'Pelosi tracker' app developer speaks on Trump's stock trading ban quote

Welcome back in here to Live Now from Fox. I am Andy Mack. One of the most viral moments and bipartisan moments of the State of the Union last night was when President Donald Trump called out insider trading on Capitol Hill, urging Congress to pass the Stop Insider Trading Act, quote, without delay, while also taking a shot at the former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Let's take you back out to this moment.

To ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information. They stood up for that. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Did Nancy Pelosi stand up if she's here? Doubt it. Pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay.

All right, that was President Trump last night at this. And of course, the Pelosi family, their financial disclosures have frequently been cited by critics for calling for those stricter limits on the congressional stock trading. It even sparked a major movement. Everyone knows about the Pelosi Tracker, and also come that— from that, the Autopilot app, which obviously tracks Pelosi but also other lawmakers, other different trends you see on social media. Finally, for the first time ever, Trump called to ban that insider trading in Congress, ban buying of individual stocks, publicly file sales before executing them, keep stocks they already own. Here's the full breakdown of what's included. All right, let's be joined right now by a friend of the program, co-founder of Autopilot, the guy that runs the Pelosi Tracker on social media, Chris Thank you so much for joining us here on Live Now from Fox. And this felt like a big deal. How much momentum might be carried from what President Trump said last night?

We're hoping a lot. That was the first time that the president has actually publicly expressed his support for that ban. And honestly, any president to that degree support a ban on congressional stock trading. I think we've always seen, whether it's on Twitter, whether it's on Reddit, whether it's in friend group chats, people talking about this ban, about how it should be passed, but nothing has ever happened for years. Hopefully with that, the momentum continues and we can actually get this ban through.

Yeah, that is so very true. We're closer potentially than ever than seeing this. And he notably called out Nancy Pelosi and the cameras weren't on her, unfortunately. But was there anyone that stood out? Because this has a lot of bipartisan support. We saw Elizabeth Warren there standing up and applauding. We saw Republicans and Democrats alike. Did anyone stand out to you?

Elizabeth Warren actually was one that did stand out to me. So the bill that is in that Trump kind of referenced right there, the Republicans all back it. They want that passed, they want that to get through. However, Democrats on the other side of the aisle, they want a different bill. They want a bill that would force divestments of individual stocks, and they also would want a bill to cover the president and his VP. So Elizabeth Warren right there clapping, that actually is a good sign, meaning there actually might be support for the one that the GOP wants. But again, it's still early to be seen. And like you said, it's not just Nancy Pelosi making these oddly timed stock trades. It happens on both sides of the aisle, and I have a surplus amount of examples that I could kind of just walk you through just to show it.

And I was gonna ask you about that because we saw plenty of bipartisan support there from Massachusetts' Elizabeth Warren. Stock trading though abused in a bipartisan fashion as well. Can you get into that?

Absolutely, yeah. So it's been happening kind of ever since 2009. Nancy Pelosi is the poster boy for it, and rightfully so. She's trading hundreds of millions of dollars. Her stock trades are pretty good. And now we have an app that allows you to literally go in and trade alongside her. And it's become so popular that I think it's like $500 million now is trading alongside her stock trades through the app. But we are now tracking other people. Even like a couple of weeks ago, there was a senator named John Hickenlooper. He bought an energy stock called ETN, Eaton Corp. A couple weeks after he bought it, he happens to sit on a Senate Energy Committee. They then get some funding from a credit facility of up to $8 billion. And next thing you know, that stock hit all-time highs and he's up 13%. There's a couple of politicians that sit on Senate Armed Services Committee that are Republicans that are buying up Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. While we'll see what's gonna go on with Iran and all that stuff. So Nancy Pelosi is not the only one. It's a systemic problem. It should be stopped. And we are here to try and get that ban actually through.

And we talk about it without delay. That's a question in terms of the timeline. What other hurdles are out there? Because there's also potentially concern that it might make people less likely to run for public office if they're not able to kind of have those assets in that way. Is that the biggest hurdle out

there? I think it's the votes. So the thing that worries me, Andy, to be honest, is as we have the new midterms coming up right now, the Republicans, they run the House and the Senate and the presidency. If they can't get this bill passed in time, the Democrats might very well win back 1 or 2 of the chambers, and then it becomes exponentially harder to do. The reason the thing that's holding it up right now is Speaker Johnson just needs to bring it to a vote. He needs to kind of walk through, do it publicly, and see if they'll ever actually vote on it, because there has not been a vote on the bill since 2012 when it was first introduced.

Yeah, that is crazy to think about. I don't know if they're gonna use kind of this political capital because it is a 1-vote margin there on the House. Can you get into other trends? Because if people aren't familiar with Autopilot without the Pelosi Tracker, you don't just do necessarily lawmakers, you're doing other sorts of trends. Can you focus on that, how you're managing some other topics?

Yeah, absolutely. So Autopilot, we first started as kind of a way to make investing simpler for the masses. You know, average everyday people, they're stuck having to pick stocks on their own and they're stuck having to put it into ETFs. We wanted to build a way to take your stock portfolio and just follow other high-quality, other high-quality investors. It just so turns out that the best investors that we started with were politicians, but we're now kind of expanding into a broader sector where we have individual investors launching their own strategies and their own portfolios, and so that people like me and you could go in and follow them. Uh, and what's cool is there's actually people that are doing better than politicians. Um, we have an AI PhD professor that has a World War III portfolio that has AI pick it, and it's up like 240%. We have a dermatologist that from Twitter used to share his stock picks. He now has outperformed Nancy Pelosi. And the goal with it is to just make stock picking simpler and easier for the average everyday person. And also on the Autopilot side to grow and expand from just politics and politicians.

And you can kind of draft behind some of these people to try to earn some of those major wins. What happens if this does go through, if it gets a vote, if it gets passed? What happens to Autopilot, if anything?

We'll be fine. So we've said very well from the beginning, you know, if a ban does go through, it definitely hurts the business. You know, it doesn't kind of necessarily grow the business and the revenue and the marketing. But we have a lot of aspirations and plans to continue building out the world's first marketplace of stock pickers vetted by their performance. Again, the best stock pickers at the time when we started just happened to be Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues, and we didn't expect it to be like that. It wasn't like we made that happen. But now we have around, I think, like 100 portfolios on the platform that you can go in and trade alongside. And the goal is to just continue building those. Nancy Pelosi, by the way, is retiring at the end of the year. Like, let's not forget about that. So we do have to grow from that and we see bigger aspirations of what we want to do.

Yeah, and obviously no connection there between you guys as of yet. I think that was the last time we talked around. Still no connection?

Still no. We even took a billboard out in Times Square thanking her for her stock trades, but we haven't gotten a call from her yet. If she's looking for a job, I'm telling I'm telling you, we're still looking to hire her.

She's got the retirement coming up. Maybe she's looking for that with some disposable income. All right, Chris Joseph, thank you so much. I appreciate your time as always here on Live Now.

Appreciate it. Have a good one.

All right, take care. All right, great conversation about this because that one viral moment last night, President Trump calling for the first time really for that Stop Insider Trading Act to be moved through without delay. We'll see what without delay is like and if there's any timeline on that because the Pilot Autopilot app there kind of in the process of it. You can see the Pelosi tracker on social media like Twitter saying Nancy Pelosi stock trading app just got called out by Trump in a big way. And he called out so many different Democrats and Republicans. Plenty of support, but also some hurdles left along this path. I'm Andy Mack. We're back after this.