We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP377: The Antisocial Network w/ Ben Mezrich

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's episode, I sit down with bestselling author Ben Mesrick to discuss his new book, The Anti-Social Network, which covers the saga of GameStop, Robin Hood, Reddit, and retail traders. It's a tale of irony, humor, high stakes, billionaires, and Ben is the perfect guest that covers such an entertaining story. We also cover Ben's framework to approaching a new book, the power of mindset, the ramifications of meme stocks for Wall Street, and a whole lot more.

Starting point is 00:00:28 I'm a big fan of Ben and his books, and this conversation didn't disappoint. So without further ado, please enjoy The Tale of GameStop with Ben Mesrick. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to The Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and today we have on the show, Ben, Mesrick. Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me.

Starting point is 00:01:10 This is great. I am so excited to get into today's conversation around the whole GameStop saga. And it's something that we really haven't covered on the show because when I noticed that you were going to write this book about it and you kind of announced it a few months ago, I said, you know what, this is going to be the time to cover this story in depth. Before we dig into the book, I want to go over your framework a little bit. But you seem to always be at this cutting edge of topics for your books, always consistently at this intersection of tech and society. And it's always fairly prescient. You're always a little bit ahead of the game.

Starting point is 00:01:41 What is your framework for approaching a new book? Yeah. For me, it's almost over and over again. My career has gone from story to story almost by accident. It's very hard to know what the next big thing is going to be. It's almost impossible to try and predict what's going to be big. So for me, I'm often pitched stories or people send me stories or I see something in the the news and it just intrigues me enough to dive in and see where it leads. And so I've kind of gone

Starting point is 00:02:07 from story to story. The first one that was successful was the story of the MIT Blackjack team, which was a book called Bringing Down the House I wrote, which became movie 21. And so I was playing with a team of blackjack players going to Vegas every weekend, just living this crazy life and turned it into a book. And so I fell into a true story that happened to be really, really cool. and that guided the rest of my career. And from there came the social network to in the morning email from a guy who had co-founded Facebook, right? And he just wanted to tell his story. So suddenly I was into that story.

Starting point is 00:02:40 So for me, it's more about finding something that really intrigues me. And I'm really turned on by themes about people taking on the system. Young people who are smart, who kind of don't like authority, who find a way to win against the things that we all kind of struggle against, whether it's a casino or Wall Street, or Facebook, it's always someone against the establishment is what I'm always most intrigued by. So that's kind of the thing I'm always looking for. Money, exciting locale, something juicy is always important to keep the story going. But the themes for me are always kind of this sort of Robin Hood, I guess, in a way, that the way of sort of taking on trying to do something, not necessarily the right thing or

Starting point is 00:03:22 because it's good, but trying to beat a system in some way or another. Those are the themes I really look for. Quickly on that, we got a question on Twitter about this, but I'm curious as well, covering Facebook and then covering Bitcoin billionaires, you had the WinkleVi twins kind of overlapping on these two stories. What was it like working with them on that research, you know, having gone through portraying them in one book and then another? Yeah, so Winklewurst twins to me are really amazing, people and amazing characters.

Starting point is 00:03:51 And when I did the book, Backsonable Villainters became the Social Network, I never thought I would be writing about the Winklevoss twins again. Honestly, they were the bad guys in the story. They were the big guys dressed in skeleton costume chasing the karate kid around in the gym, the archetypal 80s bad guys from every movie I had seen growing up. And I thought that's who they were going to be. They were the guys who took on Zuckerberg. They believed they came up with Facebook and Mark stole it from them.

Starting point is 00:04:15 And they received a huge settlement. And I thought, that's it. You'll never hear or receive from them again. But the reality was something very different. And Bitcoin billionaires came about because I saw a headline in the New York Times, which said, Weikovost twins are Bitcoin billionaires. And suddenly they'd gone from the bad guys in one movie to being worth billions. And so I called them up. And amazingly, they were not angry at me. You know, they didn't like their portrayal in the movie so much. It was a one-note portrayal.

Starting point is 00:04:41 But at the same time, they're smart guys. They understood how Hollywood works. They understood how they were viewed their caricatures. It's hard not to view them that way because they're gigantic, really good-looking Olympic athletes. But the reality is something much more. And after I spent a year hanging out with them and learning about crypto and Bitcoin, really from the ground up. I didn't know anything about crypto when I started hanging out with them. I learned that they were much more than they had been in that movie. There was much more to them. And so I think they really liked the process and really ended up liking the book, Bitcoin billionaires.

Starting point is 00:05:13 And so, yeah, so overall, I don't think they were particularly angry at me or anything like that after the fact. So it all worked out. Well, while they may or may not have found at Facebook, it all worked out for them. in the end. So much like your other books, when I was reading this new book, it really felt like I was watching a movie. I mean, the visuals you display in the book, the writing itself, it just flows just like I'm watching a movie. And the first few chapters shine a light on some of the players in the story, many of them discovering Wall Street bets for the first time. So walk us through the players you chose to feature in this story. And let's kind of set the stage

Starting point is 00:05:49 for our listeners. So there's the story that everyone's kind of heard of. You know, the one that was in the news was this Keith Gill guy, this guy from Brockton, Mass, which is kind of a working-class neighborhood outside of Boston. He's the guy who fell in love with GameStop when it was a nothing stock that nobody really should be buying, you know, it was a few dollars a share of this kind of dying brick-and-mortar company. And so we all know about Keith Gill and called himself Roaring Kitty on YouTube and DFV. I don't know what we're allowed to say on your podcast on Reddit. And he just kept posting about GameStop. I love GameStop. These are the shares I bought. He bought $53,000 worth of shares when it was trading at a few dollars a share.

