Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Ah, welcome back to behind Wait no, sorry, it could
Speaker 2: happen here.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: We'll keep that in so that our audience, who I
Speaker 2: know is deeply tied to the myth of my own perfection,
Speaker 2: knows that I too, air speaking of perfect creatures who
Speaker 2: have never made a mistake. Our guest today is Dan Olsen. Hello, Welcome,
Speaker 2: Hi Dan.
Speaker 3: How you doing. I'm doing well, not making.
Speaker 2: Mistakes, exactly exactly that you are the Buddha I met
Speaker 2: on the road, and I'm going to say hello, teach
Speaker 2: me how to be flawless.
Speaker 3: So first, have you heard of gold? Yes?
Speaker 2: Yes, I was about to talk about gold the perfect
Speaker 2: investment Dan.
Speaker 3: Perfect investment vehicle never fails.
Speaker 2: So Dan, you are a YouTuber and investigator, one of
Speaker 2: my favorite researchers. We had you on recently to talk
Speaker 2: well a couple of months ago a donuple time flat
Speaker 2: circle etcheda but we had you wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: your work reporting on the NFT bubble bursting and on
Speaker 2: the metaverse bubble bursting, and more recently, you just published
Speaker 2: a two and a half hour documentary investigation into the
Speaker 2: game stop stock cult, which is a lot of people
Speaker 2: are aware of. The first part of this, which is
Speaker 2: that in January twenty twenty one, a bunch of folks
Speaker 2: started like buying you via some weird Reddit movement started
Speaker 2: buying huge amounts of game Stop stock, which, in a
Speaker 2: period of pretty exaggerated decline, caused it to briefly surge
Speaker 2: in value to absurd levels.
Speaker 3: And I think that's where.
Speaker 2: Most people kind of and then, you know, eventually it
Speaker 2: fell apart, and I think that's where most people kind
Speaker 2: of stopped paying attention.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they they remember that week where it was like
Speaker 3: in the news, and then they just kind of assumed
Speaker 3: like that was it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it's it's been a It's an interesting and
Speaker 3: weird ride because the evolution into like cult like behavior
Speaker 3: was it was a very strange journey. It happened surprisingly rapidly,
Speaker 3: but also not that surprisingly. Like once you fully unpack it,
Speaker 3: you know, you have this internet movement that is very
Speaker 3: nebulous in its origins or not in its origins, sorry,
Speaker 3: the origins are very straightforward, like Wall Street Bets is
Speaker 3: a gambling sub that had like it self describes as
Speaker 3: if four chan found a Bloomberg terminal, So sure, you
Speaker 3: know it's it's crass it's irony poisoned. You can get
Speaker 3: just as much social clout or losing thousands of dollars
Speaker 3: as you can for winning thousands of dollars. In fact,
Speaker 3: there's an argument that there's more clout for lost porn
Speaker 3: than there is for like actually posting big games. Obviously,
Speaker 3: like not like the healthiest or most wholesome community you
Speaker 3: could imagine. But you know, out of that plus COVID madness,
Speaker 3: plus stimulus checks and just general nihilism arose this kind
Speaker 3: of Frankenstein short squeeze play on game Stop that weirdly
Speaker 3: never actually happened, because the play just sort of turned
Speaker 3: into its its own self fulfilling thing that enough people
Speaker 3: believed in the idea of this short squeeze play that
Speaker 3: they just kept piling in and piling in, and suddenly,
Speaker 3: like the short squeeze doesn't actually matter at all because
Speaker 3: there's enough critical mass flooding in that you just get
Speaker 3: this massive pump anyway, which convinces people that, oh, the
Speaker 3: squeeze is going on. Because in the moment you don't
Speaker 3: actually know like what mechanisms are driving the price movement.
Speaker 3: You just see number going up, and so more people
Speaker 3: kept piling in piling in, piling in. I got a
Speaker 3: phone call from, you know, from a friend of mine
Speaker 3: who's like, hey, have you heard about the GameStop stuff?
Speaker 3: And I'm like, yes, I heard about it two days ago.
Speaker 3: So if you heard about it today, it's it's way
Speaker 3: too late. Do not. It's over. It's over. And sure enough,
Speaker 3: like I went back and reviewed our text messages and like,
Speaker 3: and if he had bought, he would have been a
Speaker 3: just massive bag holder. Like it it plummeted, you know,
Speaker 3: hours later.
Speaker 2: And like for people who are not finance people, which
Speaker 2: I certainly am not. This is like if you watched
Speaker 2: The Big Short that's kind of the tech I mean
Speaker 2: number one, that movie is seen as a blueprint by
Speaker 2: a lot of these guys. Obviously there's folks, knowledgeable financial
Speaker 2: folks who have critiques of that movie, but it is
Speaker 2: it is accepted as like almost kind of like a
Speaker 2: sacred text within the game Stop Stop ye.
