Endless Thread - Stonktime: r/WallStreetBets And GameStop

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

The subreddit r/WallStreetBets has been at the center of a national story this week involving GameStop and a couple of angry hedge funds. To help us understand what’s happening, we call up Planet Money co-host Robert Smith. Then, we speak to Redditor u/Hungry_Freaks-Daddy who hopped on board the GameStop train earlier this week and says he has nothing to lose.  Support Endless Thread: wbur.org/socks

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Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. Amory. Oh, Ben. We're supposed to be off. We're supposed to be on break. Yeah, well, working ahead. I mean, we're not just like... Eaton, bonds.

Eating chicken tendies. We're supposed to be on break. break from publishing our show. Right. But then this incredible, I say incredible, probably like in the true meaning of the term. Like, how is this happening story falls into, falls before us. And we can't, we can't turn it down. We can't look away. So we had to do, Amory, I know you know what I'm about to say. We had to do a stonk time episode.

I get it now. Yes, a stonk time. Stonks, the new spelling for the word stocks that came from the memeverse. So just real quick, Amory, can you just, like, define where we are at, like statement of facts here? Or maybe sing it or wrap it? Okay. Five, six, seven. Well, this is story all about how the GameStop stock turned upside down. And I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there.

I'll tell you how is subreddit called? Wall Street bets turned into a community of 4.6 million people that are basically trolling hedge funds right now. That was good. I liked it. Well done. Thank you. Thank you. And we should define a few terms here, right? And say that GameStop is obviously the video game console and individual video game retail brick and mortar store, which is not doing well, at least wasn't doing well, because everybody buys everything, especially video game stuff on the internet now. And Wall Street, Betz is this subreddit that is kind of a strange combination of memes and jokes about stock trading, but also actual stories and information about real stock trading. And this week, it was also kind of an organizing location for a massive collective effort to buy dying stocks through day trading stock buying platforms like Robin Hood. Kind of as like a screw you to the hedge funds and the Titans of Finance on Wall Street from a bunch of Reddit users and online users. Wall Street

Betts is a pretty kind of like wild online community, actually. Emory, what do you want to say about this community before we really dive in? Well, I first want to admit that I consider myself an outsider to the community only because I'm not fully ingrained in it. You know, I haven't been there from the beginning. I'm not riding this roller coaster with them. I mean, I am a Redditor, So I'm observing it as a Redditor and appreciating it as a Redditor who knows the power of what Reditors can do together. But you're not, you're not like picking up four different phones and yelling, sell, sell, sell, sell. Not yet. You're not a stock.

You're not just like watching MSNBC or Fox Business or whatever the heck you would watch, right? Correct. What this story, we're talking about a community called Wall Street Betts and a little company called GameStop that's becoming. not such a little company anymore. Also something you're an expert in. Right. Games. Of the video variety.

Amory, big gamer. But what I will say is that my kind of preliminary statement, before we dig into what this story really is about, is that I had a very belated epiphany about the stock market this week, reading about what is happening right now with the Wall Street Betts community on Reddit and company. like GameStop. And that is, we think of the stock market as being the economy and that what happens in the stock market is what's happening in the economy. And that is not the case. That's not to say that what happens in the economy won't be reflected in the stock market. But I think the very admittedly simple epiphany that I have arrived at late in life is that the stock market is a casino for the economy where you have everything that's happening in the economy. You have companies big and small, producing and selling things, and people buying them like you and me. And then you have the

stock market serving as like a gambling ring above that, saying, what do we think is going to happen in the economy? So the gambling floor, if you will. The gambling floor, the larger American economy. Right. So what we're seeing right now, I think it should just be acknowledged as is craziness happening on the gambling floor, regardless of what is happening in the actual economy with actual companies buying and selling things, actual products? I also wanted to say two things, which is, one, even though I tease you about not being an expert in this stuff, the thing that I love about you is that, like, once you get, once you are a dog with a bone, you go deep.