Starting point is 00:06:28 And then you have the other side. You have Wall Street. You have Gabe Plotkin and Melvin Capital, which is this hedge fund, very stayed, very smart, who was shorting GameStop because it made sense. You know, GameStop's going to go to zero. Why wouldn't you short that company? And then you have Citadel and you have Ken Griffin, which is kind of at the center of the American economy.

Starting point is 00:06:46 They're the market makers for Robin Hood. And that's the other main character, Vlad, who we've all seen again and again. on different interviews, which has placed the tools of Wall Street in the hands of every American. That's what they've done. So that's kind of the A story. What I wanted to do was find some of these people on Reddit who either made a fortune or didn't make a fortune who got caught up in GameStop. And so my main characters are a college kid who in the book I called Jeremy, who put a few thousand dollars into GameStop and ended up making a quarter million dollars as he rode the stock up with everyone else. Another character I have is a registered nurse named Kim Campbell,

Starting point is 00:07:22 who's a wonderful woman, single mother of two, who's struggled. You know, she hasn't had the easiest life. And she's this rabid Trump supporter really believes that, you know, she's been screwed over by everybody and that Trump was going to be a savior, and that didn't pan out. And she gets into GameStop because she wants to pay for her kids' braces. And then there's another character who's a young woman who 2020 was going to be her year, who's going to get married, she was pregnant. And of course, the pandemic hits.

Starting point is 00:07:49 And ruins everything. She doesn't get her dream wedding. She has to end up sweeping hair in a beauty salon as her job. Things didn't pan out. And she sees GameStop as this sort of way of fighting back or having something for herself. And so that's kind of thematically to me, the story here is much, much bigger than this ridiculous company that is suddenly worth as much as Apple or whatever. The real story is that all of our lives were thrown into mayhem over the last two years. And we are all stuck on our couches, either in quarantine or isolation or social or we lost our jobs or whatever. And what do we do? We suddenly have tools of Wall Street in our hand,

Starting point is 00:08:25 and we have a stimulus check or whatever, a few dollars, and we all dive into game stuff. And that's the story. And there's this anger underneath, this sort of Wall Street is just full of people who've made these massive fortunes. And even though the world has come to crap, they're making even more money. Wall Street people have been doing great during the pandemic. And the stock market actually was flying during the pandemic. And so there's this bubbling up anger that I think came through on Reddit and on Discord and on Twitter and we see it every day and via Trump as well. There's this internal anger towards the establishment that's screwing everybody. And I think that that's what powers this story along. So I've chosen these characters and I set them up and they're all real

Starting point is 00:09:04 people, by the way. This is all real. We just sort of exemplify the story I'm trying to tell. Well, that's what I love so much about the story is that it touched everybody. It's seemingly just everyone seemed to get involved from everyone from the nurse practitioner to even Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Chamath, they were all throwing in voiceover. And you do squeeze in a chapter on Elon in the middle of the book that I just loved because he comes across like this bond super villain. And it's actually hard to gauge what amount, if any, of that chapter is fictitious. Can't wait until Elon reads this and I'm really curious what he's going to think of it. Well, here's my view about Elon Musk. We all know who Elon Musk is, okay? You don't need to read a

Starting point is 00:09:45 biography to have in your head an image of Elon. We've all seen it. He's out there on Twitter every day. And so I want to take him and place him where we all already know him, but go a lot farther than that. And so a lot of that chapter is real, but a lot of it obviously goes a lot farther than the reality. But what is definitely real is his feeling that he hates the shortseller. He feels like short selling is just wrong. It's something that almost destroyed Tesla. He takes it personally, because in a lot of ways it is personal. When you're betting on a company to fail, you're betting on the people who run that company to lose and go bankrupt and maybe lose everything.

Starting point is 00:10:22 When you're betting against Tesla or shorting Tesla, you're hoping Elon Musk is a massive failure and disappears, right? And so I can see why someone like him would take it very personally. And when he saw what was going on with GameStop, he immediately identifies with the Reddit people, with the people who are fighting Wall Street because he's seeing the same sort of shorts aligned against GameStop that were aligned against Tesla. And so that chapter, I think, resonates for that reason. But yeah, I mean, he's larger than life characters.

Starting point is 00:10:46 I'm always interested in pushing farther because I feel like the boring story is the one we all could look at Wikipedia for, right? You know, we all know who Elon Musk is and what he's done. We all know what Tesla is. But what we don't really know about is what's going on under the streets of L.A. in the boring tunnels, right? And with his AI stuff and the simulation stuff and the Mars stuff, like that's the fun stuff. And so I want to take it a little bit farther because that's what I do anyway. You know, when you pick up one of my books, it's not the same as picking up Walter Iison's book or someone else. It's going to be a slightly different experience and hopefully people expect that going in. I'm glad you touched on short selling or short squeeze because this is crucial to understanding this story.

Starting point is 00:11:25 So I want to just quickly cover what short selling is and also what a short squeeze is because for those who don't know, it's imperative to understand. Yeah. So short selling is a way of betting that a company is going to go down. We all know what long is a company is going to go up. You buy the stock. The stock goes up in value. You can sell it. You make a profit. The way you bet against a company is you do something called short selling, which is you borrow a share. Let's say a stock is trading at $10 a share. You borrow a share and you sell it on the market for that $10. And you promise to return that stock to that person at some point in the future. So if the stock goes down, as you believe it is,

Starting point is 00:12:04 to $5, you then re-buy the share for $5, you give it back to the person you borrowed it from, and you pocket the difference, which would be $5. But the problem with short selling is that your losses are not capped at anything. They're actually unlimited, because if you buy it at $10 and the stock just starts going up, you still have to return that share. So if you have to buy it back at $20, you've lost $10. If you have to buy it back at $100, you've lost $90. And it can go on theoretically forever.

