Winning the Degenerate Economy with StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon

Summary

Masters in Business – Winning the Degenerate Economy with StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon

Host: Barry Ritholtz (Bloomberg Radio)
Guest: Howard Lindzon (CEO, StockTwits; Co-founder, Social Leverage)
Date: May 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode brings Howard Lindzon—a venture capitalist, trader, entrepreneur, and CEO of StockTwits—back to the show for a candid, humorous, and insightful conversation on the evolution of markets, social media investing, and what he calls the "degenerate economy." As an early Robinhood investor and a longtime observer and participant in the convergence of technology, finance, and culture, Lindzon reflects on luck, timing, and the fine line between genius and market cycles. The conversation is equal parts entertainment and wisdom, peppered with anecdotes about early career misadventures, investing philosophy, and the unique dynamics shaping retail trading and startup culture today.

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Table of Contents

1. Howard Lindzon’s Background & Education
2. Inventing Social Leverage & Early Investments
3. The Robinhood Story: Serendipity and the Degen Economy
4. StockTwits, the Cash Tag, and Missed Exits
5. Understanding the “Degenerate Economy”
6. Public vs. Private Investing: Lessons Learned
7. Advice for the Next Generation
8. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
9. Timestamps for Key Segments

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1. Howard Lindzon’s Background & Education <a name="background"></a>

• Grew up in Toronto during the heyday of Canadian comedy (Second City era).
• Studied at University of Western Ontario (Commerce), MBA at Arizona State, and Master’s from Thunderbird School of Global Management.
• Early aspirations in stand-up comedy, influenced by legends like John Candy, Martin Short, Mike Myers, and Jim Carrey.

Notable Moment:

• [07:28] “Everybody wanted to be a comic. No different than, like Web 2.0. Everybody went to Stanford to be an Engineer. Right. In 90s, it was investment banking. Now it'll be robots and AI… I grew up with comedy in the water.” —Howard Lindzon

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2. Inventing Social Leverage & Early Investments <a name="social-leverage"></a>

• First invested in late 1990s companies (e.g., Cars Direct) and lost money (“retail idiot”).
• Found initial success in the 90s with a toy product (“The Grip”)—huge sales through QVC and corporate branding.
• Saw the shift from financial leverage era (pre-2008) to “social leverage” as social media exploded.
• Launched Social Leverage (“As an early adopter of social media, an idiot like me… could grow their network for free forever.” — 23:40).

On Social Leverage:

• [30:07] “You can implode with social leverage, whereas it's financial leverage… the idea was social leverage. If you know the right three people, you can grow your network for free forever.”

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3. The Robinhood Story: Serendipity and the Degen Economy <a name="robinhood"></a>

• Early Robinhood investor: $100K at $8M valuation, despite thinking it was “expensive.”
• Recognized Robinhood’s potential as a “zero customer acquisition cost” broker, as opposed to Schwab’s $150/customer.
• “If I didn’t get that right (as StockTwits founder), I’m nobody.” —[31:44]
• Venture capital's failures: Most bet on “robo-advisors,” not on fast, mobile-first brokers; Lindzon saw the consumer movement and interface advantages.
• Later participated in the next Robinhood fundraising; underscored lesson: “If you really believe, you have to go all-in—as a VC.”

Memorable Story:

• [53:03] “Luckily, by writing that term sheet, Vlad and Baiju did the right thing and they carved out as much as we could… If we had done the $11 million, I'd be a billionaire.” —Howard Lindzon

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4. StockTwits, the Cash Tag, and Missed Exits <a name="stocktwits"></a>

• Created StockTwits to bring financial chat to social media, innovating the “cash tag” (e.g., $AAPL for Apple).
• Twitter never acquired StockTwits due to lack of financial vision: “They don’t understand finance… Twitter is like my Newman from Seinfeld. It was a clown car that crashed into a gold mine.” —[41:24]
• Reflection on the startup journey: “Not everything should be venture capital… I’m not proud of running a company 17 years later. Wasn’t my dream.” —[44:07]
• Missed acquisition windows, but StockTwits is “thriving…we were 10 years ahead of our time.” —[45:39]

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5. Understanding the “Degenerate Economy” <a name="degenerate-economy"></a>

• Defines the “degen economy” as the explosion in frictionless speculation: meme stocks, day trading, meme coins, options YOLO-ing, sports betting, and prediction markets.
• “Degeneracy is an art form…speculation.” —[54:03]
• Robinhood and its seamless interface made it “too easy” for waves of new retail traders to enter markets, sometimes crashing systems like during GameStop.
• Lindzon’s “Degenerate Index” of stocks (CBOE, CME, HyperLiquid, Google, Apple, Amazon, Clear Secure, etc.) has outperformed the NASDAQ — +170% vs. +94% for QQQ since inception.
• “The whole world has become a casino. Thanks to AI and prediction markets, we’re all more productive and more degenerate.” —[53:39]

On Memes and Learning:

• “The markets are very important. Having a price on everything is fantastic.” [62:56]

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6. Public vs. Private Investing: Lessons Learned <a name="public-vs-private"></a>

• Public markets are underappreciated: “Most people should index, but everybody should learn how to pick stocks too in this era.” —[82:17]
• “I am bearish on my industry [venture investing]… What value do I add in a world of 6% interest rates, tying someone up for 10 years, when I could go buy SanDisk and get 6,000% in a year?” —[79:00]
• On angel investing: “Our job is to find a 100x…the release is telling my investors upfront: you’re gonna hate me, but my job is to find a Robinhood.” —[80:34]
• Questions today’s “spray and pray” VC environment and urges young investors to learn public markets first: “If you don't know the public markets, what are you doing in the private markets?” —[88:53]

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7. Advice for the Next Generation <a name="advice"></a>

• “No shame in being a #2 or #3. Chief of staff is the new CEO. Go work for a rocket ship…Forget about title, learn from the company that’s working.” —[86:24]
• Warns younger “degenerate” traders (including his own children) about confusing betting with investing: “If I hear that you did a parlay, we can’t be related. Stop betting. Betting is different than investing.” —[70:11]
• On modern mentorship: “Mentor-ship came from the community. Being a mentor opened me up to get mentorship. Karma.” —[83:20]

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8. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments <a name="notable"></a>

• On Luck and Timing:
  “If you were of the Google Glass era, not much worked. If you were in the BlackBerry Fund 2008, no go. No go, baby.” —Howard Lindzon [88:04]
• On Market Cycles vs. Genius:
  “We live in an era where those people are confusing their genius for a bull market.” —Howard Lindzon [14:00]
• On Public Markets:
  “What a great time to be a public market investor. And yet everybody wants to be a private investor.” —Howard Lindzon [81:59]
• On Degeneracy:
  “Degeneracy is an art form, like speculation. And I joke that I own and operate two millennials…” —Howard Lindzon [54:03]
• On Betting vs. Investing:
  “Betting is different than investing…If you want to start a company, do you know it’s 24/7, right? And no one’s going to like you.” —Howard Lindzon [86:24]
• On Angel Investing:
  “You are betting on me to hang 30 pieces of art in Howie’s Gallery, the Larry David Gallery. If I gave you the choice, you would pick the two that went to zero. Our job is to find a Robinhood.” —Howard Lindzon [80:34]
• On “Trends with no Friends” Investing:
  “I want to find stocks that are trending that have very little discussion... You want to find stocks that are trending with very few followers.” —Howard Lindzon [66:14]
• On Social Media & Innovation:
  “Twitter is like my Newman from Seinfeld. These people. It was a clown car, as Zuckerberg said; so many people that got rich...” —Howard Lindzon [41:24]

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9. Timestamps for Key Segments <a name="timestamps"></a>

• 02:02—Barry Ritholtz’s intro and episode theme
• 06:11—Howard Lindzon’s early career and comedy ambitions
• 13:08—Tech world parallels: “Web2 was the goofball era”
• 22:42—How Social Leverage started; early investing stories
• 31:07—The Robinhood origin story and Lindzon’s investment thesis
• 38:17—StockTwits, cash tags, and why Twitter never bought them
• 44:07—Reflections on running startups, missed exits, and venture backing
• 53:39—Defining and discussing the “degenerate economy”
• 54:03—Raising millennials as startups and betting vs investing
• 57:51—GameStop, apps, and the risk of retail herd behavior
• 59:10—Breakdown of the Degenerate Index; “Why isn’t this an ETF?”
• 66:14—“Trends with no friends” investing: finding ignored winners
• 70:11—Guardrails for young investors and the education paradox
• 79:00—Shift in venture capital, public market advantages
• 82:24—Final advice for young investors/entrepreneurs

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Episode Takeaways

• Markets have shifted from rigid, expensive, and closed to open, frictionless, and “degen”-driven—an opportunity and a risk.
• Timing and humility matter as much as (or more than) intelligence in investing.
• Public markets are underappreciated; angel and VC investing are often oversold, especially to those with little experience.
• “Being the house” (investing in picks-and-shovels, exchanges, infrastructure) is still as lucrative as ever—if not more so in the degenerate era.
• The best edge is “trends with no friends”—finding rising stocks that no one is talking about.
• Humor, self-awareness, and an ability to laugh at success/misfortune are underrated business virtues.

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This episode is packed with one-liners, battle scars, and hard-earned wisdom—a must-listen (or, with this summary, must-read) for anyone straddling the fault lines of finance, technology, and cultural change.

Transcript

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[Howard Lindzon]

Bloomberg

[Apple Card Announcer]

Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News this is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on

[Barry Ritholtz]

Bloomberg Radio this week on the podcast Strap Yourself in for a Banger, I welcome back my old friend degenerate gambler Howard Lindsayn. We talk about stock twits, about social leverage, about his early investment in Robinhood, about why he's concerned about the degeneracy economy between meme coins and end of day options and parlays. He's concerned about what the next generation is doing. I thought this conversation was hilarious and I think you will also. With no further ado my sit down with the one and only Howard Lenzon.

[Howard Lindzon]

Wow. If only my kids could hear that.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I know they think you're just an old man. They haven't wince, use the finger and ask for pity.

[Howard Lindzon]

Surgically reattached surgically reattached is a lesson of how lucky we are. I've lived without acute pain. Like, first of all, when I. When I cut it off, it's amazing how many people do do that.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Was it still dangling on or was it severed completely?

[Howard Lindzon]

You pick it up, you call 911 and you go, as a Jew, I wasn't sure if I boil it or freeze it. So that was the question I asked 911, because it's never happened.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Well, as a Jew, you're only supposed to take the tip off.

[Howard Lindzon]

I don't know if you cook it, I don't know if you freeze it. It's like lobster. So the woman on 911 said, Please don't bleed out. I go, that is not helpful right now. As luck would have it, I live on Coronado.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Good advice.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, good advice. I'm like, the one time I gotta write that down, 91 1. I go, let's not talk. Get me a machine over to my house. Give me a robot. So living in Coronado is a magical place. You've been there a couple of times. And the great news about Coronado is the Navy Bays, Navy seals are there. It's like, it's the greatest place.

[Barry Ritholtz]

They have a hospital right there.

