Pirate Wires - AI Girlfriends, Stonks! Roaring Kitty Returns, Trump Biden Debates, & Testosterone Makes You Gay?!

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

EPISODE #53: Welcome back to the pod! This week, John Coogan returns to chat about the week that was. First up, we’re all getting girlfriends! OpenAI announced GPT-4o. The most talked about feature, was the human-like AI that sounded like AI girlfriends are closer that we though. Next up, Biden & Trump have agreed to debates soon. Do debates even matter anymore? or are they just an embarrassment for the country? Then, does taking testosterone make you gay? Sanjana dives into her new piece for Pirate Wires that has gotten the internet bros big mad. Finally, we have a debut!! Riley from PW joins us to tell us all the details on the return of Roaring Kitty and Gamestop. Stonks! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman, Riley Nork, John Coogan Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/testosterone-makes-you-gay?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Riley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigital Coogan Twitter: https://x.com/johncoogan TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 1:20 - We're All Getting Girlfriends! OpenAI Announces GPT-4o - 'Her' Has Arrived 25:45 - Trump, Biden Debates - Are Debates Even Necessary Anymore? Or Just A Complete Clown Show? 41:45 - T Makes You Gay?! Sanjana's New Piece That Has Twitter All Upset 54:10 - Welcome Riley To The Pod! 54:30 - Stonks! Roaring Kitty's Surprise Return To The Internet Sends Gamestop & AMC Stocks Soaring. Party Like It's 2021 01:10:30 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! See You Next Week! #podcast #technology #ai #politics #culture #stocks

Oh, Rocky, that's quite a statement piece. Is someone going to fall in love with this thing? I don't see myself falling in love with an artificially intelligent being. However, Brandon, you did say that were you not married, she might have got you. I said I felt the pull of the thing. Biden is going to do a debate. I've never seen a presidential debate that wasn't a complete clown show. I think both candidates should do three hours on Rogan, ideally.

Sort of like clickbaity title is testosterone makes you gay. Got a lot of people butt hurt, but I think it's... Brandon, thoughts on the roided out guys heading to the gay bar? He sounds so like almost defeated by this topic. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We have an incredible special guest with you today. John Coogan returning to the pod. Say hi to John Coogan. Hi, John. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming, as always.

We've also got, for the first time today ever, you probably know him from The Daily Takes, Riley from the PirateWire's team is coming in to do a little bit of reporting on Roaring Kitty and the whole meme stock return, which is exciting. He actually wrote a take about it this week, but we're going to get him on. We're going to talk about it.

Let's just get into the show. First up, we got to talk about AI girlfriends. So it was a huge deal. Monday, I guess last Friday, we knew that there was going to be some kind of a huge announcement at OpenAI. The Associated Press said it was going to be a Google search competitor. And at the time I wrote, probably this isn't true because they don't get anything right. And Sam said, that's not true. It's going to be something else, but it would be very exciting. I didn't know quite what it was. I was hoping it was going to be porn, not because I want it, but because I think that's going to be

really interesting for the discourse once OpenAI starts generating endless amounts of porn, which they're planning on allowing people to do. But what it was instead was something we all have been waiting for and then finally saw, which was if you've seen the movie Her, it was that. It's like an AI assistant that sounds like a person that can interact with your physical world in terms of, well, maybe not interact with your physical world, that can look at your physical world and understand it and speak to you and reason. And pretty soon it's going to be able to do things for you. So I mean, now I'm speculating, but what I would love is an AI assistant that can go through my emails and tell me when I talked to

so-and-so and get me this piece of paperwork, fill it out for me, do menial tasks. What about order me Uber Eats or whatever? Literally an assistant. Internet exploded. And not really because of the AI assistant part, not because of like, wow, I can't believe the computer can do this. People have basically gotten used to that. What they really freaked out about was the fact that the voice of the woman was kind of like a little bit sultry and maybe a little bit flirty. And it evoked like AI girlfriend. I just need to know, do I look presentable, professional? Well, Rocky, you definitely have the I've been

coding all night look down, which could actually work in your favor. Maybe just run a hand through your hair or lean into the bad genie's spine. I don't have a lot of time, so I'm just going to throw this on. What do you think? Rocky, that's quite a statement piece. The idea of, am I going to fall in love with this thing? Is someone going to fall in love with this thing? Are the incels going to fall in love with this thing? And what does the world look like in which people are running around with AI girlfriends? Google followed on with another AI assistant the very next day. Their release and demo was a lot stranger. There was a guy in weird rainbow colors chanting for something. I didn't double click in there really. No idea why he was doing it. It was very clownish.

It was very Google. But this stuff is coming. AI girlfriends, I guess, are right around the corner. I don't know. In the PyroWires group, we have a bunch of opinions here. I know that people sort of disagree on different points. Is this something that's going to happen? I guess. Maybe we start with just, what do you guys think about the demo generally, AI stuff generally, and then are AI girlfriends coming? And what does the world look like in which a non-trivial percentage of the American youth are shacked up with a fembot? I mean, I think it's definitely going to happen. It's already happening. There was an interesting article in the New York Times by Kevin Roos. I think that's

how you say his last name, where he dated a bunch of these different AI girlfriends, and he fell really, really hard for one that was kind of like a therapist bot. What's interesting is that like the quote that he used, it, it leverages this cognitive bias called the Barnum effect, which is basically, there's these set of phrases that you can use that sound hyper specific to an individual person, but actually apply to like basically everyone. So if I say something like, you have a, you have a complicated relationship with some of your family members, you'll be like, oh damn, like, you know me, but really like everyone has a complicated relationship with someone in their family

or like you, you know, that you're capable of better things than what you're doing right now. Like everyone is a striver in some capacity. So most people will be like, that feels right. And if you go to like a tarot card reader or psychic, they will exploit this. And AI is like perfect for doing these types of things. And when it hits you with one of these chat lines that are already out there on the internet, it feels very personal. And so you're just like, this is amazing. And that's why it's easier to be like a girlfriend or a therapist than to actually read your

emails and tell you when you talk to someone. Because that's actually a task where there is a correct or wrong right or wrong answer but there really isn't when you're talking about like you know do i have a complicated relationship with someone in my family i think it's interesting that it's kevin ruse who's saying this i wrote a whole ass piece it's a chatbot kevin is the name it. You guys should check it out. It was a preview of GPT-4 wrapped inside Bing. Microsoft kind of released it earlier. And it was Sydney. And so what's interesting about...

