Navigating Wall Street and Government Oversight with Jack Young

In episode 6 of Don’t Buy The Bull, Cassandra Toroian interviews Jack Young, a prominent legal scholar and attorney. In this episode, they delve into a wide range of topics, from the intricacies of investment strategies to the impact of regulatory government agencies on the stock market.

Tune in to gain valuable perspectives on the current state of the market, the influence of social media on investing, and the importance of promoting civility in society. 

TIMESTAMPS

[00:03:33] Legal Case Changing Policies.

[00:08:11] Hanging Chad Case.

[00:12:25] Election Ballot Confusion.

[00:20:43] Role of Government and States.

[00:24:20] The National Popular Vote Compact.

[00:31:49] Abortion and Government Funding.

[00:35:20] Freedom of Speech and Civility.

[00:43:01] Government Regulation and Public Welfare.

[00:48:39] Taxes and Immigration Policy.

[00:52:26] Short Selling and Stock Market.

[01:00:41] Social Media Complexities.

[01:06:00] State Fair Blue Ribbon Pig.

[01:07:34] The Watney Brand.

QUOTES

• “Details matter. Right. One of the things is to look at elections from the voter's or the citizen's perspective. That's why right now, misinformation and disinformation. And the difference is, disinformation is intentionally aimed at telling a falsehood. Misinformation is just, you got the facts.” - Jack Young
• “This idea of pushing a thing down to the states works in the whole question of a woman's right to her own body. And again, I don't think that's really a Republican or Democratic issue. It is a little bit of a, I think, misguided religious question. But what's interesting, again, is if one of our foundations particularly one of the foundations of the Republican Party, is individual liberty. How do you blend that with this idea of, I'm going to tell you what you can or can't do with your body?” - Jack Young
• “If you want to help protect your shares from being used by short sellers, here's what you have to do. You call your brokerage firm and say, I want my shares moved from a marginal account to a cash-only account. And just that one little change. We saw them start heading for the hills, and it's actually up another couple of dollars today.” - Cassandra Toroian

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Cassandra Toroian

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CassandraToroian/

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandra-toroian/

WEBSITE

FirstHand Research and Consulting LLC: https://1sthandresearch.com/

Don’t Buy The Bull: https://dontbuythebull.io/

Transcript

Welcome to Don't Buy the Bull, a podcast dedicated to unmasking the truth behind how so-called trusted Wall Street institutions and the American government really work. I'm your host, Cassandra Tourian. You can call me Cass. I'm a seasoned former equity analyst, investment manager and former Wall Street Journal All-Star Analyst. And I'm passionate about helping people think for themselves by teaching them about things like investing, which may not be their forte. My only goal is to help you figure out how to use your own discernment and instinct to make good investment decisions for yourself. I have no skin in the game. And to do what I'd like to help you do, we have to look at the world around us, since the stock market does not operate in the bubble. So let's dive in. All right, well, good afternoon, everybody. I've got a dear friend of mine on today with us, Mr. Jack Young, who is a very prominent legal scholar and lawyer attorney from the D.C. area. And I thought he would be a great guest for us to talk to, because not only does he have so many incredibly interesting stories to tell, And he has such an incredibly interesting background. But we often, he and I, banter about investment concepts. And so I thought that he would be a great guest for us. So welcome. Glad to be here. Thank you so much for coming. Jack, why don't you start with giving us a little bit about your background. You have a tremendous academic background as well as, you know, your professional background.

Cassandra Toroian

Well, thank you. And I'm glad to be here. I grew up in northern Virginia, went to a public high school. Since it was Virginia, you know, it was a high school named after a Confederate They finally changed the name, but it was Jeb Stuart High School. OK. And I went from there to Colgate in upstate New York and then to University of Virginia Law School, where I got a J.D. and then went to Oxford, where I have a Bachelor of Civil Law.

Jack Young

Wow. I didn't even know that one. Very cool. And so then what did you do with all of that? What was your first step?

The first step is I ended up in the Attorney General's Office of Virginia, basically handling antitrust cases. OK. The settlement of a case called Gold Farm, which was a challenge to the then practice of lawyers having a fixed amount for settlements percentage. Why that's relevant is this spring we saw that the realtors got hit in the policy of setting commissions.

Okay, so was that reference, was that Goldfarb case kind of referenced at all in that?

But it's a, it was a change And here's what happened, is if a lawyer was representing someone of a large development, he or she would charge each of the houses for the title search. And this is the work, even though the developer was on a single piece of property, that you do one title search.

