YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Fortt

lines on the record: 86
first: 2021-02-16
most recent: 2021-02-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Want to build up teacher training, to prepare teachers, to present this material in the classroom. Now, I'm not an educator, but I'm blessed to be the son of an educator, the husband of an educator. I have so much respect for educators, so I'm working with experienced teachers who are workshopping these in a way that can help other teachers to present it.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've covered entrepreneurs for so long. I didn't necessarily intend to be one, but it's one thing teaching this course live to a group of mostly middle schoolers. It's another thing than translating that into an interactive experience, doing web development around it, doing original writing and original illustrations around it, kind of building up the payment system. I've been deep in it, and it's going to, I've got three full lessons published, each one an hour to an hour plus long. There are 18, 17, 18 lessons total. So it's going to take me a while to build this out, but there's also exciting work that I'm doing, both getting it in front of a college audience, building it out as a college course. Also, I'm working with a charter school locally, or actually a network of schools that's looking to use it.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, people have said things like that out loud. So yes, there's work to be done on both sides of this. They're both important goals, needles to move.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is not enough investment going to black and brown entrepreneurs because there are too many investors who are pattern matching, looking for somebody who looks like Mark Zuckerberg in a hoodie. And they admit it. Right. So”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're both important, right? They're both important. And I think we have to be careful not to elevate one at the expense of the other. I had the enormously valuable experience of growing up in Washington, D.C. in the 80s, in a community that was heavily black and I had some great black teachers and that helped my sense of identity. And despite the things that were happening in the larger culture, I had these opportunities and these role models. And boy, like, wouldn't trade that for the world. That's important, right? The in-group stuff is important. It's not politic or comfortable talk about because it gets misunderstood and can get turned around and used against the community, but it's still important. It's a conversation that's got to happen in the right ways and the right context. That doesn't mean that those other effects aren't happening. They absolutely are there.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like I hear that argument a lot. I'm an Indian American kid. I was not allowed to get bees. I still got some bees. I'm going to be honest, wasn't it? I wasn't perfect. But I felt that pressure. I know what you're talking about. But I feel like when I say equality of opportunity or when I say economic justice, I don't think everyone's going to win the lottery today. I look around and I see, well, there were a lot of black entrepreneurs at the beginning of the internet, but I don't see a lot of black entrepreneurs getting venture capital money right now. That has nothing to do with whether their friends pressured them to get straight A's.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a lot of black communities to be a nerd. Now, my Asian American friends, I got a friend who, you know, his little brother got a B once on an interim report card in one class. It was an interim report card. Didn't even end up on the final report card. And in his group of friends, they started calling him Joe B for the rest of school because he got a B once on an interim report card. Like that was a scarlet letter for him. Now, look at the disparity in the peer pressure in that situation. If one group is pressured to get straight A's, and if you deviate even on an interim report card, you get made fun of, and another group is getting pressured to have an excellent crossover, and the freshest new basketball shoes, like cash infusion isn't going to solve that, right? There's work that we need to do at multiple levels.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It goes well for them, sometimes it doesn't. But what are the cultural tendencies? What are the educational systems? What are the habits that we have set up, that we encourage that lead to these disparate outcomes for different communities? I think we have to look at that. And that's not a, I mean, I'm being kind of intentionally and unintentionally vague because in the black community, there's this thing where we have in-group conversations and we have out-group conversations, right? And the out-group conversation is very often about justice and the need for racial justice. And that is important. There's also an in-group conversation that we have about what we as a community need to focus more on, right? When I was growing up, I was not a popular kid because I wasn't into sports, right? And because I was more focused on writing and drawing superheroes. And I was a nerdy kid. It wasn't popular.