 The delicious irony, of course, in all of this, is the sneering condescension from Wall Street and from investment-talking heads on TV, who have been talking about the millennial generation and the Gen Z generation as lazy, entitled avocado toast-eating losers who can't invest in the future, and have been suggesting that instead of spending all of their money on iPhones and avocado toast, they should invest some. Well, guess what? Now they did. And the resulting reaction is no, not like that. GameStop and Wall Street vets. I feel like that's almost all I need to say to introduce our topic for today. It's one that's taken the world by storm and we're recording this on the afternoon of Thursday the 28th of January and a story that's moving fast but there's some deep stuff to get into already. I'm Adam B. Levine and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. Today as always I'm joined by the other host of the show, Stephanie Murphy. Hi there. Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello. And Jonathan Moyan. Hey, hey. So all right, folks, let's just get into this. GameStop, a troubled brick and mortar retailer in the era of digital delivery amid a pandemic that's seen much of what in-person commerce has left shut down, was trading for 17 bucks on January 4th only to see prices rise to as high as $450 per share before retail platforms like Robinhood took unprecedented action, disallowing users from buying but not selling in what sure looks like an attempt to help the people who have been betting against this stocks who just happen to be some of the biggest hedge funds and monetary status quo folks in the world. It's been a hell of a day. So just setting the stage for a second before we get into the specifics of what's going on, I want to talk about the idea of insider trading or coordination in trading markets because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around this. People think that people talking together, coordinating, you know, like in some sort of informal fashion could constitute some type of crime. As far as I can tell, that is not the case. There has for a long time been a thing called idea dinners that hedge funds and other sort of big money types like to attend where people who run different funds will go and will have dinner and as they're having dinner, they will share ideas. And by sharing ideas, they'll talk about the stocks that they want to buy or the stocks that they want to shorten things like that. And so, I mean, I'm actually not clear if that's legal or not, but I know that it happens. It's a normal thing and that it moves markets. And I want to quote from a Wall Street Journal article that was surfaced by Josh Brown, who's a financial advisor, known as Reform Broker on Twitter, quote, many hedge fund managers freely share investment ideas with one another, a practice that might seem at odds with their aspiration to post higher returns than competitors. Fund managers, traders and hedge fund chiefs exchange ideas through instant messages, emails and private chats, sharing ideas can reap financial benefits when multiple hedge funds jump into the same stock. That tends to push the share price higher. So the key element of an insider trading chart is trading that occurs based on material non-public information. So it's having information that you have because you're an insider that is not public and then you act on that. Insider trading is what happens when, for example, members of Congress that just came out of a COVID briefing and know that it's much worse than that we're letting on go and immediately trade on that, which is a crime, and then get away with it. That's insider trading. What happened here, ironically, we should call outsider trading. It's outsider trading because this was entirely based on public information exchange in a public form in the most public way. This is how markets are supposed to work. And the participants in this outsider trading definition, outsiders. And it's highly, highly ironic that in the absence of strong regulation against insider trading, the one thing that managed to rally regulators is the possibility that they can now ban outsider trading. Jonathan, can you bring us up to speed with a little bit more of an explanation for what the hell is going on? Yeah. Well, as somebody who fell in love with Bitcoin in 2011, when 90% of every post was a funny meme about what Bitcoin could be, Wall Street bets is sort of that, but on crack. What I would like to say before we get any further is that completely with all sincerity, nothing any of us are saying constitutes investment advice. This is probably the one podcast, not to say we don't meet at the others, where we 1,000, 20,000 a million percent. Like if we could naked short 500% the statement we would, this isn't investment advice. We don't think people should take anything we say to be a buy or sell signal. We just want to discuss what we think is 1 of the most important retail financial sort of moments that's happened probably this decade. And we may discuss it in excitement. We may say that we like what's happening or we like that someone is doing something in a certain way. None of it constitutes a buy or sell signal. It is just how we aesthetically are enjoying what is occurring. It's just pure shot and fraud at this point. It is somewhat interesting. And with our butts firmly covered, Jonathan, why don't you go ahead? So I've been following what's happening with