This is Financial Advice

0:00 Like, the thing is, people don’t appreciate that this is, like, we’re in a war.

0:03 [Upbeat music] Diamond hands!

0:10 [Upbeat music] Infinite means infinite!

0:18 Infinite risk!

0:19 Infinite reward!

0:21 Sure my portfolio looks a lot of red, but I’m in it for the long haul!

0:24 Lambos or Wendy’s I’m gonna get my tendies!

0:28 There are tens of thousands of hours of video and text in existence

0:32 all seeking to explain what exactly happened with GameStop in January 2021.

0:38 There are explainer videos, unhinged rants, congressional hearings,

0:42 and Netflix-produced documentaries all trying to tell the story

0:46 of this one weird moment in time and what it might mean,

0:50 what it says about us, our society, and our economy.

0:54 The common version is that a band of plucky retail investors put

0:57 the screws to hedge fund Melvin Capital in a historic short squeeze,

1:02 an unprecedented win for the little guy.

1:05 The nuanced read is that it

1:07 was a confluence of once-in-a-generation social forces,

1:10 a short squeeze but also a FOMO fuelled social media phenomenon where

1:15 just as many regular folk got wrecked as made off like bandits.

1:19 That, however, is merely where our story starts.

1:23 This is a story about what happened next.

1:25 This is a story about finance, social media,

1:29 conspiracy theories, gambling, mortal men elevated to mythological figures,

1:33 and a mountain of human suffering built of a thousand little lies.

1:38 This is financial advice.

1:41 [Melancholy music] ♪hoo hoo hoo♪ [repeats]♪ And a cold

2:08 wind is blowing in♪♪ and the children freeze and die,

2:17 die alright♪♪ “Few subjects relating to exchange

2:21 practices have been characterized by greater

2:23 differences of opinion than that of short selling.” But what is a short sale?

2:29 A short sale involves borrowing an asset, selling it at current market value,

2:33 and then returning it later, ideally at a lower price than when it was sold.

2:37 Put simply, it’s selling borrowed goods to buy back at a profit.

2:42 There are some things that we need to caveat right off the top here.

2:45 First and foremost is that meme stock investors,

2:47 or Apes as they call themselves for reasons we’ll get into later,

2:50 aren’t engaging with reality as you or I understand it.

2:55 You’ll hear of references to things that you’re

2:56 aware of, companies that exist in your universe,

3:00 but you and Apes aren’t talking about the same thing.

3:04 Your version of GameStop is an unprofitable mall retailer

3:07 that was headed slowly but inexorably towards bankruptcy due to societal

3:11 shifts and regular old mismanagement that in 2021 got something

3:15 resembling a second chance via once in a generation circumstances.

3:19 That second chance might pan out into some form of future relevance,

3:23 or at least existence,

3:25 maybe, but could just as easily be squandered and result in bankruptcy anyway.

3:29 One way or another the price as it currently stands is still

3:33 floating well above GameStop’s historical peak

3:35 profitability during the heyday of the Wii, PlayStation 3, and XBox 360,

3:40 so even a tremendous turnaround would still almost

3:44 certainly see the stock price continue to decline.

3:48 The Ape version of GameStop is an apocalyptic catalyst,

3:51 the chosen vessel through which the world will be reborn,

3:55 a mythological entity built,

3:56 brick by brick, out of communal desperation, delusion, and cope,

4:00 obsessed with the financial concepts of short selling and a short squeeze.

4:05 Their version of reality is, undoubtedly, more interesting, more dramatic,

4:10 and more sensational, but the reasons for its existence are complex.

4:15 It is tempting to say that the participants are

4:18 merely ignorant or incompetent but the sticky truth is nuanced.

4:22 There are many elements of Ape lore that are pure performance,

4:26 overt pieces of fiction that persist in the collective narrative simply

4:30 because it would be nice for Apes if they were true.

4:34 The primary lens of ape culture,

4:35 born as it was on Reddit, is that of video games.

4:39 They have cast a variety of people,

4:41 businesses, and institutions as their matched opponent,

4:44 and will often post taunting letters addressed to Ken Griffin specifically

4:48 or hedge funds broadly where they invoke their prowess in MMOs.

4:54 [Narrator] “Bro I play runescape.

4:55 I literally grind for days to watch a number go up 1.

4:59 Been playing 15 years and still not lost interest.

5:02 [laugh] They think it’s going to be any different

5:04 now?” [Narrator 2] “I just realized how fucked shorts are.

5:07 They picked a fight with the gaming industry.

5:10 The same people who will grind hours on end,

5:12 losing thousands of times in a row, to simply get one win.

5:15 We refuse to end on a loss, we refuse to sell.

5:19 [Narrator 1] “I did one of the most degenerate grinds that exists

5:23 for this picture only.” This entire genre of post is profoundly sad,

5:28 not merely because of the implication

5:30 that a willingness to wander in circles for hours

5:33 clicking on virtual plants is somehow

5:35 a transferable skill to playing the stock market,

5:38 but because they all presume a very high degree of symmetry and intentionality.

5:44 They are based in the belief that, like in a video game,

5:47 both sides are knowingly engaged in a matched competition.

5:50 But when you back up and evaluate the whole picture,

5:53 their opponents aren’t aware of the game at all,

5:57 assuming the ape is even talking about a group that actually exists.

6:02 On their forums they are winning epic battles against automated

6:05 trading algorithms specifically tuned to drive GameStop out of business,

6:10 they are in a war with the “hedgies” who are always,

6:13 every single day, “getting desperate” and “running out of ammo”.

6:18 In reality Apes are shadow boxing the random noise of the market ...and losing.

6:23 It has become a layer cake of every genre of magical thinking,

6:28 newfaith religiosity, reheated conspiracy theories,

6:30 and general superstition with an added extra-thick

6:33 frosting in the form of financial woo,

6:37 get-rich-quick culture, sunk costs, and gambler’s fallacy.

6:40 A lot of their language is rooted in the culture of 4chan and Reddit.

6:44 They call themselves “Apes” partly in reference

6:46 to Planet of the Apes and Starship Troopers,

6:48 but also because the other words they call themselves made

6:52 them look bad when the media started to pay attention.

6:55 It is a hazily defined movement dispersed across

6:58 all of social media and dozens of forums,

7:01 burdened with two years of petty drama, in-fighting, and fragmentation.

7:05 Due to their extreme beliefs their culture

7:07 has grown more and more insular over time,

7:10 so their communication is predictably littered with in-jokes,

7:14 niche references, shibboleths, abbreviations, jargon,

7:16 and private definitions of words borrowed from other disciplines,

7:21 which can make it understandably difficult to follow along.

7:24 We can get there, I believe in us, we can make this make sense,

7:29 but boy howdy does the journey require a journey.

7:33 The version of the story that you’re already

7:35 familiar with is one where a bunch of Redditors

7:37 tried to short squeeze some hedge funds

7:40 and get rich in the process by buying GameStop.

7:43 [News reporter] “Meanwhile the quote unquote meme stocks turned over.

7:47 These companies pumped up by amateur traders on social platforms like Reddit

7:51 with the express purpose of forcing certain hedge funds to lose money,

7:55 well, they plummeted today.” [Dan] The version of the story

7:58 you’re not familiar with is the one where, two years after the squeeze,

8:02 Heat Lamp Theory penned by Reddit user

8:05 6days1week argues that financial service provider ComputerShare’s operational

8:09 algorithm is being tricked by short hedge

8:11 funds into storing plan-held shares in the DTCC

8:13 like burgers under a heat lamp and also

8:16 probably someone made it illegal to report

8:19 these heat lamp shares as directly registered thus

8:21 suppressing the evidence that Apes own the float.

8:24 [Narrator]"Although that post was low effort and the speculation

8:27 itself turned out not to be completely correct, my hunch was still valid.

8:32 It was often attacked by what I believe

8:35 were bad actors asking me to 'prove someone

8:37 made it illegal.'" The abuse of ComputerShare’s algorithm

8:41 was obvious to Apes who were paying attention:

8:44 ever since Ryan Cohen’s “I want to be the Book King” tweet,

8:48 it was clear that Cohen was signalling for Apes to terminate their plans,

8:52 sell their fractionals, and book their shares.

8:54 What was not obvious was the reaction of the mods,

8:57 who would attempt to bury the story- revealing themselves to be paid shills,

9:01 clearly compromised by the hedgies in order to distract from Heat Lamp.

9:05 [Narrator 1] “Censorship of Heat Lamp DD shows we are heading

9:08 in the right direction.” [Narrator 2]“What the fuck is this shit?

9:11 So we still get pushback for Heat Lamp at other places,

9:14 but someone can post a sponsored DD that is literally the definition

9:17 of FUD and says in that comments that DRS is pointless

9:21 and MOASS will not happen.” [Narrator 3] “THE HEAT LAMP THEORY

9:25 dd to me is as impressive as the house of cards dd.

9:28 It’s like the dd’s from the beginning of super stonk.” So, yeah,

9:32 there’s a lot of ground to cover before that makes any sense at all.

9:37 [orchestal music] The wheels of finance spin

9:53 beneath the surface of the modern world.

9:56 Everywhere you look the impact can be felt.

9:58 The modern corporation consists of many moving parts,

10:02 from manufacturing to distribution to communications.

10:05 Likewise the finances behind the corporation are equally complex,

10:09 a delicately balanced dance of equity and credit

10:12 that facilitates the many wonders of the modern world.

10:15 One of the most misunderstood and contentious mechanisms of this dance

10:18 is what is called a “short sale.” “Few subjects relating to exchange

10:23 practices have been characterized by greater differences of opinion than

10:27 that of short selling.” Though many

10:30 characterize shorting as a toxic modern practice, in reality it is quite old.

10:34 And it has polarized people for as long as it’s existed.

10:38 But what is a short sale?

10:40 A short sale involves borrowing an asset, selling it at current market value,

10:45 and then returning it later, ideally at a lower price than when it was sold.

10:49 Put simply, it’s selling borrowed goods to buy back at a profit.

10:54 Two things happen with this arrangement.

10:56 First is that the short seller gets to hold the full

10:58 sale value for a period of time until the asset is returned,

11:01 providing them with capital that they can use in the interim.

11:05 Second is that when the asset is returned this represents

11:08 not the moment where the short seller makes money,

11:10 but merely when they lock in their final profits.

11:14 The risk/reward proposition of short selling is that gains

11:16 are capped by the price at the time of borrowing.

11:19 If an asset is borrowed at $5 then

11:22 the absolute maximum profit is $5 (discounting fees and interest,

11:26 of course.) On the flip side is the risk profile.

11:30 The maximum losses of a short sale are effectively infinite as the price

11:34 of the asset isn't bounded to 100% or even 10,000% of the original sale price.

11:39 As the trend for the economy as a whole is to grow,

11:43 a stock going from $5 to $10 is far more common than stocks going from $5 to $0.

11:48 In addition the borrower is expected to pay the original

11:51 owner a recurring fee based on the value of the asset,

11:54 similar to interest paid on a loan, called the cost-to-borrow, or CTB.

11:59 However unlike a personal loan that you might

12:01 already be familiar with, such as a mortgage,

12:03 where the payment encompass both interest and principal

12:05 on a schedule where the whole is eventually paid off,

12:08 the cost to borrow is paid every month, prorated by day, with no cap,

12:13 thus borrowing an asset for long periods of time can quickly eat

12:16 up profit margins or even exceed the original value of the asset itself.

12:20 For these reasons it is uncommon to hold

12:22 a short position for long periods of time.

12:25 Even though the name “short-selling” comes

12:26 from the bet that the asset will decline,

12:28 or “fall short,” it is coincidentally appropriate that short plays tend towards

12:32 short time frames of weeks or months rather than months or years.

12:36 However this short timeframe leaves

12:38 the borrower more exposed to short-term volatility.

12:41 Disruptions that might temporarily set a company back without impacting

12:44 the overall health of the business can benefit short-sellers greatly,

12:48 while unexpected good news can generate a surge

12:51 of excitement about a company that may leave short-sellers hurting,

12:54 and lenders pressuring them to return the asset or incur further liability.

12:58 At the most extreme,

12:59 lenders can compel the borrower to return the asset in full,

13:03 regardless of the cost to the borrower.

13:05 When short sellers are impelled to return large volumes of shares all at once

13:09 this sudden buying pressure can further potentiate

13:11 upwards movement on the price of the security,

13:14 applying further margin pressures to other existing short positions.

13:18 This situation is commonly referred to as a “short squeeze”

13:22 as the short-sellers are squeezed out

13:24 of their positions by the accelerating costs.

13:27 “I mean they can try, they can try as hard as they want to demoralize us,

13:32 but, uh, like, as I always say: no cell, no sell.

13:35 I’m not selling.

13:36 Power to the players.

13:37 Power to the shareholders.

13:39 Power to the individual investors each choosing for themselves to- a company

13:46 that they believe in.” In late January 2021 video game retailer GameStop

13:52 became a media sensation as the value of their stock rose

13:56 from $20 to just shy of $500 over the course of four days.

14:00 The exact confluence of events that led to this have been thoroughly documented,

14:05 so we won’t drag the point out here, but the critical takeaway is this: it was

14:10 a once-in-a-lifetime event that hinged off multiple specific coincidences.

14:15 One: The pandemic made the situation

14:18 for brick-and-mortar retail dire due to multi-valent impacts,

14:21 so many hedge funds had taken out short positions against

14:25 them anticipating a continued decline in revenue and thus share price.

14:29 Two: Governments begin to distribute stimulus packages in an attempt

14:34 at offsetting the economic impact of the pandemic.

14:37 Three: There was a zeitgeist of futility in the air,

14:41 that financially the average person was screwed,

14:43 the stimulus package wasn’t enough to fix anything,

14:46 so you might as well blow it on something reckless.

14:49 In specific, hedge fund Melvin Capital holds a truly reckless short position

14:53 in GameStop that left the fund extremely exposed if the price were to rise,

14:58 and traders on Reddit see this as an opportunity

15:01 and begin promoting it on YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter.

15:04 As the idea of getting in on a potential

15:07 GameStop short squeeze spreads through social media in late 2020,

15:10 the messaging gets flattened.

15:12 New people are flooding into Reddit’s Wall Street Bets forum,

15:16 they are bringing with them their own ideas,

15:19 their own politics, their own expectations.

15:21 The thing that really speaks to people, and thus works well for recruiting,

15:24 is the idea that this is a chance to hurt Wall Street.

15:28 As more and more people pile in the experienced

15:30 traders get tired of explaining things over and over,

15:33 thus new people are being on-boarded by people who

15:37 themselves have a stock-trading career best measured in hours.

15:42 These are users who jumped onto forums and explicitly asked “how do I get

15:46 in on GameStop as fast as possible?”

15:49 They’re not getting a lecture on risk management,

15:52 market operations, and exit strategy, not that Wall Street Bets would ever be

15:56 a good place to get those, they’re getting

15:59 a hype speech about revenge for 2008 and a bare-bones

16:03 series of instructions on what buttons to push.

16:07 Potentiating that, any large, leaderless movement with foggy politics is going

16:11 to attract a whole slew of political opportunists

16:14 from all across the spectrum who hope

16:17 to steer the tsunami in their preferred direction.

16:21 These people, trying to transform it into a coherent political movement,

16:25 inject and amplify a lot of narrative about solidarity and making a difference.

16:31 Ape together strong.

16:33 That’s the kerosene that primes this whole

16:36 thing to turn into an apocalyptic investment cult.

16:40 [match lighting] This is a bold claim, and it’s basically unfalsifiable,

16:44 but I feel like I can point to the match, the event that really,

16:49 truly allowed for conspiratorial thought to take permanent root in Ape culture,

16:54 and that’s January 28th, 2021, mid morning,

16:58 when Robinhood, an app-based free brokerage,

17:01 disabled the buying of GME and a selection of other meme stocks.

17:06 [sound of blowing out match] [News reporter] "Just this morning Robinhood,

17:08 which is really seen as the brokerage firm of choice for a lot of those younger

17:13 investors said that in light of recent volatility

17:15 they’re restricting transactions for certain securities to position-close-only.

17:20 And to be clear that means you can sell names like GameStop but you

17:23 can’t buy them.” [Dan] That was the day the price hit its all-time-high,

17:27 and in Ape mythology that was when they

17:30 were on the cusp of, like, total revolution,

17:33 the entire system was about to collapse and Apes

17:36 were about to be crowned victors over Wall Street.

17:39 Robinhood turning off the buy button was,

17:42 from their point of view, an obvious sign of targeted disruption.

17:46 The reality is far more mundane,

17:49 Robinhood runs a “disruptive” brokerage with a very tech-bro

17:53 “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission” philosophy.

17:56 In a nutshell the idea is that they run all their accounts by default

18:01 as a kind of limited margin account

18:03 that they call “instant deposits.” You make an account,

18:07 start to transfer money to your account,

18:09 the money hasn’t technically arrived yet,

18:11 but Robinhood lets you act like it has.

18:14 You want to buy a stock, Robinhood pays for it up front,

18:17 and then just takes your money when it finally arrives.

18:20 This undeniably speeds things up and makes them appealing to, say,

18:25 a huge swath of people who want to get in on this opportunity

18:29 to make wife-changing money right now before it’s too late,

18:32 but exposes Robinhood to pretty substantial risk.

18:36 If a million new users all sign up on the same day

18:39 and all immediately try and buy GameStop at $300 a share via “instant deposits”,

18:45 Robinhood might risk running out of money.

18:49 So the mundane reality is that the influx

18:52 of new users all making pretty aggressive plays

18:54 in a specific basket of stocks stressed Robinhood’s

18:57 credit and threatened its collateral across the board,

19:01 so they shut down buying of those specific securities to protect themselves.

19:06 In the aftermath the CEO of Robinhood,

19:08 Vlad Tenev, denied that the company had, in fact,

19:11 basically run out of money which may or may not have been true,

19:15 but did confirm the fundamentals of the threat.

19:18 [Tenev] “So we’re really in unprecedented times,

19:20 and in order to protect the firm and protect our customers,

19:24 um, we had to limit buying in these- in these stocks,

19:28 and to be absolutely clear-” [Host] “It sounds to-" [Tenev] “Go

19:33 ahead." [Host] “But it sounds to me as though that you're

19:37 suggesting that there was a liquidity problem.” [Dan] Turns out giving

19:40 everyone a margin account is a good idea until it isn’t.

19:43 But that’s boring.

19:45 You know what’s exciting?

19:47 They turned off the buy button specifically to kill the squeeze!

19:51 They want you to sell!

19:52 That’s an exciting idea!

19:55 The funny thing is that it didn’t even kill the pump!

19:58 Sure, Robinhood and a few other app-based

20:00 brokers with a similar structure halted buying,

20:02 but cash-account brokers were trading just fine,

20:05 and GME still rallied pretty hard the next day, peaking back over $400.

20:10 The buy button was maybe a wake up call,

20:13 a sign that the music was probably about

20:15 to stop and you should cash out while you can,

20:18 but what actually killed the momentum...

20:20 was the weekend.

