How a Viral Congressional Trading Tracker Became a $1B+ Fintech Business | Autopilot

0:00We're not going viral just to get views. We are writing up these tweets saying, trying to make people money, trying to call out the corruption, trying to get change through. So the virality is not the input. The virality is the end product doing the time, research and effort to craft up good quality content that leads to viral stuff. you don't win by following the playbook you win by rewriting it 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real no theory no fluff no shortcuts this is right about now with ryan alford what's up guys welcome to right about now hey it's not about what used to be What has been, it's about what is right now.

0:50What started with the Pelosi stock tracker turned into something much bigger. Chris Joseph with Autopilot designed a platform that helps everyday investors follow proven portfolios instead of guessing on their own. He helped expose the trades everybody was talking about and suspicious about and then turn that insight into a real business. Chris, welcome to Right About Now. What's up, Chris? How are we doing, Ryan? I'm good, brother. It's good to have you. It's been fun reading about your journey. There'll be some topics that are familiar to our audience, but we're going to get underneath it. I haven't really done too many longer form podcasts.

1:22We usually do the 10 to 15 second news segments. So it's always fun to be able to go into the broader details, explain kind of how we do it, why we did it. So I'm excited for it. You kind of surfaced what I always questioned myself when all that went down. I was just like, these people are privy to so much information. They represent us and they do this. There's got to be insider knowledge there. I feel like you surfaced what everybody is thinking. Click it all kind of partly started aside from autopilot. We pretty much just started speaking stuff that was happening right before our very eyes.

1:51Just no one was calling it out. It originally went viral back in 2021, 2022, because a lot of people didn't necessarily know that they were allowed to do it. When I started, I didn't know that politicians were allowed to trade individual stocks. I thought they were held to the same standards that a banker in New York would be, where they can't trade individual stocks, but they can own broader ETFs. When I found out that the politicians were allowed to trade individual stocks, I'm like, well, that's kind of interesting. It's probably a little bit hypocritical, but I'm sure they're not doing anything kind of too crazy.

2:21Contrary to belief, of course, I wasn't thinking too deep into it. They obviously were using their insider knowledge, whatever committees they sit on to start making some trades. And looking back, it's pretty understandable or not necessarily understandable. It's pretty obvious why they were doing it. Give them a foot, they'll take a yard. That's what they were doing for the past 10 to 12 years since the Stock Act started back in 2012. We've been calling them out. We've seen some egregious trades. They're getting a little bit better now. They still are allowed to trade. They still are allowed to do it right before our very eyes.

2:50And our goal is to keep calling them out until a ban actually does happen. I've always wondered, why would anybody want to get into politics? Or why do they want to keep these jobs so much? Maybe we've uncovered it. Another piece to the whole thing, too, is there are two or three things that all Americans can agree on in this polarizing time. One is the stock trading. They all just want them banned from stock trading. 90 % of Americans want that. And then two is term limits. A lot of people are like, how can a politician be a term, be a politician for 40 years? 40 years is insane. They're career long politicians.

3:21It shouldn't be like that. I don't think anything will happen, but at least people are calling it out more than they were five, 10 years ago. How's that going since that moment? How crazy was all that, all the publicity around it, everything that went down? It's kind of been incredible, A little bit frustrating, incredible in the sense of how big it's actually gotten. The history of it was we started it back in 2020. And it actually started in 2021. It actually started on TikTok, where TikTok was the first kind of viral moment. We saw Nancy Pelosi making trades, and we wanted to essentially build a way to get notified of her next stock trade.

3:54We could copy it. Why would we not? Why am I trading my own stocks and I could just do what she does? I got behind the camera on TikTok, started talking about it. And the next thing you know, that video went viral. NPR reached out. Fox News reached out. There's some validation to this, not only on the viral fun side, the meme-y side, the way that we described it, but also on the actual alpha side. Maybe there is actual alpha in following the politician's stock trades. Fast forward to 2022. That was when we started the Pelosi tracker on Twitter. And then we transitioned it over to Instagram. Funny enough, the Instagram account actually got banned.

4:27Zuckerberg and them, they cut it right early. and it's a bummer because joe rogan was following that one was it because they felt like it was like you were showing personal information or something to someone else i think what they were doing was they were saying we were probably using her name likeness her likeness yeah her likeness on twitter you're allowed to do it especially after you bought twitter on instagram it was always a shady one so what we did though was and this is kind of like a little bit of our founder story we recreated the pelosi tracker on instagram but called it the politician trade tracker and And what we would do is we would use one piece of content and we would call out the politician on Twitter on X, take a screenshot, make a little nice cover and then post that same piece of content on Instagram.

