Afford Anything - The GameStop Revolution, One Year Later — with Spencer Jakab

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

#361: Wall Street Journal columnist Spencer Jakab marks the one-year anniversary of that weird time when the subReddit Wall St Bets pumped shares of meme stocks like GameStop and AMC Theaters, triggering a short squeeze that forced several hedge funds to lose billions. What did we learn from that experience? And how do we actually take down Wall Street? How do we launch a truly effective financial revolution? We share those insights in today’s episode. Subscribe to the show notes at https://affordanything.com/shownotes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource you need to manage. Like your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. Saying yes to something implicitly means. Saying no to all other options. And that is terrifying, and it opens up two questions.

First, what matters most? Second, how do you align your choices around that which matters most? Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that's what this podcast is here to help you facilitate. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and this week marks the one-year anniversary of the Reddit takedown of Wall Street. I'm using that phrase a little tongue-in-cheek. You'll hear about it in the upcoming interview, but you remember a year ago when a bunch of people in a subreddit called Wall Street Betts decided to pie up.

into a bunch of meme stocks, most notably GameStop, but also AMC theaters, Nokia, Blackberry, and a few others, they decided to all pile into these meme stocks, drive up the prices, and squeeze out the short sellers, which were these major hedge funds that had taken short positions, meaning they made money if the stock went down. It was heralded as the triumph of the average investor, meaning some 25-year-old in his mom's basement, over the hedge funds who long have marshaled their data, their research, their troves of information to be able to know things that the rest of us don't. And so in the standoff between individual investors versus institutional investors, i.e. average Joe versus the hedge fund, this compelling

David versus Goliath narrative emerged. And then, to make it extra spicy, the popular trading app Robin Hood shut down trades from people who wanted to buy shares of GameStop. They only allowed trading one way, meaning they allowed people to sell but not buy. And that inherently created a downward price pressure on the price of the stock. I mean, that's simple. But economics 101, if people are allowed to sell but not buy, this necessarily exerts one-way price pressure. And it means that the decision made by the trading platform influences the price of the stock. It's a little Schrodinger's cat, kind of. Where the broker isn't just facilitating the transaction, they're influencing the outcome, whether they intend to or not, whether or not, that's the purpose of the decision.

And as we're about to hear, that was not the purpose of the decision, but it was the outcome. Not the intent, but the outcome. And so that took this juicy story and amplified it a thousandfold. So all of that took place exactly a year ago this week. And to celebrate that one-year anniversary, well, celebrates maybe an imprecise word, but to mark that anniversary, today we're chatting with Spencer Jacob. He is an award-winning columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of a book called The Revolution That Wasn't,

which is a deep dive into what happened with GameStop, Reddit, Robin Hood, and the craziest financial story, not just of the past year, but of the past decade. So to pull back the curtain and learn what really happened, and why? And by the way, if we do want to stick it to Wall Street, if we do want to stick it to the hedge funds, how exactly do we do that? To answer all of these questions, here is award-winning financial journalist Spencer Jacob. Hi, Spencer.

Hi, Paula. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You have done extensive research around the GameStop Revolution, the Reddit takedown of Wall Street. we're now celebrating the one-year anniversary. And I'm using those phrases ironically. In a sense, I'm using them with a dash of sarcasm because, of course, it's not quite fair to describe it as the Reddit take down of Wall Street. But that's how the memes describe it.

I am fascinated by what happened. And I'm really looking forward to this next hour in which we discuss how it all unfolded. But to start with, what were the conditions that, allowed this to happen, the technological conditions, the social conditions. You know, there were Yahoo chat forums in the 1990s. So why did it happen now? Why didn't it happen in the 90s or in 2000 or in 2010? You know, it's fascinating because a lot of things had to happen all at once, technologically and socially and financially to create the conditions for this to happen. And I mean, just to recap quickly for anybody who might not remember, it might not have been following, although it was a crossover story.

It wasn't just a financial story, of course. Was that a band of millions, but really the core group was hundreds of thousands of young traders who organized themselves on Wall Street bets, which is a subreddit on Reddit, decided to target hedge funds that were short. Some dowdy stocks that had not seen their heyday for 10, 20 years in some cases. The biggest one was GameStop, but it wasn't the only one. And they sort of used its shares and options and its shares as a weapon to hurt Wall Street to blow hedge funds. And they did hurt a handful of people on Wall Street. They basically, you know, there were some sophisticated people on the board who said, you know what, the short interest in these stocks is so high that if we all get together and buy the stock and buy options, certain types of options in the stock, then they'll be forced into huge losses, possibly losing all of their money.

And this will be a way to stick it to the man, and we're going to make money. That is sort of what happened. There was one hedge fund in particular that lost about $6 billion in a few days, one of the most successful hedge funds on Wall Street, several others who lost a lot of money. So how did it happen? So a lot of things had to occur. One is that trading had to be cheap, or not just cheap, it had to be specifically, it had to be free. These days, when you go to any,

retail broker in the U.S. and in other countries sometimes too, they'll say no commissions. You pay no commission when you trade. It's free to trade. It's not really free to trade. They call it free to trade because there is a cost. Everything has a cost. Just like, you know, when you're on Facebook, is it free? I mean, it's so you can send, you know, look at the photos of all your kids' friends and everyone's wedding photos. It's not free because you're sort of paying the dues and all the information you share. And trading isn't free either. I go into the ways later and the ways that it really isn't. But you have to think that it's free, which means that you can trade many, many times and not really worry about kind of chewing up the value of your account. And that's

something that was pioneered by a company called Robin Hood. They weren't the first to do it, but they're the first to make it really popular. They introduced it some years ago. That was their thing, free trading for the masses. And they attracted lots of young people with not very much money and not much sophistication either. And they have a beautiful app that's won an award. The first year came out in 2015, it's frictionless, it's intuitive, it's perfect for a generation that grew up with smartphones. And in late 2019, because Robin Hood, by that point, was getting about one out of every two brokerage accounts opened in the U.S., everybody else threw in the towel. Schwab and Fidelity and Ameritrade, eBay, all these much bigger firms just said, well, okay,

we're going to stop charging commissions too. And it's going to cost us a lot of money, but we have to do it to compete. What happened was that there was an explosion in trading in retail interest. So the opposite happened from what they expected because, of course, they still do make money when you trade in other ways. And they wound up making a lot more money. This was leading into 2020. Well, you all remember what happened in 2020, which was that the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Millions of young people around the U.S. were sent home or went home to mom and dad or were sitting at home not going to work. All of a sudden, a lot of money that they were spending going out with their friends, going out for beers and whatever they weren't spending. They got stimulus checks. A lot of them got unemployment checks as well. They had money and nothing to spend it on, and they were bored. Another thing that had happened was that sports betting had taken off. like a rocket since 2018.

