For today's episode, we're taking it all the way to Las Vegas, where I had the great pleasure of being invited to speak at The Bitcoin Conference this year (over 30,000 attendance 🤯) with my good friends Ian Carroll and Roberto Rios (formerly known as Peruvian Bull)!
We take a walk down memory lane to January 2021, where we all got our start doing this crazy internet content thing, as the Gamestop stock fiasco took the world by storm.
We discuss:
- WTF ACTUALLY happened in January 2021?
- Has the GME squeeze squoze?
- How will Bitcoin flip the tables of power for GameStop, and other corporations seeking to protect themselves from the corruption of the fiat stock market?
All of that and more is covered in today's live-recorded episode!
Huge thanks to the conference team for having us. As this was my first time presenting in front of a large audience it was very new for me, and I already have critique for myself I know I'll be changing next time…but thankfully I didn't have to moderate much as these two gentlemen know how to take the reins and run with it! 🤣
ENJOY.
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FOLLOW ROBERTO RIOS 🔗
→ Nostr: https://primal.net/peruvianbull
→ Twitter/X: https://x.com/peruvian_bull
→ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@peruvian_bull
→ Book, “The Dollar Endgame”: https://amzn.to/4dWnksY
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BEN’S LINKS 🔗
→ Twitter/X: https://x.com/benwehrman
→ Instagram: https://instagram.com/where_man
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→ Website: https://www.benwehrman.com/
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
There's something to be said for these storylines that manage to break through the public zeitgeist and into the consciousness of regular people.
(00:06):
And so it's really interesting when those stories can align and when those stories can kind of force multiply to help everyone get a little bit more woken up to like, wait a minute, like problem, solution, right?
Because ultimately, whether or not everyone is ever going to become a Bitcoiner, everyone is going to own their own Bitcoin, everyone should understand it.
(00:26):
Everyone in America should know the fundamentals of it.
They should know what it is and they should know why it exists and what it solves for, right?
Imagine how much more effective of a country we would have if everyone understood what money is,
how money actually works and what the flaws are, right?
Because suddenly you start looking for solutions.
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today.
(00:50):
So much talk about, so much happened even in the last 24 hours, but let's start with some introductions.
My name is Ben, Ben Worman. I host the Ben Worman podcast.
My name is Ian and I start trouble on the internet.
My name is Peruvian Bull and I'm a macro analyst and content creator.
(01:13):
All right, so as many of you may have heard, there was some news just in the last 24 hours
about GameStop buying some Bitcoin, which is super exciting.
We'll get to that, but I think it would be best if we started with laying some groundwork.
So, gentlemen, WTF happened in January 2021.
(01:33):
A lot of people know sort of the surface level story of what happened in 2021 with GameStop.
And that is by design.
Because the financial markets, as we all know, are full of very wealthy people that are highly incentivized to keep it that way.
And so when an event happens that threatens the status quo, they have a lot of resources and a lot of reason to make sure that whatever story gets out is not exactly going to threaten the way it's all working.
(02:07):
And so, yes, there was a big squeeze.
And yes, there was a lot of money and a lot of memes and a lot of folks online doing funny things with their winnings and losings and all that.
but ultimately it got turned into this narrative around oh there was a short squeeze that came and
went and it was all over and like oh the gamers won and cool the hedge funds lost good job but
(02:30):
realistically that was not actually what happened and that was not the end of a story that was the
start of a long wild journey that a lot of weird people on the internet went on and on to that was
digging into financial corruption. And certainly 2021 was cool and it was interesting. But ever
since then, there's just been this online community of people digging into all of the weird ways that
(02:54):
the traditional financial markets are basically a giant fraudulent scheme. And we kind of all wound
up finding each other through this interest in fraud and in F the system and slowly coming
together and learning more and exposing more. And Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop, while we were
doing that was doing his own thing behind the scenes. And I think we're starting to see the
(03:16):
fruits of that labor now. Would you agree, Peruvian? Oh, I would totally agree. And one thing I would
point out is in March 2020, we entered one of the biggest crises of modern history, especially
monetarily. We saw NASDAQs buy collapsing, bond yield spiking, the Fed starts infinity QE. And if
you're a hedge fund analyst at that time, you look at GameStop, which at the time had $75 million of
(03:39):
cash on hand and a $400 million bond due in March of 2021. And you say, I'm going to short this
company, not just a little bit, I'm going to go, you know, full bore. I'm going to go as hard as I
can. So they began shorting it over the, you know, total float. So we shorted it more than 140%
short interest. There's even data out there from FINRA that shows 221% short interest and even
higher. Like no one really knows how much the short interest was, but the problem was these
(04:03):
hedge funds and, you know, other brokers had entered this position that was essentially
unclosable because what they bet on was that GameStop was dead in the water. It was gone.
It was going to go out. It was a sure thing, and no one was going to come and save it.
And enter Ryan Cohen in August of 2020. He buys 12%.
Whoopsies.
Yep.
Yeah, and it's important to point out, too, that I think some very perceptive people had
(04:27):
realized beforehand, but it kind of took GameStop for a lot more to realize that this is part of a
pattern. This is not a one-off thing. Ever since Bain Capital and KKR took
down Toys R Us, a lot of these financial predatory firms realized that you can make a lot more off
of an acquisition if you just gut it for parts instead of trying to actually make a profitable
(04:47):
business. And when that worked so well with Toys R Us, and they realized that there's a lot of
mechanisms in place for them to gut a company from the inside out without taking on the risk
themselves, without even putting up the money to buy it in the first place, use a leveraged buyout,
And you can actually use the company's own new debt to buy the company that you don't even own yet.
(05:09):
And then they make off like bandits having basically just looted a company for all it was worth.
And that really caught the eye of a lot of these predatory financial peoples.
And they realized, you know, there's a lot of other businesses that we could do this to.
And they did that to several other businesses along the way.
But 2020 and COVID obviously was just there's a lot of businesses right for the taking.
(05:31):
And we saw the same thing happen to a lot of other businesses.
and short sellers are getting in on this action.
It's not just private equity firms.
Absolutely.
And this is something I would term vulture capitalism, right?
They mask it as some sort of venture investment
as they're reigniting a company or reinventing it.
