 Well, as you all know by now, last week a single subreddit, WallStreetBets, beat short sellers at their own game and gave these hedge funds a taste of their own medicine. And it was just beautiful to see, and all of this culminated in the company that bet against GameStop, Melvin Capital, taking a hit of more than 50%. You love to see it. This really is a David vs Goliath story. And what I also love about this story is it proved to normal Americans that the system is rigged against you. And that was especially evident when Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and Webull all literally stopped allowing people to buy shares from GameStop and AMC all to protect these hedge funds that bet against GameStop. Now we'll go to a story from The Intercept where they talk about how this really demonstrates how financial tech firms have far too much power and have to be reined in. But first, I do want to have some fun because I want to talk about some of the reactions I didn't get a chance to talk about last week that just really made my day. First of all, I've got to share this clip from MSNBC. The butt hurt here is palpable. This elite does not like that the peasants beat the elites at their own game. You're learning here, maybe it's fun, fine, maybe it's a movement, but be prepared to lose 80 to 90% of it. And if it's still worth it, then have at it. But the biggest loss of capital here will be the human capital of young men who are sitting and staring at their phone and watching the price of Bitcoin or the price of AMC. And ask yourself, would you be better off taking that one, two, or three hours a day and working out, trying to form relationships with mentors, with romantic relationships, with people at work, getting graded something so you can be the person on the other side of the trade? The greatest loss in capital here is from young men who are more prone to gambling addiction, who don't understand the markets. I think we are setting ourselves up similar to how there's a ton of young women out there who became very depressed by sitting in their rooms, looking at Instagram, self-cutting and self-harm skyrocket. I think you are going to see an explosion and young male depression. And I think a lot of it is going to be reverse engineered to apps that convince you you're part of a movement or physically addict you to your phone. Ask yourself, would your time staring at Robin Hood be better spent somewhere else? That is the real capital destruction that is taking place here. I'm sorry. What? That's a bit of a stretch, what did you say? He's concerned about you. He's not concerned about these hedge funds that are losing money because if he's concerned about you, shouldn't you be off of your phone, shouldn't you put down the phone, get turned off Robin Hood, go out there and take a walk? The fact that he said this and thinks people are going to take him seriously is hilarious. Another clip that I have to share with you is from real life Monopoly Man billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman who literally claimed on CNBC with a straight face that this is an attack on the wealthy. The reason the market is doing what it's doing is people are sitting at home, getting the checks from the government and this fair share is a bullshit concept. It's just a way of attacking wealthy people and I think it's inappropriate, we're all going to work together and pull together. He literally said that. They're attacking wealthy people. Oh, no, dude, are you serious? He can't be serious. Do you think that people care about wealthy people when how many Americans are losing their jobs, are struggling to put food on the table, not even making a living wage? You think that we care about elites because they lost money? I think they're going to be okay. And we actually have some live footage of elites reacting to Wall Street bets and a GameStop. Yeah, now for those of you unfamiliar with Leon Cooperman, he is a bit of a drama queen, the last time that he made headlines was because he literally was on CNBC and he cried because the subject of the wealth tax came up. I wish I were making this up, but I'm not. He cried because he felt as if the rich in this country, they're just being demonized too much. I mean, I think it's kind of obvious people can not only see the emotion on your face but hear it in your voice when you talk about this, Lee, why? That was magical. Now we've had our fun, so on a more serious note, I do want to talk about what is I think obvious, what I hope should be obvious to everyone, that we shouldn't allow these financial tech firms to be able to manipulate the market on behalf of these hedge funds. They shouldn't have that much power. They have to be reined in and the intercept laid out this argument beautifully. This is by Timmy Iwayemi and Max Moran who argue, to spite hedge fund bros, retail investors led a surge in GameStop's stock price largely through the trading app Robinhood. While progressives relished watching Wall Street's old guard scramble amid the chaos, financial tech firms like Robinhood, apps for lending, investing and so on certainly aren't seeking an end to financial