Speaker 3: And and it's weird because like they're the game stop enemy,
Speaker 3: the the the ape. Okay, well i'll just use their lexicon.
Speaker 3: We'll go over it real quick. They call themselves apes
Speaker 3: for reasons that are not worth explaining. Their enemy are
Speaker 3: short sellers. But short sellers are like doctor Burry short
Speaker 3: sold the housing market, and Burry is that's Christian Bales character, right,
Speaker 3: Christian Bales character. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like all of the
Speaker 3: main characters in that movie short sold the housing market
Speaker 3: like that. That was their play. That was the big
Speaker 3: short was. They're like, look, there's this bubble, We're going
Speaker 3: to short sell it. Then when the price goes down,
Speaker 3: we close our positions out and keep a tremendous amount
Speaker 3: of money.
Speaker 2: And I should we should go just because when I
Speaker 2: watched this with a friend, they did not know what
Speaker 2: short selling was. It's not I think, a normal It's
Speaker 2: not a thing normal people where it will ever be
Speaker 2: in a position to do. The basic idea and this
Speaker 2: is all occurring with like stocks and commodities, But the
Speaker 2: basic idea is you make an agreement with somebody to
Speaker 2: get basically a loan of a bunch of shares in something, right,
Speaker 2: and with the understanding that you will give those back
Speaker 2: at a point in the future. And then you take
Speaker 2: those and you immediately sell them for their their present value, right,
Speaker 2: and your hope, your play at like goal is that
Speaker 2: the value of that drops and then you are able
Speaker 2: to buy back an equivalent amount to repay the loan
Speaker 2: and have made a profit based on the gap between
Speaker 2: those two numbers.
Speaker 3: Right, that's the idea. That's that's the that's the idea.
Speaker 3: You you can as an individual like do this. You can,
Speaker 3: you can take out a short position with your broker,
Speaker 3: you can. You can do it through derivatives like puts.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't recommend it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's kind of normal people's stock stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not normal people's stock stuff. Like you're there's
Speaker 3: nothing legally barring you from doing it, but it it
Speaker 3: really is kind of this like advanced play. You got
Speaker 3: to know what's going on, especially because like a thing
Speaker 3: that a lot of people in the description sort of
Speaker 3: skip over, is it. Well, you're borrowing it. You know,
Speaker 3: you're borrowing a thing, and thus there's the expectation that
Speaker 3: you'll pay some kind of like you know, borrower's fee
Speaker 3: akin to a kin to interest on like the value
Speaker 3: of the thing that you've borrowed. Uh, but like it's
Speaker 3: it's not interest on you know, like a housing loan
Speaker 3: where the interest and like where your payments all are
Speaker 3: geared towards paying off the loan. It's just kind of like,
Speaker 3: all right, you ow me five bucks every single month
Speaker 3: forever as long as you're holding this. And so you know,
Speaker 3: if you're not paying attention, like you need to be
Speaker 3: very actively managing these kinds of positions otherwise like your
Speaker 3: borrowing fees will just eat up all of your profit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's the kind of thing where like today
Speaker 2: most of those kind of kinds of trades aren't even
Speaker 2: really made by people directly. They're made by massive banks
Speaker 2: of computers and algorithms and shit kind of yeah. Yeah, yeah, Anyway,
Speaker 2: I think that's that's enough background back to the kind
Speaker 2: of cult aspect of it, which is I think much
Speaker 2: more relevant for what we're talking about here. One of
Speaker 2: the points you made early on that I found really
Speaker 2: interesting is is that a significant amount of the initial
Speaker 2: game stock game stops I'm going to keep doing that
Speaker 2: hype was driven by influencers, right, and that there's evidence
Speaker 2: based on kind of the US government's analysis of this
Speaker 2: that got published that like regulators are paying additional tension
Speaker 2: increasing attention to the influences that or to the impact
Speaker 2: that influencers can have here because there's this concern that,
Speaker 2: especially working in groups, there's like an ability for people
Speaker 2: like this to disrupt the economy to a significant extent,
Speaker 2: to a way that would affect like normal people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so one of the weird kind of so pump
Speaker 3: and dumps have existed forever, right. The thing was is
Speaker 3: that so the the memes stock run up, it wasn't
Speaker 3: just GameStop. It was about like fifteen twenty, like in
Speaker 3: January twenty twenty one, like so late twenty twenty, early
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one. It was about fifteen twenty different companies,
Speaker 3: you know, Nokia, BlackBerry, bed Bath and Beyond, like you know,
Speaker 3: just kind of a bunch of over the hill companies
Speaker 3: that were all sort of part of this this wave.