Right. That's a good deal, though.

The long and the short of it was that that policy was changed. And then in the subsequent case called surety title, which is again relevant to the legal profession today, the state Supreme Court took over the regulation of lawyers. So it became a state regulatory system. before the bar itself decided what unauthorized practice of law and issued certain opinions along those lines. And you can see that that is an area for mischief. Whenever you have a regulatory system that has the regulations of themselves that you run into problems. And you hear some of the same things then, and that was in the mid-70s, that you hear from the realtors, but they're taking bread out of our mouths. The whole idea of regulatory systems is to protect the consumers, and in a way, and I'm sure we'll talk about this a little bit later, it's also to protect small business from pernicious actions of large corporations. And we also see that when we talk about regulation is one size does not fit all. The regulatory state can be overly oppressive if it tries to regulate too much of the capitalistic society and not take into consideration conditions of small businesses, for example.

Right. Absolutely. Well, so that kind of brings up the fact that you mentioned capitalism. You have been heavily involved with the Democratic Party over many years. I wanted to get your sort of background in how you got involved there, some of the things you did, and talk about kind of what your thoughts are now about, let's call it the regulatory government.

Well, while I was in the Attorney General's office, I also was the General Counsel of the State Electoral Board. And that meant trying on cases that came before the State Board of Elections. We went to the Supreme Court a couple of times. We pursued bribery cases in the western part of the Commonwealth of Virginia that would basically vote by it. And that carried on. I ended up representing then a series of parties, candidates in the later part of 1990s. I started doing some recounts. I was involved in the recount for L. Douglas Wilder. first African-American governor in the South, and obviously in Virginia. We won. We went on with a couple of people that I tried that case with to do something called the recount primer. And that led to being on the ground actually handling the recounts. for the Vice President, Al Gore, in Florida in 2000.

Ah, the hanging Chad case.

Well, I'm glad that you actually realized that it's Chad. Right. People try to say Chads. It's not. It's like deer. It's plural and singular. It's Chad. I actually have some of those Chads at home. Wow. And then have continued on basically doing political law in a firm that started out as Sandler Reef, became Sandler Reef and Young, and is now referred to as Sandler Reef. We did a lot of congressional investigations, I was special counsel to the Democratic National Committee for those investigations. But more importantly, most of the work with the DNC was in something that we called protect and promote the vote. A short, short, term for it was P2TV, which is to match up with something called Get Out the Vote or GeoTV. The idea was host Florida is really to to start looking at problems and trying to solve them or prevent them before they became major electoral issues. And the best example is in Palm Beach, the ballot in 2000, the so-called butterfly ballot, confused many voters as to where to then punch out the Chad. for Gore Lieberman. The problem is that the Gore Lieberman ticket was close to Pat Buchanan. Now, Palm Beach population was very much behind Joe Lieberman, first Jewish candidate. God rest his soul. Yes, exactly. Well, what happened is that 6,000 people in Palm Beach voted for Pat Buchanan when, in fact, it was clear that they wanted to vote for Joe Lieberman and Al Gore. Lieberman was really, I think, the motivating factor. Well, why is that important? Well, because the margin between Bush and Gore was 537. Tiny. And what we, well, interestingly enough, you would say, well, you know, whose fault is it that the ballot was confusing? Well, the election officials had thought they were doing the right thing. because of an older population, they increased the size of the print. When you do that, you know, things closer, so they thought they were helping. But what was interesting is both political parties looked at the ballot, thought it was okay. Early in that morning, coming out of the polls, several people said, gosh, I'm not sure that I voted for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. I might've voted for Buchanan. Oh, wow. Well, stop for a second. Okay. What was happening? Well, those 6,000 votes hadn't been cast yet, but have been, you know, a handful, a hundred, 200.

Um, well,

What do you do? You're not going to stop the election. You're not going to change the ballot. But what if you went to Kinko's and started running off a sample ballot? Doesn't have to be pretty. Circle it and say, punch, I think it was four, punch four for Gore and Joe.

Okay. So hand those Kinko's out before somebody goes in.

Here's the campaign's American Express. Stop all the other work you're doing and start cranking out these sample ballots. Do them all day. And when you get 100 of them, we have people that pick them up. We'll go out to the polling places, particularly those where we think this is a problem. Well, had that happened, someone gone to Kenko's, Al Gore would have been president. So what that led us to learn is that when a problem like that arises, you have to find a practical way to solve it. Now, there were marches, there were protests, there was all sorts of schemes to get affidavits of people who said, yes, I screwed up my ballot. Well, how are you going to figure that out? You can't. So what it led some of us to do is to say, what we need to do is to have an active group of lawyers that can answer these problems immediately and provide immediate solutions. They don't have to be elaborate. Take a sample ballot, the ink goes, and get it out so that at least our voters, which is often called a Democratic could say, yes, now I get it. So we've done that promote and protect the vote. I think it's now more election protection. It's lost some of its efficacy because programs like that are just very hard to maintain. Grassroots politics is hard work. That's why you start to see even in our local elections, less people knocking on our door, soliciting our vote, but our mailbox is now crammed with election flyers. It's expensive. Makes campaigns a little expensive by a lot. So we did that for a long time. Recount Primer became a big deal. It wasn't intended to be. It was intended to be something that election people could look at at night. It had cartoons done by one of the artists for Mad Magazine. Had some rules. It wasn't particularly flashy, but it was the right thing at the time. And that led, obviously, to the movie Recount, which is a reasonable rendering of the story. The two big books, one by Jake Tapper and the other by Jeffrey Toobin, really spell out what happened and are pretty accurate portrayals of the recount process. And some of the decisions that were made, you wouldn't make again. But you see the importance of paying attention to election details. All the way down the chain, right?

I mean, that's from local levels all the way up.

Details matter. Right. One of the things is look at elections from the voter or the citizen's perspective. That's why right now, misinformation and disinformation. And the difference is, disinformation is intentionally aimed at telling a falsehood. Misinformation is just, you got the facts.

Wrong and you didn't do your homework, right?

You didn't do your homework. The Ukrainians face this every day. And they have a program called Learn to Discern. Interesting. And I think that's the way it gets translated, at least. And the whole effort is to try to get people to spend a couple of moments about whether this is nonsense or not.

BS or not, right? You can say it.

And some people are going, the biggest problem, however, is that we have this polarization now within the country, which is in large part fueled by political candidates. And social media, right? My tribe versus your tribe, we can do that on social media. We don't necessarily have to tell the truth. And then We have foreign actors who obviously do not want to see American capitalism and democracy work.

Right. And want us to be divisive.

Oh, of course. Part of this is to try to get the society to disintegrate internally. And a lot of it is unfortunate, but it is blamed by politicians from both parties. Now, we can pick on one candidate who has been extreme in his approach and lack of fidelity, but that doesn't mean that the other side are angels. There's a lot of this, again, tribalism, which is unfortunate, particularly unfortunate for those of us who are more central. We're not far right, far left, left in the middle.

Which is probably the majority of Americans, too, I think.

And most sane Americans, I think, sort of come to the conclusion of cocks on both your houses. And we'll have to see in November what happens, because at least from the polls, neither of the major candidates are ideal for the voters. So it'll be interesting to see how this happens. And one of the issues that doesn't get as much attention, and that is the role of government, and in particular, administrative agencies. We have a Supreme Court that is conservative. I think everyone knows about the Dobbs decision. That's going to play a big role in the elections. I think it's I mean, I think it's unfortunate. And hopefully the the referendum movement will sort it out back to more likely than not a Roe versus Wade world again, simply through state. A little troublesome is that, in one sense, kicking it back to the states is sort of the Dred Scott pre-Civil War or for those of us in the South, the war between the states or the late Great Unpleasancy. But it was the whole problem of states' rights and slavery that caused the Civil War and then the whole renunciation of reform that led back to Jim Crow and the rest of it.

So, but let's talk about that for a second, because, you know, people, most people, I think all agree that we need to have term limits, right? Term limits in particularly probably the congressional realm. And so people talk about that all the time, but it's like we can't seem to actually get it done. So my question to you would be, A constitutional convention, right, a constitutional convention of states, right, is one path for that. You never hear that be talked about.

And there's a reason. Well, first off, we did try to limit terms for members of the Congress, Senate, and the House. The Supreme Court determined that term limits were unconstitutional. OK. So we've gone to then, what do you do? We're seeing today the frustration of members of both the House and the Senate saying, well, hey, I'm going to self-determine my term limit. Not enough. The problem with a convention is it would be totally open to the swathes of popular opinions at the time. And there's some good things in the Constitution. I think the whole cleverness of the separation of powers, the balance between the three branches is important. And one of the things that we don't do well today is teach civics. That's for sure. Well, I mean, I think all of us that are a little older remember, you know, having to take a class in American government or civics. Absolutely. No one teaches it now. A majority of the people not only cannot name the members of the Supreme Court, but really have no idea what the separation of powers is about. Well, you worry about then sort of the popular mob if we have an open convention, which is what a convention would be. The term limits is one problem. The other is the electoral college, which is about neither elections nor college.

But it goes back to your, but that goes back to your comment about, you know, the populace.

Right. So. And there is an answer, whether it's constitutional or not. There is an answer in the National Popular Vote Compact. The idea is that the Constitution gives the powers for this electoral college to the states. Well, let's assume the states didn't say, hey, there really doesn't seem to be much constraint on what we can do other than we still operate within the framework of a state Supreme Court and other rules. There was a movement not too long ago to have sort of the independent legislative theory that legislators could do anything they wanted to in this area and not be subject to review by a state Supreme Court. The Supreme Court came back and said, no, the legislature in the electoral college situation still has to comply with the rest of the state rules. You can't pick and choose. Well, what the National Popular Vote Compact would do is states would get together and say, we will direct our electoral votes to follow the national popular vote. Now, you need states that total up to 270. That's the magic number to win the Electoral College. They're short a little bit, and then there is a question about whether that kind of compact could withstand constitutional scrutiny. And it really is an attempt to amend the Constitution. Is that permissible in light of Article 5 of the Constitution, which talks about the amendment process? But that aside, it would change how we elect president and vice president. And for example, Al Gore got roughly half a million more votes than George Bush. Other examples, you see Hillary Clinton, more votes. And what it does do is it makes the system work a little bit better, because we're not down to these races where potentially a handful of people in a contested state, kind of make up how the now the votes go. And then you have to consider that, that for whatever reason, and there are many, we have miss and malappropriate, portioned, right, special districts. Yeah. And that arises out of a scheme, right after the, the for the formation of the country, for Governor Gary. So it's Gary Mandarin. Stick with, you know.

Not Jerry.

Not Jerry, it's Gary. Something, you know, raised at some cocktail party. Really got us off on the wrong foot. And unfortunately, and this pertains to both political parties. the party in power draws the districts to it. So whether you have North Carolina, where the Republicans might be doing it, you might also have a New York with the Democrats. It's not fair in either sense. The Supreme Court has struggled with it until recently. A recent decision by the Supreme Court said that challenging congressional districts is not the business of the federal courts. Well, federal courts have been the ones who had really enforced the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and tried to sort through this whole question of miss-sized districts. Now, again, this might turn out okay, In Pennsylvania, not too long ago, the League of Women Voters challenged the Pennsylvania redistricting, under the Pennsylvania Constitution, voting districts should be fair and equal. A lot of constitutions, including Delaware's, they won. So it does prove that, that you can win some of these state things. And, and we'll see where we're again, this This idea of pushing a thing down to the states works in the whole question of a woman's right to her own body. And again, I don't think that's really a Republican or Democratic issue. It is a little bit of a, I think, misguided religious question. But what's interesting, again, is if one of our foundations particularly one of the foundations of the Republican Party, is individual liberty. How do you blend that with this idea of, I'm going to tell you what you can or can't do with your body? Now, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't respect someone who says, my religious beliefs are X. I have a divorce. Under any circumstance, or my religious conviction is this or that. That to me is a personal decision. I think the Supreme Court probably got it wrong. But 10 years from now, we look back, we may be able to say, well, OK, they really didn't figure this out. But the states did. Right.

Isn't it also a matter of the financial there's the financial side to it, right? Where, you know, I think a lot of, let's call it, you know, religious conservatives say, I don't want my tax dollars going to pay for, right? Fine, you want to go, you know, that's your right, but I don't want my tax dollars going there. And so by removing it out of the federal and back to the state, maybe that kind of takes care of that issue for some.

Well, first off, most abortions aren't paid for by the federal government.

Well, I know they say that, but there's, you know, buildings themselves might be funded by the, you know, I mean, it might, but yeah. They start to cross over.

Maybe. But, you know, I can't believe that outlawing a pill that can solve some of the issues, which are used in 60% or more of the time. I can't believe that that's a question of of government overreach. It might be a question, particularly under Medicaid, of health services, but there are so many other things that we ought to be doing to get a healthier society. We are not particularly good about health services, education. We should not ever be ranked below European countries. Right.

Well, well, okay. So along those lines, shouldn't we also be above them when it comes to things like free speech, which seems to have an impact of late?

Well, free speech is under attack. We are better. than most, for example, under New York versus Sullivan, you get pretty much of an immunity of pass when you're criticizing, in that case, public officials. It was a local sheriff. And that is an absolute bar for for a lawsuit by the person that has been attacked. Now, England, the defamation rules are quite different, that those that are attacked can bring losses. So I think we're okay about the fundamentals. Now, the biggest problem is when government or a university particularly public university, tries to put its thumb on winners and losers in the debate. Now, I think you can have a difference of opinion about the Middle East right now. I mean, you do have to be a little compassionate. You say least about the plight of Palestinian people. You also, I think, have to understand that the attack on October 6th is viewed as, you know, a real attack on the state and the country itself. So, I mean, that's a tougher decision, but it seems to me that we ought to be able to hear from both. Now, the question really is, what's the balance of that protest? Should you be able to stop all traffic because of your view? Probably not. Well, should you be able to shout down a speaker who you don't like? Probably not. But that's not really, in my view, a First Amendment problem. It's a problem of a lack of civility in a society.

How do you change that? sort of came out of nowhere.

Well, it did. And it's, it's, it's troublesome. Yeah, because he does go to civility does go to the, to, to our society. And we have, again, this polarization inflamed by politicians on both sides. Right now, it seems to be more on one side than another. But, um, The real problem is that polarization, my tribe versus your tribe mentality, plays off of some real frustrations in this country. It's not just the inflation. It is that we've lost something, and there are people who are frustrated. that government isn't helping them. But at the same time, they would say, we need less government. Right. Right. Oh, a decade and a half ago, called deer hunting when G with Jesus, people who, you know, one of their freedoms, one of their gun. Yeah. So one of their social security. Yeah. Government support check. Yes. Yeah, just sort of blend that together. And there's

Right now, there's really kind of a centrist mentality, really.

Well, I think most people are in the center until they get frustrated because, you know, their life isn't working out the way. And some of it can be blamed on overregulation. Yeah. And be blamed on bad policies. And we still haven't really worked out how we deal with society as a whole. How do we deal with the inner cities, for example? Now, good news is gun violence is going down, but mass killings still exist. And I think it's a good thing, I'm sorry for them, that the parents of one of these attackers are getting. Now they went out and helped the kid get the gun. Very, very good about themselves or society. But we've got to come to some some compromise. It's not about taking guns away for someone who wants to go shoot Bambi.

Right. If they wanna shoot Bambi, let them shoot Bambi. Well, I'm not a deer hunter anymore.

Right, no, no. No, wait a minute, but ducks and geese, they're fair game. Okay, okay.

So then, let me ask you a question then, when we talk about the regulatory government, which seems to have gotten heavier and thicker with each decade that goes by. And of course, there are a few agencies in particular that get often brought up, CFTC, the SEC, to name a few. EPA. Yeah, absolutely. So my question would be then, How do they, which are all, as you said, to protect, supposedly, the average person. But yet, when you look under the hood, some of what they've done actually is quite the opposite. That may be the intention of why the agency was set up, but they've drifted so far away from that. How does that get reined in, particularly with, you know, we're going into a world with cryptocurrency and you've got all this land grab going on between the SEC, the FTC, or CFTC. What are your thoughts on that?

Two things. One, really, since the New Deal, we've had the rise of the administrative agency. At the same time, we have had an inactive and non-responsive Congress. So part of the problem is that Congress will legislate in the most general way and then hope that the administrative agency figures it out. The Supreme Court has said, and I think I can agree with the Supreme Court on this, and that is that an agency doesn't get a free ride on things that are major issues. That you have to have some authority from the Congress. And this has been the problem with Biden's student debt relief. There is really no place that you can rest assured that Congress intended to give the Department of Education or some other department the ability to forgive student loans. And that's true that did Congress really go. And it turns on something that, little esoteric, but called the Chevron Doctrine. And it really is the source for some of this over-regulation in that it says, in essence, that if a statute is clear, you follow the statute. But if it's ambiguous, we're going to defer to the administrative agencies definitions, a little more complicated definitions and regulations, which is sort of taking away a judicial power to review. I think the Supreme Court is probably going to do in the Chevron doctrine.

There are cases up right now where this is coming up, right?

And I think that is likely the Chevron doctrine will be retired. Now, there's some other things that Skidmore doctrine still gives you deference, but doesn't give them a kind of a free hand. Right. That's probably a good point. That's part of the part of the problem. Part of it also is mission creep. But I pull out of this Congress. Obviously, the executive is mandated to execute the laws. And if it's vague, and the Supreme Court will allow it, an agency can go sort of as far as we know. Some of this does, however, bring you to areas where the government has to legitimately think about the welfare of American people. The whole passive restraints fights earlier. Well, you know, none of us are now really opposed to seatbelts. They save lives.

Right. Speed limits.

Well, speed, well, yeah, speed limits.

Yeah, okay, all right.

Yeah. Drunk driving. Drunk driving, speed limits are all health and safety. Right. No rational person really would oppose, but you can look at, well, look, you mentioned the SEC. You can look at the Securities and Exchange Commission and say, what was it, what was it really chartered in the 33, 34 acts to do. Market manipulation, trying to give some order to the markets. But I think that they can go too far, not so much in turning a blind eye to to market manipulations, but it is in the heavy handedness, which they can go after small business. Let's assume a small business on its face didn't make the best decisions, the right decisions. Well, I don't think you have to come down so hard on that small business unless it's absolutely necessary. And many times it's not. And then there's overreaching, I know you're involved in a lawsuit that I think makes great sense. The SEC says, we'll settle with you, but you can't now go out and defend yourself. You can't.

Well, so what?

I mean, that's there simply to protect the agency. They want us to make sure that you can't undercut us. Well, you've already settled the case. You know, it's not like two private parties. This is the United States government. And the same thing can happen to state governments. There's no reason to think that an individual can't say whatever they want to about the settlement. The settlement is the settlement. But the First Amendment, I think, gives you a lot more ability to do the one thing that we've always said is fundamental to democracy, and that is your right to criticize the government. And the criticism of the government doesn't necessarily have to be well thought through. It should be.

But we really... That's what makes us not part of England.

Well, that's true. Although we might write back to... and say, we apologize, take us back. You know, you and I are in Sussex County, Delaware, you know, maybe we could help Harry and his wife by saying, okay, you can come and we will call you Prince Harry and we will call you Your Royal Highness Duke of Sussex, obviously. It goes back to William Penn, but I think the agencies need to be reeled in somewhat, but they also have to be careful about not being captured by industry. And I think it'd be interesting to watch where investigations by Congress and others go in. Was the FAA really regulating the safety of planes that came off the Boeing? Right. Yeah. You know, we kind of really do care. Yeah. you hope when you get on a plane, someone has looked at this stuff and that we are, you know, a safe company. And that the passengers, we don't have to worry about, you know, making sure we really have our seatbelt on all the time in case we're going to get sucked into the plane.

Yeah, that's frightening to think about.

Yeah, it's frightening. That's what government should be at its best. Same way it ought to be at its best about fairly collecting taxes, but also realizing that the tax code has gotten too complex.

Too complex, yeah, absolutely.

I still do my own taxes and I think I And TurboTax and I get along and we can figure it out. But it's the immigration question. Both political parties have had a crack at this immigration stuff and haven't gotten it right. I don't think it's that complicated. And Reasonable people could come up with a way of having a rational, fair immigration policy, particularly given that we still have a need for labor here in the United States. We have a need right here in Sussex County, Delaware, for people to work in the poultry industry. Well, there are people willing to work. It's getting the politics out of what is a fair immigration system. That doesn't seem to me to be that hard if you take politics out of it. Well, guess what? That you can't do when you see one community saying, Congress, don't do anything because I want to run on this issue that it's all screwed up. Well, OK. If you could identify this with one political party and say, well,

These guys are the ones. Yeah, it's both sides, right?

And then you say, well, wait a minute. It doesn't make a lot of sense that we can't solve it. But politics needs to go back to its roots, which is people solving solutions. And who gets the credit sometimes is not that important, except in this Congress and in this political environment, that's all it's about. They, the speaker, can get some things done on foreign aid, but only if he works with the other party, with the Democrats. We're calling that now coalition government. Wait a minute, the rest of the world can figure out how these coalitions work. We're not a parliamentary system, which is good and bad. But we also shouldn't have the Speaker of the House of Representatives du jour and keep threatening them. Let's get down to the business of government. And I think that's where a lot of people are. Frustrated. Frustrated, but the political process doesn't allow that to happen. Because look at the speaker right now, trying to work something out, compromise, which is the art of legislation. He may lose his job for being exactly what we asked him to do. So we will see.

Fascinating, isn't it? Well, so to kind of bring this back around to finance as well and investing. I had seen yesterday that the Truth Social app, I guess you'd call it the social media app, which went public a couple of weeks ago. And the stock, as you know, went up fairly high, 71, I think. And since then, it's been dropping like a rock. which I would pretty sure is because of short selling, which is a fairly common phenomenon by mostly institutional investors where they sell shares they don't own. They wait till they drive the stock down by continuous selling the stock falls, then they buy the shares at this lower price and they make the spread. So, nice little business.

Wasn't there an Eddie Murphy movie exactly about that?

Yeah, there was. I believe it was called Trading Places. Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes.

Yeah, that's right. It actually explained the process. It did very well.

So, yeah, I have to go back and watch that. That's a great movie.

Then you've got two things to watch. You've got to go find the recount movie. Yes, the recount movie. Still available. Yeah. And risky business. Okay, yeah.

Life would be much better. So the thing that they took away years ago, Jack, and I'm sure you know this, is there used to be a rule when you're short selling that you could only do it, you could only sell short after an uptick in the stock. The SEC took that rule away about 15-ish years ago. A lot of people argued that that was a big mistake. I'm one of them that would say it was a big mistake. And I think that the irony of that was that it happened right before 2008 when, you know, basically we were in financial hell. there were days where they actually would say, we're not allowing short selling because it was precipitating these prices to keep falling. So yesterday I noticed that the true social stock was up. You noticed it too. And we were talking about that. Yeah. And it was up pretty substantially. And I was looking at the news and saw that they had basically published an 8K with the SEC, putting out a press release that they then put on their website in their fact section saying to their investors, if you want to help protect your shares from being used by short sellers, here's what you have to do. You call your brokerage firm and say, I want my shares moved from a marginable account to a cash only account. And just that one little change. We saw them start heading for the hills, and it's actually up another couple of dollars today. I have to say that I was really surprised that no other companies before now have done something like that, like educated their shareholders. And I was just curious what your thoughts are on that.

Well, on the stock itself, one of the problems is there's not much behind the company itself. It doesn't have a large... Yeah, they're definitely a working product. There's a real financial... But on the... regulation. One of the reasons for that regulation was so that you didn't get precipitous. It's kind of like the rules that stop trading when there's unusual activity. I think some of those rules make sense. You can go overboard when you start really trying to to figure out the market and your vision of the market. I mean, the safety guards of controlling shorts, I think, makes some sense.

I think that was one of the first rules that the SEC put in place way back, was the uptick rule.

Right. And I mean, there are some reasons why you might say that we'll let the economy, the shareholders figure it out. And if you want to drive a company to its death through short selling, you might. And we have some strange things in the market, AMC. They really don't have any underlying assets, but are just trading vehicles. I'm not going to say that it's like Bitcoin for a couple of reasons. One, I'm not sure that any of us really understand how Bitcoin is priced. You also then can look at an investment like Coinbase, the stock exchange for crypto. And you can say, hey, I do understand that, but I don't understand why it isn't worth more. So picking losers and winners, I don't think is the business of government. The uptick rule is one more to to cause breathers, people to stop for a minute. The big problem is that in certain trades, you are actually hoping for that run of shorts for a long time, and there's enough strategies. I think the uptick rule works if it has a temporal life to it. You have to wait a period. I don't know what the appropriate period would be. But if you haven't had an uptick, say, in 15, 30 days, then it's Katie bar the door again. Now, for that to work, There has to be someone on the other side. And true social is, I think, hard to really figure out where it ends up. My own guess, and it is a guess, is that we'll see that stock get closer to zero than it is today.

Well, I might have to argue completely the opposite on that. And it has nothing to do with the underlying fundamentals, right? I'm looking just more at the overall strategy globally of the entire social media realm and the other players out there. And I think that it actually could have some use for other platforms out there. And I'll leave it at that. I don't want to say too much about what my thoughts are, because I'm not recommending the stock at all. But I think that it's got some merit to what its usefulness is in other ways. But I was just happy to see.

Yeah, that I agree with you. It's a little hard to predict, particularly on social media, particularly on the whole TikTok controversy, where we're going, because we all benefit from a lot of what is social media. But at the same time, we also can be victims of what we talked about earlier, misinformation, manipulation. of foreign influence. So it's complex. I mean, it's a little like it is like, where is AI going?

Right. And that's. Yeah, I mean, and the influence that has on social media content and the deep fakes and all of that, I mean, it's just going to get worse, actually.

The effects is probably the most troublesome because it gets hard to figure out what is truth and not. I mean, that learned to discern becomes difficult. Now, AI could also provide the seal of approval approach that says, hey, this is deep. This is a deep fake. This is not truthful. AI has real potential to do so much more, and quite candidly, in the legal profession. Oh, yeah, absolutely. If it could be fine-tuned. probably will put lawyers who do some of the ordinary thing out of business. I mean, it's a little like, do I really need a buyer's broker in a real estate deal? I might, I might, I might not. Depends on how social media helps me find a home. But for the legal profession, not everyone has a will. Part of it is that either you can go online and kind of do an OK job. Yeah. You can go to a lawyer.

It's really expensive.

Expensive. The answer is to use this technology in a way that benefits the society. Everyone should have a will. Everyone should be able to figure out how to do their taxes. because the machines can help us. And it also hopefully would drive down legal fees. I guess that's the benefit of being basically retired. Exactly. I was waiting for that. I can be a little more generous. Yes. But you know, when, Partners now are billing $1,000, $2,000 an hour. There better be something magical there.

Yeah, you're right.

But just to kind of sum up, there's a lot of good out there. but trying to find it and find organizations that really promote it. Now, in Delaware, for example, we have a whole host of really solid nonprofits, whether it's Counting and Saving Horseshoe Crabs, who provide a lot of benefits, or the social services. that someone like First State Community Action Agency does. There is a lot of good out there. It's just that the the the noisemakers.

Mm.

Sort of dominate the news. Right. And then can go too far.

Yeah. Well, I guess that's the sizzle that sells.

It is. Yeah. And and the victim is really civility. Yeah. Social social society.

Absolutely. You're right. And, uh, and that's really, it's worrisome. I know it worries you. It worries me. Um, we didn't, we weren't raised that way. We haven't lived that way. Uh, you know, uh, I find it always fascinating to speak with you because you have a different perspective and you bring interesting facts.

Facts to the table. You've mentioned that. Thank you. Very, very gracious. If you look over my shoulder, you'll see what is a blue ribbon with a little glass pig. Okay. That is 1976. Okay. First place at the Virginia State Fair in Hog Collin.

Really? Yes. Wow. That's unbelievable.

I'll leave you with, you know, those are the kind of accomplishments that I think make sense.

Well, that's a tidbit that I was not expecting, so I appreciate you sharing that. Did you name the little piglet up there?

No, it's, I just thought it was, I thought I was going to get fired because I was in the Attorney General's office at the time. And we had the day off to go support the state fair. And so I got involved.

Had you done this multiple times that you were willing to go? No.

Oh, really? I used the words that the clerk uses to open the Supreme Court. of both the United States and the state Supreme Court. And it seemed to work. I didn't have to go the next day. Our office was four above the Supreme Court. I had to go down and talk to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, Redd I. Anson, kind of try to apologize. He thought it was great. Funny, it's all get out. So I could go back to the attorney general and said, you know, right. Not at all worried. And I think the next day or a day later, we were arguing some election law case before the court. And so no harm was done.

Well, that's good.

Although my my uncle, my great uncle used to raise Hogs were basically another part of our family, a very, very attenuated relationship that sells ham and bacon under the Watney brand.

Fascinating. Who knew? Thank you so much for being on, Jack. I really have enjoyed speaking.

I'm glad. Let's get together again. All right. Maybe we can, A, solve the world's problems. Yeah. B, you will reveal to us the surefire guaranteed way to make a killing in the stock market.

OK, I'll try. You have to get my newsletter to do that.

Can I assume the newsletter is not free?

Well, yeah, it's free. It is. It is.

Absolutely.

Well, then how can viewers get a hold of your newsletter? Well, you can just go to my company page, firsthandresearch.com. Well, great. And it'll be right there. Or you can go on Don't Buy the Bull. The podcast has its own website, don'tbuythebull.io. and you can sign up there as well. Well, great. Well, thank you for that.

Try to get that sponsor in always. Appreciate that. Great. Cassandra, have a great weekend. You too. And let's hope that we can do this again. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye now.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. I really do appreciate it. Be sure to subscribe to the show, and that way you'll get updates about new episodes. Or if you really liked it, maybe you can share it to other folks you know. That I would really appreciate. So until next time, this is your reminder not to buy the bull. Ciao.