Starting point is 00:12:35 So if you buy a ton of shares, you know, if you sell a ton of shares shorts, that means you borrowed a ton of shares. And at some point, you have to return those shares. And what happens with a short squeeze is, let's say you short sell, meaning you borrow a bunch of shares, you sell them on the market. And let's say for whatever reason, because good news comes out about the company, or suddenly for whatever reason, everyone on Reddit wants to buy that company's stock, the stock starts to go up, you're in a tough position because you need to buy shares, which also pushes the

Starting point is 00:13:05 stock price. And so if there's a bunch of short sellers, suddenly they're squeezed as they try to reach the exit. They all dive in at the same time trying to rebuy those shares. The price keeps going up. They keep trying to rebuy and it just gets worse and worse and worse. So that's essentially a short squeeze. And it's happened a number of times in history. And it can be very, very dramatic because it happens very quickly. If something happens to make a stock start to skyrocket, all of the short sellers have to dive into the market at the same time to get out, or else they could lose everything. I mean, you don't just lose $100, you could lose a billion dollars if the stock goes up shares. And that's essentially what happened here. And what's really interesting about

Starting point is 00:13:42 this story with GameStop is the people on the other side were attempting to make a short squeeze happen. They weren't buying the stock, most of them, because they believed GameStop should be worth $1,000 a share. They were buying the stock because they saw that Wall Street had this huge short position. And they knew if they bought it, they could force a short squeeze. At one point in time, 140% of the shares of this company were short, which means that more shares were short than exist, which means that what happened with people borrowed it, sold it, and then borrowed it again and sold it multiple times. And so that's a very dangerous position for people on the short side. And a lot of the hedge funders I talked to who were not on the short side, couldn't believe that people were still

Starting point is 00:14:24 shorting a stock with that much of a short because, you know, it's crazy. I mean, you're going to get killed at some point. It's very easy for something bad to happen. That's what happened. And so there's a lot of reasons behind why hedge funds continue to short a stock. The basic reason was is that GameStop as a company looked like it was in a lot of trouble. This is a company that brick and mortar in malls selling video game consoles in a world that's gone digital, right? In a world that doesn't go to malls anymore, especially during a pandemic. So you would look on paper and say, okay, GameStop's in a lot of trouble. This company is probably going to go the way of Blockbuster or, you know,

Starting point is 00:15:00 you can name a dozen companies that have gone out of business and think, this is just the next one going out of business. But the thing that I think wasn't taking into account beyond the whole Reddit mob was that GameStop did have some outs. one of them being the video game market is actually boom and GameStop has a community of people that love video games. So just separate from the fact that it's this brick and mortar store, it also has this millions and millions of people who nostalgically love GameStop and buy and sell video games. And so their pivot to the digital world is actually not that hard for them to do if they could just figure it out. That's where the value proposition comes into this. But the reality

Starting point is 00:15:40 is what happened was it turned into a massive short squeeze. It turned into a, this massive, let's take down Wall Street. Let's stay strong and stay apes together strong is with the thing that would go off on Reddit. Let's look at this that way. Let's all stay together on this and the short sellers are going to get killed. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord. in every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is.

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Starting point is 00:20:05 Back to the show. And most of this activity, this cohort of folks who wanted to, quote unquote, they want to stick it to the man by running up the price was happening on Reddit on Wall Street Betts. So I'm assuming that you spend a good amount of time on Reddit and Wall Street Betts researching for this book. So I'm kind of curious what were some of the most surprising things you discovered on the site? Yeah. So first of all, on its surface, when you just look at it. And the reason I call the book, the anti-social network is it's just a dirty free-for-all. I mean, the language is horrific.

Starting point is 00:20:37 There are some people who are just trolls. I mean, Reddit as a whole is a world full of people who are just having fun and taking the piss out of everyone else and just sort of trollish. But as you look deeper into Wall Street bets specifically, what I found was number one, there's a lot of really smart people on there, like people who know much more about investing than I do. They might be amateur investors, but some of these people really understand this stuff and do some really good research. The other thing I noticed was that it was a very diverse group of people. It wasn't the view you have of white, trollish guys sitting on the internet. There's lots of all sorts of people on Reddit and on multiple people. By the end, it had swell to nine million people.

Starting point is 00:21:14 And you have to weed between the bots and the people who work for hedge funds and the people who are just out crazy and a lot of college kids and things like that. But as you dug deeper, you definitely saw a lot of interesting analysis. But what I also loved is the way people would put up pictures of their accounts, their wins and their losses. And people are almost more excited to put up losses than wins. I mean, there are people putting up things where they lost $100,000 in two days. And everyone makes fun of them.

Starting point is 00:21:41 But at the same time, it's this camaraderie. It's this like, you know, that I think was very unique to Wall Street bets, is people putting up their losses more than their win. And I think when DFV, when Keith Gill started out, he was being ridiculed because he had put so much money into GameStop and he lost, he was losing, it was falling apart, and people were making fun of him. And then when he starts to make money and suddenly he puts up this screenshot, which shows $47 million in profits, it's this kind of incredible moment where it's almost like, let's rally

Starting point is 00:22:11 together. This is actually possible. And so, yeah, I don't know. I had a lot of fun on it. I spent a lot of time on it. I'm on Twitter a lot already. And I'd always kind of looked at Reddit and stuff like that. But this was the first time I really saw the power of a community is pretty impressive.

Starting point is 00:22:24 So when people get together, it's incredible what power they have. I think that's something Wall Street is still trying to. to deal with to try to figure out how you work around the idea that these loosely affiliated groups can be more powerful than a Wall Street bank. You've got nine million people who each have a $2,000 stimulus check or whatever. That's as big as any Wall Street bank right there. And so it's intriguing. It's an intriguing thought.