Speaker 3: And the issue was that in the game stop price
Speaker 3: run up. So the price went from at the end
Speaker 3: of tw twenty twenty as everybody like as sort of
Speaker 3: the meme wave like begins, and particularly once Ryan Cohen,
Speaker 3: billionaire Chewy founder Chewy the Cat treat or dog online
Speaker 3: dog food sales. Yeah. Yeah, when he buys in like
Speaker 3: that kind of like puts the stamp of approval on
Speaker 3: the whole thing. So it goes from like four and
Speaker 3: a half dollars up to nineteen something. And then at
Speaker 3: the end of January, it goes from nineteen twenty dollars
Speaker 3: up to four hundred and eighty, and so in that
Speaker 3: spread the short sales, so there was short interest in
Speaker 3: game Stop. There was, in fact a reckless amount of
Speaker 3: short interest in game Stop, but the price increase was
Speaker 3: so huge, the volume of participation was so big, so
Speaker 3: many people were jumping on this that the short interest
Speaker 3: closing their position. The actual like short squeeze portion of
Speaker 3: all of this is only like ten percent of the
Speaker 3: price movement. All the rest of it is just people
Speaker 3: fomoing in on like this thing that they heard about
Speaker 3: through their cousin.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think another thing that's kind of interesting to me
Speaker 2: is like, as this thing has evolved, you know, you
Speaker 2: mentioned that the actual price got up to like close
Speaker 2: around five hundred dollars by the time this thing kind
Speaker 2: of transitions into being this millenarian kind of apocalypse cult, right,
Speaker 2: like not you know, nukes and stuff, end of days
Speaker 2: apocalypse generally, but like the entire economy is going to come.
Speaker 2: The belief that kind of has evolved broadly and that
Speaker 2: obviously there's different kind of factions is but is that
Speaker 2: like there is going to come a point where like
Speaker 2: the price of game Stop stock will increase to such
Speaker 2: an insane some people say hundreds of millions, billions of
Speaker 2: dollars per share, that it effectively allows all of these
Speaker 2: apes who have bought shares to hold the entire world
Speaker 2: economy hostage until they have there but increasingly arcane demands met. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that is the belief, and that is the belief.
Speaker 3: So so out of that, like so okay, So the
Speaker 3: short's closing was only like about ten percent of the
Speaker 3: of the total movement. So that leads to the conclusion
Speaker 3: that you know that the events of January twenty twenty
Speaker 3: one weren't a short squeeze, which is actually kind of true,
Speaker 3: Like it wasn't it wasn't purely a short squeeze. It
Speaker 3: was actually very little of it was a short squeeze.
Speaker 3: But because it wasn't a short squeeze, like that term
Speaker 3: then allows the creative individual to fill in the gap
Speaker 3: and just say that it's like just say this, like, oh,
Speaker 3: the short squeeze never happened. Therefore it's still on the
Speaker 3: table the shorts like it the end. You know, it
Speaker 3: hasn't happened yet, therefore it can still potentially happen. And
Speaker 3: in fact, if we just like look at the trend line,
Speaker 3: like I bet since it hasn't happened, since it didn't happen,
Speaker 3: and the position that they held in December was so reckless,
Speaker 3: it's only gotten worse since, which means that they're getting
Speaker 3: which means that these short sellers must be getting desperate,
Speaker 3: which means they're going to be willing to engage in
Speaker 3: whatever level of depraved criminal activity is necessary to protect themselves. Therefore,
Speaker 3: it's just getting more and more and more and more extreme. Therefore,
Speaker 3: when this finally goes off, it's not just going to
Speaker 3: be like it's not just going to be a five
Speaker 3: hundred dollars price point. It's going to be a nuclear
Speaker 3: explosion that's going to topple the entire economy. Yeah, And
Speaker 3: that's this like train of logic and what they and
Speaker 3: it all comes from that, just like missing the fact
Speaker 3: that it's like, oh, it wasn't a short squeeze because
Speaker 3: it was mostly fomo. The short squeeze was buried under
Speaker 3: a mountain of of fomo. Yeah, but so it wasn't
Speaker 3: a short scool. It's like, yeah, it's all just like
Speaker 3: based in these like word games of like, ah, you
Speaker 3: said it was you know that the dumb and dumber.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like, what are the odds a one
Speaker 3: in million, So you're saying there's a chance it's well, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's not what I'm say.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because of the impossibility of the things they're
Speaker 2: actually hoping for, but also their fundamental belief that like
Speaker 2: it's inevitable, in part because you know, this is this
Speaker 2: is not wildly different from the psychology of like needing
Speaker 2: to believe in uh that you are going to paradise
Speaker 2: in the after.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hallmarks of millennarians.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because of that, what you get is a
Speaker 2: lot of people who think that they are thinking scientifically,
Speaker 2: but what they're doing is taking an endpoint. And the
Speaker 2: endpoint is that you know this specific you know, the
Speaker 2: these hedge funds or whatever are are evil and you know,
Speaker 2: illegally bribing or whatever the government to stop us from succeeding,
Speaker 2: or there's this other conspiracy. You're starting with this endpoint
Speaker 2: and then working backwards and like finding ways to explain
Speaker 2: the things that have happened within that framework.