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically about economic justice. Well, you know, I think economic justice, I'm not sure I love the term, though I love what it represents. I think very often once we get to talking about economic outputs, we're talking about outcomes that are the result of something. We're talking really the inputs are culture, our messages, our education, right? So we need justice at that level before I think we start talking about economic justice. It's not as though if you just were able to put a big cash infusion into black and brown communities right now, just give everybody some six or seven figure amount of money, like that would solve the underlying issues. It doesn't. We see what happens when people win the lottery.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me connect the two parts of our conversation. A lot of people would say that the real racial justice comes out of economic justice. And I would agree with those people. I would agree with that idea that the lack of economic justice in this country, what you and I talked about is opportunity equality, is what has created most of the disparities that we now see as injustice. How do you approach that? I mean, you have, now you have a platform where you're teaching a course about the black experience in America. And you have a large platform where you talk to executives every day. And I don't think it's a stretch to say most of the executives on CNBC are white. How do you connect those things”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, but then once I got through with it and looked at the material and sort of looked at the structure of it, I understood that not much modification needed to be made for people to understand the black experience in the context of the American experience and in the context of individual cultural experience. So I think I've had people of various different backgrounds go through lessons in the course and say, boy, I really connected with double consciousness because of my immigrant experience. And now I have a different sense of how that plays out in American society. And it's not all negative, but it's just a lens. The Black experience is a lens through which we understand the American experience, and hopefully we understand our own experience, even if we're not having personally the Black experience.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's really in its current form that I'm building it out online and there's an interactive platform at fortmedia.com, classes.fortmedia.com. But just go to fortmedia.com. You can start. It's $5 a lesson. I wanted to intentionally make it very accessible. It really is for everybody. At first, it was, like you said, for my kids. And I also taught it over Zoom to nine other black kids over the summer. My core mission was for this to be available to young people, young people of color, who would benefit from it. But even as I was teaching it, I'm hearing from friends who are white, who are Asian American, you know, I want to do this with my kids. I was like, kind of, hold on. Hold on. It's not for you.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“expressed in poetry and art, that really helped them connect with the things that they've seen going on in society around them that they couldn't quite understand. Even the pressure around that black kids put on other black kids about what it means to act black or talk black or being accused of acting white because you're doing well in school. There's a whole lesson on internalized racism that explores some of those things. And for this generation, that was a lot of the way that they were able to connect to the continued importance and relevance of race for them.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my relationship with my mom coming up, the stuff that she was saying about race and what I needed to be afraid of, I was like, mom, what are you talking about? It's 1992. Things are totally different. Like if I was thinking that in 1992, what are my kids thinking, right, in 2020, 2021, right? So how do I show them how race is relevant for them? And so that's why I did things like tie in Shakespeare and Othello reach into Tony Morrison and the bluest eye to show the gender part of how double consciousness and identity plays out in a racialized society and how there are beauty standards that don't necessarily see beauty to the same degree, right, in everybody of every shade and how we have to have our own sense of identity and value apart from that. And so going through some of that, showing them some history around Paul Lawrence, Dunbar, and we wear the mask and dialect poetry and kind of how he was limited and ran up against limits, but later Maya Angelou had a little bit more room to run and how that gets.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, I think a lot of the talk is too abstract. And what I didn't want to do is scare our kids, right? Because we live in the suburbs right now, like with a pretty diverse police force. They don't have exactly the same concerns that we see play out elsewhere in the country. And I don't want to build up an unrealistic nightmare type relationship with the police. I've had lots of interactions with the police over my lifetime. 99% of them have been positive, right? So I don't want to overly focus on the negative, even though the negative part is important. So a lot of it was context. What I wanted to do was, first of all, on the identity piece, show them how race is relevant today. Because my mom grew up in the segregated South, and even for me,”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called false restarts. And that's really a reference to this pattern that I see in history where there are these big moments when it comes to race and culture where we take three steps forward. But then we take two steps back. So civil war, emancipation, but then reconstruction, the black codes two steps back. Civil rights movement, but then we have kind of botched integration, busing pushback against that. And so we were in this moment in summer 2020 after George Floyd was killed where there was all of this movement and talk and action around things are going to be different. I had a lot of people saying to me, it's going to be different this time, John Wright. Like everything's changing. And I was like, not so fast. Like, yes, some things are changing, but there's a pattern here. There's a lot of ambition leaps forward, but then there's two steps back. This is hard work over time that takes study, knowledge of what's been accomplished in the past, what's worked in the past, what hasn't. And so all of that is what I wanted to communicate and build into the structure of the course.