The GameStop Cult: An Untold Story

on the internet there's practically a community for everything but I have never seen something quite like [Music] this where do I begin in early 2021 there was this giant Mania that took the media by storm there's no way you could have avoided this story over the past few days ordinary citizens from across the world had gathered to buy the shares of one particular re store what the hell is happening with GameStop thousands are banding together pushing the stock price way up cheers everybody seem to shake Wall Street to its core it was supposed to be

this David versus Goliath Story the little guy has power hedge funds have lost billions the world believed the story ended after that Mania all those years ago I believe the story ended all those years ago there's just one problem it didn't it was only the beginning I believe in GameStop as a company I buy a share pretty much every single calendar day we're here to make a lot of money I wanted to know the truth these people are [ __ ] crazy but what I thought would be a simple investigation yeah it became a cult

turned into something much larger than I could have imagined his mind became just obsessed with the conspiracy behind it this is insanity how corrupt everything is aren't you tired of the rich [ __ ] you over I Googled GameStop is a called Ryan Cohen is taking over as Gamestop CEO mean King Ryan going they made a cult around him like some sort of Messiah figure he secretly communicates with them and tells them what they need to be doing people are losing their lives because of this [ __ ] they're not only hurting themselves they're hurting

the people around them is basically the end times for capitalism James you don't know you don't know what you're getting yourself into the project you're about to watch has been the result of many many months of research interviews and just a lot of hard work none of which would have been possible without our patrons and our sponsor for this video ground news for every news story you can compare all the sources that are reporting on it and instantly see the political bias the reliability the ownership and location of those sources today sensationalized headlines are prioritized

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morance I have a lot of my mind and so I just want to get it out there you know what this is it's about GameStop GameStop can't stop won't stop GameStop I'll see you around [Music] millionaires morance is part of a movement I've been looking into for months now one that started 3 years ago in the midst of a pandemic hi James good morning thank you guys again for uh having me on my name is morance Rico I'm from Southern California I'm a senior operations manager at Costco and I'm a YouTuber the strangest stories begin

where you least expect them this one seems to begin with what most people considered a dying retail store GameStop an American retail chain that specializes in video games electronics and other game related Goods which in recent years has been plagued by bad news we're going to start with GameStop the company reporting a loss of a penny per share revenue of $1.1 billion falling short of the I was just a gamer I just used to go to the store stand outside wait for the midday release midnight releases and that was my experience with GameStop before any

of this ever got around but in recent years Moran's relationship with the store has changed do you mind me asking kind of how often you yourself invest in GameStop I buy a share pretty much every single calendar day a large portion of his time is spent sharing streams and videos to his 9,000 subscribers usually pertaining to or in some way related to his investment in GameStop this is where I do most of my videos the studio just happens to be a corner in my room where my wife let me video tape GameStop Shares are usually

symbolized through its ticker symbol which is written simply as gme so whenever you see or hear gme think GameStop I'm all in on gme you guys think I'm joking I'm all in I've been all in ask anyone who knows me the amount of research I do I'm probably good for about 20 to 40 hours a week on Research not just just recording I don't know when I sleep I really don't I work about 60 hours a week so to add on to YouTube on top of that I probably sleep about 3 to 4 hours a

day and it's been everything to me since the day I started looking into GameStop this is connecting the dots part four part 8 this is connected dos Part 53 morance began investing in GameStop in 2021 but perhaps the most interesting thing about him is that he's not alone he's part of a group of equally dedicated people invested in GameStop spread across YouTube Pitch them the idea of investing in gme this stock should be way higher in value Twitter Reddit there are hundreds of thousands just like him many of those GameStop investors post on a subreddit

known as r/ superst where they share ideas and news about the company they post their own research papers of sorts which they call due diligence I I took over my uh my 401k and just turned it all over into GameStop and I would say I'm about 95% invested in GameStop I like to throw money in GameStop every time I get paid it's the only stock that I own in in outside of my 401k do you plan on on selling your shares and if so I guess when I don't think I wouldn't at this point I

would just out a principle I don't think I would you know I don't plan on selling my shares James it would have to be an act of God for me to sell my shares I know I thought the exact same thing GameStop is a company that as far as I could tell sold physical video games and consoles in stores along with other bits and pieces it didn't sound impressive yet you're telling me there is a community of people investing their money into it and even more interesting they're either saying they never plan to cash out

or plan to cash out at insanely high prices GameStop could be worth a th000 a share $750,000 a share $900,000 a share GameStop is is a nothing company GameStop it's almost up there with apple and and Microsoft is I would walk backwards and walk far far away and find another company to buy the mainstream media are a bunch of liars something just didn't make sense I wanted to find out why after reading and and diving into everything you know something's going on here deeper than then I and I ever knew where was this all coming

