It Could Happen Here - The GameStop Stock Cult (ft. Folding Ideas)

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Robert sits down with YouTuber and investigator Dan Olson to talk about his research into the cult that developed around the GameStop Stock shorting movement of 2021.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories,

combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Calls on media. Ah, welcome back to behind. Wait, no, sorry. It could happen here. You know, we'll keep that in so that our audience, who I know is is deeply tied to the myth of my own perfection, knows that I too err.

Speaking of perfect creatures who have never made a mistake, our guest today is Dan Olson. Hello. Welcome. Hi, Dan. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Not making mistakes. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. You are the Buddha I met on the road, and I'm going to say, hello, teach me how to be flawless. All right, so first, have you heard of gold? Yes, yes.

I was about to talk about gold. The perfect investment, Dan. The perfect investment vehicle. Never fails. So, Dan, you are a YouTuber, an investigator, one of my favorite researchers. We had you on recently to talk, well, a couple of months ago. I don't know, time, flat circle, et cetera. But we had you on to talk about your work reporting on the NFT bubble bursting and on the metaverse bubble bursting.

bubble bursting and on the metaverse bubble bursting. And more recently, you just published a two and a half hour documentary investigation into the GameStop stock cult, which is a lot of people are aware of the first part of this, which is that in January of 2021, a bunch of folks started like buying you via some weird Reddit movement started buying huge amounts of GameStop stock, which in a period of pretty exaggerated decline, caused it to briefly surge in value to absurd levels. And I think that's where most people kind of and then, you know, eventually it fell apart. And I think that's where most people kind of stopped paying attention. Yeah, they they remember that week where it was like in the news and then, you know, eventually it fell apart. And I think that's where most people kind of stopped paying attention. Yeah. They, they remember that week where it was like in the news and then they just kind of assumed like that was it. Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's been a,

it's an interesting and weird ride because the evolution into like cult-like behavior was, like cult-like behavior was, it was a very strange journey. It happened surprisingly rapidly, but also not that surprisingly, like once you fully unpack it, you know, you have this internet movement that is very nebulous in its origins, or not in its origins, sorry.

The origins are very straightforward. Like Wall Street Bets is a gambling sub that uh had like itself describes as if 4chan found a bloomberg terminal so sure you know uh it's it's crass it's irony poisoned um you can get just as much social clout for losing thousands of dollars as you can for, for winning thousands of dollars. In fact, there's an argument that there's more clout for loss porn than there is for like actually posting big gains.

Obviously like not, not like the healthiest or most wholesome community you could imagine, but out of that plus COVID madness plus stimulus checks and just general nihilism arose this Frankenstein short squeeze play on GameStop that weirdly never actually happened because the play just sort of turned into its own self-fulfilling thing. That enough people believed in the idea of this short squeeze play that they just kept piling in and piling in. And suddenly, the short squeeze doesn't actually matter at all because there's enough critical mass flooding in that you just get this massive pump anyway, which convinces people that, oh, the squeeze is going on. Because in the moment, you don't actually know what mechanisms are driving the price movement. You just see number going up. And so more people kept piling in, piling in, piling in. I got a phone call from a friend of mine who's like, hey, have you heard about the

GameStop stuff? And I'm like, yes, I heard about it two days ago. So if you heard about it today, it's way too late. Do not. It's over over it's over uh and sure enough like i went back and reviewed our text messages and like and if he had bought he would have been a just massive bag holder like it it plummeted you know hours later and like for people who are not finance people which i certainly am not uh this is like if you watched the big short uh that's kind of the tag i mean number one that movie is seen as a blueprint by a lot of these guys obviously there's folks uh knowledgeable financial folks who have critiques of that movie but it is it is accepted as like almost kind of

like a sacred text within the gamestop stop yeah and and it's weird because like they're the GameStop enemy. The the the ape. OK, well, I'll just use their lexicon. We'll go over it real quick. They call themselves apes for reasons that are not worth explaining. Their enemy are short sellers, but short sellers are like Dr. Burry short sold the housing market. And Burry is, that's Christian Bale's character, right?

