Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Katy, you haven't talked about this, but I watched five minutes,
Speaker 2: five randomly selected minutes of the Golden Globes last weekend.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, it happened to be the five minutes
Speaker 2: during which Snoop dogg It gave an award for Best Podcast.
Speaker 2: So and we won something to aspire to. We did.
Speaker 2: We were not even whatever like seven tiers below nominated
Speaker 2: it is. We weren't that either.
Speaker 3: Our faces weren't in a box on the screen. It
Speaker 3: was Amy Poehler was Amy. Yeah, I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 3: I thought you were going to talk about Timothy Shalmey
Speaker 3: and Kylie Jenner, but.
Speaker 2: I was not. I didn't see those five minutes or.
Speaker 1: Their pda IT award shows. I'm into it.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, Hello, and welcome to The Money Stuff Podcast,
Speaker 2: your weekly podcast where we talked about stuff related to money.
Speaker 2: I'm Matt Levine, and I write the Money Stuff column
Speaker 2: for Bloomberg Opinion.
Speaker 1: And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and
Speaker 1: an anchor for Bloomberg Television. We actually have a lot
Speaker 1: to talk about today, some of it all, right, about first,
Speaker 1: do you want to talk about mister Beest. I guess yes.
Speaker 2: This is a cultural phenomenon that I am cleansically familiar with.
Speaker 1: I only read really the headline, and I feel like
Speaker 1: we're doing great.
Speaker 2: We're clearly the best podcast.
Speaker 3: Mister Beast nabs two hundred million dollar investment from Tom
Speaker 3: Lee's Bitmine. Mister Beast, if you don't know, we're talking
Speaker 3: about Jimmy Donaldson, better known as mister Beasts, who is
Speaker 3: a YouTube phenomenon. I've also not watched him, but he's
Speaker 3: a billionaire. Yeah, he's got an empire. Yeah yeah, and
Speaker 3: now he's got two hundred million dollars from.
Speaker 2: Bitmin another content creator who's more successful than were. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you get two und million dollars from bitmine. To me,
Speaker 2: the interesting thing is the bitmind more than the mister
Speaker 2: be But go on, well, I mean, mister Beast is
Speaker 2: a content creation joy you're not.
Speaker 3: Also, I should point out it's for a stake in
Speaker 3: Beast Industries.
Speaker 1: Not the man, not the Beast himself.
Speaker 2: No, no, he's a little phenomenous. I do wonder a
Speaker 2: little right at this moment, I had not thought about
Speaker 2: it variously, but the Beast industry's succession plan looks like
Speaker 2: because like he is, you know that is that is
Speaker 2: largely an investment in.
Speaker 1: The beast himself Ken Risk Key.
Speaker 2: Beast Risk now. But like to me, the interesting thing
Speaker 2: is like bid Mind, which is a fabulous company. Its
Speaker 2: name is Bitmine Immersion.
Speaker 1: Technologies like a nice bath.
Speaker 2: Yes, the reason it was named that is because one
Speaker 2: year ago it had been for several years a bitcoin
Speaker 2: mining operation whose differentiating factor was that it immersed its
Speaker 2: bitcoin mining rigs and a nice bath to keep them cool.
Speaker 1: Amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know a lot about the physics of this.
Speaker 2: I assume it's not just it's not just dunking computers
Speaker 2: and water. There's some more complicated thing going on. But
Speaker 2: immersion is in the name because they immersed, they bathed
Speaker 2: their bitcoin matters and cool cool liquid.
Speaker 3: That is a really fascinating backstory because now they're better
Speaker 3: known as being the largest corporate holder of ether.
Speaker 2: Yes, in the last year, they pivoted away from being
Speaker 2: a minor to being a treasury company, and they pit
Speaker 2: it away from bitcoin to being an etherorem company.
Speaker 1: Didn't pivot, the name didn't pivot.