[Howard Lindzon]

They do, but I'm saying there's cops and firemen everywhere.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Everywhere, right?

[Howard Lindzon]

So literally, as I'm dialing 91 1, it's like they knew I cut my finger off. So as a miracle would have it, the young. I've never really had to be in an ambulance. So again, I'm lucky. And they took me off island because they found a hand surgeon who turned out to be 30 years old, which freaked me out because I thought he'd sew it on backwards or whatever. Anyways, long story short, you know, I was at peace once. You realize you're gonna live.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

Cause I've never had that happen like, something like that happen.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Were you gushing blood?

[Howard Lindzon]

Was it frightened? Yeah. Yeah. As a favorite of my wife, I went to the neighbors to bleed. So it was like the next day, it was spotless in front of our house. But as luck would have, everybody did a great job. The amazing thing, we make fun of so many things in America these days, the emergency system. I needed it. I don't care what I pay in taxes. It was amazing.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And yet you still have ten fingers.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I have ten fingers for now. The joke in the family is I don't want it because it's kind of like a dead finger at this Point.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Oh, really? Will it be functional? Will you regain function?

[Howard Lindzon]

It feels like if I'm using it, it just feels like a wet skin.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

And so I'm not happy. But the doctor was like, you can decide later. It was his.

[Barry Ritholtz]

If you want a prosthetic or.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, not a prosthetic. If you just want to work with a nub, it's only a third of the finger.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

So anyways, it was traumatic, but here we are.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Wow.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, there's great stories. If you're a storyteller, cut a finger off. I mean, if you want traffic on Twitter bleed out.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah, you'll get traffic, but no engagement. That's the problem with you.

[Howard Lindzon]

I wanna go viral. I got nine chances left.

[Barry Ritholtz]

21 if you want to be accurate.

[Howard Lindzon]

Toes are not good in the algorithm. Fingers are good.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And 21, the 21st, no go the

[Howard Lindzon]

21st, you could be president.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So let's roll back a little bit and start with your early education. Bachelor's from Commerce University. Bachelor's in Commerce from the University at Western Ontario.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, it's a famous business school. Mba, Arizona, and famous for Bums State Business School. What does that even mean?

[Barry Ritholtz]

And then masters at Thunderbird School of

[Howard Lindzon]

Global Management, which was a great school.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Now owned by a great animated cartoon in the 60s.

[Howard Lindzon]

Correct.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So what, given all that, what was the original career plan?

[Howard Lindzon]

Comedy. Yeah. I grew up, you and Martin Short,

[Barry Ritholtz]

right out of Canada. Right?

[Howard Lindzon]

Not Martin. He was already older, but. But I grew up in Toronto. And that was. So when I was 75, watching Johnny Carson on my first TV, you saw everybody and it was like your living room. And so Toronto had Second City had John Candy, Martin Short, Eugene Levy. Second City was before Saturday Night Live. And so I grew up to saran

[Barry Ritholtz]

around the same time. Weren't they little earlier?

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, yeah. So I'm like 12 years old, giggling, you know, and there was no Internet, so you were like, go to the comedy clubs with your friends. Toronto had this club called Yuk Yuks, which was a famous chain, like the Improv, but of Canada. And you had Mike Myers, another Canadian. Yeah, Everybody exploding onto the scene at the same time. And so I was doing standup in high school.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Get out.

[Howard Lindzon]

But not good, obviously. But Mike Myers would come up. Mike Myers would come up and kill. He was like 17 years old. Jim Carrey's 14 years old. Killing. Right. And so everybody wanted to be a comic. No different than, like Web 2.0. Everybody went to Stanford to be an Engineer. Right. In 90s, it was investment banking.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

Now it'll be robots and AI. It's just what's in the water. And I grew up with comedy in the water. And so that was the goal. And obviously, you know, with Jewish parents at the time, that ain't flying. Especially. I wasn't good. Right. And so I went to school.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You. You dropped that. You weren't good as like an afterthought. I think if you're successful and earning a living.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, I wasn't even.

[Barry Ritholtz]

A Jewish parent will put up with you now. It would be not like Jerry Seinfeld's mom is fine with it.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yes. But I'm saying now, if my son came to say, I'm gonna go hit the comedy tour, I'd warn him how dark it is. But I'd say, go make it go on YouTube, like, right, go 10,000 hours.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You don't have to live in motels.

[Howard Lindzon]

10,000 hours. Yeah. Get. The faster you get those 10,000 hours in, the better.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's right. So you grow up in Canada. You start your career in Phoenix and San Diego and New York City. I'm curious. That's an interesting, you know, Toronto, Phoenix, San Diego, New York. How did that geographical upbringing affect your perspective as an investor?

[Howard Lindzon]

Who. As an investor? I don't know.

[Barry Ritholtz]

As a young kid.

[Howard Lindzon]

As a kid, I was lucky because if you're Jewish in Toronto or New York, at that area, you go to Florida, you know, the original Del Boca Vista. And. But my dad was different and he discovered Phoenix. And So in the 80s, like, Phoenix was like swamp coolers, and he just liked the weather. And I don't know, I'll let you

[Barry Ritholtz]

know a little secret. The weather in Florida ain't great. It's humid.

[Howard Lindzon]

To my dad, obviously, that's what he. Yeah. So that's why he discovered Phoenix and bought a home. And I liked golf and biking. And so lucky for me, we had a. Instead of going to Florida, we were going to Arizona. And so I would go to the football games as a kid, and I was like, asu. That was my dream. Just go to Arizona State University, which I ended up doing for grad school, which isn't a great grad school, but it was party school. But that was my dream. Get out of Canada. Right. So I got lucky. My parents exposed me to Arizona, and I went to ASU at the time. It was amazing. And then if you're Jewish in Phoenix, because the summers, it's like New York goes to Florida in the winter. Jewish people in Phoenix go to this. Go to San Diego in the summer to get out of the ocean.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right. They want to closer to the ocean. It's a nice weather.

[Howard Lindzon]

Six hour drive and it's 70 degrees

[Barry Ritholtz]

and I love La Jolla and that's amazing.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's called Zonies. So Arizonans flood San Diego to Del Mar.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I wish.

[Howard Lindzon]

So we grew up Coronado. Not grew up, sorry. My in laws had a place in Coronado and so when we had kids I'm like, get out of the heat if you're not rich.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Summer in Coronado.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. We would not summer but a week here, a week there.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I Wish California wasn't six hours away. If it was two hours away, 100% we were just in San Francisco.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's fun again.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's a boom town. Tales of an apocalyptic hellscape have been wildly exaggerated.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's still not my favorite. But it's cool.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's less homeless than New York.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I'm not just talking about homeless. The people are still.

[Barry Ritholtz]

They're educated, they're intelligent. I mean if you're, if you lose, if you're.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's not New York City, it's not New York.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You could, you know when you leave New York, I, I don't know about you. I make a conscious effort to not be that New York abroad. Even out of time, out of town.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

California, especially San Francisco. It doesn't feel like you've left town.

[Howard Lindzon]

I love it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

I mean I just have the California bug.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yes.

[Howard Lindzon]

But coast to coast is a dream and I get to live it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So it's just a lot of travel.

[Howard Lindzon]

The thing about. And I do like Florida a lot but same as you, six hours like Phoenix or San Diego. Florida is like not on the no brainer. It's no, no one does it like it's not a thing.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right. No. Phoenix to San Diego makes sense. Phoenix to Florida just like New York to Florida makes sense.

[Howard Lindzon]

Correct.

[Barry Ritholtz]

New York to.

[Howard Lindzon]

So you ask. So you asked how that happened. That's the right of passage instead of Toronto, Florida. My whole life I jumped to the west coast and then I discovered San Diego through my in laws and my wife and man.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well you've been to Coronado. Oh yeah. It's ridiculous.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah. So let's. Let me, let me wrestle this.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Back into submission. So you've worn a lot of hats. You're a hedge fund manager, a founder, a CEO, a seed investor, a media personality. How do you describe to people who don't know you what you do?

[Howard Lindzon]

It's a great question. My in laws are in their 80s and they still ask me what do we tell people you do. And I'm like, who the hell cares? Well, and the world's now decided that for you, no one cares. Right. So what do you do? Right. Like, I think we're getting back into, like, where it's. You should be proud to have like a we call profession. I don't have a profession. So you asked how I got started as an investing. I got started as investing because I failed at everything else. And which is kind of the Larry David part of it is like I stumbled into it because the Internet is like water. It'd be like discovering California. Like, Internet was like tech. So the 90s were like, I didn't understand it was semiconductors. Right.

[Barry Ritholtz]

We're full circle.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm not a coder. I don't even know how things work. I never did Radio Shack. Right, Right. Like, so the, like walkie talkies were freaking me out. So the odds of me being in tech are part of the comedy full circle. We are now back in a tech world. Robots, chips, like real stuff, global secret.

[Barry Ritholtz]

We never left it. Just kind of.

[Howard Lindzon]

I found the goofball error. Web2 was the goofball error. Where social media, you could be the class clown and have scale. Okay, now that's gone again. And class clown. Now you need to be a bully again. You need to already have distribution.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right. It's hard to build distribution today. So I'm saying being an early adopter

[Howard Lindzon]

is certainly an advantage, but now it doesn't matter. You have to have real tech chops again. You can't pose like I am. Like I have imposter syndrome for the right reasons.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

Because I'm an imposter. Meaning the Internet left a little opening in 2006 for goofballs and we got to participate in an era of free growth when Facebook didn't charge you or have an AI algorithm that blocked you. You could say whatever you want. People go, he's funny. And you could scale for free. Which is why we had an Internet boom. Web 2.0 Internet boom right after the Internet crisis. Now we live in an era where those people are confusing their genius for a bull market.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right?

[Howard Lindzon]

And we're all sick of those people.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Can I push back on you?

[Howard Lindzon]

Sure.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But I know you so well for so long. Hold the imposter syndrome aside. The early Internet rewarded people who could communicate effectively, be it work your way through the media via blogs or short form blogs like Twitter or other social media or podcasts or video and YouTube. There's a whole run of different ways to use the Internet to scale.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So it's not an imposter. You basically just kept tacking into what was working. Oh, this works. Let's do more of it.

[Howard Lindzon]

Of course. But the era was free. So you had the great financial crisis. No one thought the Internet was going to happen. So meaning Uber couldn't be possible without Google Maps. Like people say, Uber's great. It wasn't possible unless there was an iPhone, the cloud, Google Media fiber. Otherwise globally typing, I want a taxi. Without Google Maps, no one would know where to go.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's right. And all of that only worked because of the bubble and the build out of Global Crossing and Metromedia Fiber. So I'm saying $1,000amile bought for pen.

[Howard Lindzon]

My imposter syndrome is born of. Of course I have an ego, but my imposter syndrome is surrounded by crazy people who. Who are mistaking. As I was talking to Tim o', Brien, if this was. We went from a world where strength mattered not that long ago to a century. This matters, right?

[Barry Ritholtz]

No.