So I know you've been like reading up on this a ton. Yeah. And the other thing I want to say is like, if you would just listen to your favorite public radio host of all time, Kai Rizdahl, you would know that the stock market is not the economy. Because Guy Ristall says that all the time. I've never made it past this is Marketplace. Well, you know, that's pretty good. At least you listen to the top of the show. That's good.

But seriously, you know, Kai Rizdahl, I think, actually would be very good on this. But, you know, he doesn't pick up my phone calls anymore, but you know who does. Drum roll. Drum roll. Robert Smith. Robert Smith. From NPR's Planet Money. Yes, NPR's Planet Money fame.

And by the way, they and us, and I believe today explained. in about every podcast that has any ability to have an excuse to cover this story is covering it this week. So please listen to the Planet Money version, which I'm sure will be great. Shall we invite Robert Smith into the Zoom room? Yes, please. Okay. Hold on one second. Robert, are you ready to rock? I am.

How would you identify yourself, Robert? I'm a co-host of Planet Money. Okay, we're just going to jump right in. Short selling a stock, can you educate us? Yes. Well, it's probably helpful to just think about what you normally do with a stock. If you're not a short seller, you're a long buyer, I guess is what you call it. Normally with a stock, you buy the stock when it's low, and then hopefully the stock price goes up,

and you sell it when it's high, and you make a profit. and short selling is the exact opposite. You sell the stock first when it's high, and then you wait for the stock to go down until it's low, and you sell it and you profit. So a short seller is always hoping that stocks go down. This is kind of like a, it's a hedge against the kind of natural inclination of the market as it's supposed to work, right?

Yeah, I mean, listen, you don't get popular being a short seller because, you know, we all want like the United States to grow. and improve and companies to be successful, invent new things. And short sellers are out there going, not going to happen. Not like that company's terrible. Everything's going to get worse. Like they're the pessimist. You don't want to invite them to a party.

But I will say, like, they do a necessary job in the market, which is there are some stocks that are too high. There are some companies that are kind of garbage companies. And there are some companies that are frauds and that they lie. And so a common thing a short seller does is to short sell a company and then actually investigate the company, like send out detectives and pour through their filings and find wrongdoing, find lies for the company. And then they publicize it. And everybody's like, oh, no, that's a company's terrible. And the stock goes down.

And then they make millions of dollars. So that is a service, right? Because there's somebody sort of acting as a watchman on the market. So can you give us and explain like I'm 5 or a TLDR of what the hell has happened over the last week, couple weeks, months? Yeah. Here's how GameStop just went insane in a few months. I mean, it starts last year. At the end of last year, Wall Street Betts is always talking about these different stocks. And a few people believe in GameStop. They think that GameStop will actually resurrect itself as a better online company and will grow. and is a great investment. So they start to pile money into GameStop and the stock price slowly goes up. Slowly going up, it's like a normal stock. But since the stock had so many people betting against it, something strange happens. So in order to short sell a stock like GameStop,

short sellers have to actually borrow the stock from somebody, sell that stock, and then later on buy the stock back and return it to the person they borrowed it to or institution they borrowed it to. And so it puts them in this weird position where if a stock price starts to go up and you're a short seller, you start to worry. You start to think I'm going to lose more and more and more money on this. Like this is just going to like bankrupt. And so when you panic and you're a short seller, what you have to do is buy back that stock and return it to the people you borrowed it from. But as you start to buy back the stock, you're also pushing the price up, which makes it worse for other short sellers. And this is where the snowball continues.

You have the true believers in the middle. You've got this layer of short sellers who are giving up and buying. And then you have the options, which is a way you can bet on the stock using a small amount of money. That starts to snowball more. And then you have the regular investors on like Robin Hood, who love any stock that's going up. They see that GameStop's starting to rock. and they think, oh, well, let's just jump in. Why not? And now you have all of the bigger firms who have these algorithmic trading, who computers figure out what's a hot stock. They latch

on the GameStop. And so all of a sudden, everyone's buying this stock and the stock is up a thousand percent. Are hedge funds kind of notorious short sellers? Like, is that part of the kind of hedge fund business model? Or how would you connect those to hedge funds and shortsellers? Well, yeah, I mean, hedge funds have a lot of different strategies, and among the many tools they use is short-selling some companies and then buying other companies long. So, for instance, they may find in a certain sector they think that these particular companies are going to be losers and this company will be the winner. And so by short-selling some companies and buying other companies, they can sort of goose the returns. That's the theory anyway with hedge funds. In my opening salvo to this episode, I was talking about how the economy is not the stock market and the stock market is not the economy.