GameStop. And I have to say it is one of the most entertaining and simultaneously one of the greatest financial justice boner moments. I think I've had in over a decade at a very high level. There's these things called shorts. And a short is basically when you bet against something going up. We call long when you bet that something will go up. And we're talking about company equity here when we're talking about betting about something. Right, but also I'm long Bitcoin. I'm short Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin world, we have the joke to the moon. The rocket ship is going to go to the moon. On Wall Street bets, they say that GameStop is going to go past the moon and go directly into the sun. So Wall Street bets is what is an online community? Yes. So Wall Street bets is a subreddit made specifically for discussing publicly traded equities. It's like the cryptocurrency community, except that it has an explicit blanket ban on talking about crypto. But in every other way, instead of coins, they talk about pink sheets. So it's a troll box for stocks. I would say that if our Bitcoin and our Ethereum in their early days had a baby, it would be Wall Street bets. If you could say that our Bitcoin is for innovators, then you could say that Wall Street bets is for the early majority in terms of the types of things they want to do and be a part of. And so what happened was, and if you listen, we have a number of episodes on shorting and an even more crazy topic called rehypothecation. But basically when you short something, you're betting that it's going to go down. But what happens is if you're wrong and it goes up past a certain point, you then have to buy that stock and give it to the person that you made the short position with. Now, normally what you do is you take someone's stock who has it and you say, hey, at a certain date, I'm going to buy that from you. So make sure you have it because I'll be buying it from you six months from now. And they go, that's cool. I got you. And so what you do is you say to someone, I will sell you this share that I don't own right now. And then six months from now, I will go to the open market and buy it and give it back to you. And so if the stock goes down, the person who did that made money. But if it goes up, they lost money because when they bought the stock and let's say it was $50 and then six months later, the stock goes up to $100. They lost money buying that stock and giving it to that person. If it goes down to $25, they may double their money because they sold it at 50 and then they bought it at 25. So it's sort of a way to sell a stock now and then buy it in the future and do it all on day one. And that's called shorting. And the biggest difference between going short and going long is that a stock, when you want to buy it and see it appreciate in value, upside is infinite, downside is 100%. So when you're long a position, you're betting it's going to go up. The worst that can happen is you lose all your money. When you're short, you are contractually obligated to buy that stock at that particular date, regardless of what the price is. So if Bitcoin's $100 and you go long and then Bitcoin goes to $10, you lost $90. But if Bitcoin is at $10 and you short it and it goes to $1,000, you just lost $980 off of that $10 bet. And if it goes to $100,000? Well, then you get Ben Bernanke to bail you out. Yeah, there's no limit, right? So that's the main point. And what happens if you can't afford to buy it at the current price? You are contractually obligated until you go bankrupt. This is where the next step is, if you aren't able to buy it and you go bankrupt, that actually shifts and exposes to liability the broker who backed that short. And this is really important in this upcoming story. So that's what happens. But there's a very particular way that some Goldman Sachs analyst one day decided he wanted to destroy the world and succeeded. And that's a good old question, which is, hey, what if when we short something, instead of telling somebody else, hey, why don't you hold that aside for me? Because I know six months from now, I'm going to be needing to buy it. What if we just do nothing? What if we just trust that when the music stops, there'll be an empty chair that we can sit in when we're playing red light green light, when we're playing a hot potato, you know, musical chairs, that's the one. And so that is called a naked short. And it's naked because you don't have the share in question. You're just betting that at some point in the future, when you need to have your hand on it, you will have your hand on it. Now, that is called naked shorting and is in theory very illegal. However, happens all the time. What happened when it relates to GameStop is a couple of months ago, somebody was looking at the positions of short float. Now, float in a publicly traded company is the amount of shares that are publicly available. So when a company doesn't like go, they don't usually list 100% of every share of the company. They take a percentage of the company and then they list it. And that's how companies do secondary offerings, tertiary offerings. But you can't buy more stocks than are available to be bought. So what somebody noticed was that the number of short contracts that were obligated to deliver GameStop shares were 138% larger than the total number of GameStop shares that there are to be purchased. Wow. Okay. So obviously that has an effect