Speaker 3: Like the things that would need to be true in
Speaker 3: order for the yeah thing.
Speaker 2: To happen, like the thing that like Citadel must have
Speaker 2: ordered robin Hood to stop letting people buy and share
Speaker 2: game stock stocks rather than like, you know what what
Speaker 2: actually happened, which is that robin Hood simply like could
Speaker 2: not exist if they allowed this to continue. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: you know, legally, I don't believe there's anything that was
Speaker 2: stopping them from doing that. It's medieval peasant brain kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, is what I initially like. That's how when
Speaker 2: I was watching your documentary, I was like, oh, it's
Speaker 2: this you know, this need to find this kind of
Speaker 2: like magical answer to the problem. And then I like
Speaker 2: interrogated that conclusion and was like, well, no, it's not.
Speaker 2: This is just the way people's brains work, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: like we're pattern making. This isn't medieval peasant shit. They're
Speaker 2: no dumber than we are. Like, yeah, that's what this shows.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And one of the things that I love just
Speaker 3: kind of on that is that, like you if you
Speaker 3: had a time machine and you went back one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand years and and found a bunch of you know,
Speaker 3: homoliteral literal cavemen, yeah, actual apes more or less, you know,
Speaker 3: like hundred thousand years ago. That's that's modern humans. Like
Speaker 3: genetically that's genetically modern humans. You could just like implant
Speaker 3: yourself in their tribe and teach them calculus and you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah suh that it's like like we're like things don't
Speaker 2: change it.
Speaker 3: It's like it's like, yeah, no, we've been We've been
Speaker 3: doing this ever since we were you know, this pattern
Speaker 3: seeking doesn't change. It's almost like it is basically endemic
Speaker 3: to the human psyche. There's a really good question that
Speaker 3: that I've gotten in response to this is just like
Speaker 3: is this just secular religion? Like is this just are
Speaker 3: we just like wired to need faith in some shape
Speaker 3: or form and if that is not provided by some institution,
Speaker 3: we will just invent it. And it's like I don't
Speaker 3: have the answer to that, but sign's point to yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, So I wanted to talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: one of the other things that you brought up that
Speaker 2: I thought was interesting is the way you've got this
Speaker 2: this cast of and these are you know, the influencers.
Speaker 2: These are the people who make a lot of these
Speaker 2: like arcane videos or put out these publish these prospectuses
Speaker 2: with there are dozens or hundreds of pages laying out
Speaker 2: you know, the arcana of how these different sort of
Speaker 2: anticipated apocalyptic financial moves are going to go out, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of these people the belief is that that
Speaker 2: I think is accurate at least this is what I
Speaker 2: got from your documentary. Maybe I was interpreting you wrong,
Speaker 2: is that most of these or many of these people
Speaker 2: are not believers. They're manipulating a group of people because
Speaker 2: there's in it. And one of the tactics that you
Speaker 2: see used a lot is kind of faux humility. Right,
Speaker 2: I'm just a dumb ape. You shouldn't trust me. I'm
Speaker 2: not qualified to give financial advice. But here's the secret
Speaker 2: history of the universe. To invest your money here now.
Speaker 3: So, I mean you've seen this a lot with Yeah,
Speaker 3: with various like cult leaders and pseudo cult leaders and
Speaker 3: just general like grift fluencers. You know, there's always this
Speaker 3: question of like how much of their own how much
Speaker 3: of their own hype do they believe? How much did
Speaker 3: they believe when they started, how much did they eventually
Speaker 3: just like convince themselves of as people you know, follow them,
Speaker 3: And I think it's it's very much like kind of
Speaker 3: a an individual case by case basis. Some of them
Speaker 3: are absolutely true believers. Like from the get go, some
Speaker 3: of them, like a lot of them are like soft believers,
Speaker 3: you know, you know where it's like they're not hardcore
Speaker 3: into it, you know, if you really pressed them, Like
Speaker 3: it's not motivating their their daily decisions. But what they're
Speaker 3: taking from it is like social reinforcement. That they've found
Speaker 3: a group of people who respond to them, who like
Speaker 3: their posts, who leave messages. It's like, oh man, this
Speaker 3: blew my mind. I can't believe the system is like
Speaker 3: this fragile. You know, my tits are jacked, lighting the
Speaker 3: fuse on the rocket ship, buying more moon tickets, you know.
