The Punk Rock Comedy Capitalist

An article about a men who fucked a dolphin made him an entrepreneur.

I am not joking.

Here’s the quick rundown on his career:

• Grew up in the punk rock scene that thinks money is a sin

• Wrote that dolphin-fucker article

• Started a satire site that hit millions of readers (and inspired The Babylon Bee’s founder to start)

• Got death threats online

• (His team) had beef with Elon on Twitter

• Got acquired

• Now the CEO of a popular financial data platform for traders.

Matt Saincome was a broke freelance writer in San Francisco when he decided to start leaning into his sense of humor, and started The Hard Times.

Even though he came up in the punk community, he is a strong believer in free markets, free speech, and a huge business nerd.

Now he’s the CEO of Unusual Whales—a financial trading platform with 2.5M+ followrs on X—with the mission of leveling the playing field with retail traders and fighting against Congressional insider trading (Nancy Pelosi your time is running out).

This interview is also personal to me: The Hard Times was the first ever place I got paid for making something funny online.

From there, one thing lead to another, and I know the VP of Memes slash child labor of Memelord Technologies and make memes for a living.

I talked to Matt about his journey starting growing The Hard Times to millions of readers, growing up in an environment that’s (mostly) anti-capitalist as a business nerd, why memes and comedy can make you millions on the internet, how memes can influence the stock market, and more.

It’s a long one, but you won’t regret it (that’s what she said)

Jovian: Dude, first of all, The Hard Times was the first time I got paid for being funny on the internet, so thank you for that.

Matt: I'm so glad to hear that, man.

When we first started The Hard Times the big thing was we wanted to pay people right off the bat. 

We were actually paying people using my personal credit card. So I'm glad that it meant something to you.

I saw that you guys started The Hard Times with a mere $800. Is that true?

Yes, and that was actually the last $800 in my bank account.

There were times throughout our history when it didn’t make financial sense to pay our writers, but I really believed in it and thought it was important. 

I’m glad that it resonated, even though I wish it was a higher amount. The economics of the internet are not always favorable to people trying to make others laugh, but we did our best.

I sold Hard Times and Hard Drive and haven’t been involved in a long time, but I do sometimes miss the camaraderie and laughs of those early days.

I also think it’s some kind of approval for internet creatives. If someone pays you for the wacky stuff you’re doing, there’s probably something there. I got this job with Jason at Memelord Technologies just from making memes, and now I’m doing it for a living.

There is money in engagement, and good comedy gets engagement. 

The guys from The Onion were telling me a big problem they have is some of their best writers get scooped up by the advertising industry and the movie industry.

So I think the key to make comedy work on the internet is to work on something that needs really good, engaging content, but also has a business model that openly supports it. 

Making comedy online isn't always the best business model in itself, but if you're a particularly charismatic and interesting comedy person, Patreon could be a great business model for example.

I also enjoy the thing Elon was going after with paid engagement on X. There are pros and cons to that, such as artificial gaming of the system, which doesn’t necessarily make for the best content.

But in general, I like the mindset that the best content creators on platforms could be compensated for the stuff that they're putting out.

Comedy gets engagement, engagement brings revenue.

The easiest way to start doing comedy online? Memes. That’s why we’re building Memelord Technologies.

Matt also talks about how memes can influence the financial market. Keep reading to find out.

You came from this punk scene background where people actually should not care about money. How did you become interested in business and entrepreneurship?

I came up in the punk scene and loved it, but it never felt like I fit in perfectly.

I basically came up in the punk scene, the alternative comedy scene, and the journalism scene. I value all those communities, and most of my best friends are in them.

Throughout so much of my punk upbringing, I would avoid clothes that had prominent corporate logos, because of the anti-corporate culture I was raised in stuck with me. 

But it struck me at some point in my life that I didn’t want the generally agreed upon philosophies of those scenes to control my decision making, particularly when those philosophies stopped me from being the kind of guy who could help people in my personal life.

Something switched in me where I basically said: I would wear just about any logo if it meant that I got to put food on the table for my family. Or if my friends were in need, they could come to me and I could help them.

I made that mental framework shift early on in the punk scene, which can be cult-like in both bad and good ways.

The social punishments for stepping out of line can feel very real when you’re in it deep.

It was a scene where thinking outside certain frameworks was not always incredibly welcome, and so I never felt perfectly welcome.

I'm not in the punk scene of course, but from what I understand, the punk community is very, VERY anti-money.