Sports betting is legal now, I believe, in 46 states, and you can do through a smartphone. Daily Fantasy Sports is legal pretty much in every state that had been for a number of years. And especially the young men, men between the ages of 18 and 35, who really drove this phenomenon, this GameStop mania, also happened to the, if you draw Venn diagram, they overlapped with young men who were into sports betting. Had no sports to bet on. You might remember March of April 2020, there were no sports. The only sports you could get on ESPN were like bowling, Korean baseball, you know, and just reruns of old events. Sports ceased to be a thing. And as a matter of fact, the real boom in trading kind of got another leg up when March Madness was canceled, the men's NCAA basketball tournament, which is the most gambled upon event each year in the U.S. That led to an explosion in speculative trading. and, of course, the stock market plunged. And volatility is very exciting.

If you're new to the stock market and you don't care, you know, you don't own a lot of stocks already, that you're not saying, oh, man, my 401k is getting creamed. You're just seeing this thing moving up and down a couple of percent a day. There are some stocks that are moving up 10 percent or more a day, and especially exchange-traded notes that have a lot of leverage in them. And trading in those took off like a rocket. I mean, there was one that was a bet on volatility futures that had just a massive, massive surge in trading. And people made, if they bought at a certain time and sold at a certain time, about 30 times their money in that note. That was one of the more popular things that people traded. They traded things that owned airline stocks.

You know, airlines were going to have the verge of bankruptcy and then they got bailed out. So it was like a great game. It was more exciting than sports betting or a casino and more profitable. too. And so that laid the stage for tens of millions of new, inexperienced people to come into the market who were then looking for the sort of the next rush and were learning what to do by going on social media, TikTok, YouTube, and as specifically affects this story, Reddit, Wall Street Betts, which was a very sort of, you know, wild, uproarious, meme-filled place to find trading advice. In 2020, we were also coming off of an 11-year bull run. Do you think that there was a level of confidence inspired by that, young people who maybe didn't experience the recession of 2008, 2009, or if they did, experienced a massive long-running recovery?

You know, I think that that definitely played a role. And it definitely played a role in somewhat more experienced investors diving in because the, you know, BTFD, I'm not going to spell out every word in that acronym, but that was the model. of young traders who would, let's say, who had been active for a few more years since 2015, 2016. Right. And that's what a lot of people tell me is that, you know, basically every time there's a dip, you go in and buy it because the Fed's going to bail us out, things always bounce back. And in terms of bouncing back. Sorry, I'm just going to pause you because I'm sure there are people who are listening

who are wondering what that acronym stands for. So I'll just, I'll say it. Okay. All right. Buy the effing dip. BTFD. That is indeed what it stands for. And so their experience was every time there's like a scary event, there's some the Fed might raise rates or this or that or some international event or Greece coming close to defaulting.

That was a great time to buy. That was an excellent time to buy. And so it's like a Pavlovian reaction, people who were a little bit more experienced in the market but had not experienced 2008, which is, you know, a few tens of millions of people also on top of the people who were brand new in 2020. 2020 and 2021, who played a big role in this, like you saw something plunge and you jumped in. You know, you got to be bold, you got to buy and ask questions later. And it doesn't matter if you kind of understood what you owned. You know, the thing is that it's going up and you keep on buying it, a momentum was a very successful strategy for people. So that also played a role.

And now let's look at 2020 because it was a bare market. A bare market is defined as a 20% drop from a previous. is high. And it certainly was a bare market. The stock market lost a third of its value very, very quickly, a matter of weeks. It was one of the quickest, it was actually, sorry, it was the quickest descent from an all-time high to a bare market ever. But it also was the quickest recovery by orders of magnitude from a bare market. We were back by August. You made all your money back and then kept on making money. And so, you know, it was like if you were going to sort of stick your head in the lion's mouth and come out and sort of get a dollar every time you did it or

pick up nickels in front of a bulldozer or whatever metaphor you want for like risky activity, there was example number one. That was like if you were hesitant, then you didn't make money. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of people, I'm a little bit older than most people who participated in this, people my age who had something to lose, who were worried about, you know, retiring in a decade or two, did not jump back in because there was a global pandemic. Stuff was bad, you know, and so, and even people who were known for being, having a lot of equanimity when it came to the market at Warren Buffett, you know, he sold his airline stocks. He was kind of ridiculed by some of these people for selling his airline stocks when he could have, let's say, if he had doubled down, he would have doubled his money. But, you know, who knew? You didn't know that they were going to be bailed out. You didn't know that so much money was going to be pumped into the economy and that we wouldn't all die of this new illness, you know, that only.

some people would die, you know, and so you could say he was being pretty prudent, but to these people, there was a new boss in town, and it was them, and it wasn't him. You know, that was old school, and they were new school. And, you know, people had told them, don't buy cryptocurrency, don't buy Tesla, it's a bubble, and all these things, and had turned out so far to be wrong. And so kind of, you know, your dad's broker at Merrill Lynch, who wears a suit, who's telling you what to do, was like had given you terrible advice and people on the internet had given you great advice, strangers on the internet. And this is a generation that's much more open anyway to getting advice from random people who might use pseudonyms. And there was one random guy at the center of

this whole thing who had gigantic influence more than the others. Right. Keith Gill, Roaring Kitty. That's right. And they didn't know his name was Keith Gill until really the episode was on the downside, but Keith Gill, who is, he was in fact a financial advisor, roaring kitty or deep effing value, as he was known on Wall Street bets, went for being this kind of marginal figure who was very cerebral,

who was talking about this company called GameStop, to when it all of a sudden became a thing, people looked up all his old posts and all his odd videos, and he had been touting it for a while. The irony is he had been touting it as a value investment. But he was like somewhere between the value of traditional investing in memes. You know, he was a, he was 34 years old at the time of the, the main event took place,

posting all kinds of memes and crazy videos and gesticulating wildly, you know, and so he, he was like a good person to spread the message. And when he, when he went from, like, posting cerebral videos that were five hours long to just posting, like, you know, memes with pictures of cats and, you know, movie posters and stuff like that, then he went from being kind of nobody to being, And the main thing that he did was when he became the center of retention very frequently, for a while every day, he was posting a screenshot of his Z trade account. And there was a lot of money in his Z trade account at one point. It went from having not much money to having over $50 million at one point, betting on this one stock and he wouldn't sell. I mean, he could have walked away with $50 million.