from that question would lead me down one of the most unusual rabbit holes I have ever encountered but to begin answering that question I had to go back back to when Gamestop captured public attention in a way that has never been seen before Back [Music] to Before 2021 GameStop was seen as a company on its last legs the world's largest video game retailer announced plans to close 180 to2 200 underperforming stores in the US and abroad at the time the company was very much struggling it experienced years of declining Revenue we were entering the pandemic

during 2020 so uh that was a very big uh concern for a lot of physical retailers my name is Richard coffin uh I work as a investment analyst SL portfolio manager here in Canada in the world of Finance there are big institutions out there that looked at a company like GameStop and thought it won't be long before go out of business if a company is doing poorly you usually see its share price start to fall institutions who looked at GameStop and saw a failing company decided to make a bet that the share price would continue

to fall this bet would be made through a process that is known as Short Selling where you borrow shares of the company sell it at the current market price with the promise to buy those shares back at a future date profiting the difference GameStop had been facing Short Selling from hedge funds like Melvin Capital hedge funds were seen as the big boys of the investing world you know sometimes they would manage billions of dollars on behalf of clients most people would have agreed with the hedge funds GameStop was probably not going to last unless hey

what's up everybody Welcome to roran Kitty you are this guy a former track and field star at Stonehill College now working for an insurance firm Keith Gil invested as a hobby and he shared his trades on his YouTube channel under the name roaring in Kitty yo what up everybody sorry I was a little bit late today my my daughter skipped her na she kind of delayed everything but uh welcome welcome to Roaring Kitty we'll be doing some boring stuff on this stream like analyzing financial statements looking at spreadsheets and charts and all that hello to

the one viewer looks like I got one all right that was the over under I was talking with my wife you said it's going to be more or less than that so hello roaring Kitty would also post on Reddit under the username deep [ __ ] value or dfv for sure one of the places he would start posting about his trades was a subreddit known simply as r/ Wall Street bets Wall Street bets was I guess to put it nicely a forum dedicated to investing it's a popular trading Community trading community on Reddit it's basically

a community of gamblers I I I mean investors who make wild outlandish bets on stocks with the small likelihood of making a lot of money so wal sh is a community of retail investors uh that share the love for investing and degenerate gambling it's a very active stock trading community on on Reddit it's full of memes self-deprecating humor trading speculating investing and and gambling on stocks mostly gambling though my name is Isaac I go by loose Ventures online that's how everyone knows me I used to be a moderator of the Wall Street bet subreddit I

am a simple Vice uh that's my Reddit user name and I'm a former Wall Street bet mod Wall Street bets had a reputation for YOLO these huge bets people would make where they put almost all their money into a stock and shared it for the attention of the community o i saw people lose their life their houses their wives I saw people become a military over overnight the purpose of Wall Street bets is how stupid can you make a bet it's called YOLO so this guy Keith Gil he was about to make a YOLO bet

of his own but he had no idea what sort of movement he was about to begin the first stock that I'm going to talk about is GameStop and I know it's a polarizing stock some people won't even tune into the stream right now when they hear that I'm bullish on GameStop at the current price point of about $4 per share the GameStop stock is I mean it epitomizes value investing it's like value investing at its finest because it's such a classic Keith Gil had a thesis the hedge funds you know the the big institutions with

large resources managing sometimes billions in dollars well they were wrong about GameStop millions of people still want discs period it's a big reason these new consoles have disc drives and that's why he felt like they were not accounting for the console cycle that physical discs weren't yet being phased out if roaring Kitty was right and the hedge funds shorting GameStop were wrong he would stand to make a lot of money because you see shorting a company is very risky work it can leave you vulnerable to something known as a short squeeze if GameStop's share price

were to rise instead of fall the hedge funds that are betting against the company would would need to close their short positions in order to prevent further losses but here's the twist closing their short position helps the share price rise even further which in turn forces other short sellers to close their position in other words it triggers a chain reaction that squeezes out the short sellers leaving them with substantial losses and the share price of GameStop rises even higher roaring Kitty had put $53,000 of his own savings into GameStop if he was right he had

the potential for enormous returns and as he made his bet he shared his position on Wall Street bets the Wall Street bets Community initially thought that royan kitty had no idea what he was talking about the people on the sub thought that Rory Kitty was insane there was just a myriad negative comments on on his thesis they were making fun of him like what are you talking about gme is a dead St like there's nothing there's no upside to it when Gil first invested GameStop was trading at around $5 per share But as time went

on he continued sharing his position but continued to be ridiculed until his thesis started to come true as the stock price Rose his initial 50k investment started to balloon in value and that's when people started to take notice GameStops up about 5x from when I uploaded those videos over the summer so gr Kitty was becoming a celebrity you know surprise more importantly than that they started to copy his investment he was regarded as a as a figurehead once the stock price started to move once he started posting uh celebration videos We Are the Champions cheers