But is there an argument to be made that hedge funds, short selling stocks, is bad for the economy in some way or for the financial system? So to step back, you know, the value of a stock is supposed to be the value that that company will generate in profits forever. You know, you buy a part of a company and then they operate in the real economy. And so if the real economy is doing well, they can make more profits. And if the economy is not doing well, they'll make less profits. So the two are connected, right? What a short seller does doesn't ruin the real economy, just like buying a stock doesn't improve the real economy.

There are sort of predictions about what is going to happen in the real economy in the future, in theory, until we get to this game-stop nonsense. Because that's not about reality. That's not about reality. So speaking of which, artificially inflating a stock, bad for the economy, right? Or at least the stock market? That's a heavy question, Ben. I mean, artificially, no.

I mean, it's bad for the stock market if people lie or collude in an illegal way to pump up a stock. Because what they're doing is they're telling investors with less knowledge, hey, this is a great company, you should buy this. And then when everyone buys in, the fraudsters sell their stock and laugh. Right. They tap their cigars and polish their monocles, et cetera. Yeah. So, like, that's bad for people who are investing their retirement savings in a company

and then they're poor and sad. In truth, like every day of the year, there are stocks that rock it up for some reason or another, sometimes based on news, sometimes based on. on the fact that it's going up and more people want it to go up. So, so, you know, there's thousands of stocks, there's trillions of dollars in the market. These little anomalies are fun and they're interesting to look at, but they're not going to take the entire economy or anything. It sounds like you're saying nobody freak out.

Well, look, financial crises happen when there is a big systemic problem that nobody knows about. or most people don't know about, right? Because if you knew about it, you would prepare for it. So the interesting thing about Wall Street Bats and this GameStop phenomenon is that it's totally out in the open. It's not like, wait a minute, this stock, I thought, was just valuable because GameStop's valuable. And you're telling me that people, Reditors are buying into it? No, they talk about this out in the open. They've talked about it for months.

So there's nothing hidden in this that will allow. people to, you know, lose faith in the entire stock market or economy. Now, you know, you might be a little more cautious going forward after this whole thing because you're just like every time you see a stock going up, you have to ask yourself, well, wait a minute. Is that because the company's good or is that because, you know, a bunch of people are buying it for no reason whatsoever? And that's a question you should have probably always been asking.

So in some ways, like the market is self-correcting. Now that we know this can happen, that's just. just another thing that we can know and understand about the market. It's a new kind of weather in the ecosystem of the stock market. Now, you're not allowed to play this when the entire economy collapses. I mean, I don't know. You know, it's like, it's also, look, I don't think people are, you know, mortgaging their house to get more money to pile into GameStop.

Like, these are people who are doing it for fun. and there are people who are professionals and it's mad money and it's exciting and yes, some Redditors are millionaires now and some hedge funds who took the opposite side, the short sellers, they're sad, they lost millions of dollars. But everyone's sort of playing with fun money a little bit. So we've been talking about Wall Street Betts,

which is a community on Reddit, and you actually have spent some time in that community, right? You're a Redditor yourself? I am. But you have to understand, like, I am an old conservative redditor. Like, I spend most of my time on financial independence, that subreddit. And financial independence is the world's most boring subreddit. It's a bunch of people saying, like, oh, I'm frugal, I save money, I put it into boring index funds, and I wait 40 years. Yeah, that's no fun.