5:07Funny enough, the Instagram account actually gets more views and more impressions, more engagement than the Twitter account. But the Twitter account is the original insane life changing trajectory. And it's been fun. I go to the bars in New York. I chat with friends. Everyone's always like, oh, my gosh, you're part of the team behind the Pelosi tracker. Yeah, I've been doing this for years. I know more about politicians, stock trades than probably anyone in the world, which is embarrassing. If you're like me, you probably spend a lot of time paying attention to what's happening in the world. Markets, business, crypto, interest rates, sports, politics, all of it.

5:43I'm always looking at headlines thinking, OK, what happens next? That's honestly why I've been spending time on Gemini predictions. What makes it interesting is instead of just watching stories move the market in real time, you can actually trade on the outcomes of real world events. Maybe it's oil prices, what happens with the Fed, crypto movements, major sports events, or broader world headlines. There are live contracts across all kinds of categories. And what I like is it feels built for people who already think this way. If you naturally pay attention to trends, follow business news, or spend your day analyzing what's happening in the economy and markets, this gives you a completely different way to engage with it.

6:28The platform itself is also really straightforward. Everything runs directly through the Gemini app. The interface is clean, and there are new markets opening every day. I've been on there browsing different contracts, and it's honestly just fun seeing how quickly things shift based on real-world news and momentum. And again, it's not about just passively watching headlines anymore. You can actually participate in what you think happens next. To start trading right now, head to Gemini.com slash predictions and browse through all available contracts. So there's one thing I've learned running multiple businesses.

7:06It's how fast things fall apart when communication gets messy. Missed calls, scattered text threads, team members not seeing the same conversation. that stuff quietly costs you time and revenue. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. It gives my team one shared business number so everyone sees the full conversation. Calls, texts, voicemails, all in one place. No more who talked to this customer. Replies are faster, handoffs are smoother, and customers actually feel taken care of. We realized that at my new card shop, Collector Station.

7:47Between customers calling about card inventory, grading submissions, trade offers, and even trade nights, things were moving fast. And when communication wasn't centralized, things got messy quick. I also liked that it works wherever I am. Phone, laptop, doesn't matter. I kept my existing number, added teammates in just minutes, and everything lives in one clean view. and their AI automatically logs calls and pulls out next steps. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash Ryan. That's Quo.com slash Ryan.

8:28That's Q-U-O.com slash Ryan. Quo. No missed calls, no missed opportunities.

8:40Is she still winning? Yeah, she's still making trades. Since we started tracking her back in 2023 was the day that we first started with the actual autopilot portfolio. The autopilot portfolio is the recreation of her public filings. Since we've started tracking her, she's up around 220%, 230%. While the spy in that same time period is half that. She's beating the spy by over 100%. And I can confirm that after this. She's been continuing to kill it. The majority of the stocks that she picks are all in the green. She's bought CrowdStrike. She's up. She's bought Tesla. She's up. She's bought Apple, Google, Microsoft, all the stocks that she's been buying.

9:15She is continuing to crush it with. What was funny was we didn't expect there to be alpha. It turns out there was alpha there the entire time. That's crazy, man. I heard a lot of winners in there. A lot have put it on, but it's more, I mean, CrowdStrike might be a little bit of an outlier of the names I heard, but if she's not buying speculative stuff that ends up, has there been many speculative buys? There's been a couple. Yeah. Taking a step back, one thing that we did do with the Pelosi stock tracker that was a smart idea for what we did was we did not sell out the account where it's like, we didn't necessarily do this, even though it's kind of run by our company.

9:46We didn't do it necessarily to get headlines, to get clicks, to say, oh my God, she's inside a trade. We wanted to take an investigative journalist approach to it. And to be fair to her, the majority of the trades that she has been making have not really been that speculative. There are some, and there are many that are ill-timed. The timing of them are good. But the speculative, she's not buying microcap or penny stocks. The most speculative stock that she did do though, she's still crushing it with. And that was a company called Tempest. She bought that in early 2024. Tempest is a small AI healthcare company.

10:17Since she bought that stock right after, the stock flew like 130, 120%. And that was the smallest company I've ever seen her buy. The stock has come back down since, but she's still up around 80 to 90 % since her buy on January 14th. She's not doing the most egregious stuff out of all the politicians, in my opinion, but she is still one of the best. The trades that she makes, she does time them well. She holds them to the right amount of time. At the end of the day, that is what matters. It's still like if she's outperforming the stock market, then we should find a way to get in on it with her.