20:22 When the smoke clears there’s a congressional hearing, there’s an SEC report,

20:27 there’s actually a ton of scrutiny in and around the specific events.

20:31 Melvin Capital eats some truly staggering losses and needs to turn

20:36 to Citadel Securities for a bailout to avoid closing entirely.

20:39 Regulators are worried about how

20:41 well they’re communicating with retail investors,

20:43 Legislators are worried social media influencers aren’t accountable enough.

20:47 Everyone knows that a charismatic figure can fleece

20:50 individuals and pump and dump a single stock,

20:52 but do the events of January suggest that influencers

20:55 can pose a systemic risk to the market itself?

21:00 Who, if anyone, was responsible for January?

21:05 Thing is that while a bunch of people

21:07 made a ton of money off GameStop in January,

21:09 that money has to come from somewhere.

21:13 In an actual short squeeze the idea is

21:15 that the money comes from the short sellers,

21:18 they’re the ones buying vastly overpriced GameStop shares.

21:22 So if this was a squeeze that’s simple, but, you know...

21:27 was it actually a squeeze?

21:30 The SEC report didn’t come out until fall 2021,

21:33 and while still pretty dry and technical it does try to engage with the general

21:38 public who know a bit about the stock market but aren’t deep in the weeds.

21:42 It’s not flawless, but the conclusions are sound.

21:45 GameStop was a complicated mix of activities that fed off one another.

21:49 There was a short squeeze in the mix,

21:51 a bunch of the traffic that saw GameStop starting to pump

21:54 at the beginning of the week was

21:56 driven by known short-sellers closing their positions,

21:58 but the main body of it all,

22:00 the buyers who pushed the price up to just shy of $500,

22:04 that was overwhelmingly retail buyers.

22:07 The people left holding the bag when the music stopped wasn’t Melvin Capital,

22:13 wasn’t Citadel, wasn’t BlackRock, it was Apes,

22:16 and a lot of those Apes were new recruits whose first day of stock

22:21 trading in their lives was from installing Robinhood and buying GME that week.

22:27 The story of Apes post-squeeze is a bunch of people standing around

22:31 a trashed hotel room at 5am asking when the party is supposed to start,

22:36 a bunch of newly minted bagholders trying to manifest

22:40 another even larger squeeze because the only way

22:43 they could possibly make money off their $420

22:46 GME shares is if it somehow goes even higher.

22:51 Everything becomes fodder for theories about what really happened

22:54 and why the price didn’t just keep going up.

22:58 Direct share registration, naked shorts, RegSHO,

23:02 none of these mattered to Apes at all in January,

23:05 but suddenly in February and March these ideas get

23:08 injected as explanations for why the squeeze didn’t keep squeezing.

23:13 They will, in the months that follow,

23:16 re-cast January as “the sneeze,” both to suggest

23:19 that not only was it not the main event,

23:21 it was a tiny blip compared to the inevitable true squeeze,

23:25 the mother of all short squeezes: MOASS.

23:31 “I’d like to welcome you all to the Bellagio

23:35 Resort and Casino in scenic Las Vegas, Nevada.

23:38 Ah, we’re just, uh, y'know enjoying some early tendies.

23:45 There’s some news on the wind that, uh, big things are coming,

23:50 big things are coming as early as this weekend, and Bobby’s pumping.

23:54 I don’t think anything could really go wrong.

23:57 I think, uh...

23:57 I think there’s a lot of people who want

24:00 to make it look like things are going wrong.

24:02 I hold for the infinity pool.

24:04 I just- I buy, I hold, I DRS.

24:09 MOASS is a tricky thing to talk about.

24:12 First of all it is a pure financial conspiracy theory.

24:15 We’re used to conspiracy theories that intersect with finance,

24:18 most get around to the subject of international bankers eventually,

24:22 but those theories tend to start in sociology, science,

24:26 or politics and then expand to cover finance as they grow.

24:31 MOASS starts in finance with the operations of the stock market,

24:36 so just from the word go

24:38 the subject is already inundated with unfamiliar terminology,

24:43 organizations, and acronyms.

24:45 This is all compounded by the fact

24:47 that the exact composition of the belief is mercurial.

24:50 MOASS is a vessel conspiracy containing many other modular theories.

24:56 These theories are disparate, obtuse, self-referential,

25:00 and often contradictory if not outright paradoxical.

25:04 It is, as a whole, a theory that resists critical thought at every turn.

25:08 If you try to formulate an all-encompassing

25:11 version of it you will find only frustration.

25:14 The jar, MOASS itself, is the belief that for some reason or another

25:19 GameStop or some other meme stock company is going

25:23 to skyrocket in value and make everyone who times

25:26 it right unfathomably rich in the blink of an eye.

25:29 Everything inside the jar is the how and why.

25:33 Taken as a whole MOASS is many things: it’s an apocalyptic event,

25:38 it’s an infinite money glitch, it’s revenge against Wall Street,

25:41 it’s salvation for those who gambled away their savings,

25:45 but above all MOASS is a story,

25:49 and that story goes a little something like this.

25:53 ”What you need to know before the MOASS, during the MOASS, and after the MOASS!

25:58 All in one video.

25:59 So let’s start by chugging this bitch and then get going.

26:01 We know we own the float!

26:03 So if they have to cover,

26:05 that means that they have to pay the price that we say.

26:08 Now if we hold to ten million, that’s what they have to pay.

26:11 So if it goes to a hundred thousand, if it goes to two hundred fifty thousand,

26:14 if goes to one thousand, if it goes to five hundred,

26:17 that ain’t the squeeze, baby, that ain’t the squeeze.

26:20 What’s the squeeze is once it’s past ten million.

26:23 Then we’re squeezing!" “Some point in the near future, in my opinion,

26:27 we have the MOASS actually happening where we survived all the FUD,

26:31 we survived the short attacks, and then the MOASS happens, baby.

26:34 And then we pass our floor of 10 million or 20

26:38 million and we get up to a ceiling of, let's say, $420 million a share.

26:42 And if you're raising your eyebrows, saying, 'That's not possible.

26:45 The whole economy will be ruined.' Shut up!!

26:47 You don't know what you're talking about.

26:49 Do your research!" [Narrator, yelling] "500 million per share is not a meme,

26:52 I am dead serious.” Major financial firms,

26:55 most notably hedge funds such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel,

26:58 owe their profits to massive volumes of fraudulent naked shorts sales,

27:03 flooding the market with phantom shares

27:04 that suppress the price of companies like GameStop,

27:07 AMC Theatres, and Bed Bath& Beyond.

27:10 This scheme has generated unfathomable amounts of debt

27:13 that Hedgies could never afford to pay back,

27:16 hundreds of billions of shares owed that don’t actually exist and thus

27:20 cannot be returned adding up to trillions of dollars of debt,

27:24 so their only hope is if the victim company goes out

27:27 of business entirely allowing the Hedgies to walk away with tax-free gains.

27:32 The risk is so extreme that it

27:35 justifies every employee at hundreds of financial institutions,

27:38 the media, the government,

27:39 and the courts all cooperating to keep the conspiracy under wraps.

27:43 But if that scheme were to be revealed,

27:46 if Citadel were forced to buy back those hundreds of billions of shares,

27:50 it would trigger a short squeeze

27:52 that would send GameStop’s share value into phone

27:54 number prices and create a cascade that could topple the entire global economy.

27:59 Because there are so many fake shares, Apes have already bought more shares than

28:03 are supposed to exist, they own the float,

28:06 and have thus positioned themselves to be

28:08 the beneficiaries of that apocalyptic unravelling

28:10 as long as they can remain united and refuse to sell their shares.

28:16 If no one sells then the supply is zero and the price is infinite.

28:20 Then Apes can dictate not only the price, but they can make demands.

28:25 If Ken Griffin isn’t sent to prison for his crimes

28:29 the deal is off: no cell, no sell.

28:32 As the evidence of the fraud ripples through the economy,

28:35 as the entire stock market is revealed to be a sham,

28:38 faith in institutions will falter,

28:40 and in an existential crisis the government will be forced

28:44 to make Apes whole or else face their own extinction,

28:47 precipitating the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.

28:51 And then, when the flames of MOASS have cleansed the earth,

28:53 it will usher in a golden age of humanity stewarded by the true

28:57 diamond-handed Apes who did not flinch in the face of paltry 1000% gains,

29:02 did not become paper-handed bitches over mere wife-changing money,

29:06 but hodled, hodled in the face of Fear,

29:09 hodled in the face of Uncertainty, hodled in the face of Doubt.

29:14 [Narrator 1] “So what happens in theory when they can’t get enough shares (even

29:18 with the price in the millions)?" [Narrator 2]

29:21 “The price goes to the tens of millions.

29:23 Then hundreds of millions.

29:24 Billions if it has to.

29:26 Price is just supply and demand.” “All I have to do is buy one stock,

29:33 buy one stock, GameStop feel good about it,

29:37 and watch the world crumble.” A thing that’s kinda beautiful about

29:41 a short squeeze is that you don’t really need to do anything,

29:44 you just need to be in the right place at the right time,

29:47 and a thing that marbles the whole subject of memestocks is a sublime laziness.

29:54 This is a characteristic of all get rich quick schemes,

29:57 but it’s important to keep in mind as Apes build this complex theory,

30:01 as they fill the jar,

30:02 and as they become increasingly irate when MOASS fails to materialize,

30:06 that all they’ve done, all they’ve actually done, is press a “buy” button.

30:12 As Marantz said, all he has to do is buy one stock,

30:16 feel good about it, and watch the world crumble.

30:19 It’s just Reddit’s version of the Rapture.

30:22 Now, in these sample narratives of MOASS we’ve already made a mistake,

30:25 which is trying to pin down the specifics in some coherent way.

30:29 A critical element of talking about MOASS is

30:32 that the component beliefs are modular- the jar,

30:35 the part where Apes get rich, is the only constant.

30:38 Any specific belief can be readily discarded or swapped without posing

30:42 a risk to the integrity of the structure as a whole.

30:46 For example, many MOASS theories cite the idea

30:49 that Citadel wouldn’t need to pay taxes on any gains from short positions if

30:54 the victim company goes completely out of business.

30:56 This makes narrative sense, but just isn’t true.

31:01 Like, there’s not much else that needs

31:03 to be done to debunk that, it’s just false.

31:06 But removing it from the jar doesn’t really do anything,

31:09 and it also doesn’t matter if you debunk it

31:12 because Apes will just put it back in anyway.

31:15 As a result the memestock belief system has

31:18 become an absolute rat’s nest of false threads,

31:20 misinformation, willful ignorance,

31:22 and reheated conspiracy theories from the nineties,

31:25 all of which has been constantly adjusted to compensate

31:28 for the fact that reality keeps disproving it.

31:32 It’s a mess.

31:34 So how does a philosophy like MOASS develop?

31:38 That is actually a shockingly long explanation.

31:41 A major problem here, as I said,

31:43 is that a lot of this is contradictory and circular,

31:47 a pile of half-baked theories cooked up piecemeal

31:50 by Apes with no understanding of the underlying subject working

31:53 specifically to find a thing that would need

31:57 to be true in order to maintain the conspiracy cascade.

32:01 The only reason they believe there are hundreds of billions

32:04 of fake GameStop shares in circulation is because that’s

32:06 the thing that needs to be true in order

32:09 to explain why they believe shorts never closed in 2021,

32:13 and they believe shorts never closed in 2021 because it’s

32:16 the thing that needs to be true in order for the squeeze

32:19 to still be on the table and the squeeze needs

32:22 to still be on the table because otherwise what are you doing?

32:26 Why are you here?

32:28 But also a lot of these specific ideas, they got them from somewhere,

32:31 and investigating that somewhere just opens up

32:34 a rabbit hole where you spend months delving

32:36 into other pre-existing conspiracy theories that have

32:39 tried to graft themselves onto the memestock movement.

32:43 February 2021, following the price of GameStop crashing back to earth,

32:47 many Apes who bought in late or held through it were

32:50 extremely salty and needed something or someone to blame that wasn’t just,

32:55 you know, making a poor financial decision based on Reddit hype posts.

33:00 The fiasco with Robinhood turning off the buy

33:02 button initially floated to the top because there are, even in our reality,

33:06 some questions about how that was handled and Robinhood’s

33:09 business model that are very much worth asking.

33:13 Apes of course care about none of that.

33:15 All the talk about market reform is just smoke,

33:18 they’re here to crash the system and get rich.

33:20 So what they see in the Robinhood fiasco is targeted disruption.

33:24 Someone pulled strings to turn off the buy button and stop the squeeze,

33:28 which means someone’s scared,

33:29 the whole thing must still be primed to pop off again.

33:33 Apes declare that shorts never closed, the squeeze never ended,

33:37 it’s just in a bit of a gully and it’s going to shoot

33:40 back up any day now if they can get the pressure back up.

33:43 The second thing they latch onto is that Citadel bailed out Melvin.

33:46 Now, in reality this wasn’t a philanthropic gesture,

33:50 it was a lot closer to a protection

33:52 racket shakedown because Wall Street are all greedy assholes,

33:55 and Melvin folded under the pressure in 2022 anyway,

33:59 but it gives Apes a villain, Ken Griffin.

34:03 Apes assert that he must have personally called Vlad Tenev

34:06 at Robinhood and told him to turn off the buy button

34:09 in order to protect Citadel and then lied to congress

34:12 when he told them under oath that he didn’t do that!

34:15 This seed narrative proves just sticky

34:18 enough to keep people emotionally invested,

34:20 and from there Apes crowdsource the explanations,

34:23 tacking on more and more oblique ideas

34:25 lifted out of the complexity and obfuscation

34:28 of capital markets in order to explain why this thing is still primed to pop.

34:34 Part of what makes MOASS persuasive,

34:36 why people buy in, is that very complexity and obfuscation.

34:40 People come into the subject with well-founded skepticism of Wall Street.

34:44 The narrative that Wall Street is corrupt, reckless,

34:47 and greedy is persuasive in no small part because it isn’t wrong.

34:52 So memestock proselytes present themselves as the ones

34:54 who are cutting through the darkness,

34:56 exposing the deliberately obfuscated truth of how the market really works,

35:01 democratising the ivory tower of finance.

35:04 Now, despite its reputation, finance, as a subject,

35:07 is in fact something that you,

35:09 a layperson, can learn, it is a lot less impenetrable than it seems.

35:14 Wall Street is awash with B-minus students who

35:16 wrapped their heads around it, you can too.

35:19 But we need to be careful here because just

35:22 because the subject is more accessible than you might think,

35:25 that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of actual honest to god complexity and nuance.

35:30 Understanding how to evaluate a mutual fund or trying

35:33 your hand at making money day trading is not that complex.

35:37 Understanding loopholes in securities regulation is.

35:42 So in the theory of MOASS we have

35:44 a collision of the rhetoric of the democratisation of finance

35:48 with the actual impenetrable stuff that even the majority

35:50 of the people on Wall Street don’t bother to understand.

35:54 And the systems of the economy are so intertwined and obtuse that it’s

35:58 possible to sculpt almost any story one can imagine through the framing.

36:03 It is a perfect recipe for someone to very confidently present you

36:07 with extremely wrong information that you

36:09 have no reference point to evaluate from.

36:13 And if it wasn’t already clear,

36:15 MOASS is almost totally devoid of any actual economics.

36:19 Like think about it.

36:21 Their theory is that Wall Street is

36:23 so reckless and greedy that they have created

36:25 this powder keg that will allow Apes

36:28 to make unfathomable amounts of money off of MOASS.

36:30 But despite this powder keg sitting

36:32 in the open where Redditors could stumble into it,

36:35 no one on Wall Street is greedy or reckless enough to pursue

36:39 it despite having substantially greater resources at their disposal to do so.

36:44 And the conspiracy Apes claim to be unravelling is

36:47 both incredibly vast and yet leaves no material evidence,

36:50 no memos, no emails, no insiders, just ghosts in the trading data.

36:55 But also Apes will readily discard the data if it tells the wrong story,

36:59 they’ll just claim the price is fake,

37:02 the stock is manipulated, bad news is deliberate misinformation,

37:05 you can only trust the numbers when the line goes up.

37:08 Since you can’t trust news, data, or even company filings,

37:12 the only thing to do is buy at any price and hold for MOASS.

37:17 The Mother of All Short Squeezes is a lot of things,

37:20 but it’s not a trading strategy.

37:22 But please, if you think this is at all unfair to the Ape

37:26 thesis feel free to ‘do your own research.’ Pursue the Superstonk Flipbook page,

37:29 with over 200 reddit posts dressed up to look like books.

37:33 Enjoy such critically acclaimed works

37:35 as the Billionaire Boys Club by Bad-Ass-Trader, Trust,

37:39 Death and Divorce- The Parts of Ken Griffin’s Life that Haven’t Been Published,

37:42 and Infinity War, The Final Exit DD Compilation… by gherkinit.

37:48 Regardless of the lack of actual finance underpinning it,

37:50 we do need to establish some basic literacy in order to explain why it all falls

37:56 apart and to contextualise what’s so fascinating about

37:59 the community that has grown up around it.

38:01 So real quick, what is a stock, anyway?

38:04 Stocks, or shares, aren’t a real thing,

38:07 they’re an intangible legal claim to some portion of a company or venture.

38:11 They exist entirely in the realm of the social contract

38:15 and in some form or another are as old as civilization.

38:18 Somewhere in ancient history a couple people were like,

38:21 “hey, let’s pool our resources,

38:23 dig a mine, and then split the proceeds," and in that moment the share was born.

38:28 Then the second dude was like “hey, I don’t really want to run a mine anymore,

38:33 I’m trading my share of the mine for a goat

38:35 farm” and now you have invented an equity market.

38:38 Today’s equity markets are a vastly more complex version

38:41 of that, and the whole thing is in a constant state of flux,

38:45 but the core concept is still there:

38:47 a stock is an intangible bundle of legal rights that you can sell.

38:52 But you’re probably thinking to yourself

38:54 “what about stock certificates?” Hundreds

38:56 of years ago if you wanted to sell your share in a mine

38:59 you’d need to go to the company offices where they keep

39:01 the ledger of all the people that own a share in the mine,

39:04 tell them “I’m selling my share to this guy here,

39:07 take me off the list and put his name instead.” Upsides:

39:11 the company knows exactly who owns what portion of the company.

39:14 Downsides: huge pain in the ass.

39:17 To address the fact that this was a pain in the ass,

39:20 some companies decided to embody the intangible

39:22 rights into a tangible object, a certificate,

39:25 a piece of paper imbued with legal magic that says possession

39:30 of the paper is identical to possession of the legal rights,

39:34 so that people who wanted to sell their share,

39:36 or even just a portion of their share,

39:38 could do so by handing over the certificates.

39:42 But that’s not a perfect system, you’ve probably already thought of some flaws,

39:46 and once the telephone was invented it became its own pain in the ass.

39:50 What do you mean I need to actually move

39:52 a box full of magic paper from Brooklyn to Manhattan?

39:55 What a waste of time.

39:56 Glossing over one hundred years of securities regulations following

40:00 the invention of the telephone and then the computer,

40:02 the model that we currently use is

40:04 what’s called securities entitlements and beneficial ownership.

