if someone asked me to imagine the worst, least functional government possible, I think "plutocracy, but it's run by runescape players" would probably be in the top 5
@@XanthinZardahow could you say the "We held a vote on whether or not politics are allowed in our governance system and decided that politics will not be allowed unless a future democratic vote decrees that they will be." Guys wouldn't be competent at running the entire world!!!?
@@luxill0si want you to write me a detailed essay on the impacts of american interventionism in other countries, then get back to me on whatever it is you think venezuela did wrong.
Amusingly, this already exists, and it's called Runescape. Old School Runescape has a polling system where a supermajority of members have to vote to approve of any change prior to it being implemented, ostensibly to keep the trust of the playerbase and prevent another exodus like the one that happened after the extremely unpopular free trade removal, Evolution of Combat, and Squeal of Fortune updates. In practice, it mostly gets used as a way for people who have spent hundreds or thousands of hours on the game to prevent anyone from ever getting a level or item without having to go through just as bad of a grind as they did, or a way for the PvE and PvP communities to work out their beef via downvoting each others' updates.
The whole "the hedgies picked a fight with gamers but we know what it's like to grind for a boss fight so we're gonna come out on top actually" thing makes me think of the sort of "ummmmm I watch Sherlock, I know how to hide a dead body, say your frickin prayers" posts that you used to see on Tumblr circa 2012, which is very funny to me because guaranteed apes would call those kinds of posts cringe (at best)
literally made the exact same connection to the sherlock/supernatural tumblr fandom when i hit that part of the video. insular conspiratorial online communities will always converge on the same apotheosis of cringe.
There's an echo of GamerGate which runs through all the delusional Ape rhetoric about the establishment "picking fights with gamers." The rabbit hole goes deep on this.
Remember everyone: when you're playing musical chairs, never sit down. If you keep walking around until the game is over, the host of the party is LEGALLY OBLIGATED to provide you with a throne.
I once had a student who insisted he had a better system to do math than algebra, calculus and trig. His “system” completely misunderstood how numbers fundamentally worked. He made up his own terms for concepts that didn’t exist and missed how numbers connected to reality. His entire “system” became a justification for why he was actually right when he just didn’t get math, and any attempt to explain to him why he was wrong was instantly met with a shutdown of the conversation. This is that but stonks.
At first I assumed that wife-changing money was me mishearing something, then Dan having a funny pronounciation. When I finally saw that "wife-changing money" was a term they actually used I just felt an emptiness inside me and deep secondhand embarassment.
@@BlancheNeigefandan explains it a bit. They lie and financially endanger their partners so reasonably their partners probably ask reasonable questions like how are you gonna pay for all of theese shares or the real life stuff you cant afford cause all your money is in gme. So they are resentful that their partners "dont believe in them." So they fantasize about being rich enough to attract a gold digger that doesnt ask questions.
@@BlancheNeigefan because when they become gorillianaires they can afford to get rid of the average wife they hate and get a model trophy wife. Completely delusional and narcissistic
@BlancheNeigefan because there is at least some overlap/intersection with incel culture. The idea here is that whatever kind of partner you currently have, you could have had a better one had you had more money. Ergo, when you get that more money you can, and will, "upgrade".
Dan seems to run on a pretty much exactly 3 way split between, "hey look at this interesting sociological trend", "I really genuinely want to help financially venerable people avoid scams" and "Bullying grifters is enormously fun".
@@bota6575same honestly. Part of me kinda hopes that he'll make a video on AI art or something that way he can talk about media stuff and tech hype stuff at the same time.
@notapplicable6985 So of course I had to check. Result? They don't officially exist however there are secondary markets that make both of them. Normally I wouldn't post that since it's kinda non-news, but when looking into it I found something neat. You don't need Doritos candles because Dorito chips burn like candles already. Just stick em into a fire proof base like sand and thanks to the oils in them apparently uou can just light them up. Gonna test it tonight.
No matter how many times I watch, that clip of "we tried to tell them over dinner... WHATEVER" still feels right out of a movie. It's such an exposed psyche moment 😭
The moment when you almost feel sorry for the guy until you remember that he's dishing out terrible "not financial advice" built from hog-wild conspiracy theories.
I grew up in the Rocky Mountain West, and there were these slightly off kilter people who would come to old gold rush towns from the 1800s with panning equipment, convinced they were going to find untold riches in places that had been mined dry 150 years ago. My own uncle borrowed heavily from family to support buying mining equipment, because he believed God had told him that he was going to find incredible wealth in the mountains. I thought of this a lot while watching these people justify buying massive amounts of meme stock long after the writing was on the wall.
I can understand them spinning elaborate conspiracy theories to save face for having spent stupid money on worthless stock. It’s when they keep buying more stock that flummoxes me
Right? Like, it would actually make more sense to grab your panning gear and go try the creek in your neighbor's back yard or something. If there was a working gold mine there and then there stopped being one, you KNOW they looked for more gold, and they had a literal gold mine to finance those efforts. At least if you throw a dart at a map and pan there, you're probably checking somewhere that hasn't been checked dozens of times before. Now, if you're just kinda LARPing, if it's just a fun thing you like to do when you go hiking in the hills, great! That sounds like a lot of fun! You get to feel a connection to old-timey prospector dudes! I hope you grow a cool beard and wear suspenders too (if you want)! But if you're spending money you can't afford, yeah, that's sad.
@@Russian_engineer_bmstu From the same video is probably the line that I quote the most with my friends: "Cringe. There's no other word for it. this makes me cringe. It's embarrassing."
@@Russian_engineer_bmstu that's "steam punk edgelord furry ocs" and "alien big titty goth girlfriend" - two different quotes from that video smashed together
dude listening to quotes from these ape guys and learning about their weird nonsense feels like getting exposited to by a metal gear solid villain that has no idea what the grand scheme actually is. like i'm on my knees handcuffed, i've been captured after infiltrating their base trying to figure out what the hell MOASS is and then the boss gives me a thirty minute cutscene telling me the history of bed bath and beyond complete with live acted fmvs and slideshows of arrows going up and down, only to then be told that all stocks in the world are being controlled by semi-sentient AIs and that war must be declared on the concept of money by buying the worst shares imaginable.
Don't show this to Hideo Kojima... because he'll be SO mad he doesn't have the rights to Metal Gear and can't have Snake go through an adventure just like this
@@goranisacson2502 "You shouldve done your Due Diligence, Snake. Now... BEHOLD! THE STOCKS OF THE PATRIOTS! YOUR SHARES ARE NO LONGER YOUR OWN!" -Liquid Apesalot, Metal Gear Solid 7 The Shares of Liberty I will mail this directly to kojima's house, he will be so cheesed that he missed this opportunity.
Known firefighter shills tries to break the window of my cybertruck to prove it is a bad car just because it is “on fire” and “I am dying of heat and smoke inhalation”
It's not a coincidence that Dan describes this movement in terms usually reserved for religious movements: e.g. "orthodoxy," "apocalyptic belief placed under cognitive strain." This reminds me of so many new religious movements yearning for a judgment day/apocalypse/armageddon.
Yeap, i see a reflection of the cult craze of the 1950-80's that stemmed from WWII and the various other wars that stressed out and caused mass underlying panic in America that caused people to flock to insane cults and accept their openly criminal and disgusting practices. Now in 2020-23, following the financial crash in 2008, the accelerating inflation of money at a pace never seen before, the entirely stagnant wages compared to pricing of healthcare, rent and food, free internet inundating people with inflammatory articles and exposing people to charismatic grifters with amoral ideologies; a new wave of panic and stress has swept over America, compounded further by the suprise attack of Covid, which has lead to 'finance cults' like NFT bros, Crypto Enthusiasts and Meme Stock Apes, which although are not physically violent like old style cults, still exploits followers and lead them to harm, now by financial and social isolation and loss.
Dan has a background in theology which shows up in a lot of his work which I think is really cool (he confirms this in his interview with Adam Connover if you need a source on that)
its because its an actual almost one to one example of a doomsday cult, longing for the day shorts are squeezed and they can be the emperors of earth, not too dissimilar really to heavens gate or jonestown
“Bro I play runescape.” As a long time runescape player, that’s about all I needed to hear to know the kind of cringey, delusional, gluttons for punishment we’re dealing with here.
I'm imagining a scenario where Citadel finds out that theyre up against RuneScape players and everybody in the office freaks out and starts sweating, frantically making calls
I take financial advice from a coked-up guy in face paint yelling into a microphone, my investment strategy is shitposting, and my due diligence research consists of collecting all the dankest memes. What could possibly go wrong?
5:05 "They picked a fight with the gaming industry." This one sentence kills me every time. The gaming industry. I don't even have a specific explanation, it's just so absurd at the face of it.
It's such a misunderstanding of their own role. Consumers are not a part of the industry. It's like a hypercharged version of when a sports fan talks about "our" team, and what "we" did on the field.
Also, even if referencing gamers, it's the least combative group of consumers ever. It's filled to the brim with libertarians that insisted for the past couple of decades that "voting with your wallet" is the best way to fight corporate greed while the industry they claimed to love deteriorated.
one of the things that shocks me is calling themselves the gaming industry... like no, my GDD track friends are the gaming industry, the ones who work in the industry... you are a GAMER, someone who consumes the product of the industy. you wouldnt call someone who eats a lot of fast food a part of the fast food industry, lmao!
The comparison to sovereign citizens is really apt. It's like this idea that law and governance is sort of like computer programming, and with the right mechanical exploit you have the power to do anything. When in fact, institutions can just say "Nah" and suspend the rules as an emergency measure. Debts can be forgiven, etc. That's what real power is.
Yeah it's basically how people view the society we've set up as some sort of hardcoded reality that we have no say in. It ultimately stems from a sense of lack of control and there are some actual points to made about democratic control over institutions and so on... But these people are ironically engaging in the problem in the most unproductive sheep-like way possible.
That's what happen when people start to believe that Capitalism is some sort of natural law. It isn't, power comes from violence and the rules of this world have been re-written multiple times by class violence.
Yeah exactly. Let’s say that everything about MOASS was true, that if some set of circumstances came to exist the US government would be obligated by some set of rules to give its entire gdp away to some redditors. Even in that ridiculous fantasy scenario they would still get nothing as the government would just change the rules.
I feel like this comparison is maybe too silly, since it's to fiction. But in the popular anime BOYS IN MECHS 2010s EDITION there is a villain who plans out and successfully organizes a long, complicated plan that enables him to unpopularly-but-legally claim the right to rule. And the government he has just legally taken over... Just ignores his claim. Because of course they would. Because a plan of victory that relies on a rules technicality is great for games, but does not work in real life.
@@IAmOfAll it goes back far beyond that - for a while it was a real trend in cartoon/comics to have these kinds of plots, including a very famous Disney/Donald Duck story (that I believe was the impetus for those other stories): The basic setup is something along the lines of "he who has that relic/gets that signiture/finds that document becomes king of the US/America/owns all the land" and everybode really believed that. Everyone genuinly believed if you get that crown you become king... because it was a childrens story (though even in the original story there was the implication that in-universe they were all just too mad with power to realize how crazy it is).
We've come a long way from Lake Minnewanka, and yet it feels we've never left the shores of a guy freaking out over there being no curvature despite it being clearly visible. Although the setting and the context keeps changing, Dan is talking about the same people over and over. Desperate, feeling lost, looking for answers, and the shithead grifters always showing up with the one thing that will change everything for them. The difference between someone lying to themselves about the curvature of the Earth and someone lying to themselves that their GME stock is about to get pumped to the moon is very small, just which flavor of scam that appeals to them the most dictating which of the rides at this horrifying carnival they end up on.
I truly think this type of conspiracy madness grifting, is one of the greatest and most important forces in the 21st century. Trump and his political movement is almost entirely powered by it. Flat earth, GME, Right Wing lunacy, they all are marketed and performed in the same way.
Your observation is spot on. This video strongly reminded me of the flat earth video and the NFT video, since people who didn't divest from GME when it started to plummet kind of ended up falling up in between the conspiratorially-minded flat earthers and other groups from the flat earth video, and the "I'm gonna get rich as hell, I just need to get someone to buy this bag I've been holding once it skyrockets in value, everyone but me is a sucker" mentality of the cryptobros from the NFT video.
That's a great way to put it, the series is basically: - In Search of the Flat Earth - That Time Geocentrists Tricked A Bunch of Physicists - Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs - The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse - This is Financial Advice This last video really ties up all the conspiracy theories, end-of-the-world beliefs, and hyper-capitalist ideas from the previous videos.
"I don't believe those government snakes, they are corrupt and don't play by the rules" and "The US government will play by these exact rules and give us billions of dollars" are fascinating beliefs to coexist in someone's head.
@@pobbityboppity1110 I remember reading a story about "GM Island" in World of Warcraft(?), where the story was that if you managed to find a way over there you'd be crowned an honorary GM. Instead of, you know, suspending or banning you on the spot for hacking or otherwise exploiting to get to where you aren't supposed to be. Like imagine sneaking backstage at a concert and the band just goes "Well, I guess you're a new member now."
@@Shadewaltz Wasn't the "sneak into the backstage at a concert; gets to play with the rest of the band" a common plot point in 80's and 90's cartoons and sitcoms? Heck! That's pretty much the climax in A Goofy Movie. In other words; they engage with the world using cartoon logic.
Our former friend who we lost because he went HARD in the paint for conspiracy thinking would often say "I can hold two ideas in my head at once" with an imperious air that implied that our brains were somehow weaker for being "incapable" of ignoring cognitive dissonance. Not only are those two ideas contradictory, but many of them seem oddly proud of that.
2:04:50 I love how "don't put all your eggs in one basket" gets interpreted by apes as "put all your eggs in one basket, plus this second basket which we believe will soon merge with the first basket, thereby becoming the same, singular basket. With all your eggs in it." For a group that claims to be good at interpreting secret messages, they are just consistently, astonishingly bad at reading the plaintext.
That's because the plaintext isn't telling them what they want to hear. If they took the text at face-value, it basically reveals that they a) have no idea what they're talking about, b) all of their theories and delusions are wrong and c) they are wasting all their time and money on a fantasy get-rich-quick scheme that would ultimately lead them to ruin. The only reason that secret messages 'exist' because it's easier to believe that there's a hidden truth than it is to admit that you don't understand and/or you've been played for a sucker. The line can only go up.
The congressional hearing bit at 1:10:11 is chilling. My first thought was 'Huh, Keith is referencing ape terminology and memes, even under oath before congress. Maybe he really was part of this movement.' Then I realized I had it backwards. He wasn't referencing ape stuff, every word of this testimony was picked apart and adopted by the apes afterwards. This one brief clip spawned multiple in-jokes/shibboleths/signifiers that still persist today, this testimony is something of a holy scripture. I think he made the right choice to disappear from the internet. Being a cult leader comes with severe occupational hazards.
You said "being a cult leader comes with severe occupational hazards" and now I kind of want to see OSHA guidelines for being a cult leader. "What YOU need to know to run your cult safely!"
This isn't entirely the case. I was an onlooker to these communities at the time (luckily I had no spare money to invest or I would probably have lost it) and I can say phrases like "I like the stock" were already existing memes in the community. He was aware of the audience he had and played to them quite well.
@@tevanchinsangaram6467 "I like the stock" is also an extremely generic phrase and taking it as "ape terminology" is talking about conspiracies a little bit too ironically.
"WE will have infinite money" and "you can't save everyone from a 9-5 job" are really perplexing thoughts to have in the same sentence as "we will collapse the world economy."
"We" in this case doesn't mean the proletariat. It means "we the speculators." (Of Crypto, NFTs or third thing) They expect the masses to suffer while they will ascend into Yacht Heaven.
It makes sense when you remember that neoliberal, corporate capitalism is just a _given_ to these people. The core assumptions of the system are not questioned at all. That’s what makes this so sad.
That gamer section was so sad. I cannot stress this enough: Video games are DESIGNED to let you win (regardless of how difficult that win was). Real life? Not at all.
Even worse - there’s a specific goal in games that definitely MEANS winning. Life doesn’t really have an END, much less a WINNING END (in the sense of how life as a collective experience, doesn’t have an end - even as individuals die, more individuals are born, etc)
@@phastinemoon I mean, yes, but it could be argued that Jeff Bezos has won capitalism in a very real sense. He has managed to set up a system where he can essentially levy taxes on other party's transactions. A huge part of the retail industry is basically paying rent to him which is absolutely insane.
@@CC3GROUNDZERO yes, he 'won' a single arbitrary system which grants him a cheat code to many other systems (money), but in the end, he still has a good several decades to figure out if that was enough. Just knowing the fact he's a billionare is going to tell me that it's probably not enough.
It's a bit semantic but rather than designed to "let" you win, I'd say that they're designed to be winnable. Or even if there's no "win" there's a goal that can be completed by at least someone, given enough skill. And ofc as you said, this does not exist in real life
fun easter egg: at the start of Line Goes Up dan uses an analogy comparing the banks of the '08 crash to rotten trees so big that when they fell they'd take all their neighbors with them at the start of this video, he is filming standing in front of a dead tree fallen over in an empty field lol
oh yea thats a really good catch! I never thought of him standing in front of the dead tree in the beginning with any symbolic meanings And, in a lot of ways, its absolutely true. The dead trees of 2008 are STILL wrecking havoc on the world we live in. Still "thrashing" our economy as a whole. Apes are a good example of this. Everything goes back to 08 (really if you think about it, everything goes back to Reagan but I digress)
The superstonks subreddit tried to "debunk" this video and it was just a list of really unconvincing character assassination attempts against Dan and pedantry about specific word definitions, there was no attempt to address the core of any points or arguements that were raised in this video.
@@KrankuSama I think he really, desperately needs the attention he gets from these replies. My guess is that the people in his life largely stopped talking to him when he fell down the ape rabbit hole.
@@GSDKXV I am once again asking if you have anyone in your life, anyone at all, who you can talk to? Like I'm actually scared you've gotten so sucked into the cult you've isolated yourself and you don't have any positive real world influences to keep you grounded. I hope there's someone out there who is worried about you and will eventually try and get you in touch with like, a cult victim support group, because I genuinely think you might need it.
"They're sitting around a blackjack table convincing each other that there's a secret rule, that if you hit 31 then the dealer has to give you their entire tray. So hit me, hit me, hit me, hit me." That closure was stone cold...
I really like the "aiming for 31 in blackjack" comparison at the end. Knowing that to get that number, youd already have to be at or over 21, and still asking the dealer for more. And when the other players at the table see your hand, they all realize, "this person doesn't know the rules of this game."
My understanding of BlackJack is that you get 21 or the closest number to it that's below at the table -- any if you go OVER, that's a bust and the dealer takes your cards.
@@phastinemoon You'd be correct, that's why you almost never hit on anything over 15 because your odds of busting increases exponentially (depending on previous draws and how many decks are in play of course, but I digress). The metaphor works great because if you're trying to get a 31 in Blackjack, it means that you're an idiot who tossed away a perfectly good win for a vague 'more' that ends in you losing due to not understanding how the game actually works.
i think my favorite part about moass is that they think wallstreet and the government are insanely corrupt, but once they expose that corruptness every branch of it is just gonna go "ah ggs, you did it, well done. heres literally an infinite amount of money"
That's something of a trend you'll see with conspiracies. From how I've heard people describe it, it seems like it comes down to an instinctive want to simplify wide reaching problems that are usually pretty complex and unclear into something with a very specific solution. Having a set enemy and a set path to victory helps people avoid having to think about how messy modern society tends to be a lot of the time. As something of an unavoidable result of that kind of thinking, the solutions for the problems they envision, and the proof of those problems existing inevitably tend to be somewhat infantile.
