Trump Losing His Twitter Megaphone Would Be A Big Blow: SocialFlow CEO

also a busy day for social media platforms. Twitter suspended President Trump's Twitter feed for twelve hours, required deletion of the offending tweets, and then threatened a band. Facebook suspended the President's ability to post for twenty four hours, but said nothing about a permanent band. To get the latest on how the social media platforms are reacting to yesterday's news, we welcome to Jim Anderson, CEO of Social Flow. Jim,

thanks so much for joining us here. So, you know, it's some pretty dramatic moves there by Facebook and Twitter. What do you make of it? Yeah, Paul, it is dramatic moves. I mean, in many ways we're unprecedented territory. I will say that a suspension is not yet a band. But there there's an air of inevitability to this that I haven't seen before, where you know, you've got a situation where the president was inciting violence. You know that that will be much discussed whether that was his intent

or not, but certainly that was the outcome. And the social media platforms have always taken sort of refuge saying, hey, we we are not in a position to suppress the voice of a duly elected president. But now they you saw Twitter sort of move from one policy to another, say well, the threat of violence now has caused us to use this in a different light, and that's what

led to the suspension. And so the real question in my mind is, you know, President Trump needs to sort of back down, and because Twitter said if you continue to do this, we may ban your account permanently. And when have we ever known President Sumps to back down from something? Yeah, I mean, is this something that is happening because he is the outgoing president at this point, so there is less at stake. Yeah, Bonny, without a doubt. I mean, he's got what thirteen twelve states left in office.

And it's interesting, you know, outgoing presidents, or we'll call them former presidents traditionally in the United States have had sort of irrelevance. I mean, I don't mean that pejoratively. You know, that's sort of the nature. You retire, you become an elder statesman, You sort of after a while, write a book, you open a library, and that's about what you hear from former presidents. And I don't think

anybody expects that from President Trump. You know, he's even you know, already teased the idea that he may run again. So he may be a former president and a future candidate, but once he is no longer president, and we're clearly coming up on the point where he is no longer president, you know, he's very clearly going to be treated with

a different set of rules. And I think Twitter more specifically has been quite quite a bit more aggressive than Facebook and saying, look, we may just stand your entire account. So you know, I have a lot of folks on Twitter, on social media have been calling for Facebook and Twitter too permanently, been President Trump. And even Kara Swisher, one of the more of the New York Times, one of the more influential tech observers over the last couple of decades,

has done the same here. What are the expectations post January twenty one or more of these social platforms might just in fact ben President Trump. Yeah, I think so. The first thing we need to do is we need to separate Twitter from Facebook. They are obviously two different companies. We tend to talk about them to theay what Twitter doing, What's Facebook doing? But but remember, you know, Facebook is you know, sort of twenty times larger or so than

Twitter in terms of market cap. I just checked this morning. Um, and Facebook has got a lot more to fear from regulation and antitrust and those kinds of things than than Twitter does, just sort of simply from from the size and scale of their operation. You know, they're both private companies, and there's a case to be made that they can, you know, sort of choose to operate the platforms in whatever manner they see fit because it's private, you know,

it's a private platform and private speech. Um, but I think Twitter is definitely being more aggressive. You know, President Trump has eighty nine million followers on Twitter. But to the degree he's ever had a social media superpower, it's not his ability to tweet. It's a need to get the media to cover what he tweets, and so if you take that megaphone away from him, which Twitter may very well do, um, he's going to have a really

deep hill decline. Certainly, he's got many supporters. Seventy plus million people voted for him. It's not that he will become you know, irrelevant, but but you know, losing that Twitter megaphone would be a very significant load to him. Facebook similarly, he's got a large audience there, but he's not nearly as prolific on Facebook, and that doesn't seem to be able to drive the media narrative nearly as much as what he's tweeted has been able to do.