Speaker 3: And they and they respond to that very socially, and
Speaker 3: and and out of that sort of soup of like
Speaker 3: reinforcing messages, it's really easy for people in those influencer
Speaker 3: positions to just kind of like hold conflicting like hold
Speaker 3: the conflicting beliefs of like, I know that this is impossible,
Speaker 3: but also it is like fulfilling me socially to say
Speaker 3: these things. I'll just I'll just juggle that inconsistency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the way the panics of social media, and
Speaker 2: particularly in this case, it's the mechanics largely of Reddit.
Speaker 2: That's not the only place this occurs, but Reddit is
Speaker 2: certainly like the homeland. You could say, the way in
Speaker 2: which up votes and down votes work, and the way
Speaker 2: in which upvotes and down votes take you know, critical
Speaker 2: content people who are trying to induce some accuracy or
Speaker 2: you might even say sanity in the discussion, and that
Speaker 2: that gets pushed down and hidden after a certain point
Speaker 2: of time with enough down votes, as opposed to like
Speaker 2: the stuff that is fundamentally unhinged but is like utopian
Speaker 2: gets upvoted. It's it's the the physical, like the actual
Speaker 2: mechanics of how the site is structured to work enforce
Speaker 2: fund at a fundamental level, enforced group think consensus.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. Oh and I mean in the best part about it,
Speaker 3: and we see this across like all across Reddit communities,
Speaker 3: which is this like it is it it's the social
Speaker 3: enforcement of truth that that people will take this social
Speaker 3: mechanism of up votes and down votes and use it
Speaker 3: as proof against the claim that it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: if if your negative sentiment were true, it would have
Speaker 3: been up voted. Yeah, because like there's this underline, there's
Speaker 3: this kind of just like implicit belief that people will
Speaker 3: recognize truth and will upvote truth, and thus up votes
Speaker 3: and down votes are are an accurate filter on reality
Speaker 3: which is demonstrably not true. So yeah, that's intensely at
Speaker 3: play here because you'll see apes who will then like
Speaker 3: reference the fact that like that, you know that. It's like,
Speaker 3: if this insane theory were false, why did it get
Speaker 3: so many up votes? And it's like, well, because it it.
Speaker 3: It hypes you up. It makes you. People are irrational.
Speaker 3: You got a tingly feeling in your tummy when you
Speaker 3: read it and the person told you that you were
Speaker 3: going to be a millionaire. Yeah, that's why.
Speaker 2: It's like asking why do we like magicians?
Speaker 3: Of course we like magicians.
Speaker 2: It's it looks nice, it's fun, it makes us feel
Speaker 2: a sense of wonder.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I want to discuss one of the terms that you
Speaker 2: use a lot that I missed the first couple of
Speaker 2: times because I'm not I'm not. This is not a
Speaker 2: community I had studied. I thought you misspoke at first
Speaker 2: when you described like someone reached achieving a financial wind
Speaker 2: fall as wife changing money. I just thought you, like,
Speaker 2: I do that all the time. That show it's delivererate.
Speaker 3: That's yes, yeah, no, no, and I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: this is a thing they say. Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 3: people are like, I thought you misspoke. I'm like, no,
Speaker 3: that's because I was tricking you. Like I was. I
Speaker 3: was deliberately like very light in this term, like because
Speaker 3: like because they use it like obviously as a as
Speaker 3: an entendre. And I was just like okay, like I'll
Speaker 3: just use it straight faced with no explanation three four
Speaker 3: times and then finally explain it at the end and
Speaker 3: make a lot of people angry when they realize that, like, no,
Speaker 3: they weren't just mishearing me. Yeah. So that's one of
Speaker 3: those things like that goes to sort of the four
Speaker 3: Chan roots of all of this, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: the sort of like crass irreverence slash misogyny of of
Speaker 3: chan speak and just this you know, Wall Street bets
Speaker 3: will use this kind of like celebration of making so
Speaker 3: much money that you can afford to be misogynistic and
Speaker 3: just like swap your wife. And and it turns out that, like,
Speaker 3: as we know, you make a joke like that often enough,
Speaker 3: you're eventually going to attract the people who are just
Speaker 3: straight up like yeah I hate.
Speaker 2: My wife, Yeah I want to be able to replace
Speaker 2: her using my using my crypto or my yeah whatever,
Speaker 2: my game stock Stop god gains. I was wondering if
Speaker 2: you might lay out one of the things, the parts
Speaker 2: that was most interested in me was the whole Teddy Day,
Speaker 2: Teddy Day, Oh boy, teddy d Yeah.