everybody I really started to listen to what what he said and it kind of made sense it was he was saying hey this this thing shorted to hell and if we just buy it and we hold it they're eventually have to buy it back and to me that's like sounds a little too easy to be true but I mean what the hell else am I spending my money on during the height of the co you know a lot of small businesses including mine was shut down so we had to look for online Alternatives and I

found the Reddit community so I was hoping that you know maybe with GameStop I can catch lightning on the bottle I mean there were non stop post comments just general excitement thousands thousands and thousands of posts every day you would wake up there was a new news there was a new Theory we'll going over the short squeeze we'll be going over Wall Street bets the big story on on Wall Street bets is gamestock the weapon of choice for these new Traders are platforms like Robin Hood these smaller guys maybe that are trading on Robin Hood

Robin Hood Robin Hood a lot of people are using the app Robin Hood for example to trade GameStop stock it was as easy as downloading the app on your phone opening it up selecting which stocks you wanted to buy and purchasing them Robin Hood made it easy for pretty much any regular person to get involved in buying GameStop and it was a particular favorite on Wall Street bets and as the stock price of GameStop Rose higher was started as one man's initial investment became something else somehow he became a movement uh there were a lot

of posts about yeah we need to stick together like hey we can make some money and possibly even you know put one to the man and this represented an opportunity for us retail investors to stick it to the 1% this wasn't just about getting rich it was about taking down Wall Street aren't you tired of the rich [ __ ] you over the plan was to buy and hold shares of GameStop don't sell let the share price of GameStop rise until you completely squeeze the life out of hedge funds by forcing them to exit their

short positions I understood that if GameStop survived I would make money and that short sellers would have to cover their positions and they'd need to buy my shares it is a rebellion between Wall Street and internet Traders billing over into the rest of the market this GameStop situation is the craziest I think I've ever seen people never heard of options or never traded once in their life now they're in on it somehow most of my friends do work in the finance industry and the truth is it was all we could talk about cuz once again

it was a great spectacle by January 27th GameStop had reached 300 48 a share roaring Kitty's initial $50,000 investment had grown to $47 million somebody rented the plane and drove around Robin Hood headquarters for 45 minutes with a sign saying bye gme major hedge funds like Melvin Capital were reporting heavy losses Melvin capital is now out of the stock they got out of the stock yesterday afternoon as far as anyone else could see it was working the big institutions were losing out to the regular folk how much money did people think they were going to

make on gme all of it all of it there wasn't a ceiling and [Music] then a trading frenzy intensified yesterday when the popular trading app Robin Hood blocked Traders from buying the retailer stock GameStop shares tanking today Robin Hood and other broker is making it tougher to trade the stock the buy button on popular brokerage apps like Robin Hood where most investors were buying their shares of GameStop was shut off for a day an official explanation was given but the momentum was gone what goes up did indeed come down stocks boosted by day Traders finally

tumbling as far as the world understood the hedge funds had closed their short positions during the peak of the Mania the short squeeze was [Music] done Melvin Capital would then later file for bankruptcy and the rest of the world moved on but for us this is no longer about investing this this has changed everything realize how rigged the game was back then that's where things were just beginning yeah it it was a great fun but that fun turned into something [Music] bad hi guys welcome back to morance rants pling of information a little bit of

motivation a whole lot of Truth No Financial advice I buy a share pretty much every single calendar day that um like I said I wanted to know why after all these years people are still buying shares of GameStop despite the price having fallen since that Mania to answer that question though I realized I had to ask another what exactly happened with the buy button on Robin Hood all those years ago the buy button going away was was what really triggered me you know we were pissed off that the buy button took got to away and

I sustain heavy losses Robin Hood has gotten a lot of backlash for restricting share purchases in companies like GameStop the outrage around the buy button being shut down led to a congressional hearing to investigate why did Robin Hood restrict the buying but not the selling of GameStop and why did folks get locked out on the buy side only ranking member McKenry I appreciate the opportunity to address that a lot of people even with a lot of experience in the stock market aren't really aware of kind of how the the plumbing in the background worked the

official explanation essentially boiled down to Robin Hood having a risky business model that could not support the amount of trading that was happening on their platform during the Mania they effectively had no choice but to shut down the buy button of course that explanation didn't stop people from being angry in light of that you realize that the system is 100% rigged really angry the general reaction to that happening was obviously one of extreme suspicion uh if not cries of corruption on Wall Street bets alternative theories were being proposed for why the buy button was turned

off the community was livid and that confirmed their belief that Wall Street the executives there the professionals the hedge funds the short sellers pure evil they're in cahoots with Robin Hood and any broker that turned off the buy button the GameStop investors on Wall Street bets started to believe that Robin Hood was told to shut down the buy button by hedge funds and other financial institutions who were shorting the company in order to prevent them from losing more and going bankrupt albeit there wasn't any strong evidence really to suggest that that had happened um we