Speaker 2: The name didn't get around to that yet. But so
Speaker 2: now they're like a treasury company with like kind of
Speaker 2: fourteen billion dollars of mostly ethereum, although also some like
Speaker 2: dollar cash and some random stuff. And we've talked a
Speaker 2: lot about crypto treasury companies. Sure it was a great
Speaker 2: trade to do six months ago, nine months ago, which
Speaker 2: is roughly when they did it. You could put fourteen
Speaker 2: billion dollars with theoreum in a pot and trade to
Speaker 2: twenty eight billion dollars and you make this is great.
Speaker 2: Now if you put fourteen billion dollars with Thereum in
Speaker 2: a pot you trade to like thirteen billion dollars, it's
Speaker 2: not as good a trade. And so there are a
Speaker 2: lot of people who run crypto treasury companies who are
Speaker 2: kind of looking around and being like, what are you
Speaker 2: going to do with this? And one answer is your
Speaker 2: fourteen billion dollars you can go make investments. Right, So
Speaker 2: one thing that seems to be happening here is they're like, wow,
Speaker 2: we have a lot of money, and like just putting
Speaker 2: the next incremental dollar into ethereum is not going to
Speaker 2: move the needle for us. But like mister Beast is
Speaker 2: right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty funny.
Speaker 3: I saw this read Spike alert on my phone, and
Speaker 3: I think I described it to you in an email,
Speaker 3: is like, it's very fun twenty twenty six headline mad libs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and for a crypto treasury.
Speaker 3: Company, you know, in the opening weeks of twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: maybe not a bad diversification play.
Speaker 2: Yeah, crypto treasury companies are going to generate a lot
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty six mad lives because like, it's not
Speaker 2: as simple and obvious and good a trade as it was,
Speaker 2: but all these people are raised billions of dollars to
Speaker 2: do it. And now look, now, what right? And the
Speaker 2: answer is mister beast or some other weird answer that
Speaker 2: we're gonna find in the next couple of months.
Speaker 3: I do like like this line from the article, and
Speaker 3: it's written by my very good friend FORLL Donna Hirich,
Speaker 3: so I don't want to dunk on her. But the
Speaker 3: move highlights the growing convert between digital finance and the
Speaker 3: creator economy, as crypto native firms look to align with
Speaker 3: brands that dominate gen Z and jen Alpha attention. I
Speaker 3: didn't know that this convergence was happening.
Speaker 2: So my take on this is that they have a
Speaker 2: pot of money, like the thing they were doing. The
Speaker 2: money doesn't make sense anymore, so they're doing other things
Speaker 2: with them. They're like an investing firm. But you can
Speaker 2: have another view, which is more like wait hold Ona wrote,
Speaker 2: which is that crypto treasury companies would all say, we're
Speaker 2: not just an investment company. We're not just a pot
Speaker 2: of money. We are building a new digital asset infrastructure.
Speaker 2: And like one aspect of that in a lot of
Speaker 2: like the presentations that crypto treasury companies made is investor education.
Speaker 2: We're going to increase adoption of whatever our preferred token is, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so a lot of that was just like Michael Saylor,
Speaker 2: like putting up presentations and like you know, himself being
Speaker 2: an evangelist for bitcoin. But there are other ways to
Speaker 2: do that. In one way is you give mister bast
Speaker 2: two hundred million dollars and maybe in his vast content
Speaker 2: juggernaut he says, hey, guys, buy ethereum, and maybe the
Speaker 2: price of the goes up, and maybe that makes the
Speaker 2: price of your part of the theoreum go up. I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 1: You forgot Sailor also posting AI generated images of himself
Speaker 1: in various inspiring poses.
Speaker 2: He's great, I mean say he does it, he's great
Speaker 2: to say he's either great or he does a lot
Speaker 2: of this sort of thing. But like the people who
Speaker 2: run the other not micro not strategy, crypto treasury companies,
Speaker 2: you know, they maybe need some help from, you know,
Speaker 2: the greatest content creator for his generation. I think they
Speaker 2: call them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 3: I don't want to be too glib about mister Beast
Speaker 3: because Beast Industries it oversees basically the YouTube business, which
Speaker 3: is YouTube's most watched series.