And people were like, if he's still in, I'm still in. And that gets to an idea called social proof, you know, where you see somebody who has been successful. financially and you want to copy them because clearly they know what they're talking about they made a lot of money even if they lucked into money he didn't luck into it but even if someone lucked into money if they made a lot of money you want to follow that person it's why those like i don't know if you ever have had insomnia and watched a late night infomercial and there's the guy getting out of his Lamborghini with like two blondes under each arm and a mansion in the background it is yacht in the background and who knows if it's his or not, but he's like some ordinary guy who has all this

wealth that's going to sell you 12 DVDs that show you how you did it and whatever. And so that's why he's not just sitting in an office. He's dressed really nicely as an expensive watch and he has all these toys that we know cost a lot of money because that ups his credibility. And that $50 million at one point that was in Keith Gill's e-trade account uped his credibility with this group. Right. And he was very gutsy. He did not sell.

He did not take money off the table. And part of the, really, the whole way that this scheme was supposed to work was that nobody was supposed to sell ever. And then you'd all make a lot of money somehow. Right. So a couple of things come to mind. First, my understanding, and you alluded to this when you said that the irony is that Keith Gale actually initially bought this as a value investment, he originally bought long call options on game. because of the fact that GameStop was re-formulating its board, and it brought in some people from, I believe, chewy, chewy.com? Well, that happened later. Yeah. Ryan Cohen came in, and that was towards the end. It had already surged a bit. But it was, it had a plan. Then it had another plan. Then it had another plan. And he kind of believed in the plan. So he, they brought us new board members. You know, GameStop was a failing business. I have three sons. So I love video.

game so I can give you a front row seat on GameStop over the years and my oldest boy is turning 23 soon you know and he's been gosh we've been going there for 19 years or so you know many PlayStation versions ago and we don't go there very often anymore hardly at all because it's kind of like blockbuster video was maybe four or five years before it went out of business you know digitized competitors are getting all the business now not them but he saw a way for them to reinvent themselves. And, you know, he had a good theory. He was a smart guy. And other people saw the same opportunity. Michael Burry, who was a famous value investor who became famous because he was featured in Michael Lewis as the big short. Also, after he took a

stake, Michael Burry came in and took a stake. Then another value investor came in and took a stake. And these are like boring old doughty value investors. Right. Not meme stock investors. And then later, when things started to get interesting, then Ryan Cohen, who had made a lot of money, he wasn't quite a billionaire yet, although he is now, because of GameStop, came in and bought a stake,

and he was somebody who was well respected, had a lot of street cred with these young traders, and that's when the excitement really, really started to build. And at the same time, these hedge funds were like, no, this is hopeless. I'm going to double down at even higher price and continue to bet on this stock going to zero eventually. Right.

So it seems as though there was at least initially a genuine case, a case made on fundamentals about the company in which a person could reasonably take either position. A person could reasonably state, no, I think this company is going to be going to go the way of blockbuster or a person could reasonably state, hey, this could be a long value play. There's new talent coming into the board. Ryan Cohen now has a 10% stake. He was instrumental in the growth of chewy.com, which is, you know, one of the, I mean, who could go head to head with Amazon, but Chewy did in the pets department. So he certainly knows e-commerce. You know, there's certainly at least a reasonable case to be made in the beginning that GameStop could be a good purchase, a good investment. That's right. And the analyst didn't think so. And just full disclosure, you know, I've been a financial journalist for coming up on 20 years. now, but I was in, I worked in finance. I was an analyst for almost a decade to start my career. You know, analysts, they know a lot of facts and things like that, but they're not very good of predicting what's going to happen. And so analysts were very pessimistic about the company,

but it takes two to make a market. And there were some smart people, including Keith Gill, Michael Berry, Joel Tillinghast, who's a very well-known value investor, and other people who had taken stakes in this company and thought that there was a possibility it could turn around. And, you know, that's really all you need. I mean, that's a big misconception is, you know, I think these young people didn't understand. And I write about that a lot in my book about the episode is that they were kind of laughing at Keith Gill for many, many, many months saying, like, dude, you know, you doubled your money, sell this thing, you know, and then you would lose half his money. And they're like, you know, you know how much money you lost this? Like, more money that I've made in my life.

Like, don't be such a moron. Get out of this. and he was making basically kind of probabilistic arguments. He was saying, no, I don't think that's right. And that gives me a lower cost base. And I don't really look at these short-term moves. And that's, you know, if you're going to be a successful investor over the decades, I think that's exactly the attitude to take, by the way.

He was right. He could have wound up being wrong about this and losing all of his money because he was taking a big gamble. But he's playing the odds. he liked what he saw and he thought his odds were okay and that's kind of what value investors do they're not sure but they have a strong feeling and they think that the rest of the market got it wrong yeah so that that was pretty reasonable but that's not what happened here then i think had that been his attitude all long i think he would have made twice or four times or eight times his money and sold uh way before the

peak you know he made he turned 50 grand into 50 million he made a thousand times his money at one point Wow. So how did this become the preeminent meme stock? I mean, we know that other stocks, AMC theaters, Bed Bath and Beyond, Nokia, we know that several other companies became meme stocks, but why GameStop? Why did this become the biggest story? And why did the subreddit Wall Street bets grow from less than a million people, up to 8 million people? I mean, why did this become the story? I think it's one of these things about like kind of lightning striking. It started to take off. And then you had people professionals on Wall Street who were sort of ridiculing the thing,

who were saying, you know, you guys don't know what you're doing. You know, I'm going to tell you you're inexperienced. And you had one short seller in particular who, because most of the people who are short this stock, in case, I'm sure some people listening to this don't know this, let's say you go out and you buy a stock. The most you could do is lose every penny you invested in that stock unless you borrowed money, right? That would be pretty bad, but they're not going to come after your house, right? But a short seller is in the opposite position.

The most they can make is 100%. So they sell a stock short and then it goes to zero and then they buy it back. So they sell it without owning it and they buy it back at zero. They made 100%, which would be a huge payday for a short seller. And in order to sell it without owning it, they borrow it. So they borrow it from someone, then they sell what they've borrowed. then they wait for the price to drop and then they buy it back at a lower price and then return it to the lender.