Speaker 3: Can you explain Teddy Day to our listeners? Okay. So
Speaker 3: Ryan Cohen, who fancies himself an activist investor, he buys
Speaker 3: into game Stop and gets a minority, pretty substantial holdings
Speaker 3: that count as like a minority thing. You need to
Speaker 3: file a bunch of paperwork with the sec that say, like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's like I hold greater than ten percent
Speaker 3: of this company. And he used that position to basically
Speaker 3: get power inside the company itself as chairman. As of
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks ago, he's now CEO. So so
Speaker 3: Ryan Cohen gets heavily involved with with game Stop, and
Speaker 3: he's like, I'm gonna turn this around because his real angs,
Speaker 3: what seems to be his anger anxiety in life at
Speaker 3: the moment, is this like sense of legacy. He doesn't
Speaker 3: just want to be like like, oh I got lucky
Speaker 3: with an online pet food sales thing. I'm a I'm
Speaker 3: a real. I'm a big boy finance guy, you know,
Speaker 3: I save dying companies. Real rich guy hobby. He puts
Speaker 3: out a series of children's books called Teddy, named after
Speaker 3: his late father.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And these are it's it's five books that have a
Speaker 3: target audience of two year olds. That because you know,
Speaker 3: when when you're rich and you want to do something
Speaker 3: like that, you want to vanity published books. You don't
Speaker 3: just like go to an off the shelf vanity publisher.
Speaker 3: You make your own vanity publisher because in the scheme
Speaker 3: of things like that's just not that expensive. So Amazon
Speaker 3: has made it easier than ever, easier than ever. So
Speaker 3: he founds this LLC, you know, air quote founds pays
Speaker 3: the like six hundred bucks in filing fees to create
Speaker 3: this LLC. Teddy Publishing files a whole bunch of trademarks.
Speaker 3: You know, we're talking like a few thousand dollars all
Speaker 3: in all in order to file, like in order to
Speaker 3: just file a bunch of paperwork. And this is all
Speaker 3: just like the scattershot stuff of like, okay, we're making
Speaker 3: a product aimed at children. Let's file the trademark for
Speaker 3: Teddy very broadly. And so it's going to cover like
Speaker 3: basically children's merchandise across the board. You know, what if
Speaker 3: we want to put what if we want to put
Speaker 3: the characters on blankets or bottles or cups or plates
Speaker 3: or party supplies or whatever. So these trademarks are just
Speaker 3: incredibly wide ranging across just merch Yeah. But the existence
Speaker 3: of these trademark applications and this LLC becomes the seed
Speaker 3: for Teddy the Company, as this like the mechanism through
Speaker 3: which Ryan Cohen is going to collaborate with Apes in
Speaker 3: order to trigger MOASS. Because I guess this is the
Speaker 3: important thing about the mythology. Apes believe Ryan Cohen is
Speaker 3: on their side, that he is, he is their inside man.
Speaker 3: He is working with them. He is as frustrated as
Speaker 3: they are that this hasn't happened yet. But for like
Speaker 3: arcane legal reasons, he needs to like he needs to
Speaker 3: operate like a like a clockmaker, you know, he has
Speaker 3: to do everything very delicately and indirectly, and like his
Speaker 3: hand cannot be seen pushing on the scales. So they
Speaker 3: think that it's like that this becomes the thing that
Speaker 3: they view all of their all of their hopes and
Speaker 3: dreams into his Teddy LLC. That's like this is the
Speaker 3: thing that he's going to use as the mechanism to
Speaker 3: do this. He's going to like buy game Stop via Teddy.
Speaker 3: He's going to buy me maybe some other company via Teddy.
Speaker 3: Teddy's going to get bought in to, like it is
Speaker 3: going to get bought by game Stop like one way
Speaker 3: or another. There were like hundreds of competing theories all
Speaker 3: rooted in in this. But then back in January of
Speaker 3: this year, a insanity starts in two So in both
Speaker 3: GameStop forums and bed Bath and Beyond forums, the two
Speaker 3: meme stocks that are linked by Ryan Cohen, they they
Speaker 3: create this idea called Teddy Day, which is a combination
Speaker 3: of a bunch of things. So Ryan Cohen tweeted several
Speaker 3: Titanic references. James Cameron's Titanic was being re released this
Speaker 3: past February on a day that aligned with National Teddy
Speaker 3: Bear Day, and so two different communities of apes, for
Speaker 3: completely separate reasons, latched onto this idea of Teddy Day.
Speaker 3: It was Friday, February tenth, twenty twenty three. They latched
Speaker 3: onto it as just this that like this is the day,
Speaker 3: this is when it's all going to come together. This
Speaker 3: is when he's going to make his big move. And
Speaker 3: a major driving piece of evidence that they had for
Speaker 3: Teddy Day was that in one of the Teddy books,
Speaker 3: the kids learned to read a clock and the hands
Speaker 3: on the clock are pointed to ten and two. So
Speaker 3: Ryan Cohen left them clues in this children's book published
Speaker 3: six months earlier, warning them that February tenth was going
Speaker 3: to be the day that it all went down, that
Speaker 3: that was the day of the apocalypse, that was Teddy Day.