capitalism. Indeed, once Wall Street began shrieking about amateurs beating them at their own absurd game, Robinhood warned against the very market volatility it was facilitating, and shut down trading of GameStop and other memed stocks, leading to at least one class action lawsuit and Senate and House Progressives calling for investigation. Ultimately, it looks like the hedge fund Robinhood users targeted, Melvin Capital Management, will just be partly bought by a different larger hedge fund, Citadel Capital Management. A separate company called Citadel Securities, which has the same owner as Citadel Capital Management, Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois, facilitates some of Robinhood's transactions. Robinhood itself makes money by selling data on users' trades to giant Wall Street firms who then stake their own positions based off what the little guy is up to. The Securities and Exchange Commission also charged Robinhood last month for offering bad trading prices to unsuspecting users since those trades were routed through firms paying Robinhood. If true, Robinhood's users were effectively paying a premium on their trades despite the app marketing itself as commission-free. This took place between 2015 and late 2018 when Robinhood was growing rapidly according to the SEC. You wouldn't know any of this from Robinhood's faux populist marketing about democratizing finance, but much like traditional Wall Street and big tech firms before it, financial tech is building an echo chamber of industry voices and former regulators to ease oversight and permit its predatory practices. These range from as the intercept and type investigations have previously reported, high interest lending like Best Egg to legitimately novel efforts, at least in our lifetimes, to privatize and surveil the basic operations of the monetary system. Responding to fine tech will be a key regulatory challenge for the Biden administration, but it enters this fight with one hand already tied behind their backs. American financial law vastly predates the digital era and is often ill-suited to describing online financial activity and plenty of fine tech firms design themselves to deliberately evade falling under any legal classifications and regulations that follow them. Now, the conclusion, as Bernie Sanders concisely puts it, is that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. That's exactly what this is. That's what we're seeing here. Now of course, we have to rein these companies in, but the article goes into great detail and I'll link to it down below about how Biden's administration has a lot of conflicts of interest and why it's not going to be likely that the folks who are benefiting from these companies are going to want to rein them in. And when it comes to the Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen actually took $800,000, more than $800,000 in speaking fees from Citadel. And that's according to Slate. So the question is, why would these individuals who are overseeing these financial tech firms want to regulate them and rein them in when they're not incentivized to do that? They're incentivized to let them kind of do what they want to do and regulate themselves. Look, it's why nothing really seems to change in this country because of money in politics. And I'm not just talking about the traditional legalized bribes of campaign contributions where these private companies, they'll give money to politicians and then those politicians will in turn represent them, pass policies that they want. Like it goes deeper than that. The corruption is rampant where folks who are likely to get jobs based on their previous positions, they will be buttered up by these companies. I mean, Hillary Clinton, before she ran for president, got tons of money in speaking fees. As soon as Obama got out, he got money from speaking fees as a way to, I guess, kind of like pay him back for not regulating them as hard as he should have. So it's a revolving door. Corruption, it's legalized bribery. I mean, this really is the intersection of everything that is wrong with our system and why we never see changes, why when it comes to policy outcomes, average citizens have a statistically insignificant impact on what actually gets passed, whereas special interests, they actually do dictate what policies pass out of Congress. Like it's a rigged system. Like it's rigged against you. It's rigged against us from a policy perspective. And really what this does is it lifts that veil. Normal Americans can finally see because of this story that the system isn't working for you. And that's the beauty of this story. This is basically Occupy 2.0 because the little guy won and they didn't just win, they got the entire system to expose itself. And that is a beautiful thing. And the meltdown that ensued afterwards that will continue to ensue is something that I am absolutely going to enjoy because it's about time that these assholes and these elites got a taste of their own medicine. Like it's fine for them to have the system rigged in their favor. But the minute things don't go their way, well, we saw what happens. They're so brazen.