on the price. Well, it does. So the thing about shorting, and this is where it gets evil. I don't use that word lightly. In fact, I don't think I've ever used it in this podcast. Where it gets evil is that when you short something, you're having someone sell it to you with a promise that you're going to buy it back. Now, if you think of a T-sell or you have debits and credits, everything checks out because you have one person buying and one person selling. And in a normal short, you say, sell this to me now and I'm going to get someone to hold their share aside for me because I'm going to be buying it in six months. And so you sold it and then you have someone hold it aside for you so that you can buy it. So the T-sell checks out with a naked short. You didn't secure the thing that you have to buy. You're just trusting that it exists. Now, if shorts are below 100% of float, you can kind of say, well, obviously you can get some share out there. But when it's 138% of all shares that are out there. There's what? 30% chance, a one in three chance that it's going to be literally impossible for you to secure that share in the market if all shorts get called. And so what that does is it's a way to create more sell than the product would otherwise have. So when you have 138% short, what you're doing is you're signaling to the market, you have bids and asks. People who are selling and people who are buying. And the thing that a short does is that it marks a sell event day one, not six months from now. And so if you're looking at the price of a company and you're saying, well, what's the spot price? What's happening? If someone does a short today, they sold it on that day. And so it can drive the price down. It can collapse the price. And if there are a ton of shorts on that day, it looks like a ton of people are selling that stuff. So what happened was a bunch of Wall Street corporate raiders looked at GameSpot and said, well, this company is going to be dying. Why don't we just kill it? And the way that they're going to kill it is they said, what if we do 138% sell order? Because no one's ever going to call us on it because it's going to be dead anyway. And so what they did is they effectively created phantom shares. And so GameStop said, we have, this is just a number, 100 million shares outstanding that you can be traded. What these shorts did was create 38% fake shares than they ever issued that were all sell orders. And so GameStop put 100 million shares out there. And then these corporate raiders said, we're going to make 34 million fake shares that all sold. And what does that do? Well, we all know what inflation does, but it's not just inflation. They're all sells. They're not buys. And so it's a way, when done in this manner, to kill companies in a manner in which they never agreed to. They basically decided that they were going to do a public issuance to attack the company. They went to the company and said, hey, you know, you have 100 million shares outstanding. Well, we decided we're going to create 34 million of them and sell them all against your company, even though you never did that. And what are you going to do? Have the share price go up because you can't call our bluff. What there's 138% shares outstanding. What are you going to do about it? It's not like the government does anything. What actually happened 10 years ago with JP Morgan, where JP Morgan was manipulating the spot price of silver and they paid a fine. And the fine that they paid was a percentage of the money that they made could shorting silver. So the fine was not an incentive not to do it, basically. No, the fine was an incentive to do it again. And so when people say, why does naked shorting continue? How does this keep happening? The reason why it happens is that it's a cabal of people that go around and say, what's a company on the downswing that we can manipulate? Because what are they going to do? Be able to buy the shares to call our shorts. And then six months after it happens and they get away with it, FINRA looks at them and says, pay us our 5% fee for letting you get away with it. And then everyone is happy. Well, apart from the debt company. Yeah, apart from a lot of people involved with this. Well, apart from anyone who is providing values, services, jobs, or contributing to America in any way. Right. So from Investopedia, naked shorting is the illegal practice of short-selling shares that have not been affirmatively determined to exist. Ordinarily traders must borrow a stock or determine that it can be borrowed before they sell it short. So naked shorting refers to short pressure on a stock that may be larger than the tradable shares in the market. Despite being made illegal after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, naked shorting continues to happen because of loopholes and rolls and discrepancies between paper and electronic trading systems. There are some implications for blockchain around this, but I think we're mostly going to just stick to the underlying topic here. So there's a very easy way to correct this in the marketplace. And that is, if investors get together, notice this discrepancy and use it against those people doing the naked short by driving up the price and correcting the market so that it actually reflects the fundamentals of the company instead of the attempt to destroy the company through an illegal tactic. So before we get there, because that's going to lead into what's