Starting point is 00:22:48 I think there's something there that we could all learn from actually. There's a book I love called Mindset, and it sort of touches on this like flipping an issue on its head, celebrating your losses. And, you know, I found this in my own business with trying to raise venture capital. You can get 100 noes before you get a yes. And it can really wear you down. Or if you're an actor and you go out for an audition, you get told no all the time. And it's this idea of like celebrating those nose, like flipping this on his head.

Starting point is 00:23:16 And because really at the end of the day, persistence is all that matters, right? And so this idea of celebrating losses is intriguing to me. Oh, I agree entirely. Like, you know, as a writer, obviously, your life is until you make it, it's so much rejection. When I was a struggling writer, I got about 190 rejection slips before I sold my first book. And I would tape them to the walls. So I had just walls covered in rejection slips because it was like it powers you forward. It's like you live in that misery.

Starting point is 00:23:42 And it's kind of romantic. It's an interesting point. I'm sure actors, it's even worse because it's to your face. You know, you go in and she's living in front of someone and they reject you. That's a hard thing to get used to. But I do think the more you revel in it, the stronger you. I think that was going on for sure on this board. is, you know, people who were willing to take risk because even if they lost, they still had something to post.

Starting point is 00:24:02 You could post your massive loss and get some level of feeling of camaraderie out of that. And so people were willing to take risks that on paper made no sense at all. I mean, the whole YOLO investing comes out of this, the whole idea that, and I explained it in the book for like a college kid who's got a couple thousand dollars. The idea of making 5% of that is pointless. Why take a safe investment that you might make a little bit on rather than just bet it all? on something that you could get a 10x on. Any college kid agrees with that. Always go for the 10x. Never go for the safe bet because it doesn't change your life. But a YOLO bet does change your life. And it makes sense to me that's somebody who's been involved in gambling my whole life and going to Vegas.

Starting point is 00:24:43 And like the idea of just doubling your money is not that exciting. When I used to go to Vegas all the time, you would see people sit down at a blackjack table with $1,000. And when they hit $2,000, you'd say, oh, you should leave. You just doubled your money. But that's not exciting, right? Nobody leaves doubling their money. Nobody. And Vegas knows this and they count on it and that's how they make all their money. No one will leave doubling their money. People need to make 10 times their money before they stand up on a table because doubling your money just doesn't feel like a win. And I think Wall Street doesn't necessarily understand that's what's going on here. They think people made 10, 20 percent. Now we can short it because they can go back down. But that's not how the people on Reddit think. 20 percent is meaningless to them. They want to make 2,000 percent before they would walk away. And I think that's something that someone has to figure out. now is how do you analyze when people are crazy. When people are not thinking straight, they're thinking, I want 10x. I certainly agree with the idea of having a concentrated portfolio of sorts to grow wealth. And then once you have wealth, then you can diversify and, you know, see, now you're being rational. When you've got nothing, you have nothing to lose, right? So if all

Starting point is 00:25:46 you've got is $1,000, you're not trying to make $100 on that $1,000. Because this meaningless doesn't change your life in any way. And so even though the rational thing, of course, if you only have $1,000 is to be careful, the reality is you go buy a thousand scratch ticket because the one scratch ticket can change your life, but $100 isn't going to do anything. And so I think that's something that people don't understand. And when you look at people who just have a little, they're the biggest risk teams. The people who have a lot are usually not the big risk takers because 10% is fine for them. They've already got a lot of it.

Starting point is 00:26:18 But if you've got no money, you'll risk everything. And that's what we saw happening. The story also had a lot of irony in it. So we need to talk about Robin Hood. A lot of these players, as you mentioned, we're discovering Robin Hood even for the first time. Part of the appeal of Robin Hood is that is commission free trading. And I love this quote in your book where when the product is free, you are the product. So walk us through how Robin Hood manages to make money off of commission free trading in the first place.

Starting point is 00:26:45 Yeah. And it gets a little complicated. But the reality is, so Robin Hood has this incredible app, which I love, with anybody who picks it up loves. Because it's like a video game. And it hands everyone the ability to trade like they're a Wall Street banker. There's no fees. You can put whatever a little amount you want in there. And you can instantly and almost immediately start buying stocks and options and all sorts of things at the push of the button.

Starting point is 00:27:06 And when you buy something, you know, confetti goes off. It's like it's fun. It turns it into a video game. And the way they're able to offer it free to everybody essentially is the way they actually make their money is they take all of these aggregate buys and sells. and they sell them essentially to the market makers, the people who actually put these trades through. And so the majority of their trades, or at least a good percentage of it, goes through Citadel, which is the giant sort of market maker, which is at the center of retail stock trading in the United States, pretty much the world.

Starting point is 00:27:41 And so that's what happens. When you buy and sell stocks, those trades go through this other company, and Robin Hood takes a little piece off that. So they don't have to charge you anything. So the reality is even though you're not paying anything, you're actually the product. They're making money off of you. And so it comes to a head in this story because what ended up happening was people were buying GameStop on Robinner. Because every retail guy sitting in their house, that's the platform they all use. It's the easy smartphone platform.

Starting point is 00:28:10 And there's something called clearing. And this is where it gets a little complicated. But when you buy a stock, there's this process that takes place between the moment you buy it and it actually becomes your stock. which is something called clearing. And it takes two days, actually. It's not instant, even though you buy the socket and it seems to appear immediately into your hand. And the reality is there's this two-day clearing period.

Starting point is 00:28:32 During which point, Robin Hood has to put up a certain amount of money as collateral against all of the trades that go through it. That number, it turns out, can get very, very large. And it's separate from the amount of money they take in. So if I buy a stock for $5, they have to find a different $5. or more to be as collateral to that $5 trade. And it turns out the more volatile the stock is, the larger that collateral number becomes. What happened was on around January 26 to 28, people were going crazy buying game stop.