Speaker 2: Creachy be clear, we can't be glit Like we have
Speaker 2: a podcast and he has a better podcast.
Speaker 1: He certainly does, no Amy Polar but like you know, also.
Speaker 3: In October, Beast Industries filed a trademark application for mister
Speaker 3: beasts Financial, which lists services such as a cryptocurrency exchange
Speaker 3: or a cryptocurrency exchange platform just everywhere. Also consumer lend it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so I mean, we joke now, but he's going to
Speaker 3: run our lives the Jeff Bezos of his time.
Speaker 2: Would you borrow money from a Beast?
Speaker 3: Someone would? Maybe these Jen Alpha people that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: I've never felt more old. This whole conversation, so much
Speaker 2: younger than I am, you.
Speaker 3: Know, I keep telling myself, I'm going to watch a
Speaker 3: Mister Beast's YouTube video. And I'm always looking for things
Speaker 3: to watch on YouTube. I mostly just watch US and
Speaker 3: L clips, and probably for market research or my job,
Speaker 3: it'd probably at this point be a good idea to
Speaker 3: watch a Mister Beast video.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you come away from thinking, boy, I better
Speaker 2: buy some ether, then.
Speaker 4: I'll text you.
Speaker 2: You know who else is a consumer lender who you
Speaker 2: wouldn't want to borrow money from?
Speaker 1: Tell me every banks.
Speaker 2: Credit every credit card company. I don't know. My impression
Speaker 2: is that the average interest rate on credit.
Speaker 1: Cards is super high.
Speaker 2: Eight tho.
Speaker 1: I know someone I know someone who wants to change that.
Speaker 1: His name is Donald J. Trump.
Speaker 3: He's the President of the United States, and he would
Speaker 3: like to see those rates capped at ten percent.
Speaker 1: Do you have anything to say about I.
Speaker 3: Mean, it's pretty amazing. This isn't a new topic, right,
Speaker 3: and it's not.
Speaker 2: Like a traditional Republican party talking. It's like more of
Speaker 2: a you know, Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation sort of plan,
Speaker 2: like a Bernie Sanders kind of Well.
Speaker 3: It's amazing because Bernie Sanders and AOC I think they
Speaker 3: were advocating for like fifteen percent originally, like back in
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen ten. Yeah, so President Trump undercut them at
Speaker 3: their own game, which is pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: Make at five ye why not?
Speaker 3: The banks, of course are it seems like trying to
Speaker 3: one up each other on like doomsday predictions of what
Speaker 3: this would mean. It seems like the consensus is that
Speaker 3: they would basically offer less credit.
Speaker 2: Right Like I and I think a lot of financial
Speaker 2: columnists have bad intuitions around the credit component of credit
Speaker 2: cards because like I pay my balance every month, I
Speaker 2: get rewards. Credit cards are a way to get points
Speaker 2: and a convenient payment mechanism and not a credit mechanism.
Speaker 2: The reason they're not a credit mechanism they charge like
Speaker 2: twenty percent interest and if you want credit, there are
Speaker 2: other ways to get credit. For some people, that's less true.
Speaker 2: And it's a standard form of consumer debt. And my
Speaker 2: assumption is that the rates are so high because one
Speaker 2: the default risk is high and two years short of
Speaker 2: getting adversely selected, right because the people who carry a
Speaker 2: balance with the people who are not going to be
Speaker 2: able to.
Speaker 1: Pay at off.
Speaker 2: But there is like research, you know, Brian Sheer at
Speaker 2: Vanderbilt has research on this that is kind of possibly
Speaker 2: underpinning some of these arguments, saying that the credit card
Speaker 2: industry is so profitable that it could rain and interest
Speaker 2: rates save billions for Americans and small businesses and still
Speaker 2: make profits. Right, so there's there's some fat to be cut.
Speaker 2: Here is something that some economists think, although you will
Speaker 2: not hear that from.