[Howard Lindzon]

And I'm like people just. The humility is gone. And I feel it's with my kids and everything. It's with the injury and everything. You have to have some humility. We need to get back to having some humility and laughing at our success and going, wait a minute. It was a bull market. Zero interest. There was ZIRP. There was the free Internet AWS. You had YouTube. You had. If you. Here's my question. If you aren't successful, that'd be more interesting. I want to talk to the guy like the Larry David commercial with ftx when he's like, oh, the circle who fire.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Who needs a wheel?

[Howard Lindzon]

Who needs fire? That was such a great commercial because only Larry David or after, you know, I know the guys who wrote the commercial. What made that commercial great is Larry David gets the joke.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You're idiot. He's in on it.

[Howard Lindzon]

You're in on the fact that of course you made money. You worked at Facebook. It grew because the product was genius and tricked people into signing up. You did nothing except ride the train. Now, I'm not saying smart people didn't work there, but let's remember Game of Thrones. We're all dead. The people that are successful today are Mark Andreessen Chama. The people that I can't like are hilarious. They have no humility. Is that Game of Thrones era? We're all dead. First, second. First scene. There's a hammer in our heads and you and I might have a Chance. Because we're the court jesters.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's right.

[Howard Lindzon]

And if we dance well enough.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Dance for me, monkey boss.

[Howard Lindzon]

But Andreessen dead. Chama dead. There's just a pitchfork in their foreheads on the first scene of Gladiator.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Well, if you, you know.

[Howard Lindzon]

So that's the.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You have people like da Vinci that were consultants to the king to help build weapons and things. So unless you can, you know, early days of Palantir, unless you can say, hey, here's how to make a better catapult.

[Howard Lindzon]

Sure.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You know, those guys survive.

[Howard Lindzon]

So I'm saying I come along, like tweeting stock twits, like it was just enabling communication. Listen, I'm very proud of this stuff, but I also can laugh about how stupid it is. Like, I don't have another trick. The Internet left this opening. Kind of like discovering California. If you're early to discover California, made it past the Indians and the mountains, didn't get robbed by, like, murdered stampeded cash. Like, let's carry all our money in a stagecoach pulled by horses at three miles an hour. What are the odds we get killed?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right?

[Howard Lindzon]

It's impossible. So the Internet left this opening and I snuck through it. And it's fun to look back with some humor at the whole thing.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You're gonna laugh.

[Howard Lindzon]

I think the hole's closed up. Like, Elon owns the pipes. Zuckerberg owns the pipes. True Social owns their version of a pipe. TikTok has an algorithm. How do you break through?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Because those things get tired. And the next gen says, just the way. Just the way Facebook became. Oh, my parents are on Facebook. I'm out. I'm going to go to Insta and then I'm going to go to TikTok. And so there'll be something new.

[Howard Lindzon]

Questioning that. I'm just questioning. It'll never have been. It'll never be easier than when I made money. And I'm cool with that. Like, that's the imposter.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I don't just completely disagree with you. And you're touching on a pet thesis. I love to ask what would have happened to you had you been born 100 years earlier or even. Or even 25 years earlier. Right. If you're born in 1940, what happened?

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm a furrier. Look at my ox mouth.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I have all these beaver.

[Howard Lindzon]

I have a cafe that has so many dishes on it that make no sense. And I'm selling fur or something. I mean, I had no shot. I have no strength.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right. Just think about how fortunate I cut

[Howard Lindzon]

my own finger off, right?

[Barry Ritholtz]

So if you didn't bleed out your nine fingers forever, no, you should have showed the neck. You stick, you stick your finger into the fire and you cauterize it. That's what the old timers would tell you. Get a bot, get a piece of steel in the, in the fire, they'll heat up the iron. You just burn it and that's your.

[Howard Lindzon]

All I thought about was like, howie, is the ambulance gonna charge too much? And should I bleed at the neighbor's house? Those were my first two thoughts. My wife will kill me that I'm bleeding in our yard.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Coming up, we continue our conversation with Howard Lindzen, co founder of Social Leverage, discussing what he calls the degenerate economy. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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in just 15 minutes.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the podcast with a global view on the stories that matter.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm Nathan Hager.

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[Barry Ritholtz]

Plus one conversation on the day's biggest developments, all in just 15 minutes.

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Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for a precise,

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thoughtful take on the stories that matter.

[Howard Lindzon]

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[Barry Ritholtz]

Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest is someone I've known for too long, Howard Lindsin, co founder of Social Leverage, one of the earliest seed investors in Robinhood, which is a chapter in my book.

[Howard Lindzon]

Oh, wow.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let's do segment two. And I have to start by asking about Social Leverage. You've been doing this for 20 years.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So from the first seed fund you did to today where you have a portfolio of 150 plus companies. How has this evolved? First of all, what was the first company you invested in?

[Howard Lindzon]

So the first company I invested in was the. Was so dumb. Cars direct 1998. The tippy top. As my wire left digitally, my fingertips or whatever bank it was coming from, it was worthless. Right. Meaning like it was a series Q.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right. But this. You were just early.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Pets.com eventually.

[Howard Lindzon]

But I was later in that cycle

[Barry Ritholtz]

because Carvana would have been.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. So I was the retail idiot. So I grew up like I said, I went to asu. You're gonna be a furrier, right? That's your chance. And so. And a bad one because you know, so the Internet comes along. I fall in love with stock market because I had made some money at my. At my first startup and I had to be my own broker. And so Yahoo Finance, Jim Cramer, Street.com. like they're still around.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

So. So those were my onboarding. You were a.

[Barry Ritholtz]

For thestreet.com they were the dominant. Like people who are younger don't realize.

[Howard Lindzon]

By the way, Yahoo's still massive, right? Kramer's still massive.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I think thestreet.com doesn't get the traffic.

[Howard Lindzon]

Kramer used to.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Well yeah, well he's on TV twice a day.

[Howard Lindzon]

But I'm saying this is 30 years.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

So that was my introduction to retail investing because I couldn't afford a Bloomberg still can't. So I can afford the drapes.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I think you can afford a Bloomberg post.

[Howard Lindzon]

I could.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I wouldn't know how to use Robin Hood.

[Howard Lindzon]

I wouldn't know how to use it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

There's a phone chart especially with nine fingers. How you need all 10 fingers for the terminal.

[Howard Lindzon]

So I was inspired by you did street.com had murderers row of writers. It's amazing to a new investor I just would sit and wait for articles to come out. And Yahoo Finance. So I was on the message boards. Perlman, you like we were Danlos was on the message board.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So Cars Direct was your first investment.

[Howard Lindzon]

And 10 years later I got 10% of my money back after it being successful. So my first thing was a disaster.

[Barry Ritholtz]

What was your first successful investment?

[Howard Lindzon]

So my first successful investment was a cold call that I made pre Internet in a company I probably talked about on the last show called the Grip. It was the. So I had the good fortune of being an hour before the Internet. Before the Internet. An hour before the Internet. The thing before the thing was qvc I recall. Okay. So before the Internet still On tv. QVC was the Internet, meaning there was. The whole of Philadelphia was just old people on the phone saying, yes, yes, we'll take your order and your credit card. And if you were on qvc was a studio like this.

[Barry Ritholtz]

What was the.

[Howard Lindzon]

He had a product called the Grip. I recall this, and it's in the QVC hall of fame. So I made a cold call while I was a stockbroker to this kid thinking he was rich. Because back in the 90s, it was just like the movie Wall Streets. You would get a newspaper and decide who you're going to cold call that day. So I hated my job. That was my first job out of college. And I was cold calling to get rich clients. And I called this kid and he ended up needing money, like he was just promoting himself.

[Barry Ritholtz]

He reverse pitched you?

[Howard Lindzon]

He. He reverse pitched me and. And I. And cobbled up 25 grand from my mom and friends. And I hated my. And I'm like, I'm in. And then he paid off his amex with that 25,000.

[Barry Ritholtz]

By the way, every. Every stockbroker and salesperson appreciates a good sales pitch. They're sucker for a good sales pitch.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, he was promoting himself and I was trying to sell him something and he sold me on his company. So what was it turned out to be a home run company. What was it? He was a dropout. Mark scattered. I unbelievable entrepreneur. And he had. He made this product with five balloons wrapped around this Siberian millet. And we were the largest Siberian millet orderers in the world in the 90s because we were making millions of balls a month by hand and selling them with corporate logos on them during the whole 90s run pharmacies.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And this was just a desk toy, a squeeze toy.

[Howard Lindzon]

But our genius was putting corporate logos on it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Nobody had done that before.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, that industry was huge in the 90s. Corporate giveaways, right? With trade shows and whatever. And we just got the right product at the right time, and it worked. And oh my God, we were just.

[Barry Ritholtz]

How many were the ball?

[Howard Lindzon]

There's so many ball jokes, but they'd all get deleted here. We were the ball boys of the 90s.

[Barry Ritholtz]

How many did sell?

[Howard Lindzon]

We did 60, 70 million in sales get out. And the margins were crazy because unlike retail, if you put Bed, Bath and Beyond or Compaq on a ball, they own it, right? There's no returns. And so we just had this pet rock business where like compact would call us. We need a million balls for Comdex. And we just hire people. Illegal aliens and they would come into Phoenix and they would all cut their fingers off, like making these things.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But you made it in the States.

[Howard Lindzon]

We made it in the States. We spent. We. All our money was trying to figure out how to machine make these in the 90s. And we wasted so much money trying to like get humans out of the process. Compaq would order a million, pay you

[Barry Ritholtz]

right in advance to start. Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

So we'd be buying cars. It was just a two person company.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

Like a bunch of like staff. And so we'd go out of lunch and buy cars because we were paid before we even started making the product. And so we were like, that's how I learned business. Kind of like.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And you started this on QVC?

[Howard Lindzon]

No, QVC picked us up. And Mark used to go on TV. And back in the 90s, in QVC, if it was selling, they just kept you out there like a cartoon character. They hadn't scientifically gone to the profit per second model because they were surprised at their success. So the grip appealed to like 70 year old women who had carpal, like they just like squeezing little arthritis.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

So we created this 193 pack that had soft medium, and I swear to God, you can't make this up. And soft medium and firm. And QVC just kept Mark on stage all day and the numbers would go unbelievable. And it was a miracle. That was our first success. So that was so. I was very much. That was my first Internet success.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So when did.

[Howard Lindzon]

Sorry. That was my first success.

[Barry Ritholtz]

When did social Leverage launch?

[Howard Lindzon]

So, so, so you. You and I both lived through this. The, the great financial crisis. And that was an era. So up until 2007, 2006, we lived in a world of financial leverage. Meaning. And we know what happened at the end of that stacking. You know, Excel came out. People didn't have to. My dad, when I grew up with my dad in Toronto, if you did an acquisition, it was like 700 pieces of paper with pencil taped together. Then Excel comes out, which, of course, nothing, you know, everything's made up at that point. And one sell off can change the world. But we became a world. The stacking things, financial leverage, right? That was the banking era. And the end of the financial leverage era came in 2006, 2007, at the same time that social media came out. So the play on words was I wanted to. As an early adopter of social media, I was like, if an idiot like me. So the idea was social leverage. You can implode with social leverage, whereas it's financial leverage. Of course. Well, that was pre canceled, so I'm saying my thesis was. Oh, my God, an idiot like me, who knows the right three people can just grow their network for free forever. And so that was the birth of the name social leverage.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It makes a lot of sense.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, it was just like a play on words. Some people will call me and go, oh, you guys do social investing? It's the last thing I do. Meaning there's no impact. It was just the play on words of financial leverage to social leverage.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I like it.

