Living In The Post-Truth World of Politics and Markets. With Guest Matt Tyrmand

Betting On Zero

Burke Koonce and John Fichthorn catch up in this podcast and discuss the Texas lawsuit headed for the Supreme Court, more on Hunter Biden and the state of investigative reporting. With guest Matt Tyrmand.

John, who is executive chairman of Maven, and Burke, who runs the Capitalism Maven site for TheStreet.com, have a long history together discussing markets, politics and contemporary subjects.

In this episode, we talk about the ongoing drama surrounding the presidential election with special guest Matt Tyrmand, investigative journalist and avowed right-wing provocateur. Tyrmand has done a lot of homework on Hunter Biden and has some interesting things to say about some of Biden’s business associates, but a lot of the discussion is about Project Veritas, the right-leaning investigative reporting organization which Tyrmand describes as modern-day muckraking in the tradition of Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. Project Veritas was most recently in the news for eavesdropping on CNN’s Jeff Zucker. We also get pretty deep with Matt on his take on the controversial Texas lawsuit that may or may not be headed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Politics aside, the task of convincing lots of people that “incontrovertible” evidence exists confirming something that doesn’t foot with their current worldview or personal interests is a difficult one. It’s something that Bill Ackman ran up against in his campaign against Herbalife. It’s something that short-sellers have to contend with every day, and it’s something that organizations such as Project Veritas make it their job to overcome. Project Veritas has the same issue that short-sellers do; the organization can be called partisan because it raises money from private sources, so it’s critics can say there is a conflict of interest. It’s the same battle that Ackman had to fight.

We appear to be living in a post-truth world. I suspect we will be covering this in more episodes to come.