40:08 When you buy shares via Robinhood your shares are kept in a central depository,

40:13 the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, or DTCC,

40:16 with Robinhood’s name on them,

40:18 and then Robinhood keeps their own list of which of their clients owns what,

40:24 forming a chain of beneficial ownership.

40:26 Now, the DTCC, the New York Stock Exchange,

40:29 NASDAQ, these are not government entities,

40:32 they’re private corporations that are overseen

40:34 by the Securities and Exchange Commission,

40:36 the SEC, which is part of the government.

40:39 They are designed as self-regulating organizations.

40:42 That’s a phrase that throws up some red flags,

40:45 but it is a term with a specific meaning.

40:48 Designating an organisation as self-regulating gives them some

40:51 slack to do their neoliberal profit motive routine,

40:55 subject to the approval and oversight of the regulator.

40:58 If they want a new toy, they can have it, but we aren’t paying for it.

41:02 None of this means that self-regulating orgs

41:05 or the SEC get automatic or unwavering faith,

41:08 but it means you can’t just claim self-regulated is synonymous with unregulated

41:14 to explain why this vast conspiracy has invisibly rampaged completely unchecked.

41:21 The actual stock market and its mechanics suck

41:24 in the worst possible way: the usual way.

41:28 They carry literal centuries of bad habits, cut-corners, and self-interest.

41:32 We didn’t end up with high-security bank vaults full

41:35 of jumbo-sized magic paper because it was the best system.

41:39 The central depository model of clearing

41:41 and settlement has a lot of genuine flaws, the kind of stuff that fuels beef

41:46 between experts in the Uniform Commercial Code.

41:49 “Perhaps Professor Coogan's criticism of the amendments may

41:51 really be due to the fact that they transfer

41:54 the provisions on creation and perfection of security interests

41:57 in uncertificated securities from article 9 to article 8.

42:00 Practitioners under article 9 have been known to harbor a jealous regard

42:04 for that area of practice which has traditionally been their own.” Savage.

42:10 All this is to say that criticisms of this system are very easy to find,

42:14 but it’s also very easy to misunderstand what you’re looking at.

42:19 The primary lens that Apes view this complex market through is,

42:22 of course, the short sale.

42:24 Because it is the one thing they know about the stock market,

42:27 it is the only thing that matters.

42:30 It is made compelling by the fact that short selling is controversial

42:33 well outside Ape circles and has been for a very long time.

42:37 It’s been called “blatant thuggery” by US Congressman Dennis Hastert.

42:41 The Malaysian Finance Ministry wanted to cane short sellers, but “light,

42:45 similar to the punishment carried out on juveniles.” During World War One,

42:49 the New York Stock Exchange imposed short selling regulations in part out

42:53 of fear that German spies would utilise short sales to harm the economy.

42:57 But for Apes, who were introduced to the concept by The Big Short,

43:02 it’s a personal insult.

43:04 [Mark Baum] "Short everything that guy has touched.

43:06 I want half a billion more in swaps." And all the while,

43:09 short sales have the unique quirk of putting

43:11 downward pressure on the stock price by increasing supply,

43:14 and in a sense short sales do contain a self-fulling component.

43:19 Now, there’s a Nobel Prize in Economics waiting

43:22 for you if you can quantify that self-fulling element,

43:25 but for Apes the theory alone is enough to overwhelm all other considerations.

43:30 For them it goes to the furthest possible extreme:

43:33 short sales can kill a profitable company stone dead.

43:38 When taken in combination, short selling becomes a literal conspiracy,

43:42 the act itself becomes financial terrorism.

43:46 “Quite literally, whatever Retail buys, they short.

43:52 If an institution’s holding it, it’s not going to get shorted.

43:55 Why do you think Amazon became the most overpowered merchant there is?

43:59 I work for the company and I can tell you.

44:02 It’s because Retail wasn’t holding it.

44:05 So then their ticker can go up because institutions were holding it!” One

44:08 of the truly revolutionary moments in the development of MOASS as a theory

44:11 came when Apes dredged up a conspiracy theory favoured by Dot Com companies

44:16 who were convinced that they were being

44:18 targeted for destruction by naked short sellers.

44:21 Naked short sales are kinda tricky to talk about because

44:24 the well of discussion is so poisoned by these conspiracy theorists.

44:28 A naked short sale is when you generate

44:31 a short sale without actually borrowing a share first.

44:34 It is a real thing, it is illegal and has been for a while,

44:37 people have gone to jail for doing it,

44:39 it was a historical problem, but not for the reasons Apes and their ilk claim.

44:44 The problem is compounded by the fact that a number

44:48 of legitimate market mechanics resemble naked short selling if you squint.

44:53 So there’s the real thing off over in the corner

44:55 that people go to jail for doing because,

44:58 like, there’s evidence of their crimes,

45:01 and then there’s a fantasy version espoused by cranks where

45:05 shadowy figures destroy companies for profit without leaving any evidence.

45:10 The infuriating thing is that it really kinda doesn’t even matter because most

45:14 Apes don’t bother to distinguish between

45:16 regular short sales and naked short sales.

45:19 Apes start from “short sellers are the bad

45:22 guys,” and rail against anything that enables short selling,

45:25 like stock lending which is obviously important to short selling

45:29 because you can’t borrow a share unless someone’s lending them.

45:32 Apes only rope in a crank version of naked shorts

45:35 when they eventually need to explain why there’s no evidence

45:38 of the short position that would need to exist in order

45:41 for the short squeeze to still be on the table.

45:44 So let’s walk through it.

45:46 In mid-March of 2021,

45:47 a Reddit post on r/WallStreetBets received 22 thousand upvotes,

45:51 arguing that the squeeze hadn’t truly ended.

45:55 [Narrator] “Anybody with a brain knows that GME is not

45:59 fundamentally worth its current price of this post, at $215/share.

46:04 The main talking point across all of the investing subreddits and news outlets,

46:08 was the fact that GME’s short percentage reached a height of 140%...

46:13 But what does a 140% float mean?

46:17 Did the hedge funds short/borrow more shares than even existed?

46:21 Well yes, that’s called naked shorting but it’s more

46:25 complicated than that.” By the standards of present day theories,

46:29 this is rather quaint.

46:30 The redditor mistakenly believed that the short sellers had

46:32 survived the squeeze by purchasing shares created by market makers,

46:36 whose job is to trade to customers regardless of whether they own

46:39 the asset at the time- mandating

46:41 something resembling naked short selling at times.

46:44 To the author, the excessive short interest was clear evidence of a naked

46:48 short position of at least 40% of the entire share count.

46:52 That isn’t sound, in fact it misunderstands basic

46:55 mechanics of how a short sale even works.

46:58 In this instance, we’ve exceeded 100% short interest because

47:01 buyers are blind to the intent of the seller.

47:04 No new shares have been created.

47:06 A single share can be bought, lent, and sold as many times in a row

47:10 as there are parties willing to engage in the trade.

47:13 Mere days later, an article would be discovered from the blog

47:17 OilPrice.com- your number 1 source for your oil and energy news.

47:21 The article reframed the GameStop incident not as a short squeeze,

47:24 nor as a retail frenzy,

47:26 but as a skirmish between retail investors and manipulative,

47:30 illegal naked short selling.

47:31 GameStop was the victim of a malicious short attack- the exact

47:36 same thing that is happening to the Canadian mining sector.

47:39 This article would validate the Ape’s anxieties:

47:42 The buy-button wasn’t some isolated incident predicated on boring

47:46 details about credit and margin, this was systemic.

47:49 Wall Street has been doing stuff like

47:52 this to companies since the Dot Com bubble.

47:54 The squeeze needed to be killed because Apes were on to something.

47:59 As a conspiracy theory these narratives

48:01 of naked short attacks endure because they’re convenient,

48:05 impossible to disprove, but there’s also just enough truth to it

48:10 that it can’t be ‘debunked’ like your typical conspiracy theory.

48:13 To this end Apes become very concerned about ideas of "fake

48:18 ownership" and "fake shares," two separate ideas with their own implications.

48:23 You need to have real ownership of real shares.

48:27 As demonstrated earlier the subject of what owning a stock even

48:31 is is kinda a weird mess built on centuries of jank,

48:35 which makes it really easy for Apes to simply describe it as fake ownership.

48:40 Beneficial ownership via a broker is just an IOU,

48:44 and they’re probably lending your shares out to short sellers, which means...

48:49 "financial terorism." The term "fake share" refers to numerous

48:52 different ideas and they can be used interchangeably.

48:55 The specifics are irrelevant.

48:57 It could be the dilutive effects of naked shorts, mislabelled orders,

49:01 rehypothecation, the Obligation Warehouse,

49:02 the ghost of the Stock Borrow Program,

49:05 or persistent failures to deliver- doesn’t matter,

49:08 they’ve churned through a dozen different theories for where

49:10 fake shares might be coming from and might be hiding.

49:13 For Apes, trading is like a video game,

49:16 and they’re all collectively hammering away to find

49:19 an exploit to steal Ken Griffin’s phat loot.

49:21 The actual end boss that Apes are at war with is reality.

49:25 GameStop at this point in March

49:27 is still massively over-valued and the participants

49:30 in the January 2021 frenzy are either cashing

49:33 out some sweet gains or cutting their losses.

49:36 The Apes who are in really deep are convinced that it’s

49:39 going to shoot back up any day now, but it doesn’t.

49:42 It’s volatile, it swings a lot on any given day, but the ultimate trend is down,

49:47 and the explanation they come up with is

49:50 that clearly this is because of short attacks.

49:52 Normally short attacks are specific,

49:55 identifiable transactions made with the intent

49:57 of spooking investors and triggering a wider sell-off.

50:00 To Apes, they are persistent, invisible,

50:02 and need to be occurring in such high quantities as to defy all reason.

50:07 Therefore, they must be occurring via naked shorts,

50:10 and the attackers are avoiding closing the position… somehow.

50:14 So, logically, if the only reason the price

50:17 is going down is because of these short

50:19 attacks that must mean that GameStop is accruing

50:22 more and more short interest with each one.

50:25 The actual short Interest in GameStop peaked at 140%,

50:29 which is an astoundingly reckless situation and is the reason Melvin ate dirt,

50:34 but once the Ape’s ran the numbers themselves,

50:37 they valued the “true” short interest at over 9000%,

50:42 and that number is pretty old at this point.

50:45 Within a year, history would be rewritten and it would be

50:48 claimed that the catalyst for the GME squeeze wasn’t FOMO or memes,

50:53 it was the discovery of fake shares.

50:57 So the idea is that there are a handful

51:00 of “real” shares lost in the slurry of fake shares.

51:03 Apes need to get their hands on these “real” shares,

51:06 and how they go about this is very funny.

51:10 As an example, there is a theory that stock options require the broker

51:14 to deliver a ‘real’ share- so

51:16 some Apes try to exercise out-of-the-money options.

51:19 They want to buy shares for more than their current market value,

51:22 deliberately losing money.

51:24 That kind of behaviour is indicative

51:25 of an investor who has either made a mistake,

51:28 is trying to manipulate the stock price,

51:30 or is just incredibly stupid- possibly all three.

51:34 So intermediaries won’t let you do it.

51:36 When their request is refused, Apes go nuclear at the customer support reps,

51:40 making sovereign citizen-esque arguments as to why it’s criminal for them

51:44 to infringe on the investor’s God-given right to lose money on purpose.

51:49 But above all else, “true ownership” demands

51:52 the use of the Direct Registration System.

51:54 DRS allows the investors ownership of a security to be recorded

51:57 in their own name on the books of the issuing company’s Transfer Agent.

52:01 It exists to make this circuitous mess

52:04 more palatable by giving investors an alternative,

52:07 and it has a few legitimate functions.

52:09 There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with DRS as a concept, but Apes,

52:13 again, distort it to the point of being barely recognisable.

52:17 Apes gravitate towards it initially as a catalyst for MOASS,

52:20 a way that they can force the hypothetical 9000% short interest to close,

52:24 and a belief that there’s so many

52:27 fake shares in circulation that direct registration

52:30 is the only way they’ll be able to prove they have real shares during MOASS,

52:35 but it very quickly evolves into a loyalty ritual.

52:39 And you know it’s always tomorrow until it’s today♪♪ so I

52:42 guess I’m just hodlin’ until I get paid and I DRS.

52:46 D-R-S♪♪ yeah♪♪ D-R-S♪♪ D-R-S, D-R-S,

52:51 D-R-S♪♪ The central depository model was built

52:55 to specifically enable transactions to occur quickly,

52:58 it was built to be brutally efficient above all else.

53:02 DRS, by design, reintroduces inefficiency in transferring ownership.

53:06 It makes selling your shares more expensive, and it’s slow:

53:10 many transfer agents require you to send important requests by mail.

53:15 Like, with an envelope.

53:17 That makes it a kind of symbolic castration.

53:20 You’re proving your conviction to the cause by hindering your ability to sell.

53:25 It’s community policy to keep your entire stake

53:28 in DRS- if you keep some portion of it

53:30 with your broker it means you’re enabling them to lend

53:33 your shares to short sellers and commit financial terrorism,

53:36 and the only reason you would keep the shares

53:38 with your broker is if you were planning to sell.

53:41 You aren’t thinking of selling, right?

53:44 Having opted into DRS, the shareholder receives mail from the transfer

53:48 agent as evidence of their ownership.

53:50 These letters are regularly paraded on the subreddits,

53:53 posed alongside other sacred objects demonstrating loyalty to the company.

53:57 God, a lot of these have firearms.

54:00 Somewhere within this process, the Ape ascends to the status

54:03 of a “bona fide shareholder.” They hold real shares,

54:06 entirely locked out of the reach of Wall Street.

54:09 So I want you to visualize this.

54:11 You’re hooked on watching the price of GameStop every day.

54:14 Whenever the price goes down, which it does often,

54:17 it’s because Ken Griffin, who orchestrated to kill the squeeze,

54:21 is illegally naked shorting GME in order to suppress the price,

54:25 so every week GME continues to accumulate more and more short interest.

54:30 That means that every day the theoretical

54:32 payout of MOASS gets larger and larger.

54:35 In fact the plausibility of Citadel ever willingly closing,

54:39 ever slowly winding down their position, grows more and more impossible.

54:43 MOASS becomes inevitable.

54:46 Once the conspiracy is unveiled,

54:48 something like 99% of GameStop’s shares will be revealed to be fake at the same

54:53 time it’s revealed that Citadel needs to buy

54:55 back ninety-times GameStop’s value worth of GME.

54:59 The short sellers now need to buy back “real” shares,

55:03 which are exclusively held by Apes.

55:06 This alone would be absurd, but it gets worse.

55:09 Under the “infinity pool” theory, Apes will simply refuse to sell their shares.

55:14 The supply will literally be zero, so the ticker might as well read infinity.

55:18 It’s just supply and demand.

55:20 The plan is to never let the short sellers cover their position,

55:23 and hold them hostage in a basement and drip feed them one share at a time,

55:28 with each Ape making wife-changing money with each sale.

55:31 The purported values are childish and totally arbitrary- ranging

55:35 from 10 to 500 million dollars per share as we’ve seen.

55:38 The limiter on this is naturally, you know, reality.

55:42 Citadel can't pay infinity dollars per share

55:45 nor can they pay 10 million a share.

55:48 But don't worry: Apes have already mapped out how the dominos will fall.

55:52 ““What if the unthinkable happens and more than 60%

55:54 decide to hold GME to at least 7 figures?

55:57 The DTCC can only cover 66- 67 trillion.

56:00 What happens then?” “Then it goes to- then it goes to the Fed, Rog.

56:06 The Fed has to turn on the printer." So

56:08 Citadel will be vaporised the instant the news breaks,

56:11 and their obligations will flow to the central depository itself.

56:15 A central depository has never defaulted before,

56:18 we don’t know for certain what will happen.

56:21 But Apes have done their research and all agree

56:24 that, in the event that the DTCC goes bust,

56:26 the first priority for compensation will be bona fide shareholders,

56:30 to the detriment of all others.

56:33 Like that 67 trillion figure suggests that the DTCC will

56:37 liquidate your dad’s investment portfolio to buy shares in GameStop.

56:42 Once the depository defaults we get something

56:44 resembling global financial collapse- but the US

56:47 government still has an obligation to compensate the redditors for their losses.

56:51 In the pure version of MOASS,

56:53 Apes take up the mantle of God Kings of a whole new economy.

56:57 Their new market would be blockchain-based, trading stock as NFTs,

57:01 forcing short sellers to track down

57:03 and return specific identifiable shares because Apes have

57:06 a collective fantasy about being personally contacted

57:09 by short sellers begging them to sell.

57:12 ‘MOASS realists’ argue instead that the US government,

57:15 faced with this existential crisis, will simply cut a deal with the Apes.

57:20 And whether Apes ought to squeeze the White

57:22 House is a point of contention within the movement.

57:24 So, to sum up.

57:26 MOASS is an infinite money glitch, built on the idea that Wall Street as a whole

57:30 conspires to smother dying companies through naked short sales.

57:34 They do this through exploiting flaws in securities ownership and stock lending,

57:38 to produce “fake shares”.

57:40 GameStop avoided its execution because redditors

57:43 intervened via a coincidence of destiny.

57:46 And that positions GameStop as a catalyst to unravel the greatest

57:50 fraud in history- with a side-effect being that the US government will

57:54 hand the keys to Fort Knox to a bunch of redditors…

57:57 as a down payment for their shares in video game retailer GameStop.

58:02 So, that’s the play.

58:03 All the Apes need to do now is find

58:06 evidence of some fake shares… How hard can that be?

58:10 "Yeah, I’m picking up more GameStop, I’m picking up more Bed Bath& Beyond.

58:14 I’m...

58:14 I'm super excited for Bed Bath& Beyond,

58:17 I’m seeing a lot of bullish sentiment online,

58:19 a lot of good peer reviewed theories, some DD.

58:22 You know, Cohen’s still in this play, Icahn’s in this play,

58:26 we’re going to see some collaboration between those two.

58:29 Icahn through Newell brands buys up Bed Bath& Beyond.

58:32 Spins off Buybuybaby to Cohen, he merges that with Teddy,

58:36 and that forms the foundation of GMErica,

58:38 which lights the fuse on the rocket for GameStop." So,

58:42 how do you prove that fake shares exist?

58:45 The company will tell you how many shares they have issued,

58:47 they will call it the total outstanding share count.

58:50 For example, here’s GameStop’s 10Q

58:54 from June 2021 reporting 71,815,131 outstanding shares.

58:59 But that is the number that is supposed to exist.

59:02 If you think fake shares are being introduced into the system,

59:05 that number is only useful to check your work.

59:08 You have to do a share count.

59:10 True, rigorous investigations of share counts occur so rarely

59:14 that there isn’t really a good comparison to draw from.

59:17 At minimum, it’s a hugely disruptive process that involves

59:21 cooperation from basically every branch of the stock market.