[Howard Lindzon]

But good point. You can blow up on social leverage.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So now you're up to fund four, fund six. Fund six, Wow. I have the. I am the V. The good news.

[Howard Lindzon]

You pass on all of them. So we continue to do well until you come in.

[Barry Ritholtz]

As soon as I come in, it's over.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, that's when we shut down.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And. And I famously or infamously, was an investor in stock twits. And then when you pitched me on Robinhood. It's a line in the book how that's the dumbest effing idea I've ever heard in my life.

[Howard Lindzon]

You weren't the only one.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And it was. It was. I will, I will, I will. I own.

[Howard Lindzon]

You're in the majority. You were in the majority.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I own it in the book. And between you and me, I'll say, a, it was off brand, and B, no doubt that the pandemic lockdown helped them dramatically.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, no, no. The thing about Robinhood, because I was there from day one, and by day one, I mean, it was another company, Kronos Research. Before, they were like high frequency guys and math guys, but you could only. This is about you ask about investing. The life I've led. Boots on, like, just curiosity. Your eyes, nose, ears, feet. You become a great investor by, like, touching feeling, right? You got to be on street level. The best investors are street level. I'm talking about private markets. Public market is a different thing.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So let's talk about private. Let's talk about.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, so we were talking about Robinhood. So the great thing about Robinhood is it's not that I got it right. It's like, if I didn't get that right, I'm nobody. Meaning I had to get that right as a yahoo finance user, street.com guy, E. Tradebaby, you know what I Mean? Twitter user, StockTwits founder. And if I had any nerve or any tech skills or any real balls or whatever we're gonna call it, I'd build my own brokerage. I was there to do all that. But in 2010, even till Robinhood started, no one wanted to start it. Brokerage ideas are a terrible ide. So you have to understand that in 2013, when I saw Robinhood, no one in America. That's shocking that no one wanted to Build E Trade 2.0. But what the venture capitalists were doing, they were enamored. And this is where venture capitalists. I always goof on venture capitalists. They were enameled with the wrong thing. At the time, it was like wealth front betterment. The VCs were enamored with assets under management. Aum. They felt like Vanguard was the one to disrupt. So everybody wanted to be the next. If you're a venture capitalist, you want to be the next Vanguard. No one need. And I thought that was flawed. I thought that was flawed because the margins are tiny and you're never going to build something 10 times better than Vanguard. Meaning, wait a minute, what's wrong with Vanguard versus E Trade? I'm like, it's interface trade. You know, it's just ripping me off. And I was the right guy to get that pitch at the right time. So of course I had to do that deal. It would have been. That's what. That's why the podcast with the guy who passed. If I passed on Robinhood, I'd be a more interesting guess.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Like, how much did you put into?

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, we did 100. Like, it was our first fund. So we were writing $100,000 checks. So it was $100,000 at 8 million. I thought it was expensive at an 8 million valuation. Like, at the time we were doing 3 million valuations. So, you know, we're negotiating. Like, I met them by Zhu and Vlad. I flew up because they called me because the stock twitch. So they called me and said, we have this app. They were out of money. And I flew up to Silicon Valley and they showed up wearing Google Glass. Two idiots. Like, I'm like, immediately, I might like no one. You know what I mean?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Remember that era, Glass Halls is what everybody.

[Howard Lindzon]

I don't know what it was, but I was immediately like, like what? And two dorks. But they showed me the app. They had this guy Joe, who was their designer, who had been at Facebook, and he showed me the app and that's when I knew it wasn't live. They didn't have their finra, they didn't have their broker. So it was really early. But because of stock twits and Twitter, I knew that if you build it, they will come. If you build a design like Uber. If you build Uber for trading. Okay. What people didn't get, again, was they were all betting. Hundreds of millions have been invested in betterment and wealth run at the time. So the Silicon Valley was leaning into the Vanguard model. Right. So no one wanted to do the deal, because who needs another brokerage? And by the way, building a brokerage, getting SEC approval. VCs don't like doing work. They don't like waiting a year.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's a grind. Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

VCs do not like doing investments now. They do because there's so much money in sovereign. You know, you can get so much money and charge 2%. But back in 2013, it was like, so much something that's working. I want to be the Uber of that. So to take a year off and go get SEC approval, to go do those things, they deserved it was. And you had to wait. You couldn't just go launch it and get sued.

[Barry Ritholtz]

This is. In hindsight, if you want to be the next Vanguard, wait. Their secret sauce is that they have such scale, they could charge four bips and still make money. You're losing money at 25 bips.

[Howard Lindzon]

And if you switch, you switch. But they have so much assets, so switching costs. So we could talk about this forever. I was in the right place, right time, right people pitched me, right valuation. Everything worked. I could tell you 100 stories of, like, everything lined up, and it doesn't work. Robinhood would have worked whether I showed up or not, Right? So we did 100,000. Now, obviously, we helped them tremendously with StockTwits. We were, like, responsible for hundreds of thousands of early signups because StockTwits users love the idea, of course.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Free trading.

[Howard Lindzon]

Free trading, no. But also the API hooking in that you could slide right on right over and trade. Yeah, it's pretty funny now, that idea in 07, when I had it, Jack and Av, like, as a Twitter guy, I went to Jack and av.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

And AV and Fred Wilson put me in the room with them, and I'm like, guys, what are you talking about? Kim Kardashian taking a poop on Kanye West. That's not interesting. You know what's interesting? The President's gonna tweet one day, and the markets are gonna move. Like, this is literally a pitch to Jack and Ev set up by Wilson, who was this. They were like, kumbaya. Plane lands on a Hudson, Right? You know, we're growing our beards. No. You know, like, I mean, they were just the darlings. They didn't need.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Well, so they Were like, it was the town. The town.

[Howard Lindzon]

They weren't masters before the financial guys. They were Kumbaya guys. They were builders. So my pitch fell on, like, who are you?

[Barry Ritholtz]

They didn't get monetizing Twitter through.

[Howard Lindzon]

They didn't. It's not about Monet. They didn't understand what they had. Meaning selling ads against something that Goldman Sachs will pay infinity for. Meaning a new pipe where Bloomberg's charging $2,000 to get real time information now, like Osama bin Laden getting killed. The futures, like in 08, whenever Osama was finally killed, 11, 12, I know where I was because immediately I checked the futures and they had already moved. And that's because of Twitter, right? Because some guy in Pakistan saw it and the futures move. That's when it should have clicked. It's like, shut down everything, delay the feed 30 seconds. And you know what's gonna happen? Goldman will call you, Reuters, Bloomberg. They'll see that you're off by 30 seconds, and they'll pay you fortunes to get the real time fee, right? You and me, schmuck. Two and three don't need real time.

[Barry Ritholtz]

One second, five minutes, right?

[Howard Lindzon]

So my pitch to Jack and Ev with Fred Wilson was like. Like, slow down the feed. Because 99% of the population, and then we're there anyways. With AI, no one gets the real time feed, right? Slow down the feed. Your phone will ring for the people that know that the feed's not in real time, and they will pay you infinity to get the pipe. And they were like, no, let's sell ads. So here we are.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So you haven't talked about the cash tag, which I really want to talk about something stock twits invented a dollar sign. And then AAPL is the symbol for Apple.

[Howard Lindzon]

So this is the Jack and F stories. So again, I didn't want to start a company. I just sold Wall street, which, you know, which was my best work. But again, stupid. Arguably my. No, personally, I'm most proud of it. You sell a company to CBS when you are literally an idiot is the dream.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I think that's a fair disclosure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

They said, by the way, as they wrote, as Les Moonves wrote the chat, he goes, I can't believe we're writing an idiot like this a check.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That was like, that's the quote.

[Howard Lindzon]

I said, please write that. Like, you and your book. Please write that. You're so angry. So anyways, they had just bought my company, and literally a month later, I'm like, you made the wrong acquisition. You need to buy Twitter. Like Twitter is to Quincy, who had bought my company at cbs. And I remember there was no iPhone yet. And Twitter came out, and I thought it was stupid. You thought it was stupid. We all thought it was stupid.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's just annoying.

[Howard Lindzon]

Andy Swan, an old friend, was like, I get this. This is financial. Because, you know, at the beginning, we all had our BlackBerry. It wasn't even a native mobile app. It was just the web. And it was all venture capital. And my shtick in 2006, 2007 was I just peed at the Gramercy. Like, so the VCs loved me. They were like, who's this idiot talking about with bowel movement? And then Andy Swan said, you know, this is like financial. This is like a new Bloomberg, right? And I said, and I just. So. So the hashtag was a thing. And I'm like, it was all spam. Like, if you went to Apple, like hashtag AAPL or hashtag Apple, it was like, I went to the store and bought a green apple, right? Like, that's literally what people were saying it was. So now it'd be like, let's nuke apples. But like, at the beginning, it was like, I bought a green apple. And I'm like, that's spam. So I sent Fred Wilson the first message. And I'm saying, like, and back then, BlackBerry was the hot stock. And I'm like, I just bought $R, I M N. And Fred Wilson, who's the godfather of all this and was an investor on Twitter, sent me back a text. He goes, this is genius. You need to start a company. And that's what set me down the stock twits path.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Was Wilson an investor in stock twits?

[Howard Lindzon]

No. Because he was an investor in Twitter and he thought there would be a conflict.

[Barry Ritholtz]

There's no conflict.

[Howard Lindzon]

I agree. But Fred is the og. Fred's the og. So Fred's strategy is if he bets on one, he does. And I follow Fred's strategy. There's other people who spray and pray and don't care who they. And 90% do that. But Fred was of the opinion back then is like, I work with you. There's going to be. Conflicts are a thing. Like, no conflict, no interest. He's very cool that way. But don't create conflict just to create conflict. So in his wisdom, he was like, what's going to happen if you guys get in a fight? And yada, yada, yada. So he politely backed out. But we were backed by good bc. Raising money was not my problem. My VC should have said Aaron, you know, just not a good enough idea.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So as an investor in stock twits, I always wondered why the hell didn't Twitter buy stock twits?

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, they don't understand finance.

[Barry Ritholtz]

They should have bought it.

[Howard Lindzon]

You remember the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah, of course. The whole movie is about getting.

[Howard Lindzon]

And then the last scene is, this is a very important media matters to

[Barry Ritholtz]

investing and it's just a black hole forever.

[Howard Lindzon]

Forever. Never to be seen again.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Miles.

[Howard Lindzon]

The best tech companies like Salesforce, he understands corporate dev. Sometimes you buy something to kill it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right?

[Howard Lindzon]

To say. And by the way, they're like my Newman. Twitter's like my Newman from Seinfeld.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's like Twitter like, you know, now who's dating themselves.

