and we are good martin thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with me all the listeners all the viewers thank you thank you thank you how are you doing today great thanks how are you i'm honestly if i'm being completely forthcoming i'm a little bit nervous because i don't know if i've ever spoken with someone live who is what would be the best way to say i'm going to argue so polarizing you truly are so when i announced this that this was going to go on it was a 50 50 split i got dms of people who are absurdly excited they're like i cannot wait for this to go down it's gonna be a treasure trove of information and then on the other side there was a lot of haters there was some very like way beyond pejorative comments and what i just it was funny like let me put it this way there were some people who refer to you as the most hated man in america on the other side there's people referring to you as their wife's boyfriend so and it's a 50 50 split so this is like all over the map man and i just i have to say i think we're going to get into some very very interesting stuff and if it's cool with you obviously i want to talk about what was going on with your experience with jail prison what was going on you've been on wall street you've been on wall street bets maybe your concept and your ideas thoughts opinions on amc and jimmy and kind of where things are going does that all sound good to you yeah no great really happy to have me uh i'm really happy you have me here sir appreciate it very much and you talk about whatever you want i think we're going to be able to get into some things that could be at minimum eye-opening especially that intersection of health insurance and wall street and just even some of your experience because i know you've previously worked at some hedge funds and this is always a treat because a lot of people who are watching do identify just your average run-of-the-mill retail trader retail investor so it's always interesting to be able to pick the brand of people who have like kind of seen on the other side of the wall like what's going on behind the closed curtain but before we get into the wall street um i guess talk of just even investing trading valuation short squeezes i think it's best to get the elephant out of the room and i think i myself fell victim to completely misunderstanding your story i think the average person who knows your name if they haven't done any extra due diligence on like what your story is it's very much assumed that you went to prison and got in trouble with the law because of raising a drug price and even there like at first if you google it there's this drug dereprin which it sounds important but from there then i heard that you went to it because you raised the price of insulin and they were just naming various drugs so elephant out of the room obviously you got caught doing something that you shouldn't have done what was that whole story yeah so i went to jail for fraud um i had a hedge fund uh where i managed clients money and those clients thankfully did really well it is still a crime if you tell any kind of lie or make any misleading statement whatsoever um most frauds and ponzi schemes and things like that they end with everybody crying everybody broke you know with no no money left over i made my investors three to five times their money depending on when they invested no investor lost money so i'm really proud of that and happy that obviously you know it's not a good thing to lie or mislead or do any of that paid my debt to society it's a big heavy price to pay i didn't make any money from the hedge fund so it was really uh painful personally but i'm at least proud my clients do well so you know there's a bloomberg article i think the title is probably going to prison if his clients made money it was like uh you know it's a good question but you know it's still it's still wrong to to mislead or lie no matter what you do and i regret the actions i did you know it's time to move on and grow as a person and do better so i think a lot of people listening right now and potentially if this is the first time hearing that story like right away you're like oh it's funny because the media painted it as like farmer bro raise the price of drugs going to prison and like obviously if you read it i hope that they explained it didn't really have to do with that so right there i think it's kind of the first thing where people like oh okay maybe i don't know really what happened here but if we focus on the thing that got you those negative perturbatives of like saying the most hated man in america i wrote this down i don't know if you know this but in 2017 the loud institute gave you an award for the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare so i mean let's be honest i've never really won awards in my life and you won one but it doesn't sound like the best one to win yeah well i think i think people have an emotional reaction to health care that's that's um doesn't apply to other goods and services and there are no laws that make goods and services any different from any other goods and services in any industry whether it's tech or consumer products or anything like that so the laws of economics don't just vanish because it's a healthcare product and if you go to a doctor and say you need a brain surgery and it's a million dollar brain surgery it's going to take a lot of the hospitals resources it's going to be five surgeons three nurses etc etc you're not going to get the surgery for a million dollars just because you you want it you know at the end of the day pharmaceuticals sort of get a bad rap um but there is no free service in healthcare in general um there there's money uh in the healthcare system in every single turn of it and nobody should be surprised that there's money in pharmaceuticals i think the big thing that i did that was different from others and i don't regret it is that i was willing to say that whereas i think a lot of people sort of are willing to they wanna they're not willing to do that they wanna hide and obscure the fact that this is a three trillion dollar industry and i've never met a physician who works for free i've never met a nurse who works for free i've never been a hospital that gives away their health care um to anyone but the poorest of patients i've never met a drug company that says you know we don't want to sell this drug for profit we're going to give it away um every single part of the healthcare business which is what it is is um sort of um capitalized on by capitalist actors and actually i think that's a good thing i think that's what makes it work that's why america has the best healthcare in the world in my eyes that's why we have the most amount of drug treatments the most amount of research the whole world envies our biotechnology industry there is no biotechnology industry in europe there is no biotechnology industry in china there's a reason we're the best of that there's a reason that people come from all over the world to go to memorial sloan kettering or the mayo clinic or places like that because america leads in innovation and it takes money to lead in innovation we don't cry about it when it comes to apple we don't cry about it when it comes to microsoft and facebook and google those companies make a lot of money too and they're very innovative so when it gets really personal when we think about um pharmaceuticals for some reason because or for medicine in general because you know we all feel like healthcare is a human right and it is um but how we provision that right like how we actually distribute it is something that's complicated it's difficult especially in a very big country like america where you have 300 million people you know you have people who are really really wealthy and you have people who are very poor and how do you make sure that everybody sort of gets health care obviously the wealthy people take care of themselves but what do you do about the poor people and the uninsured people and the undocumented people and the people who are just above poverty level all those are really tough cases we