happening with Reddit right now and Robin Hood, the thing to explain about naked shorting and what's happening here is it's the corporate equivalent of looking at a company. And let's say the company needs some sort of hard pivot or it's sort of a parrot that the writing's on the wall that it may not be around very long. And so you say, hey, GameStop, hey, OverStop. I don't know if these companies will be around in 20 years. I don't know if they'll be around in 15. Why don't we short it? Well, in fact, you know what? Maybe this is only going to be around another 10 years. Why don't we aggressively short it? Why don't we naked short it? Because after all, all we're doing is killing something that is going to die anyway. And the reason why that's incredibly evil is GameStop has a clean balance sheet. Maybe they won't be around for 10 years. Maybe they won't be around for five years. But in naked shorting and creating these fake shares, they're making money by killing it early, doing something that they never should have been able to do so that they can make money depriving thousands of Americans years of jobs and works and services and goods. And so the thing that's disgusting about these naked shorts is you create these fake shares that manipulate the company's share value, the PE, in a way that they never even wanted. And then the way that they think it's okay is because, well, it was going to die in five years. Why don't we kill it now? It's the corporate equivalent of going to an old lady who doesn't have kids and stealing her home out from under her. Because you're like, well, she's 80. She's going to be dead in five years. What does she need to own her own home for? I mean, nobody would do that except for Mnuchin. Right. Well, that and Bruce Wagner, when he disappeared after people found it out. But that's an old Bitcoin callback. So the way that you short and the way that you naked short is predicated entirely on the stock not going up to the point where you have to cover your short. Now, if that happens, you have too much exposure and you want to close out that position. Now, the way that you close it out is by buying the stock. However, if you buy the stock, you're going to make the stock price go up. This creates a feedback loop. And when that happens, you could see these massive swings in the price not because of good news happened or there was a good day or the fundamentals changed, but because a bunch of people all were contractually forced to buy in order to fulfill their obligation to return the share at the same time. So if I understand this correctly, if there are a lot of short sellers, big short sellers, and especially if those short sellers are shorting by more than the total circulation of the stock, when one of them is squeezed out of their position and forced to buy, they drive the price up. That then triggers somebody else to be even more squeezed than they were before, perhaps forcing them to cover their position, which then forces them to buy, which drives the price up. And because these are pretty big buys, it drives the price up quite hard because these are not very liquid markets because there weren't that many people buying in the first place. They're mostly on the other side. And so this cascades, especially in the early days where the price has been really suppressed, it's fairly easy to cascade quite fast. And if I understand it also correctly, if you have a short, even if it's not due yet, and you're accounting for your stock positions like hedge funds have to do on a daily and weekly basis, they have to reconcile their books, right? If you're accounting for your positions and your short is in a position where if it came due today, you would have to cover it. The difference in price between what you can buy it for and what you're shorting it for is now a liability on your books. And in order for your books to remain solvent, you have to have corresponding assets. So if it's really bad, you end up in a situation where you have to source cash from somewhere else just to be solvent, even if you're not actually covering the positions just so that your books are solvent. You're thinking about if you or I were to do this, not if corporate oligarchs were to do it. So the reason why naked shorting is a special kind of evil is because by creating sell demand where there shouldn't be because you're a phantom creating shares, you're driving the price down. And so when you get away with creating naked shares, you're depressing the price. So what happens is these companies said, wow, GameStop is going up. Let's naked short in order to depress the price so we're never called on our other shares. So it's a special kind of evil where if the market says, hey, we have 10% more demand for GameStop and they go, hey, half of our shorts are going to be called if it goes up 10%. Let's phantom fiction create 10% more shares of GameStop that all sell in order to wipe out that true demand so that no one will ever call us on our position. And so what happens is these corporate raiders go from American company to American company and say, we're going to kill you. And even if you can rally, we're going to phantom create fictitious sell demand. And what are you going to do? Be able to have a treasury larger than ours? They play this Monte Carlo where you could just keep doubling down on money. And if you have infinite money, you win. But no one has infinite money except for the Fed and the corporatists