That's every single post. And if anyone in financial independence ever says, oh, I'm thinking about buying Tesla, people pile onto that person and say, Go to Wall Street Bats. Like, you don't belong here. You should be with those crazy people on Wall Street Bets. So a few years ago, I did start to read Wall Street Pets. And what was your experience or what's your impression of this particular community? It's occasionally funny.

I mean, it's filled with memes and emojis and weird flexes and piling on each other. And there's a sense that people will, you know, show their screenshots and brag about how much money they made on some sort of options trade. But even even weirder is how proud they are when they lose money. Like it's a huge, big, spectacular loss. They post that, you know, for the, you know, in order to get the flare. And everyone's egging each other on and laughing and jokes fly through there that I don't understand.

So I stopped following it because I was just like, these are tiny stocks that I've never heard of that everyone's arguing about and doing memes on and I just I couldn't keep up. So apparently I missed the big story. But you're here for it. You're here for it. So it's all good. But it didn't surprise me. When I heard Wall Street Betts was involved, I'm like, yeah, I can totally see that.

I mean, I guess the weird thing is that normally on a subreddit, nobody agrees on anything. Like, that's the fun, right? Like the notion of actually organizing a subreddit in any sort of way so that everyone's pulling in the same direction, I mean, that's amazing. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to get people to risk real money altogether based on what, you know, sexy 571 thinks. Like, apparently they're willing to do it. Like, you know, they created a community. I think this is when this happens. when a subreddit, a large online community, like a subreddit, actually all pulls in the same direction,

I feel like it's usually in reaction to something, right? It's usually like everybody getting amped up about saying, you know, fuck you to the hedge funds, for instance, right? Like that seems to motivate everybody in the same direction sometimes. That's like the only time. That's a great point. And I do think that recently, over the last six months or so, Wall Street professionals, not just hedge funds, but on CNBC and analysts, have been blaming anything that is irrational, that they don't think makes sense on Robin Hood users who are bored at home or Wall Street bets that are, you know, doing it for the lulls. And it's become a thing where, oh, that's irrational. That's a Wall Street Betts thing.

That's a Robin Hood thing. Be careful about the herd of dumb money. They don't really understand what they're doing. I think unsophisticated investors are going to be hurt by this. You can bet on America, but you got to have to be careful about how you bet. And so you're right in that they were a little provoked. Wall Street Betts was provoked. You know, they were held up as these irrational.

They don't know how to do math. They don't know how to do the fundamentals. But if you do actually look at the arguments on Wall Street bets, they are analyzing the public documents. They have investment feces, which this is based on. Yeah, they got the memes and doing it for fun. But there are people who are serious on there, and they probably did take offense. Isn't this kind of like online, you know, day traders, dumb money, as some people call them, basically beating finance bros at their own game in a way?

Like, is that a valid argument to make? Yeah. I mean, that's definitely the impression you get that, you know, these Redditor outcasts, you know, are just YOLO, and, you know, they believe and they stuck together and they've managed to, you know, bankrupt some big Wall Street guys. Now, I will say, like, first of all, giant Wall Street firms have a lot more money

and a lot more positions than just game stop. There may be some who overplayed their hand, who were very short this one stock, and they're in trouble. But Wall Street is just so much bigger than this, and there's so much more money. And hedge funds have a million different positions that they're taking, and they know they're going to lose big on some

and win big on others. So, you know, in the long run, yes, some money will be transferred from those short sellers. who tend to be institutions on Wall Street, and will be transferred to Redditors sitting at home and laughing and throwing up rocket ships and eating chicken tenders and doing the whole meme thing.

Like, yeah, like some people got rich and some people got poor. Is there any possible outcome that is not the stock prices of things like GameStop and AMC is another company whose stock is going up? Is there any possible outcome that does not involve the stock prices of these companies going back down, maybe plummeting back down. Yes. The way I think about it is this is a financial version of a meme.