I came up with a lot of people who essentially thought money, or any discussion of it, or education around it, was evil by its very nature, but I do not share those views.

I am a free market guy to the point that it's a little weird. I’m a business nerd.

If I need some super glue, I think it’s amazing there are six different places near my house where I can buy it in a variety of forms and prices.

There was no central planning involved with getting me this super glue, which comes from all over and involves so many people working together to get it to me. I’m very fascinated by that mechanism and think it’s the coolest thing in the world.

That's not a very punk thing to say, but I don't care.

A lot of people come up in a certain community, and they never challenge the overarching beliefs that these communities have essentially embedded in them.

It’s like self-limiting philosophies about what is good or bad. Some of the things these communities tell you are bad can really hold you back in life, from your happiness, and from getting where you want to go.

Does the punk community see you as a “sell out”?

What’s so weird though is, after we sold The Hard Times, I went to a punk show. My punk friends came up to me shaking my hand, saying “Congratulations on the acquisition.

I also think “selling out” is not even a thing anymore.

I might even argue there isn’t much of a real subculture anymore, maybe because social media has made everything so accessible?

Part of the reason I am into doing sponsorships and trying to make money is because I love the creative world so much. I want to be able to pay people.

You talked earlier about how you got paid from The Hard Times and how getting paid for writing was a cool thing for you. Well, the money needs to come from somewhere.

I once called Keith Morris of (punk band) Black Flag when I was young to interview him for an article. I asked, “Hey, man, this show is sponsored by Vans. What do you think about that? Does that go against the anti-corporate mindset?”

He told me, “I appreciate everything the punk scene has done in those categories. But I gotta be honest with you, I’m just gonna throw it all out. I’ve been doing music for like 40 years and I haven’t made a dime. If someone wants to put $1,000 behind a show, I’m all for it.”

That was an eye-opener for me when I was young.

Have you ever had backlash from the punk community?

Yes, absolutely. 

Probably two weeks after we started The Hard Times there were posters circulating online about how to block us on Facebook, and it’s basically been like that ever since.

A part of punk scene did not love the idea of being made fun of, and I kind of expected that.

When we first started the site, you won't find my name on any of the bylines, because we really didn't know how people were going to react to it.

The punk scene is also a place where if you say the wrong thing, you don’t just get in a Twitter beef. You get punched. 

I knew that because I had toured the country with my punk band, and I had been in a lot of physical altercations. It is what it is.

I know you did some investigative journalism for a bit, right? You wrote an article about a guy who had sex with a dolphin. I just saw the title. I didn't even dare click.

I was an intern slash freelancer at SF Weekly. My editor turned to me and said, “Hey, I got this email from this person. They wrote a book about having sex with a dolphin. Maybe you should call them and interview them.”

I said, “Maybe I should go meet him!” And I went, and I met him. It was such a bizarre situation and such a bizarre interview. It went crazy viral.

Was the dolphin there?

Fortunately no dolphins. Just a guy who clearly was not making the story up. I’ll put it that way.

So how did you go from writing an article about a dolphin-fucker to starting a satire website?

The dolphin fucker article went crazy viral. I would take a walk, come back, and it had like 10,000 additional shares, then 20,000 more.

I thought to myself, how hard could it be to just be the guy who owns the website? Why exactly do I work for these other people?

I remember the big bosses came downstairs and said, “This is the biggest article we've had all year. Can you please do a follow up?” 

I thought, if the big boss comes downstairs, then maybe I should get paid more than the $30. Maybe there’s more money on the table here.

During that time, I was trying to make it as a freelance journalist and writer, and it wasn't working. I was lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking, people keep telling me I’m a good writer, but I can’t pay my bills, and my savings are depleted.

What’s the point of being a good writer if I can’t survive?

So I decided I’m not going to be a writer anymore, but I’ll try one more thing: I’ll try The Hard Times, which was an idea I had for a while.

I paid a friend I met on tour to create the logo. I coded the original website myself. It was not a very good one. We launched with my friend Bill Conway and my brother Ed, and it was basically an instant success. Facebook spread it all around the world, and all of a sudden there were millions of people reading the website.

A friend of mine who worked with me at SF Weekly turned to me in the office and said, “Hey, Matt, what do you think of this Hard Times website?” He knew I was a punk guy, but he didn’t know it was mine.

I said, “I think it sucks. Those guys shouldn't make fun of punk. What do you think?” And he said, “It’s not so bad. I like it. I think some of the jokes are funny.”

The website traffic got to the point where we could just make a business out of it, and that’s how I officially became an entrepreneur.