But in reality, they're putting people in the boards
who are running the company into the dirt,
(05:52):
taking on debt, reducing margin, right?
They're essentially slowly bleeding out the company.
And when you short the company at, say, $10 a share
and the company gets delisted,
you don't have to close that short
because the shares get erased from the DTCC.
So essentially what happens is you make money on the short
and then you never close.
And all these shorts go to this thing called
(06:12):
Obligation Warehouse in the DTCC.
And they're just all these kind of zombie companies
that are sitting there forever
that the shorts never close on them.
And so they're just kind of-
They never pay taxes on them.
Yeah.
It's just an open position.
And there's a whole rabbit hole around the DTCC.
If you're not familiar,
it's one company that is the custodian of all the shares
(06:32):
of just about every company on the market. I was just digging into them the other day,
and they currently manage something like 87 trillion with a T dollars worth of assets.
They trade multiple quadrillions worth of trades every year because they're like the central hub
through which the entire traditional financial market is moving And this has all been true for a long time It just that we didn no one really pays attention to what behind the curtain because we just busy watching numbers go up and numbers go down
(06:59):
right? We're all just stupefied by trying to win the gamble. And once the curtain came off with
GameStop, there was this huge collection, similar to how Bitcoin collects people that are willing to
ask questions and think a little more carefully. GameStop attracted this wide swath of weirdos
that we're not going to take the answers that were proffered and instead be like, what the hell just
(07:23):
happened, right? And when you start to dig, you start to uncover all these weird things that are
now much more public and common knowledge. Absolutely. You start to wonder why a company
can be shorted more than its entire float multiple times over. You start to wonder why FINRA changes
the calculation of short interest during the squeeze and then gaslights everybody that they
didn't actually do it. And in real time, if you were watching the GameStop squeeze in the last
(07:46):
week of January 2021, you saw manipulation on a scale that has never been seen before in our
public equity markets, right? We saw mass bot farms attacking subreddits and Twitter, pumping
other stocks, pumping silver, trying to get people to get distracted and move into other plays,
because the truth was GameStop was an idiosyncratic risk that was bankrupting dozens of hedge funds
(08:10):
and probably some prime brokers as well and causing a systemic event, which was covered in
a House Financial Services Committee in October of 2021.
And again, that all sounds crazy, right?
You're like, GameStop was blowing up
and all these hedge funds were gonna go extinct
because of it?
Yeah, and the House Financial Services Committee,
which has an incentive to tell you
that the shorts closed,
(08:31):
disclosed in that report
that the shorts never closed in that squeeze.
It was mainly retail buying and option gamma.
I mean, if you wanna know how it went
for a lot of these guys that were shorting it,
you could ask Bill Huang.
But unfortunately, he's going to prison
because Bill Huang got in big trouble.
If you're not familiar with the story of Archegos Capital Management,
I highly recommend that you look it up.
It's a great laugh.
But it's also a little tragic because when Bill Huang's fund blew up,
(08:53):
he was a counterparty with Credit Suisse
with a lot of his super wild and mostly illegal trades.
And Credit Suisse later blew up at the expiry of the swaps
that they had open with him.
And we all know what happened to Credit Suisse.
They are no more.
And then UBS, like Switzerland suddenly is having
an absolutely existential crisis in a lot of ways because of the after effects of GameStop
(09:18):
blowing up a giant fund. The whole market, as we know, is tied together by derivatives, swaps,
all these counterparty risks that are just stacked on algorithmic trading mechanisms that
most of the people that are actually running this stuff don't understand.
Yeah, and they employ economics professors, finance professors to tell you that we need
(09:39):
infinite liquidity, that stocks need to be able to be traded 24-7, 365. There should be an infinite
amount of stocks at the bid and the ask. There should be an infinite amount of trades happening.
And that's kind of like a, I would call it like form of sophistry, right? Like an argument where
they take a side effect of the market, which is liquidity and offering investors a way to trade
(10:02):
and make it the main focus. And when liquidity is the main focus, then you optimize for the amount
of shares tradable at any given time, which means market makers, which have an exemption
to naked short shares, and then they also have provisions where they can kick those
share buy-ins, those forced buy-ins down the road, basically ad infinitum, can just naked
(10:23):
short a stock to oblivion.
There's countless examples, but in 2005, there's an investor named Robert Simpson, and he invested
in actually a Las Vegas real estate company called Global Links.
He bought all the shares in existence and some, so like 112% of the entire flow of the
company.
And he expects, he says, look, I bought all these shares.
(10:45):
They're in my brokerage account.
The stock is going to stop trading.
There's no more shares to trade.
The next day, 50 million shares trade, double the float.
So you ask yourself, how is that possible, right?
If we're in this system that is completely focused on a free market and fundamentals
of finance, if there's no more shares, the price has to go up. Or it just stops trading
(11:07):
altogether, right? That's how the rules should work. But instead, they've created this system
of infinite liquidity and infinite share creation. And what happens is when a stock like GameStop
blows up, which is shorted 140% or 220% or 330%, that was one of the numbers we saw from
FINRA in December of 2020, of the float, it's unclosable. And suddenly all these hedge funds
(11:28):
face an existential risk of blowing up
and all their brokers face risks.
And you just see this immediate move
to shut down buying
and to kill, essentially, our free market.
And we all remember who shut down buying.
I got in trouble for talking too much about them yesterday.
But it's important to note
that it's not just one company or the other company.
It's a whole network of these players
(11:51):
that are all tied together on this backend risk
because this is not a bug in the system.
It's not just Bill Huang doing crimes.
This is a feature of the system, and it has been built up this way ever since, I mean, since before the days of the paper crisis.
But as the market's digitized, by then, the big boys already were largely in control of our financial lives, right?
(12:12):
And when you let corrupt financial institutions develop the rules that the market is going to be built on and develop the software, the networks, the systems,
you're not going to end up with any type of free market 40, 50 years down the line, right?
And so we have things like self-regulatory financial institutions, self-regulatory organizations.
(12:33):
We have revolving doors between the regulators and the financial institutions.
And we all know this.
Like our boy Gary, you know, what was it, 18 years at Goldman Sachs?
And so this is baked into the cake.
And we all accept this as though it's just normal because it's what you get taught in college.