What happens under a Biden presidency is Twitter as used? Do people still gather there too, you know, incite each other if you like. Well, the Twitter certainly will be used, and people do and probably still will incite on on on Twitter and do other things what you won't see as President Biden, of course tweeting like President front then, right,

I mean it's just a completely different, uh personality. President He will be a user of social media, I'm quite certain, or at least his staff will, but but in a much less provocative way. Right, It's different kind of politicians. So I don't suspect that we will be having many conversations about what President Biden tweeted this morning like we have with President Trump. And so it's it's just it's sort of going to be a much more normal or

traditional lot. I guess i'll call it view of the presidency and how they conduct, you know, briefings of the public. All right, Jim, thank you so much. Jim Anderson's always a pleasure to speak with you. Jim Anderson's CEO of a Social Flow and of course Bloomberg Media and other parts of Bloomberg works with Social Flow. That's just a disclaimer, Yeah, Paul, I mean I've been pretty you know, ignorant of Twitter over the last few days. I haven't really wanted to

see the back and forth. I mean some of them are pretty graphic and and pretty nasty. Yeah, it really was. And there is a call for regulation, but you bounce that against the censorship issues, uh, And that's kind d of the challenge out there in the marketplace and for the regulators as well. Well. This week, among other things, we had Impossible Foods deciding to cut the prices on their foe meat or fake meat products by fift percent. Of course, so Impossible makes burger is essentially from a

magic ingredient that is essentially modified yeast. Time to bring in Dennis Woodside, president of Impossible Foods, and Dennis, thank you so much for joining. It's been a busy day. I know that we just had news breaking that you now have an interim CFO as your previous gentleman went to app Harvest to head up a harvests. So I'm sure it's been a very busy few days for you. But talk to us about why you decided to reduce the price of your products by fiftcent at a time

when it must be difficult to do that. Yeah, thanks for having me. So the price reduction is part of an ongoing strategy to get down ultimately to the price of of ground beef. So you have you have at the very high end products like wandboo beef and like nine bucks a pound. We're currently priced with this reduction, closer to what you would pay for grass fed. But ultimately we need to compete with the mass of the market, which is which is buying what's called ground beef, and

that's even lower than where we are now. Uh, so you you should expect continuing price reductions from us over time as we get scale, and we can pass the benefits of that that scale onto our restaurant partners and onto consumers ultimately. Uh, Dennis, what's the elasticity there on the price cuts for you? It seems in this market that you've had pretty strong unit sales, perhaps strong enough that you don't need to cut prices. Give us a

sense of how that dynamiccause working for you, guys. Yeah, yeah, you know the market isn't The elasticity is incredibly high. The vast, vast majority of of consumers purchase beef in the three to six dollar range, and we're we're just outside that now. Uh. We expect, as I said, to get down there over time as we continue to scale our production. Uh. If you think about the economies of scale, you know, you you build a plan or you stand

up a supply chain. The more you put through that plant, the more lines you can run, the more ships you can run. Uh. You know, your fixed costs are just amortized over over a larger revenue base. And and so we've been able to as our as our productionist scale, as our volume scale, We've been able to get those economies over the last year. But we don't see that stopping. We just see our footwork continue to continue to expand and continue to pass that benefit onto onto our partners

and consumers. Now, you said just at the end of last year that you're going to be doubling your R and D team over the next twelve months. Important to get into the Chinese market as well, to grow your base and also keep competitors at bay, like beyond meat and you know meat makers and other countries in the world. You've also had seven fundraising rounds. Where are you in terms of capital needs? We're we're actually quite quite good

right now. We raised a couple hundred million uh in in May time frame, and then several million prior to that um. But look, you know, the market that we're going after is enormous. Our our mission is to replace all animal based protein products and that is a literally a one trillion pound market roughly four to over four trillion dollars globally, and and we're competing now in a relatively small part of it, which is primarily ground beef.

We have a sausage product as well, but primarily ground beef. But we see opportunity in many other meat products. Um and you know it's not it's not a surprise that uh, ground steak, chicken, fish, all these are interesting to us over time. For us to be competitive in those those markets, we need to invest in R and D and create the same kind of wow product that we did when we launched The Impossible Burgher. Dennis talked to us about

kind of your distribution directed tumor versus restaurants. Where are you now? You know, where do you want to be? Where's the real growth? Talk us about, you know, kind of your revenue story. Yeah, we're in over thirty thousand restaurants in the US. We're in over seventeen thousand retail doors and and that's up from like two hundred a year ago. So we made a big move into retail

over the last year. But at the same time, we have a limited products that we have to retail products now most if you if you look at beef products, you know, anybody's selling beefs to to a to a retailer probably has ten to fifteen different skews. And we're in the process of building a much broader portfolio to go to to expand that retail presence. So it's still even though we're we've we've got good presences, still pretty

early days. There's well over three thousand restaurants in the US, and that's just the U S which is less than fiftent of all beef consumption. So it's very early days for the industry. You know, most of our consumers are are the vast majority, like of them are uh meat eaters.