What that what that means is that since there's no limit to how high a stock can go, their losses are infinite. So they have to eventually they will hit their pain point and they have to buy. And if lots of people have done the same thing, then they all have to buy at the same time. It's like a theater catching fire and there's like one little narrow exit door, but they trample each other, you know, and that's what happened. And that's a short squeeze. It was a short squeeze, and these people caused the short squeeze to happen.

So, like, there's some great stock market stories in the 19th century, if you were into financial history at all. 19th century, early 20th century, people used to do this on purpose. Well, they knew somebody was short of stock, and they're like, hey, let's you and I and some other people with a lot of money sneak up. And very quietly, you know, there's no internet then, so you could kind of do it discreetly. Buy up lots and lots and lots of the stock. And then, oh, we'll show up one day and say, hey, there's not enough stock for you to buy back. You have to pay us 100 times or whatever. You're bankrupt.

You have to pay us all your money in order not to default on these loans. That's called a corner. And that would happen from time to time, like Vanderbilt and all these people were playing these games. But that has been illegal for about a century to do that because it's pretty disruptive, obviously, to the normal functioning of the stock market. But it's illegal for, you know, Paula, for you. and me and a bunch of other people to kind of might have a lot of money and get together

and to do that because that is kind of like a conspiracy. But it's not illegal or it's not clear if it's illegal for a million people to do it out in the open on a message board. And they were talking about this, you know, for many weeks on the message board. And the thing is that this is a message board full of like, you know, jokes and memes and whatever. And these Hedgehog managers were not really paying attention or a couple did, but they didn't take it very seriously. Like, they saw their names on the internet. They had, you know, services that said, oh, if my name ever shows up on the internet or the name of my fund, you know, and so they pay some junior analysts to, like, you know, write the upper report. Like, yeah, boss, they mentioned you, but these guys don't know what they're talking about.

And for the most part, they didn't. But there were a few people who really didn't know what they're talking about. We don't know who they are. I and other people have tried to determine who they are, but they clearly were pretty sophisticated and they understood that you could do this. You could create an old-fashioned corner or try to and create an explosion in the price. And so this was all planned out and written about and built the momentum built over weeks. And then Ryan Cohen showing up, upping a stake, then later getting a seat on the board, all these things, kind of just poured fuel on the fire. And then on top of that, you had one short seller in particular who was an activist short seller who went out and told these guys like, you don't know what you're doing.

You know, you're the suckers at the poker table. I think that's the exact wording he used. I'm going to post a video on Twitter. And they, you know, he became public enemy number one. His name is Andrew Left. And he's a very successful shortseller. And he was just rolled over by these amateurs and lost so much money he had to get out of the position in a couple of days. He said he lost 100%.

The main person who lost a lot of money wasn't doing any of this. He wasn't waving a red flag at balls. He was just kind of a, you know, he had a big, sophisticated fund, and he wasn't only short. He mainly was long, but Gabe Plotkin of Melvin Capital. And he lost the most, although there were other firms like his that also lost billions, but he lost about $6 billion in a matter of days. So, yeah, they stuck it to Wall Street. The reason that the title of my book is the revolution that wasn't is that that's not really what happened in the end.

Like that's when we all, I worked with the Wall Street Journal and every other publication that similar wrote a lot of stories. In those days, there were over a thousand news articles in English about this phenomenon in a period of several days about how they kind of pulled one over on Wall Street. And they didn't. That's the thing. It's like once the dust cleared and you think about it, you're like, you know, they paid a lot of money to Wall Street. Like Wall Street is a lot of different types of companies. And they paid a ton of money to companies like Virtue and Citadel Securities and all options market makers and a lot of fund managers made money and a lot of executives who were already rich at these companies made money. And so the fact that this was kind of borne out of, in part, out of a sort of sense of class resentment, all this people with like young people with not a lot of money contributed their savings to people who already were rich.

And a few guys lost money, but more money was made by far on Wall Street than was lost during this whole episode. I think they kind of still don't totally get that. We'll come back to this episode in just a minute. But first, Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments. for businesses of any size. But they also have the fintech hustle

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That was the mythology at the time. But to your point that in aggregate Wall Street made quite a bit of money, did that come from enhanced information such as payment for order flow? Was that their mechanism for money-making from this? No, it wasn't. I mean, there's a lot of payment for order flow went from one of these things that nobody talked about except like 20 geeks, you know, sort of write about it, were work in the business to something that was nefarious that everybody was talking about. And let me just explain what that is. Payment for order flow, that's how Robin Hood can be in business. It's not how Fidelity and Schwab and these more established brokers that do all kinds of give you a credit card and an IRA and stuff like that. They, you know, some of them make money on that. too, but for Robin Hood, their median customer has $240 in his or her account. That's nothing. I mean, that's like that you could never profitably operate a brokerage account with that little money. And the way that they make money is that they sell their orders and they keep a great deal of that money. They sell it to market makers. So instead of sending it to a stock exchange, they send it to

a company like Citadel Securities or Beertu or whatever, who executes the trade. Now, they're not ripping customers off. Let me just be clear. Citadel is. not cheating people because they have to give you a price that's at least as good as the stock exchange. But Citadel, you know, I mean, people in the stock exchange make money. They drive nice cars. They live in nice houses. And the people who work in Citadel live in really nice houses, too. They're not doing it for free. They made operating income of over $4 billion after depreciation and amortization in 2020. I don't know how much they made this year. That was a leak. So, but they just as we're speaking, just hours before, we had this conversation, it came out that that firm, Citadel Securities, was valued at $22 billion.

Ken Griffin owns 85% of that. That's $18.3 billion. And that's not even his main source of wealth. His main source of wealth is another company called Citadel, which is a hedge fund firm. But Robin Hood and people like that, they need to encourage as much trading as possible. They get paid the more you trade. They don't get paid if you make money. So there are some companies that make money on the front end and some companies that make money in the back end in finance, and they make money very much on the front end. They get paid when you trade in this kind of opaque way. But that's not how Wall Street made money is just to get back to your question.