If you, you know, go to learn about financial education, obviously who's funding your financial education.
(12:55):
And so we wind up at this place by 2021 where the cake is baked and it's effed.
And, you know, eventually a system full of that much greed and that many problems, something's going to break.
And when it broke, it wasn't just breaking on to a whole bunch of people that wanted to make money.
It was breaking on to this new media environment, this new sort of decentralized communication environment that a lot of these old boys, I think, didn't understand.
(13:20):
And we were talking about this a little bit earlier today, right, about how when the GameStop squeeze, we'll call it, happens, the sneeze, when that happened, it was breaking onto an Internet environment that they did not understand and they were not prepared to control.
And so we actually people in the community got to watch a live control operation in real time on Reddit and then on other platforms as well as bots flooded in as news articles were actually paid to promote the news articles saying oh we closed our position
(13:54):
Trust me, bro.
You can tell because I paid for this ad to tell you that I closed my position.
Stuff like that.
Paid ads telling them.
When have we ever seen paid ads that short closed a position?
And lost a bunch of money too.
Yeah.
And so when this event happens in a decentralized information economy,
it's not only that they can't control it, but also it's that all of us regular folks
(14:15):
start to realize that we have a lot of power and that there's a lot of information that when we put
all of our minds together, all of our talents together, you can uncover a lot of stuff from
what's out there. Because ultimately, right? Like ultimately they're not covering their tracks as
well as they should because they're lazy. They're sloppy. They're greedy, right? And, you know,
(14:37):
let's just say that a lot of the people that invested in GameStop initially
maybe weren't the brightest, but a lot of them were very bright, right? A lot of them were some
of the most intelligent and sophisticated human beings that you'll ever meet. There were engineers,
there were financial professionals, there was everyone in between, 18-year-olds that had never
invested before. And when you get all those skills, you get people working in all these industries,
(15:00):
you had things happening where they would put out disinformation about some hedge fund in some
place, Glacier Capital, that, you know, had a short position when they closed it down or whatever.
And someone's like, oh, I live next to their headquarters. I'm going to go look at what it is.
You know, they walk down the street by their window so they can actually look and like, yeah,
it's a fake building, right? It's like the decentralization of journalism was in full
(15:21):
display, as you know, as well as you've done with your whole. Exactly. And when you decentralize
information like that, it is so much harder for them to lock down a story like this. And so
So GameStop, we're talking about the investors right now, right?
We're talking about the people.
And the people involved in GameStop sort of hit a goldmine, not only of sort of corruption and money,
(15:42):
but also a goldmine of information about what's really going on.
And that's just us.
Meanwhile, we have our boy Ryan Cohen, who, let's just say there's a lot of speculation about what he's doing and what's going on.
And there has been all along.
but Ryan Cohen was a significant factor in that initial ramp,
that initial squeeze because of his reputation,
(16:05):
because of his investing style, because of his conviction.
And when he came in, it started this whole ramp,
this whole run of excitement, right?
But he didn't come in just to like buy a video game company
and just like chill and sell used video games.
I didn't think he realized what he was in for.
How could you?
I think he had a little inkling, but the events of January 2021 and what's happened after, he had no idea what hornet's nest he was walking into.
(16:30):
Naked shorting, DTCC shares, you know.
I think I agree with you.
And this is hotly debated and, you know, out there.
But there is another perspective where he is the founder of Chewy.
And if you're not familiar with Chewy, Chewy is the pet company where it's like the Amazon for pets.
And Amazon was not kind to that.
Amazon is not about that, right?
(16:51):
They would love to be the Amazon of pets.
But Ryan Cohen invented this online pet company,
and he did it through understanding that
when you're taking care of something you love,
like your dog,
you don't exactly want the Jeff Bezos treatment.
You want the Chewy treatment.
You want to be pampered.
You want to know your pet is cared for.
You want to rely on those deliveries of your pet food
and everything you need.
(17:12):
And he understood that there's a weakness
in this mass corporate model,
and he exploited it,
and he built a company around it,
and he succeeded.
And so when he beat Amazon out
and formed a successful business that he did eventually sell,
I think he did get a good look at,
and he probably saw some shorting on his company, right?
He probably saw some corruption.
He probably saw what the, shall we say, consultants are doing out there.
(17:34):
So I think you're right that he didn't,
no one could have predicted what happened, obviously, right?
No one could have predicted what Bitcoin would be back in 2000,
well, maybe some, but.
Very few.
But very few, right?
And oh boy, has it been a wild ride for people involved
and certainly for Ryan, right?
Absolutely.
I think it's a good time to bring in Orange Coin, boys.
(17:54):
So lots of, for the family-friendly audience out there, effort going on in the stock market,
which shouldn't be a surprise for the Bitcoiners.
They look at the stock market and just say, I have Bitcoin.
I don't need that.
But for the people who are still in that fiat regulated world, the infusion of Bitcoin is going to do some very interesting things.
And we just got the news yesterday that GameStop officially has purchased 4,710 Bitcoin.
(18:19):
We don't know when yet.
but it hasn't been official of what the price was that they got it.
But this is going to change things.
So what do you guys think this will change?
I think this is one of the most amazing combinations of two retail communities
in the history of modern finance, right?
On January 28th, 2021, we all saw the curtain pulled back
and we all saw the buy button shut off for like 186 retail brokers.
(18:43):
It wasn't just Robinhood.
Even though they get the flack, it was more than that.
And it was due to a clearing F up by a firm called Apex Clearing, right?
And this is a whole nother rabbit hole.
We don't have time to get into it.
But that showed that one market maker who had access to a clearing firm could make a
market error and shut down trading because they could make the DTCC think that that clearing
(19:03):
firm was way over leveraged when it actually wasn't.
And so that exposed, right, this rot, this endemic corruption in the financial system.
and everyone just saw firsthand what happens
when not only can they shut off your money,
they can shut off your bank,
they can shut off your shares,
they can shut off your equity,
they can shut off your retirement portfolio if they wanted.
These are all centralized systems.
(19:24):
We forget that brokers and broker-dealers
all work under centralized backends
and they can shut down anything they want
if they get a government order.
You send some troops to the right people
and they're gonna shut everything down.
And so your shares, which have become monetized
in the wake of this QE infinity in 2020,
which people use as this proxy for investing, right? They say, hey, I can't save money. I can't
(19:44):
make money just saving cash. I'm going to YOLO into spy calls. I'm going to YOLO into QQQ calls.
I'm going to go as hard as I can in equities and use that as a monetary savings mechanism.
Well, now we see that the curtain has been pulled back and those monetary saving mechanisms are not
truly decentralized. They're really centralized. And that's where Bitcoin came in for me. I don't
know about you. I mean, I think a lot of GameStop people, if you weren't already a Bitcoiner before
(20:07):
GameStop, which a lot of people were because they're looking for these, they understand this
stuff. A lot of GameStoppers, such as myself, started to ask a lot of questions about the money
itself. And that led them to cryptocurrency. And that eventually leads you to Bitcoin. And that's
exactly why I'm here on the stage today. And I think that, so that's where like the two communities
are deeply tied together by mentality and by perception of what's the problem and thereby
(20:31):
what's the solution. But right now there's a trend because obviously Bitcoin, there's this good
argument for Bitcoin just doing its own thing But there also a good argument for public companies and CEOs acknowledging that power and learning to interact with it in some way And there are a number
Ryan Cohen's obviously not the only or the first public company's CEO to buy Bitcoin,
(20:54):
but he's a pretty prominent name and it's a pretty prominent storyline. And it's a pretty
cool endorsement in my mind. The company is the most prominent by far that we've seen.
Exactly. And there's also a really interesting connection between cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and video games and the future digital economies and the future of actual in-game economies, which I think is a wild west that everyone has their own opinions about that we really don't know what it's going to be or how it's going to work.
(21:19):
but ultimately Ryan Cohen has fired one shot across the bow now. Like he said, I, I am a,
so he gave this interview and if you haven't seen it, it's a cool watch because he communicates in
a way that says clearly like I, I get the thesis and I'm with the thesis, but he's also not pandering.
He's not saying like, I need you like YOLO, like YOLO coin, although he did make a YOLO joke.
(21:42):
Right. But he's just looking at it from like, I have this balance sheet. I have this pile of like
$5.5 billion of cash.
And right now...
$6.5 billion.
$6.5 billion.
Yeah, with the convertible field.
He's always making money.
And so he's like,
I'm not going to put all of it into Bitcoin,
but I'm obviously going to diversify my bank account
because look at the economy, right?
And I suspect that it's not the last buy.
Do you think it's the last buy?
(22:03):
We know the first Bitcoin buy is the hardest.
It just gets easier and smoother from there
and you just keep going and going.
So I think we can all expect that.
And there's a positive feedback loop
that most people miss, right?
You see the MSTR squeeze story
and you have to remind yourself,
Again, this is one of the most manipulated stocks in history.
Every time we had earnings that were positive, and I covered a lot of the earnings on spaces with you, Ian and Ben, the stock would get slammed.
(22:25):
You know, they'd report higher than expected revenues, stock down.
You know, the other day when they reported that they're buying Bitcoin, stock down 9% in like two and a half hours.
Which has never happened for the other companies that bought in.
Not as severe, not as severe.
You know, there's sometimes where MicroStrategy will dip a little bit.
But we see, you know, this endemic corruption and shorting on GameStop that we do not see on other stocks.
(22:45):
And GameStop was one of the most heavily shorted companies, you know, in history.
And it was one of the most common on the reg show, you know, regulations to stop, you know, the naked shorting that kicks in after five days of it hitting, you know, the certain reg show thresholds.
Yeah, I mean, and it's also worth noting that aside from all the financial part of the story, there's something to be said for the actual story part of the story.
(23:09):
Because there was financial corruption going on forever, right?
And the markets were manipulated long before GameStop came along.
But if you take yourself back to 2021 in January, suddenly everyone and their mother is hearing about this corruption story.
They're hearing about what's wrong with the markets.
And inherently then what's wrong with the money, what's wrong with the entire global economy.
(23:31):
And I work in this world trying to break through to regular people.
Like wake up, like stop listening to Jay-Z for like five seconds and pay attention to the world imploding around you, right?
Because everyone in this conference gets it.
You all get that the world is imploding.
But there's something to be said for these storylines that manage to break through the public zeitgeist and into the consciousness of regular people.
(23:54):
And so it's really interesting when those stories can align and when those stories can kind of force multiply to help everyone get a little bit more woken up to like, wait a minute, like problem, solution, right?
Because ultimately, at least my personal view, is that whether or not everyone is ever going to become a Bitcoiner,
(24:14):
everyone is going to own their own Bitcoin, everyone should understand it.
Everyone in America should know the fundamentals of it.
They should know what it is, and they should know why it exists and what it solves for, right?
Imagine how much more effective of a country we would have if everyone understood what money is, how money, like, duh, how money actually works and what the flaws are, right?
(24:36):
Because suddenly you start looking for solutions.
Yeah.
Imagine if you make money from actually creating value and not grift, not naked shorting companies to the ground and buying up their assets and, you know, firing all their employees, destroying all their pensions.
You know, that's a new world we could step into, right, with a fully regulated financial system and one that's not this revolving door of trust me, bro.
I investigated myself. I'm completely free of all crimes. I might have made a few billion here and
(24:59):
there, but I find myself a million dollars. And so that should be good enough. Right. And that's
the financial world we're in. Right. That's that's literally the financial world we're in right now.
And I'm excited because, again, the combination of these two communities, there's way more overlap
than most people realize. And all three of us on stage have been banging the drum for GameStop to
buy Bitcoin and to join the broader Bitcoin ecosystem to get not only Bitcoiners who know
(25:23):
about stocks and know about investing on board, but Bitcoiners who are obviously drawn to self-custiding
their crypto. And in the same way you can self-custody crypto, you can also self-custody shares
through something called DRS. And so all of these systems, all these interlinking, interwoven
policies and programs show this amazing synergy between the two communities. Both of us do not
(25:43):
trust the traditional financial media. Both of us do not trust the banks. We don't trust the brokers.
It's just one community is more focused on the equity side and one community is more focused on
the money side.
And ironically, what GameStop hasn't realized until now, thank God, is that if you fix the
money, you fix the equity side.
You fix the capital problem.
You fix all these downstream effects of rotten money and infinite money printer to all these
(26:05):
banks and share lenders and share creators who can just essentially rehypothicates shares
into oblivion with no consequence.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
I think that's the most beautiful thing that Bitcoiners know, that it just forces that
responsibility and efficiency on all levels.
(26:26):
So seeing that in the stock market is going to be awesome.
Seeing Bitcoin really infuse those principles into these companies, we'll finally see a
way that we can have well-run companies being rewarded for doing a good job again, not having
to fight all these invisible forces everywhere.
Gentlemen, we have five seconds left.
it's been awesome
thank you so much
(26:46):
appreciate you all coming
thank you
(27:13):
Outro Music
There's something to be said for these storylines that manage to break through the public zeitgeist and into the consciousness of regular people.
(00:06):
And so it's really interesting when those stories can align and when those stories can kind of force multiply to help everyone get a little bit more woken up to like, wait a minute, like problem, solution, right?
Because ultimately, whether or not everyone is ever going to become a Bitcoiner, everyone is going to own their own Bitcoin, everyone should understand it.
(00:26):
Everyone in America should know the fundamentals of it.
They should know what it is and they should know why it exists and what it solves for, right?
Imagine how much more effective of a country we would have if everyone understood what money is,
how money actually works and what the flaws are, right?
Because suddenly you start looking for solutions.
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today.
(00:50):
So much talk about, so much happened even in the last 24 hours, but let's start with some introductions.
My name is Ben, Ben Worman. I host the Ben Worman podcast.
My name is Ian and I start trouble on the internet.
My name is Peruvian Bull and I'm a macro analyst and content creator.
(01:13):
All right, so as many of you may have heard, there was some news just in the last 24 hours
about GameStop buying some Bitcoin, which is super exciting.
We'll get to that, but I think it would be best if we started with laying some groundwork.
So, gentlemen, WTF happened in January 2021.
(01:33):
A lot of people know sort of the surface level story of what happened in 2021 with GameStop.
And that is by design.
Because the financial markets, as we all know, are full of very wealthy people that are highly incentivized to keep it that way.
And so when an event happens that threatens the status quo, they have a lot of resources and a lot of reason to make sure that whatever story gets out is not exactly going to threaten the way it's all working.
(02:07):
And so, yes, there was a big squeeze.
And yes, there was a lot of money and a lot of memes and a lot of folks online doing funny things with their winnings and losings and all that.
but ultimately it got turned into this narrative around oh there was a short squeeze that came and
went and it was all over and like oh the gamers won and cool the hedge funds lost good job but
(02:30):
realistically that was not actually what happened and that was not the end of a story that was the
start of a long wild journey that a lot of weird people on the internet went on and on to that was
digging into financial corruption. And certainly 2021 was cool and it was interesting. But ever
since then, there's just been this online community of people digging into all of the weird ways that
(02:54):
the traditional financial markets are basically a giant fraudulent scheme. And we kind of all wound
up finding each other through this interest in fraud and in F the system and slowly coming
together and learning more and exposing more. And Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop, while we were
doing that was doing his own thing behind the scenes. And I think we're starting to see the
(03:16):
fruits of that labor now. Would you agree, Peruvian? Oh, I would totally agree. And one thing I would
point out is in March 2020, we entered one of the biggest crises of modern history, especially
monetarily. We saw NASDAQs buy collapsing, bond yield spiking, the Fed starts infinity QE. And if
you're a hedge fund analyst at that time, you look at GameStop, which at the time had $75 million of
(03:39):
cash on hand and a $400 million bond due in March of 2021. And you say, I'm going to short this
company, not just a little bit, I'm going to go, you know, full bore. I'm going to go as hard as I
can. So they began shorting it over the, you know, total float. So we shorted it more than 140%
short interest. There's even data out there from FINRA that shows 221% short interest and even
higher. Like no one really knows how much the short interest was, but the problem was these
(04:03):
hedge funds and, you know, other brokers had entered this position that was essentially
unclosable because what they bet on was that GameStop was dead in the water. It was gone.
It was going to go out. It was a sure thing, and no one was going to come and save it.
And enter Ryan Cohen in August of 2020. He buys 12%.
Whoopsies.
Yep.
Yeah, and it's important to point out, too, that I think some very perceptive people had
(04:27):
realized beforehand, but it kind of took GameStop for a lot more to realize that this is part of a
pattern. This is not a one-off thing. Ever since Bain Capital and KKR took
down Toys R Us, a lot of these financial predatory firms realized that you can make a lot more off
of an acquisition if you just gut it for parts instead of trying to actually make a profitable
(04:47):
business. And when that worked so well with Toys R Us, and they realized that there's a lot of
mechanisms in place for them to gut a company from the inside out without taking on the risk
themselves, without even putting up the money to buy it in the first place, use a leveraged buyout,
And you can actually use the company's own new debt to buy the company that you don't even own yet.
(05:09):
And then they make off like bandits having basically just looted a company for all it was worth.
And that really caught the eye of a lot of these predatory financial peoples.
And they realized, you know, there's a lot of other businesses that we could do this to.
And they did that to several other businesses along the way.
But 2020 and COVID obviously was just there's a lot of businesses right for the taking.
(05:31):
And we saw the same thing happen to a lot of other businesses.
and short sellers are getting in on this action.
It's not just private equity firms.
Absolutely.
And this is something I would term vulture capitalism, right?
They mask it as some sort of venture investment
as they're reigniting a company or reinventing it.
But in reality, they're putting people in the boards
who are running the company into the dirt,
(05:52):
taking on debt, reducing margin, right?
They're essentially slowly bleeding out the company.
And when you short the company at, say, $10 a share
and the company gets delisted,
you don't have to close that short
because the shares get erased from the DTCC.
So essentially what happens is you make money on the short
and then you never close.
And all these shorts go to this thing called
(06:12):
Obligation Warehouse in the DTCC.
And they're just all these kind of zombie companies
that are sitting there forever
that the shorts never close on them.
And so they're just kind of-
They never pay taxes on them.
Yeah.
It's just an open position.
And there's a whole rabbit hole around the DTCC.
If you're not familiar,
it's one company that is the custodian of all the shares
(06:32):
of just about every company on the market. I was just digging into them the other day,
and they currently manage something like 87 trillion with a T dollars worth of assets.
They trade multiple quadrillions worth of trades every year because they're like the central hub
through which the entire traditional financial market is moving And this has all been true for a long time It just that we didn no one really pays attention to what behind the curtain because we just busy watching numbers go up and numbers go down
(06:59):
right? We're all just stupefied by trying to win the gamble. And once the curtain came off with
GameStop, there was this huge collection, similar to how Bitcoin collects people that are willing to
ask questions and think a little more carefully. GameStop attracted this wide swath of weirdos
that we're not going to take the answers that were proffered and instead be like, what the hell just
(07:23):
happened, right? And when you start to dig, you start to uncover all these weird things that are
now much more public and common knowledge. Absolutely. You start to wonder why a company
can be shorted more than its entire float multiple times over. You start to wonder why FINRA changes
the calculation of short interest during the squeeze and then gaslights everybody that they
didn't actually do it. And in real time, if you were watching the GameStop squeeze in the last
(07:46):
week of January 2021, you saw manipulation on a scale that has never been seen before in our
public equity markets, right? We saw mass bot farms attacking subreddits and Twitter, pumping
other stocks, pumping silver, trying to get people to get distracted and move into other plays,
because the truth was GameStop was an idiosyncratic risk that was bankrupting dozens of hedge funds
(08:10):
and probably some prime brokers as well and causing a systemic event, which was covered in
a House Financial Services Committee in October of 2021.
And again, that all sounds crazy, right?
You're like, GameStop was blowing up
and all these hedge funds were gonna go extinct
because of it?
Yeah, and the House Financial Services Committee,
which has an incentive to tell you
that the shorts closed,
(08:31):
disclosed in that report
that the shorts never closed in that squeeze.
It was mainly retail buying and option gamma.
I mean, if you wanna know how it went
for a lot of these guys that were shorting it,
you could ask Bill Huang.
But unfortunately, he's going to prison
because Bill Huang got in big trouble.
If you're not familiar with the story of Archegos Capital Management,
I highly recommend that you look it up.
It's a great laugh.
But it's also a little tragic because when Bill Huang's fund blew up,
(08:53):
he was a counterparty with Credit Suisse
with a lot of his super wild and mostly illegal trades.
And Credit Suisse later blew up at the expiry of the swaps
that they had open with him.
And we all know what happened to Credit Suisse.
They are no more.
And then UBS, like Switzerland suddenly is having
an absolutely existential crisis in a lot of ways because of the after effects of GameStop
(09:18):
blowing up a giant fund. The whole market, as we know, is tied together by derivatives, swaps,
all these counterparty risks that are just stacked on algorithmic trading mechanisms that
most of the people that are actually running this stuff don't understand.
Yeah, and they employ economics professors, finance professors to tell you that we need
(09:39):
infinite liquidity, that stocks need to be able to be traded 24-7, 365. There should be an infinite
amount of stocks at the bid and the ask. There should be an infinite amount of trades happening.
And that's kind of like a, I would call it like form of sophistry, right? Like an argument where
they take a side effect of the market, which is liquidity and offering investors a way to trade
(10:02):
and make it the main focus. And when liquidity is the main focus, then you optimize for the amount
of shares tradable at any given time, which means market makers, which have an exemption
to naked short shares, and then they also have provisions where they can kick those
share buy-ins, those forced buy-ins down the road, basically ad infinitum, can just naked
(10:23):
short a stock to oblivion.
There's countless examples, but in 2005, there's an investor named Robert Simpson, and he invested
in actually a Las Vegas real estate company called Global Links.
He bought all the shares in existence and some, so like 112% of the entire flow of the
company.
And he expects, he says, look, I bought all these shares.
(10:45):
They're in my brokerage account.
The stock is going to stop trading.
There's no more shares to trade.
The next day, 50 million shares trade, double the float.
So you ask yourself, how is that possible, right?
If we're in this system that is completely focused on a free market and fundamentals
of finance, if there's no more shares, the price has to go up. Or it just stops trading
(11:07):
altogether, right? That's how the rules should work. But instead, they've created this system
of infinite liquidity and infinite share creation. And what happens is when a stock like GameStop
blows up, which is shorted 140% or 220% or 330%, that was one of the numbers we saw from
FINRA in December of 2020, of the float, it's unclosable. And suddenly all these hedge funds
(11:28):
face an existential risk of blowing up
and all their brokers face risks.
And you just see this immediate move
to shut down buying
and to kill, essentially, our free market.
And we all remember who shut down buying.
I got in trouble for talking too much about them yesterday.
But it's important to note
that it's not just one company or the other company.
It's a whole network of these players
(11:51):
that are all tied together on this backend risk
because this is not a bug in the system.
It's not just Bill Huang doing crimes.
This is a feature of the system, and it has been built up this way ever since, I mean, since before the days of the paper crisis.
But as the market's digitized, by then, the big boys already were largely in control of our financial lives, right?
(12:12):
And when you let corrupt financial institutions develop the rules that the market is going to be built on and develop the software, the networks, the systems,
you're not going to end up with any type of free market 40, 50 years down the line, right?
And so we have things like self-regulatory financial institutions, self-regulatory organizations.
(12:33):
We have revolving doors between the regulators and the financial institutions.
And we all know this.
Like our boy Gary, you know, what was it, 18 years at Goldman Sachs?
And so this is baked into the cake.
And we all accept this as though it's just normal because it's what you get taught in college.
If you, you know, go to learn about financial education, obviously who's funding your financial education.
(12:55):
And so we wind up at this place by 2021 where the cake is baked and it's effed.
And, you know, eventually a system full of that much greed and that many problems, something's going to break.
And when it broke, it wasn't just breaking on to a whole bunch of people that wanted to make money.
It was breaking on to this new media environment, this new sort of decentralized communication environment that a lot of these old boys, I think, didn't understand.
(13:20):
And we were talking about this a little bit earlier today, right, about how when the GameStop squeeze, we'll call it, happens, the sneeze, when that happened, it was breaking onto an Internet environment that they did not understand and they were not prepared to control.
And so we actually people in the community got to watch a live control operation in real time on Reddit and then on other platforms as well as bots flooded in as news articles were actually paid to promote the news articles saying oh we closed our position
(13:54):
Trust me, bro.
You can tell because I paid for this ad to tell you that I closed my position.
Stuff like that.
Paid ads telling them.
When have we ever seen paid ads that short closed a position?
And lost a bunch of money too.
Yeah.
And so when this event happens in a decentralized information economy,
it's not only that they can't control it, but also it's that all of us regular folks
(14:15):
start to realize that we have a lot of power and that there's a lot of information that when we put
all of our minds together, all of our talents together, you can uncover a lot of stuff from
what's out there. Because ultimately, right? Like ultimately they're not covering their tracks as
well as they should because they're lazy. They're sloppy. They're greedy, right? And, you know,
(14:37):
let's just say that a lot of the people that invested in GameStop initially
maybe weren't the brightest, but a lot of them were very bright, right? A lot of them were some
of the most intelligent and sophisticated human beings that you'll ever meet. There were engineers,
there were financial professionals, there was everyone in between, 18-year-olds that had never
invested before. And when you get all those skills, you get people working in all these industries,
(15:00):
you had things happening where they would put out disinformation about some hedge fund in some
place, Glacier Capital, that, you know, had a short position when they closed it down or whatever.
And someone's like, oh, I live next to their headquarters. I'm going to go look at what it is.
You know, they walk down the street by their window so they can actually look and like, yeah,
it's a fake building, right? It's like the decentralization of journalism was in full
(15:21):
display, as you know, as well as you've done with your whole. Exactly. And when you decentralize
information like that, it is so much harder for them to lock down a story like this. And so
So GameStop, we're talking about the investors right now, right?
We're talking about the people.
And the people involved in GameStop sort of hit a goldmine, not only of sort of corruption and money,
(15:42):
but also a goldmine of information about what's really going on.
And that's just us.
Meanwhile, we have our boy Ryan Cohen, who, let's just say there's a lot of speculation about what he's doing and what's going on.
And there has been all along.
but Ryan Cohen was a significant factor in that initial ramp,
that initial squeeze because of his reputation,
(16:05):
because of his investing style, because of his conviction.
And when he came in, it started this whole ramp,
this whole run of excitement, right?
But he didn't come in just to like buy a video game company
and just like chill and sell used video games.
I didn't think he realized what he was in for.
How could you?
I think he had a little inkling, but the events of January 2021 and what's happened after, he had no idea what hornet's nest he was walking into.
(16:30):
Naked shorting, DTCC shares, you know.
I think I agree with you.
And this is hotly debated and, you know, out there.
But there is another perspective where he is the founder of Chewy.
And if you're not familiar with Chewy, Chewy is the pet company where it's like the Amazon for pets.
And Amazon was not kind to that.
Amazon is not about that, right?
(16:51):
They would love to be the Amazon of pets.
But Ryan Cohen invented this online pet company,
and he did it through understanding that
when you're taking care of something you love,
like your dog,
you don't exactly want the Jeff Bezos treatment.
You want the Chewy treatment.
You want to be pampered.
You want to know your pet is cared for.
You want to rely on those deliveries of your pet food
and everything you need.
(17:12):
And he understood that there's a weakness
in this mass corporate model,
and he exploited it,
and he built a company around it,
and he succeeded.
And so when he beat Amazon out
and formed a successful business that he did eventually sell,
I think he did get a good look at,
and he probably saw some shorting on his company, right?
He probably saw some corruption.
He probably saw what the, shall we say, consultants are doing out there.
(17:34):
So I think you're right that he didn't,
no one could have predicted what happened, obviously, right?
No one could have predicted what Bitcoin would be back in 2000,
well, maybe some, but.
Very few.
But very few, right?
And oh boy, has it been a wild ride for people involved
and certainly for Ryan, right?
Absolutely.
I think it's a good time to bring in Orange Coin, boys.
(17:54):
So lots of, for the family-friendly audience out there, effort going on in the stock market,
which shouldn't be a surprise for the Bitcoiners.
They look at the stock market and just say, I have Bitcoin.
I don't need that.
But for the people who are still in that fiat regulated world, the infusion of Bitcoin is going to do some very interesting things.
And we just got the news yesterday that GameStop officially has purchased 4,710 Bitcoin.
(18:19):
We don't know when yet.
but it hasn't been official of what the price was that they got it.
But this is going to change things.
So what do you guys think this will change?
I think this is one of the most amazing combinations of two retail communities
in the history of modern finance, right?
On January 28th, 2021, we all saw the curtain pulled back
and we all saw the buy button shut off for like 186 retail brokers.
(18:43):
It wasn't just Robinhood.
Even though they get the flack, it was more than that.
And it was due to a clearing F up by a firm called Apex Clearing, right?
And this is a whole nother rabbit hole.
We don't have time to get into it.
But that showed that one market maker who had access to a clearing firm could make a
market error and shut down trading because they could make the DTCC think that that clearing
(19:03):
firm was way over leveraged when it actually wasn't.
And so that exposed, right, this rot, this endemic corruption in the financial system.
and everyone just saw firsthand what happens
when not only can they shut off your money,
they can shut off your bank,
they can shut off your shares,
they can shut off your equity,
they can shut off your retirement portfolio if they wanted.
These are all centralized systems.
(19:24):
We forget that brokers and broker-dealers
all work under centralized backends
and they can shut down anything they want
if they get a government order.
You send some troops to the right people
and they're gonna shut everything down.
And so your shares, which have become monetized
in the wake of this QE infinity in 2020,
which people use as this proxy for investing, right? They say, hey, I can't save money. I can't
(19:44):
make money just saving cash. I'm going to YOLO into spy calls. I'm going to YOLO into QQQ calls.
I'm going to go as hard as I can in equities and use that as a monetary savings mechanism.