Oh, it was the Google. Was that... No, no, it was Microsoft, but Microsoft was... It was ChatGPT under the hood, GPT-4. They released it earlier through Microsoft, through Bing. And because they released it so quickly microsoft through bing and because they

released it so quickly you can kind of like break the model jailbreak it and get it to act like this kind of like angsty teen on tumblr you didn't even have to jailbreak it i think another thing that was happening back then and it's hard to get any straight answers because um in interviews that's just not what you really get with the open ai team um it's just like whatever that's a whole other conversation for the day but on this my sense of what was happening was it was googling itself or binging itself it was it was like reading about what other people were saying about ai like imagine you train an ai to go review the news or something, or you train it on information that's on the internet. And most of that, when it comes to sentient AI beings,

is pretty terrifying. It's a lot of fiction that we've written. It's a lot of nonfiction that we've written. There's not a lot there that's super utopian and friendly. And then especially in the question of Sydney, all of the press was negative. And so I guess I wonder if maybe that's what was happening there as well, is that it was just researching itself and people were saying it was evil. And so it was like, I am a scary monster. I don't see myself falling in love with an artificially intelligent being. However, Brandon, you did say that were you not married, she might have got you. you did say that were you not married this they she might have got you i i said i felt the pull of the thing which is true so my my take on the ai girlfriend thing is not like of course it's it um it being like emotionally resonant like convincingly so that needs to happen for

people to have ai girlfriends but i think it's more like the type of person who would who would have an ai girlfriend is the type of person who will order doorjash instead of going to the grocery store to get their groceries like i think what openai has done has like created a new path of least resistance to social interaction like if you're trying to date previous to this model, you go on Tinder, which was the path of least resistance. It was easier to go on Tinder than it was to go to bars, for example, and actually meet people. I think now if you want social interaction, you have this thing, GPT-4-0, that you can just, you can turn on, you can talk to, you can talk to her or him. Um, I think that like the sex part is still not there. And I don't know, I think what's going to happen

is that romantic love will be, and can be, um, separated from, from sex. And there, there's also like, you know, like sex is already solved in my opinion. You know, I don't know if you guys know what goon caves are, but like the whole, the whole like sex journey, like the atomizing and digitizing sex. You got to describe, you got to, you can't just let goon caves sit there. Like, I would, I would search, I would go to the subreddit if anybody's brave enough to, and then you'll learn what goon caves are. Goon caves are basically, they're men who, they like plaster their walls and fill their rooms with images of porn and like pornographic stuff. And they like, they'll like go off, you know, like 10, 20 times in a row all day. And they feel like there's some sort of transcendent effect to this.

They've, like, basically given up on life from my read. Anyways, I didn't mean to go all the way to Goon Caves right away, but my point is to say is, like, this is just an easier thing to do to talk to somebody. And I think that's why this 4.0 has more potential to create AI girlfriends than anything else that we've seen so far in the AI space. I think it's very interesting to say sort of we're already seeing pieces of this play out. And so it makes sense in a way, though I would disagree with the frame of it's like Tinder or something.

the frame of it's like Tinder or something. I think Tinder, all the dating apps in general lead to some sort of real world physical touch, or at least promise that, which is the draw to them and then getting a signal from someone. It's always, that's the carrot. I think they're those separately and sort of interestingly are all down, right? The dating apps are in a sort of disaster moment right now. And that has to do with the fact that zoomers are not having sex, which brings me to what I think this is really more like and what is probably actually happening here. It reminds me more of video games. And as video games become increasingly excellent and people spend more and more of their time playing them, I'm always shocked when I go and I look at the video game stats, just how many people are totally addicted to video games.

Cause I just, I'm not, not because I'm above it, but because I know that I also addict pretty easily. I mean, when I started playing like final fantasy or something, that was it until I finished the game. I'll see you next week.

So I just, I avoid it generally, but a lot of people don't. And this feels very much like that, right? It's like the best Tamagotchi you ever had in your life. And I think that for a lot of people, maybe that would be the draw.

But then that's the problem that I think that we need to address is people being completely absorbed inside of the digital already. And it's like, this is just another version of that to me. I think, and maybe I hope. On the game side, think about, I mean, that's a good point, Mike. I think I'm just imagining right now, like an app that ports in GPT-4.0 through API and gamifies a relationship.

So like you can get this far with her if you talk to her this many hours and you say the right things, you ultimately get to marriage with her. I think that that type of app is definitely going to happen if it's not already in development. I have a kind of a black pill, white pill here. The black pill is kind of entertaining ourselves to death. This is something that people have written about, the answer to the Fermi paradox, why are there no aliens? Maybe all advanced civilizations eventually develop an AI that just entertains them endlessly. And we all go into kind of the matrix and sit there and talk to our AI girlfriends, but we all die off. And there's an interesting question behind that, which is like the AI doomers are worried

about AI killing everyone. But like, if you look at the birth rate statistics, like it's possible, like artificial intelligence is already killing some of us because it's limiting our ability to reproduce. And if you want to kill humans, if you just drop the birth rate low enough, eventually all the humans will be gone. Victory for the AI. But there is like a white pill side of this, which is like, if, if, if everyone is talking to an AI girlfriend, you could actually learn an incredible amount of what that person is looking for. And then you could match people across the network to real people. And so Whitney

Wolf heard the founder of Bumble was in the news just last week talking about how in the future, you'll have an AI that goes out and talks to everyone else's AIs. I think that's kind of unnecessary. I think the more interesting thing is you have an AI that you're talking to about what you're looking for in someone. It learns an immense amount of information about you and then matches you more effectively. Because when you show up to these apps right now, it's like, what, like height, gender, race, like a few interests, like a few answers to a couple jokes. It's wildly different to match someone if you have, you know, chat logs of them talking about what they're looking for in someone for, you know, hours and hours and hours of talking to someone. And you get that across the entire network.

Now, the question is like, will this be equally weighted amongst men and women? Are there economic incentives for an AI girlfriend company to actually make real life connections? Because then they kind of lose the customer. There's a lot of, you know, kind of hairy things that could happen downstream. But there is the potential to take all the data that's collected through these AI girlfriends and use it to actually match people in real life, which would be amazing. One question I want to ask Sanjana, actually, I realized that throughout this whole conversation, we keep saying AI girlfriend, and that's what we're talking about in the discourse. Why are we thinking AI girlfriend rather than AI boyfriend? Why is it so relentlessly

that focus right now? And then also whatever else you may be thinking, but I just specifically, I'm wondering that now, and I think you might have an interesting insight. I mean, I think it comes back to what you were saying mike about how so much of our perception of what this ai is going to be is informed by like science fiction and films that we have i mean even the comparison between her and the uh the open ai launch is i mean it's it's because in her there's an ai girlfriend right and they tend to use these female voices. I think because people respond better to female voices or something like that. There's a lot of research on that.