That's not the reason they made money is that they got paid for order flow. Like they, Robin Hood made money. They got paid a ton of money for the orders that they sold. There was a huge explosion in orders. Citadel Securities and Virtue and Susquehanna and other companies like that executed the orders and they made money. And options dealers made tons and tons of money because people were told to buy the types of options

that had the greatest chance of moving the stock. Those also have to be the options in which you have the greatest chance of losing money. And if you want me to get into it, I will. But I mean, basically, they're called short-dated out-of-the-money call options. They're sort of like lottery tickets that have a bit of chance, like they could pay off really big if you get it, right, but they usually expire worthless. But by buying them, you create something, and this was described in some detail on Wall Street bets. They didn't call it the right thing, but what it's called

is a gamma squeeze. And a gamma squeeze means that the options dealers are like, okay, I sold you this option. Thank you for the money. It's probably going to expire worthless. But just in case, if this stock starts to go up, I have to buy it to protect myself. I'm not going to lose money, but I have to buy it. And what they they realized there's lots of people bought these options all at once, those options dealers would have to go out and buy the stock just as a mechanical exercise to protect themselves. And all of a sudden, people with a lot more money than them had to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on these stocks, AMC, GameStop, BlackBerry. And what all those companies have in common is that they have not been successful for like 10 or 20 years. They're all has-beens. And so they're all

companies that these hedge funds were felt pretty safe betting. against. You know, they lost a lot of money selling short Tesla, selling short companies that were sending rocket ships to the, you know, to space or making hydrogen garbage trucks and all kinds of stuff like that. Even though it was sort of silly, it kept on going up and their skepticism was not rewarded. It cost them a lot of money. But they figured who cares about GameStop? Who cares about BlackBerry? Who even owns a Blackberry today? That company is going at Nokia? Yeah, I remember I had a Nokia 25 years ago, not now. And so, you know, these were all collection of corporate has-bens, but they happened to be the easiest companies to manipulate in this way.

And so that's why they became the meme stocks. AMC, too. AMC was probably six months from going out of business. Did the effect that Wall Street bets have then start as a short squeeze and then move into a gamma squeeze? It was both. So gamma squeeze elicits a short squeeze where basically you, it happened in conjunction. So they bought the stock, but many people, if you really want to get a lot of bang for the buck,

then you use the options. And you have to get approved to buy options. Luckily, Robin Hood and a few other brokers made it really, really easy to sign up for options trading. And as I discussed in the book, you know, they made it a little bit too easy because there are people, it's not just that they did this with it. You know, it's a free country. You can burn up your money if you want. But people were buying options.

who clicked all kinds of boxes and said, yeah, yeah, I understand, I'm sophisticated, I can buy these derivatives. And then they immediately did things that showed that they had no idea what they're doing. For example, they would buy an out of the money put or call option that was not worth anything at the time. If you waited around for it to be worth something, maybe it would be, but then they would exercise the option right away. So they basically like, you know, it's like going up to like a horse track and betting on a like the lamest horse right and then not just even waiting for the race going and tearing up your ticket that's that's kind of what they were doing so what do you even have any idea what you're doing so there are people who were doing that and they made it

very easy to do that and so lots of people were getting approved for borrowing money for using derivatives and stuff like that and that kind of supercharged this this whole movement so yeah it was a short squeeze and it was a gamma squeeze all at once feeding upon itself and that's how you got these crazy moves in a very short amount of time. So this brings us to the point where Robin Hood halted trading, but only on one side of the transaction. Can you talk about what happened? Because that was when the internet and, you know, myself included, and this, everyone

who follows personal finance even, even a little bit, that was a very dramatic day for all of us. That's the day that every late night talk show host was like riffing on it. every politician left and right. You know, this was, this happened on January 28th. It happened 22 days after the Capitol riot. You know, the country was very raw at the time. It had happened barely a week after inauguration day for Joe Biden. All of a sudden, here's an issue that left and right totally agreed on. These young people got completely screwed and Robin Hood and there was going to be held to pay. Congressional hearings were called that day. And it's a little bit

more boring than what actually happened, which was that basically it's not like magic when like you buy stock, you see the trade execute right away, okay, you made this much money. It takes a couple of days for you to get your money. It doesn't show up right away. There's a whole bunch of plumbing behind there. And every broker that is a broker has to be part of that plumbing. And you have to make sure that that plumbing doesn't get clogged up. And you have to put money down with a central clearinghouse to make sure that in case you really screw up and you can't deliver the money that people paid to buy stock from your clients, you've got some money there on deposit so that everyone gets paid. And if you really blow up and even that money is not enough, then everyone else has to chip in and cover the shortfall.

If that didn't happen, then the financial system could kind of collapse, right? So you have to make sure that people are good for the money. And Robin Hood, at 3.30 in the morning Pacific Times, so 6.30 in the morning, morning, Eastern time, their operation center got a call from the group that does this, which is part of the U.S. government, actually. And they said, guys, can you send us $3 billion in a few hours so you can stay in business? Of course, there was no way they could do that. They were going to be out of business. This is for the deposits. This is for the deposits, because their clients all had taken the same kind of risk. So many of their clients had done the same exact thing,

going in the same, not like some were selling and some were buying, they were all just buying. And they were doing it with borrowed money in many cases, they were like opening accounts and using money that Robin Hood kind of fronted them before their deposits cleared or they were using margin or they were buying derivatives. And so if GameStop and eventually it was going to, if GameStop and AMC and all those other stocks reversed in price and they reversed enough, then these clients could just walk away. Sorry, I don't have that money. I'm like, I'm a 22-year-old guy, you know, I deliver pizzas. You know, I can't give you a few thousand dollars extra. So my bad. And there was a distinct possibility of that happening.

You know, they have these financial models. And so they said $3 billion, please. And there was no way that Robin Hood was going to come up, even in this crazy financial world we live in, with $3 billion. They never raised $3 billion in their entire history as a company. So Robin Hood was a few hours away from going out of business. And they went back to the DTCC and they said, okay, we're going to reduce our risk. How about if we don't allow our clients to open any more positions?

We allow them to sell, but we want to allow them to buy these stocks. And the DTCC kind of did them a solid and said, all right, well, we're going to recalculate. Then you only need $700 million, which is basically all the money that they could possibly gather in a few hours. They drew down all their bank credit lines. And they went out that day and raised another billion dollars from their investors. that day, they almost blew themselves up. They were so successful in getting their clients to speculate in these stocks that they just were too successful.

