Josh Brown, co-founder and CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, a New York City-based investment advisory firm managing over $2.7 billion, joins Julia La Roche on episode 20.

Josh, a frequent commentator on CNBC, is the author of three books, including Backstage Wall Street and the popular financial blog, The Reformed Broker.

In this episode, Josh shares his journey from a retail stockbroker launching a financial blog during the 2008 crisis to building and scaling an RIA. For Josh, writing changed the course of his career. Writing is what connected Josh with his firm's co-founder, and creating content through blogs and podcasts has been the sole driver of the firm’s clients.

These days, Josh has slowed the frequency of his blog posts, but when he writes it's an accumulation of ideas he's been pondering, and the latest blog he dropped on Sunday, Oct. 2, though, called “You Weren’t Supposed To See That,” went viral.

In 3,400 words, Josh examines “the greatest economic experiment” of the last three years, from the shutdowns, remote work enabled by technology, the stimulus, appreciation in stocks and housing, the emergence of digital art and SPACs, an increase in new businesses and LLCs, used car prices going up, household debt shrinking, household net worth rising, squandering of stimulus checks, and so on, all resulting in the worst inflation in 40 years.

As Josh highlights on the podcast, all of this revealed “a dark truth about the American dream.”

As Josh puts it in the blog, “Widespread prosperity, it turns out, is incompatible with the American Dream. The only way our economy works is when there are winners and losers. If everyone’s a winner, the whole thing fails. That’s what we learned at the conclusion of our experiment. You weren’t supposed to see that. Now the genie is out of the bottle. For one brief shining moment, everyone had enough money to pay their bills and the financial freedom to choose their own way of life.

“And it broke the f*****g economy in half.”

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro

2:16 Retail stockbroker to blogger

3:59 Lessons from broker days

7:08 Blogging during the financial crisis

9:53 Writing is essential for investors

13:18 Teaming up with Barry Ritholtz

15:37 Content is the sole driver of clients

19:31 “You weren’t supposed to see that”

23:50 A dark truth about the American dream

25:11 Legal immigration is one solution

28:44 Views on the “American Dream”

32:30 Implications for younger Americans

35:42 Where does the blame lie?

37:26 Mass prosperity wasn’t the goal

38:15 Reactions to the viral blog post

40:12 This recession is necessary to prevent the next recession. - Fed policy, literally

41:35 Why @Downtown doesn’t Tweet often

48:06 Where do we go from here?