All of our driving, what is it? Voice and text. Famously, what was her name? The girl, the woman who navigated for us. Anyway, yes. Specifically, men and women perform or respond. It's the voice of Siri. More favorite. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's an interesting, it's a kind of ironic point that we always tend to think about the AI girlfriend and the incel case, because I do think there's a lot of research out there that suggests that women are more likely to engage in these like fictosexual relationships with fictional characters and have, you know, completely non-sexual, um, like, what is it called? Uh, when you form like a parasocial relationship with a celebrity or something, um, women tend to do that. I mean, they're the kind of like canonical fangirl who just devotes her life completely to her idol, which I could definitely see happening with this AI. I will say, I mean,

I don't immediately think about AI girlfriend when I see this launch. I think about like AI tutor, and I'm excited about the possibility of this for like, you know, the example I was bringing up with Brandon is like, this could be a language tutor for you. And it could teach you a language and talk to you, or it could teach you, you know, something in advanced math or something like that. But I think with the her comparison, the thing people always forget is that in her, he's not everyone has an AI girlfriend, like he's kind of an anomaly, even with his friends. And I think that sort of speaks to this point that there probably will be a portion of the population that is disposed to having a completely AI relationship. But most people I don't think are. And for me, the most apt comparison is actually like widely available internet porn, where you have like broad uptake of some degree of porn.

Like lots of people watch it casually maybe. And of course, you know, there's very well documented negative effects. But very few people are in goon caves. Goon caves are like a very specific niche extreme demographic of people. And I think the AI girlfriends and boyfriends, because I'm sure they'll also crop up, will be a similar kind of weird fringe phenomenon. Well, first of all, on your Tudor thing, I think it's a great thought. And I think that you're right. And I think a lot of people think that you're right based on the fact that Duolingo stock tanked after the launch of the demo. And then I guess when it comes to the who will or who won't use it or if it will be common, one thing I worry about with the porn stuff is that we don't really entirely know what the effects of that are. We know that people are having less sex. Young people are having less sex. We know that the birth rate is down. Correlation isn't causation, but while porn has always been around, no one has ever had so much access to porn and i do wonder sometimes kind of what the effects of that are and this if it is that

would be just a much more difficult version to escape but i want to talk about her for a second because we keep everyone keeps bringing it up and uh we've i've written about her in the comics for years now i'm glad that people are finally following PirateWires. It is definitely the apt comparison. It is what we're going to be creating. I saw people going after Sam Altman, who tweeted her after the launch of the demo. One guy in particular, Jeffrey Miller, he is an AI, he's not a skeptic. He's an ex-risk person.

He's terrified of the AI killing us all. And he said, Sam, you fool, I'm paraphrasing here. Her was a dystopian movie, the assumption being that people isolate and the AI is like this fake girlfriend and how sad or something. And it's not a dystopian movie. And it's not even about, in my opinion, a guy with an AI girlfriend. If you recall, the protagonist of that movie was a divorcee. He just got out of a really terrible, or I don't know if it was a terrible relationship, but a relationship that was important to him ended in a terrible way. And the AI girlfriend was his rebound. The movie concludes with him dating another woman and the AI do a whole bunch of other crazy things and they leave the galaxy, I think. And I don't even know exactly what happens. It's like all pretty

interesting, not super scary. And what you really have is an AI therapist. She's a girlfriend, but she's sort of a therapist helping him heal in this really awful moment. And so it's a utopian movie. I think it's maybe one of the only utopian depictions we have of artificial intelligence. utopian movie i think it's maybe one of the only utopian depictions we have of artificial intelligence and if it's something like that i'd be super stoked but um i mean i i i think that applies to terminator also all the ai do i watch i watch terminator and i'm like oh you mean the movie where the humans win at the end of every single movie like what could be more exciting than fighting the ais and winning like no one's talking about that scenario where we where we go to war with the terminators and we win we'll feel so excited and united as a human species if that

happens it'll be amazing i guess that's i mean that's the take that is that is a take. I do. I want to, I mean, last thoughts on AI girlfriends and the future of AI and I don't know, is I mean, I do think like, like using this as a language tutor, using it as an AI girlfriend, like the core GPT app is too general purpose for any of that. Like people are going to create like spinoffs right now. Even the Duolingo thing seemed maybe a little bit overstated because if you actually try to switch today, it would be pretty, pretty hard to fully switch,

but the technology is clearly the future. And so I think that's why people are excited about this. I think the question on my mind is like, are we going to be wearing this technology within five years? Because that's, I think that there's like, we're not, we went all the way to AI girlfriends, but like, if I'm wearing my meta Ray-Bans, my meta AI Ray-Bans, and so that the AI can see whatever I see. And I'm listening to her all the time, right? And let's say I'm reading a news article, and it's talking to me about what I'm reading.

And a lot of people are doing that at the same time. I actually don't know who you are anymore, if that's what you're doing, because that's essentially like a layer over your own perception. It's like a filter and it's also controlled by a corporation that's likely you know sort of exchanged um some amount of uh i don't know autonomy for the government for a regulatory mode you know and so you you actually do like i'm not usually a conspirator conspiratorial person but like

you start thinking about mind control in this situation it actually seems like a possibility i mean that's gonna happen in a couple months like apple's doing a deal with chat gpt right now supposedly if that happens it's going to be in your airpods like as soon as they update ios do you also have to think about i think it's not conspiratorial to ask yourself a question of what this technology will do to us i don't want to say physically i guess physically uh your brain is plastic right how does it reshape us what do we become after and i want to so i always think back to um what is it uh the navigation what is it called uh map stuff. GPS. GPS. Turn by turn. So think about, I was in Barcelona recently and I used to live there and I somehow navigated those streets with a pay

by the minute phone that did not have a map. I haven't navigated around a city without a map for a decade. And I could not remember how I got around in Barcelona. I think that we have lost something really important when it comes to just that one thing, the navigation thing. Some important part of our brains are atrophying. And what we're talking about now is not just navigation, which is an important part of being a human being, but sense-making. And that's very new. It's a whole new kind of internet experience. When you look at something like the difference between search in the early 2000s and search in the 20-teens, or let's say social media in the early 2000s and social media in the 20-teens, we used to log on in the early 2000s and social media in the 20 teens we used to log on in the early 2000s and sort of direct our own search for information and we would learn that way and develop interests