I talked to the original founder of The Babylon Bee way back in the day. He actually told me that The Hard Times was part of the inspiration for the original version of the site.

That’s always a nice thing to hear as an entrepreneur trying to build something.

Why choose satire and humor writing? There’s a lot you can write about, you’re a good writer.

I’m kind of just a goofy motherfucker. I'm always telling jokes. My punk band was also kind of a comedy band.

But one of the main things I saw was this: I would write 3,000 words on a month-long investigation, and it would be the cover story of SF Weekly, which meant it was on newsstands all around the city with my name on it. Boom, right there on the street.

Now on the internet, it’s different. 

I published a story I worked on for a month, asking people to please read it, and it was free. We would get zero engagement.

I remember one of my cover stories had only one comment. It said, “Matthew, you're a master of words.” I looked at the name. It was my mom.

At the same time, I had The Hard Times going. I would spend 30 minutes making fun of myself or my friends in the punk scene, and there'd be a million people who would read it. Some of my favorite bands were commenting on these articles.

It’s just like memes in a way. Concise messaging is part of memes, and satire is a true idea wrapped up in a concise, funny package. It spreads a lot easier.

Now, that's not always the best thing in the world for society. Sometimes you should sit down and read the long-form article. I do think original reporting is really undervalued.

But at that time, for me, it wasn’t a hard choice to make.

That's similar to our thesis at Memelord Technologies. Memes are powerful because they’re snappy and easy to digest. People might not care at first, but if you keep entertaining them, eventually they’ll get curious and check out your product.

When I was in journalism school, they told me to write at an eighth grade level, because newspapers go out to people who need the information. They don't need flowery language.

They need concise and properly ordered information. Your job was to go out, report the truth, come back, and write it down.

Memes are school yard humor. They have the same level of truth, and with that, powerful ideas can spread. These platforms are incredible discovery platforms.

We used to pull our hair out writing the perfect lead. Now the lead has been elevated into just a meme image.

It's no surprise to me that when it comes to marketing ideas or products, memes are powerful.

Remember the whole Hard Drive debacle with Elon Musk?
(laughs) I do remember, yes!

I can imagine you were in an awkward position. You were still running The Hard Times and Hard Drive, and the team there, putting it mildly, doesn't like Elon Musk much.

Maybe then you would have seen that I was not exactly the most gung-ho person on attacking Elon.

I drive a Tesla. I am an entrepreneur. I think he's one of, if not the greatest entrepreneur of all time. Another thing he did was let us tell jokes.

On Facebook and Instagram we got so much flack for satire and jokes. Once a week or once a month, stuff was taken down. We got penalized and our account flagged.

On X, Elon lets the sites tell jokes, and he doesn't throttle them. If you do satire on Instagram, you get punished for various keywords, accounts flagged, deleted, but Elon lets it fly. I appreciate that about him from a comedy perspective.

During the whole debacle, I was thinking to myself, “Wow, this guy reads our video game website!” That's honestly how I felt.

I personally tweeted at him, saying, “Hey, thank you for reading, etc., but please don't crop out our name,” which was the dispute. Hard Drive itself was polite at first, because he had posted us a few times with our name cropped off.

Ultimately, if you don't want to put a byline or a watermark on a tweet, that's cool. I'm not going to sweat too much about it.

What was weird about this situation was that we couldn't understand how the image was created without the byline. It looked like someone had to take time to remove it. We couldn’t find it anywhere else online without the watermark or in that format until he posted it.

He later said a friend sent it to him. Anyways, it’s all water under the bridge.

I'm not going to say that I wasn't happy with the fact that we had an interesting, captivating moment with a culturally relevant person.

In the Musk situation, we actually made a decent chunk of money those days because of the back-and-forth involving our links.

People came to the website. We got ad revenue. That’s a win.

A similar thing just happened to Jason actually. He went viral recently after posting about making memes for Andrew Cuomo

Oh yeah, I saw that!

Yeah, and he basically just got death threats in his inbox and what not, but we actually got signups for Memelord, so hey.

That’s crazy, and it’s something that I can relate to.

My whole life, I've been doing stuff where there were death threats. I always think it's just a sign of scale.

Do you think so?

Yeah, unless you’re really up to something heinous. When The Hard Times started, the heat came immediately.

Because 10 million people see something, and some subsection of those people don't like it, don't have anything else better to do with their time, and are violent by nature or whatever.

So I am confident that my times at Unusual Whales will be similar, and even bigger numbers.