And two weeks ago, it was sea shanties. And you might have said, oh, are we going to sing sea shanties forever? No, no, we're not. Except, yeah, we are. Because Redditor Kwai Ghan Shin literally made his own version of that sea shanty meme song. And this whole thing. So... Soon may the tending man come to send a rocket into the sun. One day when the

trading is done, we'll take our gains and go. So I do think that if this is fueled by the fun and the enthusiasm and the yolo and the meme-ness of it, eventually like either the Wall Street

bets people run out of money or they just get bored and move to something else. So it is not sustainable in the long run to keep a stock above its actual value, you know? Now, I will say in a year or two, maybe everyone online will be buying their games from GameStop. Maybe GameStop managed to pivot and become a great company, and the stock price will be much higher than it was last year. Like, that's a good thesis to have, and maybe it's true and maybe it's not. So I don't see how it's going to stay at $500 a share, $400 a share, $300 a share. But, you know, some memes last.

So you know, you can't tell when they're over until your mom sends it to you. Robert Smith, co-host of Planet Money, thank you so much for breaking this stuff down for us and for being so generous with your time. And, you know, I look forward to, you know, shit posting with you on. financial independence. It's a very serious forum, Ben. You don't want your kind in there. Take your shit posting to

Wall Street bets, Ben. All right, fair enough. Fair enough. Just save your money. Save your money. Put it in boring index funds and wait 40 years. That's what everyone should do. Coming up, we talk to one of these day traders, a Redditor who's

playing the GameStop game and says he has nothing to lose. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. wherever you get your podcast.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. creative studio. Hey there. This is Amory from Endless Thry. Hey. Hey. How are you? I'm doing all right. Good. I didn't want to, I don't want to blow up your spot, but I also didn't want to be like, hey, is this hungry freaks daddy on Reddit?

Right. Right. You can just call me Jake. Jake. Jake, it's great to talk to you. Thank you for doing this. Great to talk to you. Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything else that you can tell us about yourself without blowing up your spot? like what you do for a living or where you are generally in the in the U.S., I'm guessing? Sure. I'm in the Midwest. I work for one of the largest companies on Earth right now.

I won't say who. Okay. And I have a part-time job that's very low, it's locally owned in the service industry. So Jake, how long have you been following the Wall Street Bet subreddit? I didn't subscribe until Sunday night. I wasn't aware of any of this until Sunday night. So when I checked it out in the past, I browsed it and I was like, okay, this is a meme sub, but I don't know anything about Wall Street or stocks, so this isn't for me. And, you know, I heard some rumbling Sunday night, so I checked it out again, and I browsed it for quite a while.

And then Monday morning I bought some stock. I like the stock. And you bought GameStop stock specifically? Yeah, I think I bought one share. And I think the price was, let me, I'm going to stop, I'm not giving any financial advice. This is just my personal experience and I like the stock. I think I bought one share at $90 and then I bought, because you can buy fractions of a share and I don't have a lot of money. So I saw it going up and then I saw it go back down. Isn't that the story of the stock? And it went back down to like 109 or 112 and I bought it. a couple of fractions, and I did that. I'm at 1.75 shares right now. Okay. So that is, and I don't know, I don't remember what the current value per share is or what the current amount per share is. But do you have a sense of how much money, if you were to pull out right now, how much money you would walk away with? It's literally going up and down as we speak, about $218. And was this your first time buying stock?

You know, I downloaded Robin Hood a year or two ago. I don't know, whenever it came out, someone sent it to me, and they give you a free stock. I think I got Siri. The first one I actually bought was GameStop. Now, you made a post in the Wall Street Betz subreddit. When was this? A day ago or so? Yes, this was yesterday afternoon.

Okay, so you made this post. It's titled A Message to Everyone on Wall Street from somebody with, with nothing to lose. Yes. Can you just read that post for us? Sure. And I'd like to start off by saying, I don't condone any type of violence or violent action.

None of the language used in this post or the title was intended to be interpreted as such. So when I say a message to the people on Wall Street, it's not like a sinister message. It's literally just a message. It's from me to you. This is a message to everyone on Wall Street from somebody with nothing to lose. You only think you're in control.