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“civil rights movement and now everything's supposed to be better and is it I don't know but now it's the present right like that's that's a lot of how black history is usually taught and I thought well no that's that's not a good framing it's kind of too focused on victimization on the on the one end and hero worship on the other there's so much complexity both about the black experience and the American experience that needs to wrap into all of that and so I structured something that's in three parts what I call cycles the first really focuses in on identity it's called double consciousness really focusing in on WEB Du Bois and what he articulated in the souls of black folk the second part is called how we got here and that's meant both metaphorically like how we got to this point and literally how black people got from Africa to the Americas and then the last part is”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was a lot of what I wasn't going to communicate, but I really wanted to focus on, this is an important issue. What am I going to communicate? And it went beyond, it needed to go beyond the talk that we talk about black parents having with their kids. I'd had a bid of that with our kids about authority and bias and society. I wanted to go a lot deeper. And so as I thought about all of the things that I wanted to communicate to our sons, I thought, well, this isn't a talk, this is a course. So let me think about structurally what it should be. And so much of black history, the way it's taught, focuses in on slavery and civil rights movement. And it's like there's a minor lead up and then slavery and it's terrible, it's terrible, it's terrible, middle passage, oppression, cotton, etc. And then emancipation, maybe a little unreconstruction didn't really work out.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I'm sure people might think he's got a company about black stuff. How did that happen? How did he cook that up? Well, what happened was what had happened was in all seriousness when George Floyd was killed. I was thinking about what am I going to communicate about this to our two sons, my wife and I have two sons right now. They are 12 and 10. And part of this was there was a big outpouring of emotion and activism around this. People were marching. I'm a journalist, so I don't march. I don't go anywhere and carry any signs. It's not my role, right? So this led to a little bit of confusion in the household. It's like, well, you know, are we allowed to go out and march debt? Yes, you guys can march. I'm just not coming. Can we put a sign in the yard? No, you can't put a sign in the yard.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, first of all, I didn't come up with this as a commercial idea. This wasn't like, I want to start a company. What should it be about? How about... black stuff like it wasn't That's not where it came from.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make your argument. I just don't happen to be one. I don't think that the free market automatically is moral and just because, you know, this is a country where we had a market for people not too long ago. And that's under, you know, free market. That's perfectly fine, right? It's not perfectly fine. So I'm all for the necessary regulation to express the morals of the republic. And there ought to be some. But I'm also an unabashed capitalist.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean books, history books are going to spend so much time on Elon Musk and what he has done, not just with Tesla, but also with SpaceX. The guy is a phenomenon. Like, yes, you'll also tweet about Dogecoin. I don't know how the history books are going to handle that. But a guy like that in a fair system, he gets rewarded. Like, that's what you want to happen. Yes, I'm an unabashed capitalist. I'm not a libertarian. I think there needs to be guardrails on the road. Not saying anything about libertarians.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think about this a lot, right? The place where the opportunity inequality turns into the income inequality. Is the problem, and I don't think that we've Even when the opportunities are equal and the work is equal, we still see income inequality. And I think that's flattened a little bit in this conversation about who makes all the money and whom it doesn't make enough. I often see the mistake of we shouldn't pay out against the risk. And you and I cover tech companies. Most startups just fail. That money just disappears and you've just accepted the risk of that money likely just disappearing.