59:25 It’s something GameStop lacks the authority to do themselves,

59:28 and the mere mention of it might foster uh, ‘bearish sentiment’- you know,

59:34 suggesting to investors that their shares may

59:36 be compromised- with no basis for that belief.

59:40 So it shouldn’t be surprising that, to be the best of our knowledge,

59:43 GameStop hasn’t acknowledged any part of the MOASS conspiracy… directly,

59:48 wink wink nudge nudge.

59:50 This means the Apes are on their own to expose the conspiracy from the outside.

59:54 The method Apes first latch onto is via shareholder votes.

59:58 We’ve already seen the issues that can

1:00:00 arise from counting shares directly from the market.

1:00:02 Totally normal business transactions can resemble illusionary shares,

1:00:05 and it’s not possible to work backward to solve for the initial share

1:00:10 count- especially when the number you’re after

1:00:12 contains an unknown amount of fake shares.

1:00:15 When a shareholder loans their share for a short sale,

1:00:18 they are owed a share, they still consider themselves a shareholder,

1:00:21 but they lose access to their voting rights- otherwise you’d

1:00:25 have one share providing two separate votes, if not more.

1:00:29 That gives you a hint of where this is headed.

1:00:32 One share translates to one vote.

1:00:34 So if every shareholder is involved in a vote,

1:00:37 the vote count should total precisely 100% of the outstanding share count.

1:00:42 If the number exceeds 100%,

1:00:44 that has to be the product of naked shorts, phantom shares, or dodgy voting.

1:00:48 Over-voting is a real thing in Corporate governance,

1:00:52 and it's a whole complex topic that neither of us want to endure.

1:00:56 Thankfully the Ape theory is extremely simple.

1:00:59 They aren’t trying to reveal a moderate discrepancy in the share count-

1:01:04 they believe there are dozens of times more shares in circulation than intended,

1:01:08 and that Apes have already bought far, far,

1:01:11 far more than the 72 million “real” shares.

1:01:15 As the phrase goes “Apes already own the float”.

1:01:19 “We know we own the float!” Let’s set the scene here a little.

1:01:22 It’s April/May 2021, MOASS as a theory is still evolving rapidly,

1:01:27 and GameStop has a corporate vote coming up on June 9th.

1:01:31 Apes spend weeks whipping up support for the vote,

1:01:34 promoting it all over Reddit, explaining how to submit your vote to your broker,

1:01:39 and proclaiming it as an opportunity to really,

1:01:41 truly, finally stick it to Wall Street,

1:01:44 expose the criminal naked short attacks on GameStop,

1:01:47 and trigger another squeeze.

1:01:49 This was such a big deal that numerous Apes

1:01:52 travelled to Texas to attend the shareholder meeting in person,

1:01:55 and thousands of Apes tuned in to the influencer live streams that treated

1:01:59 this banal procedural vote with the gravitas of a major political election,

1:02:05 waiting, in suspense, for the results.

1:02:09 [Rensole] "Present– more than majority of all shares.

1:02:12 Confirmed, more than majority." [Atobitt] Um, uh, okay...

1:02:17 [Elle] So they- [Rensole] So there- [Atobitt] So there were more shares!

1:02:20 [Elle] Yes!

1:02:21 They confirmed there are more shares than- [Atobitt] That's 100%!

1:02:24 [Elle] no no no, they confirmed there are

1:02:25 more VOTES than shares [Atobitt] That's what I'm saying, that's more than 100%.

1:02:30 If that's a direct quote, if you have that and that's sourced that's

1:02:33 it Because if we're saying "more than majority",

1:02:36 majority's just 50% [Elle] No no no, it wasn't majority,

1:02:40 they said "more votes than outstanding

1:02:42 shares" [Atobitt] Ooooooh shit, that's huge!

1:02:45 [Atobitt] I'm waiting for that 8-K to come out and say We had hundred percent...

1:02:49 hundreds of percent more than what we expected

1:02:52 I'm literally expecting hundreds of percentage more than...

1:02:54 [Rensole] But then in that aspect ‘more

1:02:57 than a majority’ if it outsatands the float,

1:02:59 it’s still more than a majority, that’s legalese.

1:03:02 [Atobitt] But it was more than a majority last year, too.

1:03:06 [Rensole] Yeah." [Dan] So, it didn’t work,

1:03:08 GameStop didn’t announce that nine times as many

1:03:10 votes were cast as should have even been possible,

1:03:13 they just kinda nodded at the fact that voter turnout was high.

1:03:17 This is actually how DRS entered this story in the first place!

1:03:20 Dr.

1:03:20 Susane Trimbath, or Queen Kong as the Apes nicknamed her, has

1:03:24 been promoting DRS to retail investors for twenty some odd years,

1:03:28 and the utility here is the same as the vote:

1:03:31 since the number of shares that Apes presume exist is some

1:03:35 cartoonish multiple of the actual number it should be trivial to demonstrate,

1:03:39 and unlike the vote this would cut brokers out of the picture entirely.

1:03:43 Thus began an even more intense campaign to DRS GME

1:03:48 and get GameStop to begin reporting the number of direct registered shares.

1:03:53 This, this was a lock.

1:03:56 Apes own the float after all, the crime is so vast that even mediocre

1:04:00 participation will expose some truly unreasonable numbers, 80 million,

1:04:04 90 million, 300 million direct registered shares in a company that only

1:04:10 has 72 million shares to begin with, and then… then comes the reckoning.

1:04:20 [Dan] Yeah, that one didn’t pan out, either.

1:04:24 "Okay, so the headband, maybe I should explain this.

1:04:27 It’s an homage.

1:04:29 Uhh, like...

1:04:31 Really everything that I do is an homage to my hero DFV, or Deep Fucking Value.

1:04:39 And at this point we need to talk about a man named Keith Gill,

1:04:43 an instrumental figure in all of this who those familiar

1:04:45 with the story probably feel has been conspicuously absent up to this point.

1:04:50 This is Keith Gill aka DFV aka Roaring Kitty.

1:04:54 He is simultaneously extremely important to the Ape

1:04:57 movement and utterly inconsequential to our story,

1:05:00 and for that reason it is worth

1:05:03 profiling him in order to illustrate that contradiction.

1:05:07 To some he basically invented meme stocks,

1:05:09 while to others he is merely the mouthpiece

1:05:12 through which MOASS made itself known to the world.

1:05:15 The reality, in contrast, is almost unrecognisable.

1:05:19 In our reality he is a registered securities broker

1:05:22 who was working by day at the insurance broker MassMutual.

1:05:26 In his spare time he streams investment tutorials on YouTube under

1:05:29 the alias Roaring Kitty and posts on Reddit under the handle DeepFuckingValue.

1:05:34 Next slide.

1:05:36 It is 2019 and Keith’s hope is to become something

1:05:39 of an investment influencer based

1:05:41 on his “roaring kitty” investment philosophy which,

1:05:44 as the name suggests, is a small-but-aggressive strategy.

1:05:48 Next slide.

1:05:49 As the working subject for this Keith has a theory,

1:05:52 inspired by a blog post written by Dr.

1:05:55 Michael Burry, that GameStop is under-valued.

1:05:58 The idea is pretty straightforward and honestly rather modest:

1:06:01 GameStop has been trending downwards for several years,

1:06:04 but has historically always seen a significant bump

1:06:06 in value at the start of a new console generation,

1:06:10 and the ninth gen consoles are on the horizon.

1:06:13 Next slide.

1:06:14 While consumer habits are shifting away from malls in general

1:06:17 and aggressively to digital distribution for games in specific,

1:06:21 and while GameStop’s relationship with manufacturers and developers

1:06:24 is no longer what it once was,

1:06:26 Gill’s opinion is the market is overly pessimistic

1:06:29 about how much life is left in physical media.

1:06:32 Long term, his view is that GameStop still has

1:06:35 multiple opportunities to pivot the business to something more forward-looking,

1:06:39 especially if they can expect a significant spike in revenue in the near future.

1:06:44 This is an argument that GameStop is trading at $4 to $8,

1:06:48 he feels it should be trading at $8 to $10,

1:06:51 and has the capability of going reasonably higher

1:06:54 as the ninth gen consoles carry the 2020 holiday season.

1:06:58 [Gill] "That's what I think I think about GameStop.

1:07:00 I think it is, it is at least a double I think it is probably a triple,

1:07:06 but it legit could be a 4 to 5 bagger.

1:07:08 It could be looking out, I don't know looking out six to 18 months or so umm...

1:07:14 Yeah, so that's what I think!

1:07:16 If you disagree with that, that's fine.

1:07:17 I- like I said, I've been wrong about plenty of things in the past." Next slide.

1:07:21 Of course he couldn’t have seen the coronavirus pandemic coming,

1:07:24 and how that would both decimate brick and mortar retail,

1:07:28 with malls getting hit particularly hard,

1:07:30 and stress supply lines for both the retailers and their vendors.

1:07:34 Next slide.

1:07:36 Gill chips away at this thesis for over a year, streaming about it regularly,

1:07:40 posting stream highlights as standalone videos,

1:07:42 and defending and refining the thesis

1:07:44 in discussions with other traders on Reddit,

1:07:46 even as the situation looks ever more dire

1:07:49 for GameStop as the ninth gen console launch is set

1:07:52 to be hammered by problems all the way up

1:07:54 and down the chain from raw materials to shipping stoppages.

1:07:58 Next slide.

1:07:59 However, as the meme stock craze takes root,

1:08:02 and in particular identifies GameStop’s unusually high

1:08:05 short interest as a possible squeeze play,

1:08:08 Keith is already pretty deep in on GameStop and willing to ride it out,

1:08:13 for which he is rewarded pretty handsomely.

1:08:16 Here is Keith on Christmas Day,

1:08:18 2020 discussing GameStop breaking his original optimistic price target of $20.

1:08:24 [Gill] "Hey, what's up everybody?

1:08:25 Cheers!

1:08:26 Happy Friday, happy holidays.

1:08:28 I hope everyone's having a great week.

1:08:30 Surprise!

1:08:31 [laughs] Game stops up about 5x from when

1:08:34 I uploaded those videos over the summer, so that's great to see.

1:08:37 When you have a thesis and by and large it unfolds as you hope that it could.

1:08:42 Um, that's nice, so it shouldn't be taken for granted.

1:08:44 It doesn't always happen, so that's great.

1:08:47 And yeah, it's just to clear up some potential misconceptions.

1:08:51 This was a true YOLO for me.

1:08:54 [laughs] When I was building this position last year,

1:08:57 we had nowhere close to a million dollars.

1:08:59 I certainly do not drive a Lambo.

1:09:01 We rent this house that you see, so it's been a wild ride for us as a family.

1:09:07 And, um, I- And it has been just so much fun

1:09:11 to experience that with you over the past couple of months.

1:09:14 I hope you had some fun as well, and maybe if you even picked up on some

1:09:19 educational elements along the way, all the better.

1:09:21 But it has brought me tremendous joy to just share in this what

1:09:24 has turned out to be a bit of a case study,

1:09:27 right, as some of us feel, and it has brought me tremendous joy.

1:09:30 And if you have had a good time as well, that makes me feel great.

1:09:34 Next slide.

1:09:35 When all was said and done at the end of January

1:09:37 Keith quit his job and took home an estimated $25 million,

1:09:41 for which Maxine Waters hauled his ass in front of congress

1:09:45 to answer some questions about what the hell happened and if,

1:09:48 you know, he maybe did a bit of a pump and dump.

1:09:52 Next slide.

1:09:53 Keith, accurately in my opinion,

1:09:55 insisted that while he was a higher profile member of the wave

1:09:59 he was ultimately just another member

1:10:02 of a decentralised movement and, demonstrably,

1:10:04 had been personally advocating GameStop as a potential

1:10:08 profitable move for well over a year.

1:10:11 [Gill] “I also want to say that I support retail

1:10:14 investors’ right to invest in what they want when they want.

1:10:17 I support the right of individuals to send a message based on how they invest.

1:10:22 As for me, I like the stock.

1:10:25 I’m as bullish as I’ve ever been on a potential turnaround for GameStop,

1:10:28 and I remain invested in the company.

1:10:30 Thank you.

1:10:32 Cheers everyone.

1:10:33 Next slide.

1:10:34 Apes read literally all of this as coded messaging.

1:10:38 “I like the stock” became a shibboleth

1:10:41 to signal commitment to the cause of MOASS.

1:10:44 Next slide.

1:10:45 Gill read the room and wisely peaced out.

1:10:48 While he continued to participate in the scene at an arm’s length,

1:10:52 tweeting vague nonsense mostly in the form of movie clips,

1:10:55 the length of that arm grew longer

1:10:57 and longer as Apes grew increasingly disconnected from reality.

1:11:01 Realizing that he was being elected to the role of cult leader,

1:11:05 that anything he said,

1:11:06 any company he commented on, would be baked and decoded as directions

1:11:10 for the Apes to take action on, and that such a position

1:11:14 posed a substantial threat to both his newfound wealth and his personal

1:11:17 safety should he fall afoul of either the SEC or the Apes themselves,

1:11:22 in late June of 2021 he unplugged his social

1:11:25 media entirely and disappeared from the public eye.

1:11:28 Next slide.

1:11:30 Gill has been retroactively recruited into every

1:11:32 twist and turn in the evolving Ape lore.

1:11:35 Everything that Apes convinced themselves about naked shorts, married puts,

1:11:40 the importance of failures-to-deliver, the need to DRS,

1:11:44 has been imposed on Gill in-absentia.

1:11:47 Here, for example, is a post from 2023,

1:11:50 just shy of two full years after Keith’s last public post,

1:11:54 that outright advocates for conspiratorial baking,

1:11:57 “refine your tinfoil until it’s pure gold”,

1:12:01 and assumes absolute homogeneity between Keith’s thesis and their own,

1:12:07 which is to say that this poster believes DFV believes what they believe.

1:12:14 Next slide.

1:12:15 The poster signs off, of course, with “follow the white rabbit.” Next slide

1:12:21 Although he almost certainly sold most if not

1:12:23 all of his stake in GameStop and rode

1:12:26 off into early retirement to raise his family,

1:12:28 Apes remain convinced that he’s still out there hodling to this day,

1:12:32 cheering them on from afar,

1:12:35 if not guiding them from the shadows via Reddit awards.

1:12:41 [Interviewer, from behind camera] “Can you verify that that’s a thing?” “Like,

1:12:46 can I prove that- can I prove...

1:12:48 that DRS works?" [Interviewer] “Yeah.” “Well,

1:12:50 I mean, DRS has never been disproven.

1:12:52 We just gotta, y'know,

1:12:53 we just gotta trust the plan.” One of the things that gets litigated

1:12:57 repeatedly in all this mess is the definition of what makes a meme stock.

1:13:02 I’ve actually got a conspiracy-laden email in my inbox that hinges off this.

1:13:07 [Narrator] "In January 2021,

1:13:09 there was no such thing as a 'meme stock.' Despite the SEC itself putting out

1:13:14 a report (where they directly state that price

1:13:17 movement was not related to shorts closing),

1:13:19 there continues to be no definition of what a 'meme stock' really is.

1:13:24 However, examples of meme securities apparently include GME, AMC, and BBBY.

1:13:33 The term 'meme stock' in reference to GME seems like a tactical

1:13:37 decision to deride GME investors without directly singling out a single company,

1:13:42 ostensibly in order to avoid bringing more attention to the company

1:13:46 whose success is immediately threatening

1:13:48 to financial institutions." [Dan] On one

1:13:50 hand “meme stock” is basically the new name for stocks

1:13:53 that behave like penny stocks even if they aren’t penny stocks,

1:13:56 which is useful to a degree, and on the other hand is an attempt

1:14:01 at identifying the 'why' of meme stocks via a definition.

1:14:06 Bed Bath and Beyond, in an April 2023 court filing,

1:14:09 list a couple characteristics of a meme stock

1:14:11 and why they felt it applied to them.

1:14:13 The two characteristics that they identify are

1:14:16 a general narrative of an imperilled company, and nostalgia value.

1:14:20 That’s kinda a workable definition,

1:14:21 but to cut through the noise part of the problem

1:14:25 with trying to pin down what a meme stock is, is that it’s changed.

1:14:29 A meme stock in 2023 isn’t the same substance as a meme stock in 2021.

1:14:36 The original meme stocks in the fall of 2020,

1:14:40 AMC, Nokia, GameStop, Blackberry, are defined by a gleeful contrarianism.

1:14:45 It’s not that there’s a narrative of a company in trouble,

1:14:48 though that is present in some cases,

1:14:49 and it’s not the nostalgia value, though that’s also somewhat present, too.

1:14:54 Those were not the leading motives;

1:14:57 what makes a meme stock is that aggressively,

1:15:01 publicly buying stock in a failing company past its relevance...

1:15:05 is funny.

1:15:07 The thing that truly separates a meme stock from every other garbage ticker

1:15:10 is that the act of buying in and of itself becomes the meme,

1:15:15 a combination of absurdist performance and inherently gamified exercise.

1:15:20 In 2023, though, that wave has crested and broken,

1:15:23 the joke is over, but the investors are still around,

1:15:27 and, as we’ll see, the gleeful contrarianism is gone,

1:15:31 replaced with stone-faced dedication to a perceived cause.

1:15:36 So what is a meme stock?

1:15:39 It’s a stock whose play rests entirely

1:15:41 on a concocted narrative of a storied American

1:15:43 company under assault that serves as a proxy

1:15:46 battleground for the fate of the American economy,

1:15:49 the vessel through which the true believers will manifest

1:15:52 their apocalypse and rebirth the world into a golden age.

1:15:56 It is a stock that is a candidate for MOASS.

1:15:59 While any stock with a high short interest potentially meets this criteria,

1:16:03 ultimately three businesses would rise to the top

1:16:06 to become the canon meme stocks:

1:16:08 GameStop, AMC Theatres, and Bed Bath and Beyond.

1:16:12 Now, companies tend to have high short interest because they’re in bad shape:

1:16:17 declining market share, lacklustre product,

1:16:19 poor reputation, loaded with debt, and, probably the number one reason,

1:16:23 they’re unprofitable and not making money.

1:16:26 So it’s important to note that the self-selection process here,

1:16:30 the thought process created by the theory of MOASS,

1:16:34 is going to intrinsically lead Apes to invest in bad companies.

1:16:38 “Yeah, so I’ve thought about putting one of these together,

1:16:41 I’ve thought about writing a DD.

1:16:43 I mean, like, check out all of these awards that you get.

1:16:46 It’s pretty long, y'know, but that’s good, right?

1:16:49 Like, the longer it is the more due the diligence.” Following the vote,

1:16:53 the Apes were faced with their own fork in the road.

1:16:56 Either they accept the results of their own test,

1:16:59 and acknowledge the prospect that they made a mistake,

1:17:02 or they preheat the oven and prepare

1:17:04 to bake justifications for why the overvote didn’t occur.

1:17:07 You don’t need to be told which way they went.

1:17:10 After the June 2021 shareholder meeting there was a seismic shift

1:17:14 in the tone of Superstonk- the goalposts shifted and damage control was engaged.