They almost overheated. And that's what happened. And all of a sudden, they went from being this broker that said it was democratizing finance to being public enemy number one. People were raking them over the coals. And they thought, you must have gotten a call from some hedge fund that was losing a of money and done this to save them. And that's that simply isn't what happened. If I say that on the internet, if I say that in an article, if I repeat that on Twitter or social media, I get, you know,

20 kind of crazy messages saying, who are you working for? Who's paying you? I'm not working for anybody but the Wall Street Journal. I'm just telling you what happened. But that's, that is exactly what happened. That's why they could do it. But of course, that's when everyone went crazy. And you have, not only is that still a very popular conspiracy theory, but there are probably like five more further conspiracy theories built on that that have kind of emerged that are kind of way out there because of this sense of betrayal. And so I do understand why young people, I know people who, I know young people who were in the middle of this who just felt like they were stabbed in the back by their broker. but their broker would have gone out of business and possibly, you know, probably their deposits would have been covered, but the broker wouldn't have been in business anymore. So who's to blame? What Robin Hood is to blame kind of?

Because they encouraged a lot of reckless behavior and they almost blew themselves up. And they didn't do this to help anybody but themselves. They didn't do it to help hedge funds. It did help hedge funds, but that's not why they did it. But they kind of became public economy number one. And a lot of other brokers took advantage of this to win new business to say, hey, we don't use payment for order flow or whatever. That's really not the issue. The issue is that these things happen.

The market doesn't have infinite ability to absorb risk. Right. And the reason that everyone was so upset by Robin Hood's decision, I mean, twofold. One was that by limiting people's ability to buy the stock and only allowing them to sell it, it necessarily exerted. one-way pressure on the price. Yes, it did. That day, there actually was a rise during that day because some short sellers still had to cover. So that's when, so GameStop, just to put into context, GameStop in early 2020 got as low as almost $2 per share. That morning, it got as as high as $483 per share. And there were other stocks that had even more extreme moves, by the way.

And then the wheels came off, and then it fell a bunch that day, it fell a bunch of the next day, bunch of the next day and the next day. Then the wheels really came off and the kind of momentum came out of this. But not for good because meme stocks are still a thing. And there are occasional gigantic increases in the share prices of the very same stocks that play the starring role in this. I mean, you'll see it happen any given week. You'll see, and there'll be kind of new meme stocks too that go up a whole bunch because they're talked about on social media. The difference now is that Wall Street, the people on Wall Street do care about these things, they know what's going on.

They're making money off of it. They have computer programs that read these posts faster than a human can read it, and they're taking full advantage of what's going on, or they don't care. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. In late January 2021, at the time that Robin Hood made this decision, the optics of it looked like price fixing. It looked like stock price fixing. That's why there were congressional hearings.

It was the one issue. I remember the one issue that Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed on. Yes, right. And Donald Trump Jr. and Josh Hawley. Right. Everybody. There's nobody out there. There's the most stupid thing you could possibly say as a politician was what I'm saying now.

I'm because I'm not a politician. It's like, well, actually, this is what happened. So let's be accurate. I mean, I think maybe most of them probably didn't understand at least that day or those days what was happening. And some of them did. Some of them had a staff member said, oh, actually, you know, Mr. Cruz, you know, this is what, whatever. But you're not paid to understand things you're paid to sort of put things and frame them the pop. You know, and this was a populist movement.

You were insane to, as a politician, for sure. to not sort of vilify the people who look like villains. And I'm not saying they're angels, but there's kind of an innocent explanation, which I go into it in my book. That's probably one of the less interesting things I discussed in the book. I just wanted to be out there for the record. What's interesting is just how all this happened. And all the stuff that was going on in the background,

there was just so many stories in parallel going on and just how everything had to kind of happen at the right time. It was this whole cast of characters that had to play their role and this whole series of events that had to happen and this whole series of transformations. And one thing that we didn't get to was social media was just that how social media is different than, you know, a Yahoo message board that some of us might remember from 20 or so years ago. That also was a pretty important part of it. And so how is it different? Why didn't this happen in a Yahoo message board 20 years ago? Well, there were people out there pounding the table.

buy this, buy that, buy, by Cisco, whatever. And you do have some effect, if enough people get out there and shout. And here's the basic thing about influence. Let's say, Paula, let's say you're a very reasonable person. And you go out and make a very nuanced cerebral argument about something on the internet. And then I'm not a reasonable person or I'm a very, very confident person with an agenda. And I make the opposite argument, but I'm very confident. I present fairly few facts, but I say it.

a very confident way, I'm going to have more influence than you. That is just how the world works. You know, confidence and concision and whatever as opposed to kind of cerebral and putting things and I think that this is going to happen. If I say, I know this is going to happen and you say, I think this is going to happen, the person who says, I know is going to get a lot more attention. So that's always been the case. But social media puts that on steroids because let's look at Wall Street bets, right? Let's say I go on Wall Street bets and I'm like, hey, this stock is going to the moon. It's going to $1,000. I took out a second mortgage on my house, whatever, sold my car and did all this stuff so I could put as much money as possible into the stock. And you make a more

nuanced argument. Not only is your argument less convincing, your argument will not be seen because there are algorithms that things that people have looked at that are wild, that are bold, get more attention. And so if you go on a forum that has kind of a human-based algorithm, basically, Reddit, people will upvote what I said a lot. And yours will be there if you really, really search for it, but it's kind of disappeared. And, you know, people don't have followers on Wall Street pets. They basically, they're seeing the board and they're seeing the things that are popular posts. And so mine is going to be there. And so now imagine a third person not only doesn't see your nuanced post, but sees my very confident post.

But in addition to that, they have no idea what they're doing. They're new to the market. They heard about this GameStop thing. They heard about this opening a stock brokerage account at Robin Hood. They're like, and because they're Generation Z, they don't get their advice from a human being. or from their dad's broker or whatever. They get their advice from other people that seem a lot like them on the internet with funny memes. And I'm posting funny memes and I'm, you know, whatever.

And they go on to Wall Street bets and they see my post and they're like, I guess that's what successful stock trader's doing. Hey, Spencer has a picture of his stock account and he's made a lot of money. And he's funny. And he seems like me. He's not Spencer. He's like some whatever. Stonks flying up, one, two, three, four, five.

I use some pseudonym. They don't care about that. I'm some guy out there who seems to know he's doing, seems to have had some success, is very confident in something, and so they're going to follow my lead. And so the modern social media played a crucial role in this happening,

not just in the sort of the sharing of this sort of scheme to pump up GameStop, but just the behavior of people who were new to it, who saw this, the first thing they'd see every day, during a certain period was Keith Gill's e-trade account, just the screenshot, deep effing value.