know we've tried to solve them right medicaid is for people who have very little income medicare for people who are older you know there's a number of you know kind of tools and programs to ameliorate you know difficulty in health care again it's not that easy um but the funny thing i think most people don't know mad is that there are a lot of drugs that are really expensive um there are million dollar drugs daraprim is is around 50 000 um so there are drugs 30 40 times more expensive than daraprim um and nobody talks about those so like you know if i'm the most hated man in america well what about the other 40 or 50 drugs more expensive than dara prince so again i don't want to talk too much about the past i'm ready to move on um i acknowledge mistakes i think life is about second chances and you know forgiveness and you know i i've made my share of fuck-ups in life you know i've made my share of great successes too um i think that there prim i wouldn't call it a fuck-up i think maybe the way i explained it and handled it could have been better but again i also think that i tried to explain and handle it really carefully calmly in great detail but i think people want a villain like they want that like bad guy like oh yeah that guy is sort of fun to hate you know um and i gotta admit it was kind of fun to be that bad guy like it was kind of cool to get attention from you know all kinds of famous people like steve colbert or whatever and kind of go back and forth with him and um you know um it's funny because this is the first interview i'm doing publicly i'm pretty sure uh that was prescheduled and i've got offers from good morning america tucker carlson you know some of the biggest media outlets in the country and this is just much easier because they could do it on a webcast but i think that um you know i really appreciate you taking the time to do this and you know if anybody like knows the media business and anything like that i mean again i'm not trying to pat myself on the back but to get a a fairly top-tier interview you know for for your your your sort of show i think is pretty pretty solid sort of get i mean a lot of people i've turned down that are on television have millions of viewers and things like that so i i truly appreciate it before we i guess put a pin in this just to kind of wrap that all up and i i think you kind of gloss over it and i only know this from like really kind of looking into this story and i just want to clarify to everyone who's listening right now you use the example of let's just use tech whether we're talking about the newest iphone or nvidia's newest processing chip whatever it is capitalism helps really improve quality and drive cost sound and i think what's going to be on a lot of people's minds for that particular point is yes but when you're talking about a new iphone you don't necessarily need that to survive well when you're talking about a drug that could be the difference between surviving and not surviving and i think i know where you're gonna go with the answer but there's gonna be a lot of people who right now they think okay this drug is expensive and you even brought up the example of other ones that are like 50k a month or the price goes higher and higher and higher so to me something crazy is going on with health insurance here and i don't want to really misspeak and get something wrong but your drug when that price went from 1350 up to seven 750 were people paying for it out of pocket yeah i mean i think every drug company the biggest fear they have is anybody paying out of pocket that's just something that nobody no drug company ever wants to have a patient pay out of pocket because it's obviously the it's again it's the scariest thing i mean imagine going to a dwayne reed or walgreens um swiping your prescription and and they bring you up for 25 000 or 5 000 or something like that it's scary i mean it's crazy um and that does happen and that's why we took our drug out of pharmacy um and put it in in a sort of like a private pharmacy where we made sure a patient would ever see a bill no matter what so i don't trust cvs and walgreens to always get it right like some pharmacists would just press the wrong button and ask the patient for 75 grand um so we made sure insurance covered it beforehand before sending the drug to the patient um if that was taking too long we would just send the drug to the patient immediately if there was no insurance we'd ask them to fill out a form and then send it for free so like when you have these high-priced drugs and if you know the market you know every company that has vertex biomarine astrazeneca lexion you know there's no shortage of drug companies that made a living make a great living for patients and for themselves um on orphan drugs they're three hundred thousand dollar drugs you don't wanna bill anybody three hundred thousand dollars i certainly didn't want to build anybody that for for daraprim either you're happy to build their insurance but you know you don't want to build them personally so that's why you have this closed distribution hub where you can iron out all those details with insurance and again what people don't understand is this is a really small drop like only a couple thousand people use their 2 000 people a year so it's really like not some like budget breaker like oh my god it's so expensive like the insurance company's like yeah whatever next you know you know they don't even think about it it's not even a question like it sounds crazy because if you don't know the industry it sounds like oh my god 18. now it's 750 that's madness insurance companies give a shit there's trillions of dollars of healthcare spend this is a small drive they care about things like you know are people using the right generic for lipitor are people you know using an expensive drug when they could be using a generic that's the kind of stuff why is this guy going to the to the uh sees doctor every week he should be going every month at most those are the kinds of things that that insurance companies worry about um prices on pharmaceuticals are seldom um especially ones that sell below 100 million or seldom even even thought about you know they worry about drugs to sell a billion or more um they want to make sure that if you're going for botox that they're gonna charge you for like half or all of that because it's not really medically necessary for for aesthetic reasons but if you have a life-saving medicine you need insurance always covers that they're just there's never they're going to say no and in the edge cases where they do say no i want people to get the drug are you crazy i mean why wouldn't i you know it doesn't cost us anything to make it so for us it's easy to give it away and in fact we gave away 1400 out of those 2000 patients got our job for free so we got paid on 600 people so when you get paid on only a fraction of your customers you need to get paid a lot when you get paid otherwise you can't afford to give away medicine at all and that's what's happened in the past when i've raised prices and other drugs a lot of it has been because there's just not enough um sort of profit to even bother making this medicine so we've seen big companies say i'm not i'm not going to bother making this medicine and the 800 people or thousand people that need it are just not going to get it at all if if pfizer or merck or whoever says yeah we're not going to bother with that we don't care if matt needs it or matt's mom needs it or whoever because you know we're pfizer you know we have to worry about our big blockbuster medicines so people like me buy it we need to stay in business so we'll raise the price and then we can guarantee that every single patient can get it and there'll be a backup supply there'll be a patient hub to call if you have a problem all that stuff that the other company wouldn't provide before so to me it's really sort of uh the criticism comes for people that don't understand the industry everybody i talk to in the industry is sort of like oh i get this my company did this once you know or whatever the case is so like it's