on Wall Street. Because nobody gets to call your hands and see what you're actually holding, which is not real. Not only can no one call your hand, but if they do call your hand, the government won't stop them from creating fictitious shares. So the game is rigged because imagine if when you and I played Blackjack, it was 21 to win. But whenever Bob played Blackjack, he could get anything 15 and above and then he just magically wins. That's basically what these hedge funds have been doing for years. And the hedge fund in question, Melvin Capital, made 30% year over year returns specializing in shorting American companies and naked shorting them. Which is to say, seeing which companies they could destroy by fictitiously creating more shares than there are in order to just be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because what's going to happen? GameStop can't get their shareholders to rally the stock up 30%. Why don't we fake another 30% because they're not going to be able to get over that hurdle. Who's going to want to buy a dying company? No one's going to call us out on it. And if they do, the final will just be a couple percentage points anyway. Alright, so in the end, despite this audacious amount of fraud that's going on that is quasi-legal or quasi-tolerated by regulators. Well, let's just say selectively unenforced. GameStop did rally and it rallied because a bunch of degenerates on Reddit, as they call themselves, not that I'm calling them that, decided to call this. And this wasn't some kind of unsophisticated investor following FOMO without really understanding it. The specific investment thesis here was this is artificially created sell price with too much short-selling for what's actually the float. Therefore, it is very vulnerable to a short squeeze. Therefore, we can make money by reverting the company towards its correct valuation and its correct fundamentals because it's currently undervalued because of this artificial sell pressure. And that's an actual investment thesis. This is an actual market correcting based on information about what's actually happening and it was executed and executed rather well. The end result was a massive rally in GameStop that created a massive short squeeze that cascaded into bigger and bigger and bigger losses until Melvin the hedge fund almost went bankrupt before yesterday. Well, they may just soon. And they may still and they had to get an emergency loan but there's also behind the scenes this is putting enormous pressure on brokers who have enormous exposure from multiple hedge funds who are playing this naked short game. And so the best way to describe it is this is a modern day equivalent of the movie The Producers. Yeah, in that movie the plot is that there's these producers of a theater place and one of them says oh, you know, I've been looking over the books and I think we could make more money with a flop than a hit. So let's try to do a flop on purpose and we'll make a bunch of money but it backfires on them of course and the show is a big hit and they don't want that. What they did was they said what if we sell 400% of the equity in our company and we'll just spend 100% of the money we raise on the actual play and we'll never have to pay dividends because it's gonna be a flop. But what happens it succeeds and now they owe four times the amount of dividends than they possibly could ever pay because it was designed to fail because more people own shares than there were seats on the table and right now there's 138% shorts and there aren't 138 to sit down on. So Wall Street bets which used to have about 3 million users and now has almost 10 million users. It was like 1.7 million users a couple of days ago. It has grown so fast like in Streisand effect fully in effect here. Yeah, they tried to shut it down and the end result was that it became enormously popular. I think there's two main audiences here. There's certainly some people who had a real investment thesis. They actually saw this number of shorts exceeding the float and the fact that this was artificial cell pressure and that they could basically beat Wall Street to their own game. And then there's everybody else who are joining for a variety of reasons. One is FOMO, Fear of Missing Out and basically watching this game stop and by the way it then migrated to AMC Theatres who is another depressed company because of the pandemic. The reason why it is not the same thing for AMC at Bed Bath & Beyond and please don't quote me but I believe with Bed Bath & Beyond their short to float is 80% and with AMC it's about 30 or 40% which you can say is aggressive. There may be a buying opportunity there but it is not literally impossible to deliver 30% or 80% like it is 138%. So following from that there's a lot of people who are looking at price goes up therefore price may go up further and now they're looking at an opportunity to make money on this. So if they buy GameStop and a whole bunch of other people pile into that trade then they make money on that and eventually sell it sell it before it hits its peak whatever they don't care the fact that this is a bubble from FOMO because they think they might time it but there's an interesting third group and this third group is not doing it for the Lolls. They're not doing it for the income opportunity. They're doing it out of pure desire for revenge. There's a lot of people who got financially massacred in 2008 who watched their