1:17:19 Immediately it began to circulate that an overvote

1:17:22 was never going to be unveiled by the meeting,

1:17:25 and it was in fact foolish to expect it to.

1:17:28 Conspiracy theories formed to explain the lack

1:17:30 of evidence of the conspiracy theory.

1:17:32 Some Apes were prevented from voting,

1:17:34 brokers normalized their vote counts before providing them to GameStop.

1:17:38 GameStop isn’t allowed to admit the overvote occurred.

1:17:42 Whatever explains away the negative test result.

1:17:45 The previous months of research became shockingly malleable,

1:17:48 being rewritten the instant it produced an unfavourable result.

1:17:52 And within a few months history had just been straight up rewritten.

1:17:56 The experiment did demonstrate the overvote, but nothing came of it.

1:18:01 This is Ape “research”, and it’s worth an examination in its own right.

1:18:06 Due diligence is the process of gathering a folio

1:18:08 of data on a potential investment that explores the whole package:

1:18:12 the company’s financials, the state of their competition,

1:18:15 likely technological or societal changes in the near future that could

1:18:19 impact the course of the company for better or worse,

1:18:23 how many people on the planet even theoretically want their product,

1:18:27 it can get as intense as hiring someone to drive out

1:18:31 into the woods just to make sure a mine actually exists.

1:18:35 Because this is a real thing that real investors do with a very

1:18:39 fancy sounding name it quickly became an entire genre of post on Ape forums.

1:18:44 There is a delicate line for us to walk here.

1:18:47 Learning and collaboration are… good.

1:18:50 I would love to stand here and tell you that Apes came

1:18:53 together and taught themselves how to invest and better each other’s lives.

1:18:57 It’s a great story, indeed that’s how the Apes tell it.

1:19:00 But this is not that, this is something very different.

1:19:05 Making money on the stock market isn’t ‘difficult’- a fish can do it,

1:19:10 no one going long on biotech has a plan.

1:19:13 But Apes don’t want portfolios that outperform the market,

1:19:17 they want to manufacture events that cripple

1:19:20 financial institutions while flipping off regulators.

1:19:23 Ape Due Diligence, or DD for short, is uh, rough.

1:19:29 It is mythology cloaked in the veil of research.

1:19:32 At the base layer the first generation of Apes

1:19:35 ave self-selected as victims of a pump and dump.

1:19:37 It’s a bad starting point, because these people have demonstrated a lack

1:19:41 of familiarity with the subject matter and poor judgement.

1:19:45 Like a lot of victims of stock scams, many of them were denied a good education,

1:19:49 and many have a poor grasp of English.

1:19:52 As a collective group they were weaned on Keith Gill’s YouTube channel,

1:19:56 daily discussion threads on WallStreetBets and very simple rhetorical signals.

1:20:00 That’s the kind of material they’re trained to take in, and they

1:20:04 still largely took it in by declaring “I’m just a smooth brained ape,

1:20:07 can someone with a few wrinkles explain if my tits

1:20:10 should be jacked?” Rhetoric and the broad strokes are what matter.

1:20:14 You need to understand that shorts never closed,

1:20:16 you gotta book rather than plan,

1:20:18 and you need to hate Ken Griffin with every atom of your being.

1:20:21 But paradoxically, Apes sincerely believe

1:20:23 they are collectively the Michael Burry

1:20:25 in a sequel to the Big Short that has yet to be written.

1:20:29 So while the details are irrelevant,

1:20:31 they are driven to not just research, but produce their own original research.

1:20:36 The majority of this early ‘seminal DD’ was written by Apes

1:20:40 who joined the community well after January- many being verifiable bagholders.

1:20:46 People who would be writing essays on securities

1:20:49 fraud within two weeks of making their first trade.

1:20:52 We know this because the authors will just flat out say it- posts

1:20:57 will often open with a short summary of why the author shouldn’t be trusted.

1:21:02 They will often admit that they

1:21:04 barely understand the documents they’re paraphrasing,

1:21:07 but have attempted it anyway for the benefit of the community.

1:21:10 The pitfalls are obvious.

1:21:13 Like your standard breed of crackpot,

1:21:16 Apes are educating themselves to specifically solve a big problem.

1:21:20 They are pursuing their chicken tenders.

1:21:23 When they skipped the first 3 textbooks on Finance

1:21:26 and went straight to short squeezing Melvin Capital,

1:21:29 they skipped over some fundamentals.

1:21:30 But you won’t find Ken Griffin’s secret strategy

1:21:33 in an open access course on risk management.

1:21:36 Rather than backtrack, Apes forged ahead into increasingly complex

1:21:40 and obtuse material looking for “the truth”.

1:21:43 Like, some of the crap we had to read.

1:21:46 “Furthermore the lender is being asked

1:21:48 to accept a new type of security interest, not the simple pledge,

1:21:52 but one which perforce has to be a security interest in intangible property.

1:21:57 The history of developing new security interests in purely intangible property

1:22:01 is one that might give pause to even that rara avis,

1:22:05 the adventuresome lender.” When dealing with documents this intense,

1:22:09 written by and for professionals,

1:22:11 the only way a layman can deal with it is through decoding techniques.

1:22:16 You pull out a fragment of a lecture or thesis that you

1:22:19 can make sense of and treat it as the diamond in the rough.

1:22:23 The rest is interpreted through speculation rippling out from that fragment.

1:22:27 It’s a very unsound way to approach research-

1:22:31 and these people then immediately present to the class.

1:22:35 Analogy is a favourite of the Ape Author.

1:22:38 Analogy in academia is used to bolster the substance- but since

1:22:42 the Apes were introduced to these ideas through the Big Short,

1:22:46 analogies are load-bearing.

1:22:48 Essentially using the same language as Margot Robbie,

1:22:51 but you’re expected to act on it.

1:22:53 It’s not just lightly-informative entertainment, it is in fact financial advice.

1:22:59 [Narrator] "If the rocket is launched without preparation

1:23:01 it will bring down the whole fucking base.

1:23:03 While the small explosives are going off and smaller players are going under,

1:23:07 GME will have a lot more volatility.

1:23:09 The powers that be will try to dampen that volatility as much

1:23:12 as possible since even a small ignition could set this bitch off.

1:23:16 I believe the plan is to do controlled detonations until GME is the only

1:23:21 explosive left to set off." ComputerShare works a bit like a heat lamp,

1:23:25 and what that actually means is an exercise for the reader.

1:23:29 Their thought process is so shamefully reverse engineered that they need to make

1:23:33 a joke out of the confirmation bias

1:23:35 just to guard against that very real criticism.

1:23:38 An unbelievable amount of the primary sources for the mechanics of clearing

1:23:42 and settlement come from random emails to the SEC from 2003.

1:23:48 Like, even if you presume that material is

1:23:51 accurate- consider all the obvious ways that a public

1:23:56 comment on an upcoming piece of legislation could be

1:24:00 unreliable twenty years after the legislation has been introduced.

1:24:05 That is how you get the Apes frothing over long-retired systems.

1:24:09 They jumped in a time machine from the 2020s back

1:24:12 to 2004 when we had the last hysteria about naked short selling,

1:24:16 which itself was built off a half-baked

1:24:20 understanding of the subject from the 80s.

1:24:22 This leaves… gaps.

1:24:25 The result of all of this is a truly specular rate of generational decay

1:24:30 in the Ape’s collective understanding of the thing

1:24:33 they have devoted their lives to understanding.

1:24:36 Despite becoming an increasingly ambitious ploy,

1:24:38 MOASS devolved into an incredibly simple scheme in just a few weeks.

1:24:43 You just buy GameStop shares and hold until MOASS-

1:24:48 and the infinity pool will ensure you become a gorillionaire.

1:24:51 Ape DD can only function to reproduce existing ideas,

1:24:55 or to develop new mythology in reaction to new issues.

1:24:59 Even the papers that look like they’re doing

1:25:01 the math boil down to ‘buy and hold’.

1:25:04 It's bad practice to cite a date or price for the MOASS,

1:25:07 so the only accepted values are 'soon' and 'infinite'.

1:25:12 And all of this is regulated by the mechanism of social media.

1:25:16 Some of this may be evoking memories of QAnon,

1:25:18 and while the overlap between the two movements is non-trivial,

1:25:21 for the most part it is simply that as a social media driven phenomenon,

1:25:26 its ideas are shaped by populism and Reddit’s algorithm.

1:25:31 DD that the community approves of is

1:25:33 showered with Reddit awards, praise, and clout,

1:25:36 so there’s an incentive, emotional and in some cases monetary,

1:25:41 to, you know, have more DD.

1:25:43 Atobitt was a late-arrival to the squeeze,

1:25:46 the account’s first post was on the 10th of March,

1:25:49 and by the 14th he posted his first amateur securities fraud essay.

1:25:53 By April 22 he posted the first in a series called “House of Cards”

1:25:58 that Apes pumped to the point that it was temporarily the top post on Reddit.

1:26:04 And naturally it is almost entirely gawking at emails from 2003.

1:26:09 Atobitt was conferred a level of status that would see him named

1:26:13 alongside the Queen Kong herself

1:26:15 as among the movements most prestigious thinkers.

1:26:18 He became something of an influencer,

1:26:20 complete with his own perpetually unfinished magnum opus,

1:26:24 which tragically we will never get.

1:26:26 He didn’t acquire this reputation through good work,

1:26:29 he did that by giving the Apes what they wanted.

1:26:33 For DD to be accepted, it needs to be simple.

1:26:36 It can be long, but the whole thing

1:26:39 needs to be fully summarised in 100 words, max.

1:26:42 Because the most important thing is that it

1:26:45 needs to reinforce the existing belief system- and no

1:26:48 one will read your DD if you don’t tell them you agree with them at the outset.

1:26:54 All of this is enforced through the upvote button.

1:26:57 DD that meets the community's criteria gets elevated, DD that muddies the water,

1:27:01 or worse, spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is aggressively suppressed.

1:27:07 Regardless of the rigour of any individual essay, this is academia via populism.

1:27:13 It is the ideal circumstances for critical thought to be suspended.

1:27:17 The Apes get to pick and choose what facts shape their thesis- and in doing so,

1:27:23 they create mythology.

1:27:24 This is why the MOASS theory can stand tall on a foundation of sand and vapour.

1:27:29 The actual mechanics are interchangeable.

1:27:32 Initially they misunderstood how 140% short interest could occur,

1:27:35 that led them to the Stock Borrow Program,

1:27:38 and while it proved their original theory wrong,

1:27:41 it gave them a better alternative.

1:27:43 So even though the stock borrow program is baked into the core thesis,

1:27:47 it doesn’t matter- they can substitute it with half a dozen different things.

1:27:52 The failure of the overvote just proves how rigged the system truly is.

1:27:56 Each theory is just a stepping stone to the next.

1:27:59 They can never be proven wrong if they never

1:28:02 sit still long enough for someone to debunk them.

1:28:05 Real due diligence is as much an argument to stay away

1:28:08 from an investment as it is an argument to buy in.

1:28:11 Good due diligence will argue the worst case scenario,

1:28:14 what if things go completely wrong,

1:28:17 what if a new product just sucks ass and no one wants it,

1:28:20 can the company weather bad news or will it fold in half?

1:28:24 Ape DD exists to keep MOASS alive.

1:28:28 As time went on, decoding became a more and more explicit form of DD.

1:28:33 This started innocently enough initially.

1:28:36 Keith Gill, Ryan Cohen and Michael Burry were subtweeting Apes very explicitly.

1:28:42 Whether it was Ryan Cohen’s official

1:28:44 statements thanking retail investors for their support,

1:28:46 or Gill communicating with Apes through gifs-

1:28:49 these were thinly veiled messages to Apes, but they weren’t substantive.

1:28:54 There was not a deep meaning to Ryan Cohen tweeting

1:28:57 a fist emoji or reposting an Ape meme about himself.

1:29:02 But this normalised the idea that these figures

1:29:05 communicated with Apes through secret messages.

1:29:08 And since these guys were never available to clarify or disprove theories,

1:29:12 it cultivated decoding techniques that grew more and more… ambitious.

1:29:18 [Narrator 1] “DFV Roaring Kitty tweet Deciphered!!

1:29:22 1627 has to do with Naked Shorting Options Derivative cases,

1:29:27 which ties directly in which SEC rule 10b-21”

1:29:32 [Narrator 2] “Can you explain the connection just so

1:29:34 my dumb ass can follow?” [Narrator 3] “All I

1:29:36 am coming up with is a couple of legal cases,

1:29:38 beyond that, I dunno.” [Narrator 4]“Are we saying this painting is from 1627?"

1:29:42 [Narrator 5] “This painting is from a Wes Anderson movie.” [Narrator 4]

1:29:46 “But the roman numeral on the right side is for 1627.” [Narrator

1:29:49 6] “How’s that tied to naked shorting?" [Narrator 7] “GME, Rick and Morty.

1:29:53 How the show might be hinting at us about the financial

1:29:56 system and the collapse of Citadel via their own greed.

1:29:58 This is how the 1% sees us!” [Narrator 8] “Candidly

1:30:02 I’ve seen no evidence so-called fake or synthetic shares exist.

1:30:07 But many of you disagree…” [Narrator 9] “I love it.

1:30:10 Basically saying, “Who am I to say the hedge

1:30:13 funds are creating shares out of thin air?

1:30:15 I guess we’ll just pull back the curtain to see.” [Narrator

1:30:18 10] “Adam Aron saying there’s no evidence of synthetics is actually genius.

1:30:23 Just think about it, when he does pounce,

1:30:25 they can't go after him for market manipulation.

1:30:28 Because he’ll have evidence of the exact

1:30:31 opposite…” [Narrator 11] “To a person with autism, words mean something.

1:30:36 Every word does.

1:30:37 Every symbol....

1:30:38 every unwritten, suggestive wink or nudge.

1:30:41 We're really good at giving clues and seeing

1:30:44 deeper meaning (I say we because I have asperger's).

1:30:47 We notice patterns and algorithms that normal people don't.

1:30:51 And cryptic language is often our bread and butter.

1:30:55 Yes, DFV, MJBurry, even Papa Cohen are

1:30:58 communicating with apes the only way they can...

1:31:02 through cryptic means.

1:31:05 And their messages are important.

1:31:07 Remember...

1:31:09 every word means something to an autist.” No surprise that by June,

1:31:13 Keith Gill stopped tweeting all together.

1:31:16 It got to the point where AMC CEO Adam

1:31:19 Aron dropped his phone and tweeted out a single “M”,

1:31:22 and Apes became fixated on decoding it.

1:31:25 Despite Aron’s efforts to dispel the fervour,

1:31:27 Aron’s statements just fed into the idea that the M was significant.

1:31:33 [Narrator] “Yesterday I tweeted an “M” by mistake,

1:31:35 but many of you thought I was being less than candid in the denial,

1:31:40 and that the M must have meant something.

1:31:42 Nope, just a tweeting error.

1:31:44 But today I am tweeting this, and it does mean something:

1:31:49 “Y”” [Narrator 2] “Question for the tin-foils:

1:31:52 why did he leave that much space (what is it,

1:31:56 10?) between text and "Y"?” [Narrator 3] “I think it’s 11.

1:32:00 Can’t figure it out.”[ Dan] Ryan Cohen, the chairman of the board of GameStop,

1:32:05 took one photo with notorious corporate raider Carl Icahn,

1:32:08 the guy Oliver Stone based Gordon “greed is good” Gekko off of in 1987,

1:32:13 which immediately cast Icahn as a saviour figure in dozens and dozens of DDs.

1:32:20 As conspiratorial techniques like this became more

1:32:23 popular and more dominant on these boards,

1:32:25 the line between ‘vetted DD’ and ‘speculation’ began to blur.

1:32:30 Now, the “solid AF DD” was already often built

1:32:33 on the same foundation of sand as outright speculation,

1:32:36 but there was a clear shift over time.

1:32:40 After the failed shareholder vote,

1:32:42 naturally more and more radical explanations were required.

1:32:46 All of these exist to answer the same question:

1:32:49 where’s the evidence of the fake shares?

1:32:52 Why aren’t we seeing the answer we expect to see?

1:32:56 The answer is almost always that the debt or shares

1:32:58 were shifted into some new form previously unknown to Apes.

1:33:02 Since the Ape understanding of the market is rooted very

1:33:05 firmly in the realm of googling “wrinkle brain explains short squeeze”,

1:33:10 that is most things.

1:33:12 So we start to see more and more out-there instruments being introduced,

1:33:16 they start talking about dark pools, options,

1:33:18 ETFs and so on, folding that material into a more

1:33:21 and more pure thesis based on the naked short conspiracy.

1:33:25 Maintaining a stable community built entirely out of conspiracy,

1:33:29 insecurity, and resentment is tricky.

1:33:32 To get them through this Apes police sentiment like few others.

1:33:36 Even crypto, a product wholly at the mercy of sentiment,

1:33:40 is more tolerant of bad news than Apes because they

1:33:44 are nominally willing to engage with reality as it exists.

1:33:48 They’ll spin bad news like the collapse of FTX

1:33:51 as good for the ecosystem as a whole,

1:33:54 pretending that it’s culling out bad actors,

1:33:57 but they don’t deny that FTX has gone sour.

1:34:00 Since MOASS is basically a fantasy

1:34:03 untethered from any real business fundamentals,

1:34:05 the reasons to not buy in get longer and longer as time goes on, and so

1:34:11 the restrictions on what is and isn’t permissible

1:34:14 to talk about also grow longer and longer.

1:34:17 MOASS is, when you break it down,

1:34:20 market manipulation via the prisoner’s dilemma.

1:34:23 The big, theoretical payout only works if literally everyone holds the line,

1:34:29 but simultaneously everyone involved has both the personal

1:34:33 incentive and ample opportunity to screw over the others,

1:34:36 and knows that everyone else has that same opportunity.

1:34:41 It is a philosophy that demands extremely strict orthodoxy.

1:34:45 You buy and you hold.

1:34:47 Discussing exit strategy is derided as “price anchoring.” Remember,

1:34:51 the gains are not theoretically infinite, they are literally infinite.

1:34:57 This leads directly to unhinged memes about

1:35:00 Apes becoming “gorillionaires” from selling one single share.

1:35:03 It leads to stories about the post-MOASS world where Apes

1:35:07 don’t actually need to sell any shares at all ever,

1:35:10 they just live off the dividends from GameStop for the rest of their lives,

1:35:14 and for the lives of their children, and their children’s children,

1:35:18 a future where one, single share confers wife-changing generational wealth.

1:35:22 Sharp eared listeners may have noticed that I said “dividend” in there,

1:35:25 and they may be asking the logical follow up question:

1:35:28 “where does the money for these dividends come from?” Don’t worry about it.

1:35:32 In fact, why are you so concerned with what other people do with their money?

1:35:35 Are you just here to spread FUD and undermine GME?

1:35:36 [voice changes to sound robtic and evil] I’m just an individual

1:35:39 investor who likes the stock and the company that is debt-free

1:35:42 and cash-flow-positive backed by an unprecedented

1:35:44 movement from shareholders to direct

1:35:46 register their shares in order to combat corruption in the DTCC.