Speaker 3: Banks, No, No, What you will hear from banks is
Speaker 3: the CFO of JP Morgan, for example, saying that if
Speaker 3: it were to happen, it would be very bad for consumers,
Speaker 3: very bad for the economy, and basically that their card
Speaker 3: operation would be a business that we would have to
Speaker 3: significantly change. And I've seen, you know, Bloomberg News basically
Speaker 3: describe the card's business is like the crown jewel of banks.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the crown jewel of banks are used
Speaker 2: against JP market. It's so good, then it could be
Speaker 2: less good and still you know, give credit to people.
Speaker 2: But my intuition is that they are right. And like
Speaker 2: in particular, if banks had to cut my credit card
Speaker 2: interest rate to ten percent, that wouldn't affect anyone because
Speaker 2: I don't pay interest on my credit card. But if
Speaker 2: they had to cut like the lowest credit score bars
Speaker 2: to ten percent, They would probably do a lot less
Speaker 2: credit provision to those bars, right, and there would be
Speaker 2: you know, you'd see just the migration to credit cards
Speaker 2: being a like less available product and for people with
Speaker 2: higher credit scores.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and those people who would be cut out, seems
Speaker 3: like again the consensus would be that they would go
Speaker 3: to like payday lenders more who don't exactly offer better
Speaker 3: rates necessarily.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't like the consumer credit right
Speaker 2: now is interesting, right because there's been a huge rise
Speaker 2: and buy now pay later, which is often structured as
Speaker 2: zero interest, fairly sure repayment periods, and loosely speaking, they
Speaker 2: make their money on like interchanin on like swipe fees, right,
Speaker 2: and so there would be some of that, right, but
Speaker 2: that would probrobably you probably get less credit provision that way, right,
Speaker 2: Like you probably couldn't run up as much of a
Speaker 2: balance on your Binea appay.
Speaker 1: Later, yeah product.
Speaker 2: The other thing that Trump wants is to he's also
Speaker 2: talked about swipe fees. Yes, you squeeze credit cards from
Speaker 2: both ends, right, And like, if you're a credit card
Speaker 2: company and you can charge a lot of money in
Speaker 2: swipe fees, then like you can make a lower interest
Speaker 2: rate work in some form for some time, But if
Speaker 2: you both have to give up your swipe fees and
Speaker 2: you have to give out your interest, it's like a
Speaker 2: much worse product.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I am really interested to see what happens over the
Speaker 3: next couple of days with this, because we're recording this
Speaker 3: on January fifteenth.
Speaker 2: I'll tell it's gonna happen over the next couple of days. Okay, well, no,
Speaker 2: I shouldn't say it. My genuine instinct is nothing, but like,
Speaker 2: the things are crazy now, so maybe.
Speaker 1: Maybe well specifically I'm referring to January twentieth.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, that's when if you don't stop charging more
Speaker 2: than ten percent interest, you'll be in violation of the law.
Speaker 1: The law, the law?
Speaker 2: What law?
Speaker 1: That's what I would like to know, And that's what
Speaker 1: I was going.
Speaker 2: To ask, secret law and Donald Trump's had.
Speaker 3: Well, apparently a lot of these banks are going to
Speaker 3: be in violation of it.
Speaker 2: It does seem that way.
Speaker 1: You know, who won't built, Built?
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: Built is seizing the moment unveiling three new credit cards
Speaker 1: with interest rates capped at ten percent.
Speaker 2: That's not true, right, It's isn't it? A one year
Speaker 2: promotional rate. Yes, because that's really interesting about this, Like
Speaker 2: Trump is not like credit cards can only charge ten
Speaker 2: percent for the rest of time. He's like for the
Speaker 2: next year until the midterm elections, you have to charge
Speaker 2: cha percent or less. And you know credit card companies
Speaker 2: do that all the time all the time. They offer
Speaker 2: like zero percent introductory rates, right, Like you can like
Speaker 2: have some sort of promotional program that charges ten percent
Speaker 2: or less to attract customers, right and then you know
Speaker 2: eventually jacking up to thirty percent. What a great time
Speaker 2: to have a promotional But these promotional preyers, like you
Speaker 2: often see people being like zero percent introductory APR for
Speaker 2: the first six months it built, is like ten percent,
Speaker 2: no problem, ten percent directory right for one year.