Yes and they're doing it in plain sight ! On reddit ! Like government agencies don't have an eye on them. If moass could happen the authorities would use other means much more powerful instead of supposed shorts like apes believe.
@@DarkLolification I am genuinely curious if anyone's gotten a good-faith answer from apes as to why A) none of the people with more money than all the apes have put together has exploited this to become a trillionaire and B) why they think the rules would still apply when doing so would threaten the entire economy, especially given, y'know, history. Not curious enough to go reading ape forums though, and the ones that come here aren't exactly bringing their A-game.
I gotta say, centering the critical text (IE-price is fake) while swapping through posts at rapid speed is a nifty visual effect. Hats off to whoever thought to use that.
Agree as well, was a super cool effect. Like Dan mentions, it's just bizarre to me how these "do your own research" conspiracy types love to repeat specific phrases verbatim, like some kind of mantra. Flat earthers, covid deniers, etc
I feel like this is the perfect summation of Dan’s clear long-term involvement in Internet culture. It reminded me first and foremost of the old YTMND trend of “Lindsay Lohan never changes facial expressions”, where they made a rapid-fire GIF of publicity photos of LL aligned so her face was always in the same space and at the same scale. Here the same idea was implemented with text instead of a celebrity’s face.
This is going to get lost in a sea of thousands of comments for sure but like. This is all so surreal to me because I'm a normal ass employee of AMC theatres and we did a promo event where stock holders got NFTs for buying tickets or whatever, and the theater was sold out online only for three people to show up. Literally, hundreds of tickets scooped up in seconds by grifters, while some of the most annoyingly earnest ancaps of all time came to an empty mall movie theatre to watch the new kinda bad jurrassic park movie. And when I think of apes and this movement, I think of those three people- who eagerly held onto the stock of a dying company to arrive at an empty theatre that was claimed to be sold out, with every empty chair representing the work of a grifter who saw a chance to sell back to all the other earnest people who wanted a cut.
@andyes4556 - What happened when the three people showed up? How did they act/take it? And, were you guys (as the employees) aware something like that might end up happening, or was it a total surprise on the day? Sounds like such a crazy experience!
@@novalinnhe the managers definitely let us know beforehand that the theatre was supposed to be sold out, so they told everyone to prepare for the worst because they're not as internet savvy and didn't really know about the empty crypto bubble thing. so we were fully staffed, fully doom prepared and then- nothing. the three people showed up, and they honestly weren't all that rude at the employees- they just seemed genuinely surprised. a guy was like "wow, this was it? i thought there was supposed to be more people" and he walked into the theatre with a bucket full of popcorn even though he was watching in real time as the movement had left him behind. a girl came up to the front desk a couple days later insisting that amc was running a different crypto/nft thing because she saw it on twitter, and the employees had to tell her we didn't know a thing about it. and i think the thing these people didn't want to know is that not only do we not get told anything about amc social media trying to lean into it expecting a larger demographic, but that we don't care. amc made more money appealing to swifties than it ever did trying to appeal to apes which. yeah theres not much else to say is there
It seems like they're talking about the money they'd need to divorce their current wife, then attract and marry a trophy wife. These are two acts that are individually normal in our current society, which either makes the MOASS folks less bad or society's relationship to traditional marriage worse, depending on your perspective.
Wait I thought they meant wife changing as in "my wife will change their mind about my investments being stupid once I get rich". Are they referring to actually divorcing their wives and finding someone else?
I've watched this video quite a few times and every time the "Words mean things to an autist" section makes me want to shed my skin and become a giant cockroach to avoid being associated with the person who wrote that
that part makes me want to become a cockroach as well because it's just. confusing? autistic people tend to be literal thinkers, one of the MAIN SIGNS OF AUTISM is a lack of reading between the lines. that post just confuses me so much, it makes no sense to me
My personal favorite part of their fundamental thesis is: "the big bad system that is apparently ignoring every rule in the book (to a cartoonish degree) to screw over 'the little guy' will just give up and give us every single dollar in the entire global economy". And why? Because "thats just how it works"
Well, yeah, those people are in fact fae creatures and must comply when bested at their game! They also must give you their gold if you answer their riddles and/or find it at the end of the rainbow. This is sarcasm.
I should go look up if Apes have an answer to this, actually I probably shouldn't. But I am curious, it's been years, surely someone has asked 'so what stops the government from just killing us if it gets that far?' That person was probably banned 12 seconds later for FUD, but I'm devilishly curious to know what the answer would be.
Brain dead take. Surprising from a bear. The buy button was turned off because the retail investor found an exploit to their corrupt scheme of illegal naked short selling. If you DRS GME and refuse to sell, then those short sellers no longer can use those shares to close out their positions. And according to the quarterly report, we’re already 75+ million shares on the way there.
@@GSDKXVtwo companies paused buying due to liquidity issues, but people could absolutely still buy GME from literally anywhere else. The 'turned off the buy button' narrative only works if you pretend that they paused buying of GME across the entire stock market, which is just ludicrous. Apes were simply inexperienced and/or incompetent enough to be stopped by one single hurdle. And Apes have only managed to DRS maybe a quarter of all shares, so.....
For anyone having trouble understanding a short sale, here is an example: You borrow 100 shares of a stock from somebody. You must give 100 shares back to them in one month. You immediately sell their stock at the current market price of $10 per share. Now you have $1,000. For the next month, the price of the stock goes down. At the end of the month, the stock is only worth $3. You owe that guy the 100 shares you borrowed, so you buy 100 shares at the current market value of $3 each. You spend $300 and you give that guy his 100 shares back. You profited $700 due to the stock price decreasing.
I've gone my whole life not understanding what short selling is and just resigned to thinking of it as "shady thing stock people do". This is the explanation I needed.
Good explanation. What would make it complete is to explain why the owner of the stock would lend it out. In your example, the lender lost $700 in stock value. Because the lender did not possess the shares, they could not sell while the shares were losing value. Because of this risk of loss, the lender will demand to be paid fees to compensate. In the movie "The Big Short," these fees are why Burry and all the other short sellers are panicking at the climax of the movie. The fees are eating away at their portfolios, and there is no sign that any of the securities they are shorting will drop in price in time before they go broke.
also explains why those companies collapsed during the GME short. if they borrowed millions of shares at 5 bucks a pop, but then had to pay back 500 bucks per share, they'd immediately collapse. shorts seem like the surest thing if you know of the impending doom of a company, but if something like GME happens, you can lose infinite money. it's insane.
@@JohnnyAdroitAs an addition to this, one of the main reasons why they lend their stock is that the holder has a longer timeframe. If you're holding an investment for 5 years, how do you make money in the short term? You could wait and just receive dividends (though many companies do not give dividends and instead spend that money growing). But what if someone comes by and offers you money to borrow your stock for a month? You were holding for 5 years, so you aren't affected by a small monthly dip. Though there is an issue if the stock plummets, that is pretty unlikely.
@@JM_-ix7yh haha yeah I hear that. What you have to understand is that conspiracy theorists are just people who believe a crackpot scheme. They wanted it to be true so they came into the store to get evidence. I doubt I convinced them, but who knows?
@@Blakbox92 you know? That's a great question lmfao Honestly, that was one of the worse jobs I've ever had, not in small part because of people like that. It's not hard to imagine that they had an argument with someone about their 'investment' and came to the store to get some reassurance. When I said "lol nope" to them I doubt it helped them feel better about their spending habits. I just hope that I don't hear about Ape holdouts in 10 years talking about FUD and how there used to be a GameStop in this town.
@@Blakbox92obviously the ceo personally told the employees about the merger and to only tell the real info to the shareholders. The apes have cracked the code again!!
Coming back to this video, the intro totally reminded me -- The absolute irony that someone is sighting their long-term Runescape experience as a sign of expertise is palpable. Runescape used to be littered with "merch" clans, that would invite you to a chat channel and give you instructions on an item to buy on the Grand Exchange (the in-game mass player market) at what price and then when to sell it. Naturally, this was to artificially raise the price of some niche item that the insiders were holding onto, so that they could then sell off their stash when the price got outrageous and they'd turn a massive profit. If this sounds familiar to you, the first time I'd ever heard of a pump and dump scheme I immediately said "Oh you mean like a Runescape merch clan??"
@@GSDKXV The one that cites falling revenue and tries to cut costs, most of which were necessary to long term stability, to offset it? Quarterly reports are how the finance sector has inadvertently tricked other industries into destroying long term value in the first place...
"I'm smarter than everyone else and therefore can game the system" and "Everyone already agrees with me on this because this stuff is just common sense" is a WILD pair of things to believe simultaneously.
somehow "I'm actually dumb as rocks and need someone to explain to me what i should be doing with my money next" seems to be mixed in there as well ...
It falls perfectly in line with the conspiratorial mindset of "if you can't find any proof to support the theory, that's proof that it's actually true."
Tbf, usually it's more along the lines of "Everyone *reasonable* already agrees with me on this because it's common sense", which lets them readily discard anyone who doesn't agree as unimportant.
I'm so grateful for this. I've been questioning my own sanity for the past 3 years witnessing my husband fall down this rabbit hole. I appreciate that the documentary mentions the gambling aspects and how it affects the ape's family and spouses. 😔
I'm sorry you have to go through something like that. I hope he is or has gotten help for his addiction or at least gotten out of the conspiracy, and if not that you leave him for your safety.
I am so sorry. If he believes the 'wife changing money' part you should at least consider what could happen in your relationship. Please take care of yourself. Even if he's a nice man, nothing is worth your mental health and self esteem
I like how Keith Gill's videos just show this soft-spoken, educated, respectful guy, who just agreed that a single stock was undervalued. Just the most agreeable, sensible person in the entire video, and yet these absolute lunatics think he's their cult leader.
@@SammaS423I don’t think being worshipped by lunatics disconnected from reality counts as “upwards”. And I think Keith would agree given how he handled that.
The guy gave a pretty convincing and respectable speech in front of Congress, those damn dirty apes didn’t deserve him and frankly are slandering him by association lol
“Despite its reputation, finance, as a subject, is in fact something that you, a layperson, can learn. It is a lot less impenetrable than it seems; Wall Street is awash with B-minus students who wrapped their heads around it. You can too.” One of the most unexpectedly reassuring things I’ve heard in quite some time, and I felt pretty comfortable with my understanding of the subject already. 😂 Thanks, Dan!
It's reassuring, since it means even idiots like me can influence and control the global market. It's also horrifying, since it means that many idiots are indeed currently influencing and controlling the global market. And some of them are billionaires.
It is very important to note that, yes, while most systems you interact with on a daily basis are going to be byzantine nightmare constructs of historical laziness, absolute lack of care about people who might find it hard to use them, and pure laziness, they _can_ be navigated. Dan will be accused of trying to muddy the waters by pretending the subject matter is more complex than it is anyway. A grating contradiction about the conspiratorially minded folks, is that the theories must simultaneously be overly complex, because only then can they pretend to be experts and dazzle those even less intelligent than them, but they also must be as simplistic as possible in order to sound realistic to the same people.
He’s got such a strong dad energy you never want the disappointed-dad vibe to be pointed at you but anytime he says anything like “you can do it” it makes you feel like your dad really believes in you
It's less about dazzling the supposedly less intelligent and more about dazzling themselves. It's how they convince themselves that they're super-experts who've cracked codes that have baffled even the actual experts. It's a delusional savior complex mixed with a hefty dose of the Dunning-Kruger effect. @@Arrakiz666
@@BARMN89 I've come to this video back a lot and there are a few sentences and situations I'm just completely baffled could manifest itself in the real world I'm inhabiting
@@KingCamilloSchnuffkin its wild too when you consider incel culture is convinced women do this exact same thing for the same reasons? That women only use men for their money. To think they would be self selecting "yes, i want to validate this negative view of women" is wild
@@BARMN89 Remember the cross-section of eugenics and biological essentialism in incel cultures. They don't consider that not validating that stereotype is even an option, it's a fact of the universe: women bad.
I'm still wondering if the meaning is "I will get a different wife" or "my wife's attitude will change" because I can't tell which is worse. Attitude sounds better at first until you realize it's about a gambling addiction / sunk cost fallacy cult.
It is distressing to watch 3 people hear "present: more than majority" and instantly, INSTANTLY just make up a different sentence that they heard. Like within seconds of hearing the sentence they have decided they heard a different sentence
what i find more interesting (i've seen people confabulate all kinds of nonsense on the spot, so it doesn't phase me as much anymore) is the one guy who kind-of sort-of tries to keep a level head and just lets the other two guide him out of reality and into a fantasy land that his brain is clearly telling him he should be more skeptical of seeing people who have lost the plot is one thing; it's another seeing those people use just the slightest social pressure to talk someone into joining them in the deepest possible end of the pool. it's watching radicalization happen in realtime and i'd almost bet that the other two folks had the same experience happen to them, so we're not just watching radicalization but the formation one of the pipelines
The one that really just confounded me was the guy who looked at the camera and said “let’s go see if Game Stop has any info”, talks AT the poor cashier, and then looks back at the camera saying “IT’S CONFIRMED the Game Stop employee told me so!!”
Y’know, I think the saddest thing about this whole mess is that these people don’t understand that even if they were 100% right (which they’re not), even if every single element fell into place just like they want, that the monied interests wouldn’t just play along. If something like the MOASS were to happen, they would freeze the markets, legislation would occur, the courts would go to work, and the status quo would be maintained. Capital doesn’t fight fair.
That is the most hilarious part to me, that these people think the US government would write them a check for 50 trillion dollars, and that somehow that money would be worth something afterwards
@@GSDKXVeven if youre right, which you arent, they would not give you the money. at best they would legislate to prevent any wealth transfer and at worst you and anyone else trying to recruit more shmucks would be imprisoned for market manipulation
Honestly the part where you said "they don't hate wall street, they're tsundere for wall street" made laugh out loud, another magnificent documentary here Dan, bravo.
I think a big part of this phenomenon is that were facing a crisis in medial literacy these days. People struggle to understand that real businessmen are boring functionaries who won't communicate to the public in general, let alone communicate in a series of hidden messages through tweets and unrelated children's books. It's similar to how many people forget that serial killers are often just boring psychopaths that kill those they have personal grudges with or just when they think they can get away with it. There aren't a series of clues that must be solved. Things are often just boring, horrible, and effectively random.
Yeah, you've got millions of people who have only ever experienced politics, finance, or the legal system through Network TV Dramas. They have no idea what the real world actually looks like, so they can only take the fantasy version and try to work their way backwards from it.
unfortunately, that's a small part not a big one. Qanon is (was?) highly similar in its dynamics, and big enough to have large durable effects on the composition of frigging Congress, and wasn't about finance at all.
April 18th, 2024: I just met an ape in the wild on Reddit. I assumed this whole thing had fallen apart, maybe even years ago, but apparently it's still going. GME is down to $10.30 as of right now, so I wonder how that's going for them 💀
2:27:06 "No one deserves to be exploited like this. No one deserves to get shaken down by grifters to the point that they have no other choice but to become grifters themselves and shake down everyone else around them. No one deserves to have their ego and security ground down to the point that there's no escape, no reason to step back and admit defeat, no reason to reflect." Just leaving this out so it doesn't get lost in the noise. I would pay money to put this quote on a billboard.
It's the same logic as abusers being often people who suffered abuse themselves. It's important to remember to humanize these people not because they are innocent but because we shouldn't ignore the reality that they are also victims.
@@baguettegott3409A tsundere is a character whose inner sweetness (usually romantic feelings) is masked behind a rude, unfriendly facade. This archetype usually shows up specifically in romance anime, or at least romance plots.
I find myself rewatching this video every couple of months because it's so captivating and entertaining. One of the little bits that always seems to fascinate me is Dan saying, "Next Slide" during the DFV section, as if the video suddenly became a criminal profile presentation at some unmarked FBI building. Practically speaking, it makes no sense. It's a youtube video, no one is controlling slides, but it helped me recognize that several of the sections feature their own little motifs that help present the information in entertaining ways. It's a bit of film making I don't think I appreciated or even considered before. Thanks Dan
He expanded upon this even more in the James Rolfe video; if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it, it's basically an art film that happens to contain a video essay
I mean, let's be honest... you guys wanted everyone fired and forced to stay home for years. Until whenever Fauci said it was okay to work and earn a living again to feed your family. The left has 0 principles they stand by when the chips are down
@@esmeecampbell7396plenty of people do not want to be the ones wearing the boot, but would rather the boot didn't exist. If you think everyone wants to wear the boot, that says more about you.
Something that Dan is understating here is just how fucking out of hand these people got over this. The guy asking the gamestop employee about the bed bath merger, Kais Maalej, aggressively trespassed, doxxed, and stalked his way into tons of extremely disturbing situations, including impersonating Ryan Cohen in a call to his family's OBGYN to sus out the due date of his unborn child.
@@GSDKXVmy brother in Christ can you at least admit that Kais' behavior on a personal level is fucking inexcusable. Forget the stocks for a second. He tried to impersonate someone to get information about his wife's pregnancy. Edit: lol, dude deleted his reply here to spread his nonsense in other comment chains. Coward.
@@aethertag1530 No behavior is truly inexcusable when salvation is on the line. Kxv is frankly the truest believer I’d seen in all of my life. I mean, he _is_ insane. But he definitely is a true believer.
For context, he did this because Ryan Cohen tweeted a "The last time people were excited to see me" meme with a photo of an ultrasound. Kais interpreted this as a hint that the GME-BBBY merger would happen on the DOB of Cohen's kid, hence the call.
Pelosi: "My entire portfolio is in shambles. I'm broke!" McConnell: "Well that may be but we have a duty to make these Apes whole!" And that's how Republicans and Democrats came together to beknight the Apes as lords of our new benevolent economy, children.
1:22:15 This video just became unexpectedly sentimental to me. I don’t know why it took this long. But my dad used to play the stock market when I was a kid and he was pretty serious about it. I think he was making our family income from it for about a year before he died. I realized during this textbook reading section that there’s a good chance my dad read this text himself to learn how to sell stocks, and all of a sudden I feel a more direct connection to him. He died when I was a kid, so now as an adult some times I feel like I never really got to “know” him as a person. But this was like a weird little peek into the sort of stuff my dad was genuinely interested in from his day-to-day life. My dad was a pretty fucking intelligent guy. Thank you for this, Dan
Excellent as usual. I'm no econ major but I have found the old chestnut "do not listen to economic advice from a man wearing face paint" has helped me out in real life for the most part.
You wanna know the biggest mistake the hedgies made? They messed with knitters. KNITTERS. The same people who will sit in a rocking chair for HOURS ON END looping FABRIC with NEEDLES just to watch a SCARF FOR A FRIEND get SLIGHTLY LONGER, only stopping to SIP TEA or occasionally GENTLY PET A CAT. WE WILL NEVER BACK DOWN!!!!!
You joke but the International Olympic Committee did mess with the knitters and it did go extremely badly for them. Don't mess with people with time on their hands and infinite patience!
My personal observation about knitting is that apparently involves a lot of math and all the people who do it suck at math and hate it and will always complain about it. That's probably not true in general but just in my personal experience and I find it funny because I'm really good at math and love it so those people are always like "you should try knitting!".
as Dan said on Xitter, he deliberately delayed the release to match an important date; and that doesn't require a conspiracy, just a calendar and object permanence.
It feels like a lot of this comes from the 2008 crisis. It felt apocalyptic especially to younger people at the time and the ones fucked in the end weren't the banks or the investors, but ordinary people. So the mentally now is "when the next crisis happens, I want to be in and not out".