You're trying to scare us into selling, and it won't work. Let me explain why. I grew up poor. I remember my parents struggling with money for years. shitty cars, shitty clothes. Never owned any video game consoles because not only did my parents not approve of them, they couldn't afford them. I've never had more than $9,000 cash at one time.

I've been nearly homeless too many times to count. I have struggled and have always dealt with debt, and I have lived basically paycheck to paycheck for my entire adult life. If you think the prospect of losing the few hundred dollars I have in GameStop is going to scare me into selling before Friday, you couldn't be more wrong. When you only ever average $1,000 in your checking account, What's the difference when it's $100 or $10? Do you have any idea how many times I've been there before?

You know what I do when I'm completely broke? I shrug my shoulders and I play some video games or read a book or listen to music until my next paycheck. And I'll do it again. I'm not here to get rich overnight. I don't have enough to invest to make that happen. I'm here to say, fuck you, and to be part of this moment, this movement. I will never sell. Never.

I don't care about the money at this point. If I never see it again, it makes no difference to me. I have to go right back to work tomorrow and the next day and next week and next month and next year. There isn't a single thing you can say or do to change my position. I risk my money happily. I'm not the least bit scared or worried. You might be a financial expert. I am a survival master.

Power to the people. I will not sell. So this post was taken down, presumably by the moderators of the Wall Street Betts community. I messaged them and they never got back to me. Hmm. Do you know why or do you have a guess as to why it was taken down? My assumption, and I didn't realize this until someone pointed out to me,

is the title, the message, somebody. somebody with nothing to lose, you only think you're in control, stuff like that is possibly being construed as inciting violence in some way, which once again, I absolutely did not intend it that way. When I say a message, I mean a message.

Somebody with nothing to lose, I don't have any money to lose. I'm already broke. And when I say, you only think you're in controls because they went on the news and they started using all these tactics to take back control of this situation,

and they're not in control. It was an opportunity that was highlighted and capitalized on. We're in a capitalist country, and that's what happened. You refer to this in your post there as a movement. How do you define what the movement is here, as you call it? We're moving money from one place to another. And is this moving money from people with a lot of money to people with less money? It's hard to say right now because there's a lot of moving going on.

So I think we'll see when the dust settles where everything lands. As someone who is part of this movement and part of this story, what do you appreciate about it? Or what do you think that this says about the American capitalist system, the stock market? That's the big one, right? I don't think socialism or communism is completely correct. and I don't think capitalism is completely correct. I don't think anyone should have $200 billion.

What are they doing with it? It's just sitting there. But I don't think we should put this hard limit or literally just tell someone, you've made too much money, so we're just going to take it for that reason alone. There's somewhere in between, right? And my post has resonated with a lot of people, and I think the craziest part about all of this,

is everyone from the far left to the far right, the response has been overwhelming. This post has been shared to multiple sites. It's over 100,000 likes on Twitter, and it's resonating with both sides. Your take, obviously, is that you have nothing to lose, but there are critics of what's happening right now with GameStop that say there are a lot of people, who are in over their heads with these investments by buying this GameStop stock. And it maybe started as a bit of a joke or an experiment or whatever people might want to call it. But now it's going to result in real financial loss at a time when some of the people partaking in this experiment, if we call it that, they do have a lot to lose or they didn't have a lot to begin with.

and now they're going to be in deeper? No one knows what's going to happen. A lot of people are rolling the dice right now. I have personally, I have friends that have made a lot of money and I have friends that have lost a lot of money. I don't want anyone to suffer ever. The unfortunate reality is that people do suffer. And the system, there are multiple systems at play.

A lot of them are broken and things move too slowly. So the unfortunate reality is people are going to lose money and suffer, and I hate it. I wish I could do something about it, but there's nothing I can do. Do you have any predictions as to how this is all going to play out over the next couple of days here? Gabe Newell from Valve had a quote about never try and lie to the Internet. I'm paraphrasing, but it was, don't ever try and lie to the Internet or cover something up. They will find you and they will expose you. If their tactic is to try and cover this up, stop people from buying, remove posts like mine, ban users make the subreddit private, it's only going to backfire on them.