1:35:50 FUD is literally anything that casts any amount

1:35:53 of doubt on any part of the plan.

1:35:56 “I don’t believe that GME will be worth an unlimited amount of money per share,

1:36:00 that doesn’t seem possible.” FUD!

1:36:03 “Why wouldn’t the price peak and then come back down?” FUD!

1:36:07 “I should probably set an exit threshold because I’m

1:36:09 pretty sure other people are going to be selling,

1:36:12 too, and I don’t want to miss the opportunity-” FUD!

1:36:15 “No, but for real, where does

1:36:16 the money for these dividends come from?” F-F-F-FUD!

1:36:19 Direct registration mutated extremely quickly from an attempt

1:36:22 at proving the existence of concrete crimes with objective numbers,

1:36:27 a thing it failed to do, into a loyalty ritual,

1:36:31 a spell that if executed correctly would create

1:36:34 the conditions that would allow MOASS to happen.

1:36:38 A specific quirk of the narrative of MOASS,

1:36:40 the idea that the Apes are engaged in a phantom war with the short hedge funds,

1:36:46 leads to various delusional, but logically consistent outcomes,

1:36:50 like the belief that anyone who is not on board

1:36:53 with the play is a hired agent of the opposition.

1:36:56 The rubberneckers mocking Apes on r/GME_meltdown aren’t merely trolls,

1:37:01 contrarians, or naysayers, but hired “shills” planted in Ape communities

1:37:05 as part of an elaborate psyops to undermine

1:37:08 them and convince them to sell their shares so that the shorts can cover,

1:37:11 which is of course predicated on the belief

1:37:14 that there’s no real shares available,

1:37:15 which is predicated on the belief that there’s

1:37:18 some truly unfathomable amount of undetectable naked shorts,

1:37:21 which et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

1:37:23 This is a clever word inversion.

1:37:26 An actual shill is someone who stands off to the side

1:37:28 of a grift and acts as an unrelated hype man.

1:37:31 They posture as just a random independent passerby while actually having

1:37:36 an undisclosed interest in the thing that they are helping to sell.

1:37:39 A shill wants you to buy something.

1:37:42 Naturally, SuperStonk and the other derivative

1:37:45 forums are deeply infested with shills

1:37:47 literally telling people to buy and promoting the virtue of never,

1:37:51 ever selling for any reason, ever.

1:37:53 Here’s a DD post literally structured for recruitment from Reddit’s front page.

1:37:58 The reason the DD posts have so many awards is because

1:38:01 Apes believed they could abuse the system to shill GME to r/All.

1:38:06 They’re not coordinating, though.

1:38:09 They’re all just individual investors coming to their own

1:38:12 conclusions about what to do with their Reddit awards.

1:38:15 In light of the community being 98% shilling by volume,

1:38:19 it became culturally expedient to re-define the word so

1:38:22 that all the shills would stop being accurately called shills.

1:38:27 So in Ape circles a “shill” is any unbeliever.

1:38:31 Predictably this arrangement where anyone who isn’t frothingly

1:38:34 committed to the cause is a hired shill fosters

1:38:37 an air of paranoia and has a rather

1:38:40 extreme chilling effect on the idea of, you know,

1:38:44 asking very reasonable questions that would be

1:38:47 extremely normal in any other investment forum.

1:38:50 This paranoia extends to policing maintenance of the illusion

1:38:53 that this is all just an organic, uncoordinated series of individual decisions.

1:38:59 “Everyone’s like ‘I wanna make a lot of money let

1:39:01 me do a bunch of research’ And they're like 'aye,

1:39:03 here’s what I found out' and everyone's like ‘yeah me

1:39:04 too’ yeah me too yeah me too yeah me too', and then like we realise oh crap,

1:39:09 all of our predictions we made

1:39:10 as a group… individually then as a group confirmed

1:39:13 and vetted and picked apart and the best

1:39:16 rose to top and that’s how you get research,

1:39:21 it’s like the perfect experiment…” This both

1:39:25 feeds the narrative that their behaviour

1:39:27 is not a “mass hypnosis” but is instead the product of genuine rigour.

1:39:31 And this has the added bonus of providing

1:39:34 a basis to deter accusations of market manipulation.

1:39:37 Now, while it’s true that it’s unlikely that we’ll see a RICO filed

1:39:41 with 20,000 John Doe defendants- Apes seem

1:39:43 aware that they're playing close to the fire.

1:39:46 They are looking to collectively engineer an artificial price movement which

1:39:51 would absolutely get you in trouble if you did it solo,

1:39:55 so they lean into the decentralised nature

1:39:57 of the movement as best they can, and it’s...

1:40:01 it’s very funny.

1:40:02 [Narrator] “Edit 2: Removed some “we”s etc

1:40:05 from my exit strategy after concerns were raised

1:40:08 that phrasing my exit strategy like I originally

1:40:11 did might be construed as attempted market manipulation.

1:40:14 In the end, anyone reading this is just an individual ape doing whatever

1:40:17 they want with their own money.” Users

1:40:19 will incant “this is not financial advice”

1:40:21 and “I just like the stock” with the same energy as “no copyright infringement

1:40:27 intended” in the description of a complete

1:40:29 upload of Dances With Wolves to YouTube.

1:40:32 “This is not financial advice, not legal advice.

1:40:34 For entertainment and educational purposes only.

1:40:35 Anything I say is my opinion,

1:40:37 please don't make annny financial decision based on anything I

1:40:39 say in these videos that being said hit the like button,

1:40:41 subscribe button, all that the YouTube algorithm stuff so you get

1:40:43 the vids when I put ‘em out… See what I'm thinking,

1:40:45 see me analyze that data, but like I tell every day,

1:40:47 the data they release to us is false, so they can force negative markets so we

1:40:51 can make bad trades..." “So the point is,

1:40:53 GameStop is operating smarter than ever before.

1:40:55 And that’s what people just don’t understand yet,

1:40:58 that's- the public eye just doesn't see

1:41:00 and it’s because of all the mainstream media

1:41:02 FUD- and that’s just why I think the Mother of All Short Squeezes is inevitable.

1:41:06 Of course, this is just my opinion.

1:41:08 You literally should take my opinion with a grain of salt.

1:41:11 I’m telling you a stock is gonna go way up because a lot

1:41:14 of people like it- and I am just a guy on the internet,

1:41:17 why would you believe me?” [Dan] They don’t collude,

1:41:19 instead there’s an abstract “infinity pool” that happens to describe

1:41:23 the abstract notion of shares that will never be sold.

1:41:27 It speaks to their insecurity on whether they’re safe

1:41:29 to be doing this, and that concern is probably well-founded.

1:41:34 Because sure, the US government wrote off the GME squeeze

1:41:37 as a one-off viral event and let everyone off the hook,

1:41:40 but if the Apes get their wish and really do deliberately risk

1:41:44 collapsing the US or global economy after several years of organising- yeah,

1:41:50 I think the US federal government would sooner make that RICO filing

1:41:55 then give u/hoplias literally billions of dollars for his shares in GameStop.

1:42:00 The whole of Ape culture is persuasive in no small

1:42:03 part because of how it plays off existing social anxieties.

1:42:06 We are collectively primed for these narratives

1:42:09 by a complicated soup of messages, a combination of distrust in financial

1:42:15 institutions married with a mythologization

1:42:17 of the stock market and a financial reality of stagnant wages

1:42:21 and greedflation that make it feel like playing the market is

1:42:25 the only possible way to build any kind of wealth or comfort.

1:42:29 And that’s just the stuff that’s rooted in reality.

1:42:32 Ape motivations are ultimately pretty simple.

1:42:35 Their lore is complex, but their reasons are not.

1:42:37 They’re gambling addicts who are starved for social attention.

1:42:40 The whole meme stock ecosystem actually makes a ton

1:42:43 of sense for why it’s as motivating as it is,

1:42:46 since it combines all the addictive highs of gambling

1:42:49 with all the energy of a soap opera.

1:42:51 Every day there’s something new,

1:42:53 there’s the constant drama of the price action ups and downs,

1:42:58 though mostly downs.

1:42:59 If it’s not price action then it’s new theories, new DD, new moderator drama.

1:43:05 It’s very easy to compartmentalize as entertainment,

1:43:08 to forget that what’s at stake is, you know, the family finances.

1:43:14 Money is really easy to abstract away at the best of times,

1:43:18 and it only gets easier when it’s reduced and gamified

1:43:22 and when so much of it is irony-poisoned performance.

1:43:26 Apps like Robinhood have already come under

1:43:28 criticism for their gamification of playing the market,

1:43:31 but even if that weren’t a factor the Apes are more than happy

1:43:35 to gamify things for one another and frame

1:43:37 everything in the language of video games,

1:43:40 the language of boss fights, grinding, and completionism.

1:43:44 That’s already addictive, and it just upgrades to weapons-grade bad times

1:43:48 when combined with conspiratorial mindsets and the attendant narcissism,

1:43:54 paranoia and over-confidence.

1:43:56 Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor at the University of Regina,

1:44:00 in his pre-publication paper Overconfidently Conspiratorial,

1:44:02 argues that the actual defining trait of the conspiratorially

1:44:07 minded isn’t narcissism or a need to feel special,

1:44:11 though those are observably common traits in conspiracy circles,

1:44:15 but excessive over-confidence.

1:44:17 This is anecdotally intuitive to anyone who

1:44:20 has spent significant time in conspiracy circles,

1:44:23 but it is this overconfidence that leads to the refusal to reevaluate beliefs,

1:44:28 the assumption that they accurately

1:44:30 understand complicated systems better than others,

1:44:33 and, this is to me the most interesting claim of the paper,

1:44:37 a counter-intuitive belief that their opinion is, in fact, in the majority.

1:44:42 The entire thing with Apes policing negative

1:44:44 sentiment is actually a pretty good example

1:44:46 of that, in the way that they have an itchy trigger finger for calling anyone,

1:44:51 even long time DD writers,

1:44:52 a paid shill if they say anything negative or disagree with a favoured theory.

1:44:58 In the Ape mind the only possible reason

1:45:01 to express doubt that GameStop is being attacked by short

1:45:04 sellers who are trying to kill the company in order

1:45:07 to prevent MOASS is because you’re being paid to.

1:45:10 The Ape thesis is, to them, so self-evident, so persuasive,

1:45:15 that it’s just common sense, everyone already believes it.

1:45:20 Inevitably this leads to pinnacle echo chamber behaviour:

1:45:23 no one outside the bubble can be trusted, anyone talking about Apes is engaging

1:45:29 in psychological warfare to wear Apes down,

1:45:32 because why else would you care about

1:45:36 Apes or find this interesting or newsworthy?

1:45:39 The inevitable synthesis of this thinking is a warped worldview where companies

1:45:43 no longer go out of business for any reason other than targeted destruction.

1:45:49 Sears, Blockbuster, Toys R Us, hell, Enron,

1:45:52 get retroactively cast as the victims of short sellers.

1:45:56 This is a lens on the world necessary to recast Ape behaviour,

1:46:01 their quest for infinite wealth, not as self-serving greed, but altruism.

1:46:07 Virtue has been a part of the rhetoric since the GameStop squeeze itself.

1:46:11 Investors were engaged to buy and hold to ‘get revenge for 2008’ and ‘finally

1:46:16 let the little guy have his fair share.’ We won’t say that people didn’t

1:46:21 genuinely believe that- but you can imagine

1:46:23 how useful that narrative would be to convince

1:46:26 Apes to hold while you personally divest your entire stake at $400 a share.

1:46:31 The continuing escalation of the antagonism of Wall

1:46:34 Street has fed the Ape’s sense of morality.

1:46:37 They are very much the good guys who

1:46:40 are saving the world by holding shares in GameStop.

1:46:43 But at the same time, they have, you know,

1:46:47 ulterior motives- they want destructive amounts of money.

1:46:51 They do that vile thing where ‘every

1:46:53 share is a tribute’ to certain deceased individuals.

1:46:56 You know, a tribute that involves doing

1:46:58 the thing that they already wanted to do: hold GameStop shares.

1:47:03 Sandwich?

1:47:04 This is a tribute to my grandpa.

1:47:07 Rest in peace, Jack.

1:47:10 This creates fascinating and harrowing conflicts in the Ape mindset.

1:47:14 Some Apes are here just for the money,

1:47:17 and find the activism or philanthropic elements to be cringeworthy.

1:47:21 But in the fiction, they are literally

1:47:23 involved in an invisible war against the most

1:47:26 powerful entities on the planet- and are so

1:47:29 in order to free us from our oppression.

1:47:31 When they take the reins of the economy- they are going to ‘do it right’,

1:47:36 and be just sovereigns.

1:47:38 It’s a full blown saviour complex.

1:47:40 [Narrator] “We will make the world better,

1:47:43 whether it be locally, state-wide, nationally, or globally.

1:47:47 We are here to fix the world that Wall Street and the (bad) Boomers broke!

1:47:52 We will use our tendies for good!

1:47:54 And, perhaps, get a Lambo in the process (or, in my case,

1:48:00 a mother fucking Cybertruck)!!” But at the same time,

1:48:03 they see the immense payout of MOASS

1:48:05 as the reward for the tribulations they have endured,

1:48:08 billions of dollars in remuneration for the disappointed

1:48:11 side eyes they catch at family gatherings.

1:48:13 They resent the fact that no one takes them seriously,

1:48:17 and their philanthropy exists in tension with a very intense urge

1:48:20 to rub all our noses in it when they’re eventually proven right.

1:48:24 Because we all had our chance.

1:48:26 “Beyond the toys you are going to buy, who are you going to help?

1:48:29 That’s what matters.

1:48:31 Because there are plenty of people to help.

1:48:33 Now you can’t help everybody,

1:48:34 you can’t save everybody from working a nine-to-five,

1:48:36 they had their chance, okay?

1:48:38 They coulda got in, they could have done their DD,

1:48:39 they could have done their research- we tried to tell them over dinner,

1:48:42 they didn’t listen- WHATEVER!

1:48:43 They had their chance!

1:48:45 [laugh] Okay.” Because Apes are so disconnected from actual fact,

1:48:48 reality has been happy to deliver

1:48:50 them an endless supply of Great Disappointments,

1:48:53 week after week after week of failed catalysts,

1:48:56 missed hype dates, deconstructed gamma ramps,

1:48:58 and falling stock price as the stock price

1:49:01 of these unprofitable companies continues

1:49:03 to decline from their short-squeeze peaks.

1:49:05 It’s just, it’s kinda really, really funny to watch this mass of people so

1:49:11 deeply convinced that a drop in the value of GameStop

1:49:15 is a direct attack on them when GameStop is

1:49:18 currently valued well above even their most profitable years ever.

1:49:23 As with any other apocalyptic belief placed under cognitive strain,

1:49:28 this leads to aggressive fragmentation.

1:49:30 One group says that DRS is the way,

1:49:33 but Apes just haven’t been doing it properly,

1:49:36 and an argument breaks out about Plan accounts vs Book accounts.

1:49:40 Another group says that Plan vs Book doesn’t matter,

1:49:43 all that matters is Apes need to DRS harder.

1:49:47 Both groups accuse the other of being paid shills employed to distract,

1:49:51 fragment, and mislead the community.

1:49:53 A late game DD theory is the belief in a turnaround play,

1:49:57 that MOASS won’t happen, per se, but Bed, Bath,

1:50:00 and Beyond or GameStop or, hilariously, some speculative merger of the two will

1:50:05 achieve MOASS-like valuations based entirely off strong fundamentals.

1:50:11 “And the MOASS is irrelevant because what GameStop

1:50:13 is building is a great company.” [Dan] GME purists hold to a pure form of MOASS

1:50:19 that’s firmly rooted in spiritual loyalty to GameStop.

1:50:22 Which rapidly turned into a spiritual loyalty...

1:50:25 to Ryan Cohen.

1:50:27 “Yeah, I didn’t- I mean, I didn’t actually buy until March but, you know,

1:50:31 I was reading the DD, then, y'know,

1:50:33 Ryan Cohen, he makes this play into Bed Bath& Beyond

1:50:37 and everybody on the boards just gets like super hype about it.

1:50:40 And, uh, and yeah anything the man touches is gold.

1:50:44 Like, he’s, he’s a kingmaker.

1:50:46 He’s the book king." So, who is Ryan Cohen?

1:50:51 Ryan Cohen is a bored billionaire who fancies himself an activist investor,

1:50:55 and a fixer of failing companies.

1:50:57 He made his money selling the online pet food store Chewy.com to PetsMart

1:51:01 which he founded with a combination of venture capital and daddy’s money.

1:51:04 The official story of Chewy admits

1:51:06 that they didn’t get outside investment until 2013,

1:51:09 but they hired a bunch of executives

1:51:11 from Amazon and PetsMart right out the gate,

1:51:13 and those suckers aren’t cheap, so logical deduction is that, you know,

1:51:17 there was already some money there.

1:51:19 Next slide please.

1:51:20 Ryan Cohen ran Chewy as a tech company,

1:51:22 burning venture capital and running at a loss until

1:51:25 they were bought out for $3.35 billion in 2017.

1:51:29 When the company went public in 2019 the company

1:51:32 disclosed a $268 million dollar loss for fiscal year 2018,

1:51:35 Cohen’s final year as CEO.

1:51:38 Next slide.

1:51:39 In September 2020 as the meme stock wave was gaining

1:51:41 steam he disclosed that he held a 10% stake in GameStop,

1:51:44 believing that the company could be turned around.

1:51:47 Cohen wrote an open letter to the GameStop board in November,

1:51:51 proclaiming his immense faith in GameStop’s potential

1:51:53 if they would only take his advice.

1:51:56 On Thursday December 17th, 2020 he increased his stake to 12.9%.

1:52:02 All three of these events were catalysts for GME.

1:52:04 In August, GameStop was trading below $5,

1:52:06 by the end of the year, it would be around $19.

1:52:10 Next slide please.

1:52:11 An activist investor is an investor who buys

1:52:13 stock off the open market and then throws their weight around and tries to take

1:52:17 an active role in the running of the company,

1:52:19 despite the fact that they didn’t actually give any money to the company.

1:52:22 Next slide.

1:52:23 On January 11th, 2021 it was announced

1:52:26 that Cohen would join GameStop’s board of directors,

1:52:28 and then in April Cohen was made the chairman.

1:52:31 Cohen made bold promises of a transformation

1:52:34 into “the Amazon of gaming.” Next slide, please.

1:52:37 Objectively Ryan Cohen isn’t good at actually

1:52:40 running companies or generating shareholder value.

1:52:42 GameStop’s “turnaround” has resulted in a large amount of capital

1:52:45 wasted on fulfilment centres that were closed shortly thereafter,

1:52:48 a further retraction of the company from their global operations,

1:52:51 and the launch of an NFT marketplace that the company

1:52:54 describes in its 10-K annual report as, quote,

1:52:57 “not material to the consolidated financial

1:53:00 statements for fiscal 2022.” Next slide.

