The GameStop Stock Cult (ft. Folding Ideas)

are aware of. The first part of this, which is that in January twenty twenty one, a bunch of folks started like buying you via some weird Reddit movement started buying huge amounts of game Stop stock, which, in a period of pretty exaggerated decline, caused it to briefly surge in value to absurd levels.

but also not that surprisingly. Like once you fully unpack it, you know, you have this internet movement that is very nebulous in its origins or not in its origins, sorry, the origins are very straightforward, like Wall Street Bets is a gambling sub that had like it self describes as if four chan found a Bloomberg terminal, So sure, you know it's it's crass it's irony poisoned. You can get just as much social clout or losing thousands of dollars

as you can for winning thousands of dollars. In fact, there's an argument that there's more clout for lost porn than there is for like actually posting big games. Obviously, like not like the healthiest or most wholesome community you

could imagine. But you know, out of that plus COVID madness, plus stimulus checks and just general nihilism arose this kind of Frankenstein short squeeze play on game Stop that weirdly never actually happened, because the play just sort of turned into its its own self fulfilling thing that enough people believed in the idea of this short squeeze play that they just kept piling in and piling in, and suddenly, like the short squeeze doesn't actually matter at all because

there's enough critical mass flooding in that you just get this massive pump anyway, which convinces people that, oh, the squeeze is going on. Because in the moment you don't actually know like what mechanisms are driving the price movement. You just see number going up, and so more people kept piling in piling in, piling in. I got a phone call from, you know, from a friend of mine who's like, hey, have you heard about the GameStop stuff? And I'm like, yes, I heard about it two days ago.

So if you heard about it today, it's it's way too late. Do not. It's over. It's over. And sure enough, like I went back and reviewed our text messages and like, and if he had bought, he would have been a just massive bag holder. Like it it plummeted, you know, hours later.

like that. That was their play. That was the big short was. They're like, look, there's this bubble, We're going to short sell it. Then when the price goes down, we close our positions out and keep a tremendous amount of money.

at a point in the future. And then you take those and you immediately sell them for their their present value, right, and your hope, your play at like goal is that the value of that drops and then you are able to buy back an equivalent amount to repay the loan and have made a profit based on the gap between those two numbers.

of the thing that you've borrowed. Uh, but like it's it's not interest on you know, like a housing loan where the interest and like where your payments all are geared towards paying off the loan. It's just kind of like, all right, you ow me five bucks every single month forever as long as you're holding this. And so you know, if you're not paying attention, like you need to be very actively managing these kinds of positions otherwise like your borrowing fees will just eat up all of your profit.

more relevant for what we're talking about here. One of the points you made early on that I found really interesting is is that a significant amount of the initial game stock game stops I'm going to keep doing that hype was driven by influencers, right, and that there's evidence based on kind of the US government's analysis of this that got published that like regulators are paying additional tension increasing attention to the influences that or to the impact

that influencers can have here because there's this concern that, especially working in groups, there's like an ability for people like this to disrupt the economy to a significant extent, to a way that would affect like normal people.

And the issue was that in the game stop price run up. So the price went from at the end of tw twenty twenty as everybody like as sort of the meme wave like begins, and particularly once Ryan Cohen, billionaire Chewy founder Chewy the Cat treat or dog online dog food sales. Yeah. Yeah, when he buys in like that kind of like puts the stamp of approval on the whole thing. So it goes from like four and

a half dollars up to nineteen something. And then at the end of January, it goes from nineteen twenty dollars up to four hundred and eighty, and so in that spread the short sales, so there was short interest in game Stop. There was, in fact a reckless amount of short interest in game Stop, but the price increase was so huge, the volume of participation was so big, so many people were jumping on this that the short interest

closing their position. The actual like short squeeze portion of all of this is only like ten percent of the price movement. All the rest of it is just people fomoing in on like this thing that they heard about through their cousin.

The belief that kind of has evolved broadly and that obviously there's different kind of factions is but is that like there is going to come a point where like the price of game Stop stock will increase to such an insane some people say hundreds of millions, billions of dollars per share, that it effectively allows all of these apes who have bought shares to hold the entire world

economy hostage until they have there but increasingly arcane demands met. Right, Yeah, that is the belief, and that is the belief.