Starting point is 00:29:06 The short sellers are going crazy trying to cover. And it became the most volatile, the most traded stock on Wall Street. And suddenly, Robin Hood got a collateral call for $3.7 billion, which they did not have. They needed to show $3.7 billion or else they could just get shut down right. And so that's why they had to freeze trading on GameStop. They stopped everyone from being able to buy GameStop on their app. You could still sell it, but you couldn't buy it. And that moment destroyed the rally, basically.

Starting point is 00:29:38 It sent GameStop dropping, as you would expect. Everyone got very, very upset. And then it started to look fishy because we all discover that all of their trades go through Citadel and Citadel happened to then invest in the Wall Street fund, Melvin, that was shorting on the other side. Right. I mean, they lost, not just on GameStop, but a number of stocks that were all short that Reddit attacked, basically. They lost, went from a $12.5 billion fund to like a six. It's still unclear what the exact numbers are, but they lost somewhere in the order of $5 billion, almost overnight, a matter of date.

Starting point is 00:30:11 So it all got murky and scary and dark, but Robin is at the center of all this, because on the one hand, they're built. around the idea that they're democratizing finance. They're giving everyone the ability to be a Wall Street trader. They're leveling the playing field. You're all part of this giant market. But on the other hand, when things got hairy, they immediately shut out the retail buyer. So suddenly, are they Robin Hood or are they in the other side? Who do they actually work for? Now, from their point of view, they had no choice. They couldn't operate unless they came up with this scheme to lower the collateral they had to put down. But from the outside, it just looked like they just said,

Starting point is 00:30:51 screw you to their entire user base. And so it's a tough kind of moment. Afterwards, by the way, Robin Hood has done fine. All of that anger towards Robin Hood seems to have gone away to some extent because the tool is great. It's kind of like Facebook in that way, is that every time Facebook does something that pisses everyone off, Facebook actually grows.

Starting point is 00:31:07 Everyone gets pissed off and says, I'm never going to use Facebook again. And then the next day, everyone's on Facebook. And the same thing kind of happening, Robin Hood. Because the tool is very good. The app is very good. If you're going to buy and sell stocks, Robin Hood is great. It's right in your pocket.

Starting point is 00:31:19 You have the ability to buy and sell stocks. But yes, so that is at the center of it all. And I have a lot of fun with Robin Hood in the book. I think Blod is an incredible character. If you've ever watched him on any kind of video or had him on it, if you had him on, but he's, you know, Prince Valiant haircut and he's very almost got the puppy dog eyes. And he's trying to do the right thing. I think he's got the archetypal Silicon Valley Unicorn, who are a guy who really believes

Starting point is 00:31:43 in this democracy of finance and the idea. that what they're doing is a good thing. I think he really and truly believes that. And in reality, he does hand everyone the ability to do it, but it also is game of fun. Although Wall Street already is a big game. It's a big casino anyways. He's just made it very obvious that what we're doing is playing a video game. Yeah, I remember this story, in my opinion, it culminated almost on Clubhouse because

Starting point is 00:32:06 there was a period there or there was a night where in the heat of this discussion, Vlad and Elon Musk and Mark and Dris, all these people were on Clubhouse, hashing this out. And there was actually an interesting point there where Elon took to interviewing Flab and turns out Elon's a great interviewer, which makes sense at his level. But that was surprising a little bit. It was funny because even at the time, it was hard to believe him. It was hard to believe that, oh, we just had this bill we had to pay. Even though at the end of the day, it seems like it was such a logical reason, I feel like there's still a bit of skepticism around it. You know, here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:32:39 They had options. The other option, they could have frozen the buy and the cell, right? they could have not forced only to be able to sell it. Now, their point of view is people would have been more upset if they were stuck in a stock and it started to drop and were not unable to sell it. So that's an issue. Number two, they could have had more money in hand. Could you predict such an enormous collateral call? Probably not, right? But on the other hand, the volumes and the craziness started the week before, the volumes and the day to day, so the way they argue it, and I think this is an interesting argument, the week before their collateral call was in the $125 million. And on that day, it suddenly jumped to $3.7 billion. So you look at a week of $125 million, $150 million, $125 billion, $3.7 billion, and you think, oh, how could they cover it? But at the same time, if you were looking back at that week and you saw what was going on with GameStop, and they were clearly seeing what was going on at GameStop, you might say

Starting point is 00:33:34 to yourself, uh-oh, there might be some massive collateral call coming at some point in the next week. The other thing, and this is a point I'm making the book that I don't think anyone else has made yet, is that although Citadel says they had nothing to do, they didn't tell Robin Hood that they had to stop people from buying, they said that we did nothing like that. And that's what they say, and that's probably true. They should have been able to figure out what the collateral call would be, because all of the trades were going through them. So when you think about a company like that that's built on analyzing information and forward-looking on information, wouldn't they know that Robin Hood was about to get a massive call like that? And

Starting point is 00:34:13 wouldn't be able to cover it because they know everything about Robert and because they're running, all the money is running through them. Wouldn't they be able to know this ahead of time? And what would they be able to do with that information? And so that's kind of one of the points I make in the book, which maybe I'm sure they will disagree with. And from their point of view, they would say absolutely not. We didn't know anything.