Christian Bale's character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all of the main characters in that movie short sold the housing market. Like that was their play. That was the big short. Was there like, look, there's this bubble. We're going to short sell it. the big short? Was there like, look, there's this bubble, we're going to short sell it.

Then when the price goes down, we close our positions out and keep a tremendous amount of money. And we should go, just because when I watched this with a friend, they did not know what short selling was. It's not a thing normal people will ever be in a position to do. The basic idea, and this is all occurring with like stocks and commodities, but the basic idea is you make an agreement with somebody to get basically a loan of a bunch of shares in something, right? And with the understanding that you will give those back at a point in the future. And then you take those and you immediately sell them for their present value, right? And your hope, your goal is that the value of that drops, and then you are able to buy back an equivalent amount to repay the loan

and have made a profit based on the gap between those two numbers, right? Yes. That's the idea. That's the idea. You can, as an individual, do this. Sure. You can take out a short position with your broker. You can do it through derivatives like puts. I wouldn't recommend it. Yeah.

It's not like normal people stock stuff. Yeah. It's not normal people stock stuff. Yeah, it's not normal people stock stuff. There's nothing legally barring you from doing it, but it really is kind of this advanced play. You got to know what's going on, especially because a thing that a lot of people in the description sort of skip over is that while you're borrowing it, you're borrowing a thing and thus there's the expectation that you'll pay some kind of like you know borrower's fee um akin to akin to interest on like the value of the thing that you've borrowed uh but like it's it's not interest on you know like a housing loan where the interest and like where your payments all are geared towards paying off the loan it's's just kind of like, all right, you owe me five bucks every single month forever as long as you're holding this. And so, you know, if you're not paying attention, like you need to be very actively managing these kinds of positions.

Otherwise, like your borrowing fees will just eat up all of your profit. Yeah. And it's the kind of thing where like today, most of those kinds of kinds of trades aren't even really made by people directly. They're made by massive banks of computers and algorithms and shit. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's that's enough background back to the kind of cult aspect of it, which is, I think, much more relevant for for what we're talking about here. One of the points you made early on that I found really interesting is that a significant amount of the initial GameStop hype was driven by influencers, right? And that there's evidence based on kind of the US government's analysis of this that

got published that regulators are paying additional attention, increasing attention to the influences that, that, or to the impact that influencers can have here, because there's this concern that especially working in groups, there's like an ability for people like this to disrupt the economy to a significant extent, to a way that would affect like normal people. Yeah. So one of the weird kind of, so pump and dumps have existed forever, right? The thing was, is that, so the, the meme stock run up, it wasn't just GameStop. It was about like 15, 20, like in, in January, 2021, like, so late 2020, early 2021, it was about 15, 20 different companies, you know, Nokia, Blackberry, Bed Bath & Beyond, just kind of a bunch of over-the-hill companies that were all sort of part of this wave. And the issue was that in the GameStop price run-up – so the price went from at the end of 2020 as everybody like as sort of the meme wave like begins.

And and particularly once Ryan Cohen, billionaire Chewy founder. Chewy, the cat treat or dog online dog food sales. Yeah. Yeah. When he buys in like that kind of like puts the stamp of approval on the whole thing. So it goes from like four and a half dollars up to 19 something. And then at the end of January, it goes from 1920 dollars up to 480. And so in that spread, the short sale.