haven't had a whole lot of evidence of of that uh there's certainly conflicts of interest that line up with that story uh but not much in terms of actual evidence but the real question wasn't why did the buy button get shut down the real question was whether or not the GameStop investors believed the official story to tell me that there was no corruption there was no dirty dealings going on [ __ ] they lied about the reason why they did it I tend not to believe what mainstream media tells me because it's usually a lie

so all the information that I got was from Reddit Now official reports show that the vast majority of hedge funds close their short positions during the peak of the GameStop Mania and yet do you believe that hedge funds Clos their positions in 2021 I do not believe hedge funds closed their short positions shorts and close am I correct in understanding that you believe that the shorts did not close absolutely the owner of Melvin Capital paid for a spot on CNBC and he said oh we closed we closed our shorts the only reason he was there

saying that because he didn't shorts didn't close that was the fundamental idea that was proliferating on Wall Street bets in the aftermath of the Mania the prevailing belief was they're just saying that they're just saying that to get us to to bow out and to sell our shares that hedge funds and other institutions were lying about the fact that they had closed their short positions in GameStop in order to stop people from buying more shares and ultimately prevent themselves from going bankrupt but if they're lying and shorts didn't close then you know what that means

right I still in my heart of hearts believe that GameStop is not over it meant that what happened in January of 20121 wasn't the short squeeze that everyone thought it was it was only the beginning did those who have short positions in GameStop close their positions during that Mania it would appear that most of them did there is a z% chance that they didn't close their positions despite what the official reports and what most experts were saying GameStop investors still believed that they were lying dude this these people are lying to they are lying to

you every single day what are they trying to hide why are they lying they even had a word for people who disagreed with them shills GameStop investors believed that shills could be anyone they could be anywhere they could be in the med they could be in major companies they could even be the people you're speaking to online it wasn't too uncommon for GameStop investors to believe that shills existed even in their own Community you know kind of like a secret agent paid by the hedge funds to dissuade people from buying GameStop shares if they did

close their positions why are they putting out articles telling me to sell my GameStop why are these people so interested in how I waste my money it's a paranoid hold to go go down and I try to keep keep a a healthy distance many of the GameStop investors started to believe that not only were the reports of short hedge funds closing their positions false but in fact more than 100% of the available shares of GameStop was still being shorted which might make you ask how exactly would that even be possible the GameStop investors had an

answer to that question naked shorting naked Short Selling is this idea that you can sell a stock short without first borrowing it naked Short Selling was an illegal practice like Patrick said it meant Short Selling shares without even borrowing them in the first place essentially creating Phantom or synthetic shares that didn't even exist in the market GameStop investors went on to theorize that hedge funds were naked shorting GameStop so much that the number of shares being shorted was significantly higher than the actual amount of shares available none of this makes sense and the only solution

is naked naked shorts it blew my mind how how how how how they can get away with this obviously the tricky thing with saying that short Physicians are being hidden is is that it's very hard to prove or or disprove I think that this is utter nonsense like there's no other way around it and I think it would be very hard to hide such large activity especially given that I don't know that hedge funds have much of an interest in in maintaining that short position the most big Traders most sophisticated investors want nothing to do

with this I think the real reason that the kind of people who are really excited about this stuff believe this is that they sort of need an enemy in order to maintain the narrative right I guess I would question whether hedge funds would think it's worth it to to do all this back alley sort of these Arrangements these private Arrangements just a short one retail company as the theories developed you started to see a picture of people who felt they had been wronged looking for a way to make it right the main purpose of a

GameStop investment is to hopefully potentially start a turn in the stock market to be less corrupt if I can use my money to to send a message to the rich [ __ ] I'm going to do it like [ __ ] them like seriously [ __ ] them but the picture was incomplete if the game GameStop investors didn't believe the official story around the buy button and that hedge funds still had short positions in GameStop then you know what that means right to the GameStop investors it meant that these short squeeze hadn't truly happened yet

that the Mania of 2021 was just a glimpse of what was to come they believed that another short squeeze the real short squeeze was still on the table a short squeeze unlike anything ever seen before what they started calling the moas the moas is the mythical mother of all short squeezes the idea was simple GameStop investors believed that all they had to do was continue buying and holding shares of GameStop that eventually the hedge funds who they believed were creating fake or synthetic shares of GameStop would need to close their short position by buying real

shares back from Gamestop investors and as long as Gamestop investers waited and didn't sell their shares the demand for their shares would rise so high that they effectively could choose whatever price they could sell their shares at literally one share of GameStop could have been worth millions of dollars buy higher buy higher buy Higher by what if there's nothing higher what if nothing's up there the price is infinite because as long as we keep holding we don't sell they can't cover they can't close their position they need us to sell there's nothing logical behind that