[Howard Lindzon]

So. No, but what I'm saying is they're my Newman, like in Seinfeld, meaning these people. It was a clown car. As Zuckerberg said, there's so many people that got rich.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It was a clown non executing. I love the line. Yeah, it was in one of your recent posts.

[Howard Lindzon]

Right, but Zuckerberg said it first, which was it's a clown car. I don't know.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That crashed into a gold mine.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. And so Twitter and the real problem with Twitter was it was a financial product. And Elon knows that better than anybody

[Barry Ritholtz]

in the end because although he just,

[Howard Lindzon]

well, he monetized it by stuffing it in a shell company, it's still like it's an asset. And he's made tremendous mistakes to think that Trump end arounded the whole thing. Meaning Twitter's supposed to be a real time network.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

They have to pull Truth Social.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

Truth Social is worthless other than one guy who sits on top of Twitter and you have to copy paste his tweet.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So Twitter, well, on a different platform,

[Howard Lindzon]

forgetting how bungled the company is, the fact that they owned real time and do not own real time, and that I'm the schmuck that came up with the original. Like Trump is gonna tweet. Now obviously Obama was president when I had this idea. But like, like that the pipe matters and who is king of the pipe. To think that Trump beat Elon at his own game is pretty insane.

[Barry Ritholtz]

He is savvy in ways that people don't appreciate.

[Howard Lindzon]

Insane. The Truth social exists. It's worthless. But for one guy tweeting, right? Unbelievable. It's inconceivable. You bested my man of orange, so the poison cannot be in front of you.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So now 2024, you come back to StockTwits as CEO. So what motivated that? Are the early investors going to see an exit? What's going on?

[Howard Lindzon]

That's inside information.

[Barry Ritholtz]

No. It's not public.

[Howard Lindzon]

No.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So it's non public information, but it's not a legal inside information?

[Howard Lindzon]

No. Stock just is like a corn on your foot.

[Barry Ritholtz]

No, I mean, listen, can't go.

[Howard Lindzon]

Here's the thing about venture capital. Here's the thing about venture capital. Not everything should be venture capital.

[Barry Ritholtz]

True.

[Howard Lindzon]

Okay, okay. So I joke about this with my finger. Whose fault is it? Okay, I think stocktwist is a great idea. The cash tag was a great idea. I'm very proud of it. I'm not proud of having to run a company 17 years later. Not that it wasn't my dream when I started stocktwist is to be sitting here answering questions about how am I going to make money?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let me bust this.

[Howard Lindzon]

But you were very right to do this. So what I'm saying is I and young kids need to know this. Like math. Not everybody gets to have a startup, of course. Okay, well my venture capitalists, if they're as good as they say and they are great, should have stopped me and said this isn't quite venture capitalists.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let me push back on that because I knew you were gonna go there and your venture capitalists, and we know a lot of the same people said hey, there was a window to get out. You wouldn't have gotten an FU number, but you would have gotten a pretty good number.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, I never got a number.

[Barry Ritholtz]

There was never. I thought there were discussions that just never came to fruition.

[Howard Lindzon]

Discussions?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah. I thought you guys were on the one yard line.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm discussing it right now. Openly. There's always a price. Which camera? Camera two. No, listen, we have never. Some things are only fairly valued for a second, right? Some things stay overvalued or undervalued forever, as we know from the market. And I think stocktwits out there take full responsibility. We've always missed a window of positioning.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

But the good news is stocktis is thriving, right?

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's doing well. This is a perfect.

[Howard Lindzon]

So I'm saying like Robinhood should be, we were 10 years ahead of our time. If you think about where public when. When I started stock twitch, retail investing was a laughing stock.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

And it still is to most institutions,

[Barry Ritholtz]

much less so today than it was now.

[Howard Lindzon]

So. So again, if you look at my

[Barry Ritholtz]

portfolio, by the way, the private. Private equity, private credit wouldn't be so hungry for retail investors if it was truly.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yes. They call Me every day, right? So there's two worlds that I live in. The world where retail doesn't take itself seriously enough and private equity guys call me CEOs of public companies call me to take. Like I'm in a crazy seat, right? Because I'm a goofball, right? But I am serious. You know, like, I am serious. Like, I'm trying to be serious.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Used to be 60, 40, goofball serious. Now you're 40. 60. Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

It switches.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You're the new 60.

[Howard Lindzon]

40. Yeah. I'm, I'm. I can laugh at myself, but I'm trying to run a serious business, right? Because. Because it's been a long time and we were just way ahead of the curve. Like, Jack and Ev didn't understand what we have. Fred Wilson understood it, right? There are very few people that understood. Very few people liked Robin Hood until 2020 and GameStop. They like it for the wrong reasons, by the way. I don't like the Robinhood that became like, I'm not. I call it the degenerate economy. But when I invested in Robinhood, I didn't know the degenerate economy would exist. I didn't know the prediction markets would exist. I didn't know options would be their biggest product. I was just wanting to see.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Options are bigger than crypto.

[Howard Lindzon]

For Robinhood, crypto, tiny options is everything. 90% of their profits will come from options. Any brokerage.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Wow, I didn't realize that.

[Howard Lindzon]

How are they going to make money on zero commission other than options?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Options, people doing YOLO trades, payment for order flow margin loans.

[Howard Lindzon]

That's just. That's just media being bad media.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I'm going to tell you that the big shops like Fidelity and Schwab, the single biggest line owner, line item of profitability are credit loans.

[Howard Lindzon]

Okay, it could be 90. I don't know. I don't do the financial.

[Barry Ritholtz]

At one point in time, it was over half at Schwab. I don't know what is today.

[Howard Lindzon]

When we invested in Robinhood, here was my thinking is, first of all, I love the product. You got to be a user of the product to be a good investor. I'm not the guy who's like, here's space check and here's the biotech. What do I know? So the odds have to be stacked in my favor, first of all. But second of all, and they were. I was Yahoo, I was Yahoo Finance, I was you, I was blogging, I was doing everything. And they came along at the right time. When Robin. The pitch for me with Robinhood was Not that they were going to make money. It was an 8 million valuation. Like, you know, at my event, people are like, how are they going to make money? I'm like, chill the hell out. We haven't even launched a thing yet. The point was schwab was paying $150

[Barry Ritholtz]

to get a customer to acquire customer acquisition.

[Howard Lindzon]

And my thesis was like, uber Robinhood would pay zero. So if you get a million people, Even if they're $4 in their account, it's a hundred. And that's a good herb. Those don't come along. Did I think it could be a $30 billion. I'm not so psycho that I thought I was investing in a 30, $40 million company. Billion dollar company. So of course I'm not that smart. But what I'm saying is I saw the Arb and all they had to do was deliver the product. Now it went way beyond my expectations. That's the Larry David, by the way.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You didn't give me that pitch. The pitch was.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm sure I did.

[Barry Ritholtz]

The pitch was free trading millennials, the whole next generation. You're going to capture them before anybody else.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, I knew that from Stocktons. I knew I'd capture. But if I say, if I mention the Arb trade, people are like, oh, they're going to have to raise so much money. There was a lot of problems.

[Barry Ritholtz]

In hindsight. Yeah. Would have been compelling.

[Howard Lindzon]

And.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And again, I. It's a chapter.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'll tell you a great.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's so off brand.

[Howard Lindzon]

One great story.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Go ahead.

[Howard Lindzon]

Because. Because this is just an investing story. So we're very small fund. The first one was 6 million. We've. We've done. Now we run $100 million funds.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You cap it at 100 or.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I don't think our returns would be good. We like writing one to two million dollar checks.

[Barry Ritholtz]

We get that.

[Howard Lindzon]

Stay in your lane is something everybody hates saying. But I think in my world, unless you're fee gathering, stay in your lane. Like, people know what we do.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You're gonna laugh.

[Howard Lindzon]

I believe in that. I hate when people say it, but I practice that.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's an annoying way to say I disagree with what you're saying. But what you're saying is, here's our expertise, here's my skillset.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm a good.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I'm gonna apply my. The area I know best.

[Howard Lindzon]

So with Robin. So occasionally and again. And I had breakfast with Fred this morning. We're talking about like, you're a legend. Josh is a legend. Like, I'm around surrounded by legends because I've lived long enough. I've lived long enough. And I'm curious and I'm nice and I call people to say hello, I'm a salesman. So who do I see this morning? Fred Wilson. Like, who did I rented Tim o'. Brien. Like, I'm friends with, like, people that have. You have signal. Because you have what you've been on the street and you have experience, not maybe in space, but in what you do. You have signal. So with Robinhood, and I had learned from Fred Wilson, like, if you really believe in something, and I'm not a poker player, I don't. You gotta go in. As a vc, you have to.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So Robinhood, you're convincing me to throw money into Fund 7 and that'll be the end of your run.

[Howard Lindzon]

But that's different. Every fund is like a crop of wine. It could go, oh, how you know we're wrong?

[Barry Ritholtz]

2024 was a good vintage.

[Howard Lindzon]

2020, 2021. Terrible vintage. So, so, so when Robin Hood was doing very well, but they, the two guys were like, it was not popular. Everybody, all the VCs had committed to betterment, wealth front type model. So now they needed to raise another round. And I'm like, they wanted to raise 14 or 15. 14.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah. So it was like, I think that's when we spoke.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. So they were like. And I'm like, inexperienced because we write one check, we don't have more money. So they call me up and they go, can you write us a term sheet? It's a very sophisticated way of saying, like, you won't have to like actually invest, but if you come in, like, we can shop. Like, we can kind of shop it around. So I'm like, dude, screw that, I want to invest. So over like July 4th weekend, Tom, my partner and I was two of us at the time, I'm like, let's just write an 11 million. They needed to raise 11 million bucks and they wanted to raise it at 7. Some stupid valuation. It was 60 million ish. And I'm like, well, we're never going to have to really write it. But even if we do, I can convince my friends, like, this is the one. And I called Fred Wilson, he goes, what are you calling me for? You know what to do, write a term sheet. I go, but we don't have $11 million. And Fred goes, you'll find it. Just, just do it like a six week. Which is absurd. Now, today people write billion dollar checks in an hour. But like goes, just ask for Six weeks. Right. So whatever, you're typing it up, sending him a term sheet.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Back then you had ten fingers.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, back then, but you know, ten fingers, more errors. So anyway, so we write up this term sheet, we send it to them and they shop it as they probably index ventures. Jan Hammer, who's like one of the best investors, comes back with a term sheet of 11 million on 65 million. Wow. And like a five day close. So like, you know, they got what they wanted. Oh, and by the way, index in their term sheet. Index in their term sheet, social leverage. That's a typical. Like, who are they?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

Luckily, by writing that term sheet, Vlad and Baiju did the right thing and they carved out as much as we could. We couldn't even raise a million, so they carved us out. We put 800 grand in the Series A. If we had done the 11 million, I'd be a billionaire.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But 200x on, on the.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, no, way bigger, like at the peak. But like, but we've had better investments

[Barry Ritholtz]

sitting with the Robinhood shares.

[Howard Lindzon]

A lot of my LPs, we distributed the stock. A lot of my LPs have not sold.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Nobody says, I don't ask.

[Howard Lindzon]

Our job is to deliver them.