10:48At 234%, she's beating some of the best traders in the world, I would say at that number, if that's holding. And I don't know how active she is? She's doing trades every week or every month. She trades, well, her filings come out probably three or four times a year. What's funny and a little bit frustrating about Nancy Pelosi's portfolio though, is she files the trades around moments in the calendar that she can bury the story. She files them at the beginning of the year in February, right around new year. She files them around July 4th. We're going to see if she's going to do one in two weeks.

11:18She files them around Thanksgiving. She always files them right before long weekends and things of that nature. All in all, I think she averages around probably 87 different sets of trades a year. They're not too egregious. They're not the crazy ones that we've been following with some of these other politicians. They just are very profitable. Talking with Chris Joseph, he's a co-founder of Autopilot. How do you guys make money? Autopilot, we are here to try and build up this new way for retail investors to invest. The best analogy is if I were to give you$100 ,000 now, and I were to say, what would you do with it?

11:50You would only have three options. You would have to put it in a passive ETF, which isn't bad, but people want individual stocks. You'd have to give it to a random financial advisor. He's going to charge you 2 % AUM fees just to put it in an ETF, or you're stuck having to invest it on your own, which is essentially guessing. The majority of people are guessing. Autopilot is the first platform, which is this fourth alternative that allows you to go find an investor on our marketplace, verify them based on their track record, their thesis, and their background, and then just have your money just follow them.

12:20And the way that we make money is we charge a yearly subscription. If you want to go and follow Nancy Pelosi's stock trades, for example, you can go on, connect your Robinhood account, allocate some money, and then you pay $100 to automate your portfolio with Pelosi. We have an AI PhD from Morton. You can go and follow his stock trades and you'd pay$200. It's just a simple subscription fee that is per year. And that is how we make money. And that's how you get the value from the product. Do we have any big players, Hathaway or whatever, following any of the founders or the main guys? We have the 13Fs.

12:53Per the SEC, the SEC forces hedge funds to file their trades once a quarter. They're called 13F filings. And we have all of those guys. We have Michael Burry. We have Warren Buffett. We got the new Leopold Ashton Brenner, if he's been absolutely crushing it in the AI companies. But we don't have any bigger, we don't have a personal Bill Ackman on the platform yet. What we do have though, is what we believe is the next generation, this new kind of world of Bill Ackmans. Our thesis, our thought is there are really good investors out there on Main Street. Maybe they're in Iowa, maybe they're in Idaho.

13:23I don't know. They're on the internet though. And they're sharing their stock picks left and right. They just never had the connections or the ability to launch their own personal hedge fund or prove that they're actually that good in a way that the masses can find out and catch on. What they're doing is they're going and applying to launch their own personal strategies on autopilot where they can prove their track record, prove their thesis, and then people can go in and invest alongside them. We don't have any Warren Buffetts yet, but our belief is we have the early innings of some guys could become the next Warren Buffett.

13:53And our goal is to continue finding those and showcasing them. There's so many people that want to invest better, smarter. No knock. I mean, friends that are financial planners and all that. So no knock on these guys that are professional and they've earned their credentials, but it does seem like this black box of what the hell is happening with my money on some level. This just seems very practical, but smartly applied. The idea of the black box is exactly it. There's just no transparency, nothing against financial advisors. They have a very specific role in the everyday life of their clients or for the specific stock picking side or the investing side.

14:28There's no track record to know if these people are good. And also you don't know how much they actually care about your kind of personal investments. We believe transparency always, if you're moving more towards more transparency, whether right or wrong, it's the right direction to go. More transparency into the government means calling out their stock trades more. More transparency into the financial ecosystem means calling out or at least shedding light on how money management works. More transparency into the company saying, hey, what is actually going on? More transparency, honestly, into the finance influencer ecosystem.

15:00These guys are selling courses. They're selling their own personal stock picks. They could be photoshopping the whole thing. You don't know. More transparency is the solution to this stuff, especially with people's money. That's why we're bullish with the direction that we're going and also why a lot of people use the product. The average age of paying client of an autopilot customer is 38 years old. They're not 22-year-old kids with YOLO money. They're dads with a son and a daughter and he doesn't want to pick his own stocks or do the research. So now he's going to all autopilot as the alternative and it's making his life better, making his life easier.

15:32That versus a financial advisor. That is the right direction to go. We'll see how big it can get, but that is the steps that we're going and what we are focused on at autopilot. Everybody from just coming and going and sorting by who's been the hottest, most successful the last year and everybody just using that exact track. It's diversity of the different people. We have around$1.7 billion of assets invested throughout the platform. You got Nancy Pelosi's portfolio, you got hedge funds portfolios, you got AI strategies. The thing that we've seen in the data is performance does play a part. Absolutely.