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For opportunity equality and fair rules, and then yeah, let the income be unequal, not to a degree where the poor are getting crumbs and the rich are, you know, Bezos and Musk, there's some issues there. But yeah, we want people to be successful. I'm not like AOC. I don't want to outlaw billionaires. I don't think billionaires are a sign that there's something. Hey, you know, Apple should be worth a whole lot of money for inventing the iPhone and the people who bet on it early, both by investing in it and working there and helping to invest that stuff. I'm happy that they're rich.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want income inequality. How messed up is income equality? I don't want my coworker who's working half as hard as me making the same money. Forget that. I don't want income equality, right? I want income that matches my effort and I want opportunity that's equal for everybody. I think that's what we should want. So let's talk about opportunity equality based on neighborhoods where people live, access to quality education, access to a basic level of food and healthcare that makes sure that kids can show up, ready to learn, all of that. Like what are the things that we need to get this economy working for everyone? Because selfishly, like if we're being selfish even as individuals, we should want every single person in the American economy trained up to the max of their potential because that's going to lift everybody, right? So let's go.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About BlackRock? Probably not much, especially since a significant portion of your retirement investing and even your long-term savings should just be in an index fund, and BlackRock isn't going to mess with your index fund money, right?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Like, first of all, why is the retail investor trading? If you're the retail investor, right, hopefully you're reading the verge, you're reading the reviews of the first M1 Apple laptops out, and you're thinking, okay, well, based on the fact that Apple's big enough now to vertically integrate in its hardware and get more margin out of every device, and based on the battery life that I'm hearing is coming out of this thing, do I think the stock is worth buying, right? Like, and then you're watching CNBC and you're seeing the earnings and you're making a decision on whether you should own Apple for the long term. Hopefully you're not sitting there thinking, oh, well, GameStop is at 250 now, and we're in the midst of a short squeeze. Should I buy it here? Like, I mean, if you want to gamble and have fun, you can maybe you can't go to Vegas, you can play side bets on GameStop for this week, and that'll be entertaining for you, but don't do that with your rent money or your retirement savings, right? Like invest for the long term. Then do you have to worry?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fair correctly incentivized way to make sure that every person has an opportunity to get educated, to become a productive part of the economy, and then to live comfortably, right? Like if you're working hard, if you have access to education, you're doing all the right things, maybe everybody's not going to be Jeff Bezos. But I think people just want a shot at not having to sweat it at the end of every month. And I don't think that's too much to ask.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure that's the right place. I mean, we're talking about righteous anger at a time when anybody over the past decade could have made the boring smart bet and bought the S&P 500, and they'd be doing very nicely right now if they had the disposable income to do that. And that's a big if because a lot of people have been out of work. Income inequality, which I think is a messed up term. I think the distance, the space between the poor and the rich has opened up to a crazy degree. And so people at the lower end of the socioeconomic strata have had a whole lot of difficulty being able to afford to invest for the long term. The market going up doesn't mean much to them. So yes, that's an issue. But I think the core issue, again, becomes”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the markets have been over financialized, right? Like to me, one of the classic examples, and this isn't in the US market, but you and I talk about tech companies all the time, Sony has a bigger insurance business than it does a TV business or even a film business, right? Its main business is financial services. There are lots of GM is another great example where its loans unit was big enough to at once be spun out. That's where Ally, the bank came from. That was just GM's financial services division. Like they weren't a car company. They were a bank that made cars. And then eventually we split them off and turned them into an actual bank. There's just a lot of financialized games that happen in the economy that most people don't see or don't understand that have tectonic impacts on our lives. Is that the place to point the righteous?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it is possible, but I think it's partly on us as journalists to arm the people with information. And I think it's partly on the fabric of our civil society and democracy because what's supposed to be great about democracy is and what is great about healthy democracies is that anger gets funneled into informed action and the ballot box and things get changed in a smart way because people get upset. I mean, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement on and on and on. We've seen this. Like that's what happens when righteous anger meets with good information and kind of good leadership, ethical leadership and righteous action. We've got to, I think, reinvigorate good information and reinvigorate democracy out of all of this to get things changed in the right way.