Uh and and they're shifting a small portion today of their meat um meat meat eating into plant based Over time, that share is just going to grow and grow as they see the benefits, the health benefits as well as the environmental benefits of moving to a plant more of a plant based meat UH diet Dennis and announcing this price reduction, Yours Books person said that now the lowest price for your burger product is six dollars and eight

cents per pound. How much of that is pure profit and much of what people are buying is basically, you know, helped by private equity funding. Uh So the economic unit economics of the business are quite good actually, and it's not the kind of the case where this is you know, we're selling at a loss. Um and like I said, at the the the growth of the business has has enabled us to get the scale uh in order to in order to sell product at a at a reasonable margin,

but also reduced our prices. And you think about the you know, the inputs that we we have to the product are our plants, and those plants are much lower cost than than the animal because you don't have the all of the um labor that goes into rating cows, you don't have the transportation and so forth. So the unit economics are actually quite good, especially as you start to get the scale. Hey, Dennis, thanks so much for

joining us. Really appreciate the update. Dennis Woodside, president of Impossible Foods, based in Menlo Park, California, continuing to grow that plant based food business. Well, there are many questions that will need to be answered about what occurred in Washington,

d C. Yesterday. Chief among them is security or lack thereof that allowed the whole event to take place to the scale at which it did, and we can maybe begin to start answering some of the asking some of those questions right now at Jordan Strauss, Managing director of Business Intelligence and Operations for Cruell, which is a vision of Duff and Phelps based in Philadelphia, Jordan. Thanks so

much for joining us here. The images we saw of the inability of the Capitol Police and the and the d C Police UH to secure the Capital grounds, and in fact it seemed at times some of the videos suggest that they were letting them in and not even trying to stop the folks that were coming into the Capitol. What do you make of all that? Thanks Paul and happy to be here. Look what we saw yesterday was

one of the darkest days in American history. This was predictable, it was preventable, and it represents an almost total lack of preparation. We should expect to see investigations about this for probably generations to come, and changes in the near future. I will tell you talking to our clients all over the world about contingency planning in the last twenty four hours. The big takeaway here is that there just didn't seem to be any well what it's changed. Who's protecting the

capital today? So, Nnie, the Capitol Police are a very small, but very elite unit that's a little bit unusual in the American law enforcement inventory. Like the Supreme Court Police. They're one of the only two law enforcement organizations that don't that aren't part of the executive branch. They work for the Congress. So in order to get extra help, in order to plus up, they need to get additional

resources from executive branch agencies. So another branch of the government. Similarly, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington doesn't really have jurisdiction on the capital grounds because it's it's part of the federal the federal sovereign. So what's so frustrating about this? And this was work I used to do along with many many others in government that we do now for clients. You know, the capital is a space that's very easy to protect in the sense that we do it at

least every year for the State of the Union. And there are these very complex, very well thought out plans that the Federal Interagency puts together towards things that are called national Security Special Events and s s s the highest tier of of of the stick security events, so things like the UN General Assembly, a presidential inauguration, the State of the Union, sometimes the Super Bowl. Right, there's a plan on the book that gets revisited every time

there's a new one. And I know that there's been expensive planning going on for President of like Biden's inauguration for at least the last couple of weeks. This is something we should be good at, we should be well practiced at, and we should be able to do in layers. And given the threat environment that existed, the known threat environment that existed going into yesterday, the fact that that didn't happen is just beyond a belief. Jordan, Can I

just jump in and ask who gives that command? Because right now we just learned the Chad Wolf is no longer in position. He has resigned. He was the acting Homeland Security director. Who who gives the orders and who who will do it now in his absence? Sure, Vonny, that that's a great question. So for things like national security special events, which this was not, the Department of Homeland Security through the Secret Service, is the lead coordinating agency.