[Barry Ritholtz]

There you go.

[Howard Lindzon]

The, the, the, the cash.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I want to start with a quote of yours that I really love. Quote. The whole world has become a casino. Thanks to AI and prediction markets. We are all more productive and degenerate. Now let's talk a little bit about the degenerate economy. Explain to listeners what is the degenerate economy or the degen economy.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, I don't like the word degen. So when I say degenerate, I say it in the humoristic way. You and I are degenerates, right? Because we'll buy a watch, we'll bet on a game. We laugh at degeneracy. We appreciate the art of degeneracy versus meaning. Laser eyes was dumb, right? But degeneracy is an art form, like speculation. And I live, I own and I joke that I own and operate two millennials. And when you own and operate two millennials, you watch, you look over their shoulders.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Those were your first startups.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, my kids. Yes, those are important startups. The only startups that matter.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And did either of them merge yet? Do we have any M and A activity yet?

[Howard Lindzon]

We need. We need.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I'm not talking, I'm not talking about dividends. I'm talking about. Are they married?

[Howard Lindzon]

No.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So no mergers yet?

[Howard Lindzon]

No. My son was, My son was in. Aren't you on the board.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You should be chairman of their board.

[Howard Lindzon]

Why am I on the board? I'm trying to get your CFO also, I'm trying to get them fired. I'm trying to get medical checks to see if anything's working. So. So degenerate economy was born of this idea that I couldn't believe where we went, like, with GameStop. Like, I was so stressed during the GameStop thing because really, I hadn't monetized. I hadn't monetized our investment. I'm like, on Robinhood, there was a weekend when robinhood was worth 40 billion.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

And it could have been worthless. You understand, like 100%. I wasn't rich. And I'm like, it wasn't even their blame whoever you want. People lost their minds.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let me annotate.

[Howard Lindzon]

Let me just explain to you, if you have your phone, go ahead. What Robin Hood perfected, which no one figured out, was like, when we used to play pinball, there was always that kid who was so good at it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Crazy.

[Howard Lindzon]

He could bump it. Well, he could bump it without tilting it. And he could just get the. He could just get the machine to dance for him. Tilt happened, everybody. The. The app was so well designed. The app was so well designed that everybody pushed the same button at the

[Barry Ritholtz]

same time and it couldn't carry the.

[Howard Lindzon]

The. I remember when you understand. That's literally what happened.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So that's.

[Howard Lindzon]

It was a design flaw. You was a design flaw.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It wasn't the design floor. Nobody expected it to scale 10,000x.

[Howard Lindzon]

No. But if you push everybody to one button, right? Or another button.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

And then people come on see me say, push this button, and everybody's like, let's see what happens. And guess what?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Crash.

[Howard Lindzon]

Not to be repeated again. Hasn't been repeated again. And that's what makes the markets great. That hole was filled by the hole being created.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

We haven't seen another thing like this, although recently with Caravis. But like gamestop broke the machine and almost bankrupted the company.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

And it was many lessons in there. The most important was Robinhood. None in their hubris or anything. They mistook success for a brand. When you build a brand in four years, not 40 years, you don't appreciate that you have no brand value. Right. And I'm like, no one understands this. Like, they were one of the first case studies and, like, why it didn't deserve to be zero. Who knows what all the things that went wrong, But I'm just some guy who's like, what the right. How Embarrassing would it be if it goes from 40 billion to 0? And you know, Galloway and all these guys were piling on and all these people piling on. I'm like, you don't even understand what's going on.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So wait, let me, let me tease this out of you a little bit. I thought you were going in a different direction. How degenerate the trading in things like GameStop and When Hertz was bankrupt and. Or was it Avis? I don't even remember which. Some really foolish, reckless and I think those of us with gray hair looked at it it and kind of laughed because we knew exactly how that was

[Howard Lindzon]

apes and all the ages stuff I hated.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right, but that wasn't your, that wasn't your concern. Your concern was, hey, here's a fire hose of new clients, new orders. This is the scale this company needs to become wildly successful. And they're just not prepared to deal with the sheer volume. And if this crash goes on more for a couple of hours, two days from now. This is a zero.

[Howard Lindzon]

It was a zero. We can argue. I don't know the whole story, but I imagine someone called someone at the options clearing firm and said, you're bankrupt. And the VCs lucky were in so big they had to put in more money.

[Barry Ritholtz]

They didn't have the reserve cash.

[Howard Lindzon]

We'll never know the real story.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So technically, CBOE is the counterparty on all trades and they also own the platform, so they demand a certain amount of capital if you're going to trade X. Yeah. And they're trading billions of dollars. They didn't have that capital, so.

[Howard Lindzon]

So this is why my Degener index was born. Meaning I don't think AMC's in. What's in my index, which is outperforming everything is. CBO is one of my top number one positions. Who benefits? So my degenerate economy thesis is finding the companies that benefit from global degeneracy.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You created this last year, two years

[Howard Lindzon]

ago, three years ago. All right, so I just share it

[Barry Ritholtz]

Just to put some numbers on this.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's gambling. It's day trading. It's meme coin speculation.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's vaping, unfortunately.

[Barry Ritholtz]

170%. The NASDAQ 100 over the same time period isn't even up 100%. It's up 94%.

[Howard Lindzon]

Correct.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You're almost doubling the NASDAQ.

[Howard Lindzon]

And I give it away for free. Because. And I share the.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Why isn't this an ETF?

[Howard Lindzon]

Because VanEck always talks to me. Vaneko is like, why do you Want to be in the ETF business.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So do you know you use Alpha ETF architects?

[Howard Lindzon]

No. I get it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Work with Vaneck.

[Howard Lindzon]

But then I was a billion dollar product again. This is, I think, part of like, you know, the age I'm at is like. Like I don't want to be someone yelling at me that my. That I. Kathy. What? I. As soon as I monetize it, it'll go to zero. Like, this thing will stop working. I love the idea that I can give it away for free. This goes back to the social media. Meaning, what am I going to make? It's like as soon as I start charging for it, the whole thing becomes.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I took ads off the blog because they were annoying and ugly and the amount of revenue it made was just too annoying. You're saying the same thing.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I'm saying like, hey, man, I'm like, I got a little thesis. It's not that complicated.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I love this thesis.

[Howard Lindzon]

I would. I think people, cboe, cme. Hyper Liquid now is in there. And no one knows what Hyper Liquid is. I constantly imagine Hyper Liquid is the. Is the thing. Meaning today all I get pitched on are by the next Robin Hood. And I'm like, the world doesn't have another Robin Hood. But all they keep talking about is, you know, we got perps trading 247 on hyper liquid. It's the new Solana, let's call it. Because I'm not a crypto guy. And I'm like, after getting 100 pitches of the same product and they all talked about Hyper Liquid, I just bought Hyper Liquid.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And what's the market cap of that?

[Howard Lindzon]

It's like 12 people in one of the most profitable companies in the world outside of Singapore. Like, the guy has no freedom because he's so rich. It's like a system. It's like a very fast change.

[Barry Ritholtz]

What's the symbol?

[Howard Lindzon]

Symbol Hype. Hype.

[Barry Ritholtz]

What a great symbol.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, it's a token. And you can buy it on Robinhood. I'm not promoting, I'm just saying.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Wait, so this. You could buy it on Robinhood, but does this not trade over the counter? You can't get it anywhere.

[Howard Lindzon]

You can trade it as a. There's a DAT called P U R R. Again, I'm not recommending it, but I'm long a little is a way that you can trade it over the counter. Again, you're betting on the fact you don't know anything about supply demand. You're just. It's the system that everybody's trading.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Pure speculation, pure Speculation on other people's speculation.

[Howard Lindzon]

That's my thesis. So anyways what I'm what? So the degenerate economy is about picks and shovels.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Uhhuh.

[Howard Lindzon]

We can't stop if. If a young person like my son and again I own and operate two millennials. And and they'll I don't want them betting my son will call me and goes I can't believe I lost a 20 team parlay. I go who are you? Are we even of my this is why I have to do a step in takeover of my son's company. Because I'm to going like are you talking to me like you asked me to Venmo you 50 bucks to put on a 20 team parlor and you're complaining about three threats. It's so idiotic. So I'm like trying to teach them not to be idiots. You can have a degenerate economy.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You need a little bit of math. The problem is not enough kids in math.

[Howard Lindzon]

And you also full circle on the general economy. You have the wrong teachers right now. I got brought on board by guys like you Kramer, the people who had experienced stuff Fred Wilson and these kids are learning from Chamath and David Sacks. These guys were born of one generation. They worked at Facebook. They worked for Elon. You can't if you're not rich working for Elon or Facebook. That would be interesting. If you are rich and you're kissing the nipple of Facebook and that's not interesting. You were supposed to be rich, right? Have some humor. Have so we're our job humility. Are you a little hubris. So my job is my kid is like humility. Stop being a degenerate.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

But the fact is you can't not be a degenerate when prices kids are yoloing because they can and because frictionless. Frictionless. And we learned some of these kids will learn how to be good put sellers. Premium sellers. Very few I understand. But the markets are very important. Meaning having a price on everything is fantastic.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Coming up, we continue our conversation with Howard Lindsin, co founder of Social Leverage. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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[Barry Ritholtz]

I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My old friend Howard Lindzen of Social Leverage is here. And when I say old, it's only partly because we know each other so long. It's mostly because he's an old man and is now 60 years old. Years ago, my wife and I, I'm not a cruise person. We were young, we were broke. We used to use this website called vacationstogo.com you book last minute would cost you nothing like a week long cruise through eight islands in the Caribbean. 500 bucks, food and drink included, booze included. So as soon as they hit international waters, the casino opens. I am not a gambler. We walk through and I just decide to look at the roulette table, not bet. Look at it. And this is the difference between my wife, who taught fashion illustration and design, is a visual person. I'm a little more of a math guy. And I say to her, so we're watching 20 minutes of roulette and it's just, it's so dumb.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I hate losing money.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's for, for random stupid reason.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But I point out to her, look, the red pays, or red or black or odd or even pay two to one, but you have zero and double zero, so it's not even odds. And then this group pays three to three to one, but it's one in four chance of winning. So they're making money. And I'm going over all the math with her and she listens to all the numbers and says to me, I don't know about the ratios or the math, but all I can tell you is I see people, I see the croupier taking off a whole lot more money than she's handing out to gamblers. That's the takeaway. Be the croupier, not the odds. Be the house. Don't be.

[Howard Lindzon]

CBOE hit all time highs.

[Barry Ritholtz]

They're the house. Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

Have you ever hear anybody on social media talking about cbo? They love that. No one's talking about them. So the other thesis that I have is trends with no friends.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Uhhuh.

[Howard Lindzon]

Okay, so. So I'm looking for trends because again, I run a huge social media site, right? So I. If I have a choice between Nvidia and Sandisk, everybody's talking about Nvidia.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You want Sandisk.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm not saying I know much about Broadcom. Same thing, same thing. So on stock twists, I can look for tickers that are trending with very few followers. No, it doesn't have to be. I don't like small caps. So I'm like.