Speaker 1: After new purchases.
Speaker 2: It's a great like combination of politics and marketing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm trying to find all the different asterisks here,
Speaker 3: but yeah, it is great promotion. And I mean you
Speaker 3: haven't really seen anyone else, or at least not in
Speaker 3: like a big splashy way like this sort of take
Speaker 3: advantage of this moment. It's mostly been pushed back from
Speaker 3: the bank.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because if you if you were a bank with
Speaker 2: a long standing portfolio like and you're like tenversent the
Speaker 2: directory rate on our new card. Like it's a little
Speaker 2: bit like people notice that you're mostly not charging that right.
Speaker 2: Built I think has some advantages and the like my
Speaker 2: impression is like they have fairly high credit quality and
Speaker 2: like like they're the pay your rent with a credit
Speaker 2: card thing, Like I think they have probably different economics
Speaker 2: from a regular bank.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were talking about this earlier in person that
Speaker 3: we've talked about Built on this podcast before, and I.
Speaker 2: Believe you and you told me that I forget.
Speaker 3: What the specific We've definitely talked about it on this podcast,
Speaker 3: but yeah, they have a really interesting model.
Speaker 2: But yeah, you how worked and you didn't know. I
Speaker 2: don't frankly know either. But like my impression is that,
Speaker 2: like you can't normally put your rent on your credit
Speaker 2: card because like that'll cost your landlord, you know, three
Speaker 2: percent interchange pee. But Built has negotiated with landlords to
Speaker 2: make them like Built so much that they can charge
Speaker 2: renting their credit card.
Speaker 1: And now mortgages and no mortgages, pay for your mortgage
Speaker 1: with your card.
Speaker 2: They have enough like moving pieces that like, you know,
Speaker 2: the twenty percent interest on balances is not the most
Speaker 2: important part of their business, and they can go around
Speaker 2: mean like ten percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go, Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the countdown's on. As of right now, we're five
Speaker 3: days away from all those life.
Speaker 2: I still think the answer to happen on there's nothing but.
Speaker 1: What if they're all arrested, arrested.
Speaker 2: Law law, nobody knows.
Speaker 1: We'd have an emergency podcast, emergency podcast hiding. Is there
Speaker 1: anything else to say about this specific topic.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there's a lot of things. My impression is
Speaker 2: that people on financial television and frankly and financial journalism,
Speaker 2: I've been talking about it pretty months, not for a week,
Speaker 2: you know what's amazing.
Speaker 3: I would have been one of those people, but I
Speaker 3: spent the first half of this week at the JP
Speaker 3: Morgan Healthcare conference, so I was watching these headlines fly by,
Speaker 3: and no, not this year.
Speaker 1: At least, that was my understanding. It's too busy dealing
Speaker 1: with Yeah.
Speaker 3: Because sent that truth Social last Friday night. I remember
Speaker 3: it was at night.
Speaker 1: I was on my couch, run your couch, looking at you. No,
Speaker 1: I wasn't.
Speaker 3: I actually I don't have a truth Social account. But
Speaker 3: everything that he posts then reed spikes on the terminal,
Speaker 3: so I get it through my app anyway. So it's
Speaker 3: it's like having a truth social account, I imagine. I
Speaker 3: don't know what the other posters are up to. I
Speaker 3: don't know if it's one man platform or what someone
Speaker 3: let us know.
Speaker 1: Regeneration true beast mode speaking of healthcare, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Go on, I read this speek about this lovely well
Speaker 2: terrible insider trading case. These like three brothers are accused
Speaker 2: of doing all sorts of insider trading. I think they're like,
Speaker 2: they're like healthcare people. Like I think they worked in
Speaker 2: healthcare banking, or at least one of them did, and
Speaker 2: they do a lot of trading in healthcare stocks and
Speaker 2: allegedly insider trading and market manipulation and healthcare stocks, and
Speaker 2: some of the accusations are wild. Like this is the
Speaker 2: most interesting to me, is like, you know, I love.