idea I think it's a fairy and I I would I would honestly like to answer that in a more professional way but I I think that's the best way to put it scale of it could be infinite um it could be you know personal impacts could be life-changing there's no thesis that says that's going to happen there's lots of people that hope it does because it seems right that it should the short squeeze can happen now honestly I think they're being squeezed right now to be honest it could be tomorrow we don't know no one

knows when it's going to be but they they know it's going to happen I can't tell you how that's going to happen do I think it's going to happen yes if no one sells any shares then the price will go to Infinity you see GameStop investors believed that a moas would make the share price of GameStop rise to astronomical numbers far too expensive for any hedge fund to be able to buy back so the hedge funds would be forced to pay that money back in other ways taking out loans assuming more debt whatever it takes

so moas would be people going to each other saying I don't have the money you no I don't have the money because of the connection between so many major institutions they believe that the debt caused by this moas would have a cascading effect that could topple markets leading to a recession bigger than any the world has ever seen and then even the government couldn't step in and bail out because suddenly everyone doesn't have the money it would be Armageddon for financial markets it'd be worse than any crash we'd seen ever because every single scent of

every in tion that had been put towards some other Venture would go to GameStop all of it in the event of a moas event I think the world in the end would be a much better place moas mother of all short squeezes is basically the end times for for capitalism um so some people see it as a chance for wealth some people see it as a chance for revolution like if it doesn't happened in my lifetime probably happened in my nephew's Lifetime and they're the ones getting my stops what's clear is that whatever this is

it's not just another squeeze it's doomsday for a long period of time the 99% of the post on Wall Street bets were about uh GameStop and it was getting out of hand uh Wall Street bet change in its roots uh before it was all about making money in Investments and now we had all these people screaming movement and screaming changes or whatever the moderators understandably they sort of had enough there needs to be a winner and loser and you need to know when to quit that's something that a good investor needs to know these people

are losers they don't know how to lose and that's their problem the moderators on Wall Street bets decided to shut down conversation around GameStop on the subreddit you know some people would say it was compromised by chills there was talk that one of the moderators who's really cracking down on GameStop related post was bought out by the hedgies I don't know if this is true they infiltrated wall stre bets and they bought them out the main accusations were we were paid shills that we were uh Shilling for hedge funds for the short sellers we worked

for them there was a lot of hates overs the uh Wall Street bad mods saying their Shields their this their dead and so a new subreddit was created by those who left Wall Street bets purely for conversation around GameStop this was called r/ superst um super ston was really cool um it's like a whole family Vibe it's just a bunch of guys that just love the stunk and girls guys and girls that love the stunk how much time do I spend on super ston and other places too much time any research made by the Community

was usually referred to as due diligence or just DD usually appearing as a regular Post in the community showered with redit Awards and upvotes man there's been so much good due diligence that that set produced not only with GameStop but just from like a macroeconomic standpoint as a whole these posts were then compiled into what they called their due diligence Library super stun began as everything that I wanted it to be it was you know more hype more up to the SE news you know just totally engaging for someone like me who really was invested

in the the story of GameStop not just the company itself for every action comes an equal and opposite reaction so I first heard about these communities when my partner at the time was getting very wrapped up in the GameStop short squeeze that happened in January of 202 21 I feel like it started to become a real issue when his mind became just obsessed with the conspiracy behind it and thinking that the whole entire Market is about to collapse I feel like it began to take over his life and all his spare time kind of went

into reading Reddit and getting deeper and deeper into this conspiracy rabbit hole and becoming invested in these what I think are absolutely crazy theories so he went to bed that night and I stayed up and I googled GameStop is a cult and that's where I found gme meltdown the subreddit so the GM meltdown subreddit started as people were getting pretty fed up with seeing constant spam post to the front page of Reddit of people within these stock communities begging people to come and buy into the stock that they're all obsessed with gme meltdown is a

subreddit pretty much just designed to laugh at and make fun of apes and point out all of their insane conspiracy theories apes are the DI hard hardcore cult-like investors yes I'm a proud member of gme Mone the purpose of gme mildon sub is to spread the word and spread the facts that cannot be spread in the Echo chambers that Apes have created for themselves the content is usually one of two categories either it's laughing at somebody literally having a meltdown that's why it's called gme meltdown it's it's an a melting down over how bad their

investment is doing they made a meme out of me and uh you know they took me I I wear a helmet a space helmet I have it over here somewhere but I wear a space helmet during the live stream during the earnings report and I'm cheering on the stock and I'm like come on baby and then it just starts tanking and you see the reaction of me they lost how much and then they made a mem oh man the other one is pointing out and laughing at the latest insane conspiracy theory that Apes have come