At 1:20 I just realized he's standing in front a dead tree. To quote Line Goes Up: "huge segments of the economy turn out to be dead trees, rotten to the core, but as a rotten tree falls it still shreds its neighbors and crushes anything below it." This time though, the tree is out in an open field, largely separate from the rest of the forest. The shrubs around it got crushed as it fell, but none of the other trees really cared. The choice of filming location feels too deliberate to just be me overanalyzing this, as much as so much of the problem for apes came from overanalyzing things.
I think Dan just enjoys filming in scenic locations But the dead tree is a nice metaphor for a dying company like Bed Bath shredding memestock investors in a field far away from the actual economy
I don’t think that’s overthinking, because Dan (who, remember, started the channel talking about film theory) is a fan of making in-jokes and references to his other videos for the sake of a joke (eg - “My copy of 50 Shades of Gray is strictly unique. Though many copies exist, this is the only copy that is This Copy - and it is the only copy with the specific damage of being glued shut and thrown into the Beau River.” * splash *)
Watching three adults hear "more than majority voting" and talk themselves into "more than issued voting" is one of the most distressing things I've ever seen, just sheer mental desperation to not have wasted their time and money to such a degree that they'll convince themselves that something they heard literally seconds ago was actually something else.
I want to make sure I'm understanding, they basically heard "more than 50% voting shares present for this vote" and thought/dreamed it meant "there's more than all possible voting shares present"?
That one hurt. "Sweet summer children, WHERE DID YOU THINK THE WORD MAJORITY CAME FROM IN THIS CONVERSATION IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IT WAS THE WORD USED!!!"
Imagine, being so mentally NPC that even your magical thinking is about mundane and boring things, which can lead to contrived and boring "end of the world as we know it" result. World of Bobby only he dreams about stonks.
Not as bad as some of the other stuff, like the recent BBBY shares being cancelled post-bankruptcy has apes like "It says share CANCELLATION, not DELETION, that's different somehow!"
@@fakenamerealchungus9851 I appreciate the response, doesn't explain the 150% move before he tweeted. Anyway it's still good to know the narrative being thrown around.
Thank you for explaining why someone who used to be one of my best friends in the world went literally insane and stole my car to drive it to a shareholder meeting in Texas in June of 2021.
I’m grateful that Dan decided to fill the niche of dissecting and explaining the cultural and psychological aspects of the financial and social anxiety of the online generation and the actual nonsense that’s coming out of it.
I knew for long that those in this absurdist game were quite insane. I did not realize the insanity ran so deep as to belive that shiny pieces of paper registered to themselves would mean a hill of beans in the event of an unforeseen forced financial collapse. If the economy as we know it were to collapse, they'd be the ones against the wall first, having a complete lack of valued skills and having assets that others will want. Shiny pieces of paper? Great, I can line my {purely hypothetical} falcon's cage with it before she scratches your face off, and then I'll take your bullets.
Exactly. There are good, important and relevant reasons behind the people who buy into Stonks cultic thinking, even as the actual beliefs they lead to are absolute nonsense.
Finding out that "wife-changing money" wasn't just a funny pronounciation Dan was doing for the past 2 hours was genuinely the most devastating plot twist I've experienced in years. How are these people real
Nowadays I'm not surprised by anything, young people are in depressing positions at an era where everything's rapidly changing. Lots of people are gonna do crazy things...
@@zaidlacksalastname4905 spoilers for two hours in, the phrase "wife changing money" is real and refers to how much they resent their spouses, often lying or obfuscating what their investment actually is worth and how much of the shared account they threw away. it's hard to tell, but either the phrase implies that the money will change their spouse's mind, or it will allow them to divorce their current spouse and marry a trophy wife
I love the fake out where he sounds like he's about to address it and then just never does, becomes self explanatory once he draws a picture of the characters involved
And it's coming back down already. Those morons bought MORE after it spiked because they thought it was MOASS. So this spike only lost them even more money in the long run 😂🤣 Worst investors in the history of the stock market
As always, your closing statements go hard. "They're sitting around a blackjack table, convincing each other that there's a secret rule. That if you hit 31, then the dealer has to give them their entire tray. So hit me. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me." Sums it up beautifully and really just nails the gambling connection while showing that its not really gambling when you've convinced yourself that losing is winning and winning is losing.
And took me a while to get in.. it is impossible to hit 31. 30 would be the highest possible number, when you hit on 20 get a 10. (One could argue if an ace would be 31.. but according to rules it counts as 1, so they would win the round on a 21... but not get their entire tray).
I think there's an interesting symbology too where the phrase 'hit me' could also have a masochistic side - these people are financially harming themselves and willingly (if unknowingly) begging to be exploited.
@@ronnickels5193 To go back to the idea of grinding, they are putting their own flesh between the millstones, and are hoping to turn their blood to gold.
I bought some GME right after the peak, lost about $200. Wasn't a big deal, I just saw it all over the news and had fomo about it. I was 22 in college at the time and getting a huge payout would have been life changing for me, but I also didn't have enough money to actually invest and take a huge financial hit. You calling these guys gambling addicts really stuck out to me. I know I have a very addictive personality. I also have the bad personality trait of thinking deep down that I'm "better" or "smarter" than qanon conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, relgious cults, etc. But damn, all it took was me knowing nothing about a subject and feeling left out to buy into this bullshit, even just half assed for just a few short months. I'm so glad I didn't have any actual money at the time to lose. This video was humbling to say the least lol
If you were 22 at the time of GME at peak, that means you're still pretty young in the grand scheme of things. You're at the right time of your life to really be understanding those aspects of your personality and getting that introspection, so honestly sounds like you're doing fine. Took a couple hundred bucks loss to learn a lesson that clearly a lot of people never learned and only kept on digging themselves in deeper. I think that's what really shows you'll be someone who actually learns and grows and understands their personal flaws and works to overcome them, opposed to apes who just bunker down and refuse to accept reality. It takes more strength to admit when you're wrong or beaten and pick yourself up and learn than it does to refuse to accept it.
Those are personality flaws, just realize they're pretty much 100% universal to humans. The addictiveness thing is on a spectrum so that's good to keep an eye on, but everyone's got weak spots to exploit, can be people pleasing, guilt, brain freeze during stress etc etc. When I was 21 I put $600 into some pyramide scheme "stocks" because the most stereotypical sleazy sales guy pitched it to me and some friends for like two hours. (I didn't know what pyramide schemes were back then... I knew I didn't feel like recruiting people to it however, but then he presented this wonderful opportunity to get in on their "stocks", and it seemed like, if there's a 1/100 chance it's not bull I should take it... lol). I'm now 41 and have managed to tie my shoes daily and not join any cults or get majorly scammed since. Can still happen, but, have hope 🙂
My sister told me that one of her friends "might be coming into some really serious money soon", and when I was like "oh?" she told me, "Yeah, he got in on Gamestop early on." Apparently he's promised to buy her a house.
My personal experience is that when people try to be coy about getting massive sums of money out-of-the-blue, there's never any and they've been scammed.
@@GSDKXV Funny how "over 2 billion in cash" became "over a billion in cash" Soon it'll be "only 1 billion in debt", and then "only chapter 11 bankruptcy"
Dan's videos this last year-and-a-half have been following the very real-life decisions of my younger brother pretty much step-by-step. He's getting deeper and deeper into debt after having invested in crypto, NFTs, Metaverse and GameStop. He's filled with self-righteous anger as he keeps committing to what he's convinced are ultra-clever business decisions meant to outsmart the system and beat the market. The only reason he could possible be losing money must be because the system is rigged against him and that the peoples in power are breaking the rules. It's all a conspiracy, and no one will listen to the truth. Family dinners are so much fun these days, believe you me.
My little brother started to 'think deeply' abut NFTs and crypto a few years back, but the saving grace was that he didn't have any money to spend on any NFTs in the first place.
@egodreas -- You have my sympathy. I have a friend likewise involved, though iirc perhaps not quite to the same depth as your brother. He isn't angry so much as perpetually (somewhat desperately) optimistic, and it hurts a little to get the latest updates from him. I've accepted that I cannot talk him out of his plans, but I still feel bad for him.
Even if the apes were right about literally everything and the MOASS arrived, their only reward would be a knife in the back as the rules magically changed in front of them, and there would be nothing they could do to stop it. For all of their baking and theorycrafting, they've already agreed to play someone else's game on someone else's field. Even if they truly have figured out how to hack the system, they're still forgetting the most important truth: the house always wins.
For me, the amazing thing is the conclusion that if a hypothetical collapse of the economy were to happen, old economy value would have any kind of value in the new economy, and they would get any kind of "compensation" for it
(Drums and trumpet fanfare) How lucky can one guy be (trumpets) I kissed her and she kissed me (trumpets) Like the fella once said "Ain't that a kick in the head?" (Trumpets)
They fail to realize that at the end of the day, systems are controlled by people and the banker is not an NPC that will let you use an infinite money exploit in front of him. Like if they are right and don't get disappeared by some mercenaries and they also don't get told "oh, you found a hedge fund was doing something illegal, guess we shut them down and then gamestop goes bankrupt because their value was all smoke" by a judge then their infinite money will end up being rejected by basically all of society, as the wealthy don't want to be beaten at their own game and everyone else won't suddenly bow down to a bunch of self-obsessed redditors who think they should rule the world. Like even if they managed to take control of the world economy, they don't have the social control to make everyone play along.
Someone please explain to me how this 2.5 hour RUclips documentary has become my comfort show that I watch in its entirely at least once every couple of days. I’m gonna be able to recite it from memory soon at this rate.
I was literally just thinking the same thing, I'm so glad I'm not alone. I have watched this video dozens and dozens of times. I can speak his words along with him now. There's just something really comforting/satisfying about it.
Legit came to drop a comment that I'm on my like 8th watch 😂 I already watched this twice last week, it's just so well-done and fascinating. Cheers fellow serial-watcher, enjoy your upcoming viewings!
Same! This video is on my list of many of Dan's vids that I comfort-rewatch. I think at least partly it's because of how hilarious I find his deadpan, straight-faced sense of humor. :)
Damn dude y'all produced the hell out of this! Let me go get some popcorn. Edit: Oh no. I thought "wife changing money" was just a flub the first time it was said, but...it's something they actually say, isn't it? Please tell me it's not. It's not, is it? Edit 2: Oh no.
I would just like to credit you on the comedy of how you paced your response in the edits. (I apparently did the same in my running commentary when watching Good Omens, Season 2, Episode 6)
I feel so bad for that poor employee working at the GameStop and being questioned by the guy who's trying to convince him that they're going to merge with Bed, Bath & Beyond. He has such a voice of "I do not get paid enough to deal with this crap."
can confirm that as a current retail employee that that tone of voice is the one i give to customers who cant just get the fucking hint and keep trying to give advice to improve the store like my minimum wage paid ass has anything to do with how the place is run
If you think that’s bad, Kais Maalej (the guy in the video) has a whole channel full of videos of him standing outside random Bed Bath stores spouting nonsense, harassing employees. He even once tried to break into a Bed Bath warehouse to see if they still had stock coming in. He is genuinely mentally ill
For public facing positions like that, that's probably what he's been specifically told to do. I'm a volunteer at a Zoology Museum and if a creationist starts talking their talk we are supposed to just smile and nod.
And we got to watch the Dan Train cause total carnage as it plowed through NFTs, a bad crypto video game cosplaying as the Matrix, and ghost-written audiobook grifts along the way! I'm pleased Mr Olson has set himself up in such a socially responsible yet entertainingly informative niche. :)
Something I found interesting about the constant comparison to "The Big Short" was that the explicit point of the movie was even though the main characters had "beat the system", they were all miserable, realizing that "the system" dragged down everything around it as it failed. I guess the apes must have turned off the movie halfway through.
The movie doesn't even leave it to subtext; Brad Pitts rant about rising suicide rates coinciding with major recessions is what shuts those two mini-Hedge Fund dudes up when they wanted to celebrate the deal of their lives. The only guy who isn't emotionally affected by it all is Ryan Goslings character, and that guy was framed as a massive dick from the beginning.
@@Donnerbalken28 and yet, Ryan Gosling is hot and when he is emotinally disaffected it looks Cool and Powerful, the message is lost in that. He still Wins, if only for a while. Apes want to Win, they dont want things to be good.
Most conspiratorially minded individuals also have no media literacy, see The Matrix, American Psycho and obviously The Big Short. The original Matrix movies are used by far right misogynists who want to reinstate the patriarchy and repeal queer rights for LGBTQIA+ communities when the movies themselves were written by trans-women as a allogory for gender exploration and 'waking up' from the matrix of binary gender expression and heteronormativity, instead choosing to live in a shitty real world as yourself where the world itself is hostile and alien (eg homophobia and transphobia), rather than a fake world where you pretend to be okay with existing as a cog without identity (eg pretending to be straight or gender conforming). American Psycho is used as a ideal to aspire too, where Patrick Bateman is potrayed as a idol, when the movie was a critique on the overly macho male fantasy of financial, sexual and violent freedom, how Patrick Bateman was really a pathetic loser poser, where his 'murders' were most likely made up in his head out of frustration and inferiority, where the man literally enters a dick measuring contest using the font, cardstock and colour of buisness cards, the cards themselves being utterly worthless pieces of paper and cardboared yet Patrick cares so much about literal paper that he begins to shake and go crazy, illustrating the fragile masculinity and utter impotency of men like Patrick, grandstanding, macho, violent and sexual men, being utterly useless and incapable of doing anything (aside from picking on the weak and underprivileged who cannot and will not be defended by the system, people like the homeless man and dog, the 2 struggling sex workers, the only truly confirmed kills), and the writer of the book the movie was based on is literally a gay man, the antithesis of the 'macho' male Patrick Bateman that this new generation of 'Sigma' men look up to. I haven't watched the Big Short like the other 2, but I have seen the clip your talking about, and the point is literally yelled at the viewer, 'The system sucks! People die! Stop being so self centered and actually look around yourself!'. Honestly conservatives have like 0 brain cells in the literacy department, they hear whatever they want to hear and see what the want to see and thats it.
This reminds me of a joke from Clone High: "I saw the first two thirds of the MC Hammer 'Behind the Music', and if there's one thing I learned, it's that the money never runs out!"
Another irony is that apes say they HATE shorts. But of course they dont really, they only hate it when it affects their money. They were 100% fine with the people who shorted the banks in the movie.
"It feels like we're driving backwards really fast at a wall and just before we hit it, the secret level in ready player one is going to open up and let us pass by the entire race and win" oh god no, that is incredibly sad. I can't even make a joke. I just blurted "oh no" as soon as I heard it
when dan was reading it out i remember thinking "this has to be parody, no way someone would really say this, its his investor character and this is a silly sentence" and then he put the comment on screen (2:30:47 btw) and i think i said "oh my god" out loud and covered my face from the second-hand embarrassment.
The context of 1:09:54 makes it so obvious and so funny why he decided to distance himself from the apes. Imagine having to explain to the House Committee on Financial Services that no, it's not a conspiracy, there's no big plan, no scheme, you just genuinely felt exactly as you said you did... And then you have thousands of apes going "HERE'S ALL THE WAYS HE WAS TELLING US THAT HE WAS ALWAYS PLANNING FOR THIS TO HAPPEN"
It's just that bit from Life of Brian where he is desperately saying he isn't the messiah, only for the crowd to start cheering more. Hell, the movie even has a line of the crowd saying "yes, we are all individuals." in unison.
funny how many cybertruck owners don't realize you need to use alchol or gasoline to clean it and have rusted the cybertruck. car washes can also brick it
@@GSDKXVyou keep posting this, what do you expect people will get from that interview that relates to the video? It's not a secret that wall street is full of greedy assholes and idiots like Cramer, it doesn't mean everyone who thinks they're fighting against them is right
@@damien678hes never rly done a vid on qanon, just mentioned it adjacent to other topics. but also qanon being described as secular doesnt seem totally ridiculous to me, i do think particularly at its inception it was more of a secular conspiracy theory and then eventually satan became an intrinsic part of it
The reason that the Gamestop short squeeze was so powerful was because it was _unpredictable._ No one could possibly have seen it coming. That's what the Apes as they currently stand fail to grasp; they've become completely predictable in their behavior. Even if that behavior is irrational, the fact that it is _predictably_ irrational just makes it another market force to be accounted for, another number to plug into the calculation. As Dan says, the hedge funds have already figured out how to exploit them. While they concoct a dramatic narrative about how they are sticking it to The Man, The Man is laughing at them from behind a fake mustache as he collects their money in a little bin with "INVEST HERE TO FIGHT THE MAN" scribbled on it. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad (okay, it's still a _little_ funny)
The beginning and end of my knowledge of this whole subject prior to the video was that a hedge fund was planning to profit off of Gamestop's failure, and _somehow_ a bunch of Redditors exploded a movement to hold as many stocks as possible and start chanting "diamond hands", a few in it for potential gain, but most of them out of a sheer vengeance-fueled personal vendetta for the 2008 financial crisis. I had no idea it had exploded outwards into this utterly deluded cult of personality, but I guess it's not exactly surprising in retrospect.
What I find fascinating about cults like these, is the idea that there's no one pulling the strings, no charismatic leader telling them what to do, and just form almost by accident, like its members are brainwashing themselves and each other. And the fact that then they start looking for one, even if he doesn't want anything to do with the cult.
Groups like this "electing" a leader figure is a phenomenon that I think has a lot to do with how the internet and social media algorithms work, specifically. Ian Danskin talks about this a bit in his video on the Alt-Right functioning like a cult.
This is such a valuable lesson to carry around society in general, and why things are the way they are. So many human made issues we have are propelled by social forces, but those forces can’t often be fully directed by individuals. Grifters just stick their straws in milkshakes that are already flowing.
Reminds me of incel communities, how they drag each-other down with them, which just results in a bunch of people constantly convincing each-other that everything is hopeless. Not quite as miserable here, but probably equally as dangerous
For a second I was worried, I haven't seen a comment from my favourite obsessed ape kvx210 saying random stuff about GME or other related (or unrelated) things. But they returned and posted a comment about an hour ago. Nature is healing
Oh, I bet you're gonna see him posting up a storm in the next few days, I imagine. GME is about to post their most profitable quarter in 6-9 years, and apes are gonna be riding high. Mind you, it's already trading higher than it ever did in the 2010s, when revenue was almost TWICE what it is now. They still will take some victory laps, for surely MOASS must follow, right?
Wow, GME revenue is cratering! Dang, I wish I hadn't bought those options right now. Come on apes! Defy all logic and reason! The company posted a tiny profit for the year, get excited and save my gamble, lol.
@@mac4974 Okay, so maybe you were right and it wasn't quite the bloodbath I thought it would be; especially with Game Informer becoming a separate, "You never have to walk into Gamestop" publication. A desperate and interesting move, but we'll see if they manage to move enough units.
The part where he asks the gamestop employee if he knows who Ryan Cohen only for the employee to say no and he becomes incredulous that he doesn't know who he is just because he is working at gamestop is terminally online syndrome.
Because 15 year old minimum wage employees are privy to all their employer's secrets and will be happy to tell you about any global financial conspiracies they are involved in.
@@lauriepenner350 ngl, if I was a 15 year old min wage employee and I actually did know about a global conspiracy, I 100% would off hand mention it to customers as if everyone knew it and refuse to elaborate. I think that'd be funny.
The mind-bending part of the video is at 1:02:08 where they read "present: more than majority of all shares" (if I understand it correctly, an acknowledgement that more than 50% + 1 of all shares have voted) and TALK THEMSELVES INTO BELIEVING they heard that the company just casually announced that more votes have been received than shares exist.
You can tell more than a few people there knew what it really meant but just couldn't bring themselves to break the illusion. They'd rather believe the lie.