Speaker 3: And it got just like the the spread of this
Speaker 3: got just like absolutely unhinged on the forms, like it
Speaker 3: was all that super stunk and BBB, why we're talking
Speaker 3: about For like a week and a half leading up
Speaker 3: to it, the hype was like unreal. And then of
Speaker 3: course nothing happened. You you, I don't know if you
Speaker 3: noticed this, but but the US economy did not collapse
Speaker 3: last February.
Speaker 2: Oh that's good. I had been I have been living
Speaker 2: like a postal apocalyptic warlord under the assumption that it
Speaker 2: had but all, yeah, I'll pivot now.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So so it's just it's one of those like
Speaker 3: it's just such a great encapsulation of the fact that
Speaker 3: like that. These communities, they will they will invent these
Speaker 3: these catalyst moments, convince themselves that like, oh, here's a
Speaker 3: date that's upcoming, and then the moment that, like the
Speaker 3: great disappointment happens, some of them like bleed off, but
Speaker 3: for the most part like it. Nothing can actually like
Speaker 3: stop the inertia. They can just discard it. And and
Speaker 3: they did. They you know, no one talks about Teddy
Speaker 3: Day anymore except for the fact that like it it
Speaker 3: had a brief Teddy Day two point zero as October
Speaker 3: second was like upcoming, because you know, ah, maybe it
Speaker 3: wasn't the tenth of February, it was the second of October,
Speaker 3: you know. And and sure, like I'm willing to bet
Speaker 3: that when next February rolls around, like we'll we'll get
Speaker 3: Teddy Day three point zero. Yeah, I'm sure. It just
Speaker 3: keeps this.
Speaker 2: The same thing has happened with like different kind of
Speaker 2: Christian apocalypse cults, right where you'll have a guy pick
Speaker 2: a day, then the day comes, and then there's always
Speaker 2: a reason. And fundamentally, because this becomes so much of
Speaker 2: someone's social life, because it becomes part of their emotional
Speaker 2: support network, because it's like fundamentally, you changes the way
Speaker 2: you talk, Like you learn so many new words that
Speaker 2: make it into your diction that like it's easier to
Speaker 2: just keep rolling the expected date ahead rather than like
Speaker 2: acknowledge that kind of fundamental hit to your self conception
Speaker 2: that admitting you got played would take.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, the guy who does so religion for breakfast, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he picked up on the fact that, like I was
Speaker 3: using phrases like a great disappointment in in the video,
Speaker 3: like very deliberately, because it's like it's the it's the
Speaker 3: same mechanism. So the great disappointment was like that's the
Speaker 3: event that caused the Seventh day Adventist to come into
Speaker 3: existence because it was like a expected date of the
Speaker 3: apocalypse of the Second Coming, like yeah, didn't happen, And
Speaker 3: you end up with like this then fragmentation of the aftermath.
Speaker 3: A bunch of people just bleed off. But you end
Speaker 3: up with like a couple different factions, ones who are like, ah, well,
Speaker 3: the date was like the date wasn't wrong per se,
Speaker 3: or like the idea wasn't wrong, just like the date
Speaker 3: was wrong, like maybe it's off by one hundred years
Speaker 3: or whatever. And you get other people who are like
Speaker 3: actually it did happen. It just happened in secret, like
Speaker 3: obviously it wasn't going to just like happen in Times Square.
Speaker 3: It happened, like you know, the millennium is already kind
Speaker 3: of like rolling underneath normal like normal looking society. It's
Speaker 3: going on right now. It's just day to day life
Speaker 3: hasn't changed. And that's how you know it's happening is
Speaker 3: that nothing's changing. It's like okay, okay, cool, so completely unfalsifiable,
Speaker 3: rad awesome, love that for you. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that kind of related to
Speaker 2: that I have been thinking about a lot lately is
Speaker 2: we've got this the story that keeps, you know, popping
Speaker 2: into the news every couple of usually a couple of
Speaker 2: times a year, that what are called nons are are
Speaker 2: increasing as a percentage of the population every single year,
Speaker 2: which is like people who are not affiliated to any religion.
Speaker 2: And I've seen, especially a few years ago, you know,
Speaker 2: atheists that I knew who were kind of like more
Speaker 2: active and like atheism is a movement really celebrating this.
Speaker 2: I think that does like the the assumption that that
Speaker 2: means that like atheism is growing more popular has been
Speaker 2: kind of fundamentally inaccurate. I think what we're seeing and
Speaker 2: what this this is kind of evidence of, is that
Speaker 2: like non affiliation with an organized religion is more common
Speaker 2: than ever. People are rejecting organized, settled religion at a
Speaker 2: kind of unprecedented rate that's certainly undeniable. That doesn't mean
Speaker 2: they're as they are still believers. And this is an example,
Speaker 2: right right, this is people are creating. The Internet has
Speaker 2: given created a tremendous capacity to build religions, and that's
Speaker 2: what people are doing.