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a lot of very pent up anger out there, though, right? There is an entire generation that came out of college into the financial crisis of 2008. President Obama just put out his memoir. There's a lot of regret over the size of that stimulus. Maybe you didn't get the economy going enough. You see Joe Biden right now with his coronavirus stimulus package. He's saying, I'm not making this mistake again. There's just a lot of sense that the wrong people were helped out of the financial crisis, the banks, not enough regular people were helped. And regardless, it wasn't enough. And that has wrecked the economy forever. Where does that anger go, right? If it's not pointed at Wall Street in the form of Wall Street bets and Robin Hood, how do you make it something constructive? Is it even possible?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because then that holds back innovation. But you need enough consistent, clear rules that the right type of innovation and the right type of behavior gets incentivized, whether you're talking about companies and leaders, or you're talking about people who are trading. You don't want to give people incentives to do unhealthy things.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if it's exactly in every case how we want it to work. I mean, with Tesla at the heights where it is right now, it's easy to forget that a couple years ago, Elon Musk was like, Elon Musk was like the worst year of my life. It was, you know, hell and blah, blah, blah. Now he's riding high. But in part, that's because of the pressure that he was under, which is in part because of the shorts. Now, what if we had lost Tesla and all of that innovation because some people just wanted to make money betting against it? That's why I'm saying there need to be some limits. We want the game to be fair, right? Like when you're, it's like when we're watching the NBA or watching the Super Bowl and the refs are making a bad class. Like, well, it's not that we don't want any refs and it's not that we just want consistency and we want fairness so that the best are able to win. And I think that's really what this is about. I get uncomfortable with talks about regulation being the solution to everything. We don't want too much regulation.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Elon Musk thinks shorting stocks should be illegal, but part of the reason he thinks that is because there is a lot of short interest in Tesla against a lot of extremely vocally supportive retail interests in Tesla. That seems like the right dynamic, right? You got a bunch of big players who are like, I don't think he's ever going to make enough cars. I can bet against it, and you've got a bunch of people who believe in him very specifically, who can't afford a Tesla, who can open up Robin Hood and buy some Tesla stock, and it goes up and they're happy and he's capitalized enough to build more cars. How would you even stop that? Isn't that exactly how we want that system to work?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out and look at the housing crisis. It's horrible what happened at the end of the housing crisis, people losing their homes, etc. But there were people who were short mortgage-backed securities who were absolutely telling the truth about what was happening in the market because they were incentivized to do so. That's not a bad thing. If somebody is negative, but they're right, We don't want to outlaw negativity. You know, need to learn to sort through facts and figure out what the right thing is.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's all sorts of reasons why it's not really more than 100%, but you should not have more than 100% of the float of a stock sold short. But at the same time, I don't think that short selling, betting against a stock should be illegal. And I just look back to Enron, right? Who were some of the people who called out the Enron scam? They were short sellers. In part, why? Because there was a financial incentive for them to do so. And I think that's great. You know, just like there ought to be a financial incentive for people to make their argument about why Tesla is the future and it's so awesome, you know, and it has the potential to be worth the 800 billion plus that its market cap reflects. There should be people who are able to say, you know what, these Enron financial statements, they don't make sense. This thing is a scam. It needs to be called.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, first of all, there need to be limits on short selling. The degree to which GameStop was shorted and AMC was so crazy that it was begging for this to happen, right? You should not have more than 100%”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know what that means, right? It's just like at every stack, it's Every part of the stack, we shouldn't let you short stock all the way to the market should reflect the value of labor in the companies and we shouldn't treat it like a casino. All of those sound good. Which ones do you think are the most viable and which ones do you think as you've watched the market grow and more people participate are the most reasonable?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AOC and Ted Cruz bizarrely agree that something about hedge funds should be investigated. I still don't know. Elizabeth Warren seems to think that the market in general needs a new set of regulations such that it reflects the value for companies in their workers, not over financialized hedge fund guys.