up with over time it sort of grew into a community of people interested in the ongoing saga and lore and mythology of these conspiratorial communities meld downers had started seeing the development of the theories around GameStop and felt like what they were witnessing was not real research but instead a community obsessed with the stock of a Dying company in the hopes of reliving a Mania that had just gone by we're trying to get some of the Apes to see the reality of the situation that they're in and we're trying to save them from the cult

that they're in part of the conspiracy theories that meltdown as disagreed with were the ideas around a moas happening or that shorts didn't close their positions in GameStop back in early 2021 the idea that the the shorts never closed has become another one of those shibili it's become one of those things that they say amongst each other to bolster their faith in moas everyone knows the shorts never closed we also know that shorts must close baby it is demonstrably true that the shorts closed you can look at the SEC report they did they believe that

hedge funds are making kind of infinite profits off of shorting these companies into the ground but if they knew anything about market returns they would see that like the best hedge funds in the world World routinely return like 14% or something you're aiew meltdown is a is a place where people hang out and they all have the same idea that GameStop's a failure but uh I don't think they're going to have a place to stand real soon super ston is a community surface level it is a place for people to talk about GameStop investing really

what it is is a hive mind Echo chamber where these guys spout insane conspiracy theories back and forth to each other and hype each other up and have really really really weird rituals and beliefs meltdowner also pointed to the failed predictions in the community in the year of 2021 super ston began emphasizing the importance of an upcoming shareholder vote from Gamestop the theory was that if enough GameStop investors voted the total vote count would exceed the total number of outstanding shares in other words it would prove their theories around naked short there would be a

shock in the markets and the moas would be triggered so the day of the vote arrived and unfortunately it didn't quite pan out how they expected the total outstanding shares of GameStop were at the time roughly 72 million the number of votes casted were roughly 55.5 million there was some initial confusion in the community and then the theory changed people started saying that the vote count was never going to exceed the number of shares in the first place but there's an interesting thing about communities like GameStop and other delusional groups what happens is people will

make dates the dates will come and go and immediately there's a small period where there's confusion and then almost immediately the community goes to work re-evaluating the situation and reformatting the narrative to take into account what just happened while still allowing them to maintain the same basic thesis when it came to things like moas there was this sense that it could be at any point some of them talked about what they would do with their money after moas if I got lifechanging money I'd probably help out the community here um there's a lot of homeless

people here I would like to build out a dedicated CrossCountry course in my in my state it's not really about money money is just icing to me it's about principes it's about you know stop [ __ ] over Americans the most unusual trait of this community is the savior complex where they believe that if they get get all the money that they are entitled to they will change the world for better but there was one name that without fail took a spotlight in the community someone I've avoided mentioning so when it came to why he

was investing and what he thought was going on um it really kind of all centered around Ryan Cohen something really interesting is their elevation of Ryan Cohen I learned more about who Ryan Cohen was Ryan Cohen is the number one factor for me to invest in a GameStop Ryan Cohen Ryan Cohen Ryan Cohen Ryan Cohen Ryan Cohen Ryan [Music] Cohen he took a 133% stake in GameStop his label of the meme King it all actually started with Ryan Cohen we need to hear from Ryan Cohen in some ways he has been as important for this

movement as roaring Kitty was Ryan Cohen had been the founder of chewy an online retailer for pet related products the vision has been you know build the largest pet retailer in the world he eventually went on to sell chewy for $3.3 billion making it one of the largest Acquisitions of an e-commerce brand what is next on your docket because clearly there was a lot of passion that went into building this company yeah I mean in September of 2020 he bought a 9.9 8% stake in GameStop shortly before writing a letter to the board criticizing their

current direction and urging certain changes in December he increased his ownership of GameStop to 12.9% Cohen believed that his experience with Chewy gave him a better insight into how to turn GameStop around from a brick and mortar store to an e-commerce brand by January 11th 2021 they named him to the board of directors and the rest well that was history to the GameStop movement he became this like symbol of Hope Ryan Cohen is what transformed GameStop I feel that he's the next up and cominging everything I think he will be the next War Buffett he's

on our team holy holy [ __ ] Ryan Cohen if you hear me you're [ __ ] amazing without Ryan Cohen there is no gme initially Cohen was seen as just mainly a good business fit for the company but as the movement progressed some also started to see him as fighting for the same cause Ryan is against these I call monsters right these individuals who are manipulating multiple outcomes like he said put your money where your mouth is and he's doing that that's why I love Ryan Cohen so much have a great day Cohen would

make a point about criticizing overpaid Executives presenting himself as someone who genuinely cared about retail investors and the company itself he looks out for the small you know retail shareholder he doesn't take $1 Ryan Cohen the CEO chairman of the board does not get paid [Music] $1 Cohen rarely does interviews so the only way for most investors to hear his perspective is from tweets and his annual meetings back in the 2021 Mania they even coined a nickname for him Papa Cohen how would you describe the relationship between GameStop investors to Ryan Cohen the relationship I