So there was short interest in GameStop. There was, in fact, a reckless amount of short interest in GameStop. But the price increase was so huge. The volume of participation was so big. So many people were jumping on this that the short interest closing their position, the actual like short squeeze portion of all of this is only like 10% of the price movement. All the rest of it is just people FOMOing in on like this thing that they heard about through their cousin. Yeah. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. I think another thing that's kind of interesting to me is like as this thing has evolved,

you mentioned that the actual price got up to like close to around $500. By the time this thing kind of transitions into being this millenarian kind of apocalypse cult, right? Like not, you know, nukes and stuff, end of days apocalypse generally, but like the entire economy is going to come, the belief that kind of has evolved broadly and that obviously there's different kind of factions, but is that like there is going to come a point where like the price of GameStop stock will increase to such an insane,

some people say hundreds of millions, billions of dollars per share, that it effectively allows all of these apes who have bought shares to hold the entire world economy hostage until they have their increasingly arcane demands met, right? Yeah. That is the belief. That is the belief. So out of that, like, okay okay so the shorts closing was only like about 10 of the uh of the total movement so that leads to the conclusion that you know that the events of january 2021 weren't a short squeeze which is is actually kind of true like it wasn't it wasn't purely a short squeeze it was actually very little of it was a short squeeze, which is actually kind of true. Like it wasn't, it wasn't purely a short squeeze.

It was actually very little of it was a short squeeze. But because it wasn't a short squeeze, like that term then allows the creative individual to fill in the gap and just say that it's like, just say that it's like, oh, the short squeeze never happened. Therefore, it's still on the table. It hasn't happened yet. Therefore, it can still potentially happen. And in fact, if we just look at the trend line, I bet since it hasn't happened, since it didn't happen, and the position that they held in December was so reckless,

it's only gotten worse since, which means that these short sellers must be getting desperate, which means they're going to be willing to engage in whatever level of depraved criminal activity is necessary to protect themselves. Therefore, it's just getting more and more and more and more extreme. Therefore, when this finally goes off, it's not just more and more and more and more extreme therefore when this finally goes off it's not just going to be like it's not just going to be a 500 price point it's going to be a nuclear explosion that's going to topple the entire economy yeah and that's that's this like train of logic and what they and it all comes from that just like missing the fact that it's like oh it wasn't a short squeeze because it was mostly FOMO.

The short squeeze was buried under a mountain of, of FOMO. Yeah. But so it wasn't a short squeeze. It's like, yeah, it's all just like based in these like word games of like, ah,

you said it was, you know, that the dumb and dumber, you know, it's like, what are the odds? A one in a million. So you're saying there's a chance.

It's like, well, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it's, it's interesting because of the impossibility of the things they're actually hoping for, but also their fundamental belief that it's inevitable in part because this is not wildly different from the psychology of needing to believe that you are going to paradise in the afterlife. Yeah, hallmarks of millenarianism. Yeah, yeah.

Because of that, what you get is a lot of people who think that they are thinking scientifically, but what they're doing is taking an end point. And the end point is that, you know, this specific, you know, these hedge funds or whatever are evil and, you know, illegally bribing or whatever the government to stop us from succeeding, or there's this other conspiracy. You're starting with this end point and then working backwards and finding ways to

explain the things that have happened within that framework. Yeah, and here's the things that would need to be true in order for the thing to happen. Yeah. The thing that Citadel must have ordered Robinhood to stop letting people buy and share GameStop stocks rather than like, you know, what, what actually happened, which is that Robin Hood simply like could not exist if they allowed this to continue.

Yeah. And, you know, legally I don't believe there's anything that was stopping them from doing that. It's medieval peasant brain kind of stuff is what I initially like. That's how when I was watching your documentary, I was like, oh, it's this, you know, this need to find this kind of like magical answer to the problem. And then I like interrogated that conclusion and was like,

well, no, it's not. This is just the way people's brains work, right? We're pattern making. This isn't medieval peasant shit. They're no dumber than we are. Like, yeah, that's what this shows. Yeah. And one of the things that I love just kind of on that is that like you, if you had a time machine and you went back a hundred thousand years and, and found a bunch of, you know, homeless, literal cavemen. Yeah. Actual apes, more or less, you know, like a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand years