If they use their Wall Street smarts that they say that they're so good at and don't try and censor and lie and cheat, maybe they'll win. I don't know. On the one hand, this is a remarkable effort and a coming together. of people, but on the other hand, it could, some say, lead to financial collapse. It's, you know, it's some people are calling for there to be a suspension of GameStop stock trading. Why? I think there's a general concern that some of the investors are in over their heads. And I guess there's a discomfort with the system as we know it being challenged and being put in a unfamiliar position.

It's hard to talk about this without using terms like fight. You know what I mean? Like the analogy I want to make, by the way, I'm a huge boxing fan. I was a moderator of the boxing subreddit for a while years back. So, you know, and a lot of people use these analogies anyway. Once again, I'm not condoning any sort of violence or fighting. But if this is a fight, are we fighting in the ring with a referee that's going to say, hold on, pause the stock for a second.

Or is this a street fight where there's no rules? These guys have skirted the rules and done whatever they wanted forever. And now they're getting a taste of their own medicine. They're losing. And we have zero sympathy for these people. Zero. None. And now they're trying to cry foul and get someone to come in and help them.

You guys already got bailed out. Jake, can I ask how old you are? Mid-30s. Mid-30s. Okay, so this foray into stock purchasing, this is new for you as of Sunday or Monday about a week ago. Yeah. And you're probably not alone. And maybe Wall Street Betts is like this as a community.

I don't know. But do you see this as kind of an opportunity in some way for younger people to, like, dip their toe into this? and maybe by dipping their toe into this, like starting to change the rules on the people who have set the rules for a long time. Yes. You know, the stock market is a scary thing to get into it. It is intimidating.

What's one of the weakest subjects in our school system is math. You know, this is not easy stuff to do. And this was presented as a very easy to understand situation, right? But it's morphed into something else. this point. So it started out as an opportunity, and now it's turning to a movement, or whatever you want, whatever word you want to use to call it. Now it's about the principle. So do you see this movement as being ongoing and outliving whatever happens to GameStop potentially? Like, is this we can't put the genie back in the bottle with regards to the stock market? I hope so. Well, we shall

see. As someone who has said they will not sell, we'd love to check back in with you if you're up for that. Yeah, stay in touch. If I lose money, I lose money. I'm not selling. If I make money, I'll donate half of it to the local animal shelter, you know? Wow. It's not about the money. I'll donate everything I make to the animal shelter. Okay, Jay. It's only 1.75 share. It's only 1.75 fairs. You don't have to say, wow, it might only be a couple of hundred bucks at the end of this. Even if it's a couple thousand, I'll donate it to the animal shelter. That's where I got my dog. I love my dog. I'm not doing this for the money. I'll post whatever proof you need to see on any online forum. Jake, aka Hungry Freaks Daddy on Reddit,

thank you so much for making time to talk to us and sharing more of your story. Anytime. Thanks for reaching out to me. Okay, a couple more just insane kind of late-breaking updates here. We are dropping this episode on a Friday. Thursday was in some ways the nuttiest day in the evolution of this story yet. Stocks being inflated by extremely online users like Jake, including Game Stock, AMC, Nokia were jumping all over the place, American Airlines, too. People in the financial world were halting trading. That includes Robin Hood, the app for trading stocks, which created yet another example of just truly freaking weirdness of 2021. because it got Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

and Senator Ted Cruz to agree, yes, agree, that Robin Hood's moves to restrict trading for its users of particular stocks on Thursday deserved to be investigated by the federal government. I mean, when AOC and Ted Cruz agree about something like this, who knows what is next in this wild ride. you guys, we're going to go back into researching and working on our new season now. So please, just stop doing interesting things on the internet, okay? Just for a couple of months, okay?

Seriously, though, we miss you, and we were glad to be able to put this in the feed. We hope it helps explain the madness of this week. And we hope everybody's well. And until next time. rocket into the sun one day when the trading is done we'll take our gains and go soon may the tending men come to send our rocket into the sun one day when the trading is done we'll take our gains and go