1:53:03 Ryan Cohen’s one material impact on any business he is involved

1:53:06 in as an activist investor is that he is followed by Apes who,

1:53:09 based on his limited role in the January 2021 run,

1:53:12 have elevated him to a messianic role,

1:53:14 believing that he is working “behind the scenes” to engineer MOASS,

1:53:18 and thus follow his investments.

1:53:20 Next slide.

1:53:21 This irrationally passionate fanbase has succeeded in keeping GameStop hovering

1:53:25 at an absurd valuation well above the company’s actual financial performance,

1:53:29 but they’re also highly annoying,

1:53:31 a burden for management to deal with, and a possible threat to employees.

1:53:35 “So what I’m going to do right now is I’m going

1:53:38 to go to this store here and ask if they are hiring.

1:53:42 Let's see what they say.

1:53:44 “That’s Ryan Cohen, uh, Strategy.” [Employee] "Oh yeah." “I like the guy.

1:53:48 I Don't know if you like him, but I like him so much.

1:53:53 You know who I'm talking- [Employee] "Are you- are

1:53:55 you really interested in-" "You know who I'm talking about,

1:53:56 right?" [Employee] "No." "You never heard about Ryan

1:53:59 Cohen?" [Employee] "It rings a- the name rings

1:54:00 a bell..." "If you're working in GameStop that name

1:54:04 should ring every..." [Employee] Uhh, it's too early...

1:54:07 "So right now what I notice is a lot of layoffs

1:54:12 in Bed Bath and Beyond and a lot of recruiting aggressively recruiting people

1:54:18 in GameStop." [Employee] "Yeah." "Most likely there will be a merger between

1:54:23 GameStop and Bed Bath and Beyond.” [Employee] "Woww..." "Into a bigger company.

1:54:29 [Employee] "I don't even know how

1:54:30 that works because GameStop sells games and Bed,

1:54:31 Bath& Beyond...” “The whole- the whole thing is

1:54:34 gonna change” "All right, so that's the plan.

1:54:38 So, GameStop is merging with Bed Bath

1:54:42 and Beyond and Ryan Cohen, he's not joking.

1:54:46 He is not sitting as a chairman in this company,

1:54:51 GameStop, playing with his balls.

1:54:53 No, he's not he's hiring,

1:54:56 aggressively hiring retail people and the merger is coming.

1:55:01 When?

1:55:03 The only one who knows this answer is Ryan

1:55:06 Cohen.” Apes have taken to decoding any and all communication

1:55:10 from Cohen for any “Cohencidences” that they can point

1:55:13 to as indications that he is doing what they claim he is,

1:55:16 because it would be very bad news for Apes if he were,

1:55:20 in fact, just some rich loser who enjoys the attention.

1:55:23 Next slide please.

1:55:25 No one wants to work with him.

1:55:26 Given the poor material performance of GameStop

1:55:29 relative to its inflated share value,

1:55:31 retailers Bed Bath and Beyond and Nordstrom both told him to go

1:55:34 take a hike after he attempted to buy his way into power.

1:55:38 “You know, really, at the end of the day,

1:55:40 the hedge funds, they should have seen this coming.

1:55:41 Like, they targeted gamers.

1:55:43 Y'know, we- we know what it means to just grind

1:55:49 a boss fight and grind reputation in, uh, in a video game.

1:55:57 And, so, like, y;know, locking the float.

1:56:00 Uhhh...

1:56:01 We can grind that out.

1:56:02 We know what that takes.

1:56:03 Uhh...

1:56:04 DRSing everything?

1:56:06 You know, all of it?

1:56:08 Uh...

1:56:08 We- we can do that.” Compared to GameStop and AMC,

1:56:11 companies with products for kids and teens that at least

1:56:14 have some connection to the nostalgia of youth,

1:56:17 Bed Bath and Beyond seems like a curveball, until you realise that the Apes just

1:56:22 followed GameStop’s “saviour” to his next project.

1:56:25 When Cohen first disclosed his stake in Bed Bath,

1:56:28 the resulting Ape frenzy triggered Bed Bath’s largest

1:56:30 intraday percentage price increase since its initial public offering.

1:56:35 Some investors bought in due to uncritical zealotry towards Cohen,

1:56:39 or belief that the Bed Bath play was a MOASS master stroke.

1:56:42 Others believed he would genuinely rescue the company,

1:56:45 while others just wanted to get in early on the next pump and dump.

1:56:49 Whatever the specific reason,

1:56:50 we’re only talking about Bed Bath and Beyond because of Cohen.

1:56:54 Cohen bought into Bed Bath,

1:56:55 because it was a dying company he thought he could save- it’s cut and dry.

1:56:59 Likewise, there is no nuance to Bed Bath’s troubles.

1:57:03 It’s a brick and mortar retailer

1:57:04 that was struggling for all the obvious reasons.

1:57:07 Already declining sales, a failed pivot to private label goods,

1:57:10 the pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions,

1:57:12 poor relations with their vendors,

1:57:14 and a disastrous stock-buyback program loading the company with debt created

1:57:19 a negative feedback loop where the company couldn’t stock its shelves.

1:57:23 The company reached the point of allegedly

1:57:25 turning off the air conditioning to save money.

1:57:28 Why Ryan Cohen thought he could right this ship is anyone’s guess.

1:57:32 But it’s fair to say that he didn’t

1:57:35 have much tangible impact one way or the other.

1:57:37 Presumably he intended to rapidly work his way

1:57:40 up the chain as he did with GameStop.

1:57:42 Instead, the board resisted Cohen’s influence

1:57:45 and within weeks Cohen and the company

1:57:47 had settled on an agreement to prevent a hostile takeover attempt.

1:57:51 Cohen was fixated mainly on Bed Bath’s baby

1:57:55 supplies subsidiary buybuyBABY- insisting that “under the right circumstances,

1:57:58 BABY could be valued on a revenue multiple,

1:58:01 like other ecommerce-focused retailers,

1:58:03 and justify a valuation of several billion dollars.” The claim,

1:58:08 already loaded with caveats,

1:58:09 was based on a years old internal evaluation by Bed Bath,

1:58:13 and we know now that it was hogwash, Baby was incapable of standing on its own

1:58:18 without the subsidisation of Bed Bath’s supply chain,

1:58:21 but this number is still cited by Apes over a year later.

1:58:26 So, in August he decided to divest his interest in Bed Bath-

1:58:29 but did so in a way that the kids might call… Sus.

1:58:33 Cohen initially bought a 9.8% stake in the company- which

1:58:36 needs to be disclosed via the filing of a Schedule 13D.

1:58:40 But in the time following Cohen’s purchase,

1:58:42 Bed Bath was in the process of carrying out a share buyback,

1:58:46 which reduced the number of outstanding shares and increased

1:58:49 Cohen’s ownership to 11.8% without him personally trading.

1:58:54 As a seemingly irrelevant preamble,

1:58:56 on the 12th Cohen tweeted “at least her cart is full

1:59:01 moon emoji” in reply to a scathing CNBC article about Bed Bath.

1:59:05 He was required to update all the paperwork

1:59:08 on his ownership by the end of April 2022,

1:59:10 but didn’t file the necessary Form 3 indicating a 10%

1:59:14 or greater ownership until after the close of trading on August 15.

1:59:19 By now it should be clear that Apes… aren’t very good at all this.

1:59:23 So when they saw this, they either thought Cohen bought more shares,

1:59:26 or that, in concert with the tweet,

1:59:28 he was signalling to them to buy more, to fill up their carts, moon emoji.

1:59:34 On the following morning, before trading opens,

1:59:36 Cohen then updates his Schedule 13D to reflect the new number.

1:59:40 Apes again, see this as bullish AF, and go crazy- driving up Bed Bath’s share

1:59:46 price by 70% over the course of August 16.

1:59:50 Cohen then submits a Form 144 to the SEC,

1:59:53 stating that he hadn’t bought or sold any Bed Bath

1:59:56 shares in the last 3 months but was maybe intending to.

1:59:59 After this submission, Cohen then divests himself of all of his Bed Bath shares,

2:00:05 reportedly pocketing $68 million in profit on his initial investment.

2:00:09 The Form 144, stating Cohen’s intention to sell,

2:00:12 goes public the following day on the 17th.

2:00:15 This spreads mass Ape confusion.

2:00:17 Finally on the 18th, Cohen amends the Schedule 13D and Form 4

2:00:21 to reflect his sale of Bed Bath two days earlier.

2:00:25 And that ends Cohen’s “long-term” involvement

2:00:28 with Bed Bath after about 9 months.

2:00:31 Now, whether this constituted misconduct from Ryan

2:00:33 Cohen is not a question we can answer, but it is a question worth asking.

2:00:39 Unfortunately we may never get an answer,

2:00:41 because while a lawsuit against Ryan Cohen

2:00:43 on this matter is ongoing, it’s a mess.

2:00:47 A self-represented Ape raced to the courts in less than a week,

2:00:50 to file a class action lawsuit that put

2:00:53 forth an unhinged account of this situation.

2:00:56 According to the Complaint, Ryan Cohen had been planning this from the beginning

2:01:00 as part of a conspiracy with Bed Bath’s CFO,

2:01:03 who the complaint misnames repeatedly,

2:01:05 and also JP Morgan was in on it for some reason.

2:01:08 It’s bad.

2:01:09 The Complaint is littered with factual errors,

2:01:11 applies the wrong laws and is just a trainwreck from end to end.

2:01:16 The case was wrestled off the Ape

2:01:18 and an “amendment” was submitted that looks like

2:01:22 this- but there’s only so much the new

2:01:24 team can do to alter the original complaint.

2:01:27 So it’s unlikely that anything meaningful will come of it.

2:01:30 If a jury were to find that Cohen’s behaviour

2:01:33 was a deliberate effort to inject misinformation into the market,

2:01:37 it would be a textbook example of actual market manipulation.

2:01:40 It would be a situation in which retail investors

2:01:43 would be compensated for damages caused by said manipulation.

2:01:47 Yet remarkably, despite this being a lawsuit focusing on giving

2:01:51 the Apes money- the loyalty of many Apes remains with Cohen,

2:01:55 so they cheer against the success of the class action.

2:01:59 This is the end of Ryan Cohen’s involvement with Bed Bath and Beyond.

2:02:04 We aren’t aware of him so much as mentioning it

2:02:07 in the time since a one off interview in November of '22.

2:02:10 “My views changed, of the business, and ultimately I sold.” And yet,

2:02:17 rather than Apes accepting what’s just happened to them,

2:02:19 that their supposed genius activist investor who would make them

2:02:23 all rich lured them into buying shares in a dying retailer,

2:02:27 Ape’s started to bake.

2:02:29 The decoding goes up a whole new level.

2:02:31 At this point there is absolutely no

2:02:34 communication from Cohen regarding Bed Bath and Beyond,

2:02:37 so they need to both uncover the secret messages and then decode them.

2:02:42 Cohen said he was in Bed Bath for the long-term,

2:02:45 and then bailed inside 9 months.

2:02:47 Did he lie?

2:02:48 Did he rapidly pivot when things didn’t go his way?

2:02:51 Or was that initial statement always intended to reassure

2:02:54 Apes that he was in on the play, regardless of how it appeared?

2:02:59 The myth quickly became that Cohen didn’t abandon

2:03:01 the Apes or give up on Bed Bath.

2:03:03 Instead, Cohen had to work from the shadows,

2:03:06 to outmanoeuvre both the Bed Bath board themselves,

2:03:09 who didn’t want anything to do with him, and the short sellers.

2:03:13 This is when we get that Carl Icahn tweet.

2:03:16 Apes took this to be definitive evidence

2:03:18 of a partnership between Cohen and Icahn-

2:03:22 whose endgame was to merge GameStop and Bed Bath into a competitor to Amazon.

2:03:27 “Deal’s already done.

2:03:28 We still don't know where Icahn's son is at.

2:03:31 Umm, RC's yet to reveal himself,

2:03:33 Icahn has to be involved himself" "Oh yeah, look at IEP falling,

2:03:37 man, the timing of everything man come on, they,

2:03:40 like, these people who don't believe in this shit,

2:03:42 they wanna try to psych you out and gaslight you into shit,

2:03:45 but honestly man, the timeline matches up,

2:03:47 so honestly man I'm taking the gamble,

2:03:49 personally, so there it is." And then… and then in November

2:03:53 of ‘22 Cohen publishes a series of children’s books called Teddy.

2:03:57 These are mediocre pro-capitalist pablum,

2:03:59 basically exactly what you’d expect from a billionaire libertarian who is

2:04:04 bored out of his mind and desperate for the approval of others.

2:04:08 Apes, of course, fired up the industrial ovens

2:04:11 and got ready to bake like they’d never baked before.

2:04:16 [Narrator] “Ryan's children's books are actually hidden messages for us!

2:04:20 Just look at those titles!

2:04:21 China?

2:04:22 Money?

2:04:23 Running the world?

2:04:24 Words can't hurt you- as in FUD?!

2:04:27 [laughs] It's the only way he can legally

2:04:29 communicate with us…” [Narrator 2] “My daily tin foil...

2:04:32 What up with the pattern on Teddy's signature shirt?” [Narrator

2:04:35 3] "I know people think these easter eggs are wrong,

2:04:37 but I believe the deal was closed on the 10th (Teddy Day)

2:04:41 and the 13th (Teddys Belt Buckle) is when the filing will drop.

2:04:45 Also Merger Monday.” [Dan] China is an anagram of Icahn, Teddy goes to China?

2:04:50 That means Ryan has approached Icahn about a lucrative partnership!

2:04:54 The books teach literal children to not put all their eggs in one basket,

2:04:58 which of course means that GME holders should also buy Bed Bath and Beyond.

2:05:03 When it’s 1:50 the clock hands point to 10 and 2,

2:05:06 which means that any alignment of 10,

2:05:09 2, 12, 1, and 50 become valid readings of the hidden code.

2:05:13 If you save your money you can buy ice cream,

2:05:16 which clearly means if you HOLD then you get your TREATS,

2:05:20 which is another way of signalling TENDIES.

2:05:22 “I want to be the book king”- clearly he wants us booking our shares!

2:05:27 General TSO’s chicken!?

2:05:28 Tokenized Security Offerings!

2:05:31 It was rumoured that Cohen was going to be buying a stake in Alibaba,

2:05:35 the Amazon of China.

2:05:36 But then also Cohen tweeted about James Cameron’s Titanic,

2:05:39 one of the most popular and successful films in the history of human existence,

2:05:43 and Apes took this as an obscure reference to a potential announcement,

2:05:47 and wouldn’t you know it,

2:05:50 February (2) tenth (10) 2023 is both National TEDDY bear day,

2:05:55 and the re-release of Titanic, there are too many Cohencidences!

2:06:01 This is it!

2:06:02 This is Teddy day!

2:06:03 Ryan Cohen is going to be announcing an acquisition

2:06:06 of Bed Bath and Beyond with his good friend China,

2:06:08 read Icahn, where he’s going to spin off

2:06:11 BuyBuyBaby and merge with GameStop to form GMErica.

2:06:15 [Narrator] “Exaaaactly!

2:06:16 And the shills call it all crazy conspiracy theories.

2:06:19 Fucking [censored by dialup noise].

2:06:20 RC can’t just come out and say 'oh hey guys

2:06:22 I’m working on a M&A deal with buy buy Baby-

2:06:24 get ready to be rich on a specifically called out

2:06:27 date.' He said all he could say through the books.

2:06:30 If you are really patient, one day you will have money to eat all the ice

2:06:34 cream you want while taking care of your family and friends.” “So,

2:06:38 as I do it here and I see it guys, these guys are expanding their catalogue,

2:06:43 but without throwing up the flare [mimics flare shot noise]- ‘hey,

2:06:47 we’re getting bigger’.

2:06:49 So now what can happen for GameStop,

2:06:51 GameStop can absorb Teddy at any time and in verse

2:06:55 they already have it all set out, the map is there.

2:06:58 He’s been building it in secret behind everyone else.

2:07:02 And now you have a partnership.” [scribbling noise] So let’s take

2:07:08 a moment marinate on this, to consider just how far we've really come.

2:07:12 We’ve gone from vaguely-legitimate if poorly understood and ill-defined

2:07:16 theories on market mechanics to staring at illustrations

2:07:19 of an old man fumbling a turkey in order

2:07:22 to extract coded financial advice from the patterns on his shirt.

2:07:28 There’s really only one way this can go.

2:07:32 “It is a reality that business often make poor decisions,

2:07:36 misdirecting company resources to wasteful pet projects

2:07:39 or failing to adapt to changes in taste, technology,

2:07:42 and society.” So we’ve reached a point where Apes are convinced that Ryan

2:07:46 Cohen is going to swoop in and buy out Bed Bath and Beyond.

2:07:49 Their evidence for this is overwhelmingly based on secret

2:07:52 messages delivered to them via literal children’s books.

2:07:55 Their grasp on reality has totally frayed at this point.

2:07:59 Every Bed Bath statement was a coded message,

2:08:02 all bad news was just to throw off the short sellers.

2:08:06 This meant that as Bed Bath continued to decline,

2:08:09 the Apes looked at it with distrust and confusion.

2:08:12 In January, 2023 Bed Bath and Beyond defaulted on a loan payment,

2:08:15 and on February 1st they missed an interest payment on three tranches of bonds.

2:08:20 This is bad, this is “we are completely out of money” levels of bad.

2:08:25 In response to this they were approached by a firm,

2:08:28 Hudson Bay Capital Management,

2:08:30 who presented them with a deal that was completely insane.

2:08:33 The deal is commonly referred to as “death

2:08:36 spiral financing”- and if Lucifer appeared alongside

2:08:38 Hudson Bay at that moment and offered Bed

2:08:41 Bath an alternative deal, it’d be the same.

2:08:44 These deals are the last resort,

2:08:46 where the investor will offer a shockingly small amount of capital up front,

2:08:50 and in exchange they get to decimate the stock price

2:08:54 to whatever extent is necessary for them to earn their return.

2:08:58 A company signing a deal like this is

2:09:01 the unambiguous signal that they’ve exhausted every alternative.

2:09:05 The basic arrangement of the deal is that Hudson gets preferred

2:09:08 convertible shares from Bed Bath for a lump sum of money,

2:09:11 then these preferred shares can be converted into common

2:09:14 shares that Hudson can immediately sell on the open market,

2:09:17 with the number of shares generated based

2:09:19 on the lump sum divided by the recent average value

2:09:22 of a share with a sweet discount just

2:09:25 to make sure that Hudson always has a profit margin.

2:09:28 These are called “death spiral financing” because

2:09:30 they’re a recipe for massive share dilution.

2:09:33 The financer buys preferred shares for a fixed sum,

2:09:36 converts those into a variable number of shares,

2:09:38 and then dumps those shares on to market,

2:09:41 almost certainly lowering the share price via dilution alone

2:09:44 if not compounding negative sentiment and massacred investor confidence.

2:09:48 The share price going down means that the next preferred

2:09:52 share they convert will convert into even more common shares,

2:09:55 which will further lower the price,

2:09:57 which will convert the next block into even more shares, and over and over.

2:10:02 In a mere six and a half weeks Hudson more than

2:10:06 quadrupled the number of Bed Bath and Beyond shares in existence.