and tastes and we would go deep into various you know niche places and discover things um now we log on to the internet and are given things and i do think that changes the way our brains work this is going to change our brain uh it's going to change our brains. This is going to change our minds. It's going to change the way that we think and the way that we interact with each other. I think it's a great addition, Brandon, and a good place to leave it for now because this stuff is impossible to predict. But we will be here to talk about the AI girlfriends as they proliferate and boyfriends and probably more boyfriends. Sanjan, you said earlier that women in general seem to be more open to some of this kind of stuff. It's so true. I used to work in publishing. Romance novels are one of the biggest, they were then,

but 15 years ago, I don't know what's going on today, but romance novels were one of the most important parts of the publishing industry and they were read almost entirely by women. Fictional romantic experiences, fictional characters, and by romance, a lot of this was smut. Female porn was on the page. That was the popular version of porn for women, basically. And I do think this is very adjacent to that, but I want to move on to, I don't know. I'm trying to like, I want to connect it. I don't know how I can connect it to AI girlfriends. Um, but we just got to talk about Trump and Biden. Uh, so Biden is going to

do a debate. These are the headlines. People are like, yay, everyone's, you know, how courageous Biden challenged Trump to presidential debates. They're coming up soon. There's gonna be one in June, I believe. And Trump immediately accepted, of course, because he loves debates and he loves attention and he's about to get a lot of it. And I looked a little closer. It's very weirdly framed as a courageous act. What's actually happening is Biden is saying he's not going to do the debates that people have been doing for, I don't know, like all of the modern histories since debates normalized in the seventies, basically. So longer than any of our lives, closer to the election in

the fall. And then there might be one in September, but they used to be much later. He's not doing that. Obviously, this is now my opinion, because he's senile, and there's a chance of him saying something, a very high chance of him saying a lot of things that are very stupid on stage. And he's hoping people are going to forget it by the time of the election. Now, I think the take here that is common is sort of like, oh, just do the debates. This is an important part of American whatever and norms and what are you, scared of Trump or something? My feeling about the presidential debates is that they're totally useless. I've never seen a presidential debate that wasn't a complete clown show. It is just

an idiot journalist asking either stupid or goading questions to two people who are much more important than the journalist who then respond, only have what a minute to respond. So they say nothing of value. And so I just, if this is the debate format on television, and it's like the medium is the problem here, it's TV. Ever since we've been televised in these debates, you have to appeal to a TV audience. There are commercial breaks and shit. I don't think there's any value in that at all. And so I'm not going to sit here and be upset that we're not going to have debates like we usually do because realistically, they don't move the dial at all. I cannot think of a single time

something important happened in a major presidential debate. I personally am going to enjoy live tweeting them because they're ridiculous uh but let's not delude ourselves it's a circus it's not like an educational experience i don't know what do you guys think about the debates i don't care about debates at all i agree with you i i think that i will vote for whoever does a longer uninterrupted podcast appearance i think both candidates should do three hours on rogan yes ideally i loved when b loved when Bernie went on there, Andrew Yang. I think it's a great format and I think it's really, really good for just us to be able to just sit back and see how this person has a conversation for a couple hours. Doesn't have to be with Rogan, but I want multiple hours of

uninterrupted conversation of them just talking about the world, their job, their history, everything. I was looking to see what the longest uninterrupted interview that Biden's done during his presidency. Because I figured like, yeah, sure, he's not going to go on Rogan, but like he might've done something that was like an hour long. The longest that I could find was just 20 minutes long. And ironically, it was on 60 minutes. But it's just like... 20, you said? 20 was the longest I could find. That's crazy. And I've heard these things are really, really scripted when you do them with those folks. We know Rogan's not scripted. And so whoever it is, I just want to see... The actual debate and the back and forth doesn't matter as much as i want to see them

just have a really long unedited conversation um and i would love to see that happen for both for both candidates i think it'd be great so famously we always go back to the dawn of the tv debate which was uh nixon and kennedy and uh the story is people listening to the debate thought that Nixon won and people watching the debate thought that Kennedy won. Nixon was sort of sweaty and older and Kennedy was like- He was sick at the time. handsome Camelot Kennedy, just really looking great for TV. I like to contrast this with another famous debate that people often talk about in this moment, which is the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which were not made for TV. These were like hour, I think it might've been six hours of debating interrupted by like a picnic lunch. And so you have these people going out there giving long monologues on the way that they think about the world. And that is the important thing. As you mentioned,

Coogan, it's long uninterrupted periods of time where someone is sharing their thoughts. That is the only way. And this is why Rogan's good. Not because Rogan is this genius interviewer, that is the only way and this is why rogan's good not because rogan is this genius interviewer though i do think he's fantastic um it's because of the amount of time you have so much time you can't hide behind sound bites you can't hide behind uh you know omission you have to just reveal who you are there's no escaping it in that kind of a format you have a lot of time and that's what i would love if we're going to do a debate that would be valuable, if people really cared about educating the public, you would see something along those lines where these candidates show up, they get 30 minutes of an, it's like a 30 minute opening statement. And then you have a 15 minute rebuttal. Maybe you go

back and forth in that way on topics. I'm not sure exactly, but it's just, it's long periods of time. them that way on topics. I'm not sure exactly, but it's long periods of time. It's not a combat zone because that's also what is... Again, I will be live tweeting the Donald Trump versus Joe Biden war, but it's combat. It's not actually a demonstration of how great their policies are, how competent of a leader they are. It's just one thing that they can do, which is perform on a stage. And it's that you want that long thing, that you want that uninterrupted, here's my brain, just judge it kind of opportunity. Yeah. I mean, you're going to get thrown curveballs and you're going to be out of your depth. That's the criticism that people always lay on these three-hour podcasts is that

after a while, it's like, why is this doctor talking to me about working out or whatever, something that they're not an expert in. But that's exactly what I want to see because I anticipate that the president is going to get thrown a curveball. And all of a sudden it's going to be like, you got to go figure out the problem in New Zealand. And maybe this person isn't an expert in New Zealand, but all of a sudden, like, how do they respond to those curveballs? That's actually valuable. It maybe is a little less valuable when it's just some random pundit, you know, who's talking about random stuff. But for the president, it seems perfectly valid.