families their jobs their homes disappear who grew up in that environment as teenagers or an entire generation of millennials who were trying to get their first job or get into college or get out of college or get their first house or whatever and got flattened by the 2008 recession and then proceeded to watch as no one went to jail and effectively there was complete immunity and impunity for that degree of financial fraud. And they were told that their future and their career and their ability to get their first job or move ahead or have anything in savings needed to entirely be sacrificed so those people could get their bonuses that year. Right. And now they're looking at this as an opportunity to stick it to the man. And the delicious irony of course in all of this is the nearing condescension from Wall Street and from investment talking heads on TV who have been talking about the millennial generation and the Gen Z generation as lazy entitled avocado toast eating losers who can't invest in the future and have been suggesting that instead of spending all of their money on iPhones and avocado toast, they should invest some. Well, guess what? Now they did and the resulting reaction is no, not like that. I just want to speak to the lawlessness of kind of the entirety of the financial markets, right? And like, I think again, this has really been kind of a rip the face off moment where in an effort to condemn these people who as far as anyone could tell are doing something so well and pretty much standard practice for the smart money so called that all the rules suddenly have to change around that, right? And it's just this perfect example of how nonsense everything is and how really there are, if not two sets of rules, then perhaps even more sets of rules for different people depending on your socioeconomic class. And again, like this is really rebellion against that. I actually attempted to participate in this last night. Yeah, me too. Because I had some money sitting in Robin Hood and I don't really play with stocks. So like I started placing orders and the orders stopped working because Robin Hood actually shut down the ability for people to trade in these stocks because of this. And that's another aspect of this is really concerning. Yeah. Well, you know, there are two things that they made not by law but by social consensus agreement between people in power and companies that you cannot buy in 2020. And that's N95 masks and GameStop shares. GameStop shares in anything the WallStreetBets touches. Right. Within 12 to 24 hours of this WallStreetBets forum rebellion and within 12 to 24 hours of Melvin getting in trouble and facing insolvency let's see what happened. Reddit shut down WallStreetBets, the forum and made it by invitation only. Gods actually converted the website to private temporarily. They did that on their own. They received about 2 million new users within 24 hours and out of fear that Reddit would be banning them. They preemptively paused the subreddit so that they could moderate the new users to make sure that nothing nefarious was occurring and then re-enabled it the next day. So it actually wasn't Reddit who did it. It was the moderators. Discord got rid of it. So within 12 to 24 hours the Reddit forum was turned to private because they were afraid Reddit would ban them. The Discord server for WallStreetBets was shut down. It was said that they were engaging in racist and all right sentimentality. Then TD Ameritrade banned the buying of GameStop, not the selling, allowing people to close positions. Then Robinhood banned the buying but not the selling. And in some cases appears to have closed positions on behalf of its customers for being exposed to undue risk so they de-risk the trade. And what that means is that they sold on behalf of the users. So the users had purchased these shares and then they sold on behalf of them. Wow. Charles Schwab shut down trading of GameStop, AMC and I think Bed Bath and Beyond. It started spreading to other securities too. And then NASDAQ after letting the hedge funds pile on the sell pressure all evening in after-hours trading that was not available to retail investors then closed down that market after about an hour of trading this morning once the buy pressure came back in. So this isn't just a matter of stopping manipulation or stopping trading. They literally flipped a short squeeze into a long squeeze. And what that means is that if you're an investor who was taking the long position in GameStop and using it to fight these hedge funds short positions, if you're now banned from buying and you can't support that position and you're watching the price drop because the sell pressure continues and is allowed. And you're watching your friends capitulate because they think they're going to lose out big on this because only one side is allowed. And you're watching the price drop. The more the price drops, the more exposed you are. The more money you're losing from this and therefore the bigger the pressure to sell. And that's a long squeeze. So it's not like this was a neutral regulation. It's not like they just said, okay, let's just stop everything. No, it was exactly as if you have two basketball teams out on the field and the referee goes, that's a foul, takes all five players from one team off the field turns the clock back on and lets the opposing team take two point shots from the line with no one in front of them. So it's actually worse than that. So