easy to like look at this really complicated industry that has a lot of moving parts and and make some bold claim about it or have some extreme feeling about it but when you actually peel back the layers and understand it it's a lot sort of sort of simpler than than it than it looks at from uh but i have to admit that it's really interesting i'm trying to write in your chat but oh i'm trying to write in your chat but i have a five-minute hurd so oh this this really feels as if i love to respond to some of these people this story of it's classic business and wall street but what seems to set this apart is more of like you kind of alluded to it of your willingness to lean into that villain role because it was getting some sort of like cultural attention which i have to it's definitely interesting and like hey that's social media right now that's how a lot of the world works but um not necessarily the villain role but in terms of kind of getting yourself out there and saying let's just say like really things that can stir things up i mean you've only been out of prison for a little bit now and i saw that you're already calling out mark cuban can you go a little bit into that because it very much intersects with this world of pharmaceutical companies yeah i mean i know the drug business really well they don't call me pharma bro for nothing i do a lot of successful drug companies i've done everything in pharma you could possibly do i think a lot of people know some of my stories with um retrophin which is now trevir or calabios or whatever and many other short sales i've done longs you name it i've been around a while and know the industry really well so when i saw mark cuban kind of self glorifying over like saving patients money with his pharmacy i did a little digging and i saw that he was lying um that the drug he said he's saving 99 saves you 99 because he charges 60 bucks and it's normally 3 000 bucks i looked into it because i knew that i know that drug well and i know that it's not three thousand dollars so i just went to a couple websites and i showed that it's a hundred bucks he's not saving you 99 it sounded like he was a hero like wow this was three thousand dollars what a bunch of jerks uh that it costs so much who can afford that thank god more cubans here charging sixty dollars and all you have to do is go to you know uh good rx and it's like a hundred dollars from other companies and that's his best example everything else he sells is the same price or more expensive but he has one drug where he's like look at this it's so amazing and it's a lie i mean so to me it just made sense to point it out like this guy's not some hero and he doesn't know much about the drug business at all like the guy's kind of a joke to me i don't want to get pejorative about him but like this whole idea of like trying to gain this like publicity over telling an obvious lie i just didn't want people to have the wolf pulled over their eyes and see like no this drug isn't three three thousand dollars a month it's like a hundred dollars a month so your sixty dollars is not a bad savings but it's not like some amazing thing that's sort of like a small you know pretty modest savings does that type of thing in a general sense happen often in the insurance pharmaceutical industry like a lot of like outlandish overstatements or understatements or is this like is it par for the course or is it more of a rarity i would say it's a rarity because because that's what surprised me i was like dude you're not charging nobody's paying three thousand dollars a month for that medicine's called levac and like he got so much press over it like wow you saved my life mark cuban i'm like no nobody nobody's life got saved here what are you talking about like that's not at all how it works so i was just a little surprised to see that again he needs to promote his company he needs to get some attention that's cool you know do your thing but you gotta make honest and truthful claims like i went to jail for making false claims like you could arguably go to jail just for that right away oh okay if some if somebody was mad enough at you that's that's prison time right there that's actually pretty crazy i i definitely appreciate the clarification now in more of a general sense like yes you know a lot about pharmaceuticals but also it's not hard to realize that you've actually had a pretty decently long career just in the world of wall street maybe through the eyes of biotech and pharmaceuticals but in general and this is what i really want to get into because i think it could enlighten some people especially just the person who doesn't really know much about wall street could you just tell us like kind of the the resume quick overview of where you've been on wall street kind of what you've done and then maybe we'll kind of get into some of the details of where not necessarily malpractice but just kind of the craziness because there's a lot of quote unquote apes watching right now who are very interested in market structure market makers short squeezes where wall street goes wrong and right now especially because of the pandemic there's been a renewed interest and let's refer to it as the average show of what's actually happening in wall street yes so i i'm from new york city i was born in brooklyn to an immigrant family my parents um came to this country not speaking english too well looking for kind of like odd jobs and stuff like that um you know they were middle class family i ended up working uh at a hedge fund at 16 so i um right around my 17th birthday uh just before i started working at jim cramer's hedge fund so way back before mad money and way way back before cnbc jim was a hedge fund guy and he worked in the 80s and 90s and he was a really uh solid investor actually he made about 21 23 i forget exactly percent uh per annum um over the course of his hedge fund's life that's after fees so it's pretty good and i started there in 2000 he actually retired in late 2000 so he retired with one of the best hedge fund track records he had made a lot of money um and uh basically decided to call it quits at a relatively young age i think he was in his 40s um when he did and so i was just working there as an office worker you know i didn't do anything special and then i started following biotech stocks and i made some of my first biotech investments and stuff like that and i really got involved in following biotech i went to college at night um and on weekends and occasionally once or twice during the day but i worked around the clock basically from early at dawn to midnight um we're either going to school or working at the fun and everything in between and then i ended up joining a large hedge fund um that's in the tiger so-called tiger family uh that was a multi-billion dollar hedge fund and i followed uh software and healthcare there ended up starting my own hedge fund and then i ended up starting uh some drug companies that did very very well so my hedge fund career is interesting because i never i got to learn a lot that i i never really hit home runs in hedge funds um after hedge funds i started trading really really well which was interesting because the when you have outside money like it's very hard because they want to see you make money every month and the pressure of that is like a little can kind of drive you crazy trading is hard enough as it is without outside pressure and you have like kind of someone looking over your shoulder like oh how do you do this month you know and they can take their money out if if you didn't do well so that's really frustrating so as soon as i was out um you know of the hedge fund game i started making a fortune um in um in just trading my own personal account and certainly being an entrepreneur in pharmaceuticals also made me a lot of money so um you know i i did really really well way before jacking up the price just so anybody in chat wants to um you know say something stupid um i was already worth close to 100 million dollars before i raised the price of anything so for me after i raised the price of their prime just so you know i didn't