So you now working with Unusual Whales, when I saw this I actually messaged our mutual friend Charlie Light, like what the fuck is happening?

(laughs) I understand how you might be surprised.

Sidenote: If you don’t know Charlie, he’s the king of parody accounts and an OG Twitter Memelord.

I interviewed him about memes and how he uses Memelord Technologies. Check it out

I thought it was a weird collab at first, but I realized you’re always interested in stocks and finance. You did a finance satire site before called Hard Money.

I’ve always just done things in my favorite passion areas and topics. I played in punk bands, so I made a music and punk comedy website..

My other biggest interest was video games, so I co-founded a video game section called Hard Drive with a group of people who were Hard Times writers.

My other biggest interest was finance. I’ve always been interested in stocks, cryptocurrency, risk versus reward in general. ROI.

I used to pay my bills in college by playing online poker. These are just things that have always fascinated me.

It’s a field where you can differentiate yourself by studying and just doing your best. That’s what in its purest form the stock market should be. I’ve always been attracted to challenges like that.

I was a fan of the Unusual Whales account for a long time, and in 2020 I actually reached out and talked to the founder, and tried to form a partnership.

What specifically attracted you to Unusual Whales?

I believe Unusual Whales is ultimately spreading a correct and important message, which is that our elected leaders should not be able to trade on non-public information benefiting themselves instead of doing what is best for their constituents.

And it just had this incredible social media presence where I thought whoever was running it was essentially a genius.

I got my start building audiences on social media on Facebook, so I was kind of out of the game. My skills weren’t totally timely anymore as social media continued to evolve. 

But I saw Unusual Whales taking off, and I thought, this guy has such an interesting and true message. I was drawn to it.

He also used a lot of data journalism, which I've always been fascinated by. So it was social media speaking truth to power, data journalism, and finance.

This was the coolest shit ever! It’s everything I love. I just needed to be involved.

We became friends.I just couldn't get it out of my head. I had to be involved in this business. So here we are now.

I thought Unusual Whales was just one single anon guy at first, but now apparently there’s a team?

We have a team, and we have a product, which a lot of people don't know.

The simplest way to think of it is there's a software platform on Unusual Whales that helps you plan your next trade, spot unusual options activity, and so much more.

If you really want to boil it down, think of it like a Bloomberg terminal, but more affordable and geared towards retail and options traders.

It’s about leveling the playing field for the little guy by arming them with the same data as the big hedge funds and institutions, which is something I’m very big into.

I used to work at a hotel. I was down in the basement, in the kitchen. I was doing hotel room service, and I would serve food to the guys up in the suites — one time to the former president of Mexico.

The way I've conceived of Unusual Whales is basically this: whether you’re the guy in the basement or the guy up in the penthouse suite, you should have access to the same financial information.

That way the level playing field can actually be realized, and people can compete and differentiate themselves based on their skills.

I assume the founder wants to be anonymous?

Yeah, for similar reasons why anyone in this field wants to be anonymous. At heart, it’s kind of a dangerous gig, to be frank.

You're publishing information that some of the most powerful people in the country don't want published.

Lots of eyeballs.

And now you're the face of it.

Yeah, isn't that fun? (smiles)

I feel like the awareness of this issue also spread because of Nancy Pelosi memes.

Yes exactly. That Nancy Pelosi stock trading has become a meme. But the truth is it’s not just her.

She has a history there, which is super public knowledge. In 2024 Nancy Pelosi (and her husband) was trading at a ~70% return. She was performing better than the best hedge funds in the world. How was she able to do that?

Eighty-six percent of people are not in favor of Congress being allowed to trade individual stocks the way they currently do. There are different legislative pushes going through Congress about trying to ban or limit it.

This is not even a new phenomenon. In 2008, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke was giving closed-door meetings to Congress before the financial crisis, talking about a potential crisis inbound, and many of them were selling on that information.

Some of the outrage around that led to the STOCK Act, which is part of the reason why they all disclose now, even though they disclose late and the fines for doing so are laughably small.

The more recent example would be the COVID trades. It was absolutely crazy.

Richard Burr, a senator from North Carolina, received closed-door briefings about COVID. Right after that, he was selling somewhere around $700,000 to $1.7 million worth of his shares in companies like travel and hotel companies.

This was not a small percentage of his net worth. This was him basically betting his life savings on this very oddly timed thing.

He was also caught on tape in a different closed-door meeting telling people he thought it would be like the 1918 pandemic while unloading his portfolio.