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should talk about it. I don't really know how you would do it. The process by which Robin Hood prevented people from buying stock will be investigated by Congress. I'm sure some regulation will come out of that. When does the term of service agreement for Robin Hood supersede whatever expectations? I don't know. Some regulation will be proposed there, right?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there were a lot of calls to regulate various parts of the market in the wake of the GameStop. And at the very beginning of our conversation, you said we still don't know what we learned. I would say that we don't know what part of this system we should regulate. So here's just, I made a quick list. Elon Musk thinks shorting stocks should be illegal”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a consumer protection issue. People are saying, let me trade, let me trade often. Yeah, but if we know that if you trade with high frequency, you tend to lose, then, I mean, talk about putting the retail investor in a bad position by getting them hooked on something. You know, trading is not investing, is not candy crush, right? It doesn't work that way. And if there's a system set up that makes it feel like that, that might just be bad for retail investors.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure I'm not sure that's democratized. I think you're right. And yeah, it makes it seem like a game. It's gamified. But I mean, is it democratized? There are some things that shouldn't necessarily be too fun. Like if you're seeing what stocks are trending, and that encourages you to trade them often and payment for order flow, you want a flow of orders. You want people buying and selling often kind of history shows that when you trade more often, you lose. If you make a smart buy and you hold it over time, that tends to be better. So do we want a system? I'm not saying should it be allowed. Yes, people should be allowed to do what they want, but do we want a system where the mass market of retail investors are encouraged to trade frequently when we know that they're more likely to lose? Like, I don't know.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's worth teasing out. So that is the business model that enables free trades, which makes more people likely to trade. I think if the eTrade desktop website, which I don't know if you've looked at it in a while, it's still pretty ugly, right? Like they didn't, all of their design attention is on their mobile app. But if the e-trade desktop website or any other old school bank desktop website enabled free trades based on payment for order flow, you might still not see these kinds of runs, right? You wouldn't get the democratized finance experience that we're seeing. It's also because it's a phone app that is extraordinarily friendly and makes it seem like a game. And that to me is like...”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's probably some advertising that could be done in this case. But I think part of what is at the root of this is if you're getting a good service, you should probably pay for it. Or at least the costs should be revealed to you so that you have the opportunity to pay. Because I think for a lot of people, even in this Robin Hood situation where they restricted certain types of trades over time, there were people who were very upset. How can you restrict me, Robin Hood? I ought to be able to trade. You're not paying for these trades, right? So what level of service exactly do you expect? You know, when they're sort of trying to serve everybody in a free system and they get overwhelmed, stuff is going to break, right? Either because it just can't handle the volume or because they have to break it to keep from overwhelming their system. In a way, it's similar to what we saw happen with parlor.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, you could make payment for order flow illegal. I guess that would be fine. There are probably other ways to make trading free if you really determine to do it. I mean, there are people now who want to try tipping as a way to, I don't know how that's going to work. Yeah, I had a great experience with that trade. Here's 10 bucks, Mr. Broker.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That what you're describing is called payment for order flow. Is very controversial. And theoretically, the big banks and trading houses aren't allowed to front run trades in this way, right? It's supposed to be illegal, but there's obviously value in it because they're buying it and Robin Hood exists as a business”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe you don't care, but if you're trying to put a short squeeze on the powers that be in Wall Street, you don't want them looking over your shoulder knowing what you're doing, right? Because then that's mono-e mono. So that's, yeah, the one part of it, the business model, it's free, but it's not free. Kind of like Facebook is free, but it's not free.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get an idea of what's trending before it happens. This era, data is everything. We talk about the data that Facebook has to be able to target advertising. Well, because of free apps like Robinhood potentially, Wall Street has data to target trades. For most people, individuals, if you're trading in for the long term, you know, buying some stock here or there you want to hold for a while, maybe you don't care who's looking over your shoulder and getting to see, oh, well, Neil is buying 20 shares of Apple, which of course you aren't because of the ethics policy and whatnot. You're a journalist. But, you know, hypothetical and hypothetical.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT