Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines, heard on mainstream financial media to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street, right to you on main street.

Frank Curzio: It’s August 18th. I’m Frank Curzio, host of the Wall Street Unplugged podcast, where I break down the headlines and tell you what’s really moving these markets. So, I seemed to ruffle a few feathers last week. You want to talk about our new format for a podcast coming up in a couple of weeks, like three weeks. We’re going to change it just to make it better for you. More days, more content, instead of throwing everything just on one day. And we did get some feedback, but most of the few, especially negative, holy cow. I probably received more negative feedback from last week’s podcast than any other of the past year. And a lot of it was due to COVID and the statistics that where you’re getting them from. You’re crazy, Curzio.

Frank Curzio: I get negative emails. I’m not going to lie. It’s pretty cool. I’m a New Yorker. So, if someone’s not pissed at you at least one time during a week, you start getting uncomfortable. But most of these directed towards COVID the Delta virus. We had Drew Bass send an email. I see he makes no claim to the severity of Delta, which contradicts your claims that Delta is milder. It’s just when you quote statistics of importance that relate to subjects well outside your area of expertise that you provide reference links and the descriptive text company and in the podcast. Bruce, the doctor says the death rate is the same as 2020 from 2019. This is false. Provide your sources. We had lawyers come out and say, your stats on COVID are untrue. Delta is more harmful than the original COVID strain and COVID does harm kids.

Frank Curzio: Your opinion on this undermines your credibility and the title of this email was I’m unsubscribing to your podcast again. Again. I get that a lot. I’m subscribing and they say again. Once you unsubscribe, you unsubscribe, you don’t usually come back. But a lot of you do come back. That’s surprising, because you love me. It’s like a love, hate relationship, which is fine. It’s probably because I make you money. Maybe it’s because you tried to listen to any other financial podcasts, you realize that there’s not really anything else out there where you’re going to find this many original ideas or analysis, truth, high quality guests. You’re not going to get all this for free, so come back, which is fine. That’s cool. Again. It’s like, how many times people have said that they’re going to divorce their wife or husband? Probably by a thousand times, it never happens, back and forth.

Frank Curzio: I don’t expect you to come back. That’s cool. So, let’s dig in because this is really important. Okay. It’s a much bigger point here I’m going to get to, but we need to dig in and this has to do with stocks. It’s not going to be just COVID and people say, “You’re out of your element. You don’t know what you talking about.” Do me a favor for those who say that, go back and listen to my February podcasts. Just go back. I promise going to be entertaining as hell. Listen, February, March, April, May, June. And I’ll challenge you to find someone who’s been more right about things on COVID. And I’m not saying that to pat myself on the back it’s that this podcast goes out to a lot of people and getting statistics from doctors. That’s what led me to dig in even further, because I was doing what you’re doing right now, looking at CDC and WHO’s statistics, which are bullshit.

Frank Curzio: They’re bullshit. They’re biased organizations. It’s very, very easy to see that guys. A lot of information’s being suppressed. I’m going to cover that. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s obvious and I’m going to show you how obvious it is. But for me, the stats that I was seeing from CDC and WHO contradicted a lot of stats, I was seeing other places and it may be dig further and further and further and further and find very, very good sources that are unbiased funded by both sides of the aisle. Not bullshit sources. That’s when I started digging in. If you listened to those few months… Hey listen again, I patted myself on the back. When you have access to the right information, the right resources. And for me, that was the biggest story in… Since I’ve been alive, how people are dying of COVID, and we’re getting bullshit information from the leaders who we chose to be honest with us. And I get the political landscape and how people are off on this side, people off in this.

Frank Curzio: You going to disagree no matter what. We’re talking about people’s lives here. These are lives. These people had to die. We talk about children, the effects of children, not going to school based on statistics. So, you need to have the right information in front of you, but I get it. I get it because unfortunately, maybe for those three, four or five… Well, the three emails I read, but it’s probably about 15 that came in, negative emails about COVID and bullshit, all this. I’m not going to change your mind, not going to change your mind, right? Regardless of the facts that I draw in, I’m not going to change your mind. And unfortunately, your thoughts and many, many, many people’s thoughts are based on the political party you belong to. But for me, there’s no bias. I don’t give a shit. I mean, it’s only facts and numbers, I have kids. I want the best for my kids. I don’t give a shit about being a Republican or Democrat. Give a shit about a politician giving me health advice without having facts. But let’s start, let’s start with digging into some of this research.

Frank Curzio: Well, the Delta version of the virus. An email’s coming in, “Hey, can’t any data to support that this strain is mild and original. Well, let’s dig in a little bit. I mean, look at the number of infections based on the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, I’m going to throw sources out there, guys. Quote the sources. I’m going to quote sources for you. Okay. Health Metrics Evaluation, very popular site unbiased, has ties to both organizations. People say, “Well, Trump was funding this.” Well, the CDC is funding it to WHO, is funding it as well. Bill Melinda Gates foundation is funding. So, both sides are funding. These guys do a great job.

Frank Curzio: So, I look at the death rate and let’s see over here, because I want to try to bring this up on my screen. If you’re watching on our YouTube channel, because this is important. And there’s several sites also that you’ll find this on. So, let me go into it. Well, death rate, there it is, projections and getting into it a little bit here. So, what I look at the IHME site, and you’re looking at these COVID statistics of, is this strain worse than the previous strain and I was saying, “No, it’s not. It actually isn’t.” It’s more contagious, but it’s not. People like, “Where are you getting information from?” Well, when you look on this site, again, IHME, 345 people per day are dying from COVID. 345 people per day.

Frank Curzio: Now, when you look at this number, you can go back because this number is lower over the past three months that’s when Delta’s really been spreading into the U.S. Did any other time, since we’ve been tracking COVID in the U.S. since March 2020. So, we’re looking at 18 months or March 2020 through May 2021, that this number of deaths. Deaths, which is very, very difficult to find, which is interesting. You have the backdoor, some of this stuff. When you look at weekly data or daily data, then you go back where it should be very, very easy, very easy on a simple Google search to see how many people died from COVID in 2021. You at the top 30 searches are not going to give you that. You have to dig a little further. Pretty interesting. That’s an important number. Yet, if you look at hospitals, that’s what comes up when you put… Hospitalization rates come up because they’re at record highs is scaring the shit out of people. Of course, that comes up.

Frank Curzio: Of course, this number didn’t really come up when it comes to the death rate, which I think many of us could agree. I mean, we’re looking at the most important statistic of how many people are dying. That’s the most important thing by far. So, here just bring it up on the site when you look at they have cumulative deaths in the U.S. and then they break it down by day daily deaths. And we look at daily deaths, the last available data, it is July 29th is 300, whatever 42, 45 net range. And you notice that this number is incredibly low compared to any other time, going back, back, back, back, back, back, back. So, we have very, very low deaths, but when we look at the infection rates, and again, I’m showing this right here. So, if we look at the infection rates and we look around the same date, 30th of 29th, we’re looking at a hundred thousand infections. The last time we’ve seen this amount of infections was around February.

Frank Curzio: So, if we go back from February… And look what happened when we saw the same amount of infections, when Delta wasn’t around in February going to talking about Delta, okay. And those, the infection rate was much, much higher. Again, you could follow me on YouTube page where I’m showing charts, showing figures. That’s what everybody wants to see. So, I’m going to show it to you. And I don’t blame you for asking, you should be asking, but even going back to February, when we look at this data and we go back to February, there’s 2100 deaths per day, back then. Over 2000, at what point you go in February, well, over 2000. Again, only 345. So, what could you take from that? Because last time we saw again, that affection rate, this high comparable to where it is in February, 2021. 2100 people died from COVID.

Frank Curzio: That’s a 2.3% death rate of infected to put down specters, SARS was 10%. Early on in March, this percentage was around 10% as New York decided to put all infected people in nursing homes. Again, enough blame to go around nobody knows the disease. Everyone’s like, “Let’s separate these people again.” I’m not pointing blame, whatever, but in New York to do that, right? So, what happened? That inflated it, because we didn’t know that COVID is most deadly among older people. And a lot of those older people have underlying conditions. So, that’s when it spread like crazy. And that’s why we had boats coming up the coastlines, California, New York, all that stuff. But it’s 2.3%. That was February. That’s the death I’ve infected. Today, infections getting same rate, seeing roughly say 300 deaths per day, that amounts to 0.39% compared to 2.3% in February. And that’s the death rate of infected people.

Frank Curzio: So, if you’re keeping score at home, that’s an 83% decline in death rates, which you were not going to find any media sites because nobody wants to say that. Nobody wants to say less people are dying, they’re not. They’re going to get less controlled and they’re not going to be able to scare the shit out of you. They’re not going to be able to mandate mass. And that can be a mandate that you have to, you must get the vaccine no matter what. And that’s what we’re seeing everywhere. And believe me guys, it’s coming, you see in news stories here and there, it’s coming. You’re going to need it in New York, New York city. I mean, it’s going to spread like wildfire on a flight, everything. You’re going to have to show proof. You’re just going to wear one of those fucking lanyards around your neck and have the card on you.

Frank Curzio: And you have DeBlasio, guys, he’s such a meathead. Anyway. He’s like, “And if you have a fake card, it’s a felony.” He’s threatening people. The control is just so funny. But look, it’s an 83% decline death rates. So, saying the Delta virus, more contagious is definitely more mild than the original stream when it comes to deaths, it’s not as deadly, right? I think we could assume that. That’s pretty good using statistics that I obviously gave you. Now, what about the claim that death rate is the same as in 2020 as well in 2019. Everyone went crazy over this. And then I started looking at the emails. I’m like, “The U.S. The U.S. The U.S.” I’m like, “No, it’s not the U.S. it’s globally.” I went back to listen to my podcasts, and I will give that to you, talking about stats in and out.

Frank Curzio: Okay. It’s globally. I said the U.S. If you look at the U.S. and death rates 2020, you’ll see 50 million hits of how this is record deaths, right? That’s a great, great headline for everyone’s agenda out there. That’s awesome. So, we have record deaths in 2020, in the U.S. Okay. Globally is a much bigger deal, right? The U.S. is what? Four and a half percent of the world’s population that’s about it. So, if you look globally much more relevant here, according to the World Data Atlas. Also macrotrends.com. You’re looking at 7.6 people per thousand died in 2020, the same amount of people. 7.6 per thousand died in 2019, 2018 around the same amount held pretty steady. If you’re on YouTube page, we can go into this. So, it’s the world death rate. And I have this chart up and you’ll see, from 2011 to 2020 7.8, 7.7, 7.6, 2020 7.6, 2019 7.6, 2018, 7.6.

Frank Curzio: Okay. You’re not seeing the increase. 2015 or 16 and 17 was 7.5. But even before that, 15, 14, 13 around 7.6, if you look at the chart that I have up, you see that rate at over 10% in 1984 and over 20% in 1950 dating back then. And I didn’t randomly pick a site here. I wanted to get a couple sites for you guys. So, even looking at other sites where macro-trends, you could punch in. Macrotrends.net/countries/wld/world-deathrate. You just put in macrotrends.net, world death rate, and it’s going to come up. Same thing right here, 7.6. You see it? And they have this data as well. So, it’s a little bit higher, 7.645. Okay. That’s 400,000. 7.6 in 2020, but you see it, it’s steady. And when you see that, and you see that number, people like, “Crazy, we’re getting more deaths than ever.” In the U.S., yes.

Frank Curzio: We saw a massive increase in deaths from the last week in November to December. And I want to say it’s more than like, almost any other month or COVID, right? December, because they were coming in not too hot. And then they came in really hot and that’s what set the record. And again, that’s every way to see… So, again emails coming, “Frank you’re wrong, what bullshit is this?” We can look global, four and a half percent of population in the U.S., four and a half percent. I’m shouting thousands of statistics, every single podcast. So, I want you to be my eyes and ears, because there will be something that I miss… But the fact doesn’t matter that if you’re looking at the world with COVID in 2020, the same amount of people roughly died then in 2019 and 2018, and a lot of people would not think that.

Frank Curzio: And I don’t blame you for not thinking that it’s just crazy. But when you think about it, it does make a lot of sense because you’re looking at the statistics. 80% of COVID deaths have come from people over 65 and 95% of all those deaths will come with people over 50. But if you look at those people over 65, a lot of them had underlying conditions already. They were in a danger zone and let’s say in 2020, you’re terminally ill. And again, we’re talking about deaths here. So, I want to… It’s easy to say, only this… Listen, people are dying. And I know that is fucking crazy and angry as it makes me that you’re not allowed to see your loved ones or say goodbye to them. But fear of COVID and spreading is just insane. When you look at the statistics and I feel terrible, absolutely terrible.

Frank Curzio: Just heard of another person of a very close friend that died from COVID. But you can’t go into and see them die. Like, it’s a dad, really? The kids can’t go in there? Holy shit. I mean, so you want to put in perspective, but we’re talking about statistics. It’s important that you understand. Let’s say in 2020, you’re terminally ill, cancer, Alzheimer’s, whatever. If those people got COVID and die, they’re labeled as dying from COVID. That’s what the label was, even though they were going to likely die over the next, whatever six, nine months, whatever it is.

Frank Curzio: It’s as many as people are terminally ill most are the hospitals under some kind of care. You’re there for months. I’m telling you, I went through this with my mom. Being four months in the ICU. And she got infected with certain things… It’s incredible. I mean, she was getting infected… Thank God, she got out. January 2020 was when she got out. And then February, we saw all this stuff explode, but a lot of people in these hospitals and nursing homes, they got COVID. A lot of these people died, but it does make sense. I mean, when people are home, they’re not dying from car accidents and are not dying… Workplace or whatever in the mining, whatever. Many have died from being forced to put off surgeries or get treatments at hospitals from COVID, they had delayed them, but taking all that into effect, the same amount of people, the world died in 2020, roughly as in a previous years, dating back almost all the way 2011.

Frank Curzio: And a lot of people wouldn’t know that. I’ve gotten emails saying, “Frank COVID is not the flu.” It’s not the flu, but it’s very, very similar. Are you kidding me? You don’t see the similarities and how come nobody really talks about the similarities? I’ve gotten COVID and it’s a little bit worse than the flu for me, for someone under 50 barely. Under 50, getting up there, counting the months, take it to 50, no underlying conditions. I’m pretty good. I got COVID and it was a little bit worse than the flu. My whole family got it. A little bit worse than the flu. That’s what is for the majority of people. Some people it’s not, it’s really bad. For the majority of people it’s like it. And comparing flu sets like, “Frank more people died from the flu than COVID.” I never said that. What I said is when it comes to kids. I mean, you’re looking at kids here. That’s a big, big story.

Frank Curzio: 2021, 349 kids under 17 died from COVID. They’re close to 75 million kids in the U.S. were under the age of 17. That amounts to 0.0005%. If you want to put the 345 deaths in perspective, 4,000 kids live from car accidents every year, a thousand kids die from drowning every year. So, they’re enforcing forcing mask wearing closing schools. I mean, maybe we should ban pools in the U.S. so kids don’t drown. It’s more kids. Almost three times amount of kids are dying from and who under age 17 are dying from drowning than COVID but even looking at the flu and things like that… You look at 32 to 35 million people get the flu every year. Okay. 2016 to 17, it’s 29 million. 17, 18, 45 million. 18, 19, 36 million. 19, 20, 38 million. You know how many people got the flu in 2021? 0.0015 million people got the flu, right? It’s pretty weird. So, 99% decline in the flu rate, but you know how many people got COVID around the same amount, 32, 33 million. Very, very interesting there.

Frank Curzio: Now, what happens with the flu? Well, the flu, you need a shot. You need a shot every year. There’s different strains. Even, though I think it’s around 25 to 50% of the strains that are covered when you get the flu shot. And a lot of people still get the flu again, if it’s a different strain, whatever. But you’re going to need a flu shot every single year. Well, pretty interesting, WHO told, “Hey, get the vaccine. You’re fine. Two shots. You get now booster shots.” And require you that you get a booster shot every year, similar to the flu isn’t it? Now, I can’t bring up this conversation with people. I can’t talk to people about this. Those aren’t pretty cool statistics to mention to people. I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on or whatever those are interesting statistics.

Frank Curzio: Yet. If I post this stuff on social media, it’s gone. My account probably gets suspended. I’m out to say shit like this. I can’t report facts like this. I can’t get it back to the kids. I can’t tell you how many emails came. Even this week and past. COVID, very harmful to kids, very harmful to kids. It’s a hundred percent false. And I hope that people emailing. If you don’t have kids, that’s pretty fucked up because you know this for a fact because you’re living it in real time. You seeing your kids go to school, you’re seeing… Well, hey, they’re 13, 14. One of the kids had COVID, but there’s no operator. How come? Why aren’t they giving it to each other like crazy? How come you’re not seeing outbreaks in these schools? Wow, my kid got COVID. Oh my God, I’m worried. I was worried.

Frank Curzio: My kids got it and they got over it in like two, three days. And very, very few kids die from COVID. Range of 349 in 2021. And that’s way, way too many. But, to close the schools, lock down, everything, it’s insane. But you know a lot of these facts, if you have kids, instead of relying on your local politician, media channel for references. But 349 kids under 17 died from COVID? What is that? Compared to 480,000 people over 65, who died from COVID. And again, 95% of those deaths came from people were 50 years old? When it comes to children to flu is much, much more deadly than COVID. And that’s even from the bullshit CDC website. And you had a director from the CDC, got on TV and lie about that statistic, even though it’s on their website, showing that. That’s an absolute fact, get all of you who wrote in. Really, basically, I want to say 90% of you were reporting CDC stats. CDC stats.

Frank Curzio: You could say, “Well, Frank it’s different.” No. Again, listen to my podcast. When I was covering this, when it comes to children, the flu is much more deadly than COVID and it’s not even right now, but… And you look at now how much more do we know about COVID than we did say back in October, because in October 2020, I was covering this statistics during the harder crisis. At that point, there was 72 children under the age of 15, that die from COVID-19. And from 2007 to 2018, 643 children, the age of 17 die from influenza. That was from the recent data with census, so that mean as a child is nine times more likely to die from the flu than COVID. Pretty crazy and this is when people started getting vaccinated. But again, statistics, nobody cares about, I don’t want to bore you with statistics, I’m getting to a much, much bigger point here.

Frank Curzio: So stay, keep me on. Even if you hate my guts right now, trust me, resulting you making money for you and your family. So it’d be like, even if you don’t like it, say, you know I’m going to listen to this asshole for a little bit longer. And I’m going to see how he could make me money. I’ll explain it to you. The finding statistics, the death rate numbers for COVID for 2021, it’s just very difficult. It’s kind of surprising that again, it’s not… Because now the amount of information that you should be seeing is being suppressed. And a lot of that, you try to find on Google. Why is that data so difficult to find? Deaths from COVID in 2021 for the U.S. and the world? I mean, you should get the first 10 hits on that. It’s not. You have to dig three or four pages in to try to find this. Instead, they direct you to hospitalization rates, which of course is soaring off the lows. Now, Delta spreading like crazy. And that’s when people say, “I haven’t seen any research on this.” Well, this is why.

Frank Curzio: I mean, I’m fortunate to be tapped into doctors all over the world. That all say the same thing. Every single one of them. That’s the guarantee, the certainty, listen, here’s some links. Here’s what I’m seeing and please don’t mention my name. You just can’t… How crazy is that? Doctors in the field are not allowed to report data publicly, that they see. Isn’t that American? Isn’t that democracy? Isn’t that that how we get better? But why is that? It’s because a lower death rate is less scary. It’s not entertaining. It’s not going to support mandates for vaccines and mask wearing. Doesn’t give power control to our politicians and government. Basically most media sites, reporting hospitalization rates, infection rates, and how they’re surging and surging and surging. Those are the numbers you’re seeing on CNBC now. Again, not some crazy conspiracy theory here. The girl who runs YouTube was on television a couple of weeks ago. You can go YouTube… The YouTube person. This is the person that runs it. She said… She said this. She didn’t say we. She goes, she will remove any videos she thinks is harmful to the public.

Frank Curzio: Like, when she moved every video in April and May, saying that COVID originator Wuhan, China, even though China would not let the CDC go in, they wouldn’t let WHO, they won’t let anyone. But the World Health Organization, they said, “Nope, you can’t come in.” And how did they retaliate WHO organization? They came out with a statement saying China has handled this part, the virus better than anybody else. Even though these were not even allow into China. Those officials did not even let them into China. Who… Would the WHO say that? Who do you think funds the WHO? Who do you think funds… One of the biggest funders of the WHO. If you have a grant are you really… And that’s your money that you’re bringing in, are you really going to tear apart the person who’s paying your bills? You got to be nuts to do that. I mean, I wouldn’t be like to WHO and start congratulating them and stuff like that. But you could have shut your mouth and said nothing. Not saying, “Oh, China’s great.” How do you know? “Well, they told us.” Really? Are you crazy?

Frank Curzio: I mean, come on. How crazy does it get? But she’s removing those posts because she felt it was damaging to the public. And now we know for a fact, the virus originate in China. That’s interesting. If you think I’m crazy, and this is nuts, try to find videos of someone who’s been doing this for a very, very long time all in. Interviews, interviewing people in Italy and China, lockdown and stuff like that. Again, go backwards to the podcast they’re pretty entertaining about COVID. If you think I’m crazy, try to find videos of Dr. Fauci from March 2020 to August 2020, right? When he’s of administration, flipping back and forth saying we will never lock down, masks don’t work. COVID would not spread in the U.S. And I’m not ragging on the guy here. What I rag on is that, you got admit that, hey, you were wrong sometimes and saying that you were right all along.

Frank Curzio: When you have videos of this shit, showing that… He said the opposite again, this is something that we’ve never seen before. And that’s what we thought. Even Cuomo went out there, who’s now impeached. But Cuomo went out there and said, “This is New York. And we’re tough. We’re never going to wear a mask in lock down.” And sure enough, you were wrong. Nobody knew what we were dealing with, but you try to find those videos because I just wanted to compare some of those into what he’s saying now. You can’t find them. Why can’t I find those videos?

Frank Curzio: I mean, I saw all of them when I was doing the research October, November, December. Now, they’re all gone. They’re all gone. They’re all off YouTube. I can’t find any videos of it. Isn’t that interesting. Why? We live in a pretty crazy world where we investigate anyone with no hard evidence, like it or not. I mean, Trump and the Russia thing. I mean, you could say everything else about capital, whatever, but the whole Russia thing. What was that? Three years investigation? All his sources. We know for a fact what happened there. All lies. Nobody went to jail for that. And you look at Tesla today and I’m not a Tesla fan or not or whatever, but they investigate 11 car crashes, right? They’re being investigated, which are tied to their self-driving technology. Out of 765,000 on the road. There’s 11 car crashes. I could tell you that Ford had more car crashes, GMO…

Frank Curzio: Tesla being investigated. They’re getting investigated. We have 4 million people die of COVID out of 7.9 billion people, which equals 0.04%. And we locked down the world, we close schools, mandate masks, tell people they no longer have to pay rent, give people trillions of dollars and make them happy. Why trillions goes right into the pocket of our politicians. How crazy is that? I’m not saying everything’s bad. There’s good people, listened to one of most public people I like, Dr. Gottlieb. I think he’s pretty straight up. I mentioned I have a credible source of doctors sending me stats every single week with links to their sources, which… I’ve been sharing a lot of this information with you the whole entire time. Got no agenda, but guys agree with me in that, you have to be careful in today’s world. I mean, every media company has an agenda. Every politician has an agenda, social media companies. We’ve seen it. They have an agenda.

Frank Curzio: And if you’re following information through these companies research, that’s fine. But just know that makes you sheep. That’s exactly what they want. They want to tell you what to do. They want to tell you how to think, who to like and who to hate. That’s power. That’s what they’re trying to do.

Frank Curzio: I don’t have an agenda. I’m not against anybody. I just saw a big difference in the statistics covering this early on, and I’m a research analyst. And he’s, “Well, Frank, you’re not a doctor in that new field.” Are you kidding me? You have to be a doctor to be in this field? How many docs have been so fricking wrong about this, that publicly go on TV and say all this shit? Because you can’t research something more than that, a professional researcher for 30 years, look at statistics, having amazing sources, just uncovering the truth, that’s the job, right? Why is the CDC… Why are these statistics so far off? But I don’t have an agenda here. If the data changed, I’ll change in a second. There’s non-bias studies showing that people who already have antibodies, if they’re getting COVID and those antibodies are gone after eight months, I’ll get vaccinated.

Frank Curzio: I mean, I’ve got to be forced to be vaccinated right if I want to travel or go anyplace pretty soon. Just got a message from the similar Tronic show, you have to be vaccinated to go, right? Perfect. Of course, technology, you got it, the whole sector, but there is no data on that. It is data showing tons of kids from the ages of eight to 15, that are dying from a new strain of COVID. I will run to get my daughter’s vaccinated, who are 10 years old and 13 years old. But at the end of the day, that should be my fucking choice as a parent, just like your choice as a parent, not the choice of a 75-year-old politician who is a danger zone or at significant risk of dying from COVID based on their age. They’re going to think a lot differently than someone who’s 25.

Frank Curzio: Well, that politician doesn’t have young kids anymore. Yet, mandating my kids have to wear masks and mandating that they have to get vaccinated by a vaccine that’s eight months old, does not have FDA approval, does not have of any data showing that COVID is a significant risk to kids in the 17 years old? I got to listen to a politician, tell me and mandate that my kids have to get the vaccine, or they might not go to school? They did to healthcare workers, they’ve been doing it all over the place. It’s amazing how 25% of healthcare workers in New York still have not got the vaccine. I find that’s a very big number because 450,000 people throughout hospitals, 25% of them, it’s a lot of people to say, I’m not doing it, I’m losing my job. And let’s face it, I would be out of that segment. I would have been 90% of those people got COVID, and they have access to test for antibodies, and they say, well, I have antibodies.

Frank Curzio: Why the hell am I injecting something in a virus that I already beat? And I have the antibodies for. Now, you’re asking me to inject 10x antibodies into my system? Come on, that’s a pretty cool question. I don’t know, but having these politicians, that’s crazy telling me to do this. Anyone tells me to my face that my kid has to get vaccinated, and he’s probably going to have serious problems. That’s insane. That should be the parent’s choice, if you want to do it, if not, don’t do it, you don’t… Can’t a politician, not even a doctor, politicians? Think about it: Why do blue states or red states have different policies around COVID? Why is that? Why is this decision or decisions to wear masks, to lock down certain places to mandate vaccines? Why is this based on what political party you belong to? Why is it based? Shouldn’t it be based on statistics? This is the about our kids, our families, our loved ones. Who cares about Democrats and Republicans right now? It should be based on stats.

Frank Curzio: Hey, look, you guys can follow anyone you want, whoever you want. That’s your right. You have a different opinion beyond COVID on everything and that’s cool, but wouldn’t it be nice if you had the statistics in front of you, accurate statistics, non-biased statistics to make those decisions, which is not the CDC, or the WHO, can have a clear agenda. I told you about the WHO and going into China and saying that David Gray, look at the CDC. You see what the CDC did two weeks ago? The exaggerated number of infections in Florida, coincidentally, right? Just in Florida out of every state. The state that the left is attacking the most, the governor they’re attacking the most, they’re showing that Florida… Look how terrible… They’re killing people, all this.. Isn’t it amazing the CDC inflates, and they didn’t just inflate a little bit, they had double the statistics. They doubled the amount of infections in Florida. How do you make that mistake? And only for Florida? Come on, that’s no coincidence.

Frank Curzio: You need to have the right information in front of you, that’s what made me dig in so much through this whole entire event, and it’s going to get to the point where, how are you going to make money? I’ve been doing this for over 25 years guys, traveling the world when I see stories that I think are bullshit. We’re fracking when I went to, to research fracking, I thought with everything coming out and all the stories that there’s going to be dead animals anywhere, and it’s all full of shit.

Frank Curzio: Nobody wants to hear that story that’s not exciting, but we made a lot of freaking money because it said fracking and energy independence, which is the greatest thing in the world, which separates us from going towards so many other countries is a great thing. And we made a lot of money on those stocks because I went on those rigs wet in those areas in the Barkan, middle of nowhere, holy cow, throughout Texas in 30, 40 different counties. Held with experts, interviewed people, roughnecks, people in man camps, crazy, but that’s how you find out the real story and a lot of times when you do that, people are going to be off at you.

Frank Curzio: I have been doing this for a very long time, just finding that real story weaned through the bullshit to find the best investment ideas, and now I’m bring those source to you through my company, Curzio Research. That’s why I started, which I know has made many of you a lot of money, even those of you who are not subscribers and just listen to this podcast. Now for me, I don’t have to do a free podcast. I don’t have to do this. I’d be spending that time with my kids, doing other things, golfing so why do I do it for? Why would I provide a free podcast for you? I’m going to come on here and do tons of homework, site sources, go over everything, read your questions, try to answer you, provide newsletters for you, do these podcasts, why?

Frank Curzio: Think about that. I mean, it’s not just an effort to make you better investors. I mean that’s a very, very big part of it, but it’s definitely not for the money. I mean, I’ve never made a decision based on my life on money. Never will. And I can retire right now, pretty comfortably if I wanted to, but I choose to do this. So, it’s not that money. I don’t know if I told this to you before so I’m going to share something. It’s going to sound kind of funny, but stay with me because the reason why I do this is because we’re put on this earth for a really short period of time, sometimes really short. We’ve all had friends that died when they were younger and it puts things in perspective for you. You’re like, holy shit and for me, my goal and it’s a big one, but it is a goal. I’m dead serious about it. I want to do something that leaves a mark on this world, something that’s going to help people, something that the next generation could take from me and make it better.

Frank Curzio: I don’t want a plaque. I don’t want anything. I just want something that’s going to make this world a better place and anyone could go on top of that, make it even better and better and better for the next generation and next generation. That’s what this is about, building for the next generation, building for the next generation. And it’s funny because I was traveling with two good friends, both very successful, and they asked me what my goal was when I started this company and I showed them this collectible item, which I should have bought for us for $25,000 and I didn’t buy it and it’s in case with four pictures and the four people in the pictures and they have like memorabilia and signed signatures and stuff like that with JP Morgan, banking, Andrew Carnegie, steel, John Rockefeller, oil and Cornelius Vanderbilt, which is railroads and all that old stock certificates, original signatures.

Frank Curzio: And they all laughed. They said, really? That’s how rich you want to get isn’t that great? And they were laughing. And I said, no. I said, you got to look beyond that. I said, I’m not talking about the money. These are for people that changed the world and that’s my dream, that’s my goal: To make my mark on this world and create something that could be used for future generations, and I truly believe that. It’s something when I look and I’m working so hard and people say, well, you could be spending a little bit more time with your kids and I do spend a lot of time with my kids, I love my kids in great and provide opportunities for them. That’s something my kids are going to be very, very, very proud of when they get older.

Frank Curzio: But when you look at life, life is an incredible fucking gift that so many people take for granted and it’s also incredibly short. That’s why for me, every minute matters, every minute, I hate when people waste my time, I hate it. I hate it. Even if it’s my wife, she asks me to do something that we got to do to com… I get pissed because I feel like I’m wasting stuff. As I get older, and pushed through 50, time is the most valuable commodity, I’m not going to be around forever. That’s why I always embrace my mistakes because it’s going to make me smarter, it’s why I have big network. Most of the people who are way smarter than me and thank you for everyone’s sending me statistics.

Frank Curzio: And again, it’s not statistics supporting a certain side or a support an agenda. Things change, and kids are dying from a new strain I’m going to get them vaccinated immediately, I’m not anti-vax at all. I just, for me, if someone who’s had it, doesn’t make sense, no data out. And I’ve got to get a politician to tell me, you need to take your kids… Your kids need to take it. Mandating to the point where what? They’re not going to be able to go to school or attend school, you crazy?

Frank Curzio: But for me, yeah well life I’ll never ever, ever take that for granted, it’s why I do this. So, when you’re looking at this and you’re sending the emails and you’re totally pissed, listen, a lot of this filters into how you invest. People say why are you talking about politics? You say it’s not about politics. It’s not, we all have our opinions about politics. We all do. We’ll get that late with Daniel in a little bit, because what’s going on in Afghanistan is absolutely incredible. It’s… I’ve never seen anything like it. And it’s the first time I’ve seen both sides come out and be like, what the fuck are we doing? Holy cow, we look like cowards and the whole world is watching, and we’ll get into that in a minute.

Frank Curzio: I think we can all agree on that point. I don’t care who’s in office because Trump did say, “Hey, we’re getting troops out.” Obama said it, Bush, everybody said it. Biden just said a couple of weeks ago, well, we’re not going to resolve… Whatever everybody said it. So, it’s not like, “Oh, it’s Biden’s fault or it’s Trump’s fault.” It’s our fucking politicians. Are you kidding me? Trying to make September 11th, that date.

Frank Curzio: But anyway, we looked at his COVID statistics, and I provided you pages and pages of stocks that are going to, it’s going to be one of the greatest buying opportunities you’ve seen in 20 years and provide you so many of these stocks and all this stocks like Moderna and Bio… All these names and saying, hey, here’s a time to get in. We got in like a little bit late, which was May, which wasn’t that late. Did very, very well with this because of seeing statistics and seeing how everyone’s going to get sick of the bullshit. They’re going to see the statistics one day. They’re going to understand that this is not as bad as everybody seems. And yes, it’s sad. It’s terrible. It’s a tragedy. People are dying. But if you want to make things better for you and your family find the right resources to research and if something contradicts something else, dig, don’t just listen to CDC or the WHO, and again, you seeing all these players have an agenda we select during an election be very, very careful.

Frank Curzio: I mean, talk about what medicines you can take and suppressing people for meds for doctors saying that some medicines are better than others, but yet a lot of that has to do with money. You’re not going to make money like the Modernas, made by Pfizer- BioNTech, you’re not going to make the money on these vaccines off of something that already exists that doesn’t harm you at all. But doctors have said, “Hey, you know what? Some of this stuff has actually helped out.” We’ve seen it help people, certain people out, but no, it gets suppressed. Like, it’s killing people and it’s false information. Be very, very careful what’s going on. I mean, our whole world is controlled by social media and the media that’s where most people get the information. Try to dig a little further, try to get good sources because that’s when you’re going to find the most amazing stories.

Frank Curzio: You’re going to know the truth, you’re going to be able to dig through it and I’m telling you as investors and stuff that I’m teach you through my newsletters and videos and stuff, you’re going to find ways of how to profit tremendously off this stuff. And that’s what I’ve been doing for decade, after decade, after decade and I love it. It’s always new. It’s always cool. It’s always controversial. You’re not going to, hey, you have an opinion, when you have an opinion, a strong opinion, on something and it’s based on facts and data, you’re going to have a lot of people that just disagree and get pissed. That’s bullshit. The facts are bullshit. No, they’re not. Provide the sources, provide everything, but try to find those unbiased sources on both sides, on both sides. But one particular trend and doing a research, going through that I’m a fully engulfed in whether they have the largest total addressable market the world has ever seen. I’m not exaggerating, one it’s going to inevitably change the landscape of the investment banking industry and industry. It basically saw very, very little disruption over the past century and that’s tokenization.

Frank Curzio: And you know I’m not bullshitting you because I believe in it so much, I launched our own security token, Curzio Research, called Curzio Equity Owners, symbol CEO, which allowed us to raise money to grow this business, which we’ve been doing, hiring great employees, while also giving investors an equity stake in my company, pretty much near the ground floor. Not doing 25 capital raises when we’re private and then coming out of it at a $30 billion valuation which is, don’t get me wrong, that’d be a pretty cool thing for me, but that’s what investors can invest in things like Robinhood or Facebook or other things. When they come out and snowflake at multi-billion dollar evaluations, you don’t invest and encourage the research and multi-billion dollar valuation, which brings me to today’s guest, first timer, his name is Kyle Fry. He’s the president of digital markets companies.

Frank Curzio: One of our partners in the security token industry. So, Kyle has an extensive background in investment banking, M&A, been doing it all his life and he switched careers a couple of years ago to go all in on security tokens. He saw what I saw. Firm’s helped us tremendously in terms of listing on the merge exchange, providing legal compliance advice, show’s important. They run one of deepest networks in the industry, but that makes Kyle one of the biggest insiders that you’ll find security tokens. There’s a lot what’s going on that you’re not really reading about. He’s about to break down specifically, what’s happened over the past few months, the explosion in deals, new security, token offerings, a huge amount of trading platforms about to be launched throughout the industry. But you’re going to see why I’m so excited about this trend, why I structured my whole company around this trend, and what early investors and security tokens stand to make.

Frank Curzio: And it’ll be give you the opportunity to make an absolute fortune investing in companies in the ground floor. So, enough of the buildup, and let’s get to that interview with Kyle right now. Kyle Fry, thanks so much for joining us on Wall Street Unplugged.

Kyle Fry: Happy to be here, Frank.

Frank Curzio: So, we’ve known each other for a while now, I want to say probably two years, right? You helped us tremendously with our process of bringing our CEO token to the market, which was a major process, we’ll get into that a little while. But let’s talk about the earlier days because you’re someone that’s spent most of their career in investment banking, M&A, and that is still a booming business as we see, but yet you pointed to the direction of security tokens, tokenization, going all in, what made you make that change, which is a pretty big change.

Kyle Fry: Yeah, no, I spent most of my time at Credit Suisse doing FinTech M&A, predominantly, payments, and really just seeing… Blockchain technology was still pretty new in the ecosystem. I remember talking to a bunch of my other banker friends, particular in the coverage group and they were like, look, that technology is so far out it hasn’t been proven yet, but when you really start to dig in, again, spending time in payments and thinking about when you swipe a credit card, how that the payment flows through to a merchant acquire and then to the bank, and then you’ve got visa and MasterCard, there’s so many different players, literally for money to go from A to B as you know, wiring is slow and expensive and the notion that you can remove all these intermediaries and allow true peer to peer direct payments was something that I just couldn’t take my eye off of.

Kyle Fry: The advance of the internet and really wanted to be a part of that. In banking, I had picked up capital market skills, IPO, what investors want, what makes a deal go through, all of the investment banking elements in M&A, you learn to remove all the roadblocks associated with a deal regardless. So, we were always the quarterbacks and every single deal versus some of the other groups, ECM, DCM, et cetera and then ultimately, bet on myself. I didn’t want to see all the value creation that I saw in FinTech, the shop guys coming in, all the payment processors, I saw so much more value creation and upside in just payments in and of itself that I wanted to kind of jump all in to see what this technology could do and started to really kind of see how it would impact capital markets as well, and the costs associated with that.

Kyle Fry: So, I went all in, brought in my understanding of capital markets and investment banking and really knocking down roadblocks as an entrepreneur is a massive skill set, as you know, to jump into the space, but saw this as a new wave, and I wasn’t going to let it pass me by.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. You know, I’m kind of thinking though, I wish we started a little bit later than earlier because I agree with you and for a while that we did have COVID in the middle, which disrupted a lot of different, offset a lot of different industries. And for me looking at this, as someone has followed trends all my life, it just checks off all the boxes of being good for the issuer, of being good for the investors, being good for everyone involve, less cost, less regulation. Investors being able to invest in companies for the very first time, right? At very early stages, not when they come out at 20, 30, $40 billion IPO’s, but about six months ago, I have to say it was kind of like not throwing in the towel, but saying, wow, this is getting a little crazy how this market hasn’t developed yet.

Frank Curzio: And then from that point on, and usually that’s when it happens, right? When you’re near capitulation, where all of a sudden this thing opened up tremendously, and we’ve seen deals here and there, we’ve seen securitized rates, 47 million. We saw Exodus as well, do Reg A offering, and now it looks like they go to be listening on tZERO and raising 75 million.

Frank Curzio: Talk about some of the things that you’ve seen, because you’re even more tied into this industry than I am. And for me, it seems like I don’t know what happened, but the last, I would say really four or five months, there’s just been an explosion. My phone’s ringing off the hook. You’re seeing more demand. So many people, more people are calling me, just not even for companies looking to tokenize, which is future partners and looking to partner with us. But what has happened in the past four or five months that made this happen? Is it anything? Is people just realize it? Because I’m trying to figure out the catalyst, but all of a sudden, it just seemed like there was explosion of capital come into this market and now it’s finally here.

Kyle Fry: Yeah. I think it’s a couple of things. You know, these things take time, Bitcoin’s been around since 2000- 2009, and it took forever to really hit main stage, adopted markets. The pandemic, I think, drove people online. I think there’s obviously some theories about the amount of time people spend gambling and going to casinos now took their money to stock markets. But the reality of it is there’s absolutely a very strong secular retail investing trend. All platforms are seeing this, OTC markets, for example, their retail sort of indicator grow 60% over 2020. So, there’s sort of the retail angle in terms of just more activity in the market and that’s traditional markets and digital markets, crypto has taken main stage institutionally. I think there was time when everyone was saying, blockchain’s looking for a problem to solve.

Kyle Fry: Is it really sustainable technology? Does it work? Everyone’s sort of past that. So, I think the technology aspect has checked the box if it ever has in the last six, seven months with, again, none of our institutions and adoption from retail side and big names that it’s sort of technology check, then what’s next? It’s regulation. Okay, so where is regulation taking us? Well, on the security side, we do have frameworks that we can follow. And that’s, I think, where people get stuck a lot, they start to think about, okay, how does regulation plan to Judas securities. Well, it’s exactly the same as it in traditional securities. And the folks that are coming in are realizing this is a new way to do it. I mean, you were way ahead of the time you saw coming which I think is how you can make higher returns on your investments to see trends before they come in.

Kyle Fry: And as a founder, I know you went through… You endured a lot of pain to be a leader, as I have. In the last six months, technology check, regulation…. I think people understand that you could do cross border stuff, following traditional laws. Now, it’s on to the next steps, just as crypto adopted.

Kyle Fry: It’s UI/UX, as you said, how is this better for an issuer? Lower cost of capital, lower administration, access to a global investor base. And then on the investor side, it’s how do I make this easy? I don’t want to deal with wallets if I don’t need to. Some people want to, how do we make the UX better? What Robinhood has done, look at what FTX and finance have done in the crypto space, the market speaks. If you make something better for investors and better for issuers, it’s going to take over. And if something’s cheaper, better, faster, it’s going to take over. It’s just these things take a bit of time to work through the system and I think you’re right. I think the last six months has been sort of that inflection point towards really, when do we hit that exponential curve for more adoption on digital securities?

Frank Curzio: And Kyle, let’s talk about that, right? Because you say we were early proof of concept, will it get adopted? Now, adoption is here, now we see money pour into the industry. We need to see liquidity and things like that. But now what? What is the next steps to you? Because I know what you’ve been doing with your company we’ll get to a minute with digital markets and you’re present there creating a one-stop shop, making it easier, like you said, people don’t want to deal with wallets. They want to make this process as easy as it is. Is opening an account up on E-Trade or Fidelity and being able to buy a stock almost that day and we’re almost to that point. But, now what? What do you see for the industry? Because for me, that’s a difficulty actually, right?

Frank Curzio: Because now, I’m like, I’m here, but I’m always conscious of someone that’s been following the markets for such a long time, you know, research emotion, which is Blackberry. They invented the smartphone. They’re out of the smartphone business, Apple took it over. You look at AOL… So, for me I’m always like, okay, what’s going to be the most powerful forces within this industry? Where do we want to go? Because I just feel like it’s 1995, 1996, 1997, and social media wasn’t even around then, other than maybe MySpace, I don’t know how long, but it was… There’s so many different avenues, right? We just talked about people getting websites for the first time, whenever new marketing algorithms, AI, or what’s gone today, and it’s still disrupting everything and it’s going to continue to do so, quantum computing and 5g keep going.

Frank Curzio: But what is the next steps here? Because it seems like it’s an exciting time, but where do you see the next stage of development taking place? Because the missing component, you know this as well as I do, is a liquidity part, right? So you need liquidity in order for institutions to come in and already trade. The reason why you seeing Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley get into Bitcoin. They didn’t have a change of heart and believe in Bitcoin, but when it’s a $2 trillion industry their like okay, it’s liquid, we need to get in. We could generate a lot of money off of this. What are the next steps here?

Kyle Fry: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think the end game is trading liquidity and volume… To us, our thesis is that digital technology is going to make digital securities more accessible in the public markets rather than trying to make private markets more liquid. I think the retail revolution is going to begin this faster than the institutional on the digital security side. The UI/UX needs a lot of work. As you mentioned, if you look at STL markets, right? We’re at a billion dollars of market cap, roughly, in digital securities, trading is generally still pretty low and nascent. I think that’s on ramps for crypto that’s the easibility of logging into account. That sort of KY seeing passporting. I think we’re definitely past the stage where people, I hope, don’t get excited about tokenization in and of itself.

Kyle Fry: I think the industry went through a few years where, it was let’s take two assets, if you tokenize one, it’s going to be worth more than the one that’s not tokenized. And because you have the optionality to move it around, but it never moved around. So, getting the trading venues high… And look it’s definitely chicken and egg, getting high quality assets on these trading venues that investors want, we call them destination securities, right? Like you don’t really care where they trade. You want that asset because it’s something you didn’t have access to before. You’re going to go into these trading venues. If they have five assets, it’s even more interesting and if you’re hitting real estate and art and FinTech, and you have a bunch of different types of assets, even more interesting, right? You only get one or two up there. If you look at most of the training venues today, they don’t have more than, you know, two or three assets.

Kyle Fry: So, there’s still a little chicken and egg problem. We’re super focused on getting… We have, probably, three or four high quality assets in the pipeline that would give us a pretty broad menu in terms of assets that we believe people are going to want. Want to go and again, they don’t really care where it trades, but getting the trading venue that people to understand that this is all fitting within the current regulatory framework will drive adoption. It’s easy to do, you go straight to this destination securities website, you click invest now you, log in, create an account, do your KYC/AML. On the same time, you’ve done the offering, you now have an account where you can immediately trade that share as well. What’s interesting is, and we talked about this inflection point, the people that are driving this market today are actually the crypto folks.

Kyle Fry: So Exodus, they raised $75 million, it’s a non-custodial crypto wallet. They were a $800 million company could have gone to the NASDAQ believe in the digital security paradigm and democratization and the ease of use and lower cost infrastructure. They’re a crypto company driving digital securities. INX they just did a full IPO registered offering in the United States, and listed their token on their own platform, and they’re onboarding thousands and thousands of investors, again, INX is a crypto platform with an ATS. They are touching digital securities, but it’s the crypto folks that believe in the technology.

Kyle Fry: They believe in the future we’re going to, that are driving this adoption and I think as you spin up this flywheel of investors and people seeing volume at the same time, you’re putting high quality issuances on these trading menus, it’s eventually going to hit the exponential curve. And I see that probably being in the next 12 months, 2022, more trading volumes, more high-quality assets and just easier for people to do this on their mobile phone. Same way you can do Robinhood or Coinbase for crypto or Republic, in terms of investing some of these platforms but you’ll be able to do that to venture small, mid-cap companies on your cell phone as well, just making it substantially easier.

Frank Curzio: You know, it makes me wonder too, when you look the ICO market and how these companies are raising tens of millions of dollars on a blink of an eye, right? And how quickly they could do it and I think that audience, at the time, right in understanding you’re not getting equity stake, you’re basically investing in this space on their utility features and some of these companies still don’t have utilities at all. So, but yet, there is a type of investor that’s on that site. And people believe, whether you agree with it or not, I don’t want anyone’s opinion or whatever here, because I probably get thousands of emails, frank@curzioresearch.com.

Frank Curzio: But I mean, that has taken a lot of luster away from gold because people want to, the cryptocurrencies we’ve seen gains of 20000, 50000% gains that you’d never really seen a stock market, almost impossible now because companies IPO, after this series K round, right at 50 billion. But that attracts a certain type of investor with this, it’s like, for me, I’m looking at this, check off all the boxes, hey, we got a good asset, we have a company we’re growing, we’re in two major industries now, security tokens, financial publishing.

Frank Curzio: We’re giving away an equity stake, right. We’ve paid a dividend in past every single quarter, but is that going to be attractive enough for that audience that trades those tokens? Because that is a big part of crypto, yes, institutions are getting in, but they need to see these things where, it seems like it, I don’t know if we’re doing a disservice to them by not being as aggressive or not, or having a better, you know what I’m trying to say, because there’s a massive crowd there that likes that stuff. That’s like, hey, all or none, I’m going to make 10,000%, I’m going to lose my money, I don’t care. That’s a massive audience and that’s resulting, listen, we can’t lie about it. I mean, look at the amount of volume on Binance. Look at the amount of volume Coinbase. So, I mean, the volume is incredible on these exchanges, like crack and keep going.

Frank Curzio: We’ll we get to that point, we’ll be able to get that type of investor over because it seems like that’s what you need first. And then the institutions come a little bit after, as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I just want to get your thoughts on that because to me and you have been essential all the time. I’ve been surprised that this industry hasn’t developed even quicker, especially given how much crap I’ve seen having a crypto newsletter and, looking at all these things where you can’t even find financials, you have no idea what a cash is, they probably bought four houses with it you don’t know. I would think more people will come over to this side, but, we just haven’t seen it quickly. You think that could be a problem where it’s not aggressive enough? I don’t know.

Kyle Fry: Yeah. I think, I think the keyword is, is access. You mentioned ICO’s and it was crazy, right? People were raising $35 million in 10 minutes. That was unregistered security offerings. A lot of people struggled for that and it was not, I think that actually put a bad taste in the mouth, on the technology, right? People associated with that with blockchain and Bitcoin. And ICO’s just gave the industry generally speaking a bad taste in their mouth. But I think what people miss is that ICO’s proved there’s appetite for these early stage investments to a global audience. That’s what the technology allow. So, you fast forward a bit and you have crypto, crypto markets have taken off, that was sort of the next stage in terms of commodities like Bitcoin and being able to trade volume, but what happened there was again that showed the volume.

Kyle Fry: And I think that it got people comfortable with the technology, what was next after that? Tokenized stocks. So again, the word access, people were trading millions of dollars of Tesla shares on Binance and FTX because people don’t have access to this stuff. And I think we take advantage of that in the US right, because a lot of the big name, trillion dollar, huge name companies, everyone wants to own Tesla, Coinbase, Apple, Facebook, etcetera, are on NASDAQ or NYC. And you have to open a broker account and not everyone can do that. I think people tend to think that it’s accessible, but it’s not, it’s not accessible to everyone. And it’s a proof point that people are buying these tokenized shares on a crypto exchange because they didn’t have access to Tesla before the other seven billion people outside of the United States.

Kyle Fry: So again, it’s showing access there. And now when you talk about digital securities, what are we providing that’s new? We’re providing, public access to asset classes that were typically private. IE venture early stage companies that would typically go the private company route or private placement route, the venture capital route and not have access to the public routes. But I think again, it comes back to the quality of assets. Like, I think if more people actually found out that they could invest in Curzio Research rather than Dogecoin. Dogecoin’s purely speculation based on most people going in and out of it, or an Elon Musk tweet. Curzio Research is an earlier stage growth company that no one could normally get access to. And now, it’s available to global retail investors, and you guys have a track record revenue, audited financials, and again, people didn’t have access.

Kyle Fry: And that’s when a lot of the value creation is created, right? Venture capital firms look for that hundred extra term. How do you get a hundred extra term? You invest wait earlier in the growth of a company. I think, where the regulators didn’t want public markets to access early stage is because one, there was higher risk, because a lot of companies fail earlier stage. The second is liquidity, right? If they needed the money, for any reason, they’d be protected, they could sell the shares on an open market. Now, we’re combining the two things together and saying, look, yes, there may be more risk in earlier stage companies, but you have all the information available to you as if it was a public company. So, you have all the data to do it now, should you diversify? Yes.

Kyle Fry: That’s always, what an investor should have on their mind, but seeing a company that has revenue growth, a real business operating metrics and information you can see online from a public context, why would you not choose to invest in that venture stage company over another coin that flipped to you on TikTok or something like that? So, I think people need to recognize that there’s real equity in the digital security space, and it’s going to be an asset you didn’t have access to before. Real estate, tokenized Ferraris, you name it, you’ll have access to it. And that’s really what I’m building.

Frank Curzio: And just educating people on this market, right? And I want to show something here. And this is from the tokenistic. This is how much 545 trillion worth of assets could become tokenized. I mean, they talk about all the assets. That’s not going to happen. Okay. Not all of it. And even if you lower that number and say real estate own it, it’s 200 trillion or whatever it is. But even if you take 1% of that, you’re looking at amounts or industry of whatever it is, 5 trillion. When you look at that number and we throw trillions around all the time. So it’s, I don’t know if people could put this in perspective. I follow all kinds of trends I’ve been doing for most of my career close to 30 years. You’re looking at what are some of the top trends?

Frank Curzio: Marijuana, we look at cybersecurity, we look at ESG, you can take the five biggest trends. And this is like 5X to 10X, bigger than all those combined. If 1% tokenize their assets and you say, why would they tokenize our assets? Well, you’re going to tokenize your assets because one they’re illiquid. So, why not sell off 20% of commercial real estate that’s a hundred million dollars. So, now you have $80 million asset. Once you have become publicly traded and you tokenize these assets, it inflates the value by anywhere from 40 to 60%, which is great. It’s almost like you gave 20% away from your company. You just took 20 million in house, and you still own 80% of it, which is great. Now, you can take that 20 million and maybe invest in other real estate. That’s good for that person who owns commercial real estate.

Frank Curzio: What about the investors? It’s also good for the investors as well, right? Because the investors, I would never, a lot of people don’t have access to commercial real estate or to bonds and things like that. When now you could trade this on exchange of shares. You could do that for art. You can do it for anything, but when you see the potential of this market is absolutely incredible. And now to just see it open up, it’s remarkable. Now, I want to get into what you’re doing with your company, which is, digital markets where a one-stop shop, explain what that means, because you know what it means. I know what it means. I went through the whole entire thing going from a to z. And when you really look at everything from a to z, holy cow, I mean, you’re looking at just legal compliance issues, capital raising, structuring the company, right?

Frank Curzio: Board of directors, you’re looking at transfer agents. Being in compliance after you’re publicly traded. I mean, everyone’s like, wow, I could do this. I only like five restaurants. I want to turn this into 50 restaurants, and let’s raise money. But you know, a person like you, it is a necessity because there’s so much in between. Talk about that because I don’t want this to get lost on anyone coming into any of our companies say, hey, you know what? I’m interested in doing this. It’s not that difficult to do, but it is a process and you got to work with the right people, right?

Kyle Fry: Yeah. What we ultimately want to be is the connection between issuers and investors. We want to simplify that connection. We want to ultimately be the marketplace of marketplaces, where the technology layer that sits on top of the trading venues. So, for example, if you think about Uber or Airbnb, so Uber, right, taxi medallions, highly regulated industry, Uber isn’t the business of cars, right? They’re in the business of connecting the people that want to ride. And the people that had cars, they became a technology marketplace. That’s what we’re building. So, we have deep ties into this digital security stock exchanges and alternative trading systems. So, the trading venues, what are they really good at? They’re really good at trading. They’re really good at regulation. They’re good reporting. And there not as great as you can imagine on UIUX, they are not great at sort of evolving with technologies.

Kyle Fry: I think there’s a marketing elements as well, but what we are building is the technology layer on top of the trading venues. And what does that mean? So, investors can trade on their phone. They can get access directly to a company through their website, we can allow issuers to facilitate trading directly on their platform so they can control a lot more of the UIUX with the investor. And on the investor side, it’s how do we get them to KYC one time and passport them across different areas. Back to the issuer tokenization, cap table management, do you want to do a prominent placement or public listing being able to control all that from one dashboard. So, today, as you mentioned, we’re completely obsessed and focused on the trading and liquidity of the markets. Because if that doesn’t work, this whole thing is broken.

Kyle Fry: So, we need to get that to work first, but eventually moving backwards away from the exchange, all the way to two founders in our garage, want to tokenize, manage their cap cable. As they hire employees, issue them shares all through this platform, pay a hundred dollars a month sort of fee, when they want to fundraise or do a private round, they upgraded to a next service, get an invest now button on their website as they grow. And if they’re ready to list on an exchange or do that, we’ll take him to the next step, but they’ll monitor all of this within their platform. We are also founding members of a USSCC transfer agent, so we generally think of transfer agent tokenization, sort of cap table management, and you know some big name firms in this space, right? You’ve got Carta X who made their name off of moving everyone out of Excel to more an automated system.

Kyle Fry: And then they did some vertical integration in terms of what they offer, securitize, tokenization, transfer agency. We view tokenization and cap table management and transfer agent as generally very important work, but commoditized, I think it’s important, but it shouldn’t be the driving factor. We should make this as easy and accessible for issuers alike because issuers aren’t going to go this direction if it’s complicated. So, how do we make this a fully integrated solution? So, our tech and our job is to kind of bring all of those things together. So, when you come to digital markets, you don’t need to know what happens behind the scenes. We may be partnering with first transfer as a transfer agent, but it’s sort of irrelevant to you in terms of a solution. So, we’re just trying to make it easy for you to raise capital at the lowest, lowest cost of capital to the broadest audience possible, meeting your objectives.

Kyle Fry: I think most people, not everyone wants a global investor base, but more companies are becoming global because they’re online, because they’re digital. So, you do want a global audience direct to consumer businesses. Why not have retail investors who use your product and are also investors as part of your business. And so for us building the sort of, Robinhood technology, fidelity brokerage layer on top of all of these different trading menu. So, you look at our marketplace, you find a security, like do you really care where it trades? No. Your API will do best order execution routing across all of these different exchanges and in terms of an issue, or you just want to be able to get an access to the right audience and the right investors. And so building that marketplace out.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, no, I hear that. There’s even another challenge too, is like you said, you want to make it easy for everyone, but it has to also be something that’s exciting. When people say, hey, have you invested in crypto? No. Well, I invested in doge at 0.001 cent, and I’m a thousand turned into $30,000. That makes that an easy story to tell it makes it compelling and makes people want to research. And I think we’re pretty close to being there right now, where you’re going to see more and more special for the next six months, next three months, actually more and more these issues start trading on alternative trading platforms and exchanges like merge and things like that. And then when you see these things come out and you see the gains that people can make, again, it is a high risk you’re investing in earlier stage companies.

Frank Curzio: I could tell you firsthand someone that’s done this for a long time, most of them fail, but at the stage you’re investing in. If you’re right on one of these out of 20, one of this out 50, it’s going to be life-changing, it’s going to be investing in the Microsoft. So, or the apples, right? You can’t really say what Google came out, whatever little bit higher price and Facebook as well at a larger evaluation. But imagine investing with these guys when they had less than a hundred employees, that’s the opportunity you’re going to have with these companies where those gains could be unbelievable. And these are real companies, equity, stake, which makes it exciting. And I guess at least the last question here is where do you see this industry, let’s say in three years, and then in 10 years?

Frank Curzio: Right? So, we’ve got a long-term view in three years, because you and I have spoken 12 months ago and said, wow, here it is. It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming. And it’s like, man, I can’t believe, I can’t believe now we have a different conversation. And I know we’re going to have different conversations six months from now, but what about, let’s go for three years in 10 years, where do you see this in terms of businesses starting to tokenize, everything coming together? Could this happened quicker than that? Or it’s going to take a little bit of time.

Kyle Fry: Yeah good question. One thing I want to mention Frank is who are the winners going to be in this space? And I do think it’s going to be sort of three parts. One is going to be the trading venues. So, I think the exchanges in first and foremost, and then the ATS is an MTS as a secondary distribution channel because that’s where all the trades happen. And that’s how they make their money. I think folks like us in terms of being the technology layer on top of that, how do you connect all these things? How do you make it easier for issuers and investors to access these trading venues? And then I think folks like you, Frank at Curzio Research, I think the reality of it is there’s going to be a lot of people out there seeing a lot of different things and aren’t going to know what to invest in.

Kyle Fry: And so I think, large cap companies on NASDAQ and NYC have Wall Street Research. So, at least you have sort of a third party perspective on a certain stock, but that hasn’t really been built out yet in this ecosystem. So, I think finding folks that you rely on have integrity, that you can actually use as a sounding board as to how to think about investing, ultimately investing is, do your own research, but getting all the intelligence you can, again, the winners here are going to be those three, the people that can help you think about what to invest in, the connectors into these trading exchanges, and then these trading venues, right? Once the volume takes off like Coinbase did, right, Coinbase, FTX, Binance, and reminder, by the way, FDX, you know where they’re incorporated Antigua and Barbuda, you know where Binance is incorporated? Malta.

Kyle Fry: And so the market doesn’t care where these companies are. That’s online and digital. These are 20 billion plus dollar companies in terms of where’s the industry going. You’re right. I think you and I have kind of been hurry up and wait several times at this point, I do feel like, and you and I both said it sort of independently in different conversations and I’ve had with other folks as well, this feels different this last six months in terms of adoption understanding. And I do think crypto and a lot of the trends have really gotten people over the technology and not questioning it anymore. It’s validity and understanding that we do have to follow regulation and ICOs, and all these things give it bad name. I think three years, I think we’re still sort of getting our ground’s covered on high quality assets, adoption trading liquidity.

Kyle Fry: In three years, I think you’re going to start actually seeing a lot of these things. We’ve talked about like NFTs, tokenization of Ferrari’s art, commercial real estate on exchanges where people can buy and sell them at will at real volume. I think fractionalization is going to be huge. So, making it accessible a dollar is a high amount of currency. One USD is high in some countries around the world, but making things chopped up, more accessible and easier to move around. I think people are going to recognize the power of other things that benefit investors like automated voting, better distribution or dividend paying. So, instead of this quarterly dividends we pay doing that monthly, quarterly. And in fact as far as daily, in terms of different businesses that produce and spit off cash flow immediately on chain, you receive the money you click, whether you want it reinvested, you click, whether you want it in your wallet, you decide what currency you wanted in more on-ramps and off-ramps.

Kyle Fry: So MERJ, for example, is integrated with circle and allowing crypto to on ramp. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that. I think the crypto world and the security world merging pretty heavily, and people starting to diversify away from having so many crypto holdings into digital securities, easily using stablecoins and other cryptos. That’s going to be big. For example, some of the ATS out there, and I’ll use tZERO’s example to day can only accept ACH and wire, right? Like they should be accepting crypto payments. So there’s still some infrastructure stuff to build on and off ramps to the different exchanges. I think of it takes some time. I think the US does not recognize the digital security as true ownership. They use the traditional methods. So frankly, in the United States, owning a digital security is more of a marketing thing that it is outside of the United States.

Kyle Fry: But I do see eventually the US getting there in the next three years, I think that’s going to be a big change folks like Paxos have a no action letter from the SCC to actually trade and settle real shares on their blockchain, which is huge. I think they’ve raised a significant amount of money, are doing really interesting things. Our view was outside of the United States you can do a lot more to advance the industry than inside United States, just because of regulation takes way more time than anywhere else, 10 years you’re talking, getting into defy, being able to loan against your securities, connecting niche issuers with niche investors in different forums, everything on the mobile phone. NFTs are interesting to think about in terms of, sort of laughability in terms of owning a picture, but the world is headed that way.

Kyle Fry: The world is headed online and just making these things more easily accessible, but being able to essentially tokenize and raise capital on anything and allowing securities to flow almost as if it’s payment, just a medium of exchange. You can use a security to buy things with because in the smart contract wallet we’ve KYC need and etcetera, etcetera, always need to prevent a KYC. Hopefully, we can get the one solution on a global basis. So, you do KYC one time and every country recognizes that. I think it has to go in that direction as we start getting more cross border and global. And I think, look, every country wants to prevent fraud and money laundering and all those elements, but making it easier for sort of capital flows to happen, I think is, is definitely in the 10-year horizon.

Frank Curzio: No, it’s great stuff. And real quick, we’ve got a minute left here. If someone wants to find out more information about you, your company, how could they do that? Go?

Kyle Fry: Our website is D I G T l.co, digital.co. I’m on Twitter a lot, @KyleKyleFry.

Frank Curzio: Okay, and I’m bringing up your website now, and I like the fact that you actually have a little thing on us as well, which is cool. It’s always good. I saw that, which is awesome, but Kyle, hey, I want to thank you so much for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. And you’ve been a huge help for us, tremendous help in terms of, getting us listing on merge, going over everything in terms of compliance and making sure that we were okay with that. And that was a big, big help for us it made things a lot easier. So, I just want to say thanks a lot, man. I really appreciate it.

Kyle Fry: Well, you’re welcome. Happy to be here, and it looks like you guys are the ideal client. High integrity, wanting to do things right. And came in and knew that there was a ton to learn. So, thank you.

Frank Curzio: I really appreciate it, man. Okay. So, thank you so much for coming on. And I know you joined us again soon. Take care.

Kyle Fry: Talk soon. Thanks Frank.

Frank Curzio: Right guys, great stuff from Kyle and for me, right? For doing this and people listen to podcasts. My job is finding opportunities ahead of mainstream media. I think people listen to me for 10, 15 years, whatever, doing this podcast close to 15 years. I know we’ve done a pretty good job of that. Sometimes, we may invest it in the wrong companies within those trends. Didn’t see the massive gains with some of the others, but it’s nice to really dig in, get a research, travel boots on the ground, talk to the right people and just go over these trends, break down the research with our subscribers because resulted in just getting into so many different ideas, super, super early and that’s how you make the most money. You want to get in before it’s talked about mainstreaming.

Frank Curzio: And when it comes to tokenization guys, it’s the first trend I could say this about that I truly know that is not just going to turn investors into millionaires, but it could be even much greater than that, especially if you position yourself with the right companies and that’s what we’re trying to do here. Yes, we’re a financial publishing firm, but the amount of companies that are coming and the good quality deals are coming to getting bigger, bigger, bigger, and bigger. And a lot of these people talking to us to see how it is and how we’re dealing with the partners that they’re using now. And having access to these things and having access to those STOs during the very early stages, it’s kind of like investing the Microsoft and Amazons during their early stages, which when they had less than 150 employees and I am cherry picking two companies, I’m cherry picking. These are two great companies on Earth. In today’s markets, retail investors, And I mentioned this early, you don’t have access to companies early on. You just don’t.

Frank Curzio: I mean, it’s terrible. See what’s going on with SPACs now. I mean, you’re crazy to do anything to respect right now. I don’t know if you saw the, lawsuit on Ackman, saying that it’s not an investment company based on the investment in 1940. That’s pretty crazy. And it disclosures. You’re going to see how much money these guys are making under the table. And all that works if you provide enough excitement for the average investor to buy the shit out of this thing if these deals are announced and go through. A lot of them are never going to generate money. Some of them are never going to generate revenue, forget about earnings. But right now what this industry, how has developing and how it’s going to disrupt investment banking. And we’ve done it personally from a to z. Now we have the roadmap, here it is. Here’s for any company to do such small. Here’s how you raised money. Nicole broke down what goes into it. And yes, it’s difficult, which is awesome for us because we know how to avoid those mistakes because we made a lot of them being super early to party.

Frank Curzio: But now retail investors are going to have access. It’s a lot of companies during that early growth phase, you never had that opportunity before, now you will. I’m going to bring you tons of investments through our Crypto Intelligence newsletter. I’m going to bring a ton of ideas, even though the podcasts and things like that. Not really too much for the free investors for the podcast, but that’s what you’re going to see going forward as this industry explode, you’re going to hear a ton of it and we’re going to be the one-stop shop place that you go to for the best ideas, the best research whose full of shit, whose not full of shit, because we’re going to be able to look at these ideas and we’re going to know through our partners, which almost everyone has to go to launch these security tokens, everything about anything about these companies.

Frank Curzio: So really, really exciting times. I want to thank Kyle for coming on. Really awesome. Let me know what you thought about that to frank@curzioresearch.com. Now, let’s bring on the one and only Daniel Creech back from vacation. What’s up, man?

Daniel Creech: Hey, what’s happening, Frank? Good to be back.

Frank Curzio: I missed you a little bit.

Daniel Creech: Well, thank you. I missed you a little bit too. I miss the audience more than the podcast, but hey, whatever, not necessarily in that order,

Frank Curzio: You always pick the right week to go away because… I know, but one of the things I guess we have to address, which I want to address is yeah. Afghanistan and who am I to say? It’s all the politics we don’t want to hear about politics. You need to hear it because what’s going on is going to have serious implications for your portfolio.

Frank Curzio: And for me, I think I was waiting for a response from The White House, for Biden to come out. And it took them three days. As watching these videos come and we’re running away where getting people. I won’t even go a month ago, Daniel, where he was like that’s not going to happen like Vietnam. And people getting export off the roofs by helicopter, nothing like that. Right? Forget it, I’m not even talking about that. And you could say Trump was like, we’re getting a troops out. Obama said, we’re getting any troops out, everyone’s going to be wearing in that 20 years. But just to really run away and I don’t think these politicians understand the general public and what we’re seeing. We’re seeing America leave a country on its own by itself that were there for 20 years and basically say an F-you, and hey, we tried to help you, but too bad.

Frank Curzio: And now that’s going to result in the damage to women and their rights has gone, murders in the streets. And to see that, and then to have our president come on and stop blaming Trump and blaming everybody else, instead of saying, hey, you know what? The data we got, the intel we got was wrong. We’re going to be held accountable. And here’s what people are going to be fired because Biden’s not in there, he’s not freaking Afghanistan, right? He’s getting reports from secretary of state, he’s getting reports from this generals and all these guys had it wrong even though there’s plenty of sources showing that this is exactly what’s going to happen even two or three months. His secretary of state was saying, hey, it’s getting pretty bad. And I started researching it’s like three months ago and looked at the videos and everything.

Frank Curzio: It was updates, but this is the first time I’ve seen our country united being like all the media channels are going like, what the hell is going on? And how do we mess this up? And it’s resulting in the bigger case when it comes to investments, Daniel, is China, Russia, they’re looking at us. They’re reporting stuff about Taiwan where, Hey, you know what, anyone who was an ally of the US right now, the fact that we left them and China’s going to get stronger and Russia’s going to be pardoned when Afghanistan and that’s a big deal. I didn’t have one of the large deposits. They have huge resources there. We basically stayed in a place where 20 years, without any advantage of resources and stuff like that, which is typically a reason why you’d go to another country or whatever. And yet now you’re going to see Russia, China, partner with them. I think it’s going to have serious implications.

Frank Curzio: And I really think that’s responsible for the huge volatility in the market right now. Throw that with inflation, now you’re fighting more and more risks. This is a brand new risk, geopolitical risk… And man, for me, when I look at this, it’s the first time that I have to say in my life that I feel the U.S. as a weak nation. I never ever felt that before. Again, I wasn’t around in the sixties and things like that, but I was just, for me, I couldn’t believe it. And I’m not even blaming the current administration. I’m going to blame politics in general. I don’t know how you saw it, but there is going to be serious implications. And you’re seeing that a lot of risks coming off the table in small caps, a lot of names going down 20, 30% with no news. You really starting to see that, Daniel. So, I think a lot of this has to do with this story.

Daniel Creech: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s going to have a global impact. It is a terrible situation to see some of the videos and feeds that are coming through so hopefully everybody, hopefully that deescalates and gets safe on all accounts as quickly as possible… Globally, and Chris Macintosh does a great job about talking about this on the previous podcasts and things, but there’s no doubt that alliances and basically new partnerships or different things are being drawn. The new lines are being drawn. So, the big takeaway, and you always have to kind of wait and see what’s going to happen next, but it will be who bands together more from capital outflows. The thing that jumped out to me was going through some of these earnings is Galaxy Digital, who basically we’ve dubbed as being the Goldman Sachs of digital securities…Help me with this, Frank, but it’s Mike, is it Novogratz?

Frank Curzio: Mike Novogratz.

Daniel Creech: I always butcher that. Former Goldman Sachs guy. Anyway, when they reported earnings just a day or so ago, he led in on the conference call with what was going on in Afghanistan, not from a standpoint of, “Hey, did we mess up or we’ve been there or whatever.” It was clearly from a capital control standpoint. And I mentioned this to you yesterday, Frank, just in passing, but… When things like this happen and you have terrible situations, you do, you have confiscation of bank and bank accounts. Just think of all the people that are trying to just get by life. How do you get from when you wake up to sundown? That’s a big deal. You’re literally in a war zone, no pun intended. Like, that’s crazy to think about. And he led in with that about, “Hey, that’s why crypto is so popular to everybody in the global community because it is this freedom of you can’t shut this down, no matter what’s going on with governments,” and from a macro level, you can blame this on governments.

Daniel Creech: You can blame our government. You can blame their government, but his whole point was, “Hey, this is the kind of backing we want as a financial freedom.” And there’s no coincidence that that’s coming at a time with federal monetary policy being what it is. Inflation starting to surge and be more transitory. So, no doubt, it’s having a deal on volatility, an impact on markets and small caps are getting the brunt end of that, as you noted. Unfortunately, we have to wait and see how that plays out from new alliances and/or how that’s handled, but hopefully, it gets resolved and de-escalates quickly because it’s a sad situation.

Frank Curzio: It really is. It really is.

Daniel Creech: And then from the other standpoint, I guess you look at Lockheed Martin and all those things anywhere, because if you’re going to retaliate or change something-

Frank Curzio: Are they going to retaliate or as of right now-

Daniel Creech: Well, that’s up in the air, my point is though, is that from stocks and how investors can look at that if you want to play that game.

Frank Curzio: And that’s why I’m bringing this up is, again, you’re going to have personal opinions on this whose fault it is, whatever. But I just thought that, Biden coming out had a chance to win over Americans, unite us, admit that, “Hey, we got bad intel. We didn’t see this happening. People that gave us intel will be held accountable.” Figure out a plan, right? He didn’t have a plan. He’s like, “Let me just not go back,” right? Because right now the perception of the world, and you’re looking at Russia, North Korea, China. The U.S. is not loyal to their partners and allies.

Frank Curzio: We’re running, side of humiliation, we’re running. People who are running this country, may be terribly weak. I mean, what’s the perception out there because I don’t know, but just, this was really caught us off guard, and we debated this too, when we went back and forth saying you’re not too sure if it caught him off guard.

Frank Curzio: For me, the approval rating for the president went down. You’ve seen both sides. I don’t care if you’re Republican, Democrat, and you look at the media channels, they’re going crazy at attacking the current administration and whatever. You can blame Trump as well. I don’t get, whatever. It’s, for me, the bigger point is the repercussions of this. Kyle Bass did a good job of highlighting some of these things, but you look at Afghanistan with $3 trillion dollars’ worth of minerals. Ghazni province has the largest lithium deposit in the world. Pretty big deal with EVs. Where earth minerals. I mean, who do you think is going to partner with them, right? Who’s Afghanistan, who’s the Taliban going to partner? They are going to be partnering with Russia and China for this. That makes us weaker, right?

Daniel Creech: Yeah, probably not with friends. Exactly. And then you involve material costs and all that. That’s a bigger broad inflation. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s definitely going to be repercussions.

Frank Curzio: I mean, China’s already saying that they’re going to recognize the Taliban as the official government already. For me, that’s what they’re writing about, but the U.S. is supposed to set up this country to thrive. Now, what smaller country is going to trust us? So, when I look at this and it’s just a complete failure of the system, it really is. We were looking to do this. The funny thing, I think, from all this, is the current administration was like, “We want to do this on September 11.” This way you had that September 11th date, where we all think of it as a negative, and September 11, we got out and that’s the date, right? This way it marks it down. It’s good from the perspective of Joe Biden and whatever, but look what happened now.

Frank Curzio: We basically did the opposite of what we teach our special forces to do, right? So China is now pressuring Taiwan, who we help. Chinese are going to control Taiwan. There’s a lot of things here. If you have not seen the moves China has made… Since… The election, I mean, there’s something wrong with you. Look at just against capitalism, the pressure they put on their tech companies, Alibaba, Tencent, DiDi. All these names, all these announcements, all the gaming sector, everything. It is pretty crazy and it’s going to result in, I think, huge supply chain issues. It’s going to result in, you have Apple and Coca Cola, who would never, ever, ever, ever say anything bad about China, nothing. They’re going to host the next Olympics.

Frank Curzio: How is this going to work? There’s a lot of companies that have exposure to China and China accounts of 40% of the world’s growth. It’s the largest growth market. Are we going to bring a lot of these facilities back here? That’s going to be a huge opportunity. Maybe through the infrastructure bills, there’s going to be opportunities. But if you have exposure to China right now within your companies that you own, and you could see, look at the profits and the revenues. What’s the percentage of 20, 30%. It’s significant because they’re going to be problems with that. And this is a major event. I think it’s going to be marked in history as a major event. Just the pictures that I’m seeing. Yeah. I think I’m with a lot of people here, maybe not, but I don’t care about the blame and who do you want to put it on, and political parties.

Frank Curzio: For me, just from an investor perspective, I think this is really going to hurt. The market’s going to hurt sentiment. It’s going to make things worse with China, again, who is the biggest growth market in the world. But to me, this is a scary situation that is not going away. And it puts a whole new level of risks on the market, which we’ve seen in this industry where constant money printing, unlimited money printing, interest rates low forever, always great. That’s awesome. They’re going to keep it like that forever. But, look at inflation going out of control. We’ve seen it through a couple of companies. Look at the labor shortage going on. I mean, massive, massive, massive, massive inflation taking place right now. While economic data is kind of falling off a little bit. So, what do we do here? Because now we’re like, “Okay, these risks we can handle.” Now, you throw on this massive geopolitical risk and Wiki and the ties between global partners and things like that. It might be too much for this market to handle it. It may be.

Daniel Creech: Absolutely.

Daniel Creech: I mean we’re, what? Are we still at all-time highs? I haven’t checked it today, but I mean, we’re knocking on all-time high. So, a pullback has to be in the cards at some point, or at least you would think. Since I say all that, it’s probably not going to happen. Probably going to go straight up 10% from here and make me look bad. But the geopolitical risk, it’s always been there with China. To your point, just in the last few months with crackdowns, from basically the DiDi, the Uber of China, online gaming, online shopping, everything, big data. The umbrella of national security, Frank, is so big that every government can use that for any reason you want. We do that here. They do that over there. That’s the way that game is played. What was interesting about all that, which I totally agree with about the new risk and added. Frank, the Financial Times… Is it Financial Times? Yesterday, had BlackRock, the largest asset manager. Are they at 10 trillion yet? I feel like Larry always comments about seven, eight, nine.

Frank Curzio: I think they’re at eight.

Frank Curzio: I think I saw seven point something. That’s the last, I saw.

Daniel Creech: So, they need a little bit of bump in the market to get to 10. You know they’re dying to say double digit trillions.

Frank Curzio: I don’t think they’re dying to say that though. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.

Daniel Creech: Well, hell, they call it out every time. I see the guy on TVs counting that number, so it cracks me up. When he hits 10, that’ll be the ringing of the bell. But anyway, they’re telling people that, “Hey, quit looking at China as an emerging market. They’re the second largest economy, second largest bond market, et cetera, et cetera.” And they’re basically telling them to increase their exposure to Chinese assets and essentially saying, “Hey, all the risks you’re seeing right now are baked in and/or the risk reward is in your favor.” That’s an interesting thing because… Money managers or individual investors, it’s not the only game in town. There’s a ton of options out there. They are difficult to find at times or you have to manage emotions and all that kind of stuff. But man, Kyle Bass has been hitting this on the head.

Daniel Creech: You do have a lot of those huge China winners, are not winners anymore, Frank, because rules can change overnight. I mean, it’s like crypto. Crypto at least trades 24/7, but hell you go to bed, you wake up, it could be up or down 20%. You have exposure to China. Markets aren’t open 24/7. You go to bed and bad news hits, when that market opens, it could be down 30, 40, 50% or more. And then you have the other outlier of saying, well, the government might just take your app off the store. It might just tell you to quit, get new customers. That’s a big deal. So, for the world’s largest asset manager to come out and say that at the same time, that’s intriguing to me.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, now there’s a good data point. And even the Galaxy Digital at Novogratz, because we were talking about, you’re saying that Novogratz came out on that night conference call. That’s why I love having you. We’ll listen to different things and stuff. And I own that personally, and we are in one of our portfolios for newsletters and cursory research, but he spoke-

Daniel Creech: You want to tell that fun story or go ahead.

Frank Curzio: It’s been all over the place. But he came out and said, I want to talk off the cuff. He’s like, “We have something scripted here, but,” and that’s when he was talking about, “Look when stuff like this happens it strengthens the case of Bitcoin and it does strengthen the case for gold.” It does for both those assets. It’s what do you want to own that’s kind of immune to something like this? But who knows what’s going to happen, where it is bank accounts, and we’re going to see this in other countries or whatever, but it does strengthen the case for Bitcoin, which makes sense. It’s here, it’s not going away. As much as you’re going to see fluctuate and go nuts and everything, and now, you’ve seen all the investment banks going, because of a $2 trillion industry. They know they can make fees off it’s liquid.

Frank Curzio: It’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger because people are seeing this and they’re getting pissed off. And it’s kind of like, an F- you to all governments around the world. That’s what Bitcoin’s about, that’s what gold’s about. All the money printing, all the bullshit, all the garbage from the politicians. As more and more stuff like this just comes out and constantly comes out, people are getting more and more pissed and are starting to join that new class war. It’s something to think about if you have Bitcoin, if you have Ethereum, if you have… Just getting into the right cryptos and stuff like that because the gains in this, I’ve never seen gains in our portfolio holdings. Again, some of them came down cause they were a lot higher at the top, but I’m talking about like 40 X, 30 X, 20 X gains that we had, several of them. Which is incredible.

Frank Curzio: Again, some of those got cut because they were still up. I mean, I’ve never seen a stock up 40 X before. I’ve never had to stock up 40 X, or even 30 X, I don’t think. Maybe it was a private investment that I got in early, and I held on long-term. But that’s almost impossible for a retail investor to do. You could do that in crypto so that offers… Has a lot of shit. There’s going to be a lot of shut and a lot of BS in the marketplace. But now with security tokens, NFTs, I think you’ve seen the quality rise to the top. I liked the idea NFTs. I think 90% of that, 95% is all bullshit and people are just going to sell shit to try to make money off it. But there’s memorabilia that’s digital and if it’s from someone that’s a high profile person like a Tom Brady or something, or just special art or whatever that’s attractive. That’s going to attract the people.

Frank Curzio: I see NFTs doing well. It’s just, you see every fricking idiot trying to make a dollar, trying to sell someone NFT, which is crazy. But there is value to that market so you’re seeing the cream rise to the top in almost every industry, even ICOs. But you just see everything that’s happening in terms of political, guys pay attention to it, man. I mean, we talk politics, not just to talk politics, but it does influence how I’m choosing investments, what stocks I’m choosing, what stocks I’m getting out of, what I may short, what I may buy puts on. I mean, a lot of that has to do with what’s going on around the world and you got to pay attention. You just got to pay attention. You can’t just close your eyes or look at one site and believe what everyone’s telling you. Even me, research everything guys. Research everything. You really need to in this market.

Daniel Creech: One more thing, Frank, on the China situation because I found this interesting going through 13Fs and I’ve been looking forward to bugging you about these 13Fs anyway, so this will be a good little segway. The ride sharing platform, DiDi, okay. We talked about that in the past, so we’re not going to beat that dead horse there, but China regularly crackdown stock just absolutely tanked after IPO, okay? If you pull up, so now, we always give this grain of salt with 13Fs. 13Fs are the filings that managers have to do if you have over a hundred million dollars in assets. The lag there or the big grain of salt that you must take with this is that you don’t know for sure if they still hold these positions. So, a lot of these came out on the 16th or 15th was their last day to file for the quarter, but they could… Just because it says they own XYZ maybe they don’t own that exact same amount or at all now because there’s a gap, there’s a lag there.

Frank Curzio: Especially high frequency funds.

Daniel Creech: Well, anybody can do it. Anybody can trade at any time, some more than others.

Frank Curzio: You can find out who’s doing that, right? I mean, you can look the sources and Elliott management. I mean, you could look at some of these guys and say, okay, these are low turnover. They’ll buy Berkshire and they buy and they add over time.

Daniel Creech: But, I say all that to say this because you look at respectable, well, very successful managers. So, Dan Loeb, Third Point, Paulson and Company, John Paulson, Tiger Global, and Soros, George Soros fund. All of them had new positions in DiDi. Couple million shares to several million shares over the last reporting period. Now, if you pull up a chart and see the volatility and all that, it wouldn’t shock me to see several of these to trim these or close these positions out the next time they file for these 13Fs. I’m not saying that it’s just something that caught my eye when I’m looking through a lot of these. It’s like, man, what are fund managers looking at? What are they buying? Are they buying the same thing? It’s just kind of a fun data point to look. So, that’s something I’ll be looking at next time, because 13Fs are out. Anything catch your eye? I’ve been wanting to ask you about this. What caught your eye with 13Fs if anything? Because I got a few that I want to ask-

Frank Curzio: You know, with Soros too, and guys, this is important to look at because I like looking at this and I cover this all the time, but I’m always aware that we get new listeners all the time. For these 13Fs, the biggest funds in the world, anyone will measure over a hundred million, but everybody, the billions and the trillions, they all have to report their holdings, whether they are at the end of the quarter. So, the top new buys, top exits, what they’re boosting their positions, and then cutting stakes. And again, like Daniel said, it could change. But for me, I like looking at things that just catch my eye. And one of the things that caught our eye, which I think we’re still up on and we did well on, but you know, we just recommended it.