At the same time, he wrote an op-ed that month trying to calm the public down. He said, don’t worry about it, we’re prepared, we’ve got it handled.

Nancy Pelosi became the symbol and meme of congressional stock trading, but it's really widespread. It's a real problem.

People do not want their elected leaders profiting from their positions of power. And it has a real effect on people. And it should. It has an effect on me. It makes me angry.

I don't want to hear this stuff. I want to know that people elected to represent us are trying to do what is best for the community, not just for some hotel stocks they own or some credit card company they’re overlooking legislation on.

How influential do you think memes are in moving the financial markets nowadays?

Very. Just look at $OPEN. I’ve ridden the meme craze a few times. I was a somewhat early Wall Street Bets reader and $GME call buyer.

Some meme stocks stuff reminds me more of social or fashion scene dynamics. It’s style and trends over substance. Other times these simple, sharable ideas also contain some deeper truth. 

The concept of reflexivity around meme stocks is particularly interesting to me. Basically even if the original meme thesis is junk when you first hear it, the attention can make it come true.

Early meme investors drive a stock price higher, giving the company cheaper capital, a bigger war chest, and an army of advocates, which if used correctly can actually improve the fundamentals of the business to match the original meme.

So in a way, this feedback loop can end up making the very idea that started as a joke or impossible-sounding thesis come true… or at least closer to true.

I try to remember that when new meme stocks first start bubbling up.

I’m a skeptic naturally so I try to stop myself from finding reasons the meme thesis is incorrect and start instead asking myself “could this thesis become true if this is the next $GME or $OPEN?”

If memes can move markets, it can also grow your brand.

Want to start meme marketing and be the Nancy Pelosi of memes? Try out Memelord Technologies for free.

Let’s talk about marketing a little bit. Unusual Whales has a huge presence on X, but no one really knows you guys have a product. What’s your marketing strategy around this?

I'm just getting going on it. But I think our content is going to begin to chip away at two different problems.

Problem number one is some people in our audience don't know that we have a product which can help them spot and plan their next trade – particularly if they trade options. And that we have tools and proprietary tech that can improve their current trade planning and stock research.

Problem number two is people don't know how exactly they can get value from our product, because our product is a little bit geared towards options traders and they may not have reached that level of advanced trading.

Our goal is to create new content that elevates our product, and also educate and inform people on how to make the most of it.

For people who are short on time, our partners at Autopilot have created some copy trading mechanisms and Unusual Whales has portfolios there where you can automatically follow the trades from politicians as they are disclosed with your own money. 

They're on the same mission as us, which is to tell people about congressional stock trading and hopefully get it stopped.

There's portfolios on their app by Unusual Whales that people can check out. So even if you're in the hotel basement and you don't have time to use all the information our platform provides, you can just use a copy trading mechanism.

There's also an ETF we’re a part of with Unusual Whales, and the ticker is $NANC. It's a collection of politician trades.

If you don't have any time, and maybe you don't want to learn unusual options trading alert platforms, you can take a passive approach.

However, I would urge people to check out our product and try to be a little more active with it, because ultimately it's more intellectually satisfying and more empowering to teach yourself how to do this.

Any plan to use satire or memes for promoting Unusual Whales, like Autopilot did with the Nancy Pelosi Tracker meme account?

The short answer is: a little bit of memes, but no satire. People need to know that Unusual Whales is publishing factual information, and that's how it's going to stay.

You can expect to see some memes, but you're not going to be confused about whether it's a meme.

When you posted that you’re joining Unusual Whales I thought you were just shitposting. I think a lot of people also think that.

I do joke around on my personal socials, so people didn't know whether or not I was being legitimate.

I also announced that my fiancée and I are having a baby on Instagram, and people didn’t know if that was real either.

Thank you for the time man, and I’m so grateful to be able to actually talk to you. I started from just writing funny articles on your website, and here I am making memes as my job and we crossed paths again in the tech world.

Man, I'm so glad we got the time to hang out.

Thank you for writing for The Hard Times, and thank you for remembering all the times where I was the pro-business guy who seemed a little out of place.

That was my talk with Matt Saincome, the punk rock comedy capitalist.

Matt is a living example of how for being funny and entertaining on the internet can take you, and that’s what we want to help you with on Memelord.

You can follow Matt’s journey to level the playing field with Unusual Whales on X

If you like this piece, I’d love to hear from you! Follow me @jovvvian or hit me up on LinkedIn if you’re nasty.