ago, that's, that's modern humans. Like genetically, that's genetically modern humans. You could just like implant yourself in their tribe and teach them calculus and, you know. Soon they would be shorting GameStop stuff. Like we're like, things don't change. It's like, yeah, no, we've been doing this ever since we were, you know, this pattern seeking doesn't change. It's like, yeah, no, we've been doing this ever since we were – this pattern seeking doesn't change. It's almost like it is basically endemic to the human psyche. religion? Like, is this just, are we just like wired to need faith in some shape or form? And if that is not provided by some institution, we will just invent it. And it's like, I don't have the answer to that, but signs point to yes. Yeah. Now, so I wanted to talk a little bit about one of the other things that you brought

up that i thought was interesting is the way you've got this this cast of and these are you know the influencers these are the people who make a lot of these like arcane videos or put out these publish these prospectuses with that are dozens or hundreds of pages laying out the arcana of how these different sort of anticipated apocalyptic financial moves are going to go out, right? Yeah. A lot of these people, the belief is that I think is accurate. At least this is what I got from your documentary. Maybe I was interpreting you wrong. Is that most of these or many of these people are not believers.

They're manipulating a group of people because there's money in it. And one of the tactics that you see used a lot is kind of faux humility, right? I'm just a dumb ape. You shouldn't trust me. I'm not qualified to give financial advice, but here's the secret history of the universe. Invest your money here now. So, I mean, you've seen this a lot with, with various like cult leaders and pseudo cult leaders and just general like grift fluencers, you know, there's always this question of like, how much of their own, how much of their own hype do they believe? How much did they believe when they started? How much did they eventually just like convince themselves of as people, you know, follow them? And I think it's, it's,

it's very much like kind of a, uh, an individual case by case basis. Some of them are absolutely true believers, like from the get go. Uh, some of them, like a lot of them are like soft believers, you know, I, you know, where it's like, they're not hardcore into it. If you really pressed them, it's not motivating their daily decisions, but what they're taking from it is social reinforcement. That they found a group of people who respond to them, who like their posts, who leave messages. It's like, oh man, this blew my mind. I can't believe the system is like this fragile you know my tits are jacked lighting the fuse on the rocket ship buying more moon tickets

yeah and they and they respond to that very socially and um and and out of that sort of soup of like reinforcing uh messages it's really easy for people in those influencer positions to just kind of like hold conflicting, like hold the conflicting beliefs of like, I know that this is impossible, but also it is like fulfilling me socially to say these things. I'll just, I'll just juggle that inconsistency.

Yeah. to say these things, I'll just juggle that inconsistency. Yeah. And the way the mechanics of social media, and particularly in this case, it's the mechanics largely of Reddit. That's not the only place this occurs, but Reddit is certainly like the homeland, you could say. The way in which upvotes and downvotes work and the way in which upvotes and downvotes take critical content, people who are trying to induce some accuracy, or you might even say sanity in the discussion, and that that gets pushed down and hidden after a certain point of time with enough downvotes, as opposed to the stuff that is fundamentally unhinged but is utopian gets upvoted.

It's the physical, the, the physical, like the actual mechanics of how the site is structured to work in force fund at a fundamental level in force group think consensus. Absolutely. Oh, and I mean, and the best part about it, and we see this across like all across Reddit communities,

which is this, like it is, it, it's the social enforcement of truth that, that people will take this social mechanism of upvotes and downvotes and use it as proof against the claim. That it's like, oh, well, if your negative sentiment were true, it would have been upvoted. Yeah. Because there's this kind of just implicit belief that people will recognize truth and will upvote truth.

And thus, upvotes and downvotes are an accurate filter on reality, which is demonstrably not true. Yeah. yeah so yeah that's intensely at play here because you'll see apes who will then like reference the fact that like that you know that it's like if this insane theory were false why did it get so many upvotes and it's like well because it it it hyped you up it made you excited people are not rational you got a tingly feeling in your tummy when you read it and the person told you that you were going to be a millionaire. That's why. It's like asking, why do we like magicians? Of course we like magicians. It looks nice. It's fun. It makes us feel a sense of wonder. Yeah. Yeah. keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once

we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora, an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents.

Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. I want to discuss one of the terms that you use a lot that I missed the first couple of times because this is not a community I had studied. I thought you misspoke at first when you described someone achieving a financial windfall as wife changing money.

I just thought you like, I do that all the time on the show. It's deliberate. That's a term. Yes. Yeah. No, no. After the third time you used it, I was like, oh, okay. This is a thing they say.

Yeah. A lot of people are like, I thought you misspoke. I'm like, no, that's because I was tricking you. Like I was, I was deliberately like sliding in this term, like, because like, cause they use it like obviously as a, as an entendre and as it's like, okay, like I'll just use it straight face with no explanation, you know, three, four times and then finally explain it at the end and, and make a lot of people angry. Uh, when, when they realized that like, no, I, what they weren't just mishearing me. Yeah. So that's one of those things like that goes to sort of the 4chan roots of, of all of this, which is, you know, the, the sort of like crass irreverence slash misogyny of, of Chan speak. And just this, you know, wall street bets will use this kind of like celebration of,

of making so much money that you can afford to be misogynistic, uh, and, and just like swap your wife. And, and it turns out that like, as we know, you,

you make a joke like that often enough, you're eventually going to attract the people who are just straight up. Like, yeah, I hate my wife. Yeah. I want to be just straight up like, yeah, I hate my wife. Yeah. I want to be able to replace her using my crypto or my, yeah, whatever, my game stock. Stop.

God, gains. I was wondering if you might lay out one of the things, the parts that was most interesting to me was the whole Teddy Day. Teddy Day. Oh, boy. Teddy Day is fun. Can you explain Teddy Day. Teddy Day. Oh, boy. Teddy Day is fun. Can you explain Teddy Day to our listeners? Okay. So Ryan Cohen, who fancies himself an

activist investor, he buys into GameStop and gets a minority, pretty substantial holdings that count as like a minority thing. You need to file a bunch of paperwork with the sec that say like, you know, it's like, I hold greater than 10% of this company. Uh, and he used that position to basically get power inside the company itself as chairman. Um, as of a couple of weeks ago, he's now CEO. So, so Ryan Cohen gets heavily involved with, with GameStop and he's like, I'm going to turn this around because his real angst, what seems to be his anxiety in life at the moment is this like sense of legacy. He doesn't just want to be like, oh, I got lucky with an online pet food sales thing. I'm a, I'm a real, I'm a big boy finance guy. You know, I save dying companies. Real rich guy hobby. He puts out a series of children's books called Teddy, named after his late father. And these are, it's five books that have a target audience of two-year-olds that because when you're rich and you want to do something like that, you want to vanity publish books, you don't just like go to an off-the-shelf vanity publisher,

you make your own vanity publisher. Because in the scheme of things like that's just not that expensive. Yeah, Amazon has made it easier than ever. Easier than ever. So he founds this LLC, air quote founds, pays the 600 bucks in filing fees to create this LLC, Teddy Publishing, files a whole bunch of trademarks. We're talking a few thousand dollars all in all in order to just file a bunch of paperwork. And this is all just like the scattershot stuff of like, okay, we're making a product aimed at children. Let's file the trademark for Teddy very broadly. And so it's going to cover basically children's merchandise across the board. What if we want to put the characters on blankets or bottles or cups or plates or party supplies or whatever. So the, these trademarks are just incredibly wide ranging across just merch. for Teddy, the company, as this, like, the mechanism through which Ryan Cohen is going to collaborate with apes in order to trigger MOAS.