I suspect it was not that they voted, but that they were "present" at the meeting. Corporations tend to use meeting rules that require there to be a certain minimum number of shares represented at the meeting (a "quorum") before they can vote on business. But your bigger point is absolutely right, "more than a majority" is 50% plus one, noit more than 100%.
One of them was like "yeah but more than majority that means 50%+ right?" and then another immediately jumped in with "no they said more votes than outstanding shares", fucking reality warp
More than anything that one post about autism got me because it's quite literally the exact opposite of the truth - anybody who actually knows an autistic person could tell you that one of the most basic things you can do to be courteous to them is be direct and non-cryptic when communicating.
I can sorta see where that sentiment could arise from as a frustation with society's general refusion to be even the least bit accessible to autistic people you just completely reject neurotypical ideas of communication and assert your own as correct. Basically getting frustrated because one too many English teachers insisted that the curtains being blue has an obvious meaning without ever explaining the concept of a metaphor.
A lot of these people seem incredibly self-centered. I'm guessing that person thought all other autistic people think exactly like them without checking. A community that obsessed with secret meanings would probably draw in people who like that kind of thing.
@@henryokeeffe5835 I think what they meant is that autistic people sometimes have trouble expressing themselves, or are fully nonverbal, and these autistic people rely on more indirect ways of communicating. Like, instead of saying "I love you," I'll go up to someone and lean against them until they take the hint. But yeah, this person seems to be projecting their personal experiences.
@@koboldcatgirl Nah. That fella straight up said that us autistic peeps are masters of code. We. We really arent. I had to teach myself to understand sarcasm and I still need to ask if someone made a joke or not. Though I can concur we have our own ways of communicating, code is NOT one of them
I swear the first couple times I watched this video I was sure the guy with the blue face paint was one of Dan's RUclipsr friends mucking it up. I laughed SO HARD when I realized it was an actual guy being DEAD SERIOUS
I often expect to learn a lot of things from a Dan Olson video. Learning why half my tenure as a service representative of Chewy sucked so hard is not something I expected.
How can someone be self-aware enough to realize their trading strategy is "driving backwards really fast at a wall", but delusional enough to think the secret level in Ready Player One will open up and save them from financially ruining themselves?????
Because they're already in the car and are headed towards a wall. There's a saying. If you're falling, you may as well try to fly; you've got nothing to lose. The problem is that the delusion they've picked is one where, in order for the ground to open up, they *must* drive *faster* towards that wall. And that they must convince others to start doing the same.
@iuffcgpuu I don't think you can make sense of a non-nonsensical comment by breaking it down. Whatever sense you do find by doing so is coincidental. In actuality, it's 100% delusion.
I think another aspect is that Apes think they are the protagonists of reality, and our society has brought them up largely fostering that. Everyone's the hero of their own story, they just take it to an uncommon but not unprecedented extreme. See also "Every other generation of human beings that has ever lived has died, but we will not; Jesus is coming back to get us before we die, because we are the most special people that have ever lived."
I still think my favorite part about this MOASS conspiracy is that, even if they managed to get the share price to hundreds of millions of dollars, and even if they were able to get all of the money they were then theoretically owed without legal consequences, the value of the money they'd receive would be functionally worthless due to the apocalyptic amount of inflation necessary to produce that amount of money. So not only is the likelihood of the outcome they look for basically impossible, but if it did somehow work they'd still be screwed.
I think some of them were, indeed, short-sighted, but a good deal of the reasoning was less about gain, but the opposite, about sacrifice. Like people who believe the only way to revolution is to kill and die your way out of the status quo, these shills probably DEEPLY believe their literal economial death is worth destroying the capital status. Still short-sighted, though. I can't say I don't get it, because I do (I am more or less punkish and maybe anarchist in SOME aspects), but the status quo is hard to break even in the event of wars because it requires a lot of forethought and planning to effectively patch the holes. And we DO NOT have anything better than monarchies, communism, capitalism or anarchism. We only have human systems with human flaws that will always fail.
“The value of the money is functionally worthless” it’s almost as if the concept of an amount of stuff doesn’t have an objective worth outside of “our wet little meat brains know what 1 and 10 and 0 are intuitively, and unlike other animals who just know how to use math tangibly to do animal stuff, we’re sapient and can abstract math into theory and experiment. The human experience is a species that can compose formulas that express the ways reality builds itself got so absolutely fucked up over “one” “one what” “yes”
The clip of that guy going into a gamestop and telling a random employee about his conspiracy theory is funny to me because I had so many people do stuff like that to me when I worked retail and I can very much hear in the employee's tone the sentiment of "just smile and nod and he'll go away"
You are slow. The shorts only need one thing to happen to win: bankruptcy for GME. Anyone with 2 brain cells can read their 10-Q on their investor relations website and see how healthy their balance sheet is.
Yeeeep.... same, same. Even simple (store mandatory) greetings to them become invitations for customers to open their mouths and spill their crazy out on you, and you just can't end the transaction fast enough no matter how quickly you move.
I'm happy Dan got to write off a Vegas vacation on the grounds that it served as background metaphor to the larger story he was trying to tell! Now THAT'S how you grift the system!
To be fair, you only get to write off part of the Vegas vacation, based on a bunch of rules that boil down to "The portion of your vacation expenses that were used for business purposes can be counted as a business expense". So, if he had to pay those two showgirls to pose with him for the video, that part is 100% a business expense. If he spent half of his time doing video stuff and half of his time doing fun stuff, that's a good basis for counting 50% of his transport costs as a business expense. If he used the hotel both as a filming location and as a place to sleep...well, that's a bit fuzzier. *This isn't financial advice,* but if you have a reasonable justification for whatever number you pick, you'll probably be fine. You'll need more rigor if you're doing other things that might catch an auditor's eye, though, especially if your business expenses are suspiciously high relative to your business income. (I am a professional tax preparer, writing in my capacity as someone who wants people to make more accurate tax jokes.)
@@timothymcleanyeah, also like, I'm sure he can afford popping down to Vegas for a weekend or whatever to record stuff. He's got solid patreon $ and ik Line Goes Up definitely raked in a good amount of money (deservedly). I'm glad to see Dan reinvesting his $ into the production value of these videos, bc it's really paying off.
@@timothymclean If it makes you feel better, I'd love to read tax comedy by a tax expert. Probably a dry as a saltine cracker, but people also like British comedy.
@@timothymclean Quick question on this line: "If he used the hotel both as a filming location and as a place to sleep...well, that's a bit fuzzier." Is the cost of lodging not normally considered part of the business expenses? Is the issue the nature of where he's lodging-like him using an overly expensive hotel for the shoot is understandable, but using it as the place of lodging when cheaper options were available is a thing one should avoid? Like, this isn't meant as some kind of loaded question; I literally don't know and the line just got me curious about why it's potentially fuzzy.
Right around 1:02:00 just kills me every time. The dude says, emphatically, that the number of voting shareholders present at the meeting is "more than a majority [of actual shares]" *AND THEN REPEATS HIMSELF* yet everyone else on the call starts whipping themselves into a frenzy because they somehow interpret this as meaning the number of votes is greater than the outstanding share count. Like??? what the fuck????? how is it even possible to come to that conclusion? it's not as if this is some retconning, you heard the guy telling you "more than majority" less than 6 seconds earlier and somehow it's already gone through 8 different iterations like a game of Telephone to end up with this garbled mess. They clearly were waiting to hear that the number of votes was more than the number of outstanding shares and collectively none of them stopped to consider that the information they just received was anything other than that result. Truly astounding.
I thought I was losing my mind when he played that clip and they started freaking out about how it proved something. They were so cock-sure about how it proved there were more shares than there should be, that I actually doubted what I heard for a second.
One of them even asked if he said what he actually said because it wouldn't mean what they want, and the others reassured him that the speaker didn't say what he actually said so their conspiracy won.
On my second viewing I stumbled over something around 36:50. "If you follow this marrative, hedge funds were so greedy that they created a powder keg that allows apes to make unfathomable amounts of money, yet noone at wall street is greedy enough to exploit that". What this misses is that traders in other countries with no connection to wall street hedge funds, and indeed adversarial nations could do the same. According to this conspiracy theory, any nation with a few billion USD to spare could utterly cripple the US financial system at any time. This alone should make anyone a but skeptical about the theory.
Thanks for bringing that up! I know there's Muricans that believe everything outside USA is either a tourist attraction or the first 10 turns of Sid Meier's Civilization (they post in social sites, one claimed Jesus Christ was American) so them not realizing foreign rich folk weren't trying to make millions the same way they're 'going to' should have been a red flag...
Wow, I've watched this video so many times and I've not thought of that! Yeah, take Russia pre 2022 and even a bit later. It accumulated a large war chest from oil and gas revenue which it planned to use on Ukraine. If apes were true, a person like Putin could just use some of that war chest to make the US collapse before launching the invasion. Insanity.
Bloody hell fucking china already is sabotaging the digital market with their public companies and the cybercrime oficials, they would have done this the nanosecond it becomes real.
To me, the most unfortunately revealing thing about the "they picked a fight with us gamers" stuff at the beginning is what they believe their most valuable transferable skills are for this situation. They don't brag about being clever enough to create strategies, react to changing circumstances, capitalize on blink-and-you'll-miss-it opportunities, misdirect opponents, or see through opposing bluffs; they brag about stubbornly performing rote tasks in MMOs for minimal incremental gains. It's little wonder that they end up outmaneuvered by pretty much everyone when their gameplan is on the level of an autogrinding macro designed to exploit a bug that was patched seventeen updates ago.
@@GSDKXVI’m no financial expert, but I think it’s because of the chance you could succeed, like gambling, except you can somewhat predict what your best bet is going to be.
@@GSDKXV Insofar as the stock market is supposed to follow the general trend of growth in a market, it is in fact 'designed' for people to succeed. With a reasonable strategy and good knowledge, you can perform just as well as or considerably better than the market. The apes... do not have a reasonable strategy or good knowledge.
if someone asked me to imagine the worst, least functional government possible, I think "plutocracy, but it's run by runescape players" would probably be in the top 5
Oh, so you've seen his Decentraland Video?
@@XanthinZardahow could you say the "We held a vote on whether or not politics are allowed in our governance system and decided that politics will not be allowed unless a future democratic vote decrees that they will be." Guys wouldn't be competent at running the entire world!!!?
anything to make Flute Salad the national anthem
@@luxill0si want you to write me a detailed essay on the impacts of american interventionism in other countries, then get back to me on whatever it is you think venezuela did wrong.
Amusingly, this already exists, and it's called Runescape. Old School Runescape has a polling system where a supermajority of members have to vote to approve of any change prior to it being implemented, ostensibly to keep the trust of the playerbase and prevent another exodus like the one that happened after the extremely unpopular free trade removal, Evolution of Combat, and Squeal of Fortune updates.
In practice, it mostly gets used as a way for people who have spent hundreds or thousands of hours on the game to prevent anyone from ever getting a level or item without having to go through just as bad of a grind as they did, or a way for the PvE and PvP communities to work out their beef via downvoting each others' updates.
The whole "the hedgies picked a fight with gamers but we know what it's like to grind for a boss fight so we're gonna come out on top actually" thing makes me think of the sort of "ummmmm I watch Sherlock, I know how to hide a dead body, say your frickin prayers" posts that you used to see on Tumblr circa 2012, which is very funny to me because guaranteed apes would call those kinds of posts cringe (at best)
"We have been trained for years by an industry that perfected the art of making us feel special and capable! Fear us!"
literally made the exact same connection to the sherlock/supernatural tumblr fandom when i hit that part of the video. insular conspiratorial online communities will always converge on the same apotheosis of cringe.
At least the Sherlock fans didn't gamble their life savings away on smoke.
At least I hope they didn't .
There's an echo of GamerGate which runs through all the delusional Ape rhetoric about the establishment "picking fights with gamers." The rabbit hole goes deep on this.
They targeted gamers.
*_Gamers._*
Remember everyone: when you're playing musical chairs, never sit down. If you keep walking around until the game is over, the host of the party is LEGALLY OBLIGATED to provide you with a throne.
Like I always say, the house always loses
*wanders into traffic*
Motorist: What the fuck are you doing? Get off the road!
Me: You lose, idiot! Give me my throne!
Won’t you look like a silly person? Or were you not really meaning it?
@oOBubblyOo this was me being sarcastic, as a means of making fun of apes, hodlers, and diamond hands of all ages
@@alackofgames913 oh alright, I though this was just a infantile game but some people have a strong opinion on it. Thanks for clarifying.
I once had a student who insisted he had a better system to do math than algebra, calculus and trig. His “system” completely misunderstood how numbers fundamentally worked. He made up his own terms for concepts that didn’t exist and missed how numbers connected to reality. His entire “system” became a justification for why he was actually right when he just didn’t get math, and any attempt to explain to him why he was wrong was instantly met with a shutdown of the conversation.
This is that but stonks.
I don’t know if this would be more wild if you’re talking about a high schooler or a college student
That friend? Terrence Howard.
@@auzpayeur8229 i assumed college due to calculus
@@kakroom3407 yeah but that means this guy got into a *college level math class* and was *still* like this
@@kakroom3407eh, my high school had calculus as an option. Mostly seniors who intended to go into computer science in college
At first I assumed that wife-changing money was me mishearing something, then Dan having a funny pronounciation. When I finally saw that "wife-changing money" was a term they actually used I just felt an emptiness inside me and deep secondhand embarassment.
Why would they say this? I just don't get it
@@BlancheNeigefandan explains it a bit. They lie and financially endanger their partners so reasonably their partners probably ask reasonable questions like how are you gonna pay for all of theese shares or the real life stuff you cant afford cause all your money is in gme. So they are resentful that their partners "dont believe in them." So they fantasize about being rich enough to attract a gold digger that doesnt ask questions.
@@BlancheNeigefan because when they become gorillianaires they can afford to get rid of the average wife they hate and get a model trophy wife. Completely delusional and narcissistic
Fwiw I didn't even realize he was saying it before the reveal until my second watch
@BlancheNeigefan because there is at least some overlap/intersection with incel culture. The idea here is that whatever kind of partner you currently have, you could have had a better one had you had more money. Ergo, when you get that more money you can, and will, "upgrade".
Dan seems to run on a pretty much exactly 3 way split between, "hey look at this interesting sociological trend", "I really genuinely want to help financially venerable people avoid scams" and "Bullying grifters is enormously fun".
and i love the ride that balance creates ^^
I'm cheerfully enjoying this mixture
While I enjoy his recent stuffs, I do wish he make movie analysis again. It's been a while. Last one was 2 years ago.
The finance-bro comedy skits are hilarious!
@@bota6575same honestly. Part of me kinda hopes that he'll make a video on AI art or something that way he can talk about media stuff and tech hype stuff at the same time.
Shout out to the Game Stop employee who was like "umm, I don't think it makes sense to merge a video game store with a company that sells candles."
Honestly I really like playing games by candlelight but I've learned to never bet on my tastes being shared by others.
imagine: mountain dew and doritos scented candles
@drewbabe you know PepsiCo buying GameStop somehow makes more sense...
@@drewbabeI think those might exist, there is at least mountain dew soap
@notapplicable6985 So of course I had to check. Result? They don't officially exist however there are secondary markets that make both of them. Normally I wouldn't post that since it's kinda non-news, but when looking into it I found something neat. You don't need Doritos candles because Dorito chips burn like candles already. Just stick em into a fire proof base like sand and thanks to the oils in them apparently uou can just light them up. Gonna test it tonight.
No matter how many times I watch, that clip of "we tried to tell them over dinner... WHATEVER" still feels right out of a movie. It's such an exposed psyche moment 😭
The little chuckle afterwards when he realizes all the face paint in the world can't hide that level of mask slip
Timestamp?
1:48:35 is the timestamp
'THEY HAD THEIR CHANCE!' guy is definitely snorting what he was told was cocaine
The moment when you almost feel sorry for the guy until you remember that he's dishing out terrible "not financial advice" built from hog-wild conspiracy theories.
I grew up in the Rocky Mountain West, and there were these slightly off kilter people who would come to old gold rush towns from the 1800s with panning equipment, convinced they were going to find untold riches in places that had been mined dry 150 years ago. My own uncle borrowed heavily from family to support buying mining equipment, because he believed God had told him that he was going to find incredible wealth in the mountains. I thought of this a lot while watching these people justify buying massive amounts of meme stock long after the writing was on the wall.
I can understand them spinning elaborate conspiracy theories to save face for having spent stupid money on worthless stock. It’s when they keep buying more stock that flummoxes me
Right? Like, it would actually make more sense to grab your panning gear and go try the creek in your neighbor's back yard or something. If there was a working gold mine there and then there stopped being one, you KNOW they looked for more gold, and they had a literal gold mine to finance those efforts. At least if you throw a dart at a map and pan there, you're probably checking somewhere that hasn't been checked dozens of times before.
Now, if you're just kinda LARPing, if it's just a fun thing you like to do when you go hiking in the hills, great! That sounds like a lot of fun! You get to feel a connection to old-timey prospector dudes! I hope you grow a cool beard and wear suspenders too (if you want)! But if you're spending money you can't afford, yeah, that's sad.
Indeed, the "mother" in MOASS made me think of "motherlode", so I definitely had that thought, even if I have less of a direct connection to it.
Like the late, great Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme."
"Apes are shadow boxing the random noise of the stock market -- and losing" is the best summary of the past 3 years that I have ever heard.
I think that's my favorite Folding Ideas line ever, and I've been around awhile.
Damn, the random noise of the stock market got hands.
@@mac4974my favorite is "alien goth furry oc" from the wall review review
@@Russian_engineer_bmstu From the same video is probably the line that I quote the most with my friends: "Cringe. There's no other word for it. this makes me cringe. It's embarrassing."
@@Russian_engineer_bmstu that's "steam punk edgelord furry ocs" and "alien big titty goth girlfriend" - two different quotes from that video smashed together
dude listening to quotes from these ape guys and learning about their weird nonsense feels like getting exposited to by a metal gear solid villain that has no idea what the grand scheme actually is. like i'm on my knees handcuffed, i've been captured after infiltrating their base trying to figure out what the hell MOASS is and then the boss gives me a thirty minute cutscene telling me the history of bed bath and beyond complete with live acted fmvs and slideshows of arrows going up and down, only to then be told that all stocks in the world are being controlled by semi-sentient AIs and that war must be declared on the concept of money by buying the worst shares imaginable.
Don't show this to Hideo Kojima... because he'll be SO mad he doesn't have the rights to Metal Gear and can't have Snake go through an adventure just like this
@@goranisacson2502 "You shouldve done your Due Diligence, Snake. Now... BEHOLD! THE STOCKS OF THE PATRIOTS! YOUR SHARES ARE NO LONGER YOUR OWN!" -Liquid Apesalot, Metal Gear Solid 7 The Shares of Liberty
I will mail this directly to kojima's house, he will be so cheesed that he missed this opportunity.
Perhaps on Shadow MOASS Island?
@DizzyIM -- You summed this bizarre experience up pretty well.
Even Liquid Snake couldn't prevent bed bath and beyond from going into liquidation 😢
Known firefighter shills tries to break the window of my cybertruck to prove it is a bad car just because it is “on fire” and “I am dying of heat and smoke inhalation”
Oh we're attacking fires now? So much for the tolerant left
@@robmckennie4203"I'm a fire fighter. I hate fires. Some might say I'm anti-fire" 😉🧑🚒
@DoubLL THE WOKE ANTIFIRE MOBS HAVE GONE TOO FAR
@@DoubLL "Does anyone smell petrol?"
It's not a coincidence that Dan describes this movement in terms usually reserved for religious movements: e.g. "orthodoxy," "apocalyptic belief placed under cognitive strain." This reminds me of so many new religious movements yearning for a judgment day/apocalypse/armageddon.