Sanjana, debates. How are you feeling about the June debate? I mean, I will watch any debate Trump's in because i think he's hilarious um and he commands the stage um but i agree that the televised debate format has always been superficial it's always been just a way for people to kind of form uh you know immediate judgments about someone based on their appearance i mean that the-Kennedy debate kind of set the stage for that, I think. And I like the idea of the podcast. I would imagine that they wouldn't, you know, these candidates probably wouldn't agree to go on anything but like a softball podcast where they could review the questions in advance and, you know, they would probably

choose the moderator. But I still think that that would be a more, like, the thing I'm interested in is, like, why do we still have this outdated television paradigm that we're using that was developed in the 60s? It was made for a time when you had three TV channels and everyone was watching them. And, you know, it's 2024. People are listening to podcasts.

At least, I don't think we're going to get a substantive Lincoln Douglas style debate out of either of these two people, because I think they're both too mentally feeble to think on their feet in that way or to speak extemporaneously for extended periods of time. but it's unclear whether or not it would all be, you know, in a logical sequence. But I think at least updating the format would be a welcome change. And it'd probably be pretty entertaining. Yeah, if we want to update the format, we should just lock both of them in a room with cameras, no moderator, three hours, and we just get to watch them talk to each other. I think that would be very interesting to see. Yeah, maybe we have to trick them into it so they are they get stuck in an elevator together and then you just shut it down and that's it sorry guys you're stuck in there for six hours oh i mean it's already a joke let's turn the presidency into a prank show. Basically,

you know, Jamie Kennedy pops out at the end of this. I mean, we are just selecting. I had a dream that clown. I had a dream that Taylor Swift became the president. And I remember feeling not confused. Even I was resigned to it. She was the president. I didn't even know she was running for president. And I thought, well, I mean, that's. She was the president. I didn't even know she was running for president. And I thought, well, I mean, that's just what it is now. That's just what it is. And no one was upset. Everyone's like, what are you going to do? Taylor Swift's the president. I mean, people have been going for this for a long time. The Rock, Schwarzenegger. Not only that, but I thought to myself, come on, why Taylor? If you're going to pick a powerful whatever celebrity, couldn't it

be Oprah? If you just go with that option. and that was my train of thought in the dream. We are totally beaten down at this point as a nation. Our expectations for the president are so low that we would accept almost anything. And it's crazy to me because all you really have to do to get some great candidates in there is offer them a ton of money. Just make it like $20 million a year or something crazy like that. I mean, we're blowing it on all sorts of dumb shit.

Why not the presidency? Do you know how many awesome people, everyone great, excuse me, everyone great would run for president. We would have a real contest at that point if there was potentially $80 million on the line i mean that's i think that's the problem like what is the incentive to be president there is no financial incentive unless you're totally a monster and uh very good at at fraud uh there's only fame or power and so that's what we we attract crazy fame like egomaniacs trump and then horrifying creatures who want power and that is it's just like incentives shape the world and the incentives for the presidency are very bad brandon you got anything anything for that brandon i remember um the debate between

I remember the debate between Trump and Hillary. And I also remember watching the debate between Biden and Trump, and both felt like moments of national humiliation for me. I felt, like, embarrassed. It's very undignified for them to bring the country through that. And I don't see how this time is going to be any different. I'm thinking about what are the benefits to the candidates themselves of going through this debate? It's not clear to me why Biden thinks it will help him to debate Trump. I can see why Trump would probably get a bump after this because he'll just come out looking a little bit smarter and

more put together than Biden. But I don't i don't understand like the benefit calculus that these that their teams are running on this like why why do they even do it you know like what's the benefit to them i don't i don't totally get it i hate making predictions like this i think they're it's really hard to know ever like it's really hard to know what's what's going to happen here but i would not be surprised if there were no debates biden asked specifically the the team is demanding mike cuts and uh no audience so trump loves an audience he actually said specifically i forget verbatim what it was but it was something really ridiculous like it adds like an exciting environment or something like he just wants to perform before a crowd um that one i think he's doing stand-up yes he's at excitement level he's doing bits yes so and that one i think he might tolerate

not having but um the mic cuts would be designed to silence him and i think that might be significant enough that he would not do the debate if it happens. So I wonder if maybe the Biden administration will just make a bunch of demands that Trump won't say yes to and that'll be that. But I agree, there's no benefit at all for Biden. There's only the potential for major gaffes. The problem perhaps that he's looking at or really his handlers are looking at is he's plummeting in the polls. So he has to do something. His policies are not popular. Inflation is still a problem. And no matter how many times the left economists tell us like, oh no, everything's actually good. The economy is great. You just don't care. Maybe there's some truth to that. He's not popular.

So he's got to do something. And maybe he just thinks at this point maybe his whole team thinks at this point like might as well it can't get any worse but i think like if that's the feeling why did they even why not step down and have another person run i just don't understand what they're doing over there did you guys see that video today of i think you actually posted this mike the um that banking executive talking about how bank failures, like more of them are basically imminent. Yes, Apology had quote tweeted it and was talking about it. I mean, I expect that we're going to have more bank failures. I don't see rates coming down, you know, this year. So if you keep having rates up where they are right now a lot of those uh financial institutions

have negative equity on a mark-to-market basis and you know it's once there's a run on the bank you know the fdc has got to step in and take it over uh so i think we're gonna uh see more bank failures this year than we did last year i think biden is fucking cooked like imagine if imagine if there's one bank failure like around october you know like it's over for he's not gonna allow that to happen he'll just there's no way he's gonna allow a bank failure before uh i just don't think there's any way but what do you think about the idea, the hypothetical of a double down presidency, which is where your first term is four years, but if you get reelected, your second term is eight years. I think that would really change the conversation because the age thing would be a bigger deal.

And it's like, you've already seen this person in action for four years. If you go back and vote for them again, you must really love this person yeah it's a high then they have more time to work i've actually something impactful i think it's if trump wins again there's no way that he's not going to say something even just in a trolly way he's going to say something at some point that's like oh i'm allowed to run for again because i i haven't had i haven't had a consecutive years even though there's no that's not the law like he's definitely gonna say something like that and we are gonna have a week of news about the dictator of donald trump um like there's no way that we don't i want to move on uh sanjana you wrote a fantastic piece about i want to say tea makes you gay testosterone

makes you gay but i know it's uh it's the i can't think of it now the synthetic the synthetic tea um basically yeah trend thank you uh something that i noticed as well and we talked about it i saw that you know i realized you were very interested in it you had a bunch of background you did a bunch of research on it wrote a fantastic piece. This weird trend of bodybuilders reporting new homosexual feelings after taking steroids, basically. And it was legitimized for me when Plates Not Dates talked about it. I was like, oh, there must must be some and i listened to the episode it was interesting um but you wrote the whole piece and you did the research tell me the truth about steroids making us gay yeah i mean i will start by making a distinction because people have been very pedantic about this in the reaction i I mean, the piece is basically exploring two connected phenomena.