a large percentage of the shorts come to term tomorrow on Friday. Yeah. So shorts don't expire. There are options that expire tomorrow because it's the end of the month as far as the markets are concerned. But the shorts kind of continue. But the point is, is that the longer that this goes on and the more attention that gathers around it, frankly, the more chance that more people continue to jump on board. As we said, Wall Street Bets went from 1.7 million users to 10 million users in just a couple of days because of this attention. And so again, people like me who are not interested in the stock market really at all are like, man, this seems like a really good opportunity to stick it to those guys higher up, right? The smart money who get away with basically everything. This is the money version of Occupy Wall Street. That was my impression of it too, Andrews. Yeah. Well, it's the 4chan version of Occupy Wall Street. Yes. Not only is it far more effective, people got to realize I will get these links and will post them in the show notes. 4chan was one of the three groups thanked by the people on the ground about their assistance in the Arab Spring. 4chan, a couple of years ago, found an ISIS training video, reverse engineered where it was, and then got the Russian government to drone strike the training camp. Like 4chan is not a joke and what you did is locked them up, gave them a thousand dollars, took their freedom away, made the interest rate negative, took bonds away, made savings account zero, made 30% in 2 and said, what are you going to do? Call our bluff. And the thing that is so interesting about this is it's not just about the money. It's sort of, you know, Freud calls it the phallus which is like, what's the thing that is the subtext behind everything that no one ever gets to talk out loud about? That's sort of, what's the phallus, right? And the phallus here is you're not supposed to call me out. You're supposed to let me get away with it. The thing about these hedge funds, the thing about FINRA, FINRA is not a government agency. It's an oligopoly of the companies that are the ones doing this self-regulating. It's a gentleman's club. And so what we're seeing here is not these 4chan guys who are smarter than Goldman Sachs know it was that they weren't a part of the club. What we're seeing here is the Occupy Wall Street equivalent of the Harvey Weinstein moment where you're just supposed to let Harvey Weinstein be Harvey Weinstein. Everyone knows that you have to do it and then you get your job. The reason why it had to be several hundred million dollars from retail is because anyone FINRA regulated is part of the club and they look the other way when Harvey Weinstein does what he does. And so the reason why when you're listening to everyone talk they can't tell you what happened that's illegal, they can't tell you that they're disgusted and that they're shocked and it just shouldn't be allowed to happen. It's because they're the people who would be in Hollywood that says but yeah producers supposed to molest people how else do you get an actress except this time it's not molesting a woman it's destroying tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of companies. Because you know what why not because you pay the fine and you move on you give the girl her hush money and that's how the game is played. But Main Street is not supposed to be a part of that game. Main Street's not to look at a predator and say we're calling you out on this. I don't care if the government's not going to do anything about it we're going to do something about it. And so the reason why no one can tell you why you should be offended about what's happening but you should be is because we're finally showing these f**ks that this is not okay and that they're not going to get away with it and if the government's going to let them keep going you gave every single American a thousand dollars in their pocket and they're all going to f**king press go at the same time. I find it really just delicious to watch these interviews on CNBC because some of these people are so out of touch and so in their bubble that they say the thing you're not supposed to say out loud. So I don't know who it was but one of the big hedge funds managers was on CNBC and they said that this is just a bunch of dead beats using their federal stimulus handout to execute an assault on the wealthy. Wow. And you know what? Yes that's exactly what it is. The only question is why is that a problem? They call it an assault on the wealthy when rich people lose money on a trade. You know in some circles this is just a perfect example to settle down economics. Okay so we are almost at a time here folks we're going to have to come back to this one I think after we've seen another couple of days of progress on it because I'm very curious to see where this ends up. There have been a number of unprecedented steps. So the one thing I want to say is this every market tends to have these effects where the rich get richer, where wealth accumulates where wealth and equality happens. That's something that occurs in social systems a natural outcome of other inequalities that exist and Bitcoin doesn't fix that. But there's something especially galling about this idea that once wealth and equality has started that wealth can be used about power, that power can be used to buy access and that power and access can be used to buy impunity and when the rules can be