Starting point is 00:34:31 How could they not know? Maybe you couldn't predict Elon Musk tweeting GameSong, right? But you definitely could predict that something incredibly volatile is going on here. So you could wonder why aren't they better, why wasn't Robert had better capitalized for this moment? Or why weren't they able to immediately draw a large amount of capital to cover trades that were coming through with no problem? There was no fear that the trades weren't happening. The collateral money would go back to them. So why couldn't they raise an amount of money on a guaranteed return? Those are questions that I would ask. I understand at that moment, five in the

Starting point is 00:35:03 morning you get a call that says, you have to come up with $3.7 billion and you say, well, what if I stop people from buying the stock and then you don't have to come up with it? I get that that's a solution. But the question becomes, why couldn't you make a different call to someone who has $10 million and say, I just need this for the day? And that person could have been someone like Ken Griffin. Yes, that's why it looks a little fishy. It's like, was it really the only thing you could do? It's a hard question. And so I don't know. But on the other hand, I like Robin Hood. I'm not one of the people who thinks that we should not use Robin Hood. I use Robin Hood. I think it's a great app. It really is. I love simple, well-designed beautiful apps.

Starting point is 00:35:40 and I don't see them as evil in any way. I think that's a very useful, positive thing. So yes, but it was a very interesting day. I agree. Elon was great interviewing and really took it to him, which I think was the best part about being someone like Elon is you don't have to give a crap about what anyone thinks. And he clearly doesn't. And so I think that was awesome.

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Starting point is 00:39:18 All right. Back to the show. Well, it was very tempting to kind of certainly point fingers and try and figure out who the bad guy is really in this story. And it seems like it's still a little hazy because everyone, seems to have a very good out, a very good reason behind it. But if anyone were the villain in this story from your book, in my opinion, it seems to be Ken Griffin of Citadel. And his chapter especially is just hilarious. I mean, he is sitting on a game out of skulls and bones of his

Starting point is 00:39:44 people he's killed. But yes, so let me just put this out where I don't know Ken personally. We went to the same college at the same time, but I don't think I ever crossed baths with him. He's a genius. He's built an incredible company, but his reputation is very intense. And people you talk to who work with him or work know him or have been fired by him, all sort of things. They have a lot of really dark things to say about him. So I think there is definitely a feel that he is kind of, if this were Lord of the Rings, he would be sitting under the giant eye with his orc army ready to destroy middle earth.

Starting point is 00:40:17 So I do think there's a feel in that respect. And we'll see what Hollywood does with the movie here. But yeah, when I write books like this, I really try and dramatize it and make it a lot of fun. I don't really pick, okay, this guy's the villain. You see what he is in this story and what he's done in this story. And I think you can make your own, come to your own conclusion of who the bad guy really is in this story. But everyone, I think, has its own likability factor to it.

Starting point is 00:40:40 I go back to the Facebook story. I mean, Zuckerberg, you know, is he the villain in the story? I mean, sure. But at the same time, you don't necessarily hate Mark Zuckerberg during the social. You might hate him now. But during the social network, he was kind of the bad guy, but he was also kind of likable bad guy. And I think there's some level of that in all of these characters.

Starting point is 00:40:59 Well, and also you go out of your way to highlight the fact that he almost lost everything during the global financial crisis. Even these guys who are somewhat villains, you empathize with them because you're like, these are people who have persevered through a lot of hardship. Even though this guy is a multi-billionaire and really well off, you don't get there just by happenstance. And I have a ton of respect for people. I'm different than a lot of people, writers or whatever, in that I love Billy. I love people who have succeeded because I know a lot of my. my friends went to Wall Street. I could have ended up on Wall Street. It's hard, man. The work that people put in to build these careers and a lot of luck has to happen along the way, but they're

Starting point is 00:41:35 geniuses and they all almost lost it all. I mean, almost anybody you see at an incredible high level of power almost lost it all at some point. And that's usually what drives him to the next thing. And Ken is an example of that where he nearly lost everything in 2008, 2009, and even had CNBC parked outside his office ready to interview him when he went bankrupt. And so the These guys are under at certain points in their careers, I think is something you really should take into account and how they got to where they are, I think is fascinating. And listen, Gabe Plotkin is another character who I really deeply like. I actually think Gabe is a really smart, good person. And on Reddit, he's the bad guy. On Reddit, he's attacked mercilessly. I mean, the people went after him in horrible ways, you know, anti-Semitism and all this kind of stuff. But the reality is, this is the guy who wins a lot, and he's won a lot over his career. And so you dislike that.

Starting point is 00:42:25 him because he wins so much, but he wins so much because he's smart and he works really hard, and he applied himself in an area where if you win, you win huge, right? And so I respect that. And I like Gabe. And I think he was caught completely by surprise by what happened with GameStop. He could never have guessed that the most simple short in the world, shorting a company like GameStop, would turn into something that nearly destroys his career. Yeah, and I think the animosity compounded there because you had people, like Gabe shorting the stock very innocently. Yeah, the fundamentals don't look good. It's an obvious trade. But then when Wall Street bets started driving the price up, now you say, well, this is

Starting point is 00:43:05 even better short. And there's a little bit of hubris that it gets involved where these short sellers come in even bigger and better and doubling down on the short. I talked to hedge funders who weren't short and they were like, we could not understand what Gabe was doing here. Because the stock was obviously not tied to the fundamentals anymore. It was skyrocketing and he doubled down on his short position. And the only reason to do that is because you need to win here. It's no longer based on logic anymore. This company's price, maybe it'll turn around at some point and go back to where it should be, but obviously some other forces are working here, and he probably should have gotten out earlier than he did. I mean, he did get out before Elon Musk's tweet, according to him

Starting point is 00:43:42 on CBC, and said he was out on the 26. He was already all out. But couldn't you have seen this happening a week before, two weeks before when the stock price was at 90 rather than 500? Obviously, this company should not be at $90 a share. Although things have changed since then. Let me say this for the people who love GameStop. Ryan Cohen being involved now, the pivot that GameStop is trying to make, I get why it's in the 160s now. I'm talking about last January, should it have been 160? Probably not. But, you know, anyways, yes, you do wonder, why do you keep doubling down on a short like that? And I try to get into it in the book. And this is a guy whose sports have been a big part of his life. You know, he worked with Michael Jordan. You know, he's a team owner. And I think

Starting point is 00:44:23 you look at someone like Michael Jordan and you think these are guys who need to win. These are guys who are being taken on by a bunch of dudes on their couches. They're not going to back down. And I think that plays into it. Well, to use a poker term, right, it's like he went on tilt a little bit, right? He kind of, and maybe the lesson here for everybody to take away is that you don't always have to win the same way you lost. He was doubling down on that trade. Maybe you could have made that money back somewhere else.