get one dollar salary from there prim i didn't get one dollar bonuses not one share of stock their prim has not made me personally one sec so if you think i'm greedy or something like that you should also look at the millions of dollars of donations i made you should also look that i helped get a kid in venezuela at my own cost in my own time uh medicine in a war-torn fucked-up country i i paid for people to travel across mountains to get this kid drugged because i read an article that he couldn't get his medicine so i posted my phone number on the internet so anybody who couldn't afford daraprim of which by the way there wasn't anybody call me one guy called me but by the time i called him back he already got the job for free from our company so like you know you can kiss my ass if you don't believe me but you know i i have no no i don't you know i don't have a problem sleeping and i i'm everybody that knows me personally likes me i'm not like you know it's easy to make fun of somebody or get like um the wrong impression but you know it doesn't bother me at all like all that matters to me is my friends my family the people around me they understand me and like me if uh i've started to disappoint my family or my brother or my close friends uh then i would feel bad but disappointing some random person on the internet doesn't worry about me doesn't worry me at all i should say i wanna like quickly interject here um i actually first learned of you i must have been early in college and i knew of you not even in the world of pharmaceuticals uh but for the people who don't know like you would just randomly post like how to fundamentally value a company like i would just not go to class in college and you just had videos up there just like video like random breakdowns i think you also did some science ones uh that wasn't particularly my interest but you were like here's how i would value companies and you just put these videos out um which i thought was wild and we could get more into that but just to quickly bring this back to the world of wall street so you have a career on wall street you also had it particularly through pharmaceutical country or companies um with that you've had to see some shit you've had to see some craziest things because right now obviously jimmy went absolutely haywire in january of 2021 right there amc was discussed but then that one went haywire in june of 2021 and more recently we're seeing like blow-ups at the london metal exchange with nickel and that's all happened when me and a lot of these other people are actively focused and we're talking about a year and a half time period so with yours maybe even when there was less regulation i'm i'm just kind of assuming you've had to see even crazier shit yeah no i've seen it all uh to some extent you know i've done it all too i mean i've had some embarrassing moments uh myself where i've done some crazy stuff so you know there's no doubt that you know if you look back at the history of the market people have tried to corner stocks from over 100 years um and there's a fantastic book um called the great game by john steele gordon and i actually think um you know i have nothing to do i don't know the author i have nothing to do with the book but it could be a good read for some apes um because and and gme and anybody else that is interested in the stock market because it's a great history of wall street and how it first started and goes all the way back to the 16 1700s so anyway the the point of the book though is that corners which are basically defined as when a bunch of people whether it's one person or four million people try to buy um all the shares up on stock basically and force it to go up and basically try to cause mayhem um and by doing that um the goal isn't so much to acquire the company the goal is more to sort of force the stock to go up so there's another way to acquire a whole business which i've done many many times which is you go to the company and you negotiate a merger and you sort of say take hands and say all right i'm going to buy out your company for you know and you tried as a buyer you're actually trying to get the lowest price possible right because you don't want to overpay um and you know you have to pay more than the market rate but you don't like elon musk he didn't offer 200 a share for twitter it was in the 30s he said okay i'll buy it for 40 something and they shook hands on a deal and they said okay um but in a corner buyers are trying to sort of force the stock up right then which is a really um weird thing and it's a very different sort of thing from what's normal and it's kind of like well it was certainly made illegal and it's sort of nefarious because what you're hoping to do is trap kind of short sellers and trap other people to and force force the stock to go up and up and up and again corners are been around for a long time and um the sec after seeing a lot of corners uh and other kind of like problems in the stock market the sec was created and they came out with a bunch of laws that said you can't do this you know this is it causes too much mayhem so what they said is that anytime you buy more than five percent of a company you have to tell the world that you bought five percent of the company you have to tell us and you gotta list it publicly and obviously that's good because let's say you started buying five percent of a company and you crossed from four percent to five percent now you gotta notify everybody and say hey coors capital we bought five percent of of this stock just so everybody knows and from now on you actually have to file much more regularly so like if you start selling you have to show everybody whereas in the past you can kind of do a corner and then when everybody else jumps in you start to sell and nobody can notice you you just kind of like keep it quiet you know that's sort of the bad thing about corners um amongst other things so anyway these rules have been around for a long time and then people started evading those rules in the 80s there was a book called den of thieves which is probably one of the best books about wall street ever written by james stewart and it talks about ivan bowsky and michael milken and others from that era milken ended up going to prison one of the billionaire prisoners and uh recently got a pardon from uh donald trump uh but milken did two years in prison um and uh again made even more money after prison but a lot of these guys decided that they didn't want to follow the scc's rule and they just basically said well i'll try to put some of the stock in this entity and you know if you buy you buy four point nine percent and i buy 4.9 we actually will control 9.9 together so let's let's do that and we won't have to file with the sec technically and of course the sec got wise to this and i said hold on that's illegal too um and nobody should do this and then the hunt brothers tried to buy all the silver in the world which was so there's always these schemes that people come up with like how do we force the market to go up like how do we crack and hack the stock market and long story short they never work by the way uh they all fail at the end because i think as the price goes up some of the people that bought the the so called diamond hands they're like hmm i don't know at two to three hundred i that's what happened to gamestop right clearly somebody sold right uh the the investors who bought it four or twenty maybe he was wearing kitty maybe it was somebody else i don't know the situation i don't even know who rory kitty is but the point is like these the people who got in at four or five or ten or whatever you know at 200 you're you're looking around your apartment you're saying gee i could upgrade this place you're looking at your car and you're saying maybe i should buy that new car i don't need gamestop at 200 maybe it'll go back down to 20. i got to lock in some of my gains and that's what happens so you know i think it's fairly um you know fairly common for that kind of behavior and it's just human behavior like nobody's gonna let a stock go up to a thousand or ten