 Good morning, John. I wasn't gonna do this, but then I saw a former head of the SEC on CNBC comparing the freaking GameStop short squeeze to the siege on the Capitol and I got too mad. And so now I'm here. I think it's fairly easy to pull back the curtain here and talk about why this happened, why it doesn't mean you shouldn't have faith in the stock market, and why it is nothing like the siege on the Capitol. GameStop is a mall retailer that sells video games and so it's been struggling. Its current business model is not well suited to a pandemic or the future in general. A bunch of finance people notice this, not a complicated thing to notice, and they want to make money off of that. Now they may not own GameStop stock. They didn't buy it when it was high, so they can't really sell it when it's low. They could buy it low and sell it lower, but the way to really make money off of this is to make a bet, to bet that it will go down a certain amount in a certain amount of time. And just like in Vegas, when your bet gets more specific, your payout if you win will be higher. They then make these bets public the rest of the market sees it and actually drives the price of the stock down. But then someone notices that GameStop isn't actually doing that poorly. They're sitting on a fair amount of cash, people are coming in and buying PS5s, they're not doing well, but they're not going bankrupt. So those people start to buy GameStop stock and then it stops crashing. But people who made the bets get worried, so they make more bets, so that the market will see that and they will lower the price again. And this works for an amount of time. They do it so much that they actually, it turns out, have made promises to buy more GameStop stock than exists on the market. Someone notices this and they say a fairly simple sentence. The finance guys have promised to buy so much GameStop stock that if it doesn't go bankrupt or get purchased by a private equity fund in the next, like, three months, they're going to have to buy GameStop stock at whatever the price is. And we can be the one selling it to them at whatever the price is. Other people hear that and they're like, you know what? You're right. So they do that. They start to push the price of the stock up probably closer to what it actually should be worth considering that the company's not going bankrupt. And then the stock starts to increase in value a lot and that becomes news and that brings more people in whether they understand what's going on or not. And at some point here this starts to transition from squeezing value out of hedge funds to just a little mini pyramid scheme. Buying the stock because people are buying the stock and then trying to get more people to buy the stock so you can sell the stock when it's higher. Because eventually the price of GameStop is going to go back down to a rational number. From even the most optimistic perspective, GameStop is worth 10 times less what it's trading at right now. As long as you're still squeezing the hedge funds, it's about that, not about the price. But eventually those squeezes run out and it has to go back down to a normal price. That is eventually going to happen and on the way down, people are going to lose a lot of money. Now for everyone involved in this, this was a gamble. This was not investment. If you go into the discords where these things are organized, it's just a bunch of people bullying each other not to sell while slowly selling in the background to make sure they've locked their profits in. Also it's very exciting and for certain brains, mine included. That kind of feedback is dangerous and addictive and we've seen the exuberance of this sort of like explode out into other places. Like there wasn't a like fundamental weird reason why Dogecoin was suddenly worth more. The important thing here is that this instability was not created by Reddit. It was created by hedge funds who promised to buy more stock than existed. There are some real terrible arcane systems for manipulating our world for the benefit of like the worst people. And it's just people. It's not magic. It's decipherable. And none of it has much to do with how the market actually works. Which is that people buy shares in companies that they think are doing well and will do better and sell shares in companies that they think will not do well. Now these manipulating agencies should be regulated out of existence. They shouldn't be able to do what they do. But instead at least in this one way they got memed out of existence. That door has been slammed in their face by a few hundred people who figured something out and a few million people who were mobilized in a financial action unlike any one has ever seen ever in the world. Eventually people are gonna figure out how powerful they are. It'll be interesting to see what we do with that. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.