Speaker 3: That's what this is. Yeah, and it's like how long
Speaker 3: lasting will it be? I mean, I don't in the
Speaker 3: scope of in the scope of world faiths. I don't
Speaker 3: think game stopism is is poised to stand the test
Speaker 3: of time. I don't think we'll be seeing an ape
Speaker 3: emperor any anytime soon. But but yeah, like and and
Speaker 3: the thing is is that like you go back through
Speaker 3: history and like you you look at like religious archaeology,
Speaker 3: and like you start sort of breaking away from sort
Speaker 3: of this idea of Christian hegemony as being effectively like
Speaker 3: that It's like, okay, you know, once the Christianization of
Speaker 3: Rome happened, like it was, it was then locked in
Speaker 3: in like until you know Martin Luther, and then you
Speaker 3: get like fragmentation into sects, but like it stays like
Speaker 3: locked in, and it's like it's like nah, when you
Speaker 3: start really digging into the history, it's like, this is
Speaker 3: just this is always going on, This is always boiling
Speaker 3: under the surface. You look at like Puritanism in America
Speaker 3: through a non like through just kind of like a
Speaker 3: human lens of like what you know about how people behave,
Speaker 3: and you suddenly start seeing that it's like, oh, they
Speaker 3: were just like in a constant, perpetual state of internal
Speaker 3: fragmentation as people had different ideas about like what was
Speaker 3: supposed to happen, what should happen, and just kind of
Speaker 3: like formed you know, cliques and factions, and sometimes those
Speaker 3: factions got big enough to split off and then they
Speaker 3: lasted you know, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years and then
Speaker 3: like either folded back into the main thing or or whatever.
Speaker 3: But this kind of like churn in in faith and
Speaker 3: belief is is just it's always there. It just in
Speaker 3: an organized, codified faith. It's a lot easier to lose
Speaker 3: track of it, particularly from a historical perspective. It's a
Speaker 3: lot easier to just look at like the bigger picture
Speaker 3: and be like, ah, it was all the same, it
Speaker 3: was homogeneous. And it turns out no, yeah, sorry, that
Speaker 3: was a very no, no, no, no, there was. I
Speaker 3: threw a lot of like very big assumptions into a
Speaker 3: very tightly packed statement. There, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: I think that was great, And yeah, that's that's kind
Speaker 2: of I think what I what I had to sort
Speaker 2: of ask about, you know, just sort of this fascination
Speaker 2: with the way in which almost anything can become a
Speaker 2: cult these days thanks to sort of the social dynamics
Speaker 2: of the different online communities and how they they reinforce
Speaker 2: each other. Like this is kind of at the center
Speaker 2: of almost everything that's a problem right now, one way
Speaker 2: or the other.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah. I think the thing that is new and
Speaker 3: modern really is the ability, or is the I don't
Speaker 3: want to say ability, the phenomenon of decentralized self organizing
Speaker 3: belief systems. You know that Like there's these a lot
Speaker 3: of the a lot of the meme stock influencers. You know,
Speaker 3: they're not leading it. They're just like nudging it. They're
Speaker 3: not in charge of it. And if they if any
Speaker 3: of them like tried to like really like seize the
Speaker 3: reins that that would get them like exiled. You know,
Speaker 3: any any kind of like overt power grab would be
Speaker 3: would be antithetical to it. But so it's the it's
Speaker 3: and it's the same thing like in QAnon, if somebody
Speaker 3: anyone who's come out and been like I am q
Speaker 3: listen to me, gets immediately just like just demolished by
Speaker 3: the faithful because like it's it's antithetical to their whole
Speaker 3: thing to have a really identifiable leader. And and the
Speaker 3: fact that there is no identifiable leader, that that the
Speaker 3: leader is mythological is useful and beneficial to the to
Speaker 3: the organization, and those kinds of like those kinds of movements,
Speaker 3: they're not unique to the modern age, but the modern
Speaker 3: age has made them very easy to form, almost by accident.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Dan, this would be something for people to
Speaker 2: continue to keep an eye on because it's not gonna stop.
Speaker 3: Probably I'm I'm there's gonna be some like amazing doctoral
Speaker 3: dissertations on this subject in like ten years.
Speaker 2: Yes, I would, I would certainly agree with that. Well, Dan,
Speaker 2: you want to let the people know where they can
Speaker 2: find you.
Speaker 3: They can find me on YouTube. The channel name is
Speaker 3: Folding ideas and I'm on socials, Twitter, Blue Sky, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera, as as Foldable Human excellent.
Speaker 2: All right, check out Dan's videos, check out his YouTube channel,
Speaker 2: like and subscribe and check us out. But you already
Speaker 2: have because you're here, so continue to check us out.
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