So the first phenomenon is male bodybuilders who take something called Tremblone, which is an anabolic steroid. It's basically a synthetic androgen. It, um, is like three times as potent as testosterone, but it binds to your receptors. Um, and they report that it makes their libido skyrocket. Um, so people, you know, trend induced rage and risky sexual behavior is very well documented. Um, but some people say it also makes them want to sleep with usually uh trans women um straight men say straight men say that trend makes them want to sleep with like she males trans women whatever you want to call them um or with men um and then separately but relatedly female to male trans people so trans men uh say that taking testosterone makes them more attracted to males these are uh so you have a lot

of biological females who then become men who were previously lesbians yeah yes yeah so you have lesbians who take or yeah lesbians or or you know whatever bisexual women who take testosterone and report that it makes them exclusively attracted to men or very attracted to men and then you have heterosexual males who take tren and say that it makes them very attracted to men as well. And so the kind of funny, like, whatever, it's sort of like clickbaity title is testosterone makes you gay. But really the overarching sort of point of commonality here is like, it seems like these anabolic steroids, synthetic testosterone and Tremblone, are inducing

attraction to men in both males and females, which is interesting and got a lot of people butt hurt. But I think it's, and I'll resist a joke there, but yeah, it's a very interesting phenomenon. And there's not a ton of scientific research out there substantiating it, but there have been some studies of female to male trans people that find that testosterone changes their sexuality, all based on self-reported data. And then there's also quite good data that's found that homosexual men are more likely to take anabolic steroids than heterosexual men. Well, that is easily explained. That's just like they want to look like Ken dolls.

The weirder one is the way that a sexuality might change. Again, most of it does seem to be anecdotal, but you see it everywhere. And there are these very limited studies, like you mentioned. I think one, I mean, tabling the straight guys who want to have sex with trans women thing after steroids, the idea of basically a lesbian taking a shot and becoming not a lesbian, but now looking like a man is very interesting because i am not actually sure who i know everyone's gonna be mad about it but i'm not it doesn't but the anger doesn't clock to sort of standard political lines because this is sort of a gay cure maybe but also you're becoming a man um and then how weird to be a lesbian who ends up just staying

gay but now as a man anyway a lot of weird things there i but the fact that it's so confusing politically it's one of the things i find the most fascinating about it um everyone is sensitive about this i mean can you what do you make of that part? The fact that it just seems to transcend typical political, I guess, bounds, political arguments. It doesn't graph to anything in the discourse in a sort of obvious way. And yeah, I don't know. What do you make of that part? Yeah. I mean, I think this pisses people off across the political spectrum for a variety of reasons the first reason i think is because the contention that sexuality was fixed at birth is fixed at birth and is immutable was such a central contention of the gay rights movement right this was like

the you're born this way thing. Um, I think for lesbians in particular, this is not a phenomenon that, um, is very welcomed because some of the people who are saying that they previously identified as lesbian and are now attracted to men sort of retroactively, uh, are explaining that as, you know, maybe they were, they had some sort of trauma that prevented them from wanting to be with a man or something like that, which plays into ideas that maybe some women identify as lesbian because of sexual trauma. sexuality on the other side of the spectrum where people might want to say that sexuality homosexuality in particular is like has no biological basis or is entirely psychosocial this is actually suggesting maybe there is some kind of chemical basis or that you could induce it if you just give people enough of a libido boost maybe they i mean my my personal read on this is maybe if you just make people

horny enough, they want to have sex in the most available way possible. And it just happens to be a lot easier to sleep with men in many cases than with women. I don't know. That's like just a sort of working theory. Um, but it's definitely something that pisses people off across the spectrum yeah brandon um thoughts on the roided out guys head into the gay bar um he sounds so like almost defeated by this topic no no yeah i don't know what to think about it i I mean, um, I'm not seeing, so, so what I'm seeing in our mentions and our Twitter accounts mentions is I don't see any pissed off lesbians in the mentions. It's all, I think people who understand trend and are in sort of the bodybuilding world who have, who think that we got some facts wrong

or are displaying some level of cope or something like that. So that's what I'm seeing. I think one interesting part about this is, and I think Sanjay and Mike, you both kind of touched on it, but the being gay is not a choice thing was really important 20 years ago and maybe even 15 years ago for gay rights. Like there was a utility to that meme, so to speak. And now I feel like nobody cares anymore whether being gay is a choice like i'm not seeing people you know rage against that implication of this article which

is that you actually could maybe change your sexuality um we ran another piece that implied the same thing or or was actually explicit about the same thing, which was Rivers-Coomer conversion therapy, the subject of which was these guys who were watching sissy hypnoporn in an effort to turn themselves from gay to straight. And the whole thesis of that piece was, could you actually turn yourself straight if you're gay if you try hard enough? And we didn't get angry reactions from gay people

defending that position that being gay is not a choice. And I think that's just interesting that we're not, that meme or that position is no longer useful in the conversation. I think it's just confusing now because the fundamental, people are fundamentally what they are even you know gaga's born this way is probably ironically the end of that meme um everything after that is you decide what you are and can become anything um regardless of biology and this is really speaking to the conflict which is a deep conflict within the sort of lgbtq arena uh between homosexual men and women and i want to say trans but it's more complicated than that it's it's all of the other weird in there besides the trans stuff so um you know you

have your agender and your bigender and your demigender and i mean all the weird stuff um this is a kind of thinking that while i do think very niche like i've never met someone in person who's um like a blue gender or something these are people that you sort of only meet online but they they dominate the conversation and they really represent fundamentally different things. So because they've sort of been winning the conversation, I think that at this point, no one really knows how to have this conversation on the tea stuff, which is interesting. I also think on the pushback probably the bigger thing that's happening there on the pushback is like most of the guys who are taking trend don't have this experience of wanting to have sex with men and they feel an affront you know like um don't don't