Frank Curzio: It was a stock, that was in, that I hated for a long time that you’d never see show up. It’s got a small cap name. It’s gotten beat up and David Einhorn was buying it. And not that I pay attention to David Einhorn, exactly his buying. I just, he’s a big name, someone that I look at and that name showed up and it made me research it. I researched the whole company changes model completely. So, for me, I look at these things and see who maybe David Tepper Appaloosa is buying and not necessarily saying, “Hey, he bought this. I’m going to buy it now,” but I like to see the trends and what he’s doing. So, some of the things that caught my attention here, Appaloosa, he cut stakes in the major technology companies. Alibaba, which is fine, but Micron, Facebook, Google. Cutting your stakes in that.

Frank Curzio: He was very early. I don’t want to say very early because if you wreck it. He bought these things three years ago. It’s not early, but he was going all in on a lot of these names and to see him get out of those names, I thought that’s interesting as those names are really holding up the market guys. I don’t know if you’re seeing what’s happened in the small caps. I didn’t recommend a small cap for the first time, Daniel, maybe in like a year, over a year in Curzio Venture Opportunities. And because it’s just so volatile and during earning season, and it just wasn’t a good risk reward and sure enough, we’re seeing a lot of names within that sector getting nailed on no news. A lot of risks coming out of the market, but I see something like this in Appaloosa, and not just them, but several big, high-profile fund managers are selling out of the bigger names.

Frank Curzio: That can mean nothing. That can mean something. But a lot of these names are the ones who have been holding up this market and the fact that they’re getting out probably means that they think the market could come down a little bit. Something to think about. I thought it was interesting with Carl Icahn, where he has 17 informal investment, 17 parole investments, but I’ve never seen his voice new undisclosed position and an unnamed stock. So, that’s something that doesn’t happen, but he has got a usual step that requires a separate follow with the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, so you don’t know, but if you want to provide interest in that in the SEC, that’s the way to do it, right? Because when that comes out, people go like, “Holy shit, let’s buy.” And he’s in-

Daniel Creech: The PNR marketing team, that’s a great tease.

Frank Curzio: That’s an awesome tease. Good for him. He’s so smart. Anyway.

Daniel Creech: Hey, what’s oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Frank Curzio: No. And the biggest news, I think it was Michael Burry just saying that he’s shorting Cathie Wood. Own puts on Ark Innovation ETF, increase its Tessa puts and Michael Burry, big, short, and stuff like that. He was early to that then made a fortune. It’s something to think about. A lot of people are against, Cathie. Me, I have nothing against her. I think it’s remarkable of how her funds performed. Everybody is all over her, but you know what you get with her. She is about innovation, getting into stocks and a lot of people won’t get into because they’re very, very expensive and that has worked for a long time for her. So, I wouldn’t take it as all these stocks that she’s in are going to crash and Michael Burry is right.

Frank Curzio: Because Michael Burry was very, very wrong before he was right. Unfortunately, but he still worked out, worked out for him tremendously, which, which is usually the case when people get a big idea right. The timing is tough. It usually takes a little while and then boom, holy cow. But it is something to pay attention to, I think. But I’m not going to short Cathie Wood at all. I just say, I think a lot of these names, a little bit crazy that she does add to and get into, but hey, you know what? She’s done a fantastic job pretty much so far with all the volatility. Those are just a few of the things that caught my attention. Guys this is where you get a lot of ideas, lots of different things… Elliot also… Largest purchase of the quarter include 3 million share buy of Twitter.

Frank Curzio: We’ve seen Twitter doing pretty well and they were on the board and things like that. So, just little trends like that I like to see and if things pull back or something that they’re buying, where I know David Tepper is not just going to take up one position in a stock and then just leave it there; he’ll add over time. So, new positions that come up, if I see that stock come down 10, 15%, or have a bad quarter, I might look to jump on because I know that David Tepper is probably going to add to that position because he just doesn’t take a position just like Buffet and you’re done. He’s usually adds to overtime billing that position because a lot of these guys have a lot of money into management.

Daniel Creech: Yeah, absolutely. The thing that keeps getting my attention with Carl Icahn is that he owns over 17% of Xerox. I think it’s over 30 million shares and he added to it. I admit, I don’t know why, and, but I almost want to buy it just because it’s like I look at the presentations. Margins seem to be improving. They don’t have any debt worries. I get that they fill a need and a lot of businesses and I think COVID helped them in certain aspects where a lot of people need services because since they’re working from home and they were kind of transitioning from offices and you’ve got that hybrid work from home situation. But that’s something cool to just, that makes me want to dive in a lot more and go through some more, what am I missing or what is he seeing that I’m not? But that’s a big takeaway from these 13Fs.

Daniel Creech: Frank, like you said, these are starting points. You want to find ideas, but I’m going to share a quick story and then what caught my eye. So, Dan Loeb of third point, I noticed he had a position in Upstart a few quarters ago. I forget exactly when it went public, but I believe he was an investor before Upstart went public and Upstart is a company that uses algorithms and artificial intelligence, AI, like you always say Frank, great trigger words to get marketing and things about that in your stock. What it does is it helps manager, or excuse me, loans, be more efficient for banking for mortgages and things. So, they basically go into banks and I’m dumbing this down here to my level, but they go into banks and show through pilot situations, “Hey, if you use our software and our products and our products, you could have made X number of more loans and had a smaller default rate.”

Daniel Creech: Well, if you’re in the loan business, if you can loan out more money and have less go bad on you, that’s obviously something you want to do as often as possible. They’ve had tremendous success. They blew away earnings as far as from the growth perspective recently, Dan Loeb did not change anything. His fund, almost 10% of his fund. And he’s got how many billions of dollars under management? Almost 10% is in Upstart and he maintained the entire position. If that isn’t a gut check moment or conviction, Frank, I don’t know what the hell is. That’s massive.

Frank Curzio: Speaking of Third Point too, Daniel. Top new buy for them Peloton and it’s interesting to say Peloton. I bought a Peloton, but I did cancel the subscription. So, I was using it, and then, I canceled the subscription.

Daniel Creech: You cheapskate.

Frank Curzio: I can’t believe it. It’s like four dollars a month or whatever it is. However, I did because we use UnitedHealthcare. So, we said this to all of our employees that they sign a deal with UnitedHealthcare that you get one year of the service for free, which is $4 a month. That’s pretty big. That’s big. It’s going to be a lot more people using it. Maybe a few more people are buying it, but just different things like that, that I’ll see certain things like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool.” And then Third Point buying Peloton up here and I would think Peloton is really expensive.

Frank Curzio: Stay at home stock. And maybe, you know, again, we get a little bit of stay-at-home action for a month or whatever with Delta, but I thought that was fascinating and real quick guys, to my last point, actually, this is the first point I made, when you’re looking at some of these names, Appaloosa, which is David Tepper. So, I said that he cut his stakes in Facebook and Google. You’re looking at Glenview capital, top exit. Microsoft on that list. If you’re looking at Maverick Capital, cut stakes in Amazon and Google. So, you’re seeing this. It’s not just like one or two people here. You’re seeing it a lot. I think Pershing Square boosting a stake in Domino’s pizza, I thought was very interesting. So, you’re seeing money come out of these bigger names, which is, to me, I just find that interesting.

Frank Curzio: This has been their safe haven and it’s supposed to be a safe haven. They did fantastic on these names, but these are the names that’ve been holding up the market. The Apples, big technology stocks, the trillion dollar market caps that account for whatever 20% of S&P 500, 18% whatever that number is. But you’re seeing some of the best investors come out of those names, maybe expecting a pullback. There’s no way those companies pull back and the whole market doesn’t pull back cause underlying those trends you’re seeing more lows and highs even on days where we’d need a record highs. Which is pretty crazy. That’s not a favorable sign. That’s not a healthy sign for the markets. And being in the small cap world and seeing some these names that reported, all right, maybe not so good quarters go down 30%. I’m like, holy shit.

Frank Curzio: Where did that come from? I mean, we recommended a stock that was down 50% already with insiders buying. They report a quarter, earnings are bad, they said that the revenue would stay the same and they had problem with labor shortages, and that thing freaking crashed on us, and we stopped out. That’s something where, look, I covered my lose more than winners, but you have to look at that and say, it wasn’t just an isolated situation.

Frank Curzio: I’ve seen other names now that are not in the portfolio that are getting crushed. And Dan, you covered some of those too, where you say, “Hey, did you see this one? Did you see that one?” And just some of the names, especially, you know, ESG and things like that, which are down tremendously now. And no one’s really talking about that, but those are the underlying trends of the market where, hey, you look at the S&P 500, that’s what you read. That’s higher. The Dow’s doing well, getting a little bit off its highs. But… When you’re looking at small caps and even some mid-caps, a lot of names starting to get hit, especially ones that don’t have pricing power.

Daniel Creech: Yeah and going forward and that thesis is playing out. You can never gauge the volatility a hundred percent correctly, but, a lot of this that’s happening, we knew that was happening. Obviously, we got stopped out of a position last week. We didn’t see that coming to that extent, but that’s what we need to pay attention to forward. But dig through the 13Fs guys as individuals out there because you can learn a lot. You can start to see patterns, get new ideas, just WhaleWisdom is a great free site that you can basically type any ticker and/or a hedge fund manager in and see what their most recent filings are about. So, dig through all that kind of stuff. One last thing, Loeb did add, he went from a million shares to 14 million shares in Intel.

Daniel Creech: I only bring that up because it does make me feel good. I’m still down a little bit on the position, but when you left the entire company in my hands for two Fridays, for frankly speaking, I talked about how Intel, I thought, it was just low hanging fruit. They had a decent quarter with reports, but there’s just a lot of momentum going on behind that name. If they just don’t continue to kind of drop the ball. How’s that for a simple investing thesis, Frank? Just don’t keep screwing up like you have, and your stock will probably double. Anyway, that conviction buy, adding that many shares is a big deal. Yeah. So, that’s exciting. So, we’ll look forward to kind of keeping everybody up to date on this and what we have to navigate going forward, Frank.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. Always provide ideas. So Dan, thanks so much for stopping by bud and we will see you next week.

Daniel Creech: All right. Cheers.

Frank Curzio: All right guys. So, that’s it for us. A little bit of a longer podcasts. Again, I wanted to cover a lot of statistics at the beginning of COVID and I appreciate all the emails. For me, I think people listen to this podcast and maybe I’m guessing here, you’re not going to get the same opinion here and every place else. I don’t work for anybody, right? So, I don’t have to support anyone else’s agenda. For me, it’s about the health of my family, my kids. For me, it’s about providing great opportunities for you, things that you, you don’t have access to that I was fortunate to have access to for most of my career.

Frank Curzio: And that’s going to result in having different opinions and that’s fine. But what I do want to stress is as someone that’s a researcher, that has done this all my life. Just go the extra mile, even everything that I’m saying, go the extra mile and, everybody, don’t trust anything. Always do your own homework, but you’ve just seen the difference in statistics of what was being reported and what was being told for us compared to what I was seeing in other sites and doctors were telling me. Right away, I was just like, boom, went down a rabbit hole. And I went crazy. Then I’ve just been researching this to death. I just feel like, our politicians should not be dictating health advice. They shouldn’t be telling us in mandate that you get a vaccine, right? Coming from them.

Frank Curzio: It should be coming from research, coming from doctors. That’s a pretty scary thing right now, what’s going on. When the data that matters, and we’re being forced to take a vaccine that’s eight months old and doesn’t have FDA approval and they’re going to force through the FDA approval so they could really mandate it. But there’s places where they’re mandating that you get the vaccine when it’s eight months old and it’s not approved by the FDA. That’s pretty scary. I’m not telling people not to get it. I’m not anti-vax. That’s up to you. But to be mandated, be told what to do to put something in your body. That’s a big change of something that we’ve never really seen before in this country. So, that’s a little scary, but, again, challenge everything. It’s going to result in you hearing opinions that you don’t believe or whatever and you’re going to disagree and that’s cool.

Frank Curzio: But the bottom line, we’re all in this together. I love you guys, even the people who hate me right now. Which are going to be some, but those statistics I provide the amount of research that I do, and this is hours, hours, hours, weeks, months, and for me, it’s my job, my responsibility to really put the right data in front of you so you guys can make the right choices and this way we can do better for our families. And that’s the goal here. So, I appreciate all of you listening. I love doing this podcast. I’m not going to change it. It’s great feedback. frank@curzioresearch.com here. I’m here for you. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, I’ll see you guys in seven days. Take care.

Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its hosts and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money and your responsibility.