Speaker 1: Insider trading and like doing it.
Speaker 2: So like the main thing they're accused of doing is
Speaker 2: like just standard stuff.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: They had a friend who they like. The one guy
Speaker 2: had worked with him and he was a fairly junior
Speaker 2: banker at Lizard. He's a healthcare banker, and so he
Speaker 2: had some information about Lazard's healthcare deal flow and he
Speaker 2: would just tell his buddy allegedly, hey, you know this
Speaker 2: deal is coming, and the buddy would allegedly trade options
Speaker 2: and made like forty million dollars right like the ring
Speaker 2: of them made forty millions. And in exchange for this,
Speaker 2: the brother gave the banker gifts, including a Rolex watch,
Speaker 2: fine help in drafting slides for a PowerPoint presentation that
Speaker 2: he was preparing as part of his job at Lizard,
Speaker 2: which is like, really, he's facing up to twenty five
Speaker 2: years in prison or whatever. I want a PowerPoint.
Speaker 1: I want to see the power point. It's probably it
Speaker 1: can only be so good. I mean that's what you say.
Speaker 2: Now, No, like, if you're doing your power point, if
Speaker 2: your banking job with Bizard, like the floor is high,
Speaker 2: it has to be good, but the ceiling is low,
Speaker 2: it can't be that good. And I also give him
Speaker 2: advice and assistance in his search for a new investment
Speaker 2: banking position, which did not work out well because it's
Speaker 2: hard to keep the investment banking job once you're charged
Speaker 2: with the.
Speaker 3: Most valuable piece of advice probably would have been to
Speaker 3: stop insider trading.
Speaker 2: Yes, the one piece of advice he could not provide
Speaker 2: in the circumstances. But yes, But so that's most of
Speaker 2: what they did, most of the money that they're used
Speaker 2: of making. But they also did like other wild stuff,
Speaker 2: including insider trading on drug trials, right, so, like you
Speaker 2: have a biotech company, it's like trialing a cancer drug.
Speaker 2: If the results are good, a stock will go up.
Speaker 2: If the results are bad, the stock will go down.
Speaker 2: And so they allegedly set up fake email addresses for
Speaker 2: fake doctors and would email the people doing the trial
Speaker 2: to be like, I have a cancer patient who would
Speaker 2: like to be part of the trial, and they'd be
Speaker 2: like okay, and then they'd be like, can you tell
Speaker 2: me how it's going so that I know whether I
Speaker 2: should put my cancer patient into the trial.
Speaker 1: And they'd allegedly.
Speaker 2: Get information that was useful for a hypothetical doctor, but
Speaker 2: also useful for an investor, right because if it's like
Speaker 2: a trial is going very well, then you can buy
Speaker 2: call options on the stock. And so they allegedly did that.
Speaker 2: They got some information. Apparently it wasn't like market moving enough,
Speaker 2: is my impression, because instead of using that information to reaptions,
Speaker 2: also like made up fake information saying the trial was
Speaker 2: going really well, and then instead of like putting out
Speaker 2: a fake press release or just like talking about it
Speaker 2: on Twitter, they like very subtly created like fake profiles
Speaker 2: on cancer support sites and like leaked it in a
Speaker 2: way that didn't seem like they were hyping a stock,
Speaker 2: but that made it seem like it was like legitimate
Speaker 2: medical information. And then they took that and leaked it
Speaker 2: on Twitter, and like the stock pannel, they didn't make
Speaker 2: a lot of money on this. This is very convoluted. Yes,
Speaker 2: like forty million dollars on just straightforwardly being told about mergers, right,
Speaker 2: so so like that's a better deal. But this was
Speaker 2: the very sophisticated and interesting form of insider trading that
Speaker 2: it didn't work as well as the regular form of
Speaker 2: insider showing.