2:10:10 Apes’ diamond-handed buy-at-any-cost irrationality, their stubbornness,

2:10:13 the very thing that Apes tout as their secret weapon against the hedgies,

2:10:19 is the exact thing Hudson was counting on to turn their profit.

2:10:23 The grim irony that Apes are so predictably irrational

2:10:27 in their made up war against hedge funds and short sellers

2:10:31 that it leaves them open to all manner of unique

2:10:35 and awful exploitation at the hands of hedge funds and short sellers,

2:10:39 the irony is so deep you could drown in it.

2:10:42 The capital Hudson Bay offered was used to pay down debt,

2:10:45 there was nothing left to fix any of the structural problems with the business,

2:10:49 so the only thing the deal bought them was time.

2:10:52 The Hudson Bay deal was terminated after less than two months,

2:10:55 as Bed Bath’s stock price fell under a dollar and showed no signs of recovery.

2:10:59 And through this, the whole time, Apes denied that dilution was happening,

2:11:04 denied that it was the cause of the decline in the share price,

2:11:07 denied that Hudson Bay Capital was the buyer,

2:11:09 mocked the Wall Street Journal’s use of inside

2:11:12 sources “familiar with the matter,” and denied that Bed

2:11:14 Bath and Beyond was even in the precarious

2:11:17 position that Bed Bath was actively warning them of.

2:11:20 [Narrator] “We need the proceeds from the Transactions to pay our outstanding

2:11:24 obligations under our Credit Facilities and Senior

2:11:27 Notes and to operate our business, and we expect that we will likely file

2:11:31 for bankruptcy protection if the Transactions are not consummated.

2:11:35 The issuance of the securities in this offering will significantly dilute

2:11:39 the ownership interest of the existing holders of our common stock

2:11:43 Trading in our securities is highly speculative and poses substantial risks

2:11:47 to investors.” This is the context in which Heat Lamp is produced.

2:11:51 A conspiracy whose every element is

2:11:53 reverse-engineered to offer a semblance of hope.

2:11:56 Critically in-curious,

2:11:57 Heat Lamp is baseless speculation that squares the circle and explains away

2:12:01 the continued failure to Apes to crash the global economy after two full years.

2:12:07 Okay, so, so get this.

2:12:09 What if.

2:12:10 What if we assume ComputerShare has

2:12:13 an algorithm that manages their operational efficiency,

2:12:17 and this algorithm works like a heat lamp in a diner?

2:12:22 The algorithm moves shares into the DTCC

2:12:25 in anticipation of imminent transactions.

2:12:27 So, what Wall Street is doing is rolling up

2:12:29 a bus full of people into the parking lot.

2:12:32 The staff start making hamburgers and putting them under the heat lamp.

2:12:35 But wouldn’t you know, the customers are all vegetarian,

2:12:38 and I guess aren’t hungry.

2:12:40 So now the DTCC can borrow the hamburgers and use

2:12:44 them to create synthetic hamburgers which can be used

2:12:47 to cover Citadel’s illegal hamburger sales and then return the counterfeit

2:12:51 hamburgers to the diner as if they were the originals.

2:12:55 The perfect crime.

2:12:57 But this wasn’t the part of Heat Lamp that made it stick.

2:13:00 That hamburger metaphor was buried inside a 5,000 word rant

2:13:05 so incoherent that we can’t even pull any usable soundbites,

2:13:09 it’s just walls of nonsense.

2:13:11 The author’s prior attempts at sharing this “thesis”

2:13:14 had been met with criticism and mockery,

2:13:17 resulting in mods putting the threads in the trash.

2:13:20 So the core of Heat Lamp is this beautiful story of self-actualisation,

2:13:24 as the Ape learned that his ideas are important

2:13:27 and deserve to be read- no matter what anyone tells him.

2:13:31 The bulk of Heat Lamp is scathing accusations

2:13:34 of “censorship through intimidation” by the mods- claiming

2:13:38 that this banger of a DD is being suppressed

2:13:40 by the mods to protect the interests of ComputerShare,

2:13:43 and therefore the interests of the enemy.

2:13:46 It’s full blown McCarthyism.

2:13:48 And that rhetoric is what the Apes took from Heat Lamp.

2:13:52 The Ape influencers find themselves more and more

2:13:55 in the same dilemma as conservative YouTubers who nurtured fascist audiences.

2:13:59 They need to play to the crowd or risk being turned on.

2:14:03 During the scripting of this video, Atobitt,

2:14:05 one of the key figures in the Ape community who you’ve been seeing constantly,

2:14:11 deleted his account in response to harassment brought on by expressing

2:14:15 waiving faith in the ability of Apes to defeat Ken Griffin.

2:14:19 Atobitt, like so many other DD authors before him, evolved into his final form.

2:14:25 u/[deleted].

2:14:27 The soap opera conspiracy twists and turns, that’s the fun stuff.

2:14:31 The really sinister element of all this is

2:14:34 that it’s not just socially engaging, it’s addictive.

2:14:38 Ape forums are littered with statements

2:14:41 and sentiments that are stereotypical of gambling addicts.

2:14:44 Apes are constantly talking about their plans to buy more,

2:14:47 how they wish they could afford more,

2:14:49 how they can’t wait for their paycheque so they

2:14:52 can get more shares of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

2:14:55 They use contrarian sentiment to justify their habit.

2:14:58 The price goes down?

2:15:00 Buy more.

2:15:01 The price goes up?

2:15:02 Buy more.

2:15:02 Bad news?

2:15:03 Buy more.

2:15:04 Good news?

2:15:05 Buy more.

2:15:06 Thanks for the tasty dip.

2:15:07 They suppress the price, I buy more out of spite.

2:15:10 They hide their habit from friends and family,

2:15:12 complain that partners try to limit how much GameStop they buy,

2:15:16 and brag about going behind their partners’ backs.

2:15:19 They take money from friends and family while talking up

2:15:22 the “college degree worth of DD” they found on Reddit and pour

2:15:26 it all into this slate of poorly run companies that they

2:15:30 believe have been elected as the candidates for a mythological short squeeze.

2:15:35 The entire idea of dollar-cost-averaging, an actual investment strategy,

2:15:39 has been warped into pure delusional cope

2:15:42 of “averaging down” as the stock price keeps plummeting.

2:15:46 In their minds it’s a sure play, so of course it makes sense to lower your cost

2:15:50 basis and thus improve your return, but even then,

2:15:53 within the whole mythology of MOASS,

2:15:55 if the stock is supposed to go to phone book numbers,

2:15:58 then it really doesn’t matter what your average was.

2:16:00 It’s just an exercise in sunk costs, catching a falling knife.

2:16:05 [Narrator] “As for me, after holding from $350 to $40,

2:16:09 price drops only get me more excited.

2:16:12 Every price drop is a discount and another opportunity to buy.”

2:16:16 The performative aspects are irony-poisoned

2:16:18 and insincere in a genuinely sickening way.

2:16:21 A lot of the Ape lore is easily discarded by their podcasters

2:16:25 and DD authors because they ultimately know it’s not true.

2:16:29 The hype, the tinfoil, the Cohencidences, the wife-changing money, the lambos,

2:16:35 these are all the social performances

2:16:37 needed to maintain the veneer wrapped around

2:16:39 the pathetic core of a gambling addiction

2:16:42 whose only hope for recovery is recruitment.

2:16:44 It’s the justification and distancing,

2:16:46 the things that need to be true in order for the vast amounts of time,

2:16:51 energy, and money dumped into these shares to not be a waste,

2:16:55 but Apes will still always keep one foot grounded where they can say “oh,

2:17:00 of course Teddy Day wasn’t going to happen!

2:17:03 That was just hype!

2:17:04 For fun!” The thing that January 2021 demonstrated was

2:17:08 that the price can go to the moon for no coherent, sensible,

2:17:13 sane reason beyond a bunch of people on a forum willing

2:17:17 it into existence by convincing by convincing enough other people to believe,

2:17:21 and if it happened once then maybe it can happen again.

2:17:26 But that constant double-think,

2:17:27 the constant cognitive dissonance of hyping up knowingly

2:17:31 fake ideas purely to maintain energy in a failing

2:17:34 stock play to put on an outward facing performance

2:17:38 to lure in new participants because if you don’t,

2:17:41 if you flinch, if the irony armour cracks

2:17:45 and you admit out loud that you don’t actually believe,

2:17:48 then it all falls apart, reality becomes true,

2:17:51 and then it definitely won’t happen again, that takes a toll.

2:17:56 The illusion must be defended at all costs,

2:17:59 because the illusion is all that there is.

2:18:02 [Sentimental music] [Dan] On April 23, 2023, Bed,

2:18:42 Bath, and Beyond filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

2:18:45 Despite the staggering dilution deal,

2:18:47 the company simply couldn’t raise enough capital to get ahead of its debts,

2:18:51 most of which were incurred in a stock

2:18:53 buy-back program that only ended in late 2022,

2:18:56 long after the start of the company’s decline.

2:18:59 Over the course of May and June they sold off the company piecemeal,

2:19:02 favourable lease obligations here, a building there, inventory,shelves,

2:19:05 desk chairs, computers, basically anything a price could be attached to was

2:19:10 sold off and the proceeds sent directly to their creditors.

2:19:13 Apes, of course, willfully immune to reality at this point,

2:19:17 considered all of this to be bullish.

2:19:19 This would be painful but necessary,

2:19:21 but when all was said and done even if MOASS never happened,

2:19:25 Bed Bath would still pay off handsomely.

2:19:28 This was founded on absolutely nothing,

2:19:30 rooted entirely in word games based on theories

2:19:33 that the company failed to directly deny.

2:19:36 The company itself had been warning them since January that in the event

2:19:40 of bankruptcy holders of the common shares would likely receive no recovery.

2:19:45 Critics who predicted that the Hudson

2:19:47 deal would merely upgrade the company’s forced

2:19:49 liquidation in chapter 7 up to a managed liquidation in chapter 11 were right,

2:19:55 and Apes were wrong.

2:19:56 Literally nothing that Apes predicted came true,

2:19:59 because they aligned themselves into a movement that refused,

2:20:03 categorically, to accept reality as it exists.

2:20:07 [Narrator] “Trading prices for our securities may bear little

2:20:10 or no relationship to the actual recovery, if any,

2:20:13 by holders of our securities.” Bankruptcy

2:20:16 proceedings plodded along and the mythological Ryan

2:20:19 Cohen reverse-triangle-merger Teddy Icahn partnership NFT

2:20:22 dividend reward for loyal shareholders never emerged.

2:20:26 In early June the deadline for the stalking horse bid

2:20:28 kept getting kicked back a few days at a time,

2:20:31 from the 1st to the 8th to the 11th to the 13th.

2:20:34 Since the stalking horse bid sets the tempo for further liquidations,

2:20:38 rumours in reality were that the bids submitted were all

2:20:41 relatively small grabs at specific assets rather than any move

2:20:45 for the company itself and the company wanted more time

2:20:48 behind the scenes to try and rustle up a better offer.

2:20:52 Rumours in the Ape universe were that the offers

2:20:55 were in fact so good that Bed Bath needed

2:20:58 more time to properly evaluate the true value

2:21:01 of complicated share-for-share offerings of GameStop and Icahn Enterprises L.P.

2:21:07 for BBBY.

2:21:08 Again, Icahn’s sole actual involvement in all of this is

2:21:13 that he let Ryan Cohen take a photo with him.

2:21:16 The actual stalking horse bid,

2:21:18 selected on June 13th, was Overstock, a $900m company,

2:21:23 offering $21.5 million for the company’s name,

2:21:26 logo, website, mobile app, and relevant databases.

2:21:29 Chalk another W for the Wall Street

2:21:31 Journal and their sources familiar with the matter.

2:21:34 Finally, September 29th, 2023,

2:21:35 the company formerly known as Bed Bath and Beyond “cancelled,

2:21:39 released, and extinguished” all shares in the company.

2:21:42 Those intangible legal rights,

2:21:44 the actual thing shares represent, ceased to exist.

2:21:48 And you might hope that that would be the end

2:21:51 of all of this, but, well, you know it isn’t.

2:21:55 See, there’s always something to grasp on to.

2:21:58 The shares may be legally void, but it’ll take years for every last

2:22:02 broker on Earth to remove the worthless husks

2:22:05 from Apes’ accounts because of boring reasons

2:22:08 like record keeping laws and just low priority.

2:22:12 So that’s years and years where an ever-dwindling core

2:22:15 of increasingly entrenched Bed Bath Apes can hold out hope

2:22:18 that Ryan Cohen will swoop in and gift them

2:22:22 absurdly valuable shares in a company that doesn’t even exist.

2:22:26 The apocalypse is always just one more day away.

2:22:29 Apes are in a lot of ways the funhouse mirror version of the stock market.

2:22:33 They’re not anti-Wall Street.

2:22:35 They’re tsundere for Wall Street.

2:22:37 They want to be scrappy, important,

2:22:39 savvy underdog traders who saw an opportunity and seized it.

2:22:43 They quote The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big

2:22:46 Short because that’s who they see themselves as.

2:22:48 Sure, they say they hate Wall Street,

2:22:50 but then they spend all their free time obsessing over

2:22:54 funnelling more and more of their money into the stock market.

2:22:58 There’s a desire, an instinct,

2:23:00 to try and tease Apes apart from the rest of the stock market,

2:23:03 to invalidate their approach as a perversion of the market,

2:23:07 if not something entirely separate.

2:23:09 It can be said that the Apes aren’t engaging with stocks

2:23:13 as an intangible signifier of a claim to some percent of the company,

2:23:17 but as a wholly distinct thing, an entirely abstract vessel of value.

2:23:23 Given the overlap between crypto apes and memestock apes,

2:23:27 whether it’s GameStop or DogeCoin, it’s really the same behaviour.

2:23:31 An accurate criticism of the Ape system is that this behaviour entirely

2:23:35 decouples the price of the shares from the value of the company,

2:23:38 to the point that companies like Bed Bath&

2:23:40 Beyond are saying as much in their filings.

2:23:43 The Ape counter-criticism is that this is just how the stock market works,

2:23:47 that they’re just doing what the big players do.

2:23:50 And this is a compelling conflict of ideas,

2:23:54 because it’s wrong, but not entirely wrong.

2:23:57 There is an argument to be made that in one sense all stocks are meme stocks,

2:24:02 that narrative and story are the driving forces of the stock market,

2:24:06 that talk of fundamentals is all lip service,

2:24:09 that fundamentals only matter insofar as they can be woven into the story.

2:24:14 After all, the whole exercise is a game of trying to predict the future,

2:24:18 trying to price-in things that haven’t happened,

2:24:20 but you believe are going to, and that is,

2:24:24 really, just complicated storytelling.

2:24:27 Both groups are telling a story and just sort of lightly

2:24:30 gesturing at something external to the narrative that justifies its conclusions,

2:24:34 in that regard Apes are, in fact, a reflection of the system.

2:24:38 Really the only major difference is that the things they are

2:24:41 gesturing towards are not merely wishful thinking based on suggestive data,

2:24:45 but entirely confabulated nonsense.

2:24:48 Nothing in Ape psychology is new:

2:24:50 addiction to gambling, the pressure of social control,

2:24:53 we are all vulnerable to these in some degree,

2:24:56 but when you get deep into these places it takes on whole new forms.

2:25:01 Apes are, as a result of their conflict with reality,

2:25:04 particularly vulnerable to being further targeted

2:25:06 by confidence men and other grifters.

2:25:09 Some of them grift the Apes for low-stakes fame and prestige,

2:25:12 some to wash their pet theories and gain support for their political policies,

2:25:16 and some for plain old hard cash.

2:25:19 It can be difficult to have empathy for Apes because,

2:25:22 frankly, a lot of them suck.

2:25:24 They are conspiratorially minded and, thus,

2:25:26 prone to all sorts of terrible beliefs,

2:25:28 many of which dovetail into express antisemitism,

2:25:31 making them ripe for recruitment into even more extreme ideologies.

2:25:35 As addicts they regularly make terrible decisions that hurt others.

2:25:39 They talk often about stealing from their spouses,

2:25:41 or at least hiding their addictions as they

2:25:44 spend all the money in the shared account.

2:25:45 Many are profoundly unhappy in their relationships,

2:25:48 joking through gritted teeth about "wife-changing" money

2:25:51 and how much they resent their partners.

2:25:54 Of course it's easy to see how that resentment might form.

2:25:58 They lie, they steal, they recruit relentlessly,

2:26:01 and they insist that others simply fail to recognize their brilliance.

2:26:05 They stress every relationship they are involved

2:26:07 in and routinely hurt their families with their reckless gambling;

2:26:11 it’s no mystery why the wife isn’t too happy with them these days.

2:26:16 These groups and movements appeal to entitled personalities,

2:26:18 and the entire structure of their psychology

2:26:21 and socialization is addictive and retentive.

2:26:24 The narrative of participation flatters them, it makes them savvy,

2:26:28 important forward-thinking investors who are beating the system at its own game.

2:26:32 They cannot leave, quit, or even mentally check out because then they’ll

2:26:36 miss the window of the next big play.

2:26:39 When the Due Diligence and Quantitative Theory are made

2:26:42 up out of mythological nothingness it’s easy, even logical,

2:26:45 for the upsides to be so overwhelmingly valuable that any behaviour,

2:26:51 no matter how craven or irrational, becomes permissible.

2:26:55 It’s tempting to see apes

2:26:57 in their full performative hubris bragging about “buying

2:27:00 the dip” and thanking Ken for “the discount” and think “you know what,

2:27:04 they brought this on themselves.” But no one deserves to be exploited like this.

2:27:09 No one deserves to get shaken down by grifters to the point that they have

2:27:13 no other choice but to become grifters

2:27:16 themselves and shake down everyone else around them.

2:27:19 No one deserves to have their ego and security

2:27:21 ground down to the point that there’s no escape,

2:27:24 no reason to step back and admit defeat, no reason to reflect.

2:27:30 Ironically the biggest winners in all of this have been hedge funds.

2:27:33 Sure, Keith and a few others made bank off the GameStop run,

2:27:37 but half of them gambled their gains away.

2:27:39 Hedge funds on the other hand have been

2:27:42 able to play against Apes and their predictable irrationality.

2:27:45 Melvin ate dirt in '21 and closed up shop in '22,

2:27:49 but Citadel started using Wall Street Bets as a recruiting

2:27:53 ground and Hudson Bay made a tidy profit by assuming

2:27:56 that Apes wouldn't just buy and hold through massive

2:27:59 dilution but would outright thank them for the tasty dip.

2:28:02 It is, as a phenomenon, an incredibly fraught subject for regulators because,

2:28:07 just, how do you respond to this?

2:28:10 Setting aside bigger, broader questions about what markets even should be,

2:28:15 how do you respond in the immediate term to a group of investors with enough

2:28:21 collective inertia to move prices but a fundamentally

2:28:24 flawed understanding of what they’re even doing?

2:28:28 The grim irony of Ape culture is that it has

2:28:31 the operative mechanisms of a gambling addiction without actually gambling.