Well, now we see that the curtain has been pulled back and those monetary saving mechanisms are not
truly decentralized. They're really centralized. And that's where Bitcoin came in for me. I don't
know about you. I mean, I think a lot of GameStop people, if you weren't already a Bitcoiner before
(20:07):
GameStop, which a lot of people were because they're looking for these, they understand this
stuff. A lot of GameStoppers, such as myself, started to ask a lot of questions about the money
itself. And that led them to cryptocurrency. And that eventually leads you to Bitcoin. And that's
exactly why I'm here on the stage today. And I think that, so that's where like the two communities
are deeply tied together by mentality and by perception of what's the problem and thereby
(20:31):
what's the solution. But right now there's a trend because obviously Bitcoin, there's this good
argument for Bitcoin just doing its own thing But there also a good argument for public companies and CEOs acknowledging that power and learning to interact with it in some way And there are a number
Ryan Cohen's obviously not the only or the first public company's CEO to buy Bitcoin,
(20:54):
but he's a pretty prominent name and it's a pretty prominent storyline. And it's a pretty
cool endorsement in my mind. The company is the most prominent by far that we've seen.
Exactly. And there's also a really interesting connection between cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and video games and the future digital economies and the future of actual in-game economies, which I think is a wild west that everyone has their own opinions about that we really don't know what it's going to be or how it's going to work.
(21:19):
but ultimately Ryan Cohen has fired one shot across the bow now. Like he said, I, I am a,
so he gave this interview and if you haven't seen it, it's a cool watch because he communicates in
a way that says clearly like I, I get the thesis and I'm with the thesis, but he's also not pandering.
He's not saying like, I need you like YOLO, like YOLO coin, although he did make a YOLO joke.
(21:42):
Right. But he's just looking at it from like, I have this balance sheet. I have this pile of like
$5.5 billion of cash.
And right now...
$6.5 billion.
$6.5 billion.
Yeah, with the convertible field.
He's always making money.
And so he's like,
I'm not going to put all of it into Bitcoin,
but I'm obviously going to diversify my bank account
because look at the economy, right?
And I suspect that it's not the last buy.
Do you think it's the last buy?
(22:03):
We know the first Bitcoin buy is the hardest.
It just gets easier and smoother from there
and you just keep going and going.
So I think we can all expect that.
And there's a positive feedback loop
that most people miss, right?
You see the MSTR squeeze story
and you have to remind yourself,
Again, this is one of the most manipulated stocks in history.
Every time we had earnings that were positive, and I covered a lot of the earnings on spaces with you, Ian and Ben, the stock would get slammed.
(22:25):
You know, they'd report higher than expected revenues, stock down.
You know, the other day when they reported that they're buying Bitcoin, stock down 9% in like two and a half hours.
Which has never happened for the other companies that bought in.
Not as severe, not as severe.
You know, there's sometimes where MicroStrategy will dip a little bit.
But we see, you know, this endemic corruption and shorting on GameStop that we do not see on other stocks.
(22:45):
And GameStop was one of the most heavily shorted companies, you know, in history.
And it was one of the most common on the reg show, you know, regulations to stop, you know, the naked shorting that kicks in after five days of it hitting, you know, the certain reg show thresholds.
Yeah, I mean, and it's also worth noting that aside from all the financial part of the story, there's something to be said for the actual story part of the story.
(23:09):
Because there was financial corruption going on forever, right?
And the markets were manipulated long before GameStop came along.
But if you take yourself back to 2021 in January, suddenly everyone and their mother is hearing about this corruption story.
They're hearing about what's wrong with the markets.
And inherently then what's wrong with the money, what's wrong with the entire global economy.
(23:31):
And I work in this world trying to break through to regular people.
Like wake up, like stop listening to Jay-Z for like five seconds and pay attention to the world imploding around you, right?
Because everyone in this conference gets it.
You all get that the world is imploding.
But there's something to be said for these storylines that manage to break through the public zeitgeist and into the consciousness of regular people.
(23:54):
And so it's really interesting when those stories can align and when those stories can kind of force multiply to help everyone get a little bit more woken up to like, wait a minute, like problem, solution, right?
Because ultimately, at least my personal view, is that whether or not everyone is ever going to become a Bitcoiner,
(24:14):
everyone is going to own their own Bitcoin, everyone should understand it.
Everyone in America should know the fundamentals of it.
They should know what it is, and they should know why it exists and what it solves for, right?
Imagine how much more effective of a country we would have if everyone understood what money is, how money, like, duh, how money actually works and what the flaws are, right?
(24:36):
Because suddenly you start looking for solutions.
Yeah.
Imagine if you make money from actually creating value and not grift, not naked shorting companies to the ground and buying up their assets and, you know, firing all their employees, destroying all their pensions.
You know, that's a new world we could step into, right, with a fully regulated financial system and one that's not this revolving door of trust me, bro.
I investigated myself. I'm completely free of all crimes. I might have made a few billion here and
(24:59):
there, but I find myself a million dollars. And so that should be good enough. Right. And that's
the financial world we're in. Right. That's that's literally the financial world we're in right now.
And I'm excited because, again, the combination of these two communities, there's way more overlap
than most people realize. And all three of us on stage have been banging the drum for GameStop to
buy Bitcoin and to join the broader Bitcoin ecosystem to get not only Bitcoiners who know
(25:23):
about stocks and know about investing on board, but Bitcoiners who are obviously drawn to self-custiding
their crypto. And in the same way you can self-custody crypto, you can also self-custody shares
through something called DRS. And so all of these systems, all these interlinking, interwoven
policies and programs show this amazing synergy between the two communities. Both of us do not
(25:43):
trust the traditional financial media. Both of us do not trust the banks. We don't trust the brokers.
It's just one community is more focused on the equity side and one community is more focused on
the money side.
And ironically, what GameStop hasn't realized until now, thank God, is that if you fix the
money, you fix the equity side.
You fix the capital problem.
You fix all these downstream effects of rotten money and infinite money printer to all these
(26:05):
banks and share lenders and share creators who can just essentially rehypothicates shares
into oblivion with no consequence.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
I think that's the most beautiful thing that Bitcoiners know, that it just forces that
responsibility and efficiency on all levels.
(26:26):
So seeing that in the stock market is going to be awesome.
Seeing Bitcoin really infuse those principles into these companies, we'll finally see a
way that we can have well-run companies being rewarded for doing a good job again, not having
to fight all these invisible forces everywhere.
Gentlemen, we have five seconds left.
it's been awesome
thank you so much
(26:46):
appreciate you all coming
thank you
(27:13):
Outro Music
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