Yeap, i see a reflection of the cult craze of the 1950-80's that stemmed from WWII and the various other wars that stressed out and caused mass underlying panic in America that caused people to flock to insane cults and accept their openly criminal and disgusting practices. Now in 2020-23, following the financial crash in 2008, the accelerating inflation of money at a pace never seen before, the entirely stagnant wages compared to pricing of healthcare, rent and food, free internet inundating people with inflammatory articles and exposing people to charismatic grifters with amoral ideologies; a new wave of panic and stress has swept over America, compounded further by the suprise attack of Covid, which has lead to 'finance cults' like NFT bros, Crypto Enthusiasts and Meme Stock Apes, which although are not physically violent like old style cults, still exploits followers and lead them to harm, now by financial and social isolation and loss.
Dan has a background in theology which shows up in a lot of his work which I think is really cool (he confirms this in his interview with Adam Connover if you need a source on that)
its because its an actual almost one to one example of a doomsday cult, longing for the day shorts are squeezed and they can be the emperors of earth, not too dissimilar really to heavens gate or jonestown
Damn, I didn't expect to find you here. Love your videos
I mean, it literally has become a financial apocalypse cult.
“Bro I play runescape.”
As a long time runescape player, that’s about all I needed to hear to know the kind of cringey, delusional, gluttons for punishment we’re dealing with here.
Truer words are seldom spoken.
I'm imagining a scenario where Citadel finds out that theyre up against RuneScape players and everybody in the office freaks out and starts sweating, frantically making calls
Tbh I read that as self depreciation rather than a brag.
@@breadguyyy Citadel is just the zezima bro
At least it was not a Eve Online player. (speaking as one who won Eve years ago, we be a crazy messed up bunch)
I take financial advice from a coked-up guy in face paint yelling into a microphone, my investment strategy is shitposting, and my due diligence research consists of collecting all the dankest memes. What could possibly go wrong?
😆
🎉😂
5:05
"They picked a fight with the gaming industry."
This one sentence kills me every time.
The gaming industry. I don't even have a specific explanation, it's just so absurd at the face of it.
It's such a misunderstanding of their own role. Consumers are not a part of the industry. It's like a hypercharged version of when a sports fan talks about "our" team, and what "we" did on the field.
Also, even if referencing gamers, it's the least combative group of consumers ever. It's filled to the brim with libertarians that insisted for the past couple of decades that "voting with your wallet" is the best way to fight corporate greed while the industry they claimed to love deteriorated.
also gotta love the unspoken "people who play video games sometimes = gaming industry"
one of the things that shocks me is calling themselves the gaming industry... like no, my GDD track friends are the gaming industry, the ones who work in the industry... you are a GAMER, someone who consumes the product of the industy. you wouldnt call someone who eats a lot of fast food a part of the fast food industry, lmao!
I eat food on the daily. Am I part of the food industry?
The comparison to sovereign citizens is really apt. It's like this idea that law and governance is sort of like computer programming, and with the right mechanical exploit you have the power to do anything.
When in fact, institutions can just say "Nah" and suspend the rules as an emergency measure. Debts can be forgiven, etc. That's what real power is.
Yeah it's basically how people view the society we've set up as some sort of hardcoded reality that we have no say in. It ultimately stems from a sense of lack of control and there are some actual points to made about democratic control over institutions and so on... But these people are ironically engaging in the problem in the most unproductive sheep-like way possible.
That's what happen when people start to believe that Capitalism is some sort of natural law.
It isn't, power comes from violence and the rules of this world have been re-written multiple times by class violence.
Yeah exactly. Let’s say that everything about MOASS was true, that if some set of circumstances came to exist the US government would be obligated by some set of rules to give its entire gdp away to some redditors. Even in that ridiculous fantasy scenario they would still get nothing as the government would just change the rules.
I feel like this comparison is maybe too silly, since it's to fiction. But in the popular anime BOYS IN MECHS 2010s EDITION there is a villain who plans out and successfully organizes a long, complicated plan that enables him to unpopularly-but-legally claim the right to rule.
And the government he has just legally taken over... Just ignores his claim. Because of course they would. Because a plan of victory that relies on a rules technicality is great for games, but does not work in real life.
@@IAmOfAll it goes back far beyond that - for a while it was a real trend in cartoon/comics to have these kinds of plots, including a very famous Disney/Donald Duck story (that I believe was the impetus for those other stories): The basic setup is something along the lines of "he who has that relic/gets that signiture/finds that document becomes king of the US/America/owns all the land" and everybode really believed that. Everyone genuinly believed if you get that crown you become king... because it was a childrens story (though even in the original story there was the implication that in-universe they were all just too mad with power to realize how crazy it is).
We've come a long way from Lake Minnewanka, and yet it feels we've never left the shores of a guy freaking out over there being no curvature despite it being clearly visible. Although the setting and the context keeps changing, Dan is talking about the same people over and over. Desperate, feeling lost, looking for answers, and the shithead grifters always showing up with the one thing that will change everything for them. The difference between someone lying to themselves about the curvature of the Earth and someone lying to themselves that their GME stock is about to get pumped to the moon is very small, just which flavor of scam that appeals to them the most dictating which of the rides at this horrifying carnival they end up on.
I truly think this type of conspiracy madness grifting, is one of the greatest and most important forces in the 21st century. Trump and his political movement is almost entirely powered by it. Flat earth, GME, Right Wing lunacy, they all are marketed and performed in the same way.
Your observation is spot on. This video strongly reminded me of the flat earth video and the NFT video, since people who didn't divest from GME when it started to plummet kind of ended up falling up in between the conspiratorially-minded flat earthers and other groups from the flat earth video, and the "I'm gonna get rich as hell, I just need to get someone to buy this bag I've been holding once it skyrockets in value, everyone but me is a sucker" mentality of the cryptobros from the NFT video.
That's a great way to put it, the series is basically:
- In Search of the Flat Earth
- That Time Geocentrists Tricked A Bunch of Physicists
- Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs
- The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse
- This is Financial Advice
This last video really ties up all the conspiracy theories, end-of-the-world beliefs, and hyper-capitalist ideas from the previous videos.
@@SatherianI think the Decentraland video belongs in the series too
@@edjohnpowell Oooohhhh, good point. Forgot about Decentraland
"I don't believe those government snakes, they are corrupt and don't play by the rules" and "The US government will play by these exact rules and give us billions of dollars" are fascinating beliefs to coexist in someone's head.
Massive sovereign citizen similarities in those beliefs
Video game exploit “well they gotta just hand me the keys to the castle now, no way around it” style thinking
@@pobbityboppity1110 I remember reading a story about "GM Island" in World of Warcraft(?), where the story was that if you managed to find a way over there you'd be crowned an honorary GM. Instead of, you know, suspending or banning you on the spot for hacking or otherwise exploiting to get to where you aren't supposed to be.
Like imagine sneaking backstage at a concert and the band just goes "Well, I guess you're a new member now."
@@Shadewaltz Wasn't the "sneak into the backstage at a concert; gets to play with the rest of the band" a common plot point in 80's and 90's cartoons and sitcoms? Heck! That's pretty much the climax in A Goofy Movie.
In other words; they engage with the world using cartoon logic.
Our former friend who we lost because he went HARD in the paint for conspiracy thinking would often say "I can hold two ideas in my head at once" with an imperious air that implied that our brains were somehow weaker for being "incapable" of ignoring cognitive dissonance. Not only are those two ideas contradictory, but many of them seem oddly proud of that.
2:04:50 I love how "don't put all your eggs in one basket" gets interpreted by apes as "put all your eggs in one basket, plus this second basket which we believe will soon merge with the first basket, thereby becoming the same, singular basket. With all your eggs in it."
For a group that claims to be good at interpreting secret messages, they are just consistently, astonishingly bad at reading the plaintext.
There is no plaintext mannn
It's all S U B T E X T
That's because the plaintext isn't telling them what they want to hear. If they took the text at face-value, it basically reveals that they a) have no idea what they're talking about, b) all of their theories and delusions are wrong and c) they are wasting all their time and money on a fantasy get-rich-quick scheme that would ultimately lead them to ruin.
The only reason that secret messages 'exist' because it's easier to believe that there's a hidden truth than it is to admit that you don't understand and/or you've been played for a sucker.
The line can only go up.
It's what happens when you think dumb shit like Sherlock are the way smart people think.
No, they aren't _just_ bad at reading plaintext, they actively refuse to comprehend it.
@@blakksheep736 It goes deeper than that. They don't believe plain text EXISTS.
The congressional hearing bit at 1:10:11 is chilling. My first thought was 'Huh, Keith is referencing ape terminology and memes, even under oath before congress. Maybe he really was part of this movement.'
Then I realized I had it backwards. He wasn't referencing ape stuff, every word of this testimony was picked apart and adopted by the apes afterwards. This one brief clip spawned multiple in-jokes/shibboleths/signifiers that still persist today, this testimony is something of a holy scripture.
I think he made the right choice to disappear from the internet. Being a cult leader comes with severe occupational hazards.
You said "being a cult leader comes with severe occupational hazards" and now I kind of want to see OSHA guidelines for being a cult leader.
"What YOU need to know to run your cult safely!"
This isn't entirely the case. I was an onlooker to these communities at the time (luckily I had no spare money to invest or I would probably have lost it) and I can say phrases like "I like the stock" were already existing memes in the community. He was aware of the audience he had and played to them quite well.
Being a _reluctant_ cult leader gets you thrown into the volcano.
@@tevanchinsangaram6467 "I like the stock" is also an extremely generic phrase and taking it as "ape terminology" is talking about conspiracies a little bit too ironically.
I almost never hear that phrase outside of ape circles, where it has become a mantra.
"WE will have infinite money" and "you can't save everyone from a 9-5 job" are really perplexing thoughts to have in the same sentence as "we will collapse the world economy."
"We" in this case doesn't mean the proletariat.
It means "we the speculators." (Of Crypto, NFTs or third thing)
They expect the masses to suffer while they will ascend into Yacht Heaven.
It makes sense when you remember that neoliberal, corporate capitalism is just a _given_ to these people. The core assumptions of the system are not questioned at all. That’s what makes this so sad.
It's strangely befitting of a cult mentality
@@Arrakiz666 I mean that's the distinction between them and actual revolutionaries, they don't want to fix the rigged system, they just want to win.
Turns out they'd just as greedy as the corporations and governments they hate, given the chance.
That gamer section was so sad. I cannot stress this enough: Video games are DESIGNED to let you win (regardless of how difficult that win was). Real life? Not at all.
Even worse - there’s a specific goal in games that definitely MEANS winning.
Life doesn’t really have an END, much less a WINNING END (in the sense of how life as a collective experience, doesn’t have an end - even as individuals die, more individuals are born, etc)
@@phastinemoon I mean, yes, but it could be argued that Jeff Bezos has won capitalism in a very real sense. He has managed to set up a system where he can essentially levy taxes on other party's transactions. A huge part of the retail industry is basically paying rent to him which is absolutely insane.
THIS! So much this.
@@CC3GROUNDZERO yes, he 'won' a single arbitrary system which grants him a cheat code to many other systems (money), but in the end, he still has a good several decades to figure out if that was enough. Just knowing the fact he's a billionare is going to tell me that it's probably not enough.
It's a bit semantic but rather than designed to "let" you win, I'd say that they're designed to be winnable. Or even if there's no "win" there's a goal that can be completed by at least someone, given enough skill. And ofc as you said, this does not exist in real life
fun easter egg: at the start of Line Goes Up dan uses an analogy comparing the banks of the '08 crash to rotten trees so big that when they fell they'd take all their neighbors with them
at the start of this video, he is filming standing in front of a dead tree fallen over in an empty field lol
Ooh, good catch! Ive watched these like once a month since they came out and never noticed that, very clever!
My god…
Give Dan Olson an Oscar
deep lore (like roots)
oh yea thats a really good catch! I never thought of him standing in front of the dead tree in the beginning with any symbolic meanings
And, in a lot of ways, its absolutely true. The dead trees of 2008 are STILL wrecking havoc on the world we live in. Still "thrashing" our economy as a whole.
Apes are a good example of this.
Everything goes back to 08 (really if you think about it, everything goes back to Reagan but I digress)
The superstonks subreddit tried to "debunk" this video and it was just a list of really unconvincing character assassination attempts against Dan and pedantry about specific word definitions, there was no attempt to address the core of any points or arguements that were raised in this video.
@@GSDKXVThe loudest echo in the chamber, get a life man
@@KrankuSama It's either a bot, or TRUE BELIEVER. Same level of thinking however.
@@KrankuSama I think he really, desperately needs the attention he gets from these replies. My guess is that the people in his life largely stopped talking to him when he fell down the ape rabbit hole.
@@GSDKXV WW2 is one of the top wars of all time, doesn't mean it was a good thing
@@GSDKXV I am once again asking if you have anyone in your life, anyone at all, who you can talk to? Like I'm actually scared you've gotten so sucked into the cult you've isolated yourself and you don't have any positive real world influences to keep you grounded.
I hope there's someone out there who is worried about you and will eventually try and get you in touch with like, a cult victim support group, because I genuinely think you might need it.
"They're sitting around a blackjack table convincing each other that there's a secret rule, that if you hit 31 then the dealer has to give you their entire tray. So hit me, hit me, hit me, hit me."
That closure was stone cold...
Especially, if you hit 21 the game's over autoatically, and even at 20 your highest hit's a 10 for a 30.
@@youtubeuniversity3638I guess if you drew an ace on 20 you could arguably claim 31 instead of 21
I really like the "aiming for 31 in blackjack" comparison at the end. Knowing that to get that number, youd already have to be at or over 21, and still asking the dealer for more. And when the other players at the table see your hand, they all realize, "this person doesn't know the rules of this game."
Theoretically you could get to 31 by being at 20 and then getting an ace
@@idontcare6736 Nope, because if you're at 20 and you get an ace, it'd count as 1 point. Which would still land you at blackjack.
@@librenarraty1964 when people say blackjack I always think of Uno Blackjack.
My understanding of BlackJack is that you get 21 or the closest number to it that's below at the table -- any if you go OVER, that's a bust and the dealer takes your cards.
@@phastinemoon You'd be correct, that's why you almost never hit on anything over 15 because your odds of busting increases exponentially (depending on previous draws and how many decks are in play of course, but I digress). The metaphor works great because if you're trying to get a 31 in Blackjack, it means that you're an idiot who tossed away a perfectly good win for a vague 'more' that ends in you losing due to not understanding how the game actually works.
i think my favorite part about moass is that they think wallstreet and the government are insanely corrupt, but once they expose that corruptness every branch of it is just gonna go "ah ggs, you did it, well done. heres literally an infinite amount of money"
That's something of a trend you'll see with conspiracies. From how I've heard people describe it, it seems like it comes down to an instinctive want to simplify wide reaching problems that are usually pretty complex and unclear into something with a very specific solution. Having a set enemy and a set path to victory helps people avoid having to think about how messy modern society tends to be a lot of the time. As something of an unavoidable result of that kind of thinking, the solutions for the problems they envision, and the proof of those problems existing inevitably tend to be somewhat infantile.
Yes and they're doing it in plain sight ! On reddit ! Like government agencies don't have an eye on them. If moass could happen the authorities would use other means much more powerful instead of supposed shorts like apes believe.
@@DarkLolification I am genuinely curious if anyone's gotten a good-faith answer from apes as to why A) none of the people with more money than all the apes have put together has exploited this to become a trillionaire and B) why they think the rules would still apply when doing so would threaten the entire economy, especially given, y'know, history.
Not curious enough to go reading ape forums though, and the ones that come here aren't exactly bringing their A-game.
Well, didn't you know that the government operates on Fae rules? If you answer their riddles three, to the court they'll give you the key
This is my favorite part too 😂
I gotta say, centering the critical text (IE-price is fake) while swapping through posts at rapid speed is a nifty visual effect. Hats off to whoever thought to use that.
Completely agree, never seen anything like that but it's the perfect illustrator of the prevalence of THAT exact idea
Agree as well, was a super cool effect. Like Dan mentions, it's just bizarre to me how these "do your own research" conspiracy types love to repeat specific phrases verbatim, like some kind of mantra. Flat earthers, covid deniers, etc
@@TheMisternyancryptodingbats, QAnon followers...
I feel like this is the perfect summation of Dan’s clear long-term involvement in Internet culture. It reminded me first and foremost of the old YTMND trend of “Lindsay Lohan never changes facial expressions”, where they made a rapid-fire GIF of publicity photos of LL aligned so her face was always in the same space and at the same scale. Here the same idea was implemented with text instead of a celebrity’s face.
Timestamp?
This is going to get lost in a sea of thousands of comments for sure but like. This is all so surreal to me because I'm a normal ass employee of AMC theatres and we did a promo event where stock holders got NFTs for buying tickets or whatever, and the theater was sold out online only for three people to show up. Literally, hundreds of tickets scooped up in seconds by grifters, while some of the most annoyingly earnest ancaps of all time came to an empty mall movie theatre to watch the new kinda bad jurrassic park movie. And when I think of apes and this movement, I think of those three people- who eagerly held onto the stock of a dying company to arrive at an empty theatre that was claimed to be sold out, with every empty chair representing the work of a grifter who saw a chance to sell back to all the other earnest people who wanted a cut.
At least they got good seats
Is that really what the heck $APE was?
@andyes4556 - What happened when the three people showed up? How did they act/take it? And, were you guys (as the employees) aware something like that might end up happening, or was it a total surprise on the day? Sounds like such a crazy experience!
*chef's kiss* Couldn't have put it better myself.
@@novalinnhe the managers definitely let us know beforehand that the theatre was supposed to be sold out, so they told everyone to prepare for the worst because they're not as internet savvy and didn't really know about the empty crypto bubble thing. so we were fully staffed, fully doom prepared and then- nothing. the three people showed up, and they honestly weren't all that rude at the employees- they just seemed genuinely surprised. a guy was like "wow, this was it? i thought there was supposed to be more people" and he walked into the theatre with a bucket full of popcorn even though he was watching in real time as the movement had left him behind. a girl came up to the front desk a couple days later insisting that amc was running a different crypto/nft thing because she saw it on twitter, and the employees had to tell her we didn't know a thing about it. and i think the thing these people didn't want to know is that not only do we not get told anything about amc social media trying to lean into it expecting a larger demographic, but that we don't care.
amc made more money appealing to swifties than it ever did trying to appeal to apes which. yeah theres not much else to say is there
The phrase "wife changing money" is costing me years off of my life. Everything is monetizable and transactional to these people. Nothing is real.
It seems like they're talking about the money they'd need to divorce their current wife, then attract and marry a trophy wife. These are two acts that are individually normal in our current society, which either makes the MOASS folks less bad or society's relationship to traditional marriage worse, depending on your perspective.
And here I thought I misheard, holy crap.
@@JJ-qo7th Same. It took me until it was in text on the screen for me to realise "No, they really are saying that."
Wait I thought they meant wife changing as in "my wife will change their mind about my investments being stupid once I get rich". Are they referring to actually divorcing their wives and finding someone else?
Urban dictionary seems to agree with me.
I've watched this video quite a few times and every time the "Words mean things to an autist" section makes me want to shed my skin and become a giant cockroach to avoid being associated with the person who wrote that
I'm a frequent rewatcher and also skip those 40 seconds. Credit to the vocal performer for reading it with appropriate delusional smugness
Apes created cringe so intense it initiates a Kafkaesque defense mechanism.
Why would you be associated?