Speaker 1: It seems more evil.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, Kevin, that we're talking about like breast
Speaker 3: cancer drug trials.
Speaker 2: Right, it's gross, but also like you could imagine the
Speaker 2: upshot of this being people who run biotech companies and
Speaker 2: doctors who run drug trials thinking, ohn, know, we have
Speaker 2: to worry about insider trading by the doctors and patients
Speaker 2: in this trial and sort of having more safeguards to
Speaker 2: prevent that in a way that is bad for cancer patients,
Speaker 2: but that like you know, prevents this sort of insider trading.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's like, if you're a cancer patient and you go
Speaker 2: to a drug trial, like nobody's like, oh, you better
Speaker 2: sign this piece of paper saying that you want insider
Speaker 2: trade on and we're going to monitor your training because
Speaker 2: it's not that important.
Speaker 1: Like that is so far.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly, it's not far from these guys. Yeah ideas,
Speaker 2: and so now it's like you've sort of made the
Speaker 2: whole drug trial process a little bit worse for everyone.
Speaker 3: I was going to say that, Unfortunately, it feels like
Speaker 3: drug trials, especially for small publicly listed biotech stocks, or
Speaker 3: like sort of the perfect place for this sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's.
Speaker 2: Tons of insider trading on them or like cases, but
Speaker 2: they're never patients. They're like a consulting doctor is leaking
Speaker 2: to a hedge finanale.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: There's a long history of people worrying about insider trading
Speaker 2: and drug trials, but for the patients, that's kind of
Speaker 2: a new though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the fake patients, fake patients, the patients themselves.
Speaker 2: They wrote about this, and I was like, hypothetically, if
Speaker 2: you were a patient and you took the drug and
Speaker 2: it worked really well in your case, and then you
Speaker 2: bought call options on that. Would that be insider trading?
Speaker 2: And the answer sort of depends on what you've signed.
Speaker 2: I think legal advice, but also like no one's going
Speaker 2: to come after you, like come on, but yeah, these
Speaker 2: guys kind of run it for a well.
Speaker 3: In the setup, you did ask the popular question that
Speaker 3: you know, say you were on a Boeing plane that.
Speaker 1: Was going down and it's like a big Reddit. What
Speaker 1: was the answer?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is like a class. This is like
Speaker 2: a Reddit thing that people send me a lot when
Speaker 2: it was first posted and then periodically send me every
Speaker 2: month since. But there was a Boeing plane where like
Speaker 2: the door popped off in midair and it was pretty
Speaker 2: hairing for the people on the plane, and someone posted
Speaker 2: on Reddit if I were on that plane, could I
Speaker 2: have bought put options on Boeing? Would that be insider trading?
Speaker 2: And my answer is not legal advice is no, that's fine,
Speaker 2: Like that's you know, it's like you're using your product right,
Speaker 2: Like it's like if you have an iPhone and like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't think it works very well. You can sell
Speaker 2: Apple stock and if you think it works great, you
Speaker 2: can buy Apple stock like this normal people interact with
Speaker 2: the stock market is like you experience the company's products
Speaker 2: or services and then you trade on it.
Speaker 3: I guess if like you're on that plane and you've
Speaker 3: called all your loved ones everyone you would want to
Speaker 3: talk to, and you have some extra time, that it's
Speaker 3: not unreasonable that you would think to buy puts.
Speaker 2: I feel like the framing of the question and Reddit
Speaker 2: suggests that, like you don't have that many loved ones,
Speaker 2: like kind of a DJA. But yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just I like to make everything personal, right,
Speaker 3: I would.
Speaker 2: Not I think have the presence of mind to buy
Speaker 2: puts on Boeing is the planet is like the plane
Speaker 2: lands maybe, but anyway, plant is I think it's fine.
Speaker 2: I think it's fine, but it's something like this. And
Speaker 2: that was the Money Stuff Podcast.
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