But because it wasn't a short squeeze, like that term then allows the creative individual to fill in the gap and just say that it's like just say this, like, oh, the short squeeze never happened. Therefore it's still on the table the shorts like it the end. You know, it

hasn't happened yet, therefore it can still potentially happen. And in fact, if we just like look at the trend line, like I bet since it hasn't happened, since it didn't happen, and the position that they held in December was so reckless, it's only gotten worse since, which means that they're getting which means that these short sellers must be getting desperate, which means they're going to be willing to engage in

whatever level of depraved criminal activity is necessary to protect themselves. Therefore, it's just getting more and more and more and more extreme. Therefore, when this finally goes off, it's not just going to be like it's not just going to be a five hundred dollars price point. It's going to be a nuclear

explosion that's going to topple the entire economy. Yeah, And that's this like train of logic and what they and it all comes from that, just like missing the fact that it's like, oh, it wasn't a short squeeze because it was mostly fomo. The short squeeze was buried under a mountain of of fomo. Yeah, but so it wasn't a short scool. It's like, yeah, it's all just like based in these like word games of like, ah, you said it was you know that the dumb and dumber.

You know, it's like, what are the odds a one in million, So you're saying there's a chance it's well, yeah, that's not what I'm say.

or there's this other conspiracy. You're starting with this endpoint and then working backwards and like finding ways to explain the things that have happened within that framework.

of stuff, is what I initially like. That's how when I was watching your documentary, I was like, oh, it's this you know, this need to find this kind of like magical answer to the problem. And then I like interrogated that conclusion and was like, well, no, it's not. This is just the way people's brains work, right, Yeah, like we're pattern making. This isn't medieval peasant shit. They're no dumber than we are. Like, yeah, that's what this shows.

have the answer to that, but sign's point to yes. Yeah.

These are the people who make a lot of these like arcane videos or put out these publish these prospectuses with there are dozens or hundreds of pages laying out you know, the arcana of how these different sort of anticipated apocalyptic financial moves are going to go out, right, Yeah, a lot of these people the belief is that that I think is accurate at least this is what I got from your documentary. Maybe I was interpreting you wrong, is that most of these or many of these people

are not believers. They're manipulating a group of people because there's in it. And one of the tactics that you see used a lot is kind of faux humility. Right, I'm just a dumb ape. You shouldn't trust me. I'm not qualified to give financial advice. But here's the secret history of the universe. To invest your money here now.

are absolutely true believers. Like from the get go, some of them, like a lot of them are like soft believers, you know, you know where it's like they're not hardcore into it, you know, if you really pressed them, Like it's not motivating their their daily decisions. But what they're taking from it is like social reinforcement. That they've found a group of people who respond to them, who like their posts, who leave messages. It's like, oh man, this

blew my mind. I can't believe the system is like this fragile. You know, my tits are jacked, lighting the fuse on the rocket ship, buying more moon tickets, you know.

And they and they respond to that very socially, and and and out of that sort of soup of like reinforcing messages, it's really easy for people in those influencer positions to just kind of like hold conflicting like hold the conflicting beliefs of like, I know that this is impossible, but also it is like fulfilling me socially to say these things. I'll just I'll just juggle that inconsistency.

certainly like the homeland. You could say, the way in which up votes and down votes work, and the way in which upvotes and down votes take you know, critical content people who are trying to induce some accuracy or you might even say sanity in the discussion, and that that gets pushed down and hidden after a certain point of time with enough down votes, as opposed to like the stuff that is fundamentally unhinged but is like utopian

gets upvoted. It's it's the the physical, like the actual mechanics of how the site is structured to work enforce fund at a fundamental level, enforced group think consensus.