@@FaLIStaff literally same, this is one of my favorite background videos and i always scramble to skip that part 🤣 the actor is fantastic
that part makes me want to become a cockroach as well because it's just. confusing? autistic people tend to be literal thinkers, one of the MAIN SIGNS OF AUTISM is a lack of reading between the lines. that post just confuses me so much, it makes no sense to me
My personal favorite part of their fundamental thesis is: "the big bad system that is apparently ignoring every rule in the book (to a cartoonish degree) to screw over 'the little guy' will just give up and give us every single dollar in the entire global economy". And why? Because "thats just how it works"
Well, yeah, those people are in fact fae creatures and must comply when bested at their game! They also must give you their gold if you answer their riddles and/or find it at the end of the rainbow.
This is sarcasm.
@@Veelofarthis is a good comment
I should go look up if Apes have an answer to this, actually I probably shouldn't. But I am curious, it's been years, surely someone has asked 'so what stops the government from just killing us if it gets that far?' That person was probably banned 12 seconds later for FUD, but I'm devilishly curious to know what the answer would be.
Brain dead take. Surprising from a bear. The buy button was turned off because the retail investor found an exploit to their corrupt scheme of illegal naked short selling. If you DRS GME and refuse to sell, then those short sellers no longer can use those shares to close out their positions. And according to the quarterly report, we’re already 75+ million shares on the way there.
@@GSDKXVtwo companies paused buying due to liquidity issues, but people could absolutely still buy GME from literally anywhere else. The 'turned off the buy button' narrative only works if you pretend that they paused buying of GME across the entire stock market, which is just ludicrous. Apes were simply inexperienced and/or incompetent enough to be stopped by one single hurdle.
And Apes have only managed to DRS maybe a quarter of all shares, so.....
For anyone having trouble understanding a short sale, here is an example:
You borrow 100 shares of a stock from somebody. You must give 100 shares back to them in one month. You immediately sell their stock at the current market price of $10 per share. Now you have $1,000.
For the next month, the price of the stock goes down. At the end of the month, the stock is only worth $3. You owe that guy the 100 shares you borrowed, so you buy 100 shares at the current market value of $3 each. You spend $300 and you give that guy his 100 shares back. You profited $700 due to the stock price decreasing.
I've gone my whole life not understanding what short selling is and just resigned to thinking of it as "shady thing stock people do". This is the explanation I needed.
Thank you. Im- as the apes say- incredibly fucking smooth brained
Good explanation. What would make it complete is to explain why the owner of the stock would lend it out. In your example, the lender lost $700 in stock value. Because the lender did not possess the shares, they could not sell while the shares were losing value. Because of this risk of loss, the lender will demand to be paid fees to compensate. In the movie "The Big Short," these fees are why Burry and all the other short sellers are panicking at the climax of the movie. The fees are eating away at their portfolios, and there is no sign that any of the securities they are shorting will drop in price in time before they go broke.
also explains why those companies collapsed during the GME short. if they borrowed millions of shares at 5 bucks a pop, but then had to pay back 500 bucks per share, they'd immediately collapse. shorts seem like the surest thing if you know of the impending doom of a company, but if something like GME happens, you can lose infinite money. it's insane.
@@JohnnyAdroitAs an addition to this, one of the main reasons why they lend their stock is that the holder has a longer timeframe.
If you're holding an investment for 5 years, how do you make money in the short term? You could wait and just receive dividends (though many companies do not give dividends and instead spend that money growing).
But what if someone comes by and offers you money to borrow your stock for a month? You were holding for 5 years, so you aren't affected by a small monthly dip. Though there is an issue if the stock plummets, that is pretty unlikely.
I worked at GameStop and had guys coming in asking about a merger with bed bath and beyond. Crazy to finally have context for that conversation
lowkey scary to have to deal with these cult members in person lmao
@@JM_-ix7yh haha yeah I hear that. What you have to understand is that conspiracy theorists are just people who believe a crackpot scheme. They wanted it to be true so they came into the store to get evidence. I doubt I convinced them, but who knows?
@@Blakbox92 you know? That's a great question lmfao
Honestly, that was one of the worse jobs I've ever had, not in small part because of people like that. It's not hard to imagine that they had an argument with someone about their 'investment' and came to the store to get some reassurance. When I said "lol nope" to them I doubt it helped them feel better about their spending habits.
I just hope that I don't hear about Ape holdouts in 10 years talking about FUD and how there used to be a GameStop in this town.
@@Blakbox92obviously the ceo personally told the employees about the merger and to only tell the real info to the shareholders. The apes have cracked the code again!!
@@Blakbox92They’re not exactly in touch with reality
Coming back to this video, the intro totally reminded me -- The absolute irony that someone is sighting their long-term Runescape experience as a sign of expertise is palpable. Runescape used to be littered with "merch" clans, that would invite you to a chat channel and give you instructions on an item to buy on the Grand Exchange (the in-game mass player market) at what price and then when to sell it. Naturally, this was to artificially raise the price of some niche item that the insiders were holding onto, so that they could then sell off their stash when the price got outrageous and they'd turn a massive profit.
If this sounds familiar to you, the first time I'd ever heard of a pump and dump scheme I immediately said "Oh you mean like a Runescape merch clan??"
@@dualpapayas I'll trade ya for my burnt fish collection, whaddya say?
Citing*
@@owenleal oop, ya got me
@@GSDKXV The one that cites falling revenue and tries to cut costs, most of which were necessary to long term stability, to offset it? Quarterly reports are how the finance sector has inadvertently tricked other industries into destroying long term value in the first place...
A friend of a friend actually managed to tick up the price of tinderboxes in RuneScape by like 0.5% back in the day by buying like a million of them
"I'm smarter than everyone else and therefore can game the system" and "Everyone already agrees with me on this because this stuff is just common sense" is a WILD pair of things to believe simultaneously.
The cultic milieu is fully submerged in cognitive dissonance 💀
This comment has just singlehandedly changed the way I think about conspiracy theories, so congrats for that
somehow "I'm actually dumb as rocks and need someone to explain to me what i should be doing with my money next" seems to be mixed in there as well ...
It falls perfectly in line with the conspiratorial mindset of "if you can't find any proof to support the theory, that's proof that it's actually true."
Tbf, usually it's more along the lines of "Everyone *reasonable* already agrees with me on this because it's common sense", which lets them readily discard anyone who doesn't agree as unimportant.
I can't believe Dan made a 2.5 hour documentary just so his Vegas trip could be tax deductible.
He's gaming the system.
@@rabidfirefox8914truly, the IRS lost its fight with gamers
Just as wild as that time he made a nearly 2 hour documentary to advertise his modern mario houses.
Based Dan. Extremely based. He's gonna make it.
@@edgarallenhoe3518 dont forget he also made a 75 minute "documentary" that turns out to just be an ad for his hit book Stoicism for Pussies
I'm so grateful for this. I've been questioning my own sanity for the past 3 years witnessing my husband fall down this rabbit hole. I appreciate that the documentary mentions the gambling aspects and how it affects the ape's family and spouses. 😔
I'm sorry you have to go through something like that. I hope he is or has gotten help for his addiction or at least gotten out of the conspiracy, and if not that you leave him for your safety.
Im so sorry, I hope you and or your husband find some help.
I hope he can find a way out. This is just a selfmade señffulfilling tragedy based on primal fears
@@maskingtables wtf are you talking about? 😂 This is an INVESTMENT based on data found in the balance sheet.
I am so sorry. If he believes the 'wife changing money' part you should at least consider what could happen in your relationship. Please take care of yourself. Even if he's a nice man, nothing is worth your mental health and self esteem
I like how Keith Gill's videos just show this soft-spoken, educated, respectful guy, who just agreed that a single stock was undervalued. Just the most agreeable, sensible person in the entire video, and yet these absolute lunatics think he's their cult leader.
Failing upward i guess 😅
@@SammaS423I don’t think being worshipped by lunatics disconnected from reality counts as “upwards”. And I think Keith would agree given how he handled that.
Real-life Life of Brian shit
The guy gave a pretty convincing and respectable speech in front of Congress, those damn dirty apes didn’t deserve him and frankly are slandering him by association lol
I must be so *strange* to find yourself in that position; where a load of unstable people are picking apart everything you say for clues.
“Despite its reputation, finance, as a subject, is in fact something that you, a layperson, can learn. It is a lot less impenetrable than it seems; Wall Street is awash with B-minus students who wrapped their heads around it. You can too.”
One of the most unexpectedly reassuring things I’ve heard in quite some time, and I felt pretty comfortable with my understanding of the subject already. 😂
Thanks, Dan!
It's reassuring, since it means even idiots like me can influence and control the global market. It's also horrifying, since it means that many idiots are indeed currently influencing and controlling the global market. And some of them are billionaires.
It is very important to note that, yes, while most systems you interact with on a daily basis are going to be byzantine nightmare constructs of historical laziness, absolute lack of care about people who might find it hard to use them, and pure laziness, they _can_ be navigated. Dan will be accused of trying to muddy the waters by pretending the subject matter is more complex than it is anyway.
A grating contradiction about the conspiratorially minded folks, is that the theories must simultaneously be overly complex, because only then can they pretend to be experts and dazzle those even less intelligent than them, but they also must be as simplistic as possible in order to sound realistic to the same people.
He’s got such a strong dad energy you never want the disappointed-dad vibe to be pointed at you but anytime he says anything like “you can do it” it makes you feel like your dad really believes in you
@@Arrakiz666Byzantine, Russel brand is here.
It's less about dazzling the supposedly less intelligent and more about dazzling themselves. It's how they convince themselves that they're super-experts who've cracked codes that have baffled even the actual experts. It's a delusional savior complex mixed with a hefty dose of the Dunning-Kruger effect. @@Arrakiz666
I've rewatched this video several times now, and I'm still struck by the casual cruelty of "wife-changing money"
i think about that phrase a lot too
@@BARMN89 I've come to this video back a lot and there are a few sentences and situations I'm just completely baffled could manifest itself in the real world I'm inhabiting
@@KingCamilloSchnuffkin its wild too when you consider incel culture is convinced women do this exact same thing for the same reasons? That women only use men for their money. To think they would be self selecting "yes, i want to validate this negative view of women" is wild
@@BARMN89 Remember the cross-section of eugenics and biological essentialism in incel cultures. They don't consider that not validating that stereotype is even an option, it's a fact of the universe: women bad.
I'm still wondering if the meaning is "I will get a different wife" or "my wife's attitude will change" because I can't tell which is worse.
Attitude sounds better at first until you realize it's about a gambling addiction / sunk cost fallacy cult.
It is distressing to watch 3 people hear "present: more than majority" and instantly, INSTANTLY just make up a different sentence that they heard. Like within seconds of hearing the sentence they have decided they heard a different sentence
what i find more interesting (i've seen people confabulate all kinds of nonsense on the spot, so it doesn't phase me as much anymore) is the one guy who kind-of sort-of tries to keep a level head and just lets the other two guide him out of reality and into a fantasy land that his brain is clearly telling him he should be more skeptical of
seeing people who have lost the plot is one thing; it's another seeing those people use just the slightest social pressure to talk someone into joining them in the deepest possible end of the pool. it's watching radicalization happen in realtime
and i'd almost bet that the other two folks had the same experience happen to them, so we're not just watching radicalization but the formation one of the pipelines
@@ItWasSaucerShaped honestly kinda scary to watch...
The one that really just confounded me was the guy who looked at the camera and said “let’s go see if Game Stop has any info”, talks AT the poor cashier, and then looks back at the camera saying “IT’S CONFIRMED the Game Stop employee told me so!!”
@@Wyattoons oh, him? That's one of the _lesser_ things the dude has done for the sake of his stock market cult.
Y’know, I think the saddest thing about this whole mess is that these people don’t understand that even if they were 100% right (which they’re not), even if every single element fell into place just like they want, that the monied interests wouldn’t just play along. If something like the MOASS were to happen, they would freeze the markets, legislation would occur, the courts would go to work, and the status quo would be maintained. Capital doesn’t fight fair.
That is the most hilarious part to me, that these people think the US government would write them a check for 50 trillion dollars, and that somehow that money would be worth something afterwards
@@GSDKXV Keep telling yourself that.
@@GSDKXVdude you've been in the comments for five MONTHS. take some time off, even if you are a troll.
@@GSDKXVcapitalism is the problem, the solution isn't funneling more money into the hands of capital.
@@GSDKXVeven if youre right, which you arent, they would not give you the money. at best they would legislate to prevent any wealth transfer and at worst you and anyone else trying to recruit more shmucks would be imprisoned for market manipulation
Honestly the part where you said "they don't hate wall street, they're tsundere for wall street" made laugh out loud, another magnificent documentary here Dan, bravo.
Where does he say that? I missed it
@@Chimera-man-man 2:22:30 is best timestamp. You can search the transcript found in the description for any specific term or word.
@@dominictemple thank you
bro didn't even pronounce it right i'm dead LMFAO
Ooooh, that's what he was saying! I went back like 4 times and I still had no idea.
I think a big part of this phenomenon is that were facing a crisis in medial literacy these days. People struggle to understand that real businessmen are boring functionaries who won't communicate to the public in general, let alone communicate in a series of hidden messages through tweets and unrelated children's books.
It's similar to how many people forget that serial killers are often just boring psychopaths that kill those they have personal grudges with or just when they think they can get away with it. There aren't a series of clues that must be solved. Things are often just boring, horrible, and effectively random.
Yeah, you've got millions of people who have only ever experienced politics, finance, or the legal system through Network TV Dramas. They have no idea what the real world actually looks like, so they can only take the fantasy version and try to work their way backwards from it.
unfortunately, that's a small part not a big one. Qanon is (was?) highly similar in its dynamics, and big enough to have large durable effects on the composition of frigging Congress, and wasn't about finance at all.
@@theupson qAnon was just the boomers first time reading internet political fanfiction and it broke their feeble dementia ridden brains!
@Narokkurai Amen. So many people want to think that the world is more dramatic, interesting and narrative-driven than it really is.
@@KnakuanaRka- The world is plenty interesting and dramatic. People create narratives to make sense of it.
April 18th, 2024: I just met an ape in the wild on Reddit. I assumed this whole thing had fallen apart, maybe even years ago, but apparently it's still going. GME is down to $10.30 as of right now, so I wonder how that's going for them 💀
Its a slowly dying movement. Like scientology its reputation is so bad its hard for them to recruit into the group
Their fingers are hovering over their keyboards waiting for any upward blip in the stock price so they can immediately cry out that they are winning.
Imagine how full of themselves they must be right now
2:27:06 "No one deserves to be exploited like this. No one deserves to get shaken down by grifters to the point that they have no other choice but to become grifters themselves and shake down everyone else around them. No one deserves to have their ego and security ground down to the point that there's no escape, no reason to step back and admit defeat, no reason to reflect."
Just leaving this out so it doesn't get lost in the noise. I would pay money to put this quote on a billboard.
Bit large for a billboard, maybe good for writing down and making a phone wallpaper. Reminding you each time you open it
Honestly, one of the things I really appreciate about this video is that he’s still empathetic to these extraordinarily frustrating people.
It would go down in history as the second most important billboard ever made.
@@wildfire9280 whats the first
It's the same logic as abusers being often people who suffered abuse themselves. It's important to remember to humanize these people not because they are innocent but because we shouldn't ignore the reality that they are also victims.
"Apes aren't anti-Wall Street, they're tsundere for Wall Street" is one of the most incredible and insightful sentences I have ever heard.
It's an Anime thing, right? What exactly does it mean?
@@baguettegott3409A tsundere is a character whose inner sweetness (usually romantic feelings) is masked behind a rude, unfriendly facade. This archetype usually shows up specifically in romance anime, or at least romance plots.
@@baguettegott3409 As noesun said. It's basically boys pulling girls' pigtails because they're too imature to say they like them.
he mispronounced it though. which invalidates his whole argument
@@mycophobia I did consider mentioning that I've never once heard it pronounced like that.
Structuring the entire essay just to make a "Chapter 11: Bankcuptcy" joke is an absolutely incredible flex
He stole that from jawsh's video about kais maleej
@@DEVOTIO33doubt he knows who that is. Who is that?
@@diskgrinderA guy talking about crypto games.
@@AlexaRobin21 Critically, to be clear before anyone loses thsir mind
JFC.
I find myself rewatching this video every couple of months because it's so captivating and entertaining. One of the little bits that always seems to fascinate me is Dan saying, "Next Slide" during the DFV section, as if the video suddenly became a criminal profile presentation at some unmarked FBI building. Practically speaking, it makes no sense. It's a youtube video, no one is controlling slides, but it helped me recognize that several of the sections feature their own little motifs that help present the information in entertaining ways. It's a bit of film making I don't think I appreciated or even considered before. Thanks Dan
He expanded upon this even more in the James Rolfe video; if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it, it's basically an art film that happens to contain a video essay
As Dan said in his NFT vid. Despite what they claim, they don't care about "the little guy" under the boot, they're just upset they aren't wearing it
Day one of 'owning the economy' they would buy slaves and pay them nothing
I mean, let's be honest... you guys wanted everyone fired and forced to stay home for years. Until whenever Fauci said it was okay to work and earn a living again to feed your family. The left has 0 principles they stand by when the chips are down
Everyone is just upset they aren't wearing it. Some just hide it better than others...
@@esmeecampbell7396Speak for yourself. Plenty of us dream of a world with no boots at all
@@esmeecampbell7396plenty of people do not want to be the ones wearing the boot, but would rather the boot didn't exist. If you think everyone wants to wear the boot, that says more about you.
Something that Dan is understating here is just how fucking out of hand these people got over this. The guy asking the gamestop employee about the bed bath merger, Kais Maalej, aggressively trespassed, doxxed, and stalked his way into tons of extremely disturbing situations, including impersonating Ryan Cohen in a call to his family's OBGYN to sus out the due date of his unborn child.
@@GSDKXVmy brother in Christ can you at least admit that Kais' behavior on a personal level is fucking inexcusable. Forget the stocks for a second. He tried to impersonate someone to get information about his wife's pregnancy.
Edit: lol, dude deleted his reply here to spread his nonsense in other comment chains. Coward.
@@aethertag1530 No behavior is truly inexcusable when salvation is on the line. Kxv is frankly the truest believer I’d seen in all of my life.
I mean, he _is_ insane. But he definitely is a true believer.
Wtf did I just read
For context, he did this because Ryan Cohen tweeted a "The last time people were excited to see me" meme with a photo of an ultrasound. Kais interpreted this as a hint that the GME-BBBY merger would happen on the DOB of Cohen's kid, hence the call.
@@TerminatorHIX wtf did I just read x2
"The US government still has an obligation to compensate the redditors for their losses," is such an absolutely hilarious sentence out-of-context.
It's equally ridiculous in context too
It's also hilarious in context
Pelosi: "My entire portfolio is in shambles. I'm broke!"
McConnell: "Well that may be but we have a duty to make these Apes whole!"
And that's how Republicans and Democrats came together to beknight the Apes as lords of our new benevolent economy, children.
Haha, I was gonna say, pretty hilarious in context, too.@@igormaka
The US government WILL submit to the demands of redditors
Lmao
1:22:15 This video just became unexpectedly sentimental to me. I don’t know why it took this long. But my dad used to play the stock market when I was a kid and he was pretty serious about it. I think he was making our family income from it for about a year before he died. I realized during this textbook reading section that there’s a good chance my dad read this text himself to learn how to sell stocks, and all of a sudden I feel a more direct connection to him. He died when I was a kid, so now as an adult some times I feel like I never really got to “know” him as a person. But this was like a weird little peek into the sort of stuff my dad was genuinely interested in from his day-to-day life. My dad was a pretty fucking intelligent guy.