16:04People are following the guys and girls that have had a great track record, but it also is the thesis and the ecosystem behind the stock picks. For example, we have an AI PhD from Wharton. He graduated. He's a professor of finance now at the University of Florida. He won the papers by BlackRock for writing how to use AI to pick stocks the best. His expertise is much better than you or I probably at AI. He knows how to program the different language learning models to create portfolios and baskets of stocks that AI is picking stocks for him. He's taking his expertise and his skillset and enlisting those strategies on autopilot.

16:38And then now people can go in and they can invest alongside him. People in the AI world follow that guy. Another example is we have a guy named Brooker Belcourt. He is an ex Citadel trader, an ex go to trader. He's worked in the hedge fund industry for years. He learned things while working there of how do we think about the larger macro companies. And one of his thesis is you don't buy the second or third best companies, you just buy the best. So you buy Uber instead of Lyft, you buy McDonald's instead of Burger King, things like that. And he is very popular with people that like the expertise and people come from the hedge fund world.

17:12It's not necessarily people coming in and autopilot and just the top portfolio. It is more finding the sort of strategy and the thesis, the conviction that that resonates with that individual. And then they are following that guy's stock fix. And that's how it works. Have we gotten to the point where AI is smart enough that if you give it like a thousand bucks and you set it up for day trading and just let it go, is it going to make money? I don't think it's gotten to that point. The AI, the day trading is always hard. There is an actual argument to be said, though, of can AI do two things well?

17:41One, can it do research more than any other individual? We can do more research than the average person, a retail investor, maybe not as much as a hedge fund guy, but it does do research extremely well. The other thing that it does that is an underestimated variable, it has no emotion. Even if the stock markets are going up and down, it's not going to panic and sell on the bottom. It's not going to buy the top. It has no emotion. So it's going to stick to its principles, which I believe is a advantage of AI versus the human. I wouldn't say that they're necessarily smart enough to out day trade a trader.

18:13But I would say that they have two kind of unique variables that is a reasonable element is a reasonable way that they could outperform the average everyday person. And that, again, I think is why they've been so popular. That Chachupi T portfolio, for example, is outperforming the S &P 500. There's proof in the pudding, essentially, on the app. You can go look at it all yourself. I love the transparency, the comparison coaches and stuff, all the ninjas and coaching gurus that have done nothing. They know who they are. So there's one thing I've learned running multiple businesses. It's how fast things fall apart when communication gets messy.

18:47Missed calls, scattered text threads, team members not seeing the same conversation. That stuff quietly costs you time and revenue. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. It gives my team one shared business number so everyone sees the full conversation. Calls, texts, voicemails, all in one place. No more who talked to this customer. Replies are faster, handoffs are smoother, and customers actually feel taken care of. We realized that at my new card shop, Collector Station. Between customers calling about card inventory, grading submissions, trade offers, and even trade nights, things were moving fast.

19:31And when communication wasn't centralized, things got messy quick. I also like that it works wherever I am. Phone, laptop, doesn't matter. I kept my existing number, added teammates in just minutes, and everything lives in one clean view. And their AI automatically logs calls and pulls out next steps. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months. when you go to Quo.com slash Ryan. That's Quo.com slash Ryan. That's Q-U-O.com slash Ryan. Quo. No missed calls, no missed opportunities. So there's one thing I've learned running multiple businesses.

20:16It's how fast things fall apart when communication gets messy. Missed calls, scattered text threads, team members not seeing the same conversation. That stuff quietly costs you time and revenue. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. It gives my team one shared business number so everyone sees the full conversation. Calls, texts, voicemails, all in one place. No more who talked to this customer. Replies are faster, handoffs are smoother, and customers actually feel taken care of. We realized that at my new card shop, Collector Station.

20:57Between customers calling about card inventory, grading submissions, trade offers, and even trade nights, things were moving fast. And when communication wasn't centralized, things got messy quick. I also like that it works wherever I am. Phone, laptop, doesn't matter. I kept my existing number, added teammates in just minutes, and everything lives in one clean view. And their AI automatically logs calls and pulls out next steps. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash Ryan. That's Quo.com slash Ryan.

21:39That's Q-U-O.com slash Ryan. Quo. No missed calls, no missed opportunities.

21:51You can sell whatever you want. You can give away the courses. You can do all that shit, but just be transparent about the real results that have come from your own skin in the game using these same tactics. People aren't dumb to this stuff anymore. Maybe, you know, during the COVID era of investing, people would trust anything they see on the Internet. Trust is at all time low now because AI is behind half of these people and half of these things. The poly marketing calcities prediction market. Yes, I think they're sports betting. They have done a good in the sense of they brought a way to verify truth.