Two financial media vets set out to build a podcast based on accountability

In his 28 years on air at CNBC, Tyler Mathisen interviewed hundreds of financial market prognosticators. But often, he said, one thing was missing—accountability.

In broadcast, guests come and go and say interesting things that may or may not pan out. Usually nobody bothers to check.

After leaving CNBC earlier this year, Mathisen teamed up with neighbor and longtime Reuters editor Mark Egan to launch Powercast, a monthly video podcast that starts with a look at AI-based market signals from Irish research firm Quantmatix, then asks traditional investment experts how those signals compare to their own market views.

Finfluential connected with Tyler and Mark just after the first episode to learn more about their partnership and their goals for the podcast. Here’s an edited version of the conversation.

Finfluential: How did Powercast come about—what’s the origin story?

Mark: Both Tyler and I—Tyler, obviously, very publicly at CNBC and me more in the background at Reuters—have a deep background as journalists and now we’re seeing this huge investment trend with artificial intelligence. Having been through things like the dot-com bubble and the 2008 crisis, we really want to test this one and see if it’s correct.

Tyler and I know each other as friends and professionally, so I took him out for lunch and said, ‘Why don’t we do a podcast where you and I—two veterans—test this new AI innovation and see how it might impact the work of Wall Street, the work of investing, the work of finance and the work of wealth. Is it going to make things better? And then we sort of developed the idea of starting each episode by asking what is the [Quantmatix analysis] telling us? What are the signals?

Finfluential: Tyler, what intrigued you about this idea?

We hope to bring a measure of accountability to the asset selections that we’re going to focus on. And that accountability is something that I think has always been—to be blunt about it—one of the weaker parts of financial news.

It’s very hard to be sure that you are holding a stock picker or a market forecaster totally accountable for what they’ve said. It’s very hard to go back, particularly if they made multiple appearances on your program and cover everything they’ve said, often said with nuance. But Powercast is very directedly aimed at making sure that we account for virtually every single prediction.

Finfluential: The podcast is monthly. Is that the window you’re using to assess the accuracy of the calls, at least initially?

Mark Egan We’re hoping to do it monthly, a total of up to 14 episodes, 14 episodes a year—a monthly episode, a year ahead forecast episode and perhaps an innovation show where we do a slightly different take where we look at AI and investing and we highlight some people who are innovating in interesting ways that other people may want to add into their business, whether it’s a wealth business or an asset management business.

Finfluential: So, are you going to be looking at, not just how people are using AI to manage portfolios, but also how they’re using them in their business? For example, in the case of an advisor how they manage their practice?

Mark Egan: It’s both how the investor, whether institutional or an individual, can make themselves better investors. But as we get deeper, I think it’s also going to be how it’s changing the industry. How can you become a better wealth advisor through these tools? How can you become a better portfolio manager?

Finfluential: Tyler, how are you finding the medium of podcasting versus a daily live business news show that’s focused on, say, this morning’s jobs report or CPI number?

Tyler: Well, with a history of one episode under my belt, I really don’t know that I can say with any level of certainty how I’m finding it. I mean, it’s different doing regular live television as opposed to a podcast that is taped in advance and has a longer episode length so that I can talk to our guests, not just for four minutes, but for 14 minutes. That’s liberating and it allows you to go deeper and wider.

Finfluential: And Mark, on the production side, is the pressure on you to turn it around quickly since it’s at the end of the day still a market-oriented discussion? How quickly do you look to get the episode out after you’ve spoken to the guest?

Mark Egan: We’re trying to establish a cadence where we shoot on a Wednesday or Thursday and then get the finished product out the following Monday or Tuesday. We don’t want to let more than a couple of business days go by.

Finfluential: What does success look like for Powercast?

Tyler: You measure it by the number of impressions you get and how many views you get. You know, I think that’s obviously one. Second would be to create a podcast that has a distinctive voice and attracts thoughtful guests who may make news—who may say something that gets picked up elsewhere and creates a conversation or gets a conversation going.

Mark Egan: It would be wonderful to get to 10s of thousands of views. But just as people are not reading books as much as they used to, they’re consuming content in smaller and smaller forms. Such is also true with podcasts. You may get hundreds of views of your podcast, but then you make smaller clips and those get much, much larger numbers. It’s interesting, we’ve launched on YouTube, but our numbers are much higher on TikTok with the smaller clips.

Ultimately, though, it’s a slow grind. It only takes 400 views of a YouTube podcast to be in the top 5%, but after that, you’ve got to grind it out and grow your audience.

I’m very pleased to say that in the first month, for every three people watching, we’re getting one subscriber. That’s very strong engagement.

Finfluential: How are you getting the word out about the launch? What’s the distribution strategy?

Mark Egan: TikTok is a big part, but I think the biggest part is going to be LinkedIn and YouTube. We posted a piece pointing out that we made a DraftKings call a few weeks ago and the stock is down 18% and if you want more of those tips, subscribe to Powercast because we’re going to have them every four weeks or so. I think that’s basically the strategy. You had good information—rinse and repeat.

Tyler: This is kind of a brave new world for both Mark and me, and we’ll just see where it goes. We’ll watch the numbers and hopefully the numbers will grow and maybe we’ll also make some news.