Thank you for this, Dan
Excellent as usual. I'm no econ major but I have found the old chestnut "do not listen to economic advice from a man wearing face paint" has helped me out in real life for the most part.
also: maybe don't take financial advice from someone who's clearly trying to sell you something
I AM an Econ major and can confirm this is true, all the data says so
@@kaloofy3500We can tell you're an econ major from the vibrant face paint! :)
my grandfather always told me this
“It’s just Reddit’s version of the Rapture” is an excellent line which perfectly explains all the emotional stakes.
Apes often use art of the rapture in their moass memes. They are somewhat self aware about it
@@YOSSARIAN313 literally never happens 🤡 you’re not even good at spreading misinformation
@@GSDKXV man so much coping and seething from you in this comment section
@@YOSSARIAN313 Not. A. Cult.
@@GSDKXV citadel is fine. They are still incomprehensibly wealthy
You wanna know the biggest mistake the hedgies made? They messed with knitters. KNITTERS. The same people who will sit in a rocking chair for HOURS ON END looping FABRIC with NEEDLES just to watch a SCARF FOR A FRIEND get SLIGHTLY LONGER, only stopping to SIP TEA or occasionally GENTLY PET A CAT. WE WILL NEVER BACK DOWN!!!!!
😂
Hang this on my wall, I love it
Blue hair army MF3rs. FAFO !
You joke but the International Olympic Committee did mess with the knitters and it did go extremely badly for them. Don't mess with people with time on their hands and infinite patience!
My personal observation about knitting is that apparently involves a lot of math and all the people who do it suck at math and hate it and will always complain about it. That's probably not true in general but just in my personal experience and I find it funny because I'm really good at math and love it so those people are always like "you should try knitting!".
an underrated bit about the video - the day dan uploaded this was the day the BBBY shares were extinguished.
as Dan said on Xitter, he deliberately delayed the release to match an important date; and that doesn't require a conspiracy, just a calendar and object permanence.
"I will be rich _after_ global financial collapse" is just such a patently absurd thing to believe in
I think the Qanon conspiracy still takes the cake for most absurd but honestly, the fact that I'm not overly confident in that statement says enough.
Right? It makes me think maybe these people don't even really know what money IS.
Jokes on you, I have a metric ton of bottle caps and I'm ready to become obscenely wealthy once the nukes drop... I'm doing it right.. aren't I?
@@BlindErephon It's a fancy cotton / linen mix with dead dudes on it, just like my sock.
It feels like a lot of this comes from the 2008 crisis. It felt apocalyptic especially to younger people at the time and the ones fucked in the end weren't the banks or the investors, but ordinary people. So the mentally now is "when the next crisis happens, I want to be in and not out".
At 1:20 I just realized he's standing in front a dead tree. To quote Line Goes Up: "huge segments of the economy turn out to be dead trees, rotten to the core, but as a rotten tree falls it still shreds its neighbors and crushes anything below it." This time though, the tree is out in an open field, largely separate from the rest of the forest. The shrubs around it got crushed as it fell, but none of the other trees really cared. The choice of filming location feels too deliberate to just be me overanalyzing this, as much as so much of the problem for apes came from overanalyzing things.
I think Dan just enjoys filming in scenic locations
But the dead tree is a nice metaphor for a dying company like Bed Bath shredding memestock investors in a field far away from the actual economy
I don’t think that’s overthinking, because Dan (who, remember, started the channel talking about film theory) is a fan of making in-jokes and references to his other videos for the sake of a joke (eg - “My copy of 50 Shades of Gray is strictly unique. Though many copies exist, this is the only copy that is This Copy - and it is the only copy with the specific damage of being glued shut and thrown into the Beau River.” * splash *)
I appreciate you pointing that out. I don't think it's a coincidence:)
We should start decoding the meaning of every film location in the video. It might lead us to MOASS.
@@spotblur4381 Supremely underrated joke
Watching three adults hear "more than majority voting" and talk themselves into "more than issued voting" is one of the most distressing things I've ever seen, just sheer mental desperation to not have wasted their time and money to such a degree that they'll convince themselves that something they heard literally seconds ago was actually something else.
I want to make sure I'm understanding, they basically heard "more than 50% voting shares present for this vote" and thought/dreamed it meant "there's more than all possible voting shares present"?
@@SashaMinkh Not only that, but a few seconds later they had convinced themselves that they had LITERALLY heard the words "more than issued voting".
That one hurt. "Sweet summer children, WHERE DID YOU THINK THE WORD MAJORITY CAME FROM IN THIS CONVERSATION IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IT WAS THE WORD USED!!!"
Imagine, being so mentally NPC that even your magical thinking is about mundane and boring things, which can lead to contrived and boring "end of the world as we know it" result. World of Bobby only he dreams about stonks.
Not as bad as some of the other stuff, like the recent BBBY shares being cancelled post-bankruptcy has apes like "It says share CANCELLATION, not DELETION, that's different somehow!"
Just sold at $52 after bagholding for years. Thanks for the financial advice, I would’ve been waiting for the phone numbers for the rest of my life
Literally same. Had xx shares and was convinced I had basically lost that money
Honest question, What information did this video give you as to why the stock went back to 52?
@@Andum48 DFV tweeted, that's it
@@fakenamerealchungus9851 I appreciate the response, doesn't explain the 150% move before he tweeted. Anyway it's still good to know the narrative being thrown around.
Good for you! I'm sure those still holding will get those phone book numbers (lol) but don't let the fomo fool ya. You did good. Gz
Thank you for explaining why someone who used to be one of my best friends in the world went literally insane and stole my car to drive it to a shareholder meeting in Texas in June of 2021.
Did you get your car back?
What the fuck man
How *dare* you just drop that into the comments and peace out without elaboration? :P
Holy shit
Years later, you finally get an answer as to the utter insanity of that day
wtf??? wow.. tell us more.
I’m grateful that Dan decided to fill the niche of dissecting and explaining the cultural and psychological aspects of the financial and social anxiety of the online generation and the actual nonsense that’s coming out of it.
Just when you thought the worst thing FOMO could be responsible for was people continuing to pre-order shitty live service video games...
Oh and the salty comments from the temporarily embarrassed millionaires in the comments is the cherry on top.
Talk about finding a needed niche to settle into and then immediately dominating all relevant discussion
I knew for long that those in this absurdist game were quite insane. I did not realize the insanity ran so deep as to belive that shiny pieces of paper registered to themselves would mean a hill of beans in the event of an unforeseen forced financial collapse.
If the economy as we know it were to collapse, they'd be the ones against the wall first, having a complete lack of valued skills and having assets that others will want. Shiny pieces of paper? Great, I can line my {purely hypothetical} falcon's cage with it before she scratches your face off, and then I'll take your bullets.
Exactly. There are good, important and relevant reasons behind the people who buy into Stonks cultic thinking, even as the actual beliefs they lead to are absolute nonsense.
Finding out that "wife-changing money" wasn't just a funny pronounciation Dan was doing for the past 2 hours was genuinely the most devastating plot twist I've experienced in years. How are these people real
Nowadays I'm not surprised by anything, young people are in depressing positions at an era where everything's rapidly changing. Lots of people are gonna do crazy things...
It's not? Damn
@@zaidlacksalastname4905 spoilers for two hours in, the phrase "wife changing money" is real and refers to how much they resent their spouses, often lying or obfuscating what their investment actually is worth and how much of the shared account they threw away. it's hard to tell, but either the phrase implies that the money will change their spouse's mind, or it will allow them to divorce their current spouse and marry a trophy wife
+
I love the fake out where he sounds like he's about to address it and then just never does, becomes self explanatory once he draws a picture of the characters involved
We did it guys! the stock reached $50! That's only 0% of infinity. We're gonna be rich!
And it's coming back down already. Those morons bought MORE after it spiked because they thought it was MOASS. So this spike only lost them even more money in the long run 😂🤣
Worst investors in the history of the stock market
much faster bubble burst than anyone could have seen coming
If we hold, then short sellers can’t close
@@alexpope1984 so true I’m still holding my 100 shares sad I don’t jump off at 80 but fuck it let’s see what’s happens
500 million is just around the corner 😂
As always, your closing statements go hard.
"They're sitting around a blackjack table, convincing each other that there's a secret rule. That if you hit 31, then the dealer has to give them their entire tray. So hit me. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me."
Sums it up beautifully and really just nails the gambling connection while showing that its not really gambling when you've convinced yourself that losing is winning and winning is losing.
And took me a while to get in.. it is impossible to hit 31. 30 would be the highest possible number, when you hit on 20 get a 10. (One could argue if an ace would be 31.. but according to rules it counts as 1, so they would win the round on a 21... but not get their entire tray).
I think there's an interesting symbology too where the phrase 'hit me' could also have a masochistic side - these people are financially harming themselves and willingly (if unknowingly) begging to be exploited.
@@rawbeanukI like to think it also has a karmic sentiment. That because they've suffered enough they are entitled to a massive payoff.
@@ronnickels5193 To go back to the idea of grinding, they are putting their own flesh between the millstones, and are hoping to turn their blood to gold.
I bought some GME right after the peak, lost about $200. Wasn't a big deal, I just saw it all over the news and had fomo about it. I was 22 in college at the time and getting a huge payout would have been life changing for me, but I also didn't have enough money to actually invest and take a huge financial hit.
You calling these guys gambling addicts really stuck out to me. I know I have a very addictive personality. I also have the bad personality trait of thinking deep down that I'm "better" or "smarter" than qanon conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, relgious cults, etc. But damn, all it took was me knowing nothing about a subject and feeling left out to buy into this bullshit, even just half assed for just a few short months. I'm so glad I didn't have any actual money at the time to lose.
This video was humbling to say the least lol
If you were 22 at the time of GME at peak, that means you're still pretty young in the grand scheme of things. You're at the right time of your life to really be understanding those aspects of your personality and getting that introspection, so honestly sounds like you're doing fine. Took a couple hundred bucks loss to learn a lesson that clearly a lot of people never learned and only kept on digging themselves in deeper.
I think that's what really shows you'll be someone who actually learns and grows and understands their personal flaws and works to overcome them, opposed to apes who just bunker down and refuse to accept reality. It takes more strength to admit when you're wrong or beaten and pick yourself up and learn than it does to refuse to accept it.
Good on you for knowing and seeing your personal pitfals. Keep with the introspection and willingness to be wrong and you'll go far.
Those are personality flaws, just realize they're pretty much 100% universal to humans. The addictiveness thing is on a spectrum so that's good to keep an eye on, but everyone's got weak spots to exploit, can be people pleasing, guilt, brain freeze during stress etc etc.
When I was 21 I put $600 into some pyramide scheme "stocks" because the most stereotypical sleazy sales guy pitched it to me and some friends for like two hours. (I didn't know what pyramide schemes were back then... I knew I didn't feel like recruiting people to it however, but then he presented this wonderful opportunity to get in on their "stocks", and it seemed like, if there's a 1/100 chance it's not bull I should take it... lol). I'm now 41 and have managed to tie my shoes daily and not join any cults or get majorly scammed since. Can still happen, but, have hope 🙂
You learned, and admitted your faults and mistakes. Im proud of you, keep on doing it and you’ll be less likely to fall for this stuff in the future
At least you learned.
The animated reddit post sequences where the key phrase stays in the same place are sublime. Pouring honey over my brain good. Kudos
My sister told me that one of her
friends "might be coming into some really serious money soon", and when I was like "oh?" she told me, "Yeah, he got in on Gamestop early on." Apparently he's promised to buy her a house.
**Ron Howard voiceover** he did not buy her a house
Well?
My personal experience is that when people try to be coy about getting massive sums of money out-of-the-blue, there's never any and they've been scammed.
“In reality apes are shadow boxing the random noise of the market-and losing”
God I love his videos so much.
Over 70 million shares registered into the hands of individuals and a billion in cash sure does sound a lot like “losing”
@@GSDKXV yeah it is cause they're losing money
@@GSDKXV how could you possibly believe apes own 70m shares?
@@GSDKXV Funny how "over 2 billion in cash" became "over a billion in cash"
Soon it'll be "only 1 billion in debt", and then "only chapter 11 bankruptcy"
@Adam_U chapter 11? You gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers. I personally am on chapter 27 bankruptcy
Dan's videos this last year-and-a-half have been following the very real-life decisions of my younger brother pretty much step-by-step. He's getting deeper and deeper into debt after having invested in crypto, NFTs, Metaverse and GameStop. He's filled with self-righteous anger as he keeps committing to what he's convinced are ultra-clever business decisions meant to outsmart the system and beat the market. The only reason he could possible be losing money must be because the system is rigged against him and that the peoples in power are breaking the rules. It's all a conspiracy, and no one will listen to the truth. Family dinners are so much fun these days, believe you me.
My little brother started to 'think deeply' abut NFTs and crypto a few years back, but the saving grace was that he didn't have any money to spend on any NFTs in the first place.
dude, hangin there. probably comming back to you at some point..
Maybe the family could try an intervention? Or a mental health professional? The though of my younger sibling going down this world scares me
@egodreas -- You have my sympathy. I have a friend likewise involved, though iirc perhaps not quite to the same depth as your brother. He isn't angry so much as perpetually (somewhat desperately) optimistic, and it hurts a little to get the latest updates from him. I've accepted that I cannot talk him out of his plans, but I still feel bad for him.
Dude that sucks so bad :( kinda weird but since this is technically a digital cult, have you tried looking into cult deprogramming techniques?
Even if the apes were right about literally everything and the MOASS arrived, their only reward would be a knife in the back as the rules magically changed in front of them, and there would be nothing they could do to stop it. For all of their baking and theorycrafting, they've already agreed to play someone else's game on someone else's field.
Even if they truly have figured out how to hack the system, they're still forgetting the most important truth: the house always wins.
For me, the amazing thing is the conclusion that if a hypothetical collapse of the economy were to happen, old economy value would have any kind of value in the new economy, and they would get any kind of "compensation" for it
(Drums and trumpet fanfare)
How lucky can one guy be (trumpets)
I kissed her and she kissed me (trumpets)
Like the fella once said
"Ain't that a kick in the head?"
(Trumpets)
@@GSDKXVBro you guys are just funny. Its as simple as that
They fail to realize that at the end of the day, systems are controlled by people and the banker is not an NPC that will let you use an infinite money exploit in front of him. Like if they are right and don't get disappeared by some mercenaries and they also don't get told "oh, you found a hedge fund was doing something illegal, guess we shut them down and then gamestop goes bankrupt because their value was all smoke" by a judge then their infinite money will end up being rejected by basically all of society, as the wealthy don't want to be beaten at their own game and everyone else won't suddenly bow down to a bunch of self-obsessed redditors who think they should rule the world. Like even if they managed to take control of the world economy, they don't have the social control to make everyone play along.
@@GSDKXV Bro I am a vtuber, the ways in which I am cringe are legion. But unlike some I'm not under the illusion that I have the world figured out
Someone please explain to me how this 2.5 hour RUclips documentary has become my comfort show that I watch in its entirely at least once every couple of days. I’m gonna be able to recite it from memory soon at this rate.
I was literally just thinking the same thing, I'm so glad I'm not alone.
I have watched this video dozens and dozens of times. I can speak his words along with him now. There's just something really comforting/satisfying about it.
Y’all are WEIRD AF
Anyway DRS GME
Legit came to drop a comment that I'm on my like 8th watch 😂 I already watched this twice last week, it's just so well-done and fascinating. Cheers fellow serial-watcher, enjoy your upcoming viewings!
Regardless of what he's talking about Dan is just a comfy looking and sounding guy. I think that is it part of it.
Same! This video is on my list of many of Dan's vids that I comfort-rewatch. I think at least partly it's because of how hilarious I find his deadpan, straight-faced sense of humor. :)
Damn dude y'all produced the hell out of this! Let me go get some popcorn.
Edit: Oh no. I thought "wife changing money" was just a flub the first time it was said, but...it's something they actually say, isn't it? Please tell me it's not. It's not, is it?
Edit 2: Oh no.
I like to think that this was Dan's internal monologue the whole time he was researching this vid.
This is the darkest timeline.
They’re right, once their wives see how much they’ve lost they’ll dip
I would just like to credit you on the comedy of how you paced your response in the edits.
(I apparently did the same in my running commentary when watching Good Omens, Season 2, Episode 6)
I feel so bad for that poor employee working at the GameStop and being questioned by the guy who's trying to convince him that they're going to merge with Bed, Bath & Beyond. He has such a voice of "I do not get paid enough to deal with this crap."
can confirm that as a current retail employee that that tone of voice is the one i give to customers who cant just get the fucking hint and keep trying to give advice to improve the store like my minimum wage paid ass has anything to do with how the place is run
If you think that’s bad, Kais Maalej (the guy in the video) has a whole channel full of videos of him standing outside random Bed Bath stores spouting nonsense, harassing employees. He even once tried to break into a Bed Bath warehouse to see if they still had stock coming in. He is genuinely mentally ill
The second hand embarrassment is too much, I can’t rewatch shit like that. Once was more than enough
For public facing positions like that, that's probably what he's been specifically told to do. I'm a volunteer at a Zoology Museum and if a creationist starts talking their talk we are supposed to just smile and nod.
I enjoy his half hearted attempt to speak reason to him. “How will that work because we sell video games and they sell bath stuff” 😂😂
Wow. We rode the dan train from being a cardboard box talking about evangelion to being THE journalistic voice on internet finance.
And we got to watch the Dan Train cause total carnage as it plowed through NFTs, a bad crypto video game cosplaying as the Matrix, and ghost-written audiobook grifts along the way!
I'm pleased Mr Olson has set himself up in such a socially responsible yet entertainingly informative niche. :)
dont forget the flat earth video@@sixstringedthing
And I'm absolutely here for it. Pipe dream is a partnership with either the Green brothers, Kyle Hill, or both.
I'm hungry, what should I eat?
No. He pretty chalked the whole thing up to chance & pretends that wallstreet bets didnt know exactly what they were doing.
Something I found interesting about the constant comparison to "The Big Short" was that the explicit point of the movie was even though the main characters had "beat the system", they were all miserable, realizing that "the system" dragged down everything around it as it failed. I guess the apes must have turned off the movie halfway through.
The movie doesn't even leave it to subtext; Brad Pitts rant about rising suicide rates coinciding with major recessions is what shuts those two mini-Hedge Fund dudes up when they wanted to celebrate the deal of their lives. The only guy who isn't emotionally affected by it all is Ryan Goslings character, and that guy was framed as a massive dick from the beginning.
@@Donnerbalken28 and yet, Ryan Gosling is hot and when he is emotinally disaffected it looks Cool and Powerful, the message is lost in that. He still Wins, if only for a while.
Apes want to Win, they dont want things to be good.
Most conspiratorially minded individuals also have no media literacy, see The Matrix, American Psycho and obviously The Big Short.
The original Matrix movies are used by far right misogynists who want to reinstate the patriarchy and repeal queer rights for LGBTQIA+ communities when the movies themselves were written by trans-women as a allogory for gender exploration and 'waking up' from the matrix of binary gender expression and heteronormativity, instead choosing to live in a shitty real world as yourself where the world itself is hostile and alien (eg homophobia and transphobia), rather than a fake world where you pretend to be okay with existing as a cog without identity (eg pretending to be straight or gender conforming).