Because I guess this is the important thing about the mythology. Apes believe Ryan Cohen is on their side. That he is their their side that he is he is their inside man he is working with them he is as frustrated as they are that this hasn't happened yet but for like arcane legal reasons he needs to like he he needs to operate like a like a clock maker you know he has to do everything very delicately and indirectly and like his hand cannot be seen pushing on the scales so they think that it's like that this becomes a thing that they

imbue all of their uh all of their hopes and dreams into is teddy llc that it's like this is the thing that he's going to use as the mechanism to do this he's going to like buy gamestop via teddy he's gonna buy maybe some other company via teddy teddy's going to get bought in to like it's gonna get bought by gamestop like one way or another there were like hundreds of competing theories all rooted in in this but then back in january of this year a insanity starts in two so in both gamestop forums and bed bath and beyond forums the two meme stocks that are linked by Ryan Cohen, they create this idea called Teddy Day, which is a combination of a bunch of things. Ryan Cohen tweeted several Titanic references. titanic references james cameron's titanic was being re-released this past february on a day that aligned with

national teddy bear day and so two different communities of apes for completely completely separate reasons latched onto this idea of Teddy day. It was, it was Friday, February 10th, 2023. They latched onto it as just this, that like, this is the day.

This is when it's all going to come together. This is when he's going to make his big move. And a major driving piece of evidence that they had for Teddy Day was that in one of the Teddy books, the kids learn to read a clock, and the hands on the clock are pointed to 10 and 2. So Ryan Cohen left them clues in this children's book published six months earlier, warning them that February 10th was going to be the day that was teddy day and it got just like the the spread of this got just like absolutely unhinged on the forums like it was all that super stonk and bbby were talking about for like a week and a half leading up to it the hype was like unreal and then of course nothing happened you you i don't know if you noticed this but

but the u.s economy did not collapse last february oh that's good i had been i have been living like a post-apocalyptic warlord under the assumption that it had but i'll yeah i'll pivot now yeah so so it's just it's one of those like it's just such a great encapsulation of the fact that like, that these communities, they will, they will invent these, these catalyst moments, convince themselves that like, oh, here's a date that's upcoming. And then the moment that like the great disappointment happens, some of them like bleed off. But for the most part, like it, nothing can actually like stop the inertia they can just discard it and and they did they you know no one talks about teddy day anymore except for the fact that like it it had a brief teddy day 2.0 as october 2nd was like upcoming because, you know,

ah, maybe it wasn't the 10th of February. It was the second of October, you know, and, and sure. Like I'm, I'm willing to bet that when next February rolls around, like we'll,

we'll get Teddy day 3.0. Yeah, I'm sure it just keeps this. The same thing has happened with like different kinds of Christian apocalypse cults, right? Where you'll have a guy pick a day, then the day comes and then there's always a reason.

And fundamentally, because this becomes so much of someone's social life, because it becomes part of their emotional support network, because it's like fundamentally you changes the way you talk. Like you learn so many new words that make it into your diction that like, it's easier to just keep rolling the, the expected date ahead rather than like acknowledge that kind of fundamental hit to your self-conception that admitting you got played would take.

Yeah. Yeah. The guy who does a, so religion for breakfast. Yeah. He, he picked up on the fact that like I was using phrases like a great disappointment in the video, like very deliberately because it's like a a expected date of the apocalypse of the second coming like yeah didn't happen and you end up with like this then fragmentation of the aftermath a bunch of people just bleed off but you end up with like a couple different factions ones who are like ah well the date was like the date wasn't wrong per se or like the idea wasn't wrong just like

the date was wrong. Like maybe it's off by a hundred years or whatever. And you get other people who are like, actually, it did happen. It just happened in secret. Like, obviously it wasn't going to just like happen in Times Square. It happened like, you know, the millennium is already kind of like rolling underneath normal, like normal looking society. It's going on right now. It's just day to day. Life hasn't changed.