Starting point is 00:44:49 Yeah. I mean, I definitely think the lesson is, if you don't really understand what's happening, you get out because there are market forces going on that you just can't, after the fact, you might be able to go back and analyze what was going on there. But in the heat of that moment, there were a lot of warning signs that this is not normal and something really crazy is going on. And Robin Hood should have seen the warning signs and Gabe should have seen the warning signs.

Starting point is 00:45:10 A lot of people could have seen what was going on. So part of the story is reminiscent to the global financial crisis to some degree because there were bad actors involved and no one seemed to go to prison at the end of the day. Do you feel like there should have been more ramifications or anywhere around? Or you feel like it was almost circumstantial? Great question. So there's a lot of civil suits going on that I know about. I don't know how everything is going to pan out.

Starting point is 00:45:33 I know there are multiple investigations still and there are suits going on. I know Keith Gill has completely clamped up. It's impossible to talk to him. So I'm guessing there's some sort of actions going on because he made a fortune and you could wonder, well, he did have a series six license. he was on the internet promoting a stock. How does this all pan out? And then Melvin Capital is, I don't want to get anywhere near what's going on

Starting point is 00:45:56 legally because I have no idea what's going on over there. So there might be more ramifications down the line. The question becomes, could Congress, could the SEC, could they do something to protect both sides here? Is there something that should be done about short selling in certain situations? Is there something that should be done about people conglomerating together to buy a stock? That I don't think so. I don't see anything wrong with a million people on Reddit going after a stock because they like the stock.

Starting point is 00:46:25 I think that's fine. That's no different than a Wall Street guy walking into a club somewhere and telling his friends how much he likes a stock. It's not really trading on inside information. It's just rallying behind something. It's a community. So I don't see a problem with that. So yeah, I think Robin Hood obviously has to be well regulated and there has to be a lot of caretaken in terms of. I see a lot more advertising towards younger and younger people in finance.

Starting point is 00:46:46 There's like accounts now for your high school kid. I don't know if this is a good angle here. I think this is a, you know, as someone who comes from the world of gambling a little bit, there definitely is a point where people are not as rational as they should be. And I fear the gamification of Wall Street to younger and younger people. Because the way people sports fed in college, now they day trade in college, right? And that's not a bad. Look, I love it.

Starting point is 00:47:10 If I were in college right now, I'd be doing it too. But I can see how quickly you can get in a lot of trouble. To that point, you highlight in the book that a lot of these players on Wall Street, they don't have to do much to win. They're almost like the house in the casino. So while these retail traders are out there very actively trading, it seems like a lot of these Wall Street firms don't have to do much. They can sit back on and know that in a matter of time they will ultimately come out

Starting point is 00:47:34 on top. Right. I mean, and that's the scary thing is that, you know, if you're a college kid with $4,000 in the bank and you go on Robin Hood and bet that $4,000, you can lose everything. And you could be left with nothing. But if you're a Wall Street banker who has a position on GameStop, the reality is it's not a big deal. And you could lose at that or you could just hold it longer. There's a lot of things you could do to get out of that situation that's not going to ruin your life.

Starting point is 00:47:59 And so I do think that the risk factors are so much higher for the retail people, the regular Main Street people, there has to be some protection over them. The idea that Robin Hood can just democratize and say, you now have the power of a Wall Street bank, but you also have the risk. 10 times what a Wall Street banker had. And so there has to be some level of control over that and whether it's limits or things like that. I mean, people don't like the idea of things like that, but there does have to be some level of protection for the average person because they can get screwed very easily. Like you look at GameStop, which runs all the way up to 500 and then drops all the way back down. And a lot of people, if you're a Wall Street banker, you could hold through all that. But if you're a regular person and you just lost everything you were going

Starting point is 00:48:38 to pay your rent with, what are you going to do? You can't just hold that loss, right? And so it's a Different level of risk, I think. So this started populating in other stocks as well. AMC seemed to be one and a few other meme stocks, as they're called. But it's kind of seemed to die down a little bit. Maybe it's just the stimulus checks have kind of run out or... There will be meme stops, and I do think there are fundamental changes that have happened here. And I think you're going to see it in crypto, you're going to see it in those you see

Starting point is 00:49:03 it, the idea that the value of something is no longer linked to fundamentals and doesn't need to be in any way. Every stock or whatever in a lot of ways is like a social network. If people love it, it's going to go up and nothing else really matters. It doesn't have to make anything. I think that's what Doge is showing us is that it doesn't do anything and there's an unlimited supply and it will still go up if people like it. And so GameStop, any stock could be that.