He wasn't Keith Gill yet, as far as they knew. They didn't know who he was. And everyone, and then there are just thousands of responses, if he's still buying, I'm still buying, this is going to the moon, this is going to $1,000. For what it's worth, Keith Gill never said it's going to $1,000, never urged anybody to buy, but he became a big part of the influence operation

just passively. How does what happened differ from a pump and dump, or I guess a pump without the dump? That's how somebody put it. That's how Jordan Belfort put it to me, the Wolf of Wall Street. He went to prison for pump and dump schemes and is now, you know, a law-abiding member of society, but that's how he put it to me. It was a pump without the dump. And he said that was really weird.

It said it's very hard to do and very, very unusual. It was a pump because, I mean, of course, the people on Wall Street bets are not a monolith, right? Some people were out there just to make money, but a lot of people, especially kind of late arrivals, were there for a cause. And the cause was to stick it to the man. And they were being told that they were bleeding Wall Street dry. And remember, this is a generation that they might not have had a lot of financial experience, but their formative experiences financially were struggling to repay student loans, seeing their parents lose their jobs during the financial crisis, seeing Wall Street walk away richer

than before, maybe seeing their parents or friends of their parents lose their homes in 2008, 2009. And so they had a very dim view of rich people on Wall Street. Not all rich people, mind you, but rich people on Wall Street. They did not like rich guys on Wall Street. So harming rich guys on Wall Street, what sounded like a great idea. And if they could do it with a little bit of money, that wasn't even that meaningful to them, let's go for it.

And so that's why it was kind of like a pump without the dump, because the whole point was to, quote-unquote, to have diamond hands and to not sell, which is how the whole thing came to my attention, by the way, I mentioned I have three sons, and my oldest boy, he had a lot of friends who were involved in this. He was a member of Wall Street Bats. He was not, just for the record,

none of my family were involved in any of these stocks, but a friend of his had bought GameStop. He came over to me. He was home from college. He's graduated from college now, and he said, Dad, are you writing something about GameStop? Why would I write something about GameStop? It's like a tiny little company.

I'm just editing something for the Wall Street Journal, and I stop and look at it, and I see that it's doubled in a couple of days. I'm like, wow, let's see what happened. And I realized that it had been about a year by then, that things that were mentioned on Wall Street bets would go up a lot for a short time. This was different because I said, like, listen, I think your friend should

sell his stock. I mean, this is like, this is ripe, this is ready to burst. Because I was wrong. And he said, no, he's not going to sell. He won't sell until it gets to, I don't know, X, crazy price. Like, why would he do that? Like, what's wrong with him? He said, no, no, no, it's a whole movement on Wall Street

bets. They're all hanging on. They can't sell. And literally, 10 minutes after that, I was writing a letter to the publisher of my book saying, hey, I have something that will make a really great book. This is going to be crazy. This is before the first articles that appeared about it, but I could see that it was going to blow up. That was pretty unique. I've been following investing

for three decades. This is one of the strangest thing I've ever seen. I knew it right away. You know, they responded, oh, do you have a book proposal about it? Like, no, this is how like literally I found out about this 10 minutes ago. I'll write something tonight, you know, but this is going to be a big deal. It's going to be in the news. And it was. I mean, it was, it's, it's highly unusual. This is not something that happens all the time. A lot of things have to kind of happen all at once for this to occur. One of the things that you said that stood out to me is, you know, as I think about any other pump and dump or any other pump minus the dump or any other financial scheme out there, the differentiator may be that this was a movement. Yeah. Can you talk about that? The, the notion of this as a movement. rather than it being purely a money-making ploy.

Yeah, I mean, the thing is that it wasn't a monolith. So people, many people, let's say there's like a religious movement, Paul, and like, you know, and people had been in the movement for a while and they get a new recruit. I don't know. Have you noticed that, I don't know if you know anyone who sort of suddenly become religious or kind of adhered to some group or denomination, they're the most enthusiastic ones, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's what happened here is that the people who are late, the people who are getting in

in January 2021, and there were millions of them. All they saw was, let's do this, let's blow these guys up. A lot of the people, and I speak with the founder of Wall Street Betts, Jamie Rogozinski, a really interesting, bright guy who founded this bulletin board. And he's like, no, that's not what Wall Street Betts is about. Wall Street Betts is about hacking the system and making money. The thing is like, yeah, that's what the original Wall Street Betts was about. And that's what it was about once upon a time.

but that's not what it became about for a short while. And so you've had a lot of people who basically were all about blowing up hedge funds. That was their, that was what they wanted to accomplish. But at the same time, you had people who were just, you know, they were like, yeah, you know what, I just made a lot of money. I just made, I just made like enough to buy a house, enough to buy a car. I'm selling. And they did sell. So once the smoke cleared and you looked at the figures, they sold, like lots of people who got in early.

sold and made money. They did not stick around. They did not have diamond hands. They did not take one for the movement. And I feel really sorry for the people who kind of have stayed in there and absorbed losses who bought at, you know, 400, 450, $480 and higher and are sitting on losses that are meaningful to them because they wanted to be part of the movement. And some of them would say, I don't care. I don't care that I lost money. Well, okay, fine.

But some of them do care. And there are support groups for people who lost money on these meme stocks. And it's kind of sad. And I hope that those people go out or parents those people or branches of those people, read my book because there really is a way to stick it to the man, I think, on Wall Street. If you really resent Wall Street, which makes a ton of money and you don't like the way that they do business and you don't like their ethos, yeah, there's a way to stick it to Wall Street, which is don't pay the money. they did the opposite. They paid them a lot of money. Do the opposite. Don't pay them a lot of money. You can

own stocks and own mutual funds and things like that for very, very little money. And you can slowly get rich. And Wall Street provides all the tools. And you can be like an unprofitable customer for Wall Street. You know, you could open up a Robin Hood account, buy a bunch of stocks and not check it for five years. You know, buy some conservative stocks, I hope. But like, you know, and not just not check it. and they're not going to be making any money off of you. They have to pay all the overhead of running your account. They can't call you off and say, sorry, you're not crazy, and you're not trading all the time.