So you know, for a planned, coordinated deployment of people, like for the inauguration, it's usually going to be the Secret Service coordinating a lot of local law enforcement in the district Maryland, Virginia area, uh, and the entire sort of arsenal a federal law enforcement I understand that the FBI and the hostage rescue team got there relatively quickly that the Metropolitan Police Department around the perimeters of the capital is able to use what's called an iMac and

Emergency Management Assistance Compact to get two hundred troops from Virginia. As to who does this now, there has to be a cognisant official, be it the Attorney General, the FBI director, the Secret Service director, or others that agrees to send their people in, or a National Guard deployment, which, although it was delayed for reasons which I suspect, will be investigated and will become clear uh in the coming weeks.

UM work closely with again the very elite but clearly overmatched and overwhelmed officer and Capital police in a situation like this, Jordan, what do you say to the argument that perhaps a the less forceful defense of the Capitol yesterday resulted in relatively fewer casualties than there might have been had they taken a much stronger stance than in fact it was. You know, I think there are four fatalities, but it could have been so much worse. Is that

a reasonable argument to make? I don't understand why the capital was not locked down? Uh? You know, a forceful response doesn't have to look like shooting people. It doesn't

have to look like mass arrests. If you think about these sorts of things in advance, it might look like just making sure that the Capitol building is well secured, and it should be well secured, because there were a ton of upgrades after the September eleventh attacks, after the first Capitol Hill shooting, uh, and after the tragic shooting representatives police at a softball game making it harder to

penetrate and then pushing layers of security out. It's not clear why those layers of security failed and why they weren't stop leading into the capital. Yeah. I mean, we're gonna have to fill some of these open positions, or at least designate somebody to take on their responsibilities for the next two weeks. Jordan's thank you so much for giving us those explanations. It is very important to understand

the ins and outs of what actually happens. Jordan, of course, managing director at a crull, former White House and a Sea official and director of Preparedness in response for the National Security Division of the U s d O j and Jordan's strouss in Philly which also is you know, very very divided right now Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I should say, with the final hurdle in counting electoral College votes last evening, I do want to mention as well that the incoming

majority leader, Chuck Schumer has now called for the removal of President Trump. Well, it is time to look cross asset because as the NASTAG rises above at two percent, we also have the tenure yield almost at one point zero eight percent, we have a muted VIX and a Donar index that's again approaching in ninety. It is time

to bring in Sarah Ponzac Crocess, that reporter here at Bloomberg. Sarah, what catches your eye most day as an expression of what's been happening in the country overnight, Well, it really is remarkable, and it feels like you're in two different worlds. Yesterday with the images of what we were seeing on Capitol Hill, and then you look at what was happening in markets before four pm, and yes, we saw some pairing of gains in equity markets, but nothing too remarkable.

We didn't even see a loss of more than one percent in to day. And it can seem cold, and this is also almost an extension of what we've been talking about for almost a year now with the real economy with COVID nineteen and the stark differential when it comes to financial markets. But when you speak with investors on why we see this disconnect, why we're not seeing these images really affecting investors moods is Peter Bookvar, he's over ablicely advisory. I'll read you what he said this morning,

and he said it very plainly. He said, there should be no mystery as to why the markets didn't care about what happened in the capitol yesterday. However disturbing, disgraceful, and embarrassing it was. It's because it is no bearing on the direction of the economy, earnings, an in trace interest rates. It's that simple. And like you mentioned, you look at the tenure this morning, just continuing it's climb higher. The tenure yield this morning is still up another more

than four basis points. Yeah, we're seeing the yield curve steping. Easy point out, Sarah, and that's caused a couple of strategists want a Glomo Sax and dud and Um Jonathan Golubt credit Swiss to kind of upgrade their view of the big banks right, and Jonathan Golove's view. He also upgraded his view and his year in target for the SMP five hundred from forty two hundred. And it was an interesting take because he has been talking about how