thousand or 100 000 if like there's humans involved because humans are going to say hey man i really like game stuff i really love this community but i really need to pay off my house and that's more important to me or i really need to pay for this operation i really need to pay for whatever and anytime you have even one person that does that as you may know the stock market's based on last sale it's not based on how many people have strong hands it's based on the last trade and if one trade happens where somebody says you know i'm out and they they solve the stock and it drops then the whole sort of thing comes to an end so that's why you can't really corner a stock easily um and that's why in the history of the stock market you can't point to one successful corner that's actually stayed up and worked so nelson uh the hunt brothers um cornered all the silver and then the it was working and they were actually the richest people in the world at the time they were richer than anybody they were like the bill gates of the time or the elon musk at the time and then two years later the file for bankruptcy because it's hard to like sustain the price of something artificially um they had a reason they liked silver don't get me wrong but they were artificially propping it by causing this like fake buying and then it went to zero you know uh didn't go to zero of course silver still around but uh their net worth went to zero uh they they filed for bankruptcy so um margin caused them to file for bankruptcy all kinds of stuff like that but also the rules change right the fed changed the rules and i know a lot of people with gamestop and amc feel like there's this conspiracy there's a bunch of stuff going on where where the market structure's been changed or whatever uh to make it a less fair um we can talk about that if you want but basically um you know i don't think that's the case um but it doesn't mean uh amc isn't a good buy it could very well be a really good buy so we have to just sort of look at it a different way i might open it yeah so uh i i definitely want to push back a little bit there so it sounds like with all these stories whether we're talking about tulips 400 years ago more recently silver more more recently silver or the doge and sheep phenomena it seems like each one is characterized by important different nuances like kind of similar but the nuances are really what sets it apart it's always a little different yeah and i think the one that of why a lot of let's just say the average retail trader investor was more than willing to like this diamond hand concept and really dig their heels into the ground at first i think what you were referring to of just the psychology of like behavioral finance of like hey i have bills to pay this is a lot of money i just hit like buttons on my phone and i somehow i'm up x amount of money i think what happened this time around my my my family is way more important to me than any allegiance to any community like my brother needs a hundred grand and i made 100 amc i'm sorry i see i'm out you know i need to help my brother you know and i think and i don't think there's anybody out there that's going to be like no my brother needs an operation but i'm diamond hands i'm not selling sorry buddy you're dead like what nobody's doing that i definitely agree with you there i'm just like hey obviously bill has come especially with the time between the pandemic and now with inflation and everything that's crazy but i think and and i don't know really how much you studied this particular saga this particular storyline but something on january 28th of 2021 so many people were on robin hood because that was the predominant brokerage and they were sitting around in the pandemic and they're like i'm trying to make some money so everyone i picture just they're just in their sweatpants on their couch and they felt like they had a winning trade and i think the thing that the nuance that sets this one apart of why people are still super super in my opinion rightfully angry is they just took away the buy button so before with your example of like hey it went up to two up and went up to 300 obviously someone sold i feel like there's an outstanding i guess opinion from the community that the game was kind of fucked up and maybe the best way i could explain it is the community feels as if they were at the roulette wheel they bet on green green hit and then the pit boss said we actually don't have the money to pay like better luck next time so those rare circumstances that you're saying it really works out it's just like well this one it seems like it was gonna work out and then that's really interesting basically you know what happened in two in 2010 there was a prime brokerage called mf global do you remember this at all i do not know mf global was drawn by a guy named john corzine who i believe was the senator for new jersey and he was an old goldman sachs guy and um mf global was a futures trading firm and it was my friend had a bunch of money there he was a hedge fund and he had all his money in mf global well jon corzine illegally took money never went to jail by the way never even got charged corzine took money from mf global's customers which you can't do and he decided to go ahead and bet make a big crazy yellow yeah now that's a yolo i mean when you're you're the ceo and it's your customer's money you're not supposed to do this and you can do this in stocks prime brokerage and being at a big bank you cannot do this in future it's specifically forbidden your futures account everyone's money has to be segregated he fucking did it anyway he yolo and guess what he was wrong because that's what happens with fate sometimes so you you'll load the wrong time state comes and laughs at you and says ha good try um and so what ended up happening was mf global froze everybody's money and like they were like what are you what what happened like i thought my money was segregated i thought i was okay and all these professionals hedge funds and smaller people too but mostly hedge funds i have 100 million dollars an mf global i don't know if i'm going to get it back you know it felt like lehman brothers and things like that and that's why you diversify your brokerages you know if you have all of your money in one brokerage firm i think you're basically saying i believe in this brokerage firm i've done my research on this brokerage firm i think this brokerage firm is going to succeed well you know how do you know i don't know what in in 2008 when lehman brothers went bankrupt hedge funds who had their money in all in lehman brothers they learned the risk of diversification like you have to have some money at goldman you have to have some money jp morgan you have to have somebody if one of them fails you'll survive if all of your money is in lehman and lima goes bankrupt you're toast same thing with robinhood right if you have all of your money in robin hood and you're not sure robin hood is like a legitimate operation and they're going to treat their customers legitimately then why would you have all your money in robinhood put half of it interactive brokers put half of it in any trade like you asked for it i hate to say it like i know truth hurts but like you got every dollar you have in robin hood and robin hood does something squirrelly sorry like robin you know nobody's perf and i i think with that issues with this stuff interactive brokers is better anyway why the fuck are people on robin hood you know it's just better than a brokerage trading app anyway well i think with that it's um being victim of knowing not knowing what you don't know uh i think right now a year and a half later people are starting to understand and that's how it happened they're like all i see on the news is i could trade for free i never traded before because i was told wall street isn't for people like me i don't have the money blah blah blah and then they got inundated with all these commercials trade for free is for everyone and at one point robin hood had out the statistics of what was kind of happening then and there were so many accounts that