You can't keep your account. They have to keep your account open. And your account is kind of going to be subsidized by all the people who are very active. So there's a way to stick it to the man. I mean, that's kind of the opposite of what they did. But that's a good way to do it. So low-fee, passive buy and hold investing is the actual movement? Jack Bogle, who was the one who found the true movement?

Yes, yeah, I think so. Yeah, that's the movement. That's, you don't like Wall Street making a crazy amount of money off of you. You don't like Wall Street's ethos for whatever reason. I don't hate Wall Street or love Wall Street. It is what it is, you know, but if you have a chip on your shoulder and you want to stick it to Wall Street and you and millions of other young people do that, Wall Street is going to hate you. You know, that's, that is Wall Street's worst nightmare. is you reaping the benefits without paying them crazy fees.

Oh, wow. I love that as the ultimate moral of the story, the low-feet passive index fund approach, the Boglehead approach, the fire community approach. Totally. I think that's, first of all, that's just a wise way to be with your finances, Paul. I mean, that's, I think the evidence is just overwhelming

that that is the thing to do. That is the way to be. that is the long-term route to success, you know, it's most conducive to building a nice nest egg. But as a two-fer, it's the polar opposite of what these people did. Be lazy, basically, and don't check your account all the time. Don't be hyperactive. Don't pay a lot. Be cheap and lazy, and Wall Street's going to grit their teeth, but they have to provide these services to you. And that's the other thing is, like I mentioned in the beginning of our talk, that commissions going to zero were a big part of this. Well, the fact that commissions went to zero was the

result of decades and decades and decades of technological advancement and competition. You could not have done this 40 years ago. Today, you can do this. You could be a passive investor and invest for nothing and rebalance for nothing and open up a Rubbo-Advisor account or just buy index funds and hold them or buy a lifecycle fund that rebalances. And it's the best thing that you can do for yourself in the long term. And if you hate Wall Street, well, there's a bonus. Thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you and your work? They can find me on Twitter at Spencer, J-P-E-N-C-E-R-J-A-K-A-B. They can buy my book on this whole phenomenon, which I hope they do. It's called The Revolution

That Wasn't, GameStop, Reddit, and the fleecing of small investors out from portfolio books or out in commonwealth countries from Penguin Business, and they can go to my personal website, spencerjacob.com. They'll see my picture, and they can read synopsies of my articles to the Wall Street Journal, or they can go to the Wall Street Journal, where I'm the editor of the Heard on the Street column, the financial analysis and opinion column of the Wall Street Journal, and they can even see an occasional article there, although mostly I edit other people's articles these days. Great.

Well, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you, Spencer. What is the one primary key takeaway that we got from this conversation? I mean, I hate to revel in my own confirmation bias, but you heard him say it too, right? Index funds. Index funds for the win. During the GameStop saga, there were many people who expressed anger at Wall Street for the way in which Wall Street seems to take all of the big profits.

I've talked on this podcast about how Wall Street buys up all the rental properties. squeezing mom and pop investors, people like you and me, out of the game, which is why it's so important that we don't sit out, because if we do, then Wall Street gets a monopoly on owning rental real estate, and that would make for a far worse situation for everyone. That's a bit of a tangent, but those types of behaviors trigger a lot of middle-class people and upper-middle-class people, people with 401Ks,

and knowledge-based, remote working jobs, people who feel like I've done everything right, and certainly I'm better off than the vast majority of the world's population, but why do I still perceive that there are a few orders of magnitude in Gulf that I cannot bridge? That's the pernicious effect that Wall Street has on everyday individual investors, and a lot of people a year ago joined the subreddit Wall Street bets and looked to meme stocks as a way to take a stand and as a way to participate in that David versus Goliath narrative.

But as Spencer Jacob outlined, if that is what fuels you at least a little, then make sure that your actions are efficacious and not just virtue signaling. It's so easy to virtue signal by saying, yeah, I'm going to join the subreddit, and I'm going to hoddle, hold the line, fuel the short squeeze. Or conversely, yeah, I'm going to just not participate. I've heard people say, they're not going to participate in owning properties,

they're not going to participate in opening a 401k, I'm going to opt out of the system entirely, because that'll stick it to the man. No, it won't. All it'll do is weaken yourself and reduce yourself. circle of influence, which means you'll be able to make less of an impact because you will have ceded that position of power. If you choose to squander the opportunities in front of you, that decision, that decision makes the situation worse for everyone, not just for yourself personally, but for society as a whole. So, in that classic standoff between Wall Street and

Main Street, if you want to support Main Street, as Spencer Jacob outlined, passive index investing, the practices that Jack Bogle popularized, that's simultaneously more likely to benefit you personally, your own wallet, and also makes the least amount of money for Wall Street, meaning it keeps money in the pockets of ordinary everyday people, rather than seeping that money from mom-and-pop investors in the form of excess fees. And particularly if you go with a brokerage like Vanguard. VanGard is a co-op. It's member-owned. So the revolution, quote-unquote, sure, the members of the subreddit Wall Street bets thought they were participating in a revolution. It was certainly a sexy narrative, but just because it grabs headlines, just because it provides

a talking point, doesn't mean it's effective. And in fact, as Spencer Jacob outlined, in many ways it was counterproductive. And zooming out, that is the broader moral to the story, that if you are motivated to participate in a financial revolution, pause to critically consider your method or your approach because often the thing that makes for the catchiest slogan is not the thing that actually creates change. Sometimes the revolution is quiet,

and it takes the form of creating a new co-op brokerage, as Jack Bogle did, or of popularizing the index fund, or of being the landlord that you want to see in the world. Sometimes it comes from not using a sense of moral superiority to justify being an underachiever as though there is nobility in a refusal to try. Sometimes embracing the opportunities that are in front of you

and expanding your circle of influence, that's how you make the impact that you. you want to create in the world. And that is the wide lens key takeaway from the GameStop Revolution. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford- Anything podcast. If you want to discuss this episode with members of the community, go to afford-anything.com slash community. That's afford-anything.com slash community. You can find me on Instagram at Paula P-A-U-L-A, P-A-N-T. Beware, there are people who are imitating me on Instagram. So make sure that you are on the correct account.

P-A-U-L-A, P-A-N-T. And if you do see someone who is imitating me, I've had three or four different imitators in the last couple of weeks, please do not engage with them via DM. Thank you again for tuning in, and remember that you can subscribe to our show notes for free at afford-anything.com slash show notes. My name is Paula Pat.

This is the Afford- Anything podcast, and I will catch you in the next. next episode.