And that's how you know it's happening is that nothing's changing. And it's like, okay, cool. So completely unfalsifiable. Rad. Awesome. Love that for you. Yeah. So one of the things that kind of related to that I have been thinking about a lot lately is we've got this story that keeps popping into the news every couple of usually a couple of times a year that what are called nons are increasing as a percentage of the population every single year, which is like people who are not affiliated

to any religion. And I've seen, especially a few years ago, atheists that I knew who were kind of like more active in atheism as a movement really celebrating this. I think that does, like the assumption that that means that like atheism is growing more popular has been kind of fundamentally inaccurate. I think what we're seeing and what this is kind of evidence of is that like non-affiliation with an organized religion is more common than ever. People are rejecting organized, settled religion at a kind of unprecedented rate.

That's certainly undeniable. But that is not the same. They are still believers. And this is an example. Right, right. This is people are creating. The Internet has given created a tremendous capacity to build religions. And that's what people are doing.

That's what this is. Yeah. And it's like, how long lasting will it be? I mean, I don't. In the scope of world faiths, I don't think GameStopism is poised to stand the test of time. the test of time. I don't think we'll be seeing an ape emperor anytime soon. But yeah, and the thing is that you go back through history and you look at religious archaeology and you start sort of breaking away from sort of this idea of Christian hegemony as being effectively like that. It's like, okay, once the Christianization of Rome happened, it was then locked in until Martin Luther, and then you get fragmentation into sects, but it stays locked in. And it's like, no, when you start really digging into

the history, it's like, this is always going on. This is always boiling under the surface. You look at like Puritanism in America through a non, like through just kind just like in a constant perpetual state of internal fragmentation as people had different ideas about like what was supposed to happen, what should happen, and just kind of 10, 20, 30, 50 years, and then either folded back into the main thing or whatever. But this kind of churn in faith and belief is just always there. It just, in an organized, codified faith, it's a lot easier to lose track of it. And particularly from a historical perspective, it's a lot easier to just look at like the bigger picture and be like, ah, it was all the same.

It was homogenous. Uh, and it turns out, no. Yeah. Sorry. That was a very, no,

no, no, no, no. There was, I, I threw a lot of like very big assumptions into a very tightly packed uh uh statement there um no no no i i think that was great um and yeah that's that's

kind of i think what i what i had to sort of ask about um you know just sort of this fascination with the way in which almost anything can become a cult these days, thanks to sort of the social dynamics of the different online communities and how they reinforce each other. Like this is kind of at the center of almost everything that's a problem right now, one way or the other, right? Yeah. I think the thing that is new and modern really is the ability or is the, I don't want to say ability, the phenomenon of decentralized self-organizing belief systems. You know, that like there's these, a lot of the meme stock influencers, they're not leading it. They're just nudging it.

They're not in charge of it. And if any of them tried to really seize the reins, that would get them exiled. Any kind of overt power grab would be antithetical to it but so it's the it's and it's the same thing like in q anon if somebody anyone who's come out and been like i am q listen to me gets immediately just like just demolished by the faithful because like it's it's antithetical to their whole thing to have a really identifiable leader and and the fact that there is no identifiable leader that that the leader is mythological is is useful and beneficial to the uh to the organization and those kinds of like those kinds of movements they're not unique

to the modern age but the modern age has made them very easy to form almost by accident yeah well dan uh this will be something for people to continue to keep an eye on uh because it's not gonna stop probably it's not gonna stop oh boy like there's gonna i'm there's gonna be some like amazing doctoral dissertations on this subject in like 10 years yes i i would i would certainly agree with that um well uh dan you want to let the people know where they can find you uh they can find me on YouTube. The channel name is, is folding ideas. Uh, and I'm on socials, uh, uh, Twitter, blue sky, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As a, as foldable human. Excellent. All right. Uh, check out Dan's, uh, videos, check out his YouTube channel, like, and subscribe and, uh, check us out. But you already have because you're here. So continue to check us out. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going.

That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley

into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.