were sub six months sub one year sub five thousand dollars as in it was so many new people who they i guess it's one of those things they just trusted the system because they didn't even know what questions to ask it reminds me of when some hipster moves to brooklyn and romans are on the wrong neighborhood and learns how tough brooklyn can be so it's i'm sorry six months yeah just drive to brooklyn you think it's a great neighborhood you walk down the wrong corner and you get bugs hey man welcome to brooklyn now you know better but i think because of that and like from there then it led okay they took away the buy button and then people said how could they do that and then they started to learn about the dtcc and they're like wait none of my orders are going to lit exchanges they're all going to this thing this market maker then ken griffin was talking to congress about it and they're like wait what what the fuck do you mean our orders aren't going so it like it became one of those scenarios where truly they pulled on a thread and it just completely come unwound and then then they people got pissed at robin so they went to weeble then they learned about payment for order flow and now they're going to things such as interactive brokers where they're starting to realize you have to pay for transparency and then from there people there's a huge uproar against market makers such as citadel and virtue just because and even gary gensler like conflicts of interest when like okay we're not really having open competition and i think it's one of those things where i understand what you're saying don't go down the wrong neighborhood in brooklyn maybe do a little bit of research beforehand especially with your hard-earned money but then i think there's also apparently a misappropriated trust in our governing body the sec and government that like when we're doing these types of things like well the sec is supposed to be looking at them i think they're kind of taking it with maybe too many grains of salt that we can somehow trust in it like do you see that not really man i mean i i think that like at the end of the day if you put your money in a brokerage firm and you're ready to speculate on stocks you kind of have to be prepared for anything and if you're all in on one stock and something bad happens like you already were taking a massive risk so you you want you want to tell me that i should feel bad about for somebody that they put their money in a risky brokerage they bought a risky stock and all of a sudden something bad happens like i'm sorry but like that's the stock market like if you wanted to be you want and you want free commissions and you want no payment for order flow and you want like things cost money at the end of the day like if you really want all that stuff go to a traditional brokerage go to a place that will promise you there's no payment for overflow go to a place where you know you can certificate your shares and just buy old school you know paper certificates i mean at the end of the day like and don't put all your money in one stock i mean that's the number one thing have some cash on the side so if the stock does drop you have more cash to buy and have multiple brokerages like there are this isn't the first time this has happened it's my point with mf global with lehman brothers with banks from way back when like banks fail broker just fail you know if you're this is the first time you're learning for that you're learning that okay it's the first time now you're older now you're a little wiser you got a little gray hair like i have and you know you're gonna you're gonna figure it out but if it's not your first time shame on you because you should know that brokerages you know you should have multiple brokerage accounts just in case just in case the borrower gets different on a different broker interest rate's different on a different broker they cancel trading they have financial difficulties there's a hundred reasons why just have two brokerage accounts it takes five minutes to sign up and again you might learn something on interactive that you don't have on robinhood or vice versa like it's pretty simple um fidelity you know fidelity didn't have any problems with this did they i didn't hear anything in the news they let you buy gamestop interactive brokers will let you buy game stuff morgan stanley will let you buy game stuff with e-trade like they're you know but if you just do robin hood and weeble like those are the same company basically i mean they're obviously different companies but they're they're they have the same business model clones of each other so like you have to have a legitimate brokerage firm robinhood to most people in the real world is not a legitimate brokerage firm they don't make money they're brand new they're pretty weird looking relative to other brokerage firms like most brokerage firms like gd or merge rate very stodgy log in you know that's it charles schwab like and you can open a brokerage from those places with two grand five grand like you don't need a million dollars to trade at some of these places so to me i think like i'm not gonna cry for anybody that went all in yolo on some weird stock they just heard about on wall street bets with some weird brokerage and then something went left you know i mean i would feel more outraged if jp morgan said yeah you can't buy game stock with jp morgan or e-trade or like one of these more established bigger players i don't think that's what happened again i'm not fully informed my understanding is the problem really happened at robin hood yeah it was uh not all bro and that's a question i commonly get of like well hang on if they took away the buy button like who was buying it as people were selling it and the answer is like they kind of extrapolated they thought the issues that robin hood where everyone were you're right to say things like interactive brokers like and obviously that's run by the og thomas peterffy things were fine there but coming back really to what you were saying there's no such thing as a free lunch the reason why people pay commissions on certain brokerages is because you typically are paying for not only transparency but a bit more security with all of that though i see what you're saying and coming back to like that brooklyn metaphor but at this like do you think any of the onus is on the sec for even allowing robin hood to be positioned the way it was like isn't that why we have this regulatory body yeah so they're the regulators of some things they're not regulators of everything because finance is sro it's a self-regulating uh organization with finra so the member firms of finra regulate themselves and that again you could argue this shouldn't be the case you know i think that the sec does not regulate everything in securities and there's too much you know like they trust the brokerage firms to do it themselves and you can see that the brokerage firms don't always get it right um especially when there's a unusual anomaly in the stock market which is what gate gme was now stocks go up all the time they're unusual anomalies at other points in time like bio to my industry biotech the stock can go from 10 to 100 after they announce a clinical trial result nobody cries and everything works out fine um to me like again i i'm interested in all this stuff but at the same time like i have to ask myself as my core competency as an investor my job is to make money every year for myself and my family right everything else i really don't care about so i try to find the stocks that i think are going to go up i try to find the stocks and avoid or short the stocks i think are going to go down and that's my job and i don't have any interest in like regulating the the trading world i don't have any interest in like what the sec does or finra does like that's up to them man my job is to worry about my portfolio and make my p l go up with good trades and good investments so if you think gme is a good trade or a good investment buy it and hold it and wait and see what happens you know if you don't think it's a good investment don't buy it and don't hold it see what happens same thing with amc same thing with gamestop or any other stock like to me to obsess over the details of the market structure it's a waste of time like i why would i do that like can i change the market structure myself no i can't like i'm just a dude uh can the average retail person change the market probably not either like can you get a senator interested in this kind of thing maybe maybe not but like what are you trying to do at the end of the day to me like being an advocate about you know fairness in the markets is like a fool's errand like i don't care about that enough like i care about i need to make twenty percent this year not ten percent i need to make fifty percent this year uh instead of 20 that's what i should spend my energy a finite amount of time and energy to work on investments right i want to find the best stock and buy that stock i want to find the worst stock and short that stock everything else that takes away from that to me is a waste of time so we can talk about this all we want but is it gonna really change anything and are we wasting our time when we can be looking at another chart another 10q another 10k like that's our day job and that's what like the average investor i think does because i think the average grade investor does um because like what are we going to tell the dtc to change the way they work like who cares like it's not my worry like maybe something crazy happened with these stocks in robin hood maybe something didn't again you probably see my perspective that well other brokerage firms survived like nobody stopped you from buying gamestop and other brokerage terms so to me like i don't think that's true but even assuming it's true what game do we get from talking about it like we should talk about how some biotech stock could be and like antilia could be a 5x like that's exciting like you might find extra money buying intelia it's a big biotech company a lot of people know about it i'm not like touting it or anything but that's an interesting thought to examine and see if that's true maybe we should buy that stock maybe not i don't know i have to do more research but that is at least a lot more exciting than like oh what happened on the day of january 6 2022 at dtc like who cares like i'm here to make money like i don't care about what happened yeah so i think with that and i'll do my best to articulate and this is one of those things that i think everyone who identifies as an ape it's just a myriad of different opinions and i think what it more so is is you're looking at it very quantitatively very black and white very much did i make a good trade a badge did i make money did i not make money your goal is to make money and i think with this yeah what's your goal i think with this one it's become particularly if you're looking at it the lens of gme then also it did morph to include amc it was through the lens and it just became this cultural wildfire and i almost would argue that gme and amc became a vehicle for like the newest age groups like occupy wall street it became like a digital occupy wall street because the shit storm that happened was yeah i agree the financial situation per person on average was awesome they were locked up i think there was a desire for a sense of community when everyone was shut in because of the pandemic and then the story started to go like you could buy a little piece and fuck over hedge funds the people who seem to be doing well whether that's true or not that was how it was in the media like hedge funds could get screwed over and then obviously melvin became like kind of the poster boy of like how that whole scenario went but and i saw that you were trying to do some research on amc and gme and even that you were looking at the fundamentals of it because it sounds like very much that's how you care about socks but with this one it living it in real time now for a year and a half fundamentals took the backs and it was the story that just captivated truly america and parts of the other world of like it was the story of the david and goliath it was literally the wall street story of david and goliath and that's what it was it's like dude all these davids like got together and then they selms became one giant goliath so like i know that's kind of confusing because it's more of a narrative than a common way to engage in the market but that's also inherently why i think it worked out because no one thought it was going to fucking happen like that like there's not many times where literally millions of people get in on this wildfire of a narrative opposed to like oh do i think amc is a good bounce-back play do i think gme is gonna properly pivot into crypto like that type of it's just so wild and i think that's why it took everyone off guard because they're like it was just something so far out of left field and then from there with like the analogy of bending on zero they got it right then they didn't pay and now people are just looking into everything else but with it i see what you're saying of like an individual person like if i sit here if you and i just talk about it and we're like dude uh fuck pattern day trading fuck payment for order flow uh the proper the improper reporting of ftds or political insider trading one person or two people not gonna get it but this did expand so much that now you do have petitions that are like crossing like hundreds of thousands of signatures and like people shit posting gary gensler every single day it's almost kind of hard in my opinion to see they definitely know what's going on i don't know if it's gonna prompt them to give action because to my understanding it also gets super political of like okay even if one guy wants something what's going out in the either finra or the sec and all those stuff basically a functioning kabul uh it'll be wild to see how it plays out i think it's hard to have a playbook because this type of thing with so many people engaging in it and especially with the like vast amount of social media adoption i don't think there's a playbook like i don't think there's anything to be like it could end this way but it's far far from your typical is this company overvalued or undervalued i feel like like i said before i think you could take the fundamental breakdown throw it in the back street and you're just letting literally an ape out of the zoo drive the car in the long run the fundamentals matter and i'm starting to get more constructive basically bullish on amc probably less so gme but more amc because of what you're saying what you just said i think there's a new framework that you can look at amc as a collectible instead of a stock like you can look at it as like a club um which which is kind of a bizarre way to look at a company but some would call it a cult yeah and i'm typing in your chat if you saw me distracted there i was just pulling out my credit card to get uh a subscriber which i to be a subscriber which i suggest everybody does the same um um so anyway um you gotta you gotta cut me in on that payment right there uh and i don't know ken griffin by the way i never met him um so anyway the um i think that like if you look at this company is not just a business but also kind of this like you know you say you might say cult but i would say kind of club or like almost like the shares are nfts like it's kind of an interesting way to look at it's a brand new way to look at it and i never thought of a company that way but clearly something's changing in the stock market where at least for a couple companies there's this like deep interest in kind of like having this diverse and large retail investor base and i think that that's cool it's a good thing um like i said i have no agenda if amc's going to go up i'm going to buy amc if i think it's going to go down i'm going to show you know that's it i don't have a preconceived notion but after talking last night for way too many hours to both holes and bears um you know i kind of like this concept of like this community sort of permanently making this company kind of theirs now that normally doesn't work for a host