think their relationship is unhealthy they have an obsession with him in their head they have mystified this person and created a picture of this ideal being but in reality it's illusory one thing to add to why I was so concerned about it being a cult is because of the absolute worship of Ryan Cohen they made a cult around him everything he does whether it's fail or succeeding I'm with them because if he fails I feel he's young enough and Rich enough to try again and try again and try again everyone can see themselves within Ryan

he is the symbol of everything they believe they are doing they believe they are standing up to corrupt Wall Street short sellers hedge funds whatever they think they're standing up for workingclass people or at least they claim to Ryan Cohen who we all know he is now executive chairman of GameStop activist investor Ryan Cohen is taking over as Gamestop CEO uh Ryan Cohen is a Canadian investor who in 13 years of doing business had one profitable quarter like what has Ryan Cohen done that you think makes him such a great business fan and the furthest

I ever get is people being like well he founded chewy and that's how he became a billionaire a company that was never profitable under him he didn't sell a profitable business he created a company to compete with larger pet food brands and pet like supplier Brands and undercut them while losing money to the extent that it became a better idea for another company to buy him out people in the industry think he's a complete joke and he's fooled people into believing that because he was so successful at chewy he can be successful at these other

things we haven't seen any track record in terms of his ability as an activist investor to turn companies around really if you look at gme's numbers they're awful they shut down hundreds of stores sometimes you have to cut unprofitable locations but that seems to be the only thing that he's actually doing to try to get them anywhere near profitability he's been through numerous CEOs and numerous CFOs and he can't seem to get anything done that's irrelevant to them because they don't care about the person Ryan Cohen they care about the mystical idea of Ryan Cohen

that they've come up with in their head Cohen keeps a low profile so most of these criticisms go unanswered he doesn't do interviews and he isn't very talkative that is with with the exception of his Twitter account during the 2021 GameStop Mania Cohen amassed a large following and to the average person Cohen's tweets don't seem that interesting or out of the ordinary but to others the importance of Ryan Cohen's Twitter to the Apes again is is how he secretly communicates with them and tells them what they need to be doing anything he tweets gets deciphered

like one of Ryan Cohen's last tweets said Brick by Brick and this all ties right into that GameStop nft platform would you say then Cohen is directly communicating with GameStop investors through his Twitter I'd like to think so the Apes uh were trying to decipher the time when he posted the tweets how that affected the gme stock and what he was trying to say one of Cohen's most well-known tweets was this picture of an ice cream cone which some argued had a direct impact on the share price people went back back to the Ryan Cohen

tweet and said look he tweeted an ice cream conen and that's why the stock went up it's rallying because of an emoji of ice cream Ryan Cohen famously does very few interviews if any one of the only ones he has ever done was with Joe Funicello from gm.com which was a website dedicated to looking for further information about the GameStop short squeeze of 2021 you know my my tweets are just me being me and uh I think there are a lot of Bad actors in in the meme stock world and they get you know a

space suit or whatever and or they paint their face and they go talk about stocks and they build this audience of people because they're telling them exactly what they want to hear I think GameStop's the most underrated company out there on the stock market the best value I can find and maybe they're collecting donations maybe they're selling T-shirts maybe they're selling merch they're going to end up having made some money in the end while everyone else maybe not so much or maybe so it's not like I get paid a crazy amount off of YouTube no

way I think I made $7 yesterday I do more hours than dollars when it comes to YouTube without a doubt amid all of this I had one question that I kept coming back to do you think that Ryan Cohen is aware of the community that is surrounding him I would you know believe that he's he's seen super ston he's seen r/g he's seen these big subreddits about the company but again I I think he's more interested in turning the company around Ryan Cohen has to be aware of this on some level of course he is

he gets tweeted at like hundreds of times per day and if he does know about the community does he know the power that he has over them so in total I've probably invested around 150,000 I took over my uh my 401k and just turned it all over into GameStop I probably invested $330,000 in the GameStop [Music] um yeah in 2023 Yahoo finance wrote an open letter to Cohen about his time at GameStop saying that he had failed at picking a management team failed to keep selling Collectibles and had failed to push into nfts I think