changed not just before or after the fact but during the trade when the rules of the market can be changed even against participants who in good faith were assuming that the same rules applied to them that's particularly galling. So what Bitcoin fixes what decentralized finance fixes is not wealth and equality what it fixes is that wealth and access and power do not give you the ability to change the rules in the middle of the game and that on its own is revolutionary. I think and it's not over yet I genuinely believe this is the most transformative financial event of the past decade like since 2009 and the reason why is for two reasons. One is in 2009 everyone learned that America is the country where if you're too big you will not be allowed to fail too big to fail means once you're rich enough everyone else will suffer so that you don't fail and what's happening right now is two things one is that there's a coordinated cabal of people coming together tell retail you're too small to succeed we're gonna do something it's gonna be blatant we're gonna stick our neck 50 paces past the edge of the cliff and if you call us out on it because you're not part of the club because of it who are you we're everything you're nothing you're too small to succeed you don't get to do that and the way that the government responds to this and the way that these companies are responding it will let us know if America will go from being a country that said if you're too big we won't let you fail to being the country that says if you're too small we goddamn sure won't let you succeed I got chills the most important thing to take away as a bitcoiner listening to this this is where the justice boner comes in the thing that gives me hope this is the white pill this is the moment of hope is that what bitcoin did is it took very very geeky people with highly technical knowledge or very philosophical leanings very small percentages of them and in understanding how they could affect the world in response to 2009 in response to too big to fail they bet on bitcoin we bought and sold something publicly created and billions and billions of dollars got made and because of the ideology of the people who weren't a part of that community they didn't participate and so now we live in a world where there are tens of thousands of millionaires and a hundred millionaires who believe in freedom and decentralization and live and let be in a fundamental way that the filter effect that said you will only be in this community if you believe these values now have the money to be a part of the world and change the world what's happening right now with wall street bets is tens of thousands of people in their 30s who've never participated in wall street before who have never engaged in something said hey you know what why don't I buy some shares why don't I engage in this thing as a function of math it is not possible for them to be able to succeed let's call them out on breaking the laws of mathematics and the reason why people think it's going to rally is not because they think the stock is going to go up it's that at some point Melvin Capital is going to have to buy a hundred and thirty eight percent of all shares of GameStop that exist realize that number doesn't happen and it doesn't matter what the price is you have to buy and so in the past four days Melvin paid out four billion dollars in shorts what that is is tens of thousands of people on reddit who have a job took $500 bought on robin hood it went to $50,000 and Melvin Capital gave them that money they said hey here's a shit sandwich you're going to eat this shit sandwich because you decided to try to corporate raid, destroy a company and break the laws of mathematics because your Harvey Weinstein club was never going to call you out on it well guess what I'm here eat this shit sandwich and so that what we're seeing is four billion dollars go directly from that club to the normals and I hope to God that they actualize at least most of it because what we're seeing is an entirely new class of activist investor one who isn't FINRA regulated and doesn't play the game and above all else will beat up bullies because the thing that the bullies do is the regulators are going to let them get away with it and no one with money is going to call them out on it when they do and so if no one's going to call them out on it they might as well get away with it and what's happening here is these tens of thousands of people who put $500,000, $10,000 in that now literally have six figures and in some case they're going to take some of their gains and maybe they're not going to take the four billion maybe it's going to be a billion but now you have tens of thousands of hundred thousandaires and millionaires whose entire investment thesis is how do we f*** bullies for trying to manipulate the market and because they're not a part of the game they're going to do it and I think what we're seeing is an entirely new investment class an entirely new investment thesis and an entirely new adversary that these people are going to have to look out for and on that note that is all the time we have for this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin thank you very much to the other hosts of the show Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and Andreas and Antonopoulos for sitting in on today's session this episode was edited by Jonas and featured music by Jared Rubins stay tuned for our next episode