of reasons but i still am attracted to it and i do think that amc has a kind of irreplaceable asset in the sense that they have half of the damn movie theaters in the country gamestop doesn't really have a replaceable asset yet irreplaceable one is what i meant gamestop is kind of replaceable people like video games they go to game stores and they're shifting their business model and they have a really smart management team but amc kind of has like no matter how much money they make or lose which is very important to me fundamentally there's still like this really valuable as you may know in silicon valley when you have a new website all that matters is your users because you know that you can monetize users someday later by showing them ads or doing whatever making them sign up for premium subscriptions there's always a way to monetize but the key is to get the users and amc has half the movie theaters in the country so at the end of the day like movies aren't going away you know even if they have a tough year or they had like they did in 18 and 19 eventually they're going to figure out a way to like extract revenue and earnings out of out of the production companies so i think um you know amc is probably more interesting and i like the kind of semi-psychotic kind of like ape culture you know um it's a little too conspiratorial i just think like all that shit is getting in the way of us making money not helping us um but if it provides like that like that ape uh you know uh energy that you know like you're you think you're up against ken griffin or something like that then god bless you but like to me that doesn't get me going what gets me going is revenue earning stuff like that so i'm kind of i might buy the stock i really might like and i really never thought that i would uh because all the pros kind of shit and make shit on it and make fun of it and as i was listening i'm like man these pros are just they're just closing their ears like this and it's like what about the fact that like movie theaters aren't going away that's probably the best point of all like i mean gamestop can go away like people don't need to buy games from gamestop but every teenager in the country needs to go to the movies and every you know every adult too so you know that's just going to be there forever now is it worth 10 billion is it worth 5 billion we got to figure that out too but then you add in kind of the the eighth thing and what does that mean and it means something i mean there's i don't know if it means a lot i have to figure that part out but it definitely could mean something so it's not a normal stock that's for freaking sure exactly exactly it's kind of interesting that's exactly why i took people like just off guard because it was so common before when you said you're referring to market cap which is so important for everyone to understand like what is market cap that's the value of the company and they would value was most linked to fundamental value and i would argue now value that equation has just gotten slightly more complicated where value is now fundamental value community value and that's the thing that like i think most people are like hang on this is the people we see yeah that's exactly the point it's like okay so you're getting into this real world weird world where there's a whole new age of trading and investing and it's just like that community and the thing you said treat it each share is more of like a collection like it's your ticket into the community and i think that just has not happened before and they're like oh whoa whoa whoa and it's one of these things that i think it obviously just need to be really delved into and it's more of a crowd psychology type of thing and coming there's only one company where it kind of has happened before what would that be do you know tesla well he's got a big no he's got a big convention every year oh berkshire hathaway yeah tells a little bit too but yeah berkshire hathaway man i mean people feel like they're part of a family when they buy that stock yeah they want to give it give it you know pass it down to their descendants like they're it's a really big deal for them so it's kind of cool to see it happen again i wonder if that's actually how it goes like if it was first worn then elon and now kind of amc have just because like they all trade at huge multiples but people it's it's a narrative people like the narrative they're not just like pouring over like the cash flow and the income statement and that type obviously it's important but there's something else in there and i think that's one of the biggest things that traditional financial media doesn't really get because they're like it's overvalued it's overvalued it's overvalued but then it comes to a very philosophical debate of like what's value like sometimes a piece of art is whatever 50 million but then if i go finger paint like my girlfriend doesn't even like it so there's a huge just difference in value there and i think that's what it is and right now people are adding a premium for community and it just so happens that amc is the symbolic vessel of that yeah no it's uh it's interesting i have some more research to do but i do think like there are private equity firms that will buy out companies because they're not making money right now but they will make money in the future and that's amc has that potential because they have that structural kind of like cemented situation where they have you know all that capacity for movies they need to negotiate harder with disney and stuff like that i think it's all about q2 so if they can print a good number in q2 the stock could easily double but they have to print a good number and that's you know i mean they should know today how their quarter went right today's last day of the quarter so we'll see how that goes coming back you made up a really good point of tech and san francisco and that's kind of just a world that i like originally started in of just your user base and i think you're spot on with that because i'm not sure how much you were following the deal but recently amc did have and announced an equity ownership you know mining company i believe it was gold but they're silver and that type of stuff and the proof is right there because on the announcement the next day hundreds of thousands of people just bought it and it actually got to the point that adam aaron was supposed to go on with jim cramer and cnbc and he had to not do it because legally advised not to because it would have just been like i guess too much going haywire at once but what you brought up is exactly true a monetizable user base and then later when he finally came on with cnbc they point blank asks they're like is this now amc's new business plan is to like use the usership base and adam aaron the ceo of the company flat-out just said yes and we know he has like 100 million on the sideline now but like that's what it is it's becoming a wildly different play than just watching movie theaters and hey like if he's keeping the party going he's keeping it going so like someone's coming up with some good ideas but i think you were like spot on with that like kind of commentary just coming out like a couple weeks just paying attention to the like whole narrative now yeah so um i mean again i i think q2 is still what matters like there's i think consensus says that amc is going to be profitable in q2 and that's a big step obviously after years of losses to actually have profits now you can talk about a mutual fund or hedge fund like fidelity or whatever start to buy the stock and say hold on a second i didn't know these guys are profitable um as soon as that number comes out if they had a good quarter i think the stock could really be off to the races it's obviously kind of been a tough stock to own in the last 6-12 months yep we lost you for a quick second there is your video buffering nope i had a another call all right sorry about that oh all good um so moving on to the next thing in general there are a lot of new traders and investors is there i think there's two ways we could take this one like do you