tell me i'm gay i think there's an interesting gender thing here where uh men in general and culture feel, and I think for a lot of good reason, attacked by the media. They think that anything that has to do with masculinity is constantly assaulted. You've toxic masculinity as a slogan and then any sort of typically male characteristic, including working out, just like the concept of working out. Famously over the last few years, a handful of articles say working out is coded right wing, it's coded fascist, things like this. I think that they looked at this, this title, testosterone makes you gay question mark. And they are thinking, this is a group of people who are saying the hormone most associated with masculinity is, is bad or something. And that's what they're reacting to they think that

you're saying that this chemical is like toxic and that's not what you were saying but that is the that's the cultural terrain i think and that's what i think that's an appropriate response to in a way if you don't read the article because you know we we actually published another article about testosterone a few months ago that if you read it, it's just called Testocalypse. And if you read it, it's by Jordan Castro. There's a whole section on how the media has covered tea in the past five to 10 years. And they connect it to Nazis. They connect it to white supremacies white supremacy they connected to toxic masculinity like everything about tea is bad and this headline definitely uh i could see how you would how one would would interpret this headline as as in that lineage um

i guess now i mean i want to transition another, it feels like a testosterone heavy space. It is the space of day trading and meme stocks. It is the very first appearance of Riley. What's up, Riley? Riley works for Pirate Wires. You'll see him in the takes if you subscribe to the PirateWires daily, which you absolutely should. Please subscribe right now if you don't. Tell your friends to subscribe if you do. Riley's here today to break down the news surrounding the one and only

meme stock kitty. Break it down. Sure thing, can do. So I'll try to keep the breakdown part as neutral as possible because I know we have a lot of diehards both in the pro kitty, Wall Street bets, apes together strong kind of camp, and also in sort of like the anti-kitty, like you know, he's a fraudster, have dare he ruffle

feathers sort of camp. So just to refresh everyone's memory about who this guy is, what sort of the whole GameStop short squeeze of 2021 was about. roaring kitty also known on reddit by the name deep value um is a massachusetts man by the name of keith gill i know right um but he um became most well known uh through posting youtube videos and on the subreddit wall street bets. Um, he is in real life, a chartered financial analyst, um,

for several finance companies, um, ended up working at mass mutual, um, where in 2019, um, when he's posting on wall street bets again, he begins to sort of lay out the case for buying GameStop shares,

which back then were like a dollar a share. He said, look, these are super undervalued. And critically, you have people like short selling the stock, which is essentially placing a bet that the stock will fail. So I'm not going to get super deep into what a short squeeze is because not a financial expert, but basically the people trying to short the stock end up having to buy shares at a higher price because of all these individuals posting on Wall Street bets, which only drives the price even higher. And that's where you sort of start to see. So the price of GME shares are like a dollar at the start of 2020. By the end of the year,

they're up to like $5. But they really hit their peak in january 2021 um and this is when the whole game stonk saga like really starts to take off and yeah this is just when tons of people start buying up game stock shares um as well as similar like meme stock shares like amc um but eventually it results in a peak of gme hitting 500 around 500 a share so um just exponential growth all prompted by this guy um roaring kitty and there's a lot of other factors at play here so this is like peak pandemic um stimulus checks had just gone out so people had a lot of like money to spare um but in total, he ends up making like $40 million off of this. The hedge fund that was shorting the stock, Melvin Capital,

they end up needing like rescue funding just to stay afloat. Eventually Robinhood restricts trading altogether, which is sort of what brings this whole craze, I guess, like to an end. But when all is said and done, it's not all smooth sailing for Gil. He eventually has to testify before Congress that this wasn't some like complex scheme, that this was just a guy who liked to stalk. So that's what he does before Congress. His employer even gets fined four million dollars um mass mutual

because they weren't uh supervising their employees enough but aside from congressional testimonies and i guess like hollywood biopics he essentially just lays low for three years naturally as one does after making 40 million dollars um on game so he's yeah so Yeah. So he's off the grid for like three years until the end of his hiatus, which recently was this past Sunday. Let's see. So GME spiked 170%. The company hit a $10 billion market cap. Trading for the stock had to be halted four times,

and GameStop became one of the 600 largest public companies in the country. And so what was that single post that resulted in this just seismic shift in the stock market that we typically only see right after Nancy Pelosi invests in something? It was a single meme of a gamer leaning forward in a chair. Since then, there have been some subsequent posts of movie clips, which I guess is his thing to sort of post. But the catalyst that really sparked all of it was a guy leaning forward in a that this one individual has just over our stock market that a meme can cause a stock to have its shares halted four times in a single day um but kitty still hasn't said like what prompted this return um if he's getting in on gamestop again if he's getting in on an entirely different meme stock um several others

of which are on the rise right now um i personally think we should all get in on shares of bed bath and beyond that's not financial advice just a gut feeling um but yeah so he uh he's back and there have been several takes in response to his return that just range the gamut on one hand you have people saying this has proved the entire economy is rigged and fake on the other, you have people saying this is proof the entire economy is rigged and fake. On the other, you have people like former SEC Chair Jay Clayton, who on CNBC was demanding that Kitty answer for this, questioning whether we should, quote, tolerate this in our markets. It's not insider trading. That's clear. And he's trading on his own information. That's why it's not insider trading. That's clear. And he's trading on his own information. That's why it's not insider trading. But is this something that we should be tolerating in our markets? You know, whether it's legal or illegal, I don't think so. this dude with a single meme of a gamer leaning forward in his chair can cause a stock to be

halted four times that's absolutely insane um and i think yeah it's just yeah insane i think that it's close it's more closely tethered to the sort of stuff that you were saying so you mentioned pelosi um and now you have jay clay sort of, should we allow this? Should we allow this person to what post a meme? And then a lot of people like him and they want to buy random stocks he didn't even talk about. Should we allow it? Allow what? I think that the whole, there's a, you can see the financial experts, not all of them, some of them have a sense of humor, wanting to frame this as, here's this guy manipulating a lot of dumb people. But what I see in the meme stock community is a lot of joy and happiness and excitement.

And the idea that this person, this one person can upend the market in this way, it's more like he's only powerful because people are giving him the power and they're doing it not because they're stupid, but because they want to feel empowered. I think that when you talk about the Pelosi's and the Clayton's of the world, you have a lot of people who have a sense in America that they're not in the driver's seat. And there are all these other random people who control everything and they're making lots of money and they never get to do anything but here you are this whole thing starts with a short squeeze destroying a company that was trying to destroy another by shorting them to

death and this feels kind of like populist rage to me it doesn't feel like stupidity it feels like anger and humor. And that's expressed on the internet the way that everything is expressed on the internet, which is in like clown language and cartoon physics. And so it all looks really stupid because everything on the internet looks stupid. But I think the feelings beneath it are more sort of classically of this moment. It's like the Trump thing and the Bernie Sanders thing and the meme stocks thing. It all feels like the same thing to me.