this rotation from growth to value was possibly over. That we had seen value out performance on a couple of solid days, that those being the days in which we got positive vaccine news when Janet Yellen was nominated to be Treasury secretary. Whoever, today he's overweighting cyclical assets. Like you mentioned, we see financials flying higher yet again and today up more than two percent. But we do see this interesting change today because you don't see this clear

cut cyclical defensive tilt. Yes, we do see defensive equities under performing utilities pretty much flat on the day's staples, your second worst performing sector, however, still higher at the top of the pack, though you have tech and consumer discretionary mixed in with financials. So after seeing tech under performance yesterday, there are many reasons floated, especially with that

we want to call it a blue ripple. The expectations from that, whether that be the possibility of higher capital gains and corporate taxes, not that that's expected because the Democrats did take the Senate by such a such a slim, narrow margin, but also just the expectations for higher rates since low rates have been such a boon for growth docks. But today we see tech coming back in a pretty big way. The NASDAC up more than two percent as we speak. Yeah, and we also have plenty of movement

in credit markets. We have data coming in constantly showing improvement, not so much payroll of data, though, we still have you know, more than seven hundred thousand people making first time claims. Sarah right, it's a reality check. And yes, we did see initial jobless claims decline from a week earlier, but that's still a very large number, seven hundred eight seven thousand, it's it's extremely large. We saw a negative

ADP print tomorrow. Of course, we will get that non Farm Perils report the first Friday of the new year, the first payrolls report of the new year. At some of those estimates have been downgraded brought lower after that a DP print that we did get, but this also is expected. Right now, we're seeing rising COVID cases. At least now we have seen a stimulus package past and and the expectation is for more stimulus down the pipeline by a matter of one trillion in total. Possibly. But

where we stand now is this was expected. The data is expected to get worse. It's going to be hard to watch. But again, I know we've discussed it so many times and we hear it again and again from investors. And shotage is that the market is forward looking. It's looking past this, and it's looking at a time when the vaccine rollout really gets going, and the vaccine is a majority deployed, and you have a very high savings right, and all of a sudden, you have all this pent

up demand that starts being filtered through the economy. Yeah, you wonder when you know, we see some of this, uh, you know, economic data, whether it's the job's claims or consumer spending start to cause some economists maybe to read look at some other economic forecast, I know, the bloombrick economics. Folks are looking for a slight contraction uh in the first quarter. Um, I won there's any building concern about

downside risk? Is some of these economic forecasts well as of right now, an aggregate, I would say, looking through research notes, this morning from multiple different cell side research shops and and reading notes from economists, they're not really so focused. I mean, of course they put out their forecasts for a near term economic data, but when they look at GDP forecast for the year, everyone's revising their

GDP forecast higher. That due to the expectations of more physical stimulus, more stimulus checks coming down the pipeline in addition to the six D it will likely add up to two thousand. Now that's the expectation and what that means for growth, what that means for savings, and what that means for the deployment of capital down the road

and spending. So right now, if you look at aggregate for the year of one, and that's what markets are looking at two, we're seeing growth expectations just revised higher and higher. Yeah, it's really interesting here I'm looking at the real GDP forecast on the economic forecast three point nine percent one. Uh So, that's interesting how the economists are still looking for growth. Hey, Sarah, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate that. As always, Sarah Pons

that cross asset reporter for Bloomberg News. As the markets Fannie, despite everything we see in the world. They continue to move higher, don't they. Yeah. I mean, as I say, you can have all the political chaos that you want, but if you have leadership, or at least the promise of leaderships, there isn't that much to worry about for

the market. Son in a sense, if there's more stimulus coming, which is the general consensus, if it's going to be a buy Harris administration, then you know, at least in the short term, that should be good for markets and corporate America. Absolutely, and I think that's kind of what we're seeing in the markets and what we've seen really since O's marchalows. Thanks for listening to Boomberg Markets podcast. You can subscribe and listen to interviews at Apple Podcasts

or whatever podcast platform you prefer. I'm Bonnie Quinn. I'm on Twitter at Bonnie Quinn, and I'm Paul Sweeney. I'm on Twitter at pt Sweeney. Before the podcast, you can always catch us worldwide at Bloomberg Radio.