[Barry Ritholtz]

No, I don't mean early. I mean before it really goes up.

[Howard Lindzon]

I the one thing that stuck to and I have AI you asked me why I came back to start. It's two things. AI and the fact that like I can now code with clog code and so I can call on engineers a little bit.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Oh this could take six weeks. I need it by today.

[Howard Lindzon]

Well again there's not today. But there's not six weeks.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

Okay. So. So there's that and then there's the fact that we have all this data and we have a great community. So I wanted to come back and like see this thing through and we're. And we're doing very well. The. The. The issue is now I can explain to people and I can pull out the data to show people trends with no friends. Meaning I want to F. You want to find stocks that are trending that have very little discussion.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Makes a lot of sense.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. It's just intuitive. Meaning IBD I learned on ibd. I love price relative strength. We I've just added a layer to that that matches high price relative strength with low social. It's almost like the moosh of Vegas. I'm trying to find the stocks that. No. Even though I run a social media site, I'm like betting on the fact that they'll discover this in time.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You should talk to Ben Hunt and what he's doing with Persian because they're.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. They have a narrative thing.

[Barry Ritholtz]

They're too but the combination of where the narrative is just starting to take up tipping and where the trend is.

[Howard Lindzon]

That's why I I so I give

[Barry Ritholtz]

it away for he's quantified it.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. I hate the quant side.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

I just visually see it right. From years of being a non quant. I went to asu. I don't even know Matt. But.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But if you want AI to help you with this. Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

I got to catch up with Ben's awesome. But. But he also sees the world a little darker than I see it. I'm a much more of an optimist.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You and I both.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. So.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But when I want to know what's the worst case scenario like when the tariff not so much losing the finger but his piece the end of the Pax Americana is true was the end point where if this really goes off the rails this is how bad it could globalization right. But he, he works out the details.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So great. But again, you and I are both a little more of optimism.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm much more simple.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

If I see something going up, you want to, that's my cue to look. And then if it's a certain market cap and then I check stock to, then I go, no one cares. I love that. Then I need to tell a story. Everybody needs to tell stories. Stocks are stories and some people are great at storytelling. The Palantir guy. But again, the numbers eventually matter and I'm trying to find companies going up. Right. And that's not complicated. But then I have other layers to it and I need to understand the catalyst myself. Like if it's just something I'll never understand, it's hard for me to, to ride the waves. So if I don't really understand and use the product, the odds of me getting scared out of a trade are 99%.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So let's talk about your.

[Howard Lindzon]

So that's my index.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let's talk about your startups who are becoming degenerates. Your kids given social apps, zero commission trading, all the option stuff that's going on for your kids benefit. What sort of guardrails? I don't know if it's the product regulation, educational, what do you wish was in place to protect them that isn't there yet? And let's also add, these are not minors. These are late 20s, adults out of school for almost a decade, real people. What guardrail should they have to protect them from their own worst instincts?

[Howard Lindzon]

Listen, we could argue we put our negative hat on. It's like you can go buy bullets at Walmart. So it's like what is a guardrail? Right? In a world where you can buy bullets and everybody's got drones. So I'm more like, okay, guys, if I hear that you did a parlay, we can't be related. So stop betting. Betting is different than investing. So if Shane at polymarker and they're partners of ours, if Shane or Tariq at Kalsheet had pitched me those ideas at the same time that Robin had pitched me me their idea, I would have passed. Why? I don't bet. I think it's stupid.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right?

[Howard Lindzon]

Okay, Like I think it's funny and I think prediction markets are news better than the New York Times. No offense, because I like prediction markets because I don't have an opinion. I just look at the price and I go, whether I believe it or not, I think that's the genius of it. But if Polymarket and Kalshi went out to VCs and said, we're the new news. Their valuation would be a dollar. Right. Okay, we know the real story. They can't tell what they really are good at, which is news.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And by the way, they're not great at news.

[Howard Lindzon]

I understand, but either is news good at news.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's probability of something happening.

[Howard Lindzon]

But I'd rather not read someone's opinion. I don't need to see Elon's finger on the news because that's not the real story. Give me the numbers. I know it's fake, but I got a number. If mondami is at 90% and my daughter's mad, I go, rachel, here's what you do. Then bet the other side. You'll make eight times. Or. Or put.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's 10 to 1.

[Howard Lindzon]

10 to 1. But I would bet money on Mondame. And if you really want to change how you think about the world, go help somebody on the other side who has a chance. Go put in the time. Go help Mark Cuban if you really want to be.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I love what he's doing on the healthcare side.

[Howard Lindzon]

But what I'm saying to my daughter, I said, call Mark. I'll get you in touch with Mark. Do something. But just complaining about the numbers that you see and the numbers were right. Whether, whether they. Whether they tipped it in this again, I don't want to get into all like the fraud and all the fake stuff about it, but the numbers are much easier than reading an opinion piece.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I'm gonna. Can I tell. Share something fun?

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So there were some of the early bets about outcome of the war and different events happening. And I said in a quarterly call, hey, I don't really know who's putting. We don't know who's putting these bets in. Yeah, but if you stop and think about it, if you're negotiating with another side, this being a psyop, because you spent half a million dollars to move the outcome of something, that's the least money the Department of Defense will ever spend. And anybody on their side is looking at, oh, they're really going to put boots on the ground. That's. Look at the track record here. Here. Here's a wallet.

[Howard Lindzon]

It.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's 10 for 10. My God. We have to stop and think about. You don't really know who's using this, who's betting this, who's manipulating.

[Howard Lindzon]

But we didn't.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That guy who got arrested, that was a throwaway. That's still better. False flag.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's still better than Russia and China. Using our social media.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Oh my God.

[Howard Lindzon]

So I'm very.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And North Korea and Iran.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. So I'm not saying I'm for. I'm an investor in polymarket and Kalshi personally at crazy valuation because I've wouldn't have been best like I just chased it in spb.

[Barry Ritholtz]

The co founder of Kalshi. The woman, what's her name?

[Howard Lindzon]

I don't know but I know it's a woman. I just can't remember.

[Barry Ritholtz]

No, she was a guest on the podcast and I. She was really good. This is years ago. I'm not this three years ago. I should never even thought to put money into it.

[Howard Lindzon]

So that's unfortunate.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It did more academic than anything.

[Howard Lindzon]

It was academic. It still is because there's very few people using these products for all the free press. It's like Twitter. There's very few people using Twitter.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Well Twitter drain at this point.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, but I'm saying at the beginning it had a lot of power even though there weren't that many users.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It was a fraction of Instagram or TikTok. So polymarket is the same fraction.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's a fraction of the news. But I'd rather my son and daughter go to page two of polymarket because you know what they're gonna see news that they would never look at in the New York Times. They can go look at the election in Peru and now at least they'll know the names.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Or Venezuela for that matter.

[Howard Lindzon]

Or Venezuela. So I'm super bullish for different reasons on prediction markets and I know there's like obviously I have money on this

[Barry Ritholtz]

fits right into the degeneracy index completely. How long does the degen index run for? Is this a short term thing or does this have less.

[Howard Lindzon]

That's why I don't want to charge for it because I think I'm a. Because Google and Apple are my biggest positions because they are the rails for the degenerate economy. They are the front facing tool of it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Apple because of the phones and mobile

[Howard Lindzon]

and Google because of the phones and YouTube and App Store. The casino games all run on app stores. The free games that you have, they make a fortune off that.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Why not Amazon or Facebook?

[Howard Lindzon]

Amazon just added the beginning of the year because of robots.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Axons not supposed to Amazon web service because of robots.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I mean it's just you can't not own Amazon at this era in degenerate economy because they are the center of it. Which robot. Which robot shops argue is a degenerate economy but you have to any of

[Barry Ritholtz]

the robots about builders you like?

[Howard Lindzon]

No, because they're too early. I'm a personal investor in a few but clear some names Apptronic, which is just massive. But again it's a personal investment.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You have any interest in what Elon is doing with Groan.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, but it's a holding company. Like I don't know what this position,

[Barry Ritholtz]

it's kind of random, so. So meaning Tesla is a holding company for everything.

[Howard Lindzon]

But is that going to be the entity that goes public for.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I thought it was SpaceX.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, but I'm saying to SpaceX, why does he need two tickers? Like again, I don't understand what the final being is. So why do I need to own some Elon holding company? I think that's stupid.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Because you're betting on him and you don't think he does. Who cares?

[Howard Lindzon]

I'd rather bet on something I understand Amazon. I'm with you.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I don't disagree. I'm trying to.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. Another recent ad is it's already doubled as clear secure. You know clear when you go through sure electrical. So to me, if the world's degenerate, you need security. So it's a clear. Clear's been a home run. They don't have a lot of tech, but the great brand. Brand?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah. I thought they have tech.

[Howard Lindzon]

I think they license a lot of the time.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Every. Oh, that's not theirs. They don't own it.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. So again, once you dig into a story, my conviction comes like how much of this they own. But they're a hell of a brand and the company's been around forever and

[Barry Ritholtz]

they have and they failed many times. Faa, airports and they can do so

[Howard Lindzon]

much more around stadiums. The brand matters.

[Barry Ritholtz]

What are you talking about? You go to washing nick game, it's clear. It's clear on the way.

[Howard Lindzon]

That was my bet. It's just a clear trend. No one ever talks about it too. So it's a massive uptrend broke out and you never hear people talk about it.

[Barry Ritholtz]

If you use either Chase Sapphire Reserve or Amex, I want to say Platinum, you get a credit towards any travel. And Clear is just an automatic. It's no brainer.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

What is it? $150 a year? It's fantastic.

[Howard Lindzon]

My son would call me because that's the greatest gift he ever got me. I'm like, wow, when a 20 year old knows something and an 80 year old knows something, those are good trends, you know. That's a brand.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

When it's just a 20 year old knows it, not a brand.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Maybe it catches on. Maybe it doesn't.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. Cboe, I love it because they power the whole thing. You can't do this without cboe. Cme. The Merck, you know, is, you know, the New York Stock Exchange.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let me ask you a question, a direct investing question, before we get to our favorite questions that I think a lot of investors have a hard time with.

[Apple Card Announcer]

With.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I started on trading desk, so I'm okay with losses. It's a given. But if you say to somebody, I want you to put a little Money into these 10 or 20 stocks, half of them going to go out of business.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Maybe five or break even, you'll make money on a couple and maybe one's a home run. How do you deal with that? Really? Fathead, Long Tail, you're not indexing.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm so into indexing.

[Barry Ritholtz]

No, I mean on your. On your private seed state. Like most of the seed investments you're going to make aren't going to give you a return. I am bearish. Oh, I'm wrong all the time.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm just bearish on my industry. Right. I never. I believe it was a moment in time with Zirpa. I think it got the country through its unintended circumstances. We live in all these unintended circumstances.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Consequences, right?

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. Or unintended consequences, sort.

[Barry Ritholtz]

By the way, now that you're wealthy, that happens a whole lot.