Starting point is 00:49:28 So that has to be taken to account. But I do agree that this book, and I couch it in that, is that this was a moment in time in some respects. How do we not all be sitting on our couches had life not been normal and you couldn't just leave and go do something. I mean, that's why I chose like a college kid and someone who works in health care and someone who works, you know, someone who's just starting out in life because those are the people I feel like exemplify all of us over this two-year period now, is that if you were going to college during the pandemic, it was not a normal college

Starting point is 00:49:58 experience. And that was a moment where day trading and using Robert had really took off because everyone's sitting at home dreaming about a better life than they're living right now. I think we all kind of identify with that. And so, yeah, yeah, it is a story of the moment. moment in some respects. But yeah, and at the same time, the whole meme thing, it's died down to some respect, but I also think it's carrying forward in a lot of different ways. I don't think people analyze stocks the same way anymore. And I don't think you should. I don't think you can look at a stock and say, well, the fundamentals are great and this and that. That means it's going to go up. I don't think those are connected anymore. Another big component of it is do people

Starting point is 00:50:31 on Reddit like it? Do people on internet like it? Do regular people, are they in love with this? Is there a nostalgia factor? Is there a reason why this could go up? That has a nothing to do with fundamentals. And I think that that's where it gets really intriguing. Yeah, I'm curious about if there are any other ramifications from all of this. One might be that, you know, in my opinion, hedge funds might be a little bit hesitant to go 140% short interest on anything anymore. And maybe they're hiring full-time Reddit analysts nowadays. Yeah, both of those things are happening for sure. And there are a bunch of shorts those who are getting out of the short business, simply because it's just too dangerous. There will always be

Starting point is 00:51:07 shorts, and it does have a place. If a company is being poorly run or is scamming people, or there are reasons why a company should have short pressure against it, and people should bet against it. But I do think people are more cognizant of what they're shorting and also being public about it. I think this will make people more secretive. One of the problems that Plotkin and Melvin had is they bought public options. They had to actually release information in the SEC. So that caught the attention of people on Reddit. You could have shorted a stock without people knowing if you hadn't bought these particular options. So that's where it gets interesting.

Starting point is 00:51:41 You want to keep, if you're shorting something, you don't want to be too public about it necessarily because you don't want to catch, get that bull's eye on you. And yes, people are absolutely all the funds they're hiring people to scour Reddit and Twitter and make sure they're not missing something on social media going. I'm curious about Keith Gill because, you know, he's such an interesting character and a great underdog for this story. In that testimony, he says, I like the stock. And you kind of highlighted here that at 160 bucks a share, you get it.

Starting point is 00:52:07 I mean, they did turn cash flow positive after a brutal 2020. They've got Ryan Cohen. So I got to ask you, Ben, do you like the stock? You know what? First of all, I love GameStop, the company. I say it in my beginning, acknowledgement somewhere that I have little kids, and they are like nothing better than to go to GameStop. I walked by there.

Starting point is 00:52:29 There was one in Boston. There's one on Boylston Street. I was in there every weekend. And what I love about GameStop is on one shelf, you'll have like, you know, stuffed little toys and then there's like a chainsaw dripping blood. It's like the oddest galomeration of stuff. It's just a fun store. So nostalgia-wise, I love video games. I love GameStop. And the idea that they have a community is worth way more than anything else. Their main problem, I think, has been leadership. But if they can get a hold of that and Ryan Cohen

Starting point is 00:52:59 is very smart, I do like this stuff. But what does the price really work? What is the value of it? I'm not a guy who could tell you that number. When it was running to 500, towards a thousand, obviously that was crazy. And without a short situation going on, that made no sense at all. But should it go bankrupt? No, I don't think this is a company that should go bankrupt. But then again, listen, I love Blockbuster too. It's spent a lot of time in Blockbuster. So I don't know. To me, because I'm old, I'm not 22. There's something about GameStop that, to me, would be sad if that company ever went on there. Do you see any chance for a sequel to this book, given the activity on the stock market nowadays? I mean, yeah, there's a lot of

Starting point is 00:53:37 possibilities of the sequel. You know, we're making the movie. So MGM bought the rights and the MGM, the people who did the social network, and Mike DeLuca's, you know, running it, and Aaron Ryder who produced a rival and Memento is a genius and the screenplay is in. So I believe we'll get a movie underway pretty soon. There's so many ways you could go with this story. I do think it's a possibility. And I guess we'll see how well the book does. I'm always happy to write sequels. It's just a question of whether the audience is there for them. But yeah, I'm fascinated. You know, I wrote Bitcoin Billionaires. So the whole crypto thing is always interesting to me. NFTs, I think, is a really cool field. And, you know, I don't know what the story is

Starting point is 00:54:11 there yet, but I'm dabbling in it. I'm looking into sort of how I can get involved in NFTs because I'm a big fan of that. I think the idea of sort of digital collectibles of a whole economy around that, it's brilliant. And that's the world we're moving into. You know, I look at my kids and they're more interested in buying clothes, you know, for their character on Fortnite than they would be buying real clothes, right? It's more real to them than real things are. And that's the direction we're all moving. And so I do think that there's a lot going to happen in the next five to 10 years. Well, we can agree on this. The future will not be boring. And I'm really looking forward to the pandemic being over so that, you know, I can actually get out and start signing books for people

Starting point is 00:54:54 and doing this all face to face. I think I do have one of the few careers where being locked up for a year is good for your career. But in general, I think it's just, it's good to hopefully see a light end of this tunnel. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. Well, Ben, congratulations on the new book. It's incredible. Congratulations. I can't wait to see the movie that comes out. This is just another winner. And for those who are listening, it's called the Anti-Social Network. This was a lot of fun. Thanks so much. I appreciate it from you too. And this was awesome. So I look forward to seeing it.

Starting point is 00:55:22 All right, folks, that's all we had for you this week. If you're loving the show, don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app so you get the episodes automatically every week. Feel free to say hello on Twitter at Trey Lockerby. And if you're curious about if GameStop is a buy right now, you might want to check out TIP Finance and see what the tool has to say. So go ahead and Google TIP Finance and it should pop right up. And with that, we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to millennial investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP377: The Antisocial Network w/ Ben Mezrich

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