American Psycho is used as a ideal to aspire too, where Patrick Bateman is potrayed as a idol, when the movie was a critique on the overly macho male fantasy of financial, sexual and violent freedom, how Patrick Bateman was really a pathetic loser poser, where his 'murders' were most likely made up in his head out of frustration and inferiority, where the man literally enters a dick measuring contest using the font, cardstock and colour of buisness cards, the cards themselves being utterly worthless pieces of paper and cardboared yet Patrick cares so much about literal paper that he begins to shake and go crazy, illustrating the fragile masculinity and utter impotency of men like Patrick, grandstanding, macho, violent and sexual men, being utterly useless and incapable of doing anything (aside from picking on the weak and underprivileged who cannot and will not be defended by the system, people like the homeless man and dog, the 2 struggling sex workers, the only truly confirmed kills), and the writer of the book the movie was based on is literally a gay man, the antithesis of the 'macho' male Patrick Bateman that this new generation of 'Sigma' men look up to.
I haven't watched the Big Short like the other 2, but I have seen the clip your talking about, and the point is literally yelled at the viewer, 'The system sucks! People die! Stop being so self centered and actually look around yourself!'.
Honestly conservatives have like 0 brain cells in the literacy department, they hear whatever they want to hear and see what the want to see and thats it.
This reminds me of a joke from Clone High: "I saw the first two thirds of the MC Hammer 'Behind the Music', and if there's one thing I learned, it's that the money never runs out!"
Another irony is that apes say they HATE shorts. But of course they dont really, they only hate it when it affects their money. They were 100% fine with the people who shorted the banks in the movie.
"It feels like we're driving backwards really fast at a wall and just before we hit it, the secret level in ready player one is going to open up and let us pass by the entire race and win" oh god no, that is incredibly sad. I can't even make a joke. I just blurted "oh no" as soon as I heard it
These guys seriously need to touch grass
When was this?
@@simonoliver4751 damn it I always put timestamps, I don't know why I didn't this time... lemme try to find it
when dan was reading it out i remember thinking "this has to be parody, no way someone would really say this, its his investor character and this is a silly sentence" and then he put the comment on screen (2:30:47 btw) and i think i said "oh my god" out loud and covered my face from the second-hand embarrassment.
Blah blah blah 75+ million DRSed shares on GameStops balance sheet 😂😂😂😂
The context of 1:09:54 makes it so obvious and so funny why he decided to distance himself from the apes. Imagine having to explain to the House Committee on Financial Services that no, it's not a conspiracy, there's no big plan, no scheme, you just genuinely felt exactly as you said you did... And then you have thousands of apes going "HERE'S ALL THE WAYS HE WAS TELLING US THAT HE WAS ALWAYS PLANNING FOR THIS TO HAPPEN"
It's just that bit from Life of Brian where he is desperately saying he isn't the messiah, only for the crowd to start cheering more. Hell, the movie even has a line of the crowd saying "yes, we are all individuals." in unison.
The cybertruck line has aged like the finest wine
funny how many cybertruck owners don't realize you need to use alchol or gasoline to clean it and have rusted the cybertruck. car washes can also brick it
Seems like the perfect car for them tbh 😂
And now I'm thinking Tesla stock is just another meme stock
@@ronnickels5193 not meme, just overvalued, speculative.
@@KissatenYoba I heard it described as an automotive company priced as a tech company
"We tried to tell them over dinner, they didn't listen" is so transparently revealing i can't believe he said that on a livestream
Dan Olson analysing post-modern secular cults is my favourite genre.
Would be HILARIOUS if anyone normal reading this took a look at Jon Stewart interviewing Jim Cokerat. Or S1E5 from The Problem.
@@GSDKXVyou keep posting this, what do you expect people will get from that interview that relates to the video? It's not a secret that wall street is full of greedy assholes and idiots like Cramer, it doesn't mean everyone who thinks they're fighting against them is right
Calling Qanon secular is... quite funny
@@damien678hes never rly done a vid on qanon, just mentioned it adjacent to other topics. but also qanon being described as secular doesnt seem totally ridiculous to me, i do think particularly at its inception it was more of a secular conspiracy theory and then eventually satan became an intrinsic part of it
@@vlad5042 the flat earth video wasn't really about flat earth, it was an essay/documentary on qanons, the flat earth stuff was just a segway/intro.
The reason that the Gamestop short squeeze was so powerful was because it was _unpredictable._ No one could possibly have seen it coming. That's what the Apes as they currently stand fail to grasp; they've become completely predictable in their behavior. Even if that behavior is irrational, the fact that it is _predictably_ irrational just makes it another market force to be accounted for, another number to plug into the calculation. As Dan says, the hedge funds have already figured out how to exploit them. While they concoct a dramatic narrative about how they are sticking it to The Man, The Man is laughing at them from behind a fake mustache as he collects their money in a little bin with "INVEST HERE TO FIGHT THE MAN" scribbled on it. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad (okay, it's still a _little_ funny)
They are truly, truly regarded
That is a hilarious mental image
The beginning and end of my knowledge of this whole subject prior to the video was that a hedge fund was planning to profit off of Gamestop's failure, and _somehow_ a bunch of Redditors exploded a movement to hold as many stocks as possible and start chanting "diamond hands", a few in it for potential gain, but most of them out of a sheer vengeance-fueled personal vendetta for the 2008 financial crisis. I had no idea it had exploded outwards into this utterly deluded cult of personality, but I guess it's not exactly surprising in retrospect.
“Wanna know what the definition of insanity is?”
It wasn’t unpredictable what are u talking about
Only for mainstream normies who get their information from tik tok
What I find fascinating about cults like these, is the idea that there's no one pulling the strings, no charismatic leader telling them what to do, and just form almost by accident, like its members are brainwashing themselves and each other.
And the fact that then they start looking for one, even if he doesn't want anything to do with the cult.
The "self-organizing high control group", I believe Dan called this phenomenon in his NFT video.
Groups like this "electing" a leader figure is a phenomenon that I think has a lot to do with how the internet and social media algorithms work, specifically. Ian Danskin talks about this a bit in his video on the Alt-Right functioning like a cult.
@@shinyskunk Yeah, I was thinking of his lecture on how the alt-right is like a cult when I made this comment.
So fascinating. And also horrifying.
This is such a valuable lesson to carry around society in general, and why things are the way they are. So many human made issues we have are propelled by social forces, but those forces can’t often be fully directed by individuals. Grifters just stick their straws in milkshakes that are already flowing.
Reminds me of incel communities, how they drag each-other down with them, which just results in a bunch of people constantly convincing each-other that everything is hopeless. Not quite as miserable here, but probably equally as dangerous
For a second I was worried, I haven't seen a comment from my favourite obsessed ape kvx210 saying random stuff about GME or other related (or unrelated) things. But they returned and posted a comment about an hour ago. Nature is healing
Oh, I bet you're gonna see him posting up a storm in the next few days, I imagine. GME is about to post their most profitable quarter in 6-9 years, and apes are gonna be riding high.
Mind you, it's already trading higher than it ever did in the 2010s, when revenue was almost TWICE what it is now. They still will take some victory laps, for surely MOASS must follow, right?
Wow, GME revenue is cratering! Dang, I wish I hadn't bought those options right now.
Come on apes! Defy all logic and reason! The company posted a tiny profit for the year, get excited and save my gamble, lol.
@@mac4974 Okay, so maybe you were right and it wasn't quite the bloodbath I thought it would be; especially with Game Informer becoming a separate, "You never have to walk into Gamestop" publication. A desperate and interesting move, but we'll see if they manage to move enough units.
They’ve probably contributed more views to this video than anyone else 😂
I think he is dead all comments have been vaporized
The part where he asks the gamestop employee if he knows who Ryan Cohen only for the employee to say no and he becomes incredulous that he doesn't know who he is just because he is working at gamestop is terminally online syndrome.
Somehow in this ocean of nonsense and cringe, that guy stands tall as the absolute most pathetic part of it.
also proof he's never worked a retail job
@@trouty606I was genuinely scared he might try to hurt that poor employee.
Because 15 year old minimum wage employees are privy to all their employer's secrets and will be happy to tell you about any global financial conspiracies they are involved in.
@@lauriepenner350 ngl, if I was a 15 year old min wage employee and I actually did know about a global conspiracy, I 100% would off hand mention it to customers as if everyone knew it and refuse to elaborate. I think that'd be funny.
The mind-bending part of the video is at 1:02:08 where they read "present: more than majority of all shares" (if I understand it correctly, an acknowledgement that more than 50% + 1 of all shares have voted) and TALK THEMSELVES INTO BELIEVING they heard that the company just casually announced that more votes have been received than shares exist.
You can tell more than a few people there knew what it really meant but just couldn't bring themselves to break the illusion. They'd rather believe the lie.
I suspect it was not that they voted, but that they were "present" at the meeting. Corporations tend to use meeting rules that require there to be a certain minimum number of shares represented at the meeting (a "quorum") before they can vote on business. But your bigger point is absolutely right, "more than a majority" is 50% plus one, noit more than 100%.
One of them was like "yeah but more than majority that means 50%+ right?" and then another immediately jumped in with "no they said more votes than outstanding shares", fucking reality warp
I was left with: do they actually understand percentages?
@@sunnydong9069 literally "I reject your reality and substitute my own", happening in real time, for the world to see.
Scary stuff.
More than anything that one post about autism got me because it's quite literally the exact opposite of the truth - anybody who actually knows an autistic person could tell you that one of the most basic things you can do to be courteous to them is be direct and non-cryptic when communicating.
I can sorta see where that sentiment could arise from as a frustation with society's general refusion to be even the least bit accessible to autistic people you just completely reject neurotypical ideas of communication and assert your own as correct. Basically getting frustrated because one too many English teachers insisted that the curtains being blue has an obvious meaning without ever explaining the concept of a metaphor.
A lot of these people seem incredibly self-centered. I'm guessing that person thought all other autistic people think exactly like them without checking. A community that obsessed with secret meanings would probably draw in people who like that kind of thing.
Yep, when I saw that I had to pause the video to process just how wrong they were
@@henryokeeffe5835 I think what they meant is that autistic people sometimes have trouble expressing themselves, or are fully nonverbal, and these autistic people rely on more indirect ways of communicating. Like, instead of saying "I love you," I'll go up to someone and lean against them until they take the hint. But yeah, this person seems to be projecting their personal experiences.
@@koboldcatgirl Nah. That fella straight up said that us autistic peeps are masters of code.
We. We really arent. I had to teach myself to understand sarcasm and I still need to ask if someone made a joke or not.
Though I can concur we have our own ways of communicating, code is NOT one of them
I swear the first couple times I watched this video I was sure the guy with the blue face paint was one of Dan's RUclipsr friends mucking it up. I laughed SO HARD when I realized it was an actual guy being DEAD SERIOUS
Almost the same on my first watch!
XD
That guy was terrifying 😅 he seemed coked up or something
Not as scary as the weird GameStop intruder tho
I often expect to learn a lot of things from a Dan Olson video.
Learning why half my tenure as a service representative of Chewy sucked so hard is not something I expected.
The irony of chewy being successful 😂😂😂😂😂
How can someone be self-aware enough to realize their trading strategy is "driving backwards really fast at a wall", but delusional enough to think the secret level in Ready Player One will open up and save them from financially ruining themselves?????
Because they're already in the car and are headed towards a wall. There's a saying. If you're falling, you may as well try to fly; you've got nothing to lose.
The problem is that the delusion they've picked is one where, in order for the ground to open up, they *must* drive *faster* towards that wall. And that they must convince others to start doing the same.
@iuffcgpuu I don't think you can make sense of a non-nonsensical comment by breaking it down. Whatever sense you do find by doing so is coincidental. In actuality, it's 100% delusion.
I think another aspect is that Apes think they are the protagonists of reality, and our society has brought them up largely fostering that. Everyone's the hero of their own story, they just take it to an uncommon but not unprecedented extreme.
See also "Every other generation of human beings that has ever lived has died, but we will not; Jesus is coming back to get us before we die, because we are the most special people that have ever lived."
If they love a shitty book...
@@GeneralBolasThing is, you can hit the brakes instead of hoping for a reality-bending miracle.
I still think my favorite part about this MOASS conspiracy is that, even if they managed to get the share price to hundreds of millions of dollars, and even if they were able to get all of the money they were then theoretically owed without legal consequences, the value of the money they'd receive would be functionally worthless due to the apocalyptic amount of inflation necessary to produce that amount of money. So not only is the likelihood of the outcome they look for basically impossible, but if it did somehow work they'd still be screwed.
They'd still collapse the economy though. They just wouldn't be the philosopher kings of the new world order
I think some of them were, indeed, short-sighted, but a good deal of the reasoning was less about gain, but the opposite, about sacrifice. Like people who believe the only way to revolution is to kill and die your way out of the status quo, these shills probably DEEPLY believe their literal economial death is worth destroying the capital status.
Still short-sighted, though. I can't say I don't get it, because I do (I am more or less punkish and maybe anarchist in SOME aspects), but the status quo is hard to break even in the event of wars because it requires a lot of forethought and planning to effectively patch the holes. And we DO NOT have anything better than monarchies, communism, capitalism or anarchism. We only have human systems with human flaws that will always fail.
“The value of the money is functionally worthless” it’s almost as if the concept of an amount of stuff doesn’t have an objective worth outside of “our wet little meat brains know what 1 and 10 and 0 are intuitively, and unlike other animals who just know how to use math tangibly to do animal stuff, we’re sapient and can abstract math into theory and experiment.
The human experience is a species that can compose formulas that express the ways reality builds itself got so absolutely fucked up over “one” “one what” “yes”
@@LucifersfursonaHave you ever even taken an economics class?
@@Hypogean7 I mean that's basically just a very crude version of the subjective theory of value
“Evolved into his final form:
u/[deleted]”
Such a banger line
The clip of that guy going into a gamestop and telling a random employee about his conspiracy theory is funny to me because I had so many people do stuff like that to me when I worked retail and I can very much hear in the employee's tone the sentiment of "just smile and nod and he'll go away"
You are slow. The shorts only need one thing to happen to win: bankruptcy for GME. Anyone with 2 brain cells can read their 10-Q on their investor relations website and see how healthy their balance sheet is.
Yeeeep.... same, same. Even simple (store mandatory) greetings to them become invitations for customers to open their mouths and spill their crazy out on you, and you just can't end the transaction fast enough no matter how quickly you move.
Had a guy start telling me about how great QAnon is…in a coffee shop. Sir. Take your absurdly specific drink and go.
@@JkittycatTheDork I'm now interested in what the drink was.
I'm happy Dan got to write off a Vegas vacation on the grounds that it served as background metaphor to the larger story he was trying to tell! Now THAT'S how you grift the system!
To be fair, you only get to write off part of the Vegas vacation, based on a bunch of rules that boil down to "The portion of your vacation expenses that were used for business purposes can be counted as a business expense".
So, if he had to pay those two showgirls to pose with him for the video, that part is 100% a business expense. If he spent half of his time doing video stuff and half of his time doing fun stuff, that's a good basis for counting 50% of his transport costs as a business expense. If he used the hotel both as a filming location and as a place to sleep...well, that's a bit fuzzier.
*This isn't financial advice,* but if you have a reasonable justification for whatever number you pick, you'll probably be fine. You'll need more rigor if you're doing other things that might catch an auditor's eye, though, especially if your business expenses are suspiciously high relative to your business income.
(I am a professional tax preparer, writing in my capacity as someone who wants people to make more accurate tax jokes.)
@@timothymcleanyeah, also like, I'm sure he can afford popping down to Vegas for a weekend or whatever to record stuff. He's got solid patreon $ and ik Line Goes Up definitely raked in a good amount of money (deservedly).
I'm glad to see Dan reinvesting his $ into the production value of these videos, bc it's really paying off.
@@timothymclean If it makes you feel better, I'd love to read tax comedy by a tax expert. Probably a dry as a saltine cracker, but people also like British comedy.
@@timothymclean Quick question on this line: "If he used the hotel both as a filming location and as a place to sleep...well, that's a bit fuzzier."
Is the cost of lodging not normally considered part of the business expenses? Is the issue the nature of where he's lodging-like him using an overly expensive hotel for the shoot is understandable, but using it as the place of lodging when cheaper options were available is a thing one should avoid? Like, this isn't meant as some kind of loaded question; I literally don't know and the line just got me curious about why it's potentially fuzzy.
@@timothymcleanseconding another commenter, I feel like properly written tax comedy could be extremely funny!
Right around 1:02:00 just kills me every time. The dude says, emphatically, that the number of voting shareholders present at the meeting is "more than a majority [of actual shares]" *AND THEN REPEATS HIMSELF* yet everyone else on the call starts whipping themselves into a frenzy because they somehow interpret this as meaning the number of votes is greater than the outstanding share count.
Like??? what the fuck????? how is it even possible to come to that conclusion? it's not as if this is some retconning, you heard the guy telling you "more than majority" less than 6 seconds earlier and somehow it's already gone through 8 different iterations like a game of Telephone to end up with this garbled mess.
They clearly were waiting to hear that the number of votes was more than the number of outstanding shares and collectively none of them stopped to consider that the information they just received was anything other than that result. Truly astounding.
Doesn't the guy reading it out loud have the wrong intonation for "present"? It highlights the incompetence on display and adds to the confusion.
Yep it's called confirmation bias. A very nasty bias.
I thought I was losing my mind when he played that clip and they started freaking out about how it proved something. They were so cock-sure about how it proved there were more shares than there should be, that I actually doubted what I heard for a second.
Religion in motion.
"I'm not the messiah."
"Only the messiah would be so humble!"
One of them even asked if he said what he actually said because it wouldn't mean what they want, and the others reassured him that the speaker didn't say what he actually said so their conspiracy won.
On my second viewing I stumbled over something around 36:50. "If you follow this marrative, hedge funds were so greedy that they created a powder keg that allows apes to make unfathomable amounts of money, yet noone at wall street is greedy enough to exploit that".
What this misses is that traders in other countries with no connection to wall street hedge funds, and indeed adversarial nations could do the same. According to this conspiracy theory, any nation with a few billion USD to spare could utterly cripple the US financial system at any time.
This alone should make anyone a but skeptical about the theory.
Thanks for bringing that up!
I know there's Muricans that believe everything outside USA is either a tourist attraction or the first 10 turns of Sid Meier's Civilization (they post in social sites, one claimed Jesus Christ was American) so them not realizing foreign rich folk weren't trying to make millions the same way they're 'going to' should have been a red flag...
Wow, I've watched this video so many times and I've not thought of that!
Yeah, take Russia pre 2022 and even a bit later. It accumulated a large war chest from oil and gas revenue which it planned to use on Ukraine. If apes were true, a person like Putin could just use some of that war chest to make the US collapse before launching the invasion. Insanity.
Bloody hell fucking china already is sabotaging the digital market with their public companies and the cybercrime oficials, they would have done this the nanosecond it becomes real.
To me, the most unfortunately revealing thing about the "they picked a fight with us gamers" stuff at the beginning is what they believe their most valuable transferable skills are for this situation. They don't brag about being clever enough to create strategies, react to changing circumstances, capitalize on blink-and-you'll-miss-it opportunities, misdirect opponents, or see through opposing bluffs; they brag about stubbornly performing rote tasks in MMOs for minimal incremental gains. It's little wonder that they end up outmaneuvered by pretty much everyone when their gameplan is on the level of an autogrinding macro designed to exploit a bug that was patched seventeen updates ago.
Not to mention they operate in an environment designed for them to succeed.
My first thought was "Someone should tell them there's no respawning when their life savings hit zero."
@@vaiyt So if the stock market isn’t designed for people to succeed, why invest?
@@GSDKXVI’m no financial expert, but I think it’s because of the chance you could succeed, like gambling, except you can somewhat predict what your best bet is going to be.
@@GSDKXV Insofar as the stock market is supposed to follow the general trend of growth in a market, it is in fact 'designed' for people to succeed. With a reasonable strategy and good knowledge, you can perform just as well as or considerably better than the market. The apes... do not have a reasonable strategy or good knowledge.