Ryan is disrespecting all these shareholders and they deserve better than what Ryan Cohen is giving him but above all they criticize the fact that he wasn't communicating to the average investor community no qas no detailed plan nothing why do you think that Ryan Cohen uh um benefits or profits from having movements like we see around the stock I certainly think that GameStop uh and Ryan Cohen to a degree have profited from uh the movement behind them one of the things that the Apes love to talk about when saying how great GameStop is doing is about

the fact that they have a billion dollars plus cash on hand having all that cash on hand and then Ryan Cohen with the ability to invest with it it's the best value stock that I could see I mean that sounds good right but when you really look into it you realize that the reason this cash exists is because in June of 2021 months after GameStop share price had shut up thanks to the Mania the company issued more shares into the market which you could reasonably assume had been bought up by other GameStop investors looking to

buy more shares in other words GameStop's cash didn't come from the business making sales it came from other GameStop investors and in fact the company would have a negative Book value if it weren't for that money that was raised by those new investors if Ryan Cohen had any [ __ ] clue of what to do to grow GameStop he would be spending that money he would also be leveraging debt to help grow the business but he's not doing that because he doesn't know what he's doing and really a company can last as long as investors

are willing to lose money with them and then Ryan Cohen you know any investment he makes where he gets sort of that retail support behind it it's going to benefit him to some degree and there's always a chance that that gets abused or or he's able to to use that against people to some degree I originally asked myself the question of why why people had been investing in GameStop after all these years so far I could see that the claims of corruption Ryan Cohen the idea of a moas they all played a role in that

answer there was just one problem moas do you uh personally believe a moas like event could happen I don't think politically it would be allowed to happen yeah I personally believe a a moas could happen it could be tomorrow we don't know no one knows when it's going to be but they they know it's going to happen I can't tell you how that's going to happen do I think it's going to happen yes it seemed to me that there was a spectrum of beliefs in the community that not everyone believed in moas and some focused

on other areas like like corruption I just focus on the company and the fundamentals of it when I spoke to morance for example he seemed quite reasonable in his approach he he liked GameStop because he believed in the company on a fundamental level granted his Devotion to the company did strike me as excessive this investment is a savings for me and my family I plan to pass it on to the kids and let them see just how great GameStop once was but I was warned by some of these Skeptics and meltdowns that there had been

a shift over time in the GameStop investing communities I think the majority of the superst community believes or at least at one point believed in moas but as dates have failed and goalposts moved it has shifted into just believing that no GameStop is actually just a really really good company that I want to invest in people more like morance let's say who at least claim that it's not about moas it's about these these fundamentals that they'll gesture at the balance sheet it's looking great blah blah blah despite not claiming to care about moas it was

pretty clear to me that morance did check the boxes for what seemed to be a moas likee belief you combined the 2008 housing crisis financial crisis with the pandemic and now you have something that's catastrophic something you cannot contain and just so happens GameStop is one little pin to what that is 100% of people that are invested in gme think that MO is going to happen but only small percentage of them are brave enough to say it it felt like I was being presented with two realities in one I'm being told that GameStop is a

company with a lot of potential that Ryan Cohen is turning them around stamping out corruption and about to trigger one of the greatest short squeezes of all time that could potentially topple America's economy on the other hand I'm being told that GameStop is a dying business that most of the short positions had been closed after the 2021 Mania and that AR super ston and GameStop investors in general are operating in a cult-like fashion that Ryan Cohen is no savior there is no squeeze there is no reward and as I continued my research desperate to find

out why nearly 3 years after it started people were still spending their savings on GameStop I found something even more shocking GameStop wasn't the only Community like this the Mania of 2021 set in MO this idea that perhaps GameStop wasn't the only short squeeze opportunity that there were other companies out there other seemingly failing companies with hidden potential other victims of Wall Street corruption companies like Sears Nokia Blackberry AMC and for each of them a similar if not identical movement had sprung up thriving communities with somewhat similar ideas principles and beliefs moas naked shorting shills

corruption the potential you realize holy [ __ ] this isn't just GameStop there are groups of communities like this but amongst them there was one community that captured my attention the most in March of 2022 while still a chairman for GameStop Ryan Cohen sends a letter to the board of directors of a once successful but now failing homegood store Bed Bath and Beyond in that letter he disclosed that he had a 9.8% share in the business and criticized the leadership for not doing enough this was just like he had done once with gametop before the

2021 Mania what happened next an idea started to form I believe that he was trying to communicate that this is going to be the next GameStop Bed Bath and Beyond obviously the Ryan Cohen news uh sending that thing just absolutely skyrocketing like the bed bath people are a whole other level these are the most extreme of the extreme that what had happened before would happen again the Bed Bath and Beyond Community are the most insane these people need help and you cannot help them people put their identities into a stock and can't let go just

buy Bed Bath and Beyond put my home address and said I'm home alone come visit me you're out here telling people this could hit $5 I don't know you love making videos ran Cohen as far as I'm cons rug pull to everybody he publish these children's books and in my opinion they're not written for children what is Ryan Cohen trying to tell us you know what what is the master strategy he made money and everyone who followed them lost their ass Chief Financial Officer of bed Bap and Beyond who died by Suicide show me a

proof of that he died [ __ ] I've seen so many tweets talking about how like we're the flat earthers of the investing world and like all that but you're crazy until you're not can you explain to me what happened with Bed Bath and Beyond things were about to become a whole lot more interesting [Music]