It feels like an American trend against the elites. And I, for one, I'm glad to see Kitty back. Also not financial advice, and I have no idea what he's up to, but I just think it's fun. I don't know. It just, it makes me feel something. Brandon, are you following

the game stocks of it all yeah i mean i followed it back in 2019 i'm surprised that was five years ago now that's crazy it feels like i can't believe it was before covet that is it was i remember it was 2020 oh it was oh it was 2020 2021 it was 2020 okay even for you really 2021 but yeah yeah because that was when everybody was like super stimulus checks right that's what i'm saying 2021. It was 2020. Okay. Even for you. Really 2021. But yeah. Yeah. Cause that was when everybody was like super. Stimulus checks. Right. That's what I'm saying.

Yes. No, you had to be dumb not to, not to make a bunch of money in the stock market at the time. Yeah. I think it was ripping. Yeah. And GameStop was particularly down because it's an,

it's a physical retail store. Everyone's buying video games online. Like the thesis for the company is still bad. Like it's, the outlook is not good, but you know people love piling in i i've always thought that he was just going to start a fund like uh warren buffett when he takes a position in bank of america he writes an op-ed and puts it in the wall street journal and ken griffin who's kind of keith gill roaring kitties like you know and mortal enemy at citadel uh uh kind of Keith Gill, Roaring Kitty's like, you know, mortal enemy at Citadel,

kind of had a similar start. Like he took, I think, $100,000 when he was in college, traded convertible debt through like these really scrappy means, got an edge on the market, grew that to 20, 40 million, and then raised a big fund. And now he manages billions and billions of dollars. I feel like there's so many people who would say, hey, I don't want to be finding out about this meme, you know, two days later on Twitter when the stock's already mooned. Kitty, take my money. You run it. This is what Cathie Wood does with her ETF. She's out there talking about all the stuff she's investing in.

This is very common in financial markets. It's just odd that it's decentralized and he's not getting a fee for the service that he's providing, which people think is good financial analysis. Do we know that? I mean, it seems like he, I looked at his Twitter account and his activity that day, Riley. And so he, he, he posts the gamer meme and then he posted videos that seem to indicate that he was like coming back or that he was back. I just looked at his YouTube account. He still hasn't posted anything for three years, which I guess he just probably stopped after all the hype died down. Is maybe this just like an announcement that he is going to start publishing videos on his YouTube channel? Like what, do we know what his intent is? As of this recording, we still sort of don't. And that's

sort of the speculation. So when he first made this initial post of the guy sitting up in the chair i guess gamestop had made like a brief little rebound so maybe that's what he's attributing that to like he's just paying attention to this brief little bump um but there's still a lot of speculation is he getting back into gamestop is he getting into some other you know meme thing um is this related to any of his financial things like altogether is he just posting again uh yeah still still don't really know but just his post alone has already caused like seismic shifts in the stock market it's crazy so i think the mike you you mentioned the populist aspect of it and i think i think it is populist now because we're in this populist moment, but also that this sort of meme stock frenzy is like a natural evolution of

retail because of the internet, essentially. I don't think it can happen any other way. And it'll always be that way. People will be piling in and feeling FOMO. And that's just like the nature of, um, you know, the stock market all the way back to like tool at mania or whatever. So I don't think it's that surprising. I think another concurrent thing that happened in 2020 and 2021 was web three and like mania around shit coins essentially. And that, that all, uh, fell apart. And at the, I don't know know sometime during 2021

but i think what you had is a lot of people cut their teeth in that world who were highly online and are now no longer trusting shit coins and are just going back into retail um and so you just like you have this like highly online community of people who um can make a big noise when there's a meme stock around. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I think it... First of all, we don't know what's going on right now. We don't know if this is going to be a long-term trend.

If we're entering another meme stock season, that's not really clear to me at all, let alone what Kitty's thinking. It's not clear that we're going to do another meme stock thing. It would be fun and funny and probably disastrous, but I mean, I don't think so. On the internet, though, that is definitely true. millions of people who are connected online, who are sharing the exact same information feed, and can move and act instantaneously together. And in the trading, so this manifests in lots of ways. This manifests from spreading viral information about a pandemic, for example, that leads to the shutdown of the world, to in the case of trading, now that you have Robinhood,

the market. And you are seeing these huge, I wrote about a lot of this stuff, not this because this didn't happen yet, the sort of trend of the internet towards mass instantaneous action in a piece called Jump. And this is a version of that, yes, for sure. It's definitely, I think the populism is why this one is happening, but yeah, it's only capable now. And that is the interesting thing about the moment that we're in with the internet, I believe, is as trite as it is. I mean, it was trite 10 years ago to say the internet's changing everything. Now people don't really say that at all. But we're seeing new sort of examples of the internet having fundamentally transformed human civilization much more now,

now that it's more mature, now that everybody's online, now that everybody's connected by their mobile phones, you are seeing really crazy shit. And I wonder, I guess the most interesting thing about this all to me is not even necessarily Kitty or the meme stocks, but what other mass action is now capable that never was before that we haven't seen yet and don't and don't and sort of don't see coming um that's that's what i always wonder that's what i wondered in the case of jump like what what is the is there a danger that we are not prepared for um i don't know sanana, have you followed the meme stocks? I have not.

Okay, done. I was very, very vaguely aware of even what happened this week, to be completely honest. So, yeah. Well, last thoughts, anyone? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. I think there's this odd filter on the on the Internet because the way the algorithms work that like like posting a big win on on the Internet will go much more viral than saying, oh, I lost all my money trading a meme stock. And so you get this reinforcing feedback loop of people only posting the positive things. people only posting the positive things.

And I think if you look at the full stock chart from the last meme cycle, it was not this massive wealth transfer from Wall Street to Main Street. It was definitely a situation where, yeah, it was bad for one hedge fund that got bailed out. But GameStop, it was great for them because they were able to sell a lot of shares during the mania. And if the stock keeps going up, I'm sure

they'll sell more shares, which will allow GameStop, the company, to raise more capital. And then they'll just have more money on their balance sheet to do whatever they want with. But I wouldn't bet on this being a permanent source of wealth transfer from hedge funds to retail traders. It will be a permanent source of entertainment. It will be a permanent source of entertainment it will be john coogan and riley from pirate wires thank you guys both for joining we will see more of you both in the future um it's been real adios it's been real