[Howard Lindzon]

I am wealthy. Just born at the right time. A lot of unintended circumstances. ZIRP is a good thing.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm not saying. I'm not saying I shouldn't be ashamed.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But if you have assets, if you're. If you're working stiff, it's like I used to be. It was tough.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. S and P is at all time highs. Cash levels at all time highs. If I hear those two things together, what do I think of inflation?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

There's never been a better time to have assets. Right. Doesn't mean I don't know when it's going to end.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

I have cash and stocks. The double whammy. The.

[Barry Ritholtz]

The.

[Howard Lindzon]

So I'm lucky. I am so bearish on what I do for a living. Meaning what value do I add in a world of 6% interest rates, tying someone up for 10 years when I could go buy SanDisk in the public markets and get 6,000% in a year. I'm not saying I'm smart enough to hold these things, but in a world where Robinhood and a thousand Robin Hoods are going to bloom, if you're asking me, my biggest bet, public Markets do the work. You have an analyst in clock, right? You can go see beaten ups. No one's following any stock. Everybody's momentum Investing. Go find 10 companies. Why would you do a startup investing? Every kid wants to be an angel investor. I'm like, dude, do it in the public markets. You have liquidity, and you're not locking up your clients for 10 years.

[Barry Ritholtz]

But you're not answering my question, which is how do you as an investor deal with the psychology of knowing most of your seed investments aren't gonna work out? Is it just the nature of the beast?

[Howard Lindzon]

No.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Or does that weigh on you at all?

[Howard Lindzon]

No, I think it aligned with how I thought of the world as someone who believes their high integrity, who wants people to believe they're high integrity for my kids sake and, you know, the integrity of telling my investors that upfront, is the release meaning I'm not telling my investors we're gonna be 90% hit. Right. If you give me money, you're gonna hate me because you're gonna think the idea that I love is the dumbest idea. The Robin Hood quote, unquote.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah, dumbest idea.

[Howard Lindzon]

You are betting on me to hang 30 pieces of art in Howie's gallery, the Larry David Gallery, and you will pick. If I gave you the choice to invest in all 30, you would pick the two that went to zero. So you're betting on me to deceive the world my way, and then I'm not telling you we're making a hundred times our money, but my job is to find one company that's a hundred bagger. Okay? So I have to know math. I have to do this. I have to just get yelled at by my LPs when they read our quarterly letters and go, that was the dumbest idea. I'm like, you're right. I'm embarrassed. But our job is to find a Robin Hood. And we found many of them. Lifelock, Robin Hood, beehive. We've got one called Alpaca. Again, a trend with no fan. Alpaca powers a thousand robinhoods around the world. They're like the modern apex. So I'm saying our job is to know what we know, take crazy bets, and sell that to our LPs. Is like, you're investing for 10 years. This is like, it's not as good as it was in 2013 when rates were zero. And now it's a different game again. And I'm thinking, like, you've got Claude, and you can do an anal. You can analyze the stock in, like, Three seconds. I'm like, everyone's a CFA all of a sudden. If they want to be. What a great time to be a public market investor. And yet everybody wants to be a private investor.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So again, it's so funny coming from you.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. In 2020. I've been writing about this since COVID It's like, public markets are amazing because there's so many stupid people making dumb bets on Robinhood. And dislocation is everywhere, and it's only getting worse.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And the degenerate economy is going to continue driving this theme.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yes. And I think most people should index, but everybody should learn how to pick stocks, too, in this era.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I gotcha.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

All right. So it's almost midnight. I only have you for a few minutes more, and you have to end up at your event tonight. Cash event tonight, Cash Tag awards.

[Howard Lindzon]

Breaking news. Stocktoberfest, October 6th. Coming back to New York. That's our big event.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's exciting.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. A thousand people on the west side.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I am looking forward to October 6th.

[Howard Lindzon]

If you want to come hit me up.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let's do our speed round. Five questions, two hours, 10 seconds each. I'm going to jump right into it, starting with boxers who were your early mentors who helped shape your career.

[Howard Lindzon]

I think part. I hate saying this. I didn't have good early mentorship. So I really take pride in mentoring other people because I were your later mentors.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I hear Fred Wilson. Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

You like people that I discovered, like, the mentorship came from the community. Being the mentor led me, like, stuck towards being a giver. Opened me up to get mentorship. I think young kids are not getting good mentorship.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So just pure karma.

[Howard Lindzon]

Karma.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I love that. What are some of your favorite books? What are you reading right now? I know you're reading next. What are you reading now?

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I got your. But I don't read.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You're on flights all the time. What do you do? Just movies.

[Howard Lindzon]

I'm so addicted to, like, hbo, Amazon.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So you're watching series?

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah, I built. I'm just very.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's my next question.

[Howard Lindzon]

But hang on. So you're asking books. I still love the classic Shoe Dog for Business. You know, Phil Knight's book. I love Agassiz biography. I like stuff. I just. I just. My brain doesn't work with books.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Huh. That's really interesting. Tell us what you're watching on Netflix, hbo, Amazon.

[Howard Lindzon]

I just rewatched the Neck. Have you watched the neck on HBO? Soderbergh? Oh, it's a. About the 1900s. The Knickerbocker Hospital.

[Barry Ritholtz]

No, I did not watch Season.

[Howard Lindzon]

It's a. It's like surgery wasn't done until, like, barbers used to do surgery in 1900.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

All the rich oil guys started backing hospitals. And that was the original tech. Surgery was tech. And it's just an incredible period piece about the 1900s in SoHo in New York. Huh.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I'll check.

[Howard Lindzon]

Give us one more. More. There's very little good stuff on tv. I think Rooster's pretty good.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Can I tell you something?

[Howard Lindzon]

On hbo, you have that backwards. Okay.

[Barry Ritholtz]

There's too much.

[Howard Lindzon]

I think I've seen it all.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Have you seen Landman?

[Howard Lindzon]

Great. But that's. That's more like Harlequin Romance kind of series. Are fun to watch and the kids like them too.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Okay. The Nick you'll love because did you see Three Body Problem? If you want something a little more.

[Howard Lindzon]

That's sci fi, I think. I don't like sci fi.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You don't like sci fi? So you didn't watch the expansion dance?

[Howard Lindzon]

No, I didn't like that either. I try it and I never get into it. Huh.

[Barry Ritholtz]

That's interesting.

[Howard Lindzon]

I like degenerates.

[Barry Ritholtz]

How do you feel about Spy? That sort of stuff.

[Howard Lindzon]

I love them.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Killing Eve.

[Howard Lindzon]

Killing is good.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Was great.

[Howard Lindzon]

I like stuff. I can really follow it. Well. Yeah, it was good.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Wow.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah.

[Barry Ritholtz]

About any of the British period pieces.

[Howard Lindzon]

I love Brit Box.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I watch Brit Box. So the Crown Bridgerton.

[Howard Lindzon]

Not Bridgerton, but Britbox is a great channel.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah.

[Howard Lindzon]

There's that criterion for old movies.

[Barry Ritholtz]

If you have Britbox, go back and watch. What was the name of that show? There was a show that came out around the same time as Friends, only Coupling. And it has teeth. It's. I mean, everything from the 90s is a little dated, but whereas Friends was kind of milk, toast and mushy, this has a sharp edge. And it's British, so it's nasty and funny in a way that only the Brits can do.

[Howard Lindzon]

Okay. Yeah. So I'm a media fanatic, but not like, I'm weird and I'm so bullish on YouTube. Apple TV.

[Barry Ritholtz]

YouTube is just great.

[Howard Lindzon]

I just love YouTube.

[Barry Ritholtz]

All right, so final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a college grad interested in either becoming a seed investor or a startup entrepreneur?

[Howard Lindzon]

Well, I think there's no shame in being a number two, number three, or number four. So chief of staff is the new CEO. So go be someone's chief of staff. Like, don't worry about pay or title. Worry about finding something that's Working this way, it's much easier to go work for a company that's just working. So go, like, ignore the title, ignore the salary, find a rocket ship and attach yourself. Whether it's manscape, you're going to learn more. There are going to be smarter people around. There's going to be, you know, less aggravation, more work. But hey, like, if you're really serious, I tell my daughter, it's like, if you're really serious about this, it's going to take a lot of work, but go do it. If you're not serious, be a socialist. Like, it's okay, but like, don't commit. Don't fool yourself. Like, go work for a rocket ship. Otherwise, who are you talking to? So, like, there's no room anymore for these kids that, like, if you want to start a company, do you know it's 24 7, right. And if you. And no one's going to like you. And if you want to be a number two, do you know what it takes to be a number two? So I'm like, be honest, but, like, go work for a company that's working.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And our final question. What do you know about the world of venture and seed investing today that would have been helpful 65, 70 years ago when you were first getting started?

[Howard Lindzon]

No, I think I luckily got the right mentorship and entered at the right time. I think you have to do it for a while. You gotta get a crop. Like, if you're gonna go do wine or weather matters. And same with tech. Like, what matters with tech is you have to. If you were of the Google Glass era, not much worked.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Right.

[Howard Lindzon]

If you were in the BlackBerry Fund 2008, no go. No go, baby. So.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So unless you could have been an early investor in Apple or when they were public, when the iPhone was.

[Howard Lindzon]

I think the public markets are underappreciated because seed investing became cool because of Zuckerberg and because of a few of these rocket ships.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Yeah, I thought seed investing or venture investing really became cool in the 90s, and then in the 2000s it kind of faded.

[Howard Lindzon]

No, it's never been more loved today. Oh, I go see these young kids, it seems like they know nothing and they all want to be venture investor. I'm like, yeah, have you ever bought a stock? You get wounded, like, day one. Like, stock drops 20%. Like, go open a Robinhood account and learn how to invest. If you don't know the public markets, what are you doing in the private markets?

[Barry Ritholtz]

Got to graduate to private.

[Howard Lindzon]

Yeah. I think the most the guys who were interesting to me, and I'm not saying they still are the crossover investors, the people that, like, knew the public markets and then started doing private. And I think that was my edge. I knew how pricing worked. Whether I was right or wrong. I understood how market markets worked. And the seed investing, the prices made sense to me relative to public markets. Now the prices in private markets make no sense to me.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Howard it is always a blast when you come in. You're a bucking Bronco. I never know where we're going to go. You are not Larry David. You are the Zach Galifianakis of finance.

[Howard Lindzon]

He was just on Conan. Watch that episode.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I should put two ferns in here just for your arrival. Thank you, by the way, for, for being so generous with your time and good luck at the Cash Tags Awards tonight. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 600 we've done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexa Alexis Noriega is my overworked video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I would also like to just drop a little piece of information. The paperback of how not to Invest comes out today. By the time you hear this, it'll be out already. What else do I want to say other than you look good?

[Howard Lindzon]

Thanks. Thanks.

[Barry Ritholtz]

I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

[Bloomberg Daybreak Hosts]

On June 10, Bloomberg Invest is back in Hong Kong. We look at the role Hong Kong plays between China and the world as major powers compete and markets realign. As global investors rethink risk, we'll explore the forces driving driving Asian demand and the future of private capital. Catch exclusive interviews with top newsmakers, plus a live recording of Bloomberg's Odd lots podcast. Visit BloombergLive.com investhongkong to learn more. Supporting sponsor Deutsche Bank.