talk about one week, they were going to be irrelevant the next week. So we started shifting more away from those type of stories and trying to find things that are going to be truly irrelevant when hopefully people are listening to these a year or two down the road.

Is it time for me to do my one? I think it's time. Hit me. All right. I might be cheating a little here. I'm not sure what the official rules say, but I think visiting Wall Street as a part of this show, directly related there. But if you were to tell me day one when we started this show,

that we'd be able to visit Wall Street as Wall Street Weekly, paid by the radio station because we were at an awards banquet in New York. I would have thought that's pretty cool. I guess I always had thought that our show was good enough. to be considered for a national award, but I think once you actually get something like that, you feel very imposter syndrome, like, oh, wow, we don't deserve to be here with people

who have committed their lives to doing radio. But overall, it was just a crazy opportunity to see at least a part of what our show is about in real life. Man, I didn't really think about that until you said that. How, when you were saying, how you didn't really imagine that we could be going to New York on a trip like that to Wall Street. for the radio show. That's kind of crazy to think back on. That was not even remotely in my mind.

Yeah, and that was such a fun trip. Praise God for this opportunity. It's been so fun. Yeah, I was not even thinking about that at that time. But yeah, now that you just mentioned it, that's insane to think that we actually went to Wall Street because of this radio show, because of this sort of random interest idea that you had one and a half years ago. Wow, that's, yeah, that's pretty incredible. At the end of the day, though, I think we both agree that, And I'm going to get very Hillsdale in here. Just being able to do this for the sake of itself was worth it. Even if we wouldn't have been able to get all these crazy opportunities to meet, to interview,

and to go places, even if we only had one listener or 10 listeners, just being able to really dive into a topic that we're passionate about is so valuable. And it's really something I'll never forget. Yeah, but the added trips are definitely a huge blessing as well along with that. I mean, we're going to Omaha, Nebraska. week. Yeah, the radio program is not paying for that, but walking around a place with a microphone that says Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM makes people want to talk because when people hear that they can be on the radio, they will tell you all of their life stories and all their experiences.

Definitely. I mean, yeah, you want to make someone feel valued, ask them what their story is. And hopefully we were able to do that in 22-minute increments. Well, for the last time, we've reached the end of our time slot. One quick memory that I also just remembered. Also from our very first episode that makes me smile just to think about this, but I remember

the very first time we clicked record on the computer in that small, cramped, old recording office. We were just kind of both looking at each other as you were doing the intro, and we were just smiling so big, like, this is crazy that we're doing this. We're actually

recording a podcast. and 30 some episodes later. 35, he said. I think, yeah, 35, 37 somewhere in there. And this is the final official one, like I said. Hopefully we can get a Berkshire episode out because those are fantastic. But Patrick, is there anything you want to say before we go off air for the last time? Well, it's been a while a ride.

It's been a ton of fun. We've both put a lot of hours into this. George, thank you so much. This has been really great. And Pat, the best co-host, a man. could ask for and you the best audience a show could ask for so thank you so much for listening to wall street weekly on hillsdale's own wrfh radio free hillsdale one one point seven fm