been up voted. Yeah, because like there's this underline, there's this kind of just like implicit belief that people will recognize truth and will upvote truth, and thus up votes and down votes are are an accurate filter on reality which is demonstrably not true. So yeah, that's intensely at play here because you'll see apes who will then like reference the fact that like that, you know that. It's like, if this insane theory were false, why did it get

so many up votes? And it's like, well, because it it. It hypes you up. It makes you. People are irrational. You got a tingly feeling in your tummy when you read it and the person told you that you were going to be a millionaire. Yeah, that's why.

an entendre. And I was just like okay, like I'll just use it straight faced with no explanation three four times and then finally explain it at the end and make a lot of people angry when they realize that, like, no,

they weren't just mishearing me. Yeah. So that's one of those things like that goes to sort of the four Chan roots of all of this, which is, you know, the sort of like crass irreverence slash misogyny of of chan speak and just this you know, Wall Street bets will use this kind of like celebration of making so much money that you can afford to be misogynistic and

just like swap your wife. And and it turns out that, like, as we know, you make a joke like that often enough, you're eventually going to attract the people who are just straight up like yeah I hate.

a couple of weeks ago, he's now CEO. So so Ryan Cohen gets heavily involved with with game Stop, and he's like, I'm gonna turn this around because his real angs, what seems to be his anger anxiety in life at the moment, is this like sense of legacy. He doesn't just want to be like like, oh I got lucky with an online pet food sales thing. I'm a I'm a real. I'm a big boy finance guy, you know,

I save dying companies. Real rich guy hobby. He puts out a series of children's books called Teddy, named after his late father.

has made it easier than ever, easier than ever. So he founds this LLC, you know, air quote founds pays the like six hundred bucks in filing fees to create this LLC. Teddy Publishing files a whole bunch of trademarks. You know, we're talking like a few thousand dollars all in all in order to file, like in order to just file a bunch of paperwork. And this is all just like the scattershot stuff of like, okay, we're making a product aimed at children. Let's file the trademark for

Teddy very broadly. And so it's going to cover like basically children's merchandise across the board. You know, what if we want to put what if we want to put the characters on blankets or bottles or cups or plates or party supplies or whatever. So these trademarks are just

incredibly wide ranging across just merch Yeah. But the existence of these trademark applications and this LLC becomes the seed for Teddy the Company, as this like the mechanism through which Ryan Cohen is going to collaborate with Apes in order to trigger MOASS. Because I guess this is the important thing about the mythology. Apes believe Ryan Cohen is on their side, that he is, he is their inside man. He is working with them. He is as frustrated as

they are that this hasn't happened yet. But for like arcane legal reasons, he needs to like he needs to operate like a like a clockmaker, you know, he has to do everything very delicately and indirectly, and like his hand cannot be seen pushing on the scales. So they think that it's like that this becomes the thing that they view all of their all of their hopes and dreams into his Teddy LLC. That's like this is the thing that he's going to use as the mechanism to

do this. He's going to like buy game Stop via Teddy. He's going to buy me maybe some other company via Teddy. Teddy's going to get bought in to, like it is going to get bought by game Stop like one way or another. There were like hundreds of competing theories all

rooted in in this. But then back in January of this year, a insanity starts in two So in both GameStop forums and bed Bath and Beyond forums, the two meme stocks that are linked by Ryan Cohen, they they create this idea called Teddy Day, which is a combination of a bunch of things. So Ryan Cohen tweeted several

Titanic references. James Cameron's Titanic was being re released this past February on a day that aligned with National Teddy Bear Day, and so two different communities of apes, for completely separate reasons, latched onto this idea of Teddy Day. It was Friday, February tenth, twenty twenty three. They latched onto it as just this that like this is the day, this is when it's all going to come together. This

is when he's going to make his big move. And a major driving piece of evidence that they had for Teddy Day was that in one of the Teddy books, the kids learned to read a clock and the hands on the clock are pointed to ten and two. So Ryan Cohen left them clues in this children's book published six months earlier, warning them that February tenth was going to be the day that it all went down, that that was the day of the apocalypse, that was Teddy Day.

And it got just like the the spread of this got just like absolutely unhinged on the forms, like it was all that super stunk and BBB, why we're talking about For like a week and a half leading up to it, the hype was like unreal. And then of course nothing happened. You you, I don't know if you noticed this, but but the US economy did not collapse last February.

they did. They you know, no one talks about Teddy Day anymore except for the fact that like it it had a brief Teddy Day two point zero as October second was like upcoming, because you know, ah, maybe it wasn't the tenth of February, it was the second of October, you know. And and sure, like I'm willing to bet that when next February rolls around, like we'll we'll get Teddy Day three point zero. Yeah, I'm sure. It just keeps this.

a reason. And fundamentally, because this becomes so much of someone's social life, because it becomes part of their emotional support network, because it's like fundamentally, you changes the way you talk, Like you learn so many new words that make it into your diction that like it's easier to just keep rolling the expected date ahead rather than like acknowledge that kind of fundamental hit to your self conception that admitting you got played would take.

same mechanism. So the great disappointment was like that's the event that caused the Seventh day Adventist to come into existence because it was like a expected date of the apocalypse of the Second Coming, like yeah, didn't happen, And you end up with like this then fragmentation of the aftermath.

A bunch of people just bleed off. But you end up with like a couple different factions, ones who are like, ah, well, the date was like the date wasn't wrong per se, or like the idea wasn't wrong, just like the date was wrong, like maybe it's off by one hundred years or whatever. And you get other people who are like actually it did happen. It just happened in secret, like obviously it wasn't going to just like happen in Times Square. It happened, like you know, the millennium is already kind

of like rolling underneath normal like normal looking society. It's going on right now. It's just day to day life hasn't changed. And that's how you know it's happening is that nothing's changing. It's like okay, okay, cool, so completely unfalsifiable, rad awesome, love that for you. Yeah.

And I've seen, especially a few years ago, you know, atheists that I knew who were kind of like more active and like atheism is a movement really celebrating this. I think that does like the the assumption that that means that like atheism is growing more popular has been kind of fundamentally inaccurate. I think what we're seeing and what this this is kind of evidence of, is that like non affiliation with an organized religion is more common

than ever. People are rejecting organized, settled religion at a kind of unprecedented rate that's certainly undeniable. That doesn't mean they're as they are still believers. And this is an example, right right, this is people are creating. The Internet has given created a tremendous capacity to build religions, and that's what people are doing.

emperor any anytime soon. But but yeah, like and and the thing is is that like you go back through history and like you you look at like religious archaeology, and like you start sort of breaking away from sort of this idea of Christian hegemony as being effectively like that It's like, okay, you know, once the Christianization of Rome happened, like it was, it was then locked in in like until you know Martin Luther, and then you get like fragmentation into sects, but like it stays like

locked in, and it's like it's like nah, when you start really digging into the history, it's like, this is just this is always going on, This is always boiling

under the surface. You look at like Puritanism in America through a non like through just kind of like a human lens of like what you know about how people behave, and you suddenly start seeing that it's like, oh, they were just like in a constant, perpetual state of internal fragmentation as people had different ideas about like what was supposed to happen, what should happen, and just kind of like formed you know, cliques and factions, and sometimes those

factions got big enough to split off and then they lasted you know, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years and then like either folded back into the main thing or or whatever. But this kind of like churn in in faith and belief is is just it's always there. It just in an organized, codified faith. It's a lot easier to lose track of it, particularly from a historical perspective. It's a lot easier to just look at like the bigger picture and be like, ah, it was all the same, it

was homogeneous. And it turns out no, yeah, sorry, that was a very no, no, no, no, there was. I threw a lot of like very big assumptions into a very tightly packed statement. There, no, no, no.

reins that that would get them like exiled. You know, any any kind of like overt power grab would be would be antithetical to it. But so it's the it's and it's the same thing like in QAnon, if somebody anyone who's come out and been like I am q listen to me, gets immediately just like just demolished by the faithful because like it's it's antithetical to their whole

thing to have a really identifiable leader. And and the fact that there is no identifiable leader, that that the leader is mythological is useful and beneficial to the to the organization, and those kinds of like those